While the explosive events of the past week confirm what many suspected about the international soccer bureaucracy, they also tell us something deeper about international relations: The world is a much better place thanks to American hegemony.

It’s no accident that the indictments were delivered by the U.S. Department of Justice, which found “rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted” corruption spanning decades. That FIFA was corrupt was one of the biggest open secrets in the world. Yet for years this organization proceeded with business as usual. Had a majority of its members wanted to do something about it, they would have. Like that other august and effective international body, the United Nations General Assembly, most major FIFA decisions (including the election of its chairman and the location of the World Cup) are determined by a “one country, one vote,” process. This means that, also like at the U.N., dictatorships, thugocracies, and other illiberal regimes—what the late U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan referred to as the “jackals” of Turtle Bay—have disproportionate sway over FIFA business.

Soccer does indeed “explain the world,” as a book of that title claims. Its governing body is a place where might makes right, where dark dealings and shady associations win the day, where the bullies and the cheaters win, where the world’s only Jewish state is singled out for abuse—and it’s all presided over and funded by venal Swiss bankers. That is, it will be until Sepp Blatter, the FIFA chairman who ruled for 17 years with an iron fist, exits the chairmanship sometime later this year, having announced his resignation on Tuesday amid swirling rumors that he had a role in the corruption. FIFA is a microcosm of the world order in its default state—anarchic and unjust—its way of operating emblematic of the “transnational” “global governance” structures so fetishized by liberal internationalists.