Should I attempt to bribe you? Let’s see what our philosophers have to say about that.

Machiavelli is the natural starting point because he’s the one thinker who explicitly grades corruption by results rather than intent. In “The Prince,” he distinguishes cruelty “well used” from cruelty that is “badly used.” The only criterion is whether it secures the state. By his own logic, a bribe or an illegal shortcut that fails to secure the desired outcome is the worst category available. It has all the moral cost, none of the payoff, and reputational damage on top of that. See “The Prince,” ch. 8.

Second, Aristotle gives a different angle. For him, virtue is inseparable from “phronesis,” that is, practical wisdom; knowing not just what’s right but what actually works in the particular situation. A corrupt act that also fails to achieve its aim isn’t just unjust, it’s a failure of judgment on its own terms. It’s “akrasia,” a weakness of will, compounded by miscalculation. The agent didn’t even correctly calculate their own self-interest. See “Nicomachean Ethics,” book VI.

Third, Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel’s concept of moral luck covers the outcome side. Normally, moral luck describes how a bad result makes an act look worse in retrospect, more than the intention alone would justify (i.e., a drunk driver who hits someone is judged more harshly than one who gets home safe, even though the driving was equally reckless). You can stack two failures on top of one another: a bad intention (the corrupt act itself) PLUS some pretty bad resultant luck (i.e., it didn’t even work), with no consequentialist payoff to offset the moral cost. See Nagel’s 1979 essay “Moral Luck.”

Fourth, let’s head over to Königsberg. Kant would reject the whole framing here. Using people or institutions as mere means is wrong, regardless of outcome. Success or failure is irrelevant to the moral status of the act. What the failure does do, for Kant, is that it strips away the only actual excuse a consequentialist could ever have offered on the actor’s behalf.

Fifth and finally, for the mathematicians among us, game theory supplies the cleanest one-line name for the structural pattern: the sucker’s payoff. You defect to the other side, you incur the cost and reputational risk of defecting, and you still end up worse off than if you’d cooperated.

There are many, many examples of this in history. Here are just five.

–Jugurtha and the Roman Senate (200-101 BC). Sallust’s account has Numidian King Jugurtha repeatedly bribing Roman senators to buy time and favorable treatment during Rome’s war against him. According to Sallust, Jugurtha once famously sneered that Rome itself was “a city for sale” if a buyer could be found. The bribes did buy time, but not survival. He was eventually captured and paraded through the streets of Rome in Marius’s triumph (104 BC). Mind you, Sallust is a moralizing historian with an agenda about Roman senatorial decline, so treat his specifics as rhetorically shaped, not any sort of neutral reportage.

–The Panama Canal scandal, France (1880s–1890s). Company officials bribed legislators and newspapers to conceal the venture’s collapsing finances and to keep public investment flowing. The concealment didn’t save the company. It went bankrupt in 1889, and the bribery mostly just ensured that there would be a much LARGER prosecution once the fraud came out, implicating figures well beyond the original company or the original bribes.

–If you’re an American baseball fan, you’ve heard about the Black Sox scandal of 1919. Eight Chicago White Sox players took payoffs to throw the World Series. They succeeded. They threw it… and they STILL ended up being banned for life, several of them living out their years in poverty and disgrace.The corrupt act worked on its own terms and the punishment STILL outweighed the gain, by a wide margin, I’d argue.

–If you’ve ever had a class in US history, you’ve heard about the Teapot Dome scandal (1920s). Interior Secretary Albert Fall took bribes to hand no-bid oil leases to private companies. The Supreme Court later voided the leases entirely, so the underlying transactions produced no durable benefit for anyone. Fall became the first former US cabinet officer imprisoned for actions in office, for a deal that didn’t even hold up.

–Then we come to Tricky Dick and to Watergate (1972–1974). The original break-in generated little useful intelligence. It’s a common argument nowadays among historians that Nixon would likely have beaten McGovern in 1972, regardless. The race wasn’t close. If that theory is correct, the crime was both unnecessary and fatal. It produced no electoral benefit and ended the presidency that it was meant to protect.

Finally, ladies and gentlemen, we come to today: to the World Cup, to the US-Belgium match, to FIFA, to Infantino, and to Trump.

Now, nothing reported here is actual bribery per se in the classical sense. No money changed hands. What happened here is closer to influence-peddling between a head of state and a global sporting body… which, let’s be honest, is in its own category of filth. Nonetheless, the underlying moral shape is identical to the historical cases above: an unusual exercise of pressure to bend a rule, undertaken specifically to produce a competitive advantage that, in the end, bought nothing. The sucker’s payoff. The “Trump payoff,” we could call it.

US striker Folarin Balogun received a red card against Bosnia-Herzegovina, which includes an automatic one-match suspension. Always has, always will. Now… Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick began mapping out how the US might contest the call. White House aide Andrew Giuliani took up the effort, then Trump personally called FIFA President Gianni Infantino. FIFA then suspended the one-game ban under a rarely, if ever, used disciplinary rule. This allowed Balogun to play against Belgium. This was also the first time since 1962 that a World Cup red card had not resulted in a suspension. Indeed, FIFA’s critics (UEFA, national footballing bodies, etc,) say that FIFA bent its own rules to please Trump. J’accuse!

[This wasn’t without precedent. Months earlier FIFA had invented something called a “Peace Prize” and awarded it to Trump to flatter his ego, with Infantino personally praising Trump during the associated ceremony.]

The intervention worked, procedurally. Balogun played… and the US still lost, quite comprehensively lost, too. Belgium beat the US 4-1, eliminating the co-host team at the Round of 16 stage DESPITE home advantage AND a full-strength lineup. The US actually briefly equalized at 1-1 through a Malik Tillman free kick, but conceded again within about a minute and never recovered. The defensive breakdowns that produced Belgium’s other goals were unforced. These were not decisions that a fit Balogun could have prevented.

Now, let’s go back to the beginning here. Run this Trump-Infantino influence peddling through the frameworks above. The verdict is unambiguous.

Machiavelli
Cruelty/corruption has been “badly used.” It drew international backlash (UEFA called it “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable”) without securing the state, i.e., without producing the win it was ostensibly meant to enable.

Moral Luck
The reversal now reads, after a 4-1 loss, as pure reputational cost with zero competitive benefit, worse in hindsight than it would have looked had the US won by even one goal.

Sucker’s Payoff
The clean game theory label. The US defected from the norm of non-interference in FIFA’s disciplinary process, paid the full reputational price of defecting, and still lost the match it defected from to try to win.

Kant
It’s irrelevant whether it worked or not. It’s still bad, though. The loss just removes the one argument that could have been made (“but it got results”) that a defender of the intervention could otherwise have made.

In the end, the historical pattern holds. As with Nixon and Watergate, the intervention wasn’t even strictly necessary by its own logic. A healthy US football team lost to a Belgium side that scored through individual quality and US defensive errors that had nothing to do with the red card. The controversy bought reputational cost with no return, which is the exact shape every example above shares.

Categories: Uncategorized