(A shorter version of this appeared in Newsday’s Opinion pages)

Will anybody really notice when President Biden and other high-ranking U.S. officials don’t show up for February’s Winter Olympics in Beijing? The Biden Administration’s declaration of a diplomatic boycott of the Games expressly allows athletes to compete in China, so the quadrennial shushing, sliding and skating among the world’s sportswomen and sportsmen will proceed with great fanfare and with NBC’s typically melodramatic presentation. Curling fans will not be robbed of their exotic brand of entertainment.

So: Does such a high-level snub accomplish anything?

The White House has declared its action as an objection to the Chinese government’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity” and other abuses, including a crackdown of freedoms in Hong Kong and Tibet and the recent disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai after she accused a high-ranking Communist official of sexual assault.

It’s clear that China doesn’t much worry about criticism from the West. And Olympic boycotts historically have not been an effective tool in reforming nefarious behavior. The 1980 U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Summer Games, called by President Jimmy Carter and joined by 64 other nations protesting the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, outraged the athletes who felt they were pawns, and it had no impact on the Soviet occupation, which lasted another nine years. About all it accomplished was the Soviets’ revenge boycott of the Los Angeles Games four years later which again was foisted upon non-voting athletes.

The argument here is that, while the President’s declaration is essentially a symbolic one, it nevertheless is generating an abundance of commentary and likely some discomfort for the corporate giants helping to bolster Beijing and the International Olympic Committee. And, in doing so, it is highlighting the feeble stance on human rights by the International Olympic Committee, which promotes a mission of global goodwill through a sort of United Nations in Sneakers.

The IOC awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics to Beijing, in spite of China being one of the world’s most repressive governments, amid global protests that included pleas at the time for a full boycott. When that threat passed and the competition began, all the focus went to the athletes and China’s spectacularly run events. Then the IOC favored Russia with the 2014 Winter Games in the face of complaints about Moscow’s anti-gay legislation. And Beijing was chosen again for 2022.

Each instance violated language in Provision 6 of the IOC charter requiring Olympic hosts to insure that “rights and freedoms….shall be secured without discrimination of any kind, such as race, color, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, birth or other status.”

Called out again for ignoring such policies, both Beijing and the IOC predictably are bemoaning the United States’ proposed diplomatic action by invoking the old sports-and-politics-shouldn’t-mix cliché—when, in fact, sports and politics always are mixed. Especially with the Olympics, which has become the world’s biggest soapbox, playing to the grievances of dissidents and the self-interest of image-makers every bit as much as the guardians of carefree sport.

Every Olympics site has served as a political statement by the host, whether it was Nazi Germany’s 1936 Games as propaganda for Hitler’s criminal agenda, Japan’s 1964 Olympics to demonstrate its post-World War II revival, South Korea’s 1988 Games to showcase a turn to democracy, even L.A.’s 1984 celebration of capitalist might. China wants to telegraph its technological and economic power and, not least, an athletic prowess in the familiar, if illogical, assumption that gold medals suggest a nation’s moral superiority.

Naturally, since the core of the Olympics is sport, the athletes prioritize competition but, increasingly, they may not just shut and play. Several U.S. Olympians, including figure skaters Evan Bates and Nathan Chen, have confirmed their participation while condemning China’s human rights violations as “abysmal,” and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee declared last year that it would not punish its jocks for reasonable demonstrations during the Games. (The IOC, citing its old rule limiting “athlete expression,” said it will.)

So neither Biden nor vice president Kamala Harris nor any department secretaries will join the hullabaloo in February. And China won’t change its spots. But we’ve been forced to think about the issue now.