Maybe the State Department should call itself the Sports Department.
President Donald Trump has kept most of Foggy Bottom’s diplomats out of the loop on major global crises, relying instead on Secretary of State Marco Rubio, his small leadership team, and a few special envoys. But the State Department is finding itself on the front lines of an unexpectedly thorny geopolitical challenge: reconciling Trump’s restrictionist views on immigration with his desire to host a successful World Cup.
The United States’ role as a co-host for the world’s dominant sporting event is offering the department a chance to prove it matters, according to interviews with department officials and documents obtained by POLITICO. The documents include a “Sports Diplomacy Playbook” laying out how the country should use mega-events like the World Cup and Olympics to advance a mix of soft-power and foreign-investment aims, along with some of Trump’s social-policy priorities.
“State has a very important role to play, especially from a foreigner’s perspective,” said John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama, one of 48 countries sending teams to the tournament.
Many U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide are beefing up staffing to help process visas for incoming fans, and are developing a new World Cup-specific visa processing system to prioritize ticket holders for consular interviews. At the same time, the State Department is asking other countries to share information on so-called soccer hooligans so it can deny them visas, a current and former State official said. The two were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.
“The people at the State Department are going to do their best to rise to the challenge, but they’ve got two audiences,” said Gerald Feierstein, a former senior U.S. diplomat whose positions included ambassador to Yemen. “They’ve got the foreign audience, where the desire is going to be to roll out the welcome mat. The other audience is this xenophobic administration that just looks around the world and sees lots of people that they don’t like and don’t want to see come here. That’s the tightrope the State Department is going to be walking.“
When asked for comment, the State Department spokesperson’s office referred to remarks Rubio made late last year, in which he extolled his department’s efforts to dramatically reduce the visa wait times for people planning to attend the World Cup.
Despite that, he said, “our advice to everybody is if you have a ticket for any of the games, you need to apply if you haven’t done so as soon as possible. Don’t wait till the last minute. Your ticket is not a visa.”