South Africa did not lose the opening game of the World Cup only because Mexico were better. They also lost because of their two red cards. They forgot the first law of football (as well as war and politics): before you can defeat the opponent, you must stop defeating yourself. Although things improved later, it was a rough start.
The US, in the Iran conflict, has played like Bafana Bafana’s nine-man team in the Azteca more than the South Korea version.
President Donald Trump has got America in a mess — now he is tired and looking for a way out before injury time starts.
Over the past weeks, Washington and Tehran have negotiated “the concept of a peace plan”, to borrow Trump’s unfortunate phrasing. It’s a 14-point ceasefire memorandum that pauses military operations and opens a 60-day window for further negotiations on disputed topics such as Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief, maritime security in the Strait of Hormuz, Lebanon, enforcement and reconstruction. It posits a resumption of Iranian oil exports, access to frozen assets and a proposed $300 billion (R5 trillion) private investment fund for Iran.
Then came new clashes in Hormuz that threaten the deal. Again, after a rough start, both sides are trying to improve their shape.
Iran appears to be winning this “unconditional surrender”.
The US is negotiating like a team getting ground down by a superior opponent: angry and convinced
that the whole stadium is against it and somehow surprised that the other team has noticed the missing players.
The red card is simple-minded. It does not care about your intentions. It simply marks a serious rules infraction. It does not pause to admire your team spirit or the fact that you were playing your heart out. It removes you from the field and leaves your teammates to pay for your indiscretion.
The world has been wanting to show America a red card for years. But Iraq drew only a yellow. Afghanistan drew only a yellow. Trump’s abandonment of the nuclear deal with Iran drew only a yellow. Is Iran 2026 where the red card finally gets thrust into America’s face?
Sometimes, the red card reminds us, the strongest tackle is the one you don’t make. You let the opponent run himself into a dead end. You close the angle. You slow the game.
That is not America’s style. America often attacks even when playing defence. Its foreign policy towards Iran has been a sequence of red cards the ref should be whipping out but isn’t. The fans are livid.
The analogy breaks down in one important place. A footballer who receives a red card walks to the dressing room. The match continues without him and he watches the consequences on a screen. A superpower stays on the pitch. It keeps touching the ball. It stops play to argue with the ref again and again.
The danger of American indiscipline is not that it will be removed from the pitch. It is its continued destructive presence — a nine-man team that will not accept it is a nine-man team, playing as if the cards came because the ref is biased.
This is the strange weakness of American power in the Trump era. It is vast, loud, dangerous and often effective in the short term. But it struggles to convert force into stability. It can create a crisis. But can it resolve one?
South Africa’s problem in the World Cup opener was not that its players lacked passion. No South African watching the match thought: these men do not care.
The problem was the opposite. They cared in a way that became expensive. Their vulnerability was a tactical advantage for Mexico. Their red cards remind us that discipline is not the opposite of passion — it is what passion becomes when it grows up.
The US has a similar problem with Iran. It negotiates with the ghost of the 1979 hostage crisis, the Iraq wars, Israel’s security anxieties, Gulf oil, domestic evangelical politics and the old imperial reflex that says the world is only stable when Washington is obeyed.
Iran negotiates with its own ghosts. The 1953 CIA-backed coup that handed the country back to the Shah who ran his secret police with American equipment and American silence. The assassination of Soleimani on Iraqi soil. The clerical establishment’s need for an external enemy, because without Washington as villain the question becomes: What exactly are you the solution for?
Those of us watching from the stands have our own accounting. We have seen powerful nations carry their ghosts into other people’s territories before. We know how that story ends — not with the ghosts exorcised but with the consequences shared among those not even involved.
When superpowers lose their discipline, the red card is not shown to them, even though they deserve it. It is shown to the rest of us — and we are the ones who must abandon the pitch.
Washington and Tehran will negotiate their traumas across a table in a neutral city. The rubble, if it comes, will fall somewhere else.
Can the US stop talking as if bombing and bargaining are two forms of the same policy? Can Iran stop using the Strait of Hormuz as a global choke chain every time it wants the world to feel its pain? Can Israel be restrained enough not to turn the negotiation into a smoking crater?
If there is a case for cautious hope, it lies in the fact that even exhausted rivals sometimes get bored of being heroic. Peace is not cinematic. It is monitoring and verification. Such peace can be boring for the modern strongman.
The modern strongman wants the spectacle of victory without the tedium of settlement. He wants the handshake photograph, the market bounce, the boast. But durable agreements are not built out of Mexican waves. They are built out of systems that still function when the applause has died out.
America’s defenders will say that without the pressure of bombings there would be no agreement. Iran doesn’t move because someone asks nicely. What country does? But such pressure without a political purpose is just wanton violence with a good PR campaign.
The real test of the US-Iran framework is whether both sides can survive their need to look undefeated. Because what kills peace most efficiently is humiliation. When one side is conquered, it can launch a generation of bitterness. Just ask the Weimar Germans.
For South Africa, the lesson after the opening game was: stay on the field. You cannot change a tournament from the dressing room. You cannot inspire a comeback while disqualified.
For the US, the lesson is not so different. Stay in the room. Stop treating every negotiation as a chance to assert imperial masculinity. Stop disqualifying yourself.
The most durable thing America could negotiate right now is not a better deal for itself. It is a deal Tehran can live with and justify to its population.
If America wants Iran contained, inspected and controlled, it will need more than aircraft carriers and adjectives. It will need patience. Consistency. Restraint. And most of all, caution. Not typical American assets under the current administration.
For the rest of us, especially in the Global South, there is another lesson. A small country loses its head on a football field and everyone laughs. A superpower loses its head in the Gulf and cities tremble.
We in the Global South have a particular relationship with the
mistakes of powerful nations. We do not call the plays. We cannot enforce the rules. And so we have developed a specific skill: we are very good at knowing, before the consequences arrive, exactly what it is going to cost us.
But now, we might be able to
make them pay. Iran looks like it might finally be the US’s red card. Or maybe even two of them. Might the situation improve as drastically as Bafana Bafana?
Michael Brian Lee is the Mail & Guardian’s US correspondent in New York.