Liberal American Exceptionalism
For good or for bad, the US can't unilaterally exempt itself from the rules like it used to
I’m fascinated by the Sha’Carri Richardson story. One of the fastest women of all time, and very much at the start of her career, it was looking like she would face off in the Olympic 100 meters against a veteran, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Price of Jamaica, who is also one of the fastest women of all time and has somehow come back from giving birth to run even faster than she did before. A world record thought unbreakable, Florence Griffith-Joyner’s famous (and suspicious) 10.49, run in the Olympic Trials in Indianapolis in 1988 in her one-legged outfit, could be in jeopardy. NBC was surely getting ready for an orgy of coverage.
And then it all came crashing down for Richardson. She tested positive for marijuana. Worse, her positive test came in her post-race Olympic Trials drug test, which has the effect of disqualifying her from the Trials, and thus the Olympic team. I’ve already written about the dubious racial takes that we’ve seen in response to this, reflective of a media environment that rewards pieces that, unsupported by any evidence, ascribe anything that happens to a member of a minority group to racism or prejudice.
But the response to Richardson’s exclusion from the Olympics is also indicative of another American pathology- American exceptionalism.
Let’s start with the two people in the country who admirably did not succumb to this- Richardson herself and Joe Biden. From the start, Richardson has accepted her suspension. There will be no court challenges, no last minute appeals, no campaign in the court of opinion to put her on the team. Her message, essentially, is “I broke the rule, due to enormous burdens I faced in my personal life, and I will be back next year to kick everyone’s butt and run fast”. It’s impossible not to both sympathize and admire her. We speak too often of athletes as role models; Richardson’s conduct is truly exemplary.
And President Biden said all the right things when asked about the situation. The rules are the rules, he said, and we can’t change the rules ad hoc. But Richardson deserves our personal sympathy. He managed to say both things that needed to be said.
But meanwhile, on Twitter, there’s outrage. Why did the USADA suspend Richardson 30 days? Why did we not demand an exception, or that the rule be changed? Why didn’t the US Olympic Committee and USA Track and Field jettison their normal rule and put her on the Olympic relay team even though she was disqualified and thus technically did not place in the Trials 100? (Normally, you need a top six finish to make the relay team.)
Essentially, these questions ask, why can’t the US use its power to bend the rules to get Richardson into the Olympics? And the fact that these questions are being asked, by liberals, shows how intelligent Americans have just absorbed American exceptionalism narratives.
Madeline Albright once, famously, asked a rhetorical question in a Clinton Administration cabinet meeting. “We have all this military power, why can’t we use it?” This is in many ways the same question. The answer does not satisfy many people (it certainly did not satisfy Albright, who got her way in involving the US in several military conflicts). But perhaps it is worth setting out.
The world depends on international cooperation. Not only on the biggest issues like global warming and military security. But also on thousands of other issues. Extradition of criminal suspects and cooperation in criminal investigations. Rules for trade on the high seas and access to ports. Adjudication of water rights disputes. Settlement of refugees.
As a result, unilateral actions don’t work very well, even if technically a nation has the power to do them. It makes other countries hate you. It leads to reprisals, and where less powerful countries can’t effectively retaliate through diplomacy, those reprisals can sometimes take the form of aid to terrorists and cybercriminals. It thwarts attempts to cooperate on other issues.
This was always true, but it is also true that there was a time in the post-WW2 period and especially after the end of the Cold War when the US power and influence was so great that we could get away with a lot of unilateralism. Nations dared not cross us. And we got used to that.
But that era is now over. It is over for a number of reasons- most obviously the rise of China and the rejection by Russians of the devolution of that nation’s power that US policymakers tried to engineer after the fall of the Soviet Union. But it’s also over because especially on climate policy and cybercrime, we face threats that require international cooperation, which gives other countries powerful leverage against us if we act unilaterally.
But so many Americans still think in terms of unilateralism. You can see that most clearly in our policy towards Russia. It’s perfectly clear that Russia’s annexation of Crimea is going to stick, yet American policymakers still act as though we can just impose sanctions until we bring Putin to heel. Heck, we still, to this day, impose sanctions on Cuba and put that country on various “terrorism” lists that impose punishments on the government, even though Fidel Castro is long dead. We are still trying to unilaterally reverse the results of the Cuban revolution!
But, you might say, isn’t the Olympics just a sports event. Not really! The Olympics, and in fact, any universal, international sports event (this includes things like the FIFA World Cup and various world championship events in different sports) is a complex, sensitive diplomatic enterprise. For instance, you have to find a way to let Taiwan in without offending China. You have to make sure Greek and Turkish athletes don’t get into altercations. You have to make sure that Arab athletes stand for the Israeli national anthem and raising of the Israeli flag.
And the doping protocols are also a complex, sensitive enterprise. Right now, the World Anti-Doping Agency is taking very aggressive steps to shut down state sponsored doping by Russian athletes. These steps are quite controversial, and require that the rest of the world completely backs WADA. If, for instance, a number of former Soviet republics decide that Russia is being punished too severely and pull out of WADA, you could have a situation where the entire regime of preventing doping in sports could come crashing down.
American exceptionalism runs right into the heart of these things. Everyone in World Athletics has to follow the same marijuana rules, whether the athletes come from countries like ours that have been liberalizing marijuana laws, or places like Singapore or Malaysia where marijuana is still quite illegal, or places like Jamaica where it is part of the culture. Even if the prohibition on marijuana use by athletes is misguided, the US Anti-Doping Agency agreed to it and has to follow WADA’s rules, and if we were to try to make an exception and allow Richardson and go to Tokyo, or to change the rule just because a popular American athlete got caught by it, this could undermine the carefully negotiated diplomatic victories that allowed for intrusive doping controls in the first place.
This may seem like hyperbole, but in fact the WADA protocols, which every nation agreed to, are as complex as the regimes for regulating chemical weapons. Each country had to agree to such things as testing lab inspections, random visits to athlete’s houses for out-of-competition testing, and a schedule of suspensions and punishments for athletes who test positive as well as “whereabouts” violations where an athlete does not show up for a test.
And not to put a fine point on this, but just like in foreign policy, the rest of the world does not view the US as a country of moral purity on the drug testing issue. Plenty of American athletes in international competition, including most famously the cyclist Lance Armstrong but also a ton of track and field athletes, were found to be involved in doping. And while I got a lot of flack for suggesting this on Twitter, in fact, even American athletes like FloJo who never tested positive but whose performances were suspicious, were subject to widespread, and justified, speculation in the world of track and field. Nobody involved in track and field in the rest of the world thinks that American athletes are particularly clean, and in fact, in the pre-WADA era, our drug testers protected American athletes like Carl Lewis, who failed drug tests in 1984, the year he won four Olympic gold medals, just like Russian officials protected their athletes.
So what Richardson’s newfound fans online are actually asking for is for our officials to demand that the world treat America differently, as exempt from the rules, because we have the power to force our will on others, and because this country (but not a number of other countries) has changed its mind about marijuana. They are asking for the rules not to apply to us, just like in the good old days.
But it is 2021, and American exceptionalism no longer works that way. We need to work with the rest of the world. Sha’Carri Richardson is a truly innocent victim of that- anyone can understand why she had a moment of weakness when her mother died. But only the entire world community, not American officials, can grant her an exemption from the rules that were agreed to by all.