The first time Cortina d’Ampezzo, a ski resort town in northern Italy, was scheduled to host the Winter Olympics, it was 1944. Because of World War II, the Games were canceled.
Now, eight decades later, the Winter Games are returning to several locations in Italy, including Cortina, during one of the greatest periods of geopolitical turmoil since the last world war.
This time around, there is no risk of an Olympic cancellation. Yet the Games feel discordant with these times — the rousing promise of sportsmanly adherence to rules and peaceful competition among nations set against the fraying of diplomatic norms and decades-old alliances.
The Milan-Cortina Games are “happening in the most fractious political moment in the recent history of the Olympics,” said Jules Boykoff, an expert in sports politics at Pacific University in Oregon.
When athletes from more than 90 delegations parade in the opening ceremonies across northern Italy on Friday, they will represent a contradiction of the global chaos outside the stadium walls.
In recent weeks, President Trump has ordered a military intervention against Venezuela without congressional approval; threatened to use force to take Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of a NATO ally; and warned he would inflict economic pain on longstanding European partners who came to Greenland’s aid.
Though he dropped those latter ultimatums, they amplified a broader sense of deteriorating multilateral cooperation, and came amid fears for the future of the United Nations following drastic cuts to national contributions, including from the United States.
There have been wars amid previous Olympic Games. What’s different now are the many threats to the guardrails of global diplomacy.
When Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, attends the opening events on Friday, her presence will serve as a pointed reminder of those troubled diplomatic alliances. As one of Europe’s right-leaning leaders, she was once viewed as someone who might act as a broker between Mr. Trump and Europe.
Since he returned to office, however, she has had little visible influence on the American leader. And in January, she outright criticized Mr. Trump after he asserted that European soldiers had played only a minor role in Afghanistan and reminded him that “friendship requires respect.”
The Olympics are meant to give all countries, regardless of size, an equal chance. Athletes from midsize countries like Italy compete alongside those from big global powers like the United States. In the real world, Ms. Meloni has only “a 5 percent moderating” effect on Mr. Trump, said Giovanni Orsina, the head of the political science department at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome.
“The world order has always been working according to power politics,” Mr. Orsina said. “What is really disturbing” now, he added, is that there are leaders of global powers who are “not even trying to follow the rules.”
For some, these Olympics still offer the chance for leaders to rebuild their weakened diplomatic relationships. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are scheduled to appear with Ms. Meloni at the opening ceremony in Milan on Friday.
Leo Goretti, editor of The International Spectator, an Italian journal of international affairs, said the Italian prime minister may therefore be able to use the Olympics “to create a sense of friendship and proximity to the U.S., which may have seemed to be obfuscated in recent weeks.”
For others, that optimism feels misplaced. The notion that the Olympics might “bring the world together or somehow provide a respite or a much-needed break just seems unrealistic,” said Richard N. Haass, a former U.S. diplomat and retired president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a research group in New York. “If you made the Olympics contingent on peace and harmony breaking out, you’d never have them.”
The International Olympic Committee has tried to portray the Games as a politically neutral stage, but “sports are politics by other means,” said Mr. Boykoff of Pacific University. To think otherwise, he said, “is obviously hocus-pocus.”
Politics already has raised the temperature in Italy in advance of the Games. Last week, it emerged that federal ICE agents from an investigative unit of the Department of Homeland Security would join a security team from the State Department at the Olympics in Milan.
The news set off outrage among Italians angered by the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents in Minneapolis. Ms. Meloni personally avoided commenting on the matter, but with protesters planning demonstrations in Milan during the Games, her government rushed to clarify that the American agents will have no authority to enforce public order in the country.
Over the course of the history of the modern Olympics, world events have inevitably intruded onto the Games. Five Olympics were canceled during both world wars. During the Munich Summer Games in 1972, Palestinian militants kidnapped and killed Israeli athletes. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the United States boycotted the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow and four years later, the Soviet Union reciprocated by refusing to send athletes to the Los Angeles Games.
Ten months before Seoul hosted the Summer Olympics in 1988, North Korean agents detonated a bomb on a South Korean airliner in an effort to frighten international athletes and visitors out of attending the Games. The coronavirus pandemic forced the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games by one year.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian Olympic Committee tried to claim athletes from occupied Ukrainian territory and was barred from fielding a delegation at the Olympics. For these Winter Games, athletes from Russia and Belarus will not compete under their national flags but as “neutral” athletes. Still, the I.O.C. has rejected calls to bar delegations from Israel and the United States, amid global anger at Israel’s conduct in Gaza and Mr. Trump’s actions in Venezuela, saying such matters “fall outside our remit.”
Since the 1990s, the I.O.C. has called on nations to pause military conflict during the Games, a call it repeated this year. For some Olympians, that peaceful mission, always aspirational, feels particularly dissonant now.
With so many wars raging around the world, people have become numb to conflict, said Silvia Salis, the mayor of Genoa who competed in the Beijing and London Summer Games in the hammer throw. In this context, she asked, “do these Olympics make sense?” She added: “We need to make stronger demands of the major powers on the international stage.”
Another geopolitical factor that overshadows the Winter Olympics is climate change. With temperatures rising and snowcaps melting, global warming will be “completely catastrophic” for winter sports, said David Goldblatt, author of “The Games: A Global History of the Olympics.” Mr. Goldblatt pointed to research that indicates that in the absence of artificial snow-making, only four cities would be able to host the Winter Games by 2050.
With some national leaders denying the existence of climate change or rolling back policies to slow global warming, Mr. Goldblatt said, the Winter Olympics are “something close to a kind of funeral party.”
Josephine de La Bruyère contributed reporting from Rome.
Motoko Rich is the Times bureau chief in Rome, where she covers Italy, the Vatican and Greece.
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