Let’s say you’re an optimist. In late November, United Nations members overwhelmingly passed an International Olympic Committee resolution calling for the worldwide cessation of violence during the two weeks of next summer’s Paris Olympic Games. Uplifting, no?

It’s called the Olympic Truce, a tradition first invoked 1,247 years ago—776 B.C.—when Greece’s warring rival city-states agreed to suspend all fighting to stage the first of the ancient Olympics’ elaborate sporting festivals. Merely a time out from butchery, but a ray of hope.

Let’s say you’re a pessimist. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has now been raging for almost two years, an aggression that in fact began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The recent Israeli-Hamas truce fell apart just days after it was implemented and fears of an expanded and brutal Middle East war persist. Can a collection of international sports poohbahs really expect to somehow put the brakes on these things?

Or, to cut that baby in half, what if the best you can expect is pragmatism?

In 2000, the Olympic Truce Centre was formally established in Athens and veteran diplomat and human rights activist Stavros Lambrinidis was named director. “We are not claiming to have a magic wand, where governments and religious organizations have failed,” Lambrinidis, now European Union ambassador to the United States, said when the Games returned to their ancient birthplace in 2004. “We hope to communicate to the world during the biggest peaceful celebration of humanity, where 12 more countries are members [of the IOC] than the United Nations, that with every representative in the stadium, of every religion, every color, every political point of view, you cannot fight and play at the same time. You can’t.

“You shouldn’t send some of your youth to play and some of your youth to die.”

Before the Truce Centre debuted, Olympic officials regularly had pitched the old call to give peace a chance—at least during the couple of weeks of their global athletic competition—with the slight possibility that all the world’s leaders and policy makers might like the idea.

In 1992 for the Barcelona Summer Games, the IOC cited its Truce tradition to grant Olympic status to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the breakaway Yugoslavia republic that was then taking a beating from the Serbs in their bloody civil war. Two years later, during Opening Ceremonies at the Lillehammer Winter Games, the IOC got a one-day pause in the ongoing Yugoslav war to allow 10,000 children from both sides of the conflict to be inoculated.

Then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, in an unusual plea at the Lillehammer Opening Ceremonies, asked on-site spectators “and even those watching from your homes” to stand for a moment of silence for former Yugoslav city of Sarajevo, which had hosted the 1984 Winter Games, “whose people for over two years have suffered too much.

“Please,” Samaranch begged, “stop fighting. Please, stop killing. Drop your guns, please.”

No such thing happened for another year. In 1998, the Clinton administration was pressured to delay bombing raids in Iraq during the 1998 Nagano Winter Games. The Bush administration likewise was convinced to temporarily cease attacks on Afghanistan during the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Neither of those military halts was permanent. And among the contradictory Olympic messages is how its Opening Ceremonies typically feature both a symbolic release of the “doves of peace”—and a military flyover. Not to mention the Games’ rampant nationalism even as they offer a brief alternative of play.

“I understand the cynicism,” Truce Centre director Lambrinidis said at the 2004 Athens Olympics. “This is a hard world. If it were a loving, peaceful world, you wouldn’t need an Olympic Truce. I’m willing to talk to any cynic—who, usually, by the way, are closet romantics. Is this a partly romantic appeal? Absolutely. Is it unrealistic? Absolutely not. The question is whether you can be a hard-headed realist and do some good. The question is: Do world leaders want to take this and run with it?”

He called himself “a convert” to the Olympic Truce tradition, a belief that beyond providing merely a diversion from bad news in the real world, it is an attempt to confront what is behind the discouraging front-page headlines. “The fact that the war doesn’t stop is not proof the Olympics Truce doesn’t work,” he said. “Whether it will stop wars for 16 days is not a legitimate yardstick.

“The power of this is that it’s not just a call for one more truce; it’s tied to an event in which every county in the world wishes to participate. You must create not just a police shield, but a moral shield around the Games that exercises public-relations pressure, even on non-state actors. Why treat terrorists as differently?

“It is not our job to decide what is a legitimate conflict and what isn’t, or whether a war is for self-defense or not. And these are Games for the youth of the world. You cannot punish the youth of the world for the sins of their leaders. We cannot use the stick approach, but we can use the carrot.”