contempt for rules that he kept trying to overturn the citizens’ electoral decision in 2020 even after dozens of courts concluded the contest was fair. Mr Trump is a true fan of combat sports. He played an important role in legitimising the UFC, hosting fights at his Taj Mahal casino in 2001 as the league was struggling for regulatory approval. The UFC also enhances what has always been Mr Trump’s own most effective mixed-martial-arts move, borrowed from judo: turning the weight of the establishment against itself. To the extent elite tastemakers disgorge their piety upon his White House fights, they will serve his populist politics. The league’s president, Dana White, has campaigned for Mr Trump and embraced his transgressive politics. The UFC code of conduct bans “insulting language”, including with regard to religion and gender, and in 2013 the league suspended a fighter for transphobic remarks. But Mr White now calls hate speech “probably the most important free speech to protect”. He did not penalise Mr Strickland for any of his trash talk, such as disparaging Mr Chimaev, a Muslim from Chechnya, as a terrorist. (Some have noted that, as with Mr Trump, Mr White’s celebration of free speech does not extend to criticism of his own enterprise.) But the league’s alignment with Mr Trump can only go so far. The audience for the UFC is mostly male and, compared with other American sports, enviably young. Yet like the fighters the fans are diverse in other respects, and that pluralist reality sits uneasily with lockstep devotion to any politics. So does the ethos of the sport, which places real weight, in the end, on character. Mr Chimaev and Mr Strickland battered each other for the full five rounds. But when the fight was done, before the decision was announced, the two exhausted, bloodied men embraced. “Hey Chimaev,” Mr Strickland gasped, as their foreheads rested together, “whatever happens, I wanna apologise.” When the narrow split decision went the challenger’s way, Mr Chimaev did not denounce the judges or claim the fight was rigged. He kissed Mr Strickland’s shaved head and then fastened the championship belt he had just lost around the victor’s waist. Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster, stepped up to interview Mr Strickland before the crowd. When asked how happy the outcome made him, Mr Strickland did not boast or preen. He repeated his
apology to the entire arena. “I respect all you guys,” he said. His divisive behaviour was meant to help sell the fight, he explained, but he had gone too far. And then Mr Strickland voiced a sentiment that every American leader should try repeating each morning in the mirror: “I should be a better fuckin’ example,” he said. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/05/14/what-donald-trump-could-learn- from-the-ufc
Essay The cold war, Vietnam and a fractured America The architects of the Vietnam War knew it was doomed
The cold war, Vietnam and a fractured America May 14th 2026 1950s-1970sPeace without peaceAt the end of the second world war two great powers eyed each other across a ruined Europe. America and the Soviet Union, once allies, were now ideological rivals. The cold war had begun. Under the doctrine of containment, America not only resisted Soviet expansion but sought to anchor a liberal order abroad, backing western Europe’s reconstruction through the Marshall Plan and binding the region into NATO. The Soviet Union consolidated its grip on eastern Europe, installing loyal regimes and suppressing dissent. The sense of danger deepened in 1949, when the Soviets tested an atomic bomb, ushering in a nuclear arms race that produced arsenals capable of destroying the planet many times over. Confrontation shifted to the periphery, where the superpowers fought by proxy in wars on the Korean peninsula and in Vietnam.
This rivalry defined the next four decades, creating a permanent state of tension. It was a new kind of conflict—ideological, global, yet without direct war thanks to deterrence by the too-apt acronym MAD, or mutually assured destruction. The revolution was televisedThere may be nothing more American than the notion that America did not really become “America” until it was televised, like a product. That happened in the 1950s and 1960s, when television became a common good. In 1954 the leading face of America’s “red scare”, Senator Joe McCarthy, was humiliated on a live nationwide broadcast when an Army lawyer asked him, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 Bull Connor’s use of high-pressure firehoses and police dogs against black children protesting against segregation shocked millions of viewers nationwide, galvanising the civil- rights movement. In 1968 Walter Cronkite, the country’s best-known news presenter, declared that America was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam, a turning point in that war. Meanwhile, entertaining shows like “Bonanza”, “Perry Mason” and “Leave it to Beaver” beamed an idealised (although mostly white Protestant) vision of American liberty, progress and moral justice into countries around the world. It was a lavishly produced vision, for truly there was nothing more American than the advertisements that came with—and paid for—all this news and entertainment. 1961-63The days of Camelot The first televised presidential debate pitted a youthful, smiling senator from Massachusetts against a tired-looking vice-president who melted under the hot lights. John F. Kennedy went on to win narrowly over Richard Nixon in 1960. Just 43, Kennedy was the youngest person ever elected president (and the first Catholic). Appropriate to the television age, his brief presidency was a triumph in image-making, beginning with his inaugural address. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he told Americans. “Ask what you can do for your country.” Overseas he projected a benevolent vision of America as protector of the free world. “Ich bin ein Berliner,” he declared in front of the Berlin Wall.
His years in office were shaped by America’s communist neighbour to the south, Cuba. In his first year a botched attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, known since as the Bay of Pigs fiasco, embarrassed him. But in 1962 Kennedy managed the most serious nuclear showdown of the cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, with a cool head and deft diplomacy, averting potential catastrophe. He died by assassination, in November 1963, an almost mythical figure, with a sense of promise unfulfilled. Much like his country. He had a dreamIn 1954, in Brown v Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that segregation of public schools denied black Americans equal treatment, violating their rights under the 14th Amendment. By overturning the “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v Ferguson almost 60 years earlier, the justices struck a first blow to the Jim Crow era, energising the civil- rights movement. The next year Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower enforced the Brown decision by ordering federal troops to escort nine black students into a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Martin Luther King led non-violent demonstrations, but he was long unpopular among white Americans, who viewed him and the movement as divisive even after his “I have a dream” speech in 1963. It was repeated television footage of violence by police against protesters that helped shift white opinion decisively in favour of the cause. Congress passed a Civil Rights Act in 1964 and a Voting Rights Act in 1965. In 1968 King was assassinated while campaigning for economic justice for poor Americans of all races to match the newly won legal rights for black people. Guns and butterThe assassination of Kennedy thrust Lyndon Johnson into the Oval Office. He quickly set about trying to make America not just “the rich society and the powerful society” but “the Great Society”. Some policies he nicked from Kennedy. But Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was his greater influence. Johnson declared a “war on poverty”, providing health insurance for the old and the poor and setting up programmes to boost employment and education. Johnson saw through the elimination of draconian immigration quotas that had been in place for decades, and cajoled Congress into passing historic civil-rights legislation that finally ended the Jim Crow era. But Johnson’s
presidency, and America’s image in the world for years to come, would be defined by his greatest foreign-policy failure, or “practising ‘escalatio’ on the Vietnamese”, as Tom Lehrer, the period’s top satirist, put it. One giant leapJuly 20th 1969 was the apogee of the American century; the day the Eagle, Apollo 11’s lunar module, set down two astronauts in the magnificent desolation of the Sea of Tranquility. The plaque they left there said “We came in peace for all mankind”, and if “in peace” was a stretch— Apollo was a creature of war, even if the war in question was a cold one —“for all mankind” had a certain truth to it. A remarkable nation was doing a remarkable thing, and the claim to be doing it for everyone was more a generosity, less an arrogation. The space age was to deliver much more, and much of it mattered more: eyes in the sky for arms control and spying, monitoring the environment and fighting wars; satellites for telecoms, broadcasting and internet access; positioning systems that have done for “where am I?” what the watch did for “what time is it?”; pictures of the furthest reaches of heaven; echoes of the earliest moments of time. But nothing resonated like the delivering of that plaque to that dusty plain. 1965-75The unwinnable conflictAmerica came to see communist expansion as a global threat. If one country fell, others might follow. This “domino theory”—and a fear by successive presidents of appearing weak— underpinned America’s intervention in Vietnam. What began with a handful of military advisers to the non-communist government in Saigon escalated into full-scale war with Ho Chi Minh’s communists in the north. By 1969 America had deployed more than half a million troops to Vietnam and was bombing North Vietnam as well as neighbouring Laos and Cambodia. Officials cited enemy body counts and kill ratios as evidence of progress. But America’s conventional superiority proved ill-suited to a guerrilla war rooted as much in nationalism as in ideology. Its support for an unpopular authoritarian regime further weakened its cause. A war fought to “save” Vietnam relied on tactics that devastated it, from the destruction of villages to the use of chemical defoliants such as Agent Orange. When America withdrew—having lost more than 58,000 soldiers and having contributed to