After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, President Jimmy Carter threatened a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. Carter hoped the threat would force Soviet troops back over the Afghan border.
Instead, the moment underscored his administration’s listless, limping foreign policy: The Soviets stayed in Afghanistan for nine more years, the United States government was humiliated, and 466 Team USA athletes missed the chance to compete. That moment sprang to my mind recently as some in the GOP call for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. A word of caution: As Carter amply demonstrated, Olympic boycotts don’t work, and what’s more, they risk our country’s reputation and ruin the dreams of young competitors.
Unsurprisingly, Carter went into the boycott with hesitation. He expressed reluctance about a boycott, saying that it sent “cold chills” down his spine. At first, he urged the International Olympic Committee to relocate the games out of Moscow unless the Soviets left Afghanistan within the month. It was a classically Carter-esque move: The idea had no hope, and the fixed timeline left no flexibility. The IOC rejected the call to move the games, and Carter had no choice but to push for a boycott. What followed was a White House full-court press to pressure advertisers, athletes, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and other countries to spurn the 1980 Moscow Summer Games. Given the scale of antipathy toward the Soviet Union, Carter convinced Congress to vote with him, but some inside his administration wondered about the wisdom of a boycott. Those doubts were well-founded: The U.S. was coming off a spectacular showing in the 1980 Winter Olympic Games, which were held in Lake Placid, New York.
Unlike Carter’s feeble attempts to stand up to the Soviets, U.S. athletes had actually done so: The U.S. hockey team beat a favored Soviet team, a moment immortalized as “the miracle on ice.” For the Carter-ites, the miracle was problematic. “The Olympic situation seems to be disintegrating,” a White House aide warned the national security adviser. “If we are not careful, our magnificent hockey win may fuel domestic sentiment against the boycott.” Indeed, public polling showed a shift against the boycott. Carter’s last stand was the USOPC, and thanks to aggressive lobbying and a convincing speech from former Treasury Secretary William Simon, it voted to keep U.S. athletes out of the 1980 Moscow Games. The action had no effect on the Soviet Union, except to make the communists turn around and kick the U.S. in the shins by skipping the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Many of Carter’s officials spent years apologizing. Carter himself did so privately to a number of would-be Olympians.
Republicans should learn from Carter’s grievous mistake. If you want to be tough on China this year, take a page from the 1980 Olympic athletes. “The only way to compete against Moscow is to stuff it down their throats in their own backyard,” said Al Oerter, a four-time gold medalist. Instead of a boycott, we should encourage American athletes to beat China on its turf. To punish China’s varieties of misbehavior, call for the games to be moved out of Beijing, and do so vocally and vehemently. And as the games approach, draw attention to Chinese violations of human rights and its repression of free speech in Hong Kong. If that’s not enough, push for a diplomatic boycott: If President Biden is his back-slapping self on the 2022 Olympic podium next to Chinese President Xi Jinping, make him pay a steep political price. But for the love of all that is decent, don’t do what Carter did. Don’t hurt athletes and American prestige for a boycott that won’t change China’s behavior.
Encouragingly, several Republicans, including Sens. Rick Scott and Ted Cruz, have argued that China should not host the games but that American athletes should attend regardless of location. Let’s not do what Carter did. The president I served, Ronald Reagan, knew this all too well. As the 1980 boycott took shape, he offered a prescient observation at a speech in Pittsburgh: “The way in which President Carter has gone about the boycott risked turning the whole exercise into yet another failure in U.S. foreign policy. … He is singling out our athletes … to make the sacrifice for his foreign policy failures.”
Let’s not make that same error again.
Edward Rollins is a former assistant to President Reagan who served both Reagan terms in the White House and as the national campaign director for the successful Reagan-Bush 1984 campaign.
