BATH, ENGLAND -- Last week, Condoleezza Rice said that Washington had changed its mind and, under the right conditions, might be ready to join Europe and negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program. Next Sunday, in Nuremberg, Iran plays Mexico in the first round of the World Cup.

Who can say for sure which event, in terms of Iran's engagement with the world, will be seen by history as the more important?

To Americans the question might sound absurd. But then, Americans know more about the importance of the Iran crisis than the importance of soccer.

Yes, the brave guys of the United States team are in Germany, ready to play the Czechs, Italians and Ghanaians (London bookies make the Yanks 80-1 to win the Cup, which at least is better than Iran, at 250-1).

Yes, more and more Americans have played the game at school or college. Yes, they know about bending it like David Beckham. Yes, "soccer moms" are a significant sociological and electoral group.

And yet there is no pretending that the final of the epic quadrennial tournament, in Berlin on July 9, will matter to America remotely as much as baseball.

You Americans have the World Series, the rest of us have the World Cup, and never the twain shall meet. That goes even for Americans who might take some ancestral interest in distant sports.

How many ardent Irish Americans know how the different species of football played in Ireland correspond closely to social fault lines and even political parties (Gaelic football for the ruling Fianna Fail party, rugby for the Fine Gael, soccer for Labor)?

How many proud Jewish Americans know about the Zionist origins of the Israeli soccer clubs, and the significance of the fact (it would take another essay to explain this) that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is inevitably a fan of Jerusalem Betar?

"Winning the Cup isn't necessary for a team to make a mark on its national's character with a noble victory, or a heroic defeat."

By now the game is passionately followed on every continent. There are five African teams in Germany - Angola, Togo, Ghana, Tunisia and Ivory Coast (which has been an astonishingly prolific source of players for European clubs) - as well as the Japanese and the Australians.

A Ghanaian would have seemed an exotic when the tour began, in 1930. Only teams from Latin America and Europe played in the original World Cup, and only such teams have so far won it.

But winning the Cup isn't necessary for a team to make a mark on its nation's character with a noble victory, or a heroic defeat. Over and again, beautiful national legends have been conjured up by the Cup, with the tournament playing a part in the broader political and cultural dramas of many competing countries.

Given the tense state of international affairs, something of the kind could very well happen again this summer, though not necessarily so happily.

In the age of totalitarianism, sports were shamelessly used and abused. Mussolini was flattered and sustained by Italy's victories in the World Cups of 1934 and 1938, held on either side of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, which were even more ruthlessly exploited by Hitler.

But democracy can claim its victories also. After the war that destroyed Hitler and Mussolini, and after a 12-year hiatus, the Cup began again, in a tournament in Brazil that saw some unlikely events (beginning when the team from India was forbidden to play in bare feet).

Although England was the land where the game was invented, we had been too haughty to compete in the prewar Cups. This time the English team did take part - and was knocked out by the United States in a humiliation that rankles with Bunker Hill or Yorktown.

Four years later came "the Miracle of Bern." At a time when the Germans were not a happy nation, West Germany defeated Hungary in the Swiss capital. All Germans, even if they weren't yet born in 1954, know the exultant "Aus! Aus! Aus! Aus!" from the radio commentator Herbert Zimmermann - "The game is over. Germany is world champion!" - which seemed to epitomize a new national pride.

There were then only 40,000 television sets in Germany, and most of the population in West Germany - and many millions in the East as well - listened to that match, and its improbable result, on the radio. It forms the climax of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film "The Marriage of Maria Braun," whose tragic heroine dies to the blaring sound of Zimmermann's "Aus! Aus! Aus! Aus!"

Then again, even Englishmen who weren't yet born in 1966 know our equivalent. "They think it's all over," Kenneth Wolstenholme of the BBC shouted when fans ran on the pitch at Wembley prematurely, before adding, "It is now!" as England won.

Long after the miracles of Bern and Wembley, there was a third miracle, in Paris in 1998. French soccer has varied over the years from inadequate to feeble, and France was suffering from a prolonged malaise or morosité, even as communal relations with the huge immigrant population had gone from bad to worse.

When Les Bleus won that World Cup, with a multiethnic "rainbow team" including several descendents from the French colonial empire, under the wonderful first-generation Frenchman Zinedine Zidane, the French - for a moment, anyway - felt good about themselves.

If Europe's troubled past and present have been reflected indirectly in sports, for Latin America it can sometimes seem that soccer is their history.

A majority of World Cups, nine of 17, have been won by South American countries. Brazil is the only country to have won the Cup five times - and it is Brazil that entirely redefined the sport.

By now "the beautiful game" is a stale cliché, and often inapt, as stories of corruption and cheating fill the sports pages. But when Brazil was at its pinnacle, beautiful was an understatement.

Those were the years of Pelé, from the 1950s to the 1970s. He gloriously helped his side win the Cup in 1958 and 1970, and should have helped win the two between those: In 1962 Brazil won even though Pelé had been sidelined, and well-nigh crippled, by foul tackling, and in 1966 the whole Brazilian team was effectively "hacked out" of the game by dirty play.

Many individual games have had - and will yet have - loud political overtones. It's possible that Croatia will shortly come head to head with Serbia, just as in 1982 it was possible that England might have played Argentina only weeks after the countries had been at war in the Falklands.

That particular rematch had to wait until 1986, when Argentina defeated England thanks to Diego Maradona's two goals, one infamously dishonest - the "hand of God," as he later insolently described his punching of the ball into the net, noticed by everyone but the referee - and one indescribably brilliant, as he danced and swerved past the hypnotized England defense.

Over and again, the Cup has played a part in the broader political and cultural dramas of many competing countries.

Will there be another miracle in Berlin or will there be conflict on the field with excruciating political implications?

Some cynics have suggested that Secretary Rice's demarche was made in the knowledge that it would be refused, and that the White House would be horrified if the talkative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran actually invited the secretary of state to Tehran.

But there is a more likely dilemma. No European country would welcome Ahmadinejad if he turned up to give another of his repellent harangues. But what if he makes good on a threat to come to Germany to watch his team play?