This weekend, upon hearing the Biden administration’s bold move to announce a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics, I was thinking about the halcyon days of late 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, only to be met by the fierce international response of a U.S. boycott of the next year’s Summer Games in Moscow. Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviets cowered in the face of such a firm display of disapproval, and within weeks, the Soviets had left Afghanistan in one of the last great foreign policy achievements of the Carter administration.
What, what? Really?
Ok, so apparently this is less a major historical turning point and more a dream I, or possibly Jimmy Carter, had Sunday night.…