The next
Olympic Games
may be more than a year away, but the war in Ukraine is already causing diplomatic headaches for organizers. Over the weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach
exchanged heated statements
about the possibility of Russian athletes competing at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris.
Zelensky was in the right: The IOC should proactively move to ban Russia from the competition. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a violation of the Olympic spirit. Europeans such as Bach, however, who run international institutions such as the IOC or the Austria-based
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
, seem to think that appeasing tyrants is the best way to keep international relations chugging along and producing profits.
Bach went so far as to
claim
that letting Russians compete is part of the Olympics’ “peace mission.” He said he wants the games to “unify” the world, “not to contribute to more confrontation, more escalation.” But it is foolish to treat Russia like just any other country, as opposed to an aggressor state that has plunged Europe into violence unseen since World War II.
Of course, it is never that surprising when the IOC makes excuses for tyranny. Last year, the IOC allowed China to host the Winter Olympics, despite the mass murder of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. At the time, Bach
deflected
from questions about the Chinese Communist Party’s genocidal policies. He said that commenting on the subject would be “putting the games at risk.” The IOC also had a minimal
reaction
to Russia’s state-run doping system at earlier Olympics — they banned the Russian flag and anthem but still allowed Russians to compete as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.”
The IOC’s cozy relations with tyrants are the product of two forces: rampant corruption and naive idealism. And sadly, both problems afflict other, more important institutions of global governance.
The biggest reason these international institutions are so vulnerable to authoritarians’ influence is the corruption endemic to global governance. The IOC is corrupt, facing regular accusations of
bribery
and
censorship
. But, regretfully, that kind of corruption is commonplace at the international level.
China
and Russia are running
massive
campaigns
to corrupt national governments and international organizations in service of their ambitions. When autocrats cannot manipulate globalists into doing their bidding, they find ways to bribe them into doing it anyway.
But Russia’s continued presence at the Olympics also represents the failed hope of a past world. In the 1990s, Western liberals believed international affairs had reached the “
end of history
.” They thought the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that, over time, more and more of the world would embrace the concept of an “
open society
.” Liberals set to work, then, integrating the new Russian Federation and the Chinese Communist Party into the international system. It turned out, though, that these regimes were more interested in using that system to their own advantage. The ideology of global governance makes the bureaucrats administering it naive and easy targets for manipulation.
As globalism reshaped the world economy in the 1990s and 2000s, authoritarians quickly learned how to capture international institutions and use their power for their own benefit. Take, for instance, the CCP’s hijacking of the World Health Organization. Experts at the
Hudson Institute
found that after the outbreak of COVID-19, Chinese President Xi Jinping effectively “transformed the World Health Organization into a party propaganda outlet that spread disinformation and excluded China’s regional rivals from its pandemic response.” Russia’s manipulation of the IOC’s “peace mission” resembles China’s manipulation of the WHO’s public health mission. In both cases, authoritarian regimes exploited globalist liberals’ desires for universal peace to get a leg up on the free world.
To be sure, not every global leader has shown the kind of weakness Bach displays. Czech President-elect Petr Pavel’s
bold opposition
to Russia and China exemplifies the moral clarity of most Eastern European leaders. And in Britain,
Boris Johnson
and
Ben Wallace
have been powerful advocates for the Ukrainian cause. The problem is that international institutions such as the IOC or the
World Economic Forum
are more likely to be dominated by the Thomas Bachs of the world than the Petr Pavels.
The solution to the Davos set’s willingness to appease
Putin
and Xi is a reassertion of American power and influence at the global level. Perhaps American officials should boycott future World Economic Forum meetings where CCP officials are
giving addresses
. The Biden administration could also work harder and smarter to block rising sympathy for authoritarians in the Global South. But a great first step would be pressuring the U.S. Olympic Committee to join Zelensky’s call for banning Russia from the Paris Games publicly.
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Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, a communications firm based in Washington, D.C. Before that, he was a communications aide to Sen. Ben Sasse. He graduated from Hillsdale College in 2018 and, in 2017, was a political studies fellow at the Hudson Institute.
