The Cold War and the 1984 Olympic Games

A Soviet-American Surrogate War

Philip D'Agati

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137360250
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Political History & Theory

The Soviet boycott of the 1984 Olympic Games is explained as the result of a complex series of events and policies that culminated in a strategic decision to not participate in Los Angeles. Using IR framework, D'Agati developes and argues for the concept of surrogate wars as an alternative means for conflict between states.

Chapter 1

The Surrogate War, the Boycott, and the Search for a Hidden Story

A Call for a Deeper Understanding

The assumption that began this study was simple enough: the Soviet Union, a state with very complex and interrelated domestic and foreign policies, would most likely have a goal behind its decision to boycott the Olympics. Given the nuanced decisions behind most of Soviet policies, it is not unreasonable to assume that the Soviet decision to boycott the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics was not simply retaliatory. Hans Morgenthau illustrated that diplomacy is neither haphazard nor uncalculated.1 His study of international relations is actually an excellent presentation of precisely how deliberate and carefully designed foreign relations are between states. Of even greater significance is Thomas Schelling’s study of conflict, in which he delineates the concept of bargaining between two or more states.2

One of Schelling’s most important contributions is that international relations are not always a zero-sum game; international relations do not exist at an extreme in which one state gains completely and another state loses completely. Instead, he explains, it is a non-zero-sum game in which bargaining plays a crucial role in determining degrees of success and failure of each participant. Moving forward with Schelling, it becomes increasingly hard to assume that the Soviet Union would opt for automatic noninvolvement instead of entering into a bargaining game with the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as an attempt to arrive at a conclusion with a better outcome for the Soviet Union than boycotting.

The simple fact that, as will be demonstrated in Chapters 6 and 7, the Soviet Union did have both demands and diplomatic encounters with the LAOOC and the IOC during the months before the Los Angeles Summer Games suggests there is more to this story. Therefore, with the simple application of Schelling’s theory, we are able to immediately dismiss statements that the simplest answer—“tit for tat,” as Christopher Hill put it when describing the boycott3—is automatically the correct one. This does not, however, dismiss the explanation of vengeance as the final answer. Morgenthau and Schelling’s theoretical notions would suggest that the Soviet Union would have considered many options for their sports policy in the 1980s, with the possibility of boycott likely being one among many.

To fully understand the purpose behind the Soviet boycott, we have to first understand what goal(s) Soviet officials had in their participation or nonparticipation in Los Angeles. As we will see, the boycott may actually have been the method of achieving a goal rather than the goal itself, thus making the current explanation of vengeance inaccurate. The American boycott, followed by an American Olympics, provided a “competition” between the superpowers. The decision to boycott must have been a result of a careful decision process, resulting from the conclusion that they would gain more by not attending the Games. Soviet officials must have seen the nonparticipation as preserving the state’s sports authority instead of as mere retaliation, with retaliation being only a side effect of the actual decision and not the decision itself. The added benefit of retaliation with a Soviet nonparticipation was most likely an incentive to ultimately decide not to go. The question in this study is not whether retaliation played a role—it would be naïve to assume it did not—but to place retaliation in its proper context as a part of the decision process: the greater process of which the retaliation was a part of—what I will define as a longstanding surrogate war against the United States.

This study relies on a belief that international sports can serve as a form of surrogate war. As such, concepts and theories on war are pertinent to this study. In particular, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s study on the causes of war offers a particularly interesting justification for challenging current explanations for the Soviet boycott.4 In his account for war, termed the expected utility of war, Bueno de Mesquita explains that war only occurs when the benefits from going to war outweigh the potential cost of the war. Additionally, he states that decision makers are rational maximizers: they will act in a manner that provides a positive outcome while simultaneously being willing or unwilling to take risks in their actions.5

The expected utility of war is perhaps the best explanation for Soviet sports policy. As Chapter 3 will reveal, the Soviet Union had a history of attending only those sports competitions in which they could guarantee victory. In war terminology, they would only go to war if they “expected” that the outcome would be in their favor. As Chapter 4 will indicate, hosting the Olympics represents its own form of competition, which would also fall within the scope of Bueno de Mesquita’s arguments.

In addition to Bueno de Mesquita, we need to note there is a possibility of multiple levels of competition within a single event. These layers, nested games as George Tsebelis referred to them,6 are used to explain how suboptimal choices, made by an actor, might actually be rational if placed in the context of a larger goal—meaning that they appear suboptimal because the focus of the research is on the wrong question. These suboptimal choices—nested games—become particularly relevant when analyzing complex foreign policy goals in surrogate wars.

Nested games are a reminder that actual observed outcome is not necessarily the main goal of an action. For our analysis, this would mean that the Soviet goal was not to boycott; rather, it was to achieve some other goal, which boycotting would help to attain. Current explanations assume that the boycott was the direct result of a desire to punish or embarrass the United States for its decision to boycott the Moscow Olympics. However, it is also possible that the boycott served a more important goal of the Soviet Union and that retaliation was not the primary objective. Current theories on international relations and the history of Soviet involvement in sports all suggest that the Soviet Union’s involvement in the Olympics represents a calculated strategy to attain specific goals of the state. Where previous studies saw the boycott as a means to its own ends, this argument sees it as merely the process to attain the actual objectives of a well-crafted Soviet sports policy that was far more sophisticated than “You didn’t come to ours, so we aren’t coming to yours.”

The Path to a New Understanding

The two interrelated goals of this study are to establish the actual Soviet objectives that led to the boycott and to replace current understandings of the boycott with a theory based in a more rigorous understanding of Soviet sports enterprises. This study will focus on the choices that Soviet actors made in their sports diplomacy. Recognizing that these choices are made through the institutions and regulations of the Olympic Movement, the rational choice framework will be constrained by structuralist factors. To that end, the study is informed by the arguments of Morgenthau,7 Schelling,8 Kenneth Waltz,9 and others on the deliberate and calculated nature of the decision process of international relations while accepting statements, by Ira Katznelson and others,10 that structural realities influence outcomes of decisions. Lastly, the process of establishing Soviet interests and objectives in participating in the Olympics will be established through historical perspectives on Soviet sports policy decision making.

Additionally, it must be noted that the theoretical framework of this study will be deeply influenced by historical analysis. It will be demonstrated that Soviet sports policies are consistently designed around meeting the same set of specific goals—namely, to seek the promotion of the Soviet political, social, economic, and cultural system as superior to all others with particular emphasis on a comparison with Western and capitalist political systems. Granted that every individual example of Soviet sports diplomacy had its own unique situation and therefore its own specific goals, the underlying purpose behind Soviet involvement in international sports, and therefore the broad goals for that involvement, remained consistent.

By recognizing that international sports competitions represented a recurring opportunity for Soviet objectives, we find that there is a roughly sixty-year period of history from which consistent strategies of Soviet sports policy can be established. By placing this study into a historical perspective, we are able to establish a pattern of Soviet decision making and judge the 1984 decision to boycott accordingly.

Surrogate Wars: Fields of Competition for States

On a more theoretical level, this study serves to systematize the concept of a surrogate war through a close look at the 1984 boycott. This concept may have many similarities to a traditional war, but its unique nature has attributes that distinguish it from traditional war. To start, I define surrogate war as a conflict between two or more states that features a direct competition between representatives of those states but does not feature as an expected outcome property damage or severe personal injury, including loss of life. The expected nonlethal nature of surrogate wars is a key point of differentiation from traditional wars and proxy wars. These differences made surrogate wars, particularly during the Cold War, an increasingly popular option in twentieth-century politics.

The definition of surrogate war differs from a similar concept, proxy war, in a few key ways. William Safire defined proxy war as “great-power hostility expressed through client states.”11 By logical extension, proxy wars can include the use of nonstate actors in this capacity as well. The key difference between surrogate and proxy wars is the type of engagement. While proxy wars are the same engagement concept as traditional warfare, just waged by different actors, surrogate wars are more commonly waged by the primary state’s nonmilitary capabilities, in various forms or manifestations of competition.12 The focus of our analysis will be not only types of surrogate wars but also the capabilities that are used to wage them.

The interaction of all states, when in conflict, is conducted as a facet of war. Each state’s participation in war is conducted by a means consistent with that state’s capabilities and the perceived likelihood of victory from its preferred method of participation. For some states, this results in a traditional concept of war. In other cases, a traditional war becomes untenable and states instead must seek alternative venues for conflict. One attractive alternative is a surrogate war, in which states settle disputes in a manner that, while structurally distinct from more traditional concepts of war, is no less valid and no less theoretically bounded.

First, it must be noted that potential surrogate wars are not limited to any specific “type” of engagement. Far from encompassing a set list of types of conflicts, surrogate wars indicate a concept of conflict, which can manifest itself in many different ways. Carl von Clausewitz’s definition of war states that war is politics by other means.13 If we accept this context and suggest surrogate wars are “wars by other means,” then surrogate wars too are politics by other means. A surrogate war becomes another option in the arsenal of state conflict, allowing states to define and meet objectives that are otherwise outside their capacity.

While the usage of surrogate wars can be seen as nothing more than war with nonlethal tactics, that would be overly simplistic. A surrogate war allows for direct contest between states in circumstances in which traditional concepts of war are either not practical or not possible. In some cases, this is the logical result of the cost of war in certain circumstances. The lack of significant direct conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and the use instead of “competitions” in sports, technology, economics, and industry offers initial evidence of this.

While conflict between “enemies” is what most would assume plays out in surrogate wars, this is not a required feature of the relations of participants in a surrogate war. Arguably, another use of surrogate wars is in a rivalry between allied states as a means to abate rivalry rooted in nationalism and to diffuse interstate conflict among them. In such a scenario, surrogate war allows for confrontation and competition between these states without weakening or fragmenting alliances and their benefits.14

Surrogate wars, therefore, fall within the current theoretical understandings of war, but with a few additional conditions. These conditions include four elements: degree, competition, luck, and outcome. First, surrogate wars, even more so than situations of brinkmanship, allow for a conflict between two states that does not result in excessive costs and the risks of traditional war. The formula of expected utility, while still valid, often has different outcomes for surrogate wars simply because the cost involved can be much less. This is not to suggest that the terms, conditions, and outcomes of surrogate wars are trivial. Instead, it suggests that surrogate wars offer solutions to interstate challenges that are not contestable on a traditional battlefield.

Degree

Surrogate wars vary in degree of cost and planning, much like the spectrum of concepts from brinkmanship to total war. Arguably, we can analyze surrogate wars in a similar fashion, by identifying the amount of resources a state is willing to commit to them. This is only superficially useful though. Ranging from spontaneous to multiyear planning endeavors, the degrees of complexity of surrogate war are ipso facto conditions for the likely structures and outcomes of those events.

An element of degree is the context of battle versus war. Surrogate wars can manifest themselves as a singular event, separate from other forms of conflict between two states, or they may be embedded into a broader conflict with many “battles.” During traditional wars, states often claim victory in a variety of potential venues, like trumpeting the control of the skies in World War II as a moment of pride and rallying for England. Within a war, states seek many avenues to accept victory for many purposes. Surrogate wars can manifest individually, as a series of contests, or even as an event within a traditional war. It should be noted that celebrations of “victory” in a traditional setting of war, as a means to maintain morale or for some other purpose, are merely interpretations of the circumstances of war and not surrogate wars.

Competition

The degree of sophistication of the structural element of a surrogate war, in other words the concept of competition, needs careful consideration. To be valid, a surrogate war must be a deliberate contest between representatives of two or more states, through which a structured means of determining a victor is present.15 While the terms of victory may be somewhat up for debate between participants, the effectiveness of a contest as a surrogate war is lessened if determination of victory is cloudy or open to contestation between the represented states. Competitions that are structured around a set of governing rules tend to be more effective than those that are more haphazardly drawn.16 As a result, sporting events are a common and effective type of surrogate war.

As I define them, surrogate wars do not require physical competition. The objective can be attained through physical prowess, mental capability, ingenuity, or some other capability of the individual(s) involved. Any ability of a citizen that the state can claim to have been partially or fully responsible for developing or that can be attributed to the overall capability of members of a specific national identity is a necessary condition for a surrogate war. Acceptable examples would be any sport where physical prowess determines victory. Competition is not, however, a factor solely of physical ability. The Space Race,17 arms race, or even chess represent surrogate wars of intellect, engineering, and state capability. Competition therefore requires success to be contingent on the abilities of the competitors that would be a legacy of state policy.

Strict rules for competition are required in surrogate wars because the concept of surrender does not readily exist in most examples of surrogate war. In a war, the moment of victory for one side is the surrender or destruction of the other.18 In surrogate wars, surrender can be an outcome, but so can a structured stopping point, such as a length of time or a set point-total earned. Competitions, ultimately, must possess mutually accepted terms of victory to bolster the legitimacy of declared outcomes. Victory must be a definable reality; otherwise, nothing is clearly gained, as the “losing” side can argue it did not really lose.

Luck

Ambiguity can also be a result of the role of luck in surrogate wars. In war, many factors determine victory, including luck. Because the point of a surrogate war is to rank states in terms of their success, victory must be determinable and the result of factors arguably within the control or influence of the state. Luck, therefore, cannot be a necessary precondition of the competition. In traditional war, surrender is the admission of loss; therefore luck is inconsequential for determining who won. Either way, one side said the other side won. When the competition exists within a frame of limitations, then outcomes are post facto debatable. The degree of luck or uncertainty involved in the competition will exacerbate postcompetition arguments over which side is the actual winner and will diminish the value of the victory in competition.

Therefore, haphazard or luck-based competitions do not provide effective examples of surrogate wars. This is of course not to suggest that luck must be discarded. Indeed, many generals have attested a victory to the presence of God, Lady Luck, or another mystical explanation. Even so, luck is often manifested as favorable conditions within which we must still perform. Luck is not totally dismissed. If the competition is determined with an outcome of surrender, then luck is a condition both sides must seek to overcome. However, as the conditions for victory become more arbitrary, luck becomes a more potential justification for failure. For a surrogate war to be effective, all competitors together must be in control of the outcome, with luck playing a minimal role, if at all. To illustrate this point, consider two games: roulette and chess.

While gamblers may claim to possess a hidden skill in determining what number will come up in roulette, and while there are different methods of betting that have a higher likelihood of paying off, the results of roulette are still a system of random chance the result of which is that any number has an equal chance of coming up. The methods by which one plays can be carefully strategized, but that process has no influence on the outcome of the spin. In chess, however, the rules of the game place both players on an equal plane in terms of options for the game. The player with the strongest strategy attains victory. Luck is perceived to st...