Word: boycotts
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...Soviets have long understood the political possibilities of sports, and especially the Olympics; they have counted heavily upon playing host to the 1980 Games. Some ill-informed Americans argue that the U.S. will only hurt itself with a boycott. They have ridiculed the idea that a boycott of the Olympics is anything more than an ideological spitball. In fact, both the Soviet government and the Soviet people have relied upon the Moscow Games to secure commodities they have never quite been able to purchase in the market of world opinion: prestige and respectability. Intensely proud and patriotic, they have inherited...
Even a limited boycott, by the U.S. and a few other nations, is a profoundly upsetting possibility to the Soviets. They tend to view the U.S. as their only important and worthy competition in the world, athletically
...otherwise. They have been angered and shocked by the American boycott. It has, in fact, already carried exactly the message that Washington intended to send and has delivered it to precisely the address where it can be most effective: the national pride of a very touchy people...
...effects of the boycott upon Soviet behavior are not easy to predict. "The Soviets are a people who have a great desire to be proud of their government," says Princeton University Political Scientist Robert C. Tucker. "If the government is seen to be in disgrace because of the barefaced invasion of a small neighboring country, then they will be in some serious way discomfited by it." Some effects may be undesirable. The boycott may help create even more of a cold war climate in the U.S.S.R.; Soviet leaders may exploit the atmosphere, as they have in the past, conjuring...
However the Soviets react, the U.S. has no alternative but to boycott the Moscow Games, even if it does so in the company of only a few other countries. If the U.S. were to participate in the Games, the Kremlin would take it as an abject confession of American weakness, of an absence of will. The Soviets would read it as supine acquiescence. American responses to Soviet military adventurism are now limited; to decline to exercise the powerful option of an Olympic boycott would be an act of diplomatic negligence...