Though the year is still young, 2026 has already revealed itself to be one of significant geopolitical turmoil and realignment – especially as far as the United States of America is concerned. These pages have recently and compellingly written on the need for foreign policy realists (Christian or otherwise) to come to terms with the return of multipolarity, a growing reality and an intentional (and perhaps necessary) pivot away from prior, United States-led attempts to establish a liberal global order premised on democratic ideals and Bretton Woods-style economics.

Yet if the United States is going to pursue a new, and admittedly somewhat far flung, geopolitical order in which it concentrates its security and economic resources in protection and pursuit of select national partners, as the 2025 National Security Strategy’s recapitulation of the Monroe Doctrine and its recent foreign policy moves certainly suggests it will, what bonds beyond American might and dollars will knit this sundry group of nations together in harmony?

This March, 20 baseball teams, representing 19 different nations (since Puerto Rico competes independently of Team USA), contended for the gold in the World Baseball Classic (for those unfamiliar, think the MLB-sponsored baseball version of the World Cup tournament). Earlier this week, in an ironic twist of fate (or more likely, divine providence), a prayerful Venezuelan team triumphed over a starstudded Team USA to capture its first world championship. 

As an aspiring baseball aficionado, I’ve followed the World Baseball Classic with keen interest for some time, but something jumped out at me this time that I had not noticed before when I first saw the list of qualifying teams this year. That list read like a subtle map of nearly all the major nations constituting the United States’ preferred sphere of influence, whether through shared interests and values (such as Australia, Great Britain, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) or hemispheric proximity (such as Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela). This observation, paired with the impassioned yet unmistakably cordial international play that the tournament featured, made me wonder if baseball has been largely ignored as a powerful cultural tie between the United States and nations lying outside the Anglosphere, especially those in the Caribbean and Pacific. 

Pondering the veracity of this hypothesis, I stumbled across a fascinating historical reality, analogous to the recently disproven “Golden Arches Theory,” that I’ve dubbed “Doubleday’s Law.” This “Law” can be stated thusly: since the United States’ rise to a position of geopolitical preeminence following the end of World War 2, the United States has never gone to war (de jure or de facto) with another nation’s government whilst that nation has maintained a professional baseball league (many Americans may be surprised to know that roughly two dozen nations presently do).

The 1989 invasion of Panama, President Reagan’s Operation Just Cause, may seem an exception to this “Law,” but it isn’t. Panama’s professional baseball league, Liga Profesional de Béisbol de Panamá (LPBP), founded in 1946, was forced to shutter in 1972 amidst declining economic conditions (in 2011, the LPBP resumed play after a one-season blip in the early 2000s).

Clearly, the existence of a professional baseball league within a nation is not an exclusive, or even necessarily a direct, causal factor in explaining why “Doubleday’s Law” holds (and mind you, Cuba’s Serie Nacional de Béisbol just concluded its 64th season, so there is no guarantee that it will remain valid). But the existence of such a league today likely requires at least three things: (1) a longstanding, historical relationship of cultural and economic exchange with the United States; (2) an economy robust enough to sustain a professional sport as an entertainment product; and (3) a culture (or at least a significant subculture) which has taken an avid interest in the quirky, yet gentlemanly and exhilarating game that Americans invented when we realized cricket wasn’t quite suitable for our less provincial needs. Accordingly, cultivating peaceful relations with nations possessing these quiet qualifications has long served the United States’ deeper interest in ordered liberty and mutual flourishing.

While soccer has often been the focus of the European powers’ recreational and transcultural bonding, and despite a relatively recent (and regrettable) love affair with American football, the United States has long engaged in “baseball diplomacy” (i.e., the promotion of baseball to strengthen cultural ties). The most paradigmatic example of such efforts remains the governmentally-endorsed 1934 exhibition tour of Japan by an All-American team led by Babe Ruth. Related efforts continue today (e.g., in the aptly named Baseball Diplomacy Act that seeks to remove barriers to Cubans playing professionally in the United States). But where baseball has taken root, in the surprising number of nations where it truly has, it seems to have done so less because of direct governmental efforts and more because ordinary Americans venturing abroad (for example, railway engineer Johnny Tayson in Mexico and professor Horace Wilson in Japan during the late 19th Century), earnestly loved the game and took the time to teach it to locals who embraced it, freely integrating the sport into their own culture. And then those locals indirectly returned the favor by carrying the game onward (as a pair of Cuban brothers, Ignacio and Ubaldo Alomá, did when they resettled in the Dominican Republic). 

This unique history and shared love of the game is a very good thing for the United States as it seeks to not strike out whilst in pursuit of a more economically sustainable world order – perhaps only the most recent example of the “special providence” which Otto von Bismarck lamented. For baseball is not merely America’s pastime; it is arguably the linguistic key to scores of foundational American English idioms lifted straight from the diamond into everyday speech. And perhaps I’m overly romantic about baseball, but I’m far from the first to notice that baseball quietly schools us in virtues that echo the imago dei: hard work, patience, perseverance, precision, camaraderie, collegiality, celebration, community, rule-following, respect for authority, sure-handedness, and the simple, yet primeval, joy of spending time outdoors under the heavens. It’s hard to think of better colloquialisms or values to build a new world order around, if America is to be so obliged.

And I have even more cause for tempered optimism to share. If “Doubleday’s Law” continues to hold, we may yet escape Thucydides’s Trap: a well-funded, professional baseball league began its inaugural season in the People’s Republic of China on New Year’s Day, 2026.