Bad Idea: Expecting Olympic Boycotts to be a Useful Diplomatic Tool
Bad Ideas in National Security Series
December 21, 2021 — Riley McCabe, Jake Harrington
On February 4, 2022, an Olympic cauldron will be lit in the city of Beijing for the second time in fewer than 14 years. In so doing, Olympic history will be made as Beijing becomes the first city to have hosted both the Summer and Winter games. Since the historic bid in 2015, the 2022 Beijing Olympics have been the focus of much controversy, with widespread calls for the games to be relocated or boycotted. For years, human rights groups and activists have campaigned against Beijing’s role as host, citing the Chinese government’s myriad human rights violations. These violations include surveillance operations and political imprisonments in Tibet; the “re-education,” surveillance, and forced labor of Uyghurs in Xinjiang; antidemocratic crackdowns in Hong Kong; and cultural repression in Southern Mongolia. These calls mirror similar efforts surrounding the 2008 Olympics, when human rights groups, celebrities, and politicians alike protested China’s hosting of the games.
The Olympics have long been a source of international political controversy. Ironically enough, the debate in Washington about how the United States should approach the 2022 Olympics is inextricably tied to the same country that inspired the only other U.S. Olympic boycott in history: Afghanistan. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan motivated the Carter administration to push for the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and now the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the American-backed government in Kabul is raising serious questions about U.S. global power, prestige, and credibility. It is no accident that in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Kabul, global attention shifted eastward to the Taiwan Strait, particularly as Chinese state media exploited the chaos in Afghanistan as the “death knell of U.S. hegemony.” Indeed, the fall of Kabul has precipitated the latest pressure on U.S. policymakers to quickly and decisively repel China’s efforts to advance the narrative of American decline.
https://defense360.csis.org/bad-idea-expecting-olympic-boycotts-to-be-a-useful-diplomatic-tool/
