Antony Blinken on the Diplomatic Niceties of the Beautiful Game

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken is perhaps the highest-ranking soccer fan in the United States government since Henry Kissinger. Last night, I spoke with him as he was flying to Qatar. Of course, he had many important meetings on his agenda. But he was also planning on attending the United States’ opening match in the World Cup, against Wales. I asked Blinken about the diplomatic value of soccer, his own relationship with the sport, and Qatar’s troubling treatment of migrant laborers.

As I was Googling around, I saw curiously little written about your soccer fandom, and I wanted to know if you had a theory about why this significant fact about yourself has remained