Miracle on Sand: Fifa World Cup & US-Iranian Relations
By Maxwell Stroemer
During what has rightly become the most protested and scrutinized international sporting tournament in recent memory, I hope spectators have not missed the political significance of yesterday’s US-Iran World Cup match. Yesterday’s match marked the first time the United States and Iran competed since the 1998 World Cup. Regardless of the stakes, I argue that special attention should always be given to competitions between national teams whose governments also duel in the theater of international relations.
A Miracle on Ice
Hockey enthusiasts and keen sports historians will affectionately remember the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. The most significant event of these winter games was the match played between the USA’s men’s hockey team and the USSR’s accomplished squad. The Soviets were expected to hand the Americans an embarrassing defeat on home soil. Set during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency and Leonid Brezhnev’s Premiership, this hockey match was a face-off between two sworn enemies. And not one to be engaged on the field of battle - where international law and conventions of armed conflict apply - but in the sporting arena, governed by the International Ice Hockey Federation. I suppose the ice rink gave a new dimension to the Cold War phenomenon…
Remembered as the Miracle on Ice, team USA emerged victorious with ten minutes to spare. Notwithstanding all the tectonic geopolitical shifts that followed, this hockey match is heralded as a great American ideological victory akin to the Berlin Airlift (c. 1948-9). One month after the winter games, Carter announced that the United States would boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A decade or so later, the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Soviet Union’s 15 republics disintegrated.
The same year as Lake Placid, the US also officially cut diplomatic relations with a new foreign antagonist: Iran.
Khomeini & The Iranian Revolution
In 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini successfully constructed a revolutionary ideology consisting of Marxism, anti-colonialism and Islamic evangelism. Influenced by Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and the revolutionaries Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara, Khomeini saw the world as divided between the oppressed and the oppressors. These teachings aligned with Shia history - particularly the ambush led by Caliph Yezid against Hussein ibn Ali, the third Shia Imam, on the banks of the Euphrates near Karbala.
The success of Khomeini’s ideology was undoubtedly supported by memories of Western intervention in Iran’s internal affairs during the mid-twentieth century. In 1953, the US Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated a coup d'état against Mohammed Mossadegh - the legitimate Iranian Prime Minister who threatened British and American oil interests in the region. Operation Ajax was designed to collapse the Mossadeq government and replace it with a regime that was aligned with the West’s neoliberal agenda for Iran’s most precious commodity. At the expense of Iranian people - including Khomeini personally - this foreign intervention allowed re-installment of the pro-Western Shah Pahlavi who turned Iran into a brutal - but oil-rich - police state.
Khomeini and his followers were angered by the US decision to grant amnesty to the Shah - who was dying of leukemia. In response, protestors seized the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4th, 1979 and kept 52 American hostages. The militants sought to exchange the hostages for the Shah himself but the US government refused to negotiate. The hostages were detained for a total of 444 days and the United States officially severed ties with Iran in April 1980.
Iran as a vampire of the international system?
Born out of the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic has carefully constructed a provocative foreign policy toward regional neighbors and the West that is buttressed by Shia theology and national security interests. This is most clearly demonstrated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s (IRGC) proxy activities in Lebanon and Iraq. As early as 1983, IRGC had supported Shia militias in their attacks on Israeli, US and other Western interests in Lebanon. These attacks included bombings of the US and French barracks and the US Embassy in Beirut. After the 2003 US invasion, Iraq became a significant security concern for Iran. In the preceding weeks to the invasion, Iran instructed thousands of Badr Brigade - another Shia militant group - to infiltrate and secure portions of southern Iraq. In a particularly politicized event, five US soldiers were abducted and then executed in Karbala by these armed militants. Although Tehran denied knowledge of the attack, a senior IRGC member suggested in an editorial that the Karbala attack was a retaliation for the arrest of Iranian diplomats in Erbil.
Few international security threats have captured the collective imagination of Western governments like the Isamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions. Following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election as Iran’s sixth president in 2005, the nuclear program was seen as an arena to prove Iran’s sovereignty and self-determination. A known regime hardliner and former member of the IRGC - Ahmadinejad was a champion of the Iranian nuclear program. Under his leadership, Iran, Brazil and Turkey co-signed the Tehran Declaration, “initiating peaceful nuclear cooperation.”
By 2015, Iran entered the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as a consequence of nearly a decade of international sanctions. Framed as a “win-win” scenario with the West, Iran’s chief negotiator Muhammad Javad Zarif announced, “I believe this is a historic moment - we are reaching an agreement that is not perfect but it is what we could accomplish and an important achievement.” In connection, former President Rouhani stated, “We didn't ask for charity. We asked for fair, just and win-win negotiations.” There is an almost conciliatory tone from Zarif and Rouhani which suggests that the US strategy of sanctions pressure on Iran in order to reach a compromise was effective. Between President Trump’s haphazard dissolution of the JCPOA and President Biden’s pledge to re-join the treaty, prospects of a new deal currently remain in limbo.
After Mahsa Amini’s brutal death at the hands of Iranian security forces in September, the Islamic Republic has been swept by unprecedented anti-regime protests. The regime has responded with a brutal crackdown on alleged dissidents - charging over 1,000 people in Tehran with involvement. Earlier this month, an Iranian court issued a death sentence to a man affiliated with recent anti-regime activism. At least 20 others are facing charges that carry the death penalty too.
Iran has also been providing armaments to Russian forces in support of Putin’s illegal - and shameful - “special technical operations'' in Ukraine. Since October, Russian forces have been using Iranian made Shahed-136 drones in combat. Often, these “kamikaze” drones are deployed against Ukrainian civilian targets. It is also expected that Iran will send the Fateh-110, a mobile short-range ballistic missile, to the Russian military. According to US officials, Iranian military personnel have been spotted providing material support to Russian forces in Crimea.
Football dwells in the shadows of international relations
Given recent domestic human rights abuses, team Iran has been put in a difficult position with the world watching. While some have been critical of the team for not being more outspoken, their collective refusal to sing the Iranian national anthem before their opening game against England last week was a brave symbol of solidarity for the anti-regime activists who have been killed and imprisoned by the state. Though the Iran team lost to the US 0-1 yesterday, rare social media footage suggests that the US victory was ironically met with great jubilance in the streets of Tehran. One wonders how a US defeat at the world cup would support regime propaganda.
As the tournament commenced, Fifa asked the 32 competing teams to “focus on football” in a blanket reference to the myriad controversies, including abhorent migrant working conditions, Qatari intolerance for homosexuality, questions on Fifa’s institutional integrity, and £92 pints, that have preempted the 2022 World Cup in Doha. Yesterday, the US Secretary of State said that he hoped the US-Iran match would “speak for itself.” By following Fifa’s lead, I wonder if Mr. Blinken is missing an opportunity here by discouraging the politicization of this particular match. As demonstrated at Lake Placid in 1980, sports can be a powerful symbolic instrument in foreign policy.
In War as Experience (2012), Sylvester reminds us that: “in the shadows of international relations, people dwell ” (p. 490). She proposes that we ought to move away from realist, top-down understandings of state power. Rather, we should engage real issues by descending into the ordinary. What if the newest breakthrough between two enemy states doesn’t start with an official communiqué between Tehran and Washington DC? Or at a bilateral conference in Geneva? What if it starts in arid Doha - at the most scrutinized tournament in history - with a beautiful game? Perhaps it is football that now dwells in the shadows of US-Iranian relations….
Image courtesy of Prehistorik via Adobe Stock, ©2022, some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
