Pressure Instead of Diplomacy

Trump is causing unrest even before he is allowed to return to the White House. But even the Biden administration is whooping it up in its final days and coming down hard on the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Whenever something doesn’t suit an American, they’ll try to make it fit. And nowadays they’ll do it not only with diplomacy, but with the pressure of dollars. President-elect Donald Trump wants to swipe Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal and is threatening to impose tariffs.

While Trump’s adjutant, Elon Musk, continues to impertinently attack the British government, a rumor is spreading that he’d like to acquire the Premier League club Liverpool FC. In the middle of this general agitation, the Biden administration is whooping it up in its final days. It is withholding its annual payment of $3.6 million to the World Anti-Doping Agency, which it considers incompetent.

The outgoing U.S. administration may not be as expansionist in nature as the incoming one, but it is still playing dirty in exercising its power. Of course, WADA has been doing a pretty makeshift job for years and badly needs to improve itself. But it is invasive for the U.S. to insist that its “Goody Two-Shoes” alone can fix the organization.

Biden has given his deal-obsessed successor a template for hanging WADA out to dry. In the end, it could hurt the athletes who want nothing more than to be clean and to win.