Carrots, Sticks, and Olympic Torches
According to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in an article in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, China’s reluctant and belated concession to allow a skeleton UN-AU peacekeeping force in Sudan represents a newly “cooperative approach on a range of problems.” But the reality is that some newfound sense of Chinese responsibility on the world stage had nothing to do with Beijing’s decision to “cooperate.” The concession on Darfur (if you want to call it that) was entirely about the Beijing Olympics. Given that it took a threatened boycott by Western leaders for China to stop arms sales to Sudan and drop its veto of the peacekeeping resolution, I am dubious that we’ll see any further “responsible” behavior after the Olympic Games have come and gone. At this point, the Games are going ahead—with or without protesting Western leaders—and the leverage a coordinated boycott might have provided will be a mere memory.
But I’m not writing this to bemoan a missed opportunity or cast aspersions on Rice’s diplomatic optimism. I’m writing this to call some attention to the next opportunity down the road: Sochi 2014.
China and Russia are both rising powers, economically, militarily and diplomatically. Secretary Rice referred to both as carrying “special responsibility and weight as fellow permanent members of the UN Security Council.” Translation: they both have lots of nuclear weapons, so our military power doesn’t really scare them. China is also not the only rising power we’d love to see adopt a more cooperative stance as it claims (or reclaims) “full membership in the international community.”
Russian cooperation is essential for Western objectives on WMD non-proliferation, peace and stability in the Middle East and Central Asia, energy security, and combating international organized crime, to name just a few top policy priorities. But flush with newfound mineral wealth and confidence born of a resurgent central government, Moscow seems poised to extract a high price for cooperation with the West on these issues. Moreover, the Kremlin has effectively taken any Western efforts to encourage domestic political reform totally off the table. What are we going to do about it?
That’s where the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi might play a very valuable role. The West’s approach to Beijing on Darfur was clumsy and disorganized. We waited too long to exert significant pressure and we failed to speak with one voice. As a result, we put the Chinese in a position to lose face whether they cooperated with us or not. But we have the opportunity to try a different approach with Russia on Sochi.
Starting in 2009, the next US President, in concert with European allies, should put forth a set of positive incentives for cooperation with Russia on a timetable culminating in the 2014 games. For example, the West can offer full normalization of trade relations and Russian accession to the WTO in exchange for Russia’s commitment to spend a significant portion of its massive state oil and gas revenues on securing remaining WMD facilities and helping to find long-term alternative employment for WMD scientists. We can offer to promote the Russia-NATO Council to a much higher profile within the alliance, and even give Russia a say in NATO expansion, if Moscow applies and maintains pressure to halt Iranian nuclear enrichment. And we could propose Russian leadership of the Council of Europe, if it committed to a major reform of its police and court system consistent with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Those are the carrots. The stick, obviously, is a Western boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics. A boycott would be a crushing blow to Russia, struck in the one area where it remains genuinely vulnerable to international opinion. But let us not merely hope that Russia cooperates when cooperation is needed, and haphazardly fling boycott threats in its face if it does not. Rather, let us forge a unified policy now, setting out clear incentives for cooperation, a timeline, and an equally clear and enforceable consequence for failure to cooperate.
With China, the West undermined its own leverage by so wantonly and disjointedly threatening boycotts of the Beijing Olympics that we effectively applied a wilted stick to deny the carrot. With Russia, the carrots should be openly and explicitly offered, and the stick reserved until absolutely necessary.
No related posts.
I am reminded of an article posted here by Seth Green in April, entitled “The sad Irony of the Boycott Debate”. His concern was that a U.S. boycott might not be taken particularly seriously, given global public opinion about our own track record.
That concern seems equally, if not more valid with respect to a boycott of the Russian winter Olympics. With the world’s view of America as it stands, boycotting might harm the U.S. more than Russia. A general Western boycott might indeed be an effective stick, but perhaps an American driven boycott would not.
For this approach to really work, the threat would need to be multilateral, unified, and highly credible. Good thing there are five years left to work with.
Comment on June 11, 2008 @ 12:48 pm
I understand the rationale behind using the publicity generated by an Olympic games to encourage Russia to do the right thing by cooperating with the rest of the world on vital security issues.
However, there are two things to consider. The first is, as Jeff mentioned above, our own standing in the world. For a number of reasons, we are seen in a less flattering light than we were the last time we boycotted an Olympic games, and six years from now, while I hope the United States will have a better image abroad, it’s hard to tell how much influence a boycott threat would have. A lot of us remember the 1984 LA Olympics and Mary Lou Retton and all the grand American athletes — and oh yes, the Soviets boycotted, their loss. Which brings me to the next point. . .
Our 1980 boycott of the Moscow summer Olympics only served to dash the hopes of thousands of athletes in this country and gutted our Olympic fundraising efforts for 1984. (All the “support the team” donations you see now go to assist the 2012 cycle.) Besides the obvious time limitation on peak physical performance, many non-revenue amateur athletes can’t maintain the financial and personal costs of dedicated training indefinitely. It’s not fair to them to use their lifelong dreams as a tool of coercion, the effectiveness of which is dubious.
I’m not sure there is a “right” way to use the Olympics as an instrument of pressure, and so I want to look for other, more substantial ways to engage Russia. I think using the Olympics would only reflect poorly on us.
Comment on June 12, 2008 @ 7:37 am
Kirsten, I think you’re right that there would be definite costs for the US in actually boycotting the Sochi games, and that a boycott is very far from a perfect policy tool in that respect. However, that’s often the case with the kind of leverage that involves pulling back from multilateral engagement–all sides stand to lose. But by far the worst cost of having to implement a boycott would be that if it got to that point we would have failed to secure Russian cooperation on the three critical issues I mentioned in my piece above, among others.
To your and Jeff’s additional argument that the US is in a poor position to make a credible unilateral call for more “responsible” Russian policies, I would partly agree and partly disagree. Yes, the US case would be much stronger, and the possibility of a boycott a much more effective implement, if we can align our policies with those of Western Europe and our other allies. However, even without a coordinated position on Sochi, I think the US would be fully justified in calling for an end to Russia’s reckless policies on Iran, its aggressive and confrontational stance in the region (including vis-a-vis NATO), and its highly cynical “dictatorship of laws,” in which legal authority and Kremlin political authority seem indistinguishable.
Comment on June 12, 2008 @ 7:07 pm