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***PORT SECURITY AFFIRMATIVE***
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1AC
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1AC-Economy Advantage
First note that a confluence of factors makes US economic decline certain-poor jobs growth is
crushing prior gains
Bloomberg BusinessWeek 6/5 (US economic outlook worsens after jobs report;
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-06/D9V6OHEO1.htm)
The faltering U.S. job market has prompted economists to take a much dimmer view of the country's growth
prospects. That's a shift from just a few weeks ago, when many were upgrading their forecasts. Friday's
surprisingly bleak jobs report for May followed a spate of disappointing data. Manufacturing activity slowed, an
index of home sales fell and consumer confidence tumbled. Mounting troubles in Europe and elsewhere have
heightened economists' concerns. "The latest economic data have been decisively disappointing," Michael
Feroli, an economist at JPMorgan Chase, wrote in a client note. JPMorgan Chase sharply reduced its growth
forecast for the July-September quarter to a 2 percent annual rate, down from 3 percent. It cited the weaker
U.S. hiring and a likely drop in U.S. exports related to slower growth overseas. And JPMorgan Chase now
forecasts growth of 2.1 percent for 2012, down from 2.3 percent. Julia Coronado, an economist at BNP Paribas
in New York, said she now expects growth of 2.2 percent this year, down from her previous forecast of 2.4
percent. She also revised down her estimate of growth in the April-June quarter to a 2.2 percent annual rate,
from a 2.5 percent rate. "We keep hoping that we're going to turn a corner and move into a stronger phase of
recovery, and the door keeps getting slammed shut," Coronado said. Forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers
and Swiss bank UBS have also marked down their expectations since Friday's jobs report. As a general rule, it
takes about 2.5 percent growth to generate enough hiring to keep up with population growth and prevent the
unemployment rate from rising. The reduced forecasts suggest that hiring may not strengthen much this year.
After months of fitful expansion since the recession ended three years ago, many analysts had expected the
economy to begin strengthening steadily. Last month, the National Association for Business Economics said its
latest survey of economists found rising expectations for job gains and housing construction. And in April, the
Federal Reserve raised its forecast for growth this year to nearly 2.7 percent, from a January estimate of 2.5
percent. Now, it looks as if the recovery is stumbling again. The biggest blow was Friday's jobs report. It said
employers added only 69,000 jobs in May, the fewest in a year. The government also said far fewer jobs were
added in the previous two months than first thought -- 11,000 fewer in March and 38,000 fewer in April. And the
unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent, the first increase since last June. Less hiring means
fewer Americans have money to spend. That holds down consumer spending, which drives about 70 percent of
the economy and helps fuel job growth. And a rising unemployment rate tends to reduce confidence. That can
further shrink spending. Even at stronger levels of hiring, Americans' incomes had been already growing only
weakly. They increased 0.2 percent in April, the government said last week, the slowest pace in five months.
Other reports last week showed that more people sought unemployment benefits, a sign that hiring could
remain sluggish. Construction spending rose, but by less than many economists had forecast. And the
government said the economy expanded at an anemic 1.9 percent annual rate in the first three months of 2012.
That's down from 3 percent in the fourth quarter. The run of bleak reports extended into Monday. Companies
cut their orders to factories for a second straight month, the government said. And a gauge of business
investment plans fell. On top of that, Europe's financial crisis is worsening. Worries are growing that in elections
later this month, Greek voters will reject the terms of a bailout and lead the country to drop the euro. That could
ignite financial chaos and perhaps force larger economies among the 17 countries that use the euro, such as
Spain and Italy, to abandon the currency, too. The resulting crisis would slow U.S. exports, about 20 percent of
which go to Europe. Fear about a collapse of the euro has contributed to a nearly 10 percent drop in the S&P
500 stock index since April 2. Falling stock prices tend to damage consumer confidence and reduce spending.
Key developing countries, such as China, India and Brazil, are also reporting weaker growth. Those countries are
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big markets for U.S. heavy machinery. U.S. farmers also export corn, soybeans and other grains to China.
"You've got deterioration on all fronts at this point," said Scott Anderson, an economist at Wells Fargo
Securities. Anderson said Wells Fargo will likely reduce its forecasts for U.S. growth.
And the U.S. economy is key to the global economy
Mathew Harris, PhD European History @ Cambridge, counselor of the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC),
and Burrows, member of the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit, 2009 (“Revisiting the Future: Geopolitical
Effects of the Financial Crisis” http://www.ciaonet.org/journals/twq/v32i2/f_0016178_13952.pdf)
Such was the world the NIC foresaw as the crisis unfolded. Now, emerging markets the world over have lost
more than half of their value since September 2008 alone. Banks that have never reported a net loss earnings
quarter were dissolved in a matter of days. Even with the one year anniversary of the Bear Stearns collapse
approaching in March, markets may have yet to find a floor. The proportions of the current crisis hardly need
familiarizing. As the panic has not yet given way to a lucid picture of the impacts, most economists and political
forecasters are smart enough to shy away from sweeping predictions amid the fog of crisis. Yet, in the postcrisis world, it seems conceivable that global growth will most likely be muted, deflation will remain a risk
while any decoupling of the industrialized from developing countries is unlikely, the state will be the relative
winner while authoritarianism may not, and U.S. consumption as the engine for global growth will slowly fade.
Whether U.S. political and market clout will follow, and whether U.S. political leadership will come equipped
with knowledge of the strategic forces affecting the United States remains to be seen. How Much of a
Geopolitical ‘‘Game Changer’’ is the Financial Crisis? Mapping the NIC’s predictions against early facts, one of
the most interesting observations is less about any particular shock generated by the financial crisis and more
about its global reach. If anything, the crisis has underscored the importance of globalization as the overriding
force or ‘‘mega-driver’’ as it was characterized in both the NIC’s 2020 and 2025 Global Trends works.
Developing countries have been hurt as decoupling theories, assertions that the emerging markets have
appreciably weaned themselves from the U.S. economy, have been dispelled. This second epicenter of the
crisis in emerging markets could also continue to exacerbate and prolong the crisis. Alongside foreseeable
exposures, such as Pakistan with its large current account deficit, are less predictable panics like Dubai, whose
debt was financed on suddenly expensive dollars. Even those with cash reserves, such as Russia and South
Korea, have been severely buffeted.
Economic collapse precipitates great power wars
Walter Mead, CFR, 4 February 2009 (Only Makes you stronger: Why the recession bolstered America,
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2169866/posts)
History may suggest that financial crises actually help capitalist great powers maintain their leads--but it has
other, less reassuring messages as well. If financial crises have been a normal part of life during the 300-year
rise of the liberal capitalist system under the Anglophone powers, so has war. The wars of the League of
Augsburg and the Spanish Succession; the Seven Years War; the American Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars;
the two World Wars; the cold war: The list of wars is almost as long as the list of financial crises. Bad economic
times can breed wars. Europe was a pretty peaceful place in 1928, but the Depression poisoned German public
opinion and helped bring Adolf Hitler to power. If the current crisis turns into a depression, what rough beasts
might start slouching toward Moscow, Karachi, Beijing, or New Delhi to be born? The United States may not,
yet, decline, but, if we can't get the world economy back on track, we may still have to fight.
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Global economic crisis causes war---strong statistical support proves, and their defense
doesn’t account for global crises
Jedediah Royal, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of Defense, 2010
(“Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises,” in Economics of War and
Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 213-214)
Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict. Political
science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the
security and defense behavior of interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic,
dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008)
advances Modelski and Thompson's (1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that rhythms in the global
economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the often bloody transition from
one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crises could usher in a
redistribution of relative power (see also Gilpin, 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances,
increasing the risk of miscalculation (Fearon, 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of
power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to challenge a declining
power (Werner, 1999). Separately, Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with
parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although
he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions and security conditions
remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland's (1996, 2000) theory of trade expectations suggests that
'future expectations of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security
behavior of states. He argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as
they have an optimistic view of future trade relations. However, if the expectations of future trade decline,
particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, the likelihood for conflict increases, as states
will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for
decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent
states. Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a
national level. Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between international conflict and external
conflict, particularly during periods of economic downturn. They write, the linkages between internal and
external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal
conflict, which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends to amplify the extent to
which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg & Hess, 2002, p. 89). Economic
decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess, and Weerapana,
2004), which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally
reduce the popularity of a sitting government. 'Diversionary theory' suggests that, when facing unpopularity
arising from economic decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external military
conflicts to create a 'rally around the flag' effect. Wang (1996), DeRouen (1995), and Blomberg, Hess and
Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly
correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards
diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic
leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. DeRouen
(2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United States, and
thus weak Presidential popularity, are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent
economic scholarship positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic
crises, whereas political science scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic
and national levels.
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Independently, economic crisis collapses hege and causes multiple scenarios for nuclear war
Friedberg & Schoenfeld 2008 [Aaron, professor of politics and international relations at Princeton
University's Woodrow Wilson School, Gabriel, Visiting Scholar @ Witherspoon Institute, The Dangers of a
Diminished America, WSJ, 10/21, Proquest]
Protectionist sentiments are sure to grow stronger as jobs disappear in the coming slowdown. Even before our
current woes, calls to save jobs by restricting imports had begun to gather support among many Democrats and
some Republicans. In a prolonged recession, gale-force winds of protectionism will blow. Then there are the
dolorous consequences of a potential collapse of the world's financial architecture. For decades now, Americans
have enjoyed the advantages of being at the center of that system. The worldwide use of the dollar, and the
stability of our economy, among other things, made it easier for us to run huge budget deficits, as we counted
on foreigners to pick up the tab by buying dollar-denominated assets as a safe haven. Will this be possible in the
future? Meanwhile, traditional foreign-policy challenges are multiplying. The threat from al Qaeda and Islamic
terrorist affiliates has not been extinguished. Iran and North Korea are continuing on their bellicose paths,
while Pakistan and Afghanistan are progressing smartly down the road to chaos. Russia's new militancy and
China's seemingly relentless rise also give cause for concern. If America now tries to pull back from the world
stage, it will leave a dangerous power vacuum. The stabilizing effects of our presence in Asia, our continuing
commitment to Europe, and our position as defender of last resort for Middle East energy sources and supply
lines could all be placed at risk. In such a scenario there are shades of the 1930s, when global trade and
finance ground nearly to a halt, the peaceful democracies failed to cooperate, and aggressive powers led by
the remorseless fanatics who rose up on the crest of economic disaster exploited their divisions. Today we run
the risk that rogue states may choose to become ever more reckless with their nuclear toys, just at our
moment of maximum vulnerability. The aftershocks of the financial crisis will almost certainly rock our
principal strategic competitors even harder than they will rock us. The dramatic free fall of the Russian stock
market has demonstrated the fragility of a state whose economic performance hinges on high oil prices, now
driven down by the global slowdown. China is perhaps even more fragile, its economic growth depending
heavily on foreign investment and access to foreign markets. Both will now be constricted, inflicting economic
pain and perhaps even sparking unrest in a country where political legitimacy rests on progress in the long
march to prosperity. None of this is good news if the authoritarian leaders of these countries seek to divert
attention from internal travails with external adventures.
And, these wars go nuclear-we control magnitude and probability-every conflict is inevitable
and escalates
Robert Kagan, Senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Senior transatlantic
fellow at the German Marshall Fund, August and September 2007 (End of Dreams, Return of History, Policy
Review, http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/8552512.htm)
This is a good thing, and it should continue to be a primary goal of American foreign policy to perpetuate this
relatively benign international configuration of power. The unipolar order with the United States as the
predominant power is unavoidably riddled with flaws and contradictions. It inspires fears and jealousies. The
United States is not immune to error, like all other nations, and because of its size and importance in the
international system those errors are magnified and take on greater significance than the errors of less powerful
nations. Compared to the ideal Kantian international order, in which all the world 's powers would be peaceloving equals, conducting themselves wisely, prudently, and in strict obeisance to international law, the unipolar
system is both dangerous and unjust. Compared to any plausible alternative in the real world, however, it is
relatively stable and less likely to produce a major war between great powers. It is also comparatively
benevolent, from a liberal perspective, for it is more conducive to the principles of economic and political
liberalism that Americans and many others value. American predominance does not stand in the way of
progress toward a better world, therefore. It stands in the way of regression toward a more dangerous world.
The choice is not between an American-dominated order and a world that looks like the European Union. The
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future international order will be shaped by those who have the power to shape it. The leaders of a postAmerican world will not meet in Brussels but in Beijing, Moscow, and Washington. The return of great
powers and great games If the world is marked by the persistence of unipolarity, it is nevertheless also
being shaped by the reemergence of competitive national ambitions of the kind that have shaped human affairs
from time immemorial. During the Cold War, this historical tendency of great powers to jostle with one another
for status and influence as well as for wealth and power was largely suppressed by the two superpowers and
their rigid bipolar order. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has not been powerful enough, and
probably could never be powerful enough, to suppress by itself the normal ambitions of nations. This does not
mean the world has returned to multipolarity, since none of the large powers is in range of competing with the
superpower for global influence. Nevertheless, several large powers are now competing for regional
predominance, both with the United States and with each other. National ambition drives China's foreign
policy today, and although it is tempered by prudence and the desire to appear as unthreatening as possible to
the rest of the world, the Chinese are powerfully motivated to return their nation to what they regard as its
traditional position as the preeminent power in East Asia. They do not share a European, postmodern view that
power is passé; hence their now two-decades-long military buildup and modernization. Like the Americans, they
believe power, including military power, is a good thing to have and that it is better to have more of it than less.
Perhaps more significant is the Chinese perception, also shared by Americans, that status and honor, and not
just wealth and security, are important for a nation. Japan, meanwhile, which in the past could have been
counted as an aspiring postmodern power -- with its pacifist constitution and low defense spending -- now
appears embarked on a more traditional national course. Partly this is in reaction to the rising power of China
and concerns about North Korea 's nuclear weapons. But it is also driven by Japan's own national ambition to be
a leader in East Asia or at least not to play second fiddle or "little brother" to China. China and Japan are now in
a competitive quest with each trying to augment its own status and power and to prevent the other 's rise to
predominance, and this competition has a military and strategic as well as an economic and political component.
Their competition is such that a nation like South Korea, with a long unhappy history as a pawn between the two
powers, is once again worrying both about a "greater China" and about the return of Japanese nationalism. As
Aaron Friedberg commented, the East Asian future looks more like Europe's past than its present. But it also
looks like Asia's past. Russian foreign policy, too, looks more like something from the nineteenth century. It is
being driven by a typical, and typically Russian, blend of national resentment and ambition. A postmodern
Russia simply seeking integration into the new European order, the Russia of Andrei Kozyrev, would not be
troubled by the eastward enlargement of the EU and NATO, would not insist on predominant influence over its
"near abroad," and would not use its natural resources as means of gaining geopolitical leverage and enhancing
Russia 's international status in an attempt to regain the lost glories of the Soviet empire and Peter the Great.
But Russia, like China and Japan, is moved by more traditional great-power considerations, including the pursuit
of those valuable if intangible national interests: honor and respect. Although Russian leaders complain about
threats to their security from NATO and the United States, the Russian sense of insecurity has more to do with
resentment and national identity than with plausible external military threats. 16 Russia's complaint today is not
with this or that weapons system. It is the entire post-Cold War settlement of the 1990s that Russia resents and
wants to revise. But that does not make insecurity less a factor in Russia 's relations with the world; indeed, it
makes finding compromise with the Russians all the more difficult. One could add others to this list of great
powers with traditional rather than postmodern aspirations. India 's regional ambitions are more muted, or are
focused most intently on Pakistan, but it is clearly engaged in competition with China for dominance in the
Indian Ocean and sees itself, correctly, as an emerging great power on the world scene. In the Middle East there
is Iran, which mingles religious fervor with a historical sense of superiority and leadership in its region. 17 Its
nuclear program is as much about the desire for regional hegemony as about defending Iranian territory from
attack by the United States. Even the European Union, in its way, expresses a pan-European national ambition to
play a significant role in the world, and it has become the vehicle for channeling German, French, and British
ambitions in what Europeans regard as a safe supranational direction. Europeans seek honor and respect, too,
but of a postmodern variety. The honor they seek is to occupy the moral high ground in the world, to exercise
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moral authority, to wield political and economic influence as an antidote to militarism, to be the keeper of the
global conscience, and to be recognized and admired by others for playing this role. Islam is not a nation, but
many Muslims express a kind of religious nationalism, and the leaders of radical Islam, including al Qaeda, do
seek to establish a theocratic nation or confederation of nations that would encompass a wide swath of the
Middle East and beyond. Like national movements elsewhere, Islamists have a yearning for respect, including
self-respect, and a desire for honor. Their national identity has been molded in defiance against stronger and
often oppressive outside powers, and also by memories of ancient superiority over those same powers. China
had its "century of humiliation." Islamists have more than a century of humiliation to look back on, a humiliation
of which Israel has become the living symbol, which is partly why even Muslims who are neither radical nor
fundamentalist proffer their sympathy and even their support to violent extremists who can turn the tables on
the dominant liberal West, and particularly on a dominant America which implanted and still feeds the Israeli
cancer in their midst. Finally, there is the United States itself. As a matter of national policy stretching back
across numerous administrations, Democratic and Republican, liberal and conservative, Americans have insisted
on preserving regional predominance in East Asia; the Middle East; the Western Hemisphere; until recently,
Europe; and now, increasingly, Central Asia. This was its goal after the Second World War, and since the end of
the Cold War, beginning with the first Bush administration and continuing through the Clinton years, the United
States did not retract but expanded its influence eastward across Europe and into the Middle East, Central Asia,
and the Caucasus. Even as it maintains its position as the predominant global power, it is also engaged in
hegemonic competitions in these regions with China in East and Central Asia, with Iran in the Middle East and
Central Asia, and with Russia in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. The United States, too, is more
of a traditional than a postmodern power, and though Americans are loath to acknowledge it, they generally
prefer their global place as "No. 1" and are equally loath to relinquish it. Once having entered a region, whether
for practical or idealistic reasons, they are remarkably slow to withdraw from it until they believe they have
substantially transformed it in their own image. They profess indifference to the world and claim they just want
to be left alone even as they seek daily to shape the behavior of billions of people around the globe. The jostling
for status and influence among these ambitious nations and would-be nations is a second defining feature of
the new post-Cold War international system. Nationalism in all its forms is back, if it ever went away, and so is
international competition for power, influence, honor, and status. American predominance prevents these
rivalries from intensifying -- its regional as well as its global predominance. Were the United States to
diminish its influence in the regions where it is currently the strongest power, the other nations would settle
disputes as great and lesser powers have done in the past: sometimes through diplomacy and accommodation
but often through confrontation and wars of varying scope, intensity, and destructiveness. One novel aspect of
such a multipolar world is that most of these powers would possess nuclear weapons. That could make wars
between them less likely, or it could simply make them more catastrophic. It is easy but also dangerous to
underestimate the role the United States plays in providing a measure of stability in the world even as it also
disrupts stability. For instance, the United States is the dominant naval power everywhere, such that other
nations cannot compete with it even in their home waters. They either happily or grudgingly allow the United
States Navy to be the guarantor of international waterways and trade routes, of international access to markets
and raw materials such as oil. Even when the United States engages in a war, it is able to play its role as guardian
of the waterways. In a more genuinely multipolar world, however, it would not. Nations would compete for
naval dominance at least in their own regions and possibly beyond. Conflict between nations would involve
struggles on the oceans as well as on land. Armed embargos, of the kind used in World War i and other major
conflicts, would disrupt trade flows in a way that is now impossible. Such order as exists in the world rests not
merely on the goodwill of peoples but on a foundation provided by American power. Even the European Union,
that great geopolitical miracle, owes its founding to American power, for without it the European nations after
World War ii would never have felt secure enough to reintegrate Germany. Most Europeans recoil at the
thought, but even today Europe ’s stability depends on the guarantee, however distant and one hopes
unnecessary, that the United States could step in to check any dangerous development on the continent. In a
genuinely multipolar world, that would not be possible without renewing the danger of world war. People
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who believe greater equality among nations would be preferable to the present American predominance often
succumb to a basic logical fallacy. They believe the order the world enjoys today exists independently of
American power. They imagine that in a world where American power was diminished, the aspects of
international order that they like would remain in place. But that ’s not the way it works. International order
does not rest on ideas and institutions. It is shaped by configurations of power. The international order we
know today reflects the distribution of power in the world since World War ii, and especially since the end of the
Cold War. A different configuration of power, a multipolar world in which the poles were Russia, China, the
United States, India, and Europe, would produce its own kind of order, with different rules and norms reflecting
the interests of the powerful states that would have a hand in shaping it. Would that international order be an
improvement? Perhaps for Beijing and Moscow it would. But it is doubtful that it would suit the tastes of
enlightenment liberals in the United States and Europe. The current order, of course, is not only far from
perfect but also offers no guarantee against major conflict among the world ’s great powers. Even under the
umbrella of unipolarity, regional conflicts involving the large powers may erupt. War could erupt between China
and Taiwan and draw in both the United States and Japan. War could erupt between Russia and Georgia,
forcing the United States and its European allies to decide whether to intervene or suffer the consequences of a
Russian victory. Conflict between India and Pakistan remains possible, as does conflict between Iran and Israel
or other Middle Eastern states. These, too, could draw in other great powers, including the United States.
Such conflicts may be unavoidable no matter what policies the United States pursues. But they are more likely
to erupt if the United States weakens or withdraws from its positions of regional dominance. This is especially
true in East Asia, where most nations agree that a reliable American power has a stabilizing and pacific effect on
the region. That is certainly the view of most of China ’s neighbors. But even China, which seeks gradually to
supplant the United States as the dominant power in the region, faces the dilemma that an American
withdrawal could unleash an ambitious, independent, nationalist Japan. In Europe, too, the departure of the
United States from the scene — even if it remained the world’s most powerful nation — could be
destabilizing. It could tempt Russia to an even more overbearing and potentially forceful approach to unruly
nations on its periphery. Although some realist theorists seem to imagine that the disappearance of the Soviet
Union put an end to the possibility of confrontation between Russia and the West, and therefore to the need
for a permanent American role in Europe, history suggests that conflicts in Europe involving Russia are possible
even without Soviet communism. If the United States withdrew from Europe — if it adopted what some call a
strategy of “offshore balancing” — this could in time increase the likelihood of conflict involving Russia and its
near neighbors, which could in turn draw the United States back in under unfavorable circumstances. It is also
optimistic to imagine that a retrenchment of the American position in the Middle East and the assumption of a
more passive, “offshore” role would lead to greater stability there. The vital interest the United States has in
access to oil and the role it plays in keeping access open to other nations in Europe and Asia make it unlikely that
American leaders could or would stand back and hope for the best while the powers in the region battle it out.
Nor would a more “even-handed” policy toward Israel, which some see as the magic key to unlocking peace,
stability, and comity in the Middle East, obviate the need to come to Israel ’s aid if its security became
threatened. That commitment, paired with the American commitment to protect strategic oil supplies for most
of the world, practically ensures a heavy American military presence in the region, both on the seas and on the
ground. The subtraction of American power from any region would not end conflict but would simply change
the equation. In the Middle East, competition for influence among powers both inside and outside the region
has raged for at least two centuries. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism doesn ’t change this. It only adds a new
and more threatening dimension to the competition, which neither a sudden end to the conflict between Israel
and the Palestinians nor an immediate American withdrawal from Iraq would change. The alternative to
American predominance in the region is not balance and peace. It is further competition. The region and the
states within it remain relatively weak. A diminution of American influence would not be followed by a
diminution of other external influences. One could expect deeper involvement by both China and Russia, if
only to secure their interests. 18 And one could also expect the more powerful states of the region, particularly
Iran, to expand and fill the vacuum. It is doubtful that any American administration would voluntarily take
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actions that could shift the balance of power in the Middle East further toward Russia, China, or Iran. The world
hasn ’t changed that much. An American withdrawal from Iraq will not return things to “normal” or to a new
kind of stability in the region. It will produce a new instability, one likely to draw the United States back in again.
The alternative to American regional predominance in the Middle East and elsewhere is not a new regional
stability. In an era of burgeoning nationalism, the future is likely to be one of intensified competition among
nations and nationalist movements. Difficult as it may be to extend American predominance into the future, no
one should imagine that a reduction of American power or a retraction of American influence and global
involvement will provide an easier path.
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We’ll isolate two internal links—
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First efficiency:
Inadequate port infrastructure in the US has crippled global supply chains risking economic
shocks
Maritime Administration and USMTS; US Marine Transportation System; November 2007 (A Vision for
the 21st Century; http://www.marad.dot.gov/documents/Vision_of_the_21st_Century_10-29.pdf)
America’s great economic growth brings with it enor- mous challenges. To meet the demands of our Nation to
grow and prosper, the U.S. transportation infrastructure is being stretched to the limits of its capacity, and as
a result, functions less efficiently and reliably. American ports, the critical link in freight movement, are already
challenged to face a projected surge in cargo over the next 10 to 15 years. The difficulties posed by increased
volume of cargo are compounded by environmental challeng- es, a limited supply of land to expand and
congested road and rail linkages. In addition, there is a growing backlog of dredging projects that must be completed in order to maintain or improve channel and harbor depths. Without these improvements, some
vessels cannot travel fully loaded and new, larger oceango- ing vessels have limited access to our ports.
Congestion is not limited to ports. It is a systemic national problem that will get far worse with devastating
repercussions on the economy and U.S. global leader- ship. Shoreside transportation capacity is already at a
premium. Chokepoints and gridlock are routinely encountered. There are 24/7 “rush hours” on the busiest
highways and routine freight backups on rail lines. Packed airports and crowded skies are a given. Idling ships,
trains and trucks seem to have become a fact of life. Congestion is literally contagious, as are the inefficiencies.
Congestion is more than an inconvenience. Congestion constrains growth, distorts business deci- sions and
threatens continued U.S. leadership as the world’s largest global trad- ing partner.
Ports are the backbone of the US economy-more funding for infrastructure maintenance is
needed
ASCE American Society of Civil Engineers 30 July 2011 (Improvement and Maintenance of Ports, Harbors and
Waterways; http://www.asce.org/Content.aspx?id=8325)
The need for a dedicated funding source to maintain and improve the nation’s ports, harbors and waterways
is vital to the nation’s economic growth. Previous legislation created such a source, the Harbor Maintenance
Tax (HMT), which is not currently being used for such projects. Obtaining funding for each maintenance and
improvement project now requires the long process of Congressional authorization, appropriation, and
allocation. An effective regulatory program is also needed to safeguard the sensitive and natural attributes of
estuarine and coastal environments within which port, harbor and waterway maintenance and improvement
dredging projects take place. Conducting and managing the regulatory process in an objective and timely
manner at all levels of industry and government will serve the overall environmental benefits and public
interests of the projects. Specific topics within the current regulatory program that deserve attention are: the
lack of concurrent reviews and firm deadlines for action by the various agencies; delay by agencies in setting up
uniform criteria; delay in setting up permanent disposal sites for dredged material; and the complexity of
procedures for routine maintenance. Rationale The growing U.S. port industry generates tremendous
economic benefits to the nation. It creates 13.3 million jobs throughout the nation (Martin Associates,
Lancaster PA, 2008) and accounts for $3.95 trillion in economic impacts, including $1.4 trillion in waterborne
imports and exports alone (U.S. Census Bureau, 2007). In 2007, international trade represented nearly 30% of
the U.S. GDP (Office of U.S. Trade Representative). This increasingly global economy and growing demand for
cargo have resulted in the creation of larger ships, and thus the need for maritime improvements such as
draught requirements for channels, the size of turning basins needed in harbors, and the length of berths
needed at ports. It is in the best interest of the United States to have well-maintained and modern port,
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harbor, and waterway facilities. This can be achieved through dedicated funding for maritime projects and an
improved regulatory process.
Panama expansion in 2014 means massive economic crisis absent renewed investment
NOW-federal certainty is key to solve
Paul Scott Abbott, Editor, AAPA Seaports Magazine; Summer 2010 (Future port infrastructure growth tied to
federal funds, private sector; http://www.aapaseaports.com/article.cgi?id=19005)
With expansion of the Panama Canal and an anticipated economic rebound expected to spur increased cargo
volumes for many ports of the Western Hemisphere, industry leaders are looking to new sources - from
federal stimulus dollars to private investments - to help fund the infrastructure that will be needed to keep
goods flowing. While recovery from the worst global fiscal downturn in decades may not come speedily, even
the most conservative experts concur that the economy and port volumes will have been significantly
rejuvenated by the time Panama Canal expansion is done in 2014 - a century after the Big Ditch's digging. That
doesn't leave much time for the logistics system to be fully geared up. And, with the recession having put the
squeeze on traditional infrastructure funding mechanisms such as port revenues and bond financing, leaders
of ports throughout the Americas are increasingly looking toward private partners and federal coffers.
'Change is on the horizon' In opening remarks at the Shifting International Trade Routes Workshop, cosponsored Jan. 26-27 by the American Association of Port Authorities and U.S. Maritime Administration, in
Tampa, Fla., MARAD's senior adviser for maritime policy, Orlando Gotay Jr., commented, "Change is on the
horizon, and expansion of the Panama Canal will bring about a lot of that." Mr. Gotay said new possibilities
expected to open up when the Panamanian government's $5.25 billion project results in completion of
enhanced locks and channels in 2014 will include more all-water routes between Asia and North American East
Coast and Gulf Coast ports. He vowed an increased federal role in fostering expansion of maritime freight
transportation capabilities, including along inland waterways, as supported by MARAD's America's Marine
Highway Program, formerly referred to as the Short-Sea Shipping initiative. At the same AAPA/MARAD
workshop, Alberto Alemán Zubieta, CEO of the Panama Canal Authority, referred to the canal expansion as "a
game-changer in many ways," noting that dynamic growth of Panama's own crossroads container-handling
terminals will be among the impacts. Whereas the new locks will allow passage of megaships carrying as many
as 12,600 twenty-foot-equivalent container units - compared with the current maximum transcanal vessel
capacity of 4,400 TEUs - Mr. Alemán is among those expecting that the workhorse containerships dominating
the marketplace will continue to be smaller than the 10,000-plus-TEU giants. Likely just as significant will be the
doubling in overall annual throughput capacity of the canal. Strategic approach urged Richard A. Wainio, the
Tampa Port Authority's port director and chief executive, who previously served 23 years in executive positions
with the Panama Canal, noted that a handful of transshipment hubs - not just on U.S. soil but also in the
Caribbean, including perhaps Cuba - may expect to benefit from having channels and berths as deep as 50 or
more feet. But, he said, most of the beneficiaries of canal expansion, including his own port and its growing
container-handling facility, will not need to invest in such deep channels. Thus, Mr. Wainio urged "a more
strategic, holistic view" toward maritime infrastructure projects, "taking into consideration overall needs and
financial constraints." "Load centering is necessary to bring a balance in trade flows," Mr. Wainio said. "You
can spread the wealth by allowing more regional ports to be players. "Ports need to be more strategic in the
way that they look at projects," he added, "and invest only in those projects that make sound financial
sense." At the same time, Mr. Wainio said, federal officials must streamline processes to allow key projects to
advance more rapidly. Government support crucial In his introductory remarks at the Tampa workshop, AAPA
President and CEO Kurt J. Nagle said that the Panama Canal expansion is not the only factor that should
influence port-related infrastructure, pointing to the importance of governmental addressing of funding
demands. "Clearly, the expansion means a lot to the ports, including their infrastructure needs and
development needs," Mr. Nagle said, adding that just as critical are maintenance plus deepening and widening
of navigation channels and sufficiency of landside connections. To meet these respective waterside and
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landside needs, U.S. port industry leaders are seeking to have Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund proceeds
properly routed to channel projects and to see adequate long-term funding for roadways under a multiyear
surface transportation reauthorization package, as well as for port-related projects to get a fair share of
future federal stimulus spending. (See Ports & Politics section, beginning on page 32.)
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Second Keynesian stimulus:
New government spending on infrastructure is key to boost consumer spending and
revitalize economic growth
Henry Blodget is CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider 6/19 (Yes, It's Time For A Massive Infrastructure
Spending ProgramRead more: http://www.businessinsider.com/infrastructure-spending-program-20126?op=1#ixzz1yvg17NUd http://www.businessinsider.com/infrastructure-spending-program-2012-6)
I recently laid out the fundamental problem with the US economy: Massive consumer debts and high
unemployment are crippling consumer spending, which accounts for about 70% of our economy. I noted that,
to get the economy healthy again, consumers have to get back to work and reduce their debts. This latter
process has begun, but it will take significantly more time, probably another decade. No one can wave a magic
wand and make consumer debt go away. (If they could have, they would have). What someone can do is wave
a magic wand and create jobs--jobs that benefit the whole country and put spending money back in
consumer's pockets. Who can wave that magic wand? The government. Instead of cutting spending and firing
people, the way it has been for the last few years, the government can do the opposite: Commit to spending,
say, an extra $2-$3 trillion over the next decade to rebuild our country's infrastructure--and create work and
awesome infrastructure for millions of Americans in the process. Yes, the government could also commit to
hiring more teachers, firefighters, policemen, and other folks who generally improve life for all Americans. But
hiring those folks is much more controversial. So the government should start with a massive infrastructure
spending program. But wait. Can we afford to spend $2-$3 trillion on infrastructure? We already have $15
trillion of debt, and we're accumulating more debt at a rate of more than $1 trillion per year! The answer is....
yes, we can afford it. As long as we commit to fixing our social-insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid) over the next decade. Those programs are what are slowly bankrupting this country, not
infrastructure spending. And in the meantime, our infrastructure is collapsing. Don't think we should initiate a
massive infrastructure spending program? Believe folks who tell you that "government spending doesn't work?"
Think the 2009 stimulus proves that government spending doesn't work? Then read on... YES, GOVERNMENT
SPENDING DOES WORK--SOME GOVERNMENT SPENDING The economy is basically composed of three big
spending engines —consumers, corporations (investment), and governments. So when the first two weaken,
as they have in recent years, the third can help offset this weakness. Specifically, the government can increase
its spending to offset the lost consumer and business spending. When governments spend money well,
moreover—such as on infrastructure projects that benefit all citizens—the impact of this spending lasts far
beyond the years in which the money is spent. Roads, bridges, schools, airports, national broadband networks,
and other investments can improve the country for decades. When the government spends money badly,
meanwhile--on bailouts and handouts and by perpetuating unsustainable promises of entitlement programs-the money is just wasted. Ever since the 2009 stimulus "failed to fix the economy," the consensus in the US has
been that government stimulus doesn't work. There's actually a lot of evidence to suggest that it did work, or at
least helped improve the situation (check out these charts). But the theory that government spending "doesn't
work" is pervasive. In support of this theory, everyone first points to Japan, where the government has been
frantically "stimulating" the economy for two decades now. Then they point to the Great Depression, with its
massive public-works programs. But other evidence suggests that the impact of government stimulus,
specifically infrastructure stimulus, is being badly misunderstood. The work of economist Richard Koo, for
example, suggests that Japan's stimulus has been vastly more successful than is commonly believed. Far from
not working, Koo argues, Japan's government stimulus has kept Japan's economy alive for the past 20 years.
Without the stimulus, Koo says, Japan's economy would not have crawled along for the last two decades—it
would have collapsed. When the same logic is applied to the US stimulus of 2009-2010, the conclusion is that
the stimulus "failed to fix" the US economy, but that it kept the recession from being much worse. In addition
to Japan, one of the most often-repeated examples cited by those who say stimulus doesn't work is the US
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experience in the Great Depression. To see that stimulus doesn't work, they say, all you need to do is look at
the huge public-works programs of the 1930s, which failed to pull the US permanently out of the Depression.
What finally got the US out of the Depression, these folks continue, was World War 2. But what was World
War 2 if not a gigantic government stimulus? That's exactly what World War 2 was. It put the US government
deeply in debt, vastly deeper in debt than we are today. But it got our production engine humming again. And
it set the stage for decades of impressive growth, during which we eventually worked off the World War 2
debt. So there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the current consensus that stimulus "doesn't work" is flatout wrong. In fact, the evidence suggests, stimulus can keep the economy from collapsing while the private
sector heals itself. And this, in turn, suggests that ruling out future stimulus in the form of infrastructure
investment as a way to help the economy is a major mistake, especially with US infrastructure in such lousy
shape and so many US workers idled by the construction industry slowdown.
And inflation spurs growth—solves risk aversion and stimulates the economy
Mirhaydari 2010 — Anthony Mirhaydari, investment columnist at MSN Money, former senior research
analyst at Markman Capital Insight—an investment advisory and money management firm, 2010 (“No Inflation
Means No Recovery,” MSN Money, September 8th, Available Online at
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Extra/mirhaydari-no-inflation-means-norecovery.aspx?page=all, Accessed 09-08-2011)
The problem is extreme risk aversion. And it's being enabled by low inflation. The hordes are hoarding Instead
of using cheap financing to invest and hire workers or even raise dividends or repurchase shares, corporations
are hoarding cash. The ratio of liquid assets to total assets has jumped from 2.9% in 1980 to nearly 7%, a level
not seen since 1960. As a result, the manufacturing capacity of the country is beginning to rust away as
managers forgo even basic maintenance expenditures to stash money in the bank, a subject explored at length
in a recent column. The banks aren't doing much either. Although we've seen some positive signs, with lending
standards finally beginning to ease, there are now fewer loans outstanding than there were in September 2008.
Instead of extending credit to businesses and consumers, the financial sector is dumping its cash into U.S.
Treasurys and parking money in the Federal Reserve's vaults. The latter strategy earns a paltry 0.25%, yet the
amount of money sitting idle at the Fed has jumped from just $810 million in the months before the recession to
more than $1 trillion now. These are reservoirs of cash waiting to be tapped. Similarly, U.S. consumers aren't
using cheap credit to buy discounted luxury homes or go on spending sprees. That's despite mortgage rates
that have plunged to just 4.3% while home affordability has returned to levels not seen since before the bubble.
Credit card debts are being paid down. Indeed, the personal savings rate has jumped from a low of 0.8% in 2005
to 5.9% now. Obviously, part of the problem is that many consumers, banks and businesses are still paying for
past sins. Debts are being repaid and balance sheets rebuilt. And millions of people are still without work. But
the process is nearing its end. Banks are about 85% of the way through recognizing their housing-bubble losses,
according to estimates by Credit Suisse and the International Monetary Fund. And Fed data show that
household debt-service burdens have improved to levels not seen in 10 years. Overall, the picture is of an
economy rebuilding its ability to create and consume credit. Drunk on deflation So what's the holdup? With fear
and uncertainly still dominating the popular consciousness, many Americans are more concerned about simply
being able to get their money back than with getting higher returns or chasing the hottest investing idea. On the
great scale of fear and greed, we're fully tilted toward fear. And low inflation makes fearful decisions -- like
leaving cash at the Fed to earn 0.25% or investing in 10-year Treasurys yielding 2.6% -- palatable. You can see
this in the way bonds and stocks have decoupled from their traditional relationship. Stocks are so undervalued
relative to corporate bonds that they're trading at levels seen less than 0.01% of the time. (For the statistics
buffs, equity yields are trading 3.36 standard deviations below the mean relative to Baa corporate yields.) Under
more-normal circumstances, inflation would slowly eat away at the returns from these conservative
investments. It would force investors, managers and bankers to seek out riskier, higher-yield investments.
That would help push cash back off the sidelines and back into the game – resulting in more loans, more
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investment and higher asset prices. This, in turn, would result in increased spending and hiring, helping propel
the economy forward. So the moral of the story is: We need inflation to help kick the recovery into overdrive.
Moreover, inflation is the lesser evil at this point, with moderate inflation being less painful than a Japanesestyle deflationary spiral.
Specifically infrastructure stimulus is key to economic growth—multiple reasons
New America Foundation 2010 — New America Foundation—“a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy
institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the
United States,” 2010 (“The Case for an Infrastructure-Led Jobs and Growth Strategy,” February 23rd, Available
Online at
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_case_for_an_infrastructure_led_jobs_and_growth_strate
gy, Accessed 06-09-2012)
As the Senate takes up a greatly scaled down $15 billion jobs bill stripped of all infrastructure spending, the
nation should consider the compelling case for public infrastructure investment offered by Governors Arnold
Schwarzenegger (R-CA) and Ed Rendell (D-PA). Appearing on ABC’s "This Week" on Sunday, the bipartisan CoChairs of Building America's Future explained why rebuilding America’s infrastructure is the key to both job
creation in the short and medium term and our prosperity in the longer term.
Rather than go from one negligible jobs bill to the next, the administration and Congress should, as the
governors suggest, map out a multi-year plan of infrastructure investment and make it the centerpiece of an
ongoing economic recovery program.
Here is why:
With American consumers constrained by high household debt levels and with businesses needing to work off
overcapacity in many sectors, we need a new, big source of economic growth that can replace personal
consumption as the main driver of private investment and job creation. The most promising new source of
growth in the near to medium term is America’s pent-up demand for public infrastructure improvements in
everything from roads and bridges to broadband and air traffic control systems to a new energy grid. We need
not only to repair large parts of our existing basic infrastructure but also to put in place the 21st-century
infrastructure for a more energy-efficient and technologically advanced society. This project, entailing billions
of dollars of new government spending over the next five to ten years, would generate comparable levels of
private investment and provide millions of new jobs for American workers.
More specifically, public infrastructure investment would have the following favorable benefits for the
economy:
Job Creation. Public infrastructure investment would directly create jobs, particularly high-quality jobs, and
thus would help counter the 8.4 million jobs lost since the Great Recession began. One study estimates that
each billion dollars of spending on infrastructure can generate up to 17,000 jobs directly and up to 23,000 jobs
by means of induced indirect investment. If all public infrastructure investment created jobs at this rate, then
$300 billion in new infrastructure spending would create more than five million jobs directly and millions
more indirectly, helping to return the economy to something approaching full employment.
A Healthy Multiplier Effect. Public infrastructure investment not only creates jobs but generates a healthy
multiplier effect throughout the economy by creating demand for materials and services. The U.S. Department
of Transportation estimates that, for every $1 billion invested in federal highways, more than $6.2 billion in
economic activity is generated. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, offers a more
conservative but still impressive estimate of the multiplier effect of infrastructure spending, calculating that
every dollar of increased infrastructure spending would generate a $1.59 increase in GDP. Thus, by Zandi’s
conservative estimates, $300 billion in infrastructure spending would raise GDP by nearly $480 billion (close to
4 percent).
A More Productive Economy. Public infrastructure investment would not only help stimulate the economy in
the short term but help make it more productive over the long term, allowing us to grow our way out of the
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increased debt burdens resulting from the bursting of the credit bubble. As numerous studies show, public
infrastructure increases productivity growth, makes private investment more efficient and competitive, and
lays the foundation for future growth industries. In fact, many of the new growth sectors of the economy in
agriculture, energy, and clean technology require major infrastructure improvements or new public
infrastructure.
Needed Investments that Will Pay for Themselves. New infrastructure investment can easily be financed at
historically low interest rates through a number of mechanisms, including the expansion of Build America
Bonds and Recovery Zone bonds (tax-credit bonds that are subsidized by favorable federal tax treatment) and
the establishment of a National Infrastructure Bank. Public infrastructure investment will pay for itself over
time as a result of increased productivity and stronger economic growth. Several decades of underinvestment
in public infrastructure has created a backlog of public infrastructure needs that is undermining our
economy’s efficiency and costing us billions in lost income and economic growth. By making these
investments now, we would eliminate costly bottlenecks and make the economy more efficient, thereby
allowing us to recoup the cost of the investment through stronger growth and higher tax revenues.
The negative’s anti-deficit hysteria is wrong—large deficits are key to growth
Krugman 2010 — Paul Krugman, Columnist for the New York Times, Professor of Economics and International
Affairs at Princeton University, and Recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, 2010 (“Fiscal Scare Tactics,”
The New York Times, February 5th, Available Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/opinion/
05krugman.html?pagewanted=print, Accessed 02-10-2010)
These days it’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings
about the federal budget deficit. The deficit threatens economic recovery, we’re told; it puts American
economic stability at risk; it will undermine our influence in the world. These claims generally aren’t stated as
opinions, as views held by some analysts but disputed by others. Instead, they’re reported as if they were facts,
plain and simple.
Yet they aren’t facts. Many economists take a much calmer view of budget deficits than anything you’ll see on
TV. Nor do investors seem unduly concerned: U.S. government bonds continue to find ready buyers, even at
historically low interest rates. The long-run budget outlook is problematic, but short-term deficits aren’t —
and even the long-term outlook is much less frightening than the public is being led to believe.
So why the sudden ubiquity of deficit scare stories? It isn’t being driven by any actual news. It has been obvious
for at least a year that the U.S. government would face an extended period of large deficits, and projections of
those deficits haven’t changed much since last summer. Yet the drumbeat of dire fiscal warnings has grown
vastly louder.
To me — and I’m not alone in this — the sudden outbreak of deficit hysteria brings back memories of the
groupthink that took hold during the run-up to the Iraq war. Now, as then, dubious allegations, not backed by
hard evidence, are being reported as if they have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now, as then,
much of the political and media establishments have bought into the notion that we must take drastic action
quickly, even though there hasn’t been any new information to justify this sudden urgency. Now, as then,
those who challenge the prevailing narrative, no matter how strong their case and no matter how solid their
background, are being marginalized.
And fear-mongering on the deficit may end up doing as much harm as the fear-mongering on weapons of
mass destruction.
Let’s talk for a moment about budget reality. Contrary to what you often hear, the large deficit the federal
government is running right now isn’t the result of runaway spending growth. Instead, well more than half of
the deficit was caused by the ongoing economic crisis, which has led to a plunge in tax receipts, required
federal bailouts of financial institutions, and been met — appropriately — with temporary measures to
stimulate growth and support employment.
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The point is that running big deficits in the face of the worst economic slump since the 1930s is actually the
right thing to do. If anything, deficits should be bigger than they are because the government should be doing
more than it is to create jobs.
True, there is a longer-term budget problem. Even a full economic recovery wouldn’t balance the budget, and it
probably wouldn’t even reduce the deficit to a permanently sustainable level. So once the economic crisis is
past, the U.S. government will have to increase its revenue and control its costs. And in the long run there’s no
way to make the budget math work unless something is done about health care costs.
But there’s no reason to panic about budget prospects for the next few years, or even for the next decade.
Consider, for example, what the latest budget proposal from the Obama administration says about interest
payments on federal debt; according to the projections, a decade from now they’ll have risen to 3.5 percent of
G.D.P. How scary is that? It’s about the same as interest costs under the first President Bush.
Why, then, all the hysteria? The answer is politics.
The main difference between last summer, when we were mostly (and appropriately) taking deficits in stride,
and the current sense of panic is that deficit fear-mongering has become a key part of Republican political
strategy, doing double duty: it damages President Obama’s image even as it cripples his policy agenda. And if
the hypocrisy is breathtaking — politicians who voted for budget-busting tax cuts posing as apostles of fiscal
rectitude, politicians demonizing attempts to rein in Medicare costs one day (death panels!), then denouncing
excessive government spending the next — well, what else is new?
The trouble, however, is that it’s apparently hard for many people to tell the difference between cynical
posturing and serious economic argument. And that is having tragic consequences.
For the fact is that thanks to deficit hysteria, Washington now has its priorities all wrong: all the talk is about
how to shave a few billion dollars off government spending, while there’s hardly any willingness to tackle
mass unemployment. Policy is headed in the wrong direction — and millions of Americans will pay the price.
And economic growth ensures that deficits decline—it’s counter-cyclical
Wray 2010 — L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Research
Director with the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, and Senior Research Scholar at The Levy
Economics Institute, with Yeva Nersisyan, Ph.D. Candidate in Economics and Math and Statistics at the
University of Missouri–Kansas City, 2010 (“Neoliberal Deficit Hysteria Strikes Again,” New Economic
Perspectives, March 22nd, Available Online at
http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2010/03/neoliberal-deficit-hysteria-strikes.html, Accessed 0325-2010)
Indeed, robust growth reduces budget deficits by raising tax revenue and reducing certain kinds of
government spending such as unemployment compensation. That was exactly the US experience in the
postwar period. The budget deficit is highly counter-cyclical, and will come down automatically when the
economy recovers.
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1AC-Terrorism Advantage
Terrorist attacks on seaports are inevitable in the status quo--only a question of when not if
Paul W. Parfomak and John Frittelli Resources, Science, and Industry Division of CRS 9 January 2007
(Maritime Security: Potential Terrorist Attacks and Protection Priorities;
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl33787.pdf)
The prior discussion illustrates the uncertainty surrounding some of the maritime terrorism scenarios of
greatest concern to U.S. maritime security officials. Questions about the likelihood of these specific, high
priority scenarios beg the larger question of how likely is any maritime terrorism attack against the United
States. Some experts suggest that some such attack, in one form or another, is almost inevitable. For example,
one senior U.S. military officer has reportedly asserted that “it’s just a matter of time until the terrorists try to
use a ... maritime attack against us.”116 Security analysts also point to known terrorist plots to attack U.S.
maritimetargets, such as those passing the Straits of Gibraltar, as evidence that global terrorist groups
continue to plan maritime terrorism activities. Information from captured Al Qaeda member Abd al Rahman
al Nashiri reportedly included plans for attacks on a wide range of Western maritime targets, including
military vessels, oil tankers, and cruise ships.11
This attack will be nuclear-secret documents prove terrorists have the necessary material
Graham Allison, Prof @ Harvard, 25 January 2010 (Foreign Policy, A Failure to Imagine the Worst,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/25/a_failure_to_imagine_the_worst?page=0,0)
In his first speech to the U.N. Security Council, U.S. President Barack Obama challenged members to think about
the impact of a single nuclear bomb. He said: "Just one nuclear weapon exploded in a city -- be it New York or
Moscow, Tokyo or Beijing, London or Paris -- could kill hundreds of thousands of people." The consequences, he
noted, would "destabilize our security, our economies, and our very way of life." Before the Sept. 11, 2001,
assault on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, who could have imagined that terrorists would mount an
attack on the American homeland that would kill more citizens than Japan did at Pearl Harbor? As thenSecretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified to the 9/11 Commission: "No one could have imagined them taking
a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon ... into the World Trade Center, using planes as missiles." For most
Americans, the idea of international terrorists conducting a successful attack on their homeland, killing
thousands of citizens, was not just unlikely. It was inconceivable. As is now evident, assertions about what is
"imaginable" or "conceivable," however, are propositions about our minds, not about what is objectively
possible. Prior to 9/11, how unlikely was a megaterrorist attack on the American homeland? In the previous
decade, al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and
the USS Cole in 2000 had together killed almost 250 and injured nearly 6,000. Moreover, the organization was
actively training thousands of recruits in camps in Afghanistan for future terrorist operations. Thinking about
risks we face today, we should reflect on the major conclusion of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission established to
investigate that catastrophe. The U.S. national security establishment's principal failure prior to Sept. 11, 2001,
was, the commission found, a "failure of imagination." Summarized in a single sentence, the question now is:
Are we at risk of an equivalent failure to imagine a nuclear 9/11? After the recent attempted terrorist attack on
Northwest Airlines Flight 253, this question is more urgent than ever. The thought that terrorists could
successfully explode a nuclear bomb in an American city killing hundreds of thousands of people seems
incomprehensible. This essential incredulity is rooted in three deeply ingrained presumptions. First, no one
could seriously intend to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a single attack. Second, only states are
capable of mass destruction; nonstate actors would be unable to build or use nuclear weapons. Third, terrorists
would not be able to deliver a nuclear bomb to an American city. In a nutshell, these presumptions lead to the
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conclusion: inconceivable. Why then does Obama call nuclear terrorism "the single most important national
security threat that we face" and "a threat that rises above all others in urgency?" Why the unanimity among
those who have shouldered responsibility for U.S. national security in recent years that this is a grave and
present danger? In former CIA Director George Tenet's assessment, "the main threat is the nuclear one. I am
convinced that this is where [Osama bin Laden] and his operatives desperately want to go." When asked
recently what keeps him awake at night, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates answered: "It's the thought of a
terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, especially nuclear." Leaders who have reached this
conclusion about the genuine urgency of the nuclear terrorist threat are not unaware of their skeptics'
presumptions. Rather, they have examined the evidence, much of which has been painstakingly compiled here
by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former head of the CIA's terrorism and weapons-of-mass-destruction efforts, and
much of which remains classified. Specifically, who is seriously motivated to kill hundreds of thousands of
Americans? Osama bin Laden, who has declared his intention to kill "4 million Americans -- including 2 million
children." The deeply held belief that even if they wanted to, "men in caves can't do this" was then Pakistani
President Pervez Musharraf's view when Tenet flew to Islamabad to see him after 9/11. As Tenet (assisted by
Mowatt-Larssen) took him step by step through the evidence, he discovered that indeed they could. Terrorists'
opportunities to bring a bomb into the United States follow the same trails along which 275 tons of drugs and
3 million people crossed U.S. borders illegally last year. In 2007, Congress established a successor to the 9/11
Commission to focus on terrorism using weapons of mass destruction. This bipartisan Commission on the
Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism issued its report to Congress and the Obama administration in
December 2008. In the commission's unanimous judgment: "it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass
destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013." Faced with the
possibility of an American Hiroshima, many Americans are paralyzed by a combination of denial and fatalism.
Either it hasn't happened, so it's not going to happen; or, if it is going to happen, there's nothing we can do to
stop it. Both propositions are wrong. The countdown to a nuclear 9/11 can be stopped, but only by realistic
recognition of the threat, a clear agenda for action, and relentless determination to pursue it.
Terrorists have already stolen nuclear material and are preparing to attack
John Zarocostas, The Washington Times, 10 December 2007 (Pre-empting a dirty bomb threat: global effort
aims to stop illegal nuclear trade with terrorists, ln)
Security officials warn that terrorists are trying to obtain radioactive mater-ials to construct a "dirty bomb"
and have called on countries around the globe to intensify efforts to stem the illicit traffic in nuclear bombmaking materials. "Since 2001, there have been several attempts to obtain radiological material for use in a
'dirty bomb,' " said William Nye, director of counter-terrorism and intelligence at Britain's Home Office. He
noted that in the investigation codenamed Operation Rhyme, eight terrorists were convicted for planning
attacks on buildings in the United Kingdom and the United States. Besides planning to blow up limousines
packed with gas cylinders and explosives, the cell's members "were considering using a radioactive bomb," he
recently told an international conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, organized by the International Atomic Energy
Agency. A new United Nations report on nuclear terrorism by the Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR)
said the most likely nuclear threat is terrorists' building a "dirty bomb," in which an ordinary explosive
disperses radioactive mater-ials. These materials are widely used worldwide and often not adequately
controlled. The report said a simulation showed that a dirty-bomb attack in Lower Manhattan would "spread
radioactive fallout over sixty blocks. Immediate casualties would be limited to victims of the immediate blast.
The aftereffects, including relocation and cleanup, would cost tens of billions of dollars." Former chief of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Hans Blix said a dirty would have "a terror effect" and noted that
such weapons can be constructed using materials such as cobalt and cesium, which are available for use in
hospitals and other industries. "That's why it's important to have good controls over all nuclear materials," he
said. Patricia Lewis, UNIDIR director, said a dirty bomb would not cause much damage but over time would
increase levels. She also said that news of a radioactive blast could cause mass panic and that the economic and
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cleanup costs would be enormous. In Edinburgh, Mr. Nye stressed to security specialists from more than 60
countries, including the United States, that "we have seen al Qaeda's leader in Iraq calling for nuclear scientists
to join global jihad and there is no doubt that core al Qaeda retains the ambition to build or obtain nuclear
weapons." He said that at the moment, "it is questionable" whether the intent is supported by real capability
but cautioned that a series of successful interceptions of radiological and fissile material by security forces
show that it is possible to obtain materials, painting a worrying picture of a continuing and increasing threat. In
its 2006 annual report, the Vienna-based IAEA reported 149 incidents of illicit nuclear-materials trafficking in
that year. The total included 15 seizures of nuclear and radioactive material from people involved in
trafficking and smuggling, the IAEA report said. "We are in the same global boat in the fight against nuclear
terrorism," Tomihiro Taniguchi, IAEA deputy director general. "There is now universal recognition of the illicit
trafficking problem and more uniform agreement on the need to take action to combat nuclear terrorism," Mr.
Taniguchi said. The report said one incident involved the seizure of uranium enriched to 89 percent. The IAEA
said more than 50 percent involved theft and loss of material. It also noted that in about 75 percent of the
cases, the material has not been recovered, "adding to the pool of lost material, some of which is potentially
available for malicious use." In late November, authorities in Slovakia arrested two Hungarians and a Ukrainian
in an attempted sale of uranium, according to an Associated Press report. Steven Aoki, deputy undersecretary
for counterterrorism, told delegates that the IAEA database has recorded more than 600 incidents since 1993
and pointed out that while the vast majority turned out to be scams and frauds, "there have certainly been at
least a few cases in which traffickers managed to obtain actual weapons-grade nuclear material." Mr. Aoki
said that recently, 60 countries have joined co-sponsors United States and Russia as partners in the Global
Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, under which nations share techniques to fight the threat and participate
in joint exercises. This has included, he said, establishing cooperative procedures "to interdict sea and air
shipments of materials related to weapons of mass destruction, potentially including nuclear materials and
related technology." The U.S. also is actively cooperating with allies and interested countries around the world
to boost surveillance at major ports and border crossings, according to U.S. officials. This includes the
installation of radiation-detection equipment in ports around the world such as Antwerp, Belgium; Rotterdam,
the Netherlands; and Singapore. In October, in a statement to the House Committee on Homeland Security, Mr.
Aoki said that "in this post-Cold-War world, nuclear terrorism may be the single most catastrophic threat that
this nation faces." Besides terrorists acquiring materials to construct radioactive dispersal devices (RDD) or
dirty bombs, Mr. Aoki warned that they could also acquire special nuclear materials - plutonium or enriched
uranium - and build an improvised nuclear device, or acquire one from a nuclear weapons state.
Specifically, al Qaeda has the motive and means to go nuclear
James R. Van De Velde, Booz Allen Hamilton, Washington, DC, August 2010 (“The Impossible Challenge of
Deterring “Nuclear Terrorism” by Al Qaeda”, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 8)
Many of the 33 U.S. State Department-designated foreign terrorist organizations worldwide have expressed
interest in chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) capabilities. And several terrorist groups,
particularly Al Qaeda, remain interested today in such materials and weapons; some groups have specifically
shown interest in nuclear weapons as well. A September 2006 statement by Al Qaeda in Iraq called on
scientists to join the struggle in Iraq and produce unconventional weapons against American forces in that
country.10 Al Qaeda leadership in particular has shown a consistent interest in the development of a nuclear
capability and other WMD. Former senior Al Qaeda operations planner Khalid Shaykh Muhammad (KSM)
confirmed in March 2003 that senior Al Qaeda leadership—including bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and
Muhammad 'Atif (a.k.a. Abu Hamza al-Masri)—all believed that obtaining a CBRN capability was necessary and
that they were intent on developing weapons that could cause large numbers of casualties. Following
Pakistan's nuclear tests in 1998, bin Laden urged Muslims to follow Pakistan's example and “not be lax in
possessing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.” In a 1999 interview, bin Laden called acquisition of WMD
a “religious duty.”11 As has been widely reported, in May 2003, a Saudi cleric, Nasir Bin Hamad Al-Fahd,
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produced the only widely recognized fatwa on the use of WMD. In “A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using
Weapons of Mass Destruction against Infidels”—a 25 page fatwa—Fahd argues that the Western ban on use of
weapons of mass destruction “was not to protect humanity but to protect themselves and monopolize such
weapons.”12 Al-Fahd asserts that Americans and the West have killed ten million Muslims and, therefore, “If a
bomb that killed ten million of them and burned as much of their land as they have burned Muslims land were
dropped on them it would be permissible, with no need to mention any other argument.”13 It seems reasonable
to conclude that the current Al Qaeda leadership likely sympathizes with this perspective. To state the
obvious, using a WMD today would be “high impact and low cost” for a terrorist group: they have no
headquarters, for instance, to threaten in retaliation. And they accept death as part of their operation. And in
reply, the West has developed no deterrence policy based on punishment.
It is only a question of access-ports are a weakness in the US security infrastructure making a
nuclear attack in the short-term a near certainty; boosted infrastructure spending is key to
solve
Jerrold L. Nadler, Edward J. Markey and Bennie G. Thompson are Democratic representatives from New
York, Massachusetts and Mississippi, respectively 6/26 (Cargo, the Terrorists’ Trojan Horse;
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/27/opinion/the-dangerous-delay-on-port-security.html)
MILLIONS of cargo containers are unloaded from ships each year at American seaports, providing countless
opportunities for terrorists to smuggle and unleash a nuclear bomb or weapon of mass destruction on our
shores. To counter this threat, Congress passed a law five years ago mandating that by July 2012, all maritime
cargo bound for the United States must be scanned before it is loaded on ships. But the Obama administration
will miss this deadline, and it is not clear to us, as the authors of the law, whether it ever plans to comply with
the law. Over the years, terrorists have shown themselves to be frighteningly inventive. They have hidden
explosives in printer cartridges transported by air and embedded explosives in the shoes and underwear of
airline passengers. The cargo containers arriving on ships from foreign ports offer terrorists a Trojan horse for
a devastating attack on the United States. As the Harvard political scientist Graham T. Allison has put it, a
nuclear attack is “far more likely to arrive in a cargo container than on the tip of a missile.” But for the past
five years, the Department of Homeland Security has done little to counter this threat and instead has wasted
precious time arguing that it would be too expensive and too difficult, logistically and diplomatically, to
comply with the law. This is unacceptable. An attack on an American port could cause tens of thousands of
deaths and cripple global trade, with losses ranging from $45 billion to more than $1 trillion, according to
estimates by the RAND Corporation and the Congressional Research Service. Anyone who doubts these
estimates should recall the labor strike that shut down the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach for 11 days in
2002. Economic losses were put at $6.3 billion or more. Homeland Security says it would cost $16 billion or more
to meet the mandate, but that projection assumes that the department would pay to acquire, maintain and
operate scanning equipment and related operations, without any offsetting fees from companies in the global
supply chain. In contrast, Stephen E. Flynn, an expert in terrorism and port security at Stanford, has said a
scanning system could be implemented in every major container port in the world at a cost of $1.5 billion, and
that the costs could largely be absorbed by companies doing business at the ports.
This escalates to global nuclear war
Speice 2006 – 06 JD Candidate @ College of William and Mary [Patrick F. Speice, Jr., “NEGLIGENCE AND
NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION: ELIMINATING THE CURRENT LIABILITY BARRIER TO BILATERAL U.S.-RUSSIAN
NONPROLIFERATION ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS,” William & Mary Law Review, February 2006, 47 Wm and Mary
L. Rev. 1427
Accordingly, there is a significant and ever-present risk that terrorists could acquire a nuclear device or fissile
material from Russia as a result of the confluence of Russian economic decline and the end of stringent Soviet23
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era nuclear security measures. 39 Terrorist groups could acquire a nuclear weapon by a number of methods,
including "steal[ing] one intact from the stockpile of a country possessing such weapons, or ... [being] sold or
given one by [*1438] such a country, or [buying or stealing] one from another subnational group that had
obtained it in one of these ways." 40 Equally threatening, however, is the risk that terrorists will steal or
purchase fissile material and construct a nuclear device on their own. Very little material is necessary to
construct a highly destructive nuclear weapon. 41 Although nuclear devices are extraordinarily complex, the
technical barriers to constructing a workable weapon are not significant. 42 Moreover, the sheer number of
methods that could be used to deliver a nuclear device into the United States makes it incredibly likely that
terrorists could successfully employ a nuclear weapon once it was built. 43 Accordingly, supply-side controls
that are aimed at preventing terrorists from acquiring nuclear material in the first place are the most effective
means of countering the risk of nuclear terrorism. 44 Moreover, the end of the Cold War eliminated the
rationale for maintaining a large military-industrial complex in Russia, and the nuclear cities were closed. 45 This
resulted in at least 35,000 nuclear scientists becoming unemployed in an economy that was collapsing. 46
Although the economy has stabilized somewhat, there [*1439] are still at least 20,000 former scientists who are
unemployed or underpaid and who are too young to retire, 47 raising the chilling prospect that these scientists
will be tempted to sell their nuclear knowledge, or steal nuclear material to sell, to states or terrorist
organizations with nuclear ambitions. 48 The potential consequences of the unchecked spread of nuclear
knowledge and material to terrorist groups that seek to cause mass destruction in the United States are truly
horrifying. A terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon would be devastating in terms of immediate human and
economic losses. 49 Moreover, there would be immense political pressure in the United States to discover the
perpetrators and retaliate with nuclear weapons, massively increasing the number of casualties and
potentially triggering a full-scale nuclear conflict. 50 In addition to the threat posed by terrorists, leakage of
nuclear knowledge and material from Russia will reduce the barriers that states with nuclear ambitions face and
may trigger widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons. 51 This proliferation will increase the risk of nuclear
attacks against the United States [*1440] or its allies by hostile states, 52 as well as increase the likelihood that
regional conflicts will draw in the United States and escalate to the use of nuclear weapons.
China and Russia will be drawn in culminating in extinction
Robert Ayson, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand at
the Victoria University of Wellington, 2010 (“After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects,”
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, July, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via
InformaWorld)
A terrorist nuclear attack, and even the use of nuclear weapons in response by the country attacked in the first
place, would not necessarily represent the worst of the nuclear worlds imaginable. Indeed, there are reasons
to wonder whether nuclear terrorism should ever be regarded as belonging in the category of truly existential
threats. A contrast can be drawn here with the global catastrophe that would come from a massive nuclear
exchange between two or more of the sovereign states that possess these weapons in significant numbers.
Even the worst terrorism that the twenty-first century might bring would fade into insignificance alongside
considerations of what a general nuclear war would have wrought in the Cold War period. And it must be
admitted that as long as the major nuclear weapons states have hundreds and even thousands of nuclear
weapons at their disposal, there is always the possibility of a truly awful nuclear exchange taking place
precipitated entirely by state possessors themselves. But these two nuclear worlds—a non-state actor
nuclear attack and a catastrophic interstate nuclear exchange—are not necessarily separable. It is just
possible that some sort of terrorist attack, and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain
of events leading to a massive exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that possess
them. In this context, today’s and tomorrow’s terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during the
early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as raising the risks of a
catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late
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1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem. It may require a
considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially plausible situation where an act of nuclear terrorism
could lead to such a massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack on
the United States, it might well be wondered just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the
picture, not least because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state sponsors or
encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible to be involved in supporting that sort of
terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten them as well. Some possibilities, however remote, do
suggest themselves. For example, how might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the
fissile material used in the act of nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks,40 and if for some reason
Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of that nuclear material to a
particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while
the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be “spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its
radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from
its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the materials used and, most important … some indication of where
the nuclear material came from.”41 Alternatively, if the act of nuclear terrorism came as a complete surprise,
and American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible at all)
suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like the United
Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very
short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program continues, and possibly Pakistan. But at what
stage would Russia and China be definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo? In particular,
if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in Washington’s relations with
Russia and/or China, and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers,
would officials and political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this
occurring would only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed
conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war, as
unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The reverse might well apply too: should a
nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict
with the United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider
the United States as a possible perpetrator or encourager of the attack? Washington’s early response to a
terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided)
confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example, in the noise and confusion during the immediate
aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be expected to place the country’s armed
forces, including its nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of alert. In such a tense environment, when careful
planning runs up against the friction of reality, it is just possible that Moscow and/or China might mistakenly
read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation,
the temptations to preempt such actions might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption
would probably still meet with a devastating response. As part of its initial response to the act of nuclear
terrorism (as discussed earlier) Washington might decide to order a significant conventional (or nuclear)
retaliatory or disarming attack against the leadership of the terrorist group and/or states seen to support that
group. Depending on the identity and especially the location of these targets, Russia and/or China might
interpret such action as being far too close for their comfort, and potentially as an infringement on their
spheres of influence and even on their sovereignty.
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1AC-Solvency
Funding for the plan has already been allocated and is sufficient to retrofit ports and boost
efficiency
MTD Maritime Trades Department @ AF-CIO 2012 (Port Modernization;
http://maritimetrades.org/issues/allied-trades/port-modernization/)
U.S. ports are important strategic and economic assets, generating as they do millions of jobs and serving as
loading platforms for the nation’s military forces. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, ILA members and other
unionized stevedores worked around the clock to ensure that the men and women of the U.S. armed forces had
the ammunition and equipment that was needed to perform the mission. According to recent estimates,
approximately 95 percent of our nation’s trade enters or leaves through 36 of the nation’s largest seaports.
With international trade set to double over the next 15 years, America’s ports will play an even greater role in
the economic life of the nation. Unfortunately, while the international maritime industry is changing, U.S.
ports are finding it hard to keep up. While cargo vessels are getting larger and larger, inadequate federal
funding levels and other obstacles are making it harder and harder for U.S. ports to accommodate them.
Besides the economic issues involved, there’s the public safety. There have been a number of recent highprofile accidents that have been caused by inadequate channel conditions in several U.S. ports. There are a
number of things holding up dredging projects. Some environmental groups are opposed to any economic
development on the waterfront. The MTD believes that environmental safety and economic development are
not mutually exclusive. Our port maritime councils have worked hard on a grass roots level to promote local
modernization projects. There’s also a matter of funding. Ten years ago, the Supreme Court found the Harbor
Maintenance Tax to be unconstitutional. Even though Congress and the administration have not come up with
a badly needed new source of dedicated funding, the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund still has a $3 billion
surplus on hand. Unfortunately, many in the dredging industry suspect that this money will be used for other
purposes. As one representative from the American Association of Port Authorities noted skeptically, “It was
real when it was paid.”
Additional staffing and technology funding is key to port security and stopping nuclear
terrorism-federal leadership is necessary
Jon D. Haveman and Howard J. Shatz Public Policy Institute of California 2006 (Protecting the Nation’s
Seaports: Balancing Security and Cost; http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/r_606jhr.pdf)
The research in this study suggests a number of steps that the U.S. and state governments can take as they
seek to strengthen the homeland security effort. The biggest threats to the United States from the maritime
supply chain are from containers. Although an attack on a port could prove very costly, the infiltration of a
nuclear weapon into some other location in the country using a container could prove even more costly. This
suggests that the government should focus its efforts on sealing the supply chain and improving targeting
abilities—while not neglecting lower-cost actions to make the ports and their perimeters more difficult
targets. Furthermore, a rapid response and economic reconstitution plan could minimize damage from either an
attack on a port or an attack using the maritime supply chain. How the government reacts to the many problems
created by an attack could be as important as how well it anticipates those problems, given that it cannot stave
off terrorists with certainty. Strengthened recovery plans could return the economy to full activity quickly and
prevent the population from panicking, breeding more trouble. Second, given that no one measure can provide
100 percent security against the shipment of terrorist materiel in containers—or even terrorists themselves,
since they have been found to travel by this means—the layered response being implemented is indeed the
right way to proceed. The chief issues here are whether there are enough inspection points, or layers, and
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whether the current layers add enough security to justify their cost and the drag on commerce that they may
cause. Third, better policy guidance is needed. The U.S. government has demanded the implementation of
multiple programs simultaneously, without setting priorities. This leaves the setting of priorities in the hands
of senior government officials, who may have fine judgment but who also can be unfairly blamed by
politicians for mistakes they may make in the absence of political guidance. Responsibility for program
priorities belongs to elected officials—first to the federal executive branch and its agencies for designing
strategy and implementation and to the Congress to allocate sufficient money to meet national goals. But
even at the state and local levels, there is room for priority-setting, especially in the design of incident
response and in ensuring a risk-based allocation of money and personnel. Also as part of better policy guidance,
a more coherent technology policy will help bring about increased security and economic benefits. Parts of this
policy include the encouragement of technology development by the private sector, the purchase of
commercial technology and subsequent modification for security purposes—rather than the special
development of new security technology—and encouragement of greater international collaboration in
technology development. Fourth, response and recovery merit more attention. If there is an attack on the
maritime system, a complete shutdown of that system could cause far more harm than the initial attack on one
part of it. Plans 26 for reconstituting the system—and with it the economy—could also serve as a disincentive to
terrorism attacks. Terrorists have been shown to direct their attacks at those targets where they are more
likely to achieve their aims.23 Finally, the U.S. government should reconsider the level of staffing and funding
devoted to port security efforts. Under current programs, 12,000 facility and vessel security plans and more
than 5,600 C-TPAT plans will need monitoring (with the number of C-TPAT plans steadily rising). The U.S. Coast
Guard has gained a large set of new duties that need staffing. New technologies need developing. Customs
officials must review large amounts of new information to target high-risk containers. Personnel from the
Coast Guard and other parts of the government need training in tasks previously unknown to them. Finally,
new security equipment will need maintenance, repair, and upgrading. Efficiency can go only so far. As
Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine said at a recent hearing: The Coast Guard should no longer have to say we
can do more with less. We’ve heard that consistently before this committee, time and again. Frankly, I think
it’s a phrase that we ought to remove from the vocabulary. I well recall a past commandant saying that doing
more with less will evolve into doing everything with nothing. Obviously we all refuse to accept that
philosophy and that rationale.24
Finally investments in new screening technology boost security and efficiency across port
supply chains
Jay Stowsky University of California, Berkeley; 2006 (Harnessing a Trojan Horse: Aligning Security Investments
with Commercial Trajectories in Cargo Container Shipping;
http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/r_606jhr.pdf)
In the area of screening technologies, work currently is focused on two issues. First, there is the issue of
reducing the costs of screening cargo containers by increasing cycle time or throughput. This is a particularly
pressing concern for ports and represents the major tradeoff between enhanced security and improved
efficiency from advances in transparency (tracking) along the supply chain. Container screening adds time to
the processing of containers; port operators or customs inspectors must also bear the significant cost of the
scanning equipment. Current leading technologies for screening cargo containers include x-ray and
radiological/nuclear screening systems and systems geared to explosive and explosive trace detection.18 The
research emphasis in screening technology is in the area of so- called “smart screening” systems. The idea
here is to arm the screening machines with software that can detect anomalies and then automatically alert
human operators to the need for further inspection and, perhaps, the need to instigate countermeasures.
Vendors would like to improve the efficiency of screening machines by making them more broadly effective
across the entire range of threatening agents, which include chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear
(CBRN) weapons. Screening machines are likely to incorporate advanced sensors to detect these and other
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potential threats, including new types of explosives. Scanning equipment is expected to enhance security by
enabling the detection of weapons at ports of entry, thereby preventing their transport onto the mainland by
truck or train. The expectation is that better screening technologies will also reduce commercial losses from
fraud by enabling the quicker detection of illegal or dangerous goods and their removal from the supply chain.
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Solvency-HMTF Funding
The HMTF has allocated monies sufficient to maintain retrofitted port security and efficiency
measures
Sandy Levin Congressman 12th District of Michigan May 7, 2012 (Letter urging Harbor Maintenance Trust
Funds Actually be Spent on Operating and Maintaining our Nation’s Navigational Channel;
http://levin.house.gov/letter-urging-harbor-maintenance-trust-funds-actually-be-spent-operating-andmaintaining-our-nation)
The Harbor Maintenance Tax (HMT) and Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund (HMTF) were established in 1986 to
strictly and efficiently fund U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) operations and maintenance purposes and
ensure that our navigation system operates effectively. The HMT is a user fee charged against the value of
imports and domestic cargo arriving at the nearly 1,000 U.S. ports and harbors and deposited into the HMTF,
where they are then subject to appropriations. Yet only about half of the funds collected through a user fee
charged on shippers are actually appropriated for harbor maintenance, threatening width and depth of
American waterways. The USACE has estimated that even the so-called top-priority harbors, those that handle
about 90 percent of the commercial traffic, are dredged to their authorized depths and widths only 35 percent
of the time. This lack of maintenance is simply unacceptable. Ports and harbors support about 13 million jobs
and account for $4 trillion in economic impacts. Additionally, because waterborne transportation is often the
least expensive means of transporting vital commodities used for manufacturing, construction, and energy
generation, shipping bolsters our international competitiveness, economic recovery and job creation, while
also keeping costs in check for American consumers. The harbor maintenance provisions, contained in
Sections 1533 and 401 of the Senate and House bills, respectively, would ensure all funds deposited into the
HMTF in a given fiscal year be fully expended to operate and maintain the navigation channels of the United
States, and not for other purposes. We ask that this language be retained and strengthened further through an
“enforcement of guarantees”; that language should mirror that provided in Section 2(c) of the Realize America’s
Maritime Promise (RAMP) Act (H.R. 104). Similar action was taken for aviation programs in the Aviation
Investment and Reform Act for the 21st Century (AIR-21) to more closely tie aviation trust fund revenues with
expenditures in the Airports and Airways Trust Fund. Given this precedent, we believe taking similar action
for the HMTF is appropriate, and will provide a greater degree of certainty for waterborne commerce. As the
economy struggles to recover, we cannot afford to threaten commerce and trade by failing to maintain our
harbor infrastructure. We look forward to working with you to ensure our nation has a strong transportation
infrastructure supporting jobs, growing our economy, and competing successfully in this global economy.
Thank you for your consideration of our request.
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Solvency-Screening Tech
Non-intrusive scanning tech is sufficient to detect and counter CBRN threats entering
seaports
WENDY J. Keefer 4/21 2008 (Container Port Security: A Layered Defense Strategy to Protect The Homeland
and The International Supply Chain; CAMPBELL LAW REVIEW Vol. 30:139;
http://law.campbell.edu/lawreview/articles/30-1-139.pdf)
Ultimately, some of the success in this arena will depend upon advancements in technologies that can be
made available at reasonable prices. Security technology is continuously evolving, not only in terms of
capability but also in terms of compatibility, standardization, and inte- gration with information systems. It is
important to note that there is no single technology solution to improving supply chain security. As technology
matures, it must be evaluated and adjustments to opera- tional plans must be made. Priority should be given
to effective secur- ity solutions that complement and improve the business processes already in place, and
which build a foundation for 21st century global trade. A more secure supply chain also can be a more
efficient supply chain. ... . Technology plays a particularly important role in providing for screening of cargo at
the critical nodes of the supply chain through data acquisition, delivery, and analysis (e.g., the secure
transmission of cargo manifests). It also provides for certainty, through scanning and imaging of cargo at those
nodes where multiple cargo flows join, (e.g., at ports of departure and entry). Such information built into
normal business process as a preventative measure also leverages recovery capabilities by providing
necessary information to key decision mak- ers on the safety, security and prioritization of cargo.157 Better
technologies may permit more efficient cargo screening and examinations of a larger number of containers,
ideally, prior to depart- ing for and entering United States ports. Certainly, a continued focus on technology is
appropriate. CBP is currently utilizing large-scale X-ray and gamma ray machines and radiation detection
devices to scan cargo. The acquisition and deployment of radiation detection equipment is coordinated
closely with DHS’ Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO). Presently, CBP operates over 913 radiation
portal monitors (RPMs) at our Nation’s ports (including 342 RPMs at seaports), utilizes over 180 large scale
non-intrusive inspection devices to examine cargo, and has issued 14,150 handheld-held radiation detection
devices. DNDO is currently developing next-generation technologies for CBP and other operators that will
provide improved detection capabilities. These next-genera- tion systems will be gradually introduced at our
nation’s ports begin- ning this calendar year. Also, over 600 canine detection teams capable of identifying
narcotics, bulk currency, human beings, explosives, agri- cultural pests, and chemical weapons are deployed at
our ports of entry.158 Non-intrusive inspection devices are assuredly key to quick container examination.
Equally important is the use of devices to detect intru- sion into containers so that those containers passing
inspection at the time of loading are not tampered with in route to the United States. In a perfect world such
devices would detect the unauthorized intrusion anywhere on a container and not just intrusions through the
container doors. “[J]ust because you have a device that secures the doors does not mean that the container is
secure.”159
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Solvency-A2: Screening=Delays
New advances in screening tech means no delays-prefer the recency of our ev
Jerrold L. Nadler, Edward J. Markey and Bennie G. Thompson are Democratic representatives from New
York, Massachusetts and Mississippi, respectively 6/26 (Cargo, the Terrorists’ Trojan Horse;
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/27/opinion/the-dangerous-delay-on-port-security.html)
Homeland Security says it uses a “layered, risk-based approach” to cargo scanning, which, instead of
comprehensive scanning, targets specific cargo thought to be high-risk. But this approach is inadequate.
Recent advances in screening technologies have undermined Homeland Security’s contention that the
technology is not available to scan all cargo containers without disrupting commerce. An effective highvolume container screening system was installed in the Port of Hong Kong in 2005. Trials of new, Americanmade technology have demonstrated that scanning all containers would be feasible at many ports. The
world’s largest marine terminal operators have offered to work with the department to put the law into
effect. Cost and technology have never been the primary obstacles to meeting this mandate. What is missing
is a sense of urgency and determination. We recognized that the scanning of 100 percent of all cargo
containers in five years could be a challenging deadline to meet. That is why we included the authority to
extend the deadline in cases in which Homeland Security certified that there are at least two major obstacles
relating to the availability and accuracy of the technology, the logistics of its deployment and use, or impacts
to trade. Now Homeland Security is using this authority to simply exempt itself from any meaningful
compliance with the law we wrote to close a dangerous loophole in United States security. We have urged the
department over the last five years to make the law a reality, to no avail. Our nation can no longer risk such
delays.
And the biggest risk of delay is a successful terrorist attack-the plan solves
Author: Stephen E. Flynn CFR Feow January/February 2006 (Port Security Is Still a House of Cards;
http://www.cfr.org/border-and-ports/port-security-still-house-cards/p9629)
But the days when policy makers could take safe transportation for granted are long past. The Sept. 11, 2001
attacks on New York and subsequent attacks on Madrid and London show that transport systems have become
favored targets for terrorist organizations. It is only a matter of time before terrorists breach the superficial
security measures in place to protect the ports, ships and the millions of intermodal containers that link global
producers to consumers. Should that breach involve a weapon of mass destruction, the United States and
other countries will likely raise the port security alert system to its highest level, while investigators sort out
what happened and establish whether or not a follow-on attack is likely. In the interim, the flow of all inbound
traffic will be slowed so that the entire intermodal container system will grind to a halt. In economic terms,
the costs associated with managing the attack’s aftermath will substantially dwarf the actual destruction from
the terrorist event itself.
Gains in efficiency offset delays introduced by enhanced scanning
John F. Frittelli Specialist in Transportation Resources, Science, and Industry Division 27 May 2005 (Port and
Maritime Security: Background and Issues for Congress; http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL31733.pdf)
Given the dependence of the United States and the global economy on a highly efficient maritime
transportation system, many experts acknowledge that slowing the flow of trade to inspect all inbound
containers, or at least a statistically significant random selection would be “economically intolerable.”16
Supply chain analysts are concerned that increased security-related delay at seaports could threaten the
efficiency gains achieved in inventory management over the past two decades by forcing companies to hold
larger inventories. Enhanced security has benefits as well as costs. Many experts see economic benefits to
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tighter control over maritime commerce. Resources put towards seaport security can also reduce cargo theft,
narcotic and migrant smuggling, trade law violations, the accidental introduction of invasive species, and the
cost of cargo insurance. Improved planning for responding to a terrorist attack at a seaport could also improve
responses to other emergencies, such as natural disasters or transportation accidents. New technologies
intended to convert the sea container into a “smart box,” such as electronic seals, sensors, or tracking devices,
could also improve shipment integrity, help carriers improve their equipment utilization, and help cargo
owners track their shipments. In response to the terrorist threat, the CBP has accelerated development of its
new information management system, the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE). This system will assist
CBP inevaluating cargo manifest information for high risk shipments but will also speed the customs filing
process for U.S. importers.17
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***TERRORISM ADVANTAGE***
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Terrorism Advantage-Weak Security Now
Status quo port security is a house of cards-piecemeal reforms have accomplished little and
make an attack more likely
Author: Stephen E. Flynn CFR Feow January/February 2006 (Port Security Is Still a House of Cards;
http://www.cfr.org/border-and-ports/port-security-still-house-cards/p9629)
Ostensibly, the flurry of U.S. government initiatives since 9/11 suggests substantial progress is being made in
securing the global trade and transportation system. Unfortunately, all this activity should not be confused
with real capability. For one thing, the approach has been piecemeal, with each agency pursuing its signature
program with little regard for other initiatives. There are also vast disparities in the resources that the
agencies have been allocated, ranging from an $800 million budget for the Department of Energy’s Megaport
initiative to no additional funding for the Coast Guard to support its congressionally mandated compliance to
the ISPS Code. Even more problematic are some of the questionable assumptions about the nature of the
terrorist threat that underpin these programs. In an effort to secure funding and public support, agency
heads and the White House have oversold the contributions of these new initiatives. Against a backdrop of
inflated and unrealistic expectations, the public is likely to be highly skeptical of official assurances in the
aftermath of a terrorist attack involving the intermodal transportation system. Scrambling for fresh
alternatives to reassure anxious and angry citizens, the White House and Congress are likely to impose
Draconian inspection protocols that dramatically raise costs and disrupt crossborder trade flows. The new
risk-management programs advanced by the CBP are especially vulnerable to being discredited, should
terrorists succeed at turning a container into a poor man’s missile. Before stepping down as commissioner in
late November 2005, Robert Bonner repeatedly stated in public and before Congress that his inspectors were
“inspecting 100% of the right 5% of containers.” That implies the CBP’s intelligence and analytical tools can be
relied upon to pinpoint dangerous containers. Former Commissioner Bonner is correct in identifying only a tiny
percentage of containers as potential security risks. Unfortunately, CBP’s risk-management framework is not up
to the task of reliably identifying them, much less screening the low- or medium-risk cargoes that constitute
the majority of containerized shipments and pass mostly uninspected into U.S. ports. There is very little
counterterrorism intelligence available to support the agency’s targeting system. That leaves customs
inspectors to rely primarily on their past experience in identifying criminal or regulatory misconduct to
determine if a containerized shipment might potentially be compromised. This does not inspire confidence,
given that the U.S. Congress’s watchdog, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general have documented glaring weaknesses with current
customs targeting practices. Prior to 9/11, the cornerstone of the risk-assessment framework used by customs
inspectors was to identify “known shippers” that had an established track record of engaging in legitimate
commercial activity. After 9/11, the agency expanded that model by extracting a commitment from shippers to
follow the supply chain security practices outlined in C-TPAT. As long as there is no specific intelligence to tell
inspectors otherwise, shipments from C-TPAT-compliant companies are viewed as low-risk. The problem with
this method is that it is designed to fight conventional crime; such an approach is not necessarily effective in
combating determined terrorists. An attack involving a weapon of mass destruction differs in three important
ways from organized criminal activity. First, it is likely to be a one-time operation, and most private company
security measures are not designed to prevent single-event infractions. Instead, corporate security officers try
to detect infractions when they occur, conduct investigations after the fact, and adapt precautionary strategies
accordingly. Second, terrorists will likely target a legitimate company with a well-known brand name precisely
because they can count on these shipments entering the U.S. with negligible or no inspection. It is no secret
which companies are viewed by U.S. customs inspectors as “trusted” shippers; many companies enlisted in CTPAT have advertised their participation. All a terrorist organization needs to do is find a single weak link
within a “trusted” shipper’s complex supply chain, such as a poorly paid truck driver taking a container from a
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remote factory to a port. They can then gain access to the container in one of the half-dozen ways well known
to experienced smugglers. Third, this terrorist threat is unique in terms of the severity of the economic
disruption. If a weapon of mass destruction arrives in the U.S., especially if it enters via a trusted shipper, the
risk-management system that customs authorities rely on will come under intense scrutiny. In the interim, it will
become impossible to treat crossborder shipments by other trusted shippers as low-risk. When every
container is assumed to be potentially high-risk, everything must be examined, freezing the worldwide
intermodal transportation system. The credibility of the ISPS code as a risk-detection tool is not likely to
survive the aftermath of such a maritime terrorist attack, and its collapse could exacerbate a climate of
insecurity that could likely exist after a successful attack. Moreover, the radiation-detection technology
currently used in the world’s ports by the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection Agency is not
adequately capable of detecting a nuclear weapon or a lightly shielded dirty bomb. This is because nuclear
weapons are extremely well-shielded and give off very little radioactivity. If terrorists obtained a dirty bomb
and put it in a box lined with lead, it’s unlikely radiation sensors would detect the bomb’s low levels of
radioactivity. The flaws in detection technology require the Pentagon’s counterproliferation teams to
physically board container ships at sea to determine if they are carrying weapons of mass destruction. Even if
there were enough trained boarding teams to perform these inspections on a regular basis—and there are
not—there is still the practical problem of inspecting the contents of cargo containers at sea. Such inspections
are almost impossible because containers are so closely packed on a container ship that they are often simply
inaccessible. This factor, when added to the sheer number of containers on each ship—upwards of 3,000—
guarantees that in the absence of very detailed intelligence, inspectors will be able to perform only the most
superficial of examinations. In the end, the U.S. government’s container-security policy resembles a house of
cards. In all likelihood, any terrorist attack on U.S. soil that involved a maritime container would come in
contact with most, or even all, of the existing maritime security protocols. Consequently, a successful seaborne
attack would implicate the entire security regime, generating tremendous political pressure to abandon it.
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Terrorism Advantage-Weak Security Now
Incredibly easy to sneak a WMD into a cargo container and into port now
Paul W. Parfomak and John Frittelli Resources, Science, and Industry Division of CRS 9 January 2007
(Maritime Security: Potential Terrorist Attacks and Protection Priorities;
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl33787.pdf)
The potential smuggling and detonation of a nuclear or dirty bomb device in a shipping container at a U.S.
port is one of the threats most specifically and frequently mentioned by legislators in the context of maritime
security.88 Shipping containers may be particularly vulnerable to terrorist infiltration compared to other
types of cargo for three reasons. First, shipping containers are relatively large. They come in standard sizes
from 20 to 53 feet long, although the most common are 40 feet or longer—about the size of a truck semi-trailer.
Second, the containers on any given ship are packed at the factories or warehouses of many different
companies that can be dispersed far and wide from the loading port, making it impossible for government
authorities to ensure that only legitimate cargo has been packed. Third, the containers are typically trucked to
the port of loading, during which the integrity of the shipments rests entirely on the trustworthiness or due
diligence of the truck drivers. A maritime security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, who is a former
Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, outlines a scenario that most concerns him: Let me share with you the
terrorist scenario that most keeps me awake at night.... A container of athletic foot wear for a name brand
company is loaded at a manufacturing plant in Surabaya, Indonesia. The container doors are shut and a
mechanical seal is put into the door pad-eyes. These designer sneakers are destined for retail stores in malls
across America. The container and seal numbers are recorded at the factory. A local truck driver, sympathetic
to al Qaeda picks up the container. On the way to the port, he turns into an alleyway and backs up the truck
at a nondescript warehouse where a small team of operatives pry loose one of the door hinges to open the
container so that they can gain access to the shipment. Some of the sneakers are removed and in their place,
the operatives load a dirty bomb wrapped in lead shielding, and they then refasten the door.
Status quo reforms provide loopholes creating fatal security gaps
John F. Frittelli Specialist in Transportation Resources, Science, and Industry Division 27 May 2005 (Port and
Maritime Security: Background and Issues for Congress; http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL31733.pdf)
The U.S. maritime system consists of more than 300 sea and river ports with more than 3,700 cargo and
passenger terminals. However, a large fraction of maritime cargo is concentrated at a few major ports. Most
ships calling at U.S. ports are foreign owned with foreign crews. Container ships have been the focus of much
of the attention on seaport security because they are seen as vulnerable to terrorist infiltration. More than 9
million marine containers enter U.S. ports each year. While the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection
(CBP) analyzes cargo and other information to target specific shipments for closer inspection, it physically
inspects only a small fraction of the containers. The Coast Guard and CBP are the federal agencies with the
strongest presence in seaports. In response to September 11, 2001, the Coast Guard created the largest portsecurity operation since World War II. The Coast Guard has advanced its 24- hour Notice of Arrival (NOA) for
ships to a 96-hour NOA. The NOA allows Coast Guard officials to select high risk ships for boarding upon their
arrival at the entrance to a harbor. CBP has also advanced the timing of cargo information it receives from ocean
carriers. Through the Container Security Initiative (CSI) program, CBP inspectors pre-screen U.S.-bound marine
containers at foreign ports of loading. The Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TP A T) offers
importers expedited processing of their cargo if they comply with CBP measures for securing their entire supply
chain. To raise port security standards, Congress passed the Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002 (P.L.
107-295) in November 2002. The focus of debate in Congress has been about whether current efforts to
improve port security are adequate in addressing the threat. While many agree that Coast Guard and CBP
programs to address the threat are sound, they contend that these programs represent only a framework for
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building a maritime security regime, and that significant gaps in security still remain. The GAO has investigated
how the CSI and C-TPAT programs are being implemented and found several shortcomings that need
correction. TheGAOfoundthatC-TPAT participantswerebenefittingfromreduced scrutiny of their imported cargo
after they had been certified into the program but before CBP had validated that the participants were indeed
carrying out the promised security measures. The GAO also found that not all containers that CBP had
targeted for inspection at the overseas loading port were being inspected by the host customs administration.
This report will be updated periodically.
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Terrorism Advantage-WMD Smuggling Internal
More ev
CFR January 2006 (Editorial; Targets for Terrorism: Ports; http://www.cfr.org/port-security/targetsterrorism-ports/p10215)
Are U.S. ports vulnerable to terrorist attacks? Yes. CFR Senior Fellow Stephen Flynn says “maritime
transportation is one of our nation’s most serious vulnerabilities.” At current staffing and funding levels, U.S.
Coast Guard personnel and Customs agents can thoroughly inspect only about 5 percent of the 9 million
shipping containers that arrive at U.S. ports every year. Though the Customs Service is using increasingly
sophisticated risk-assessment technology to choose which shipments to inspect, many outside experts are
unsure about the system’s effectiveness. What’s the volume of traffic at U.S. ports? Some 7,500 ships with
foreign flags make 51,000 calls on U.S. ports each year. They carry the bulk of the approximately two billion
tons of freight, three billion tons of oil transports, and 134 million passengers by ferry each year. The volume of
traffic gives terrorists opportunities to smuggle themselves or their weapons into the United States with little
risk of detection; in May 2002 there were reports that twenty-five Islamist extremists entered the United
States by hiding in shipping containers. Are ports hard to protect? Yes. They’re often large and busy, offering
multiple opportunities for terrorists to get in and attack. The port of Houston, for example, is twenty-six miles
long, and thousands of trucks enter and exit its major terminals every day. Moreover, ships often traverse
narrow channels; a sunken ship in such a channel could close the port for weeks or months and cause
economic chaos.
Question of when not if a port is infiltrated with a WMD
Paul W. Parfomak and John Frittelli Resources, Science, and Industry Division of CRS 9 January 2007
(Maritime Security: Potential Terrorist Attacks and Protection Priorities;
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl33787.pdf)
Other experts concede that evaluating the likelihood of nuclear terrorism is inherently uncertain, but that
such potential attacks warrant attention even if they are unlikely. The probability of a terrorist attack with an
actual nuclear weapon cannot be reliably estimated, and it is surely lower than the probability of virtually any
other type of terrorist attack. But the devastation from such an attack would be so overwhelming that, based
on expected damages — the probability multiplied by the consequences — this threat must be considered
one of the greatest dangers America faces....75 Terrorist attacks on U.S. ports with radiological dispersion
devices (“dirty” bombs)isalsoconsideredamongthegravestmaritimeterrorismscenarios.76 A 2003
simulation of a series of such attacks concluded that they “could cripple global trade and have a devastating
impact on the nation’s economy.”77 Many terrorism analysts view such a dirty bomb attack as relatively
likely. In a 2005 survey, for example, nuclear non-proliferation experts expressed their beliefs (on average)
that there was a 25% chance of a dirty bomb attack in the United States by 2010 and a 40% chance of such an
attack by 2015.78 Studies suggest that the materials required to make a dirty bomb may be widely available
and poorly controlled internationally.79 According to some press reports, U.S. and British
intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded that Al Qaeda has succeeded in making such
a bomb.80 Port operators have testified before Congress that they believe “it is just a
question of time” before terrorists with dirty bombs successfully attack a U.S. port.81
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Porous American ports mean smuggling a weapon would be easy
Allison 2004 (Graham, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Prof of
Government at Harvard, former assistance Sec. Of Defense for policy, Nuclear Terrorism, p. 10-11)
Third, terrorists would not find it difficult to smuggle such a nuclear device into the United States. The nuclear
material in question is smaller than a football. Even an assembled device, like a suit-ease nuclear weapon,
could be sent in a Federal Express package, shipped in a cargo container, or checked as airline baggage. Of the
seven million cargo containers that arrive in U.S. ports each year, fewer than 5 percent are opened for
inspection. As the chief executive of CSX Lines, one of the foremost container-shipping companies, noted, "If
you can smuggle heroin in containers, you may be able to smuggle in a nuclear bomb."17
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Terrorism Advantage-WMD Smuggling Internal
US port security is terrible – smuggling would be easy
Graham Allison, Harvard Government Prof, 2002 [The National Interest, "The New Containment: An Alliance
Against Nuclear Terrorism," w/ Andrei Kokoshin, Fall, LN]
Terrorists would not find it very difficult to sneak a nuclear device or nuclear fissile material into the United
States via shipping containers, trucks, ships or aircraft. Recall that the nuclear material required is smaller
than a football. Even an assembled device, like a suitcase nuclear weapon, could be shipped in a container, in
the hull of a ship or in a trunk carried by an aircraft. After this past September 11, the number of containers
that are x-rayed has increased, to about 500 of the 5,000 containers currently arriving daily at the port of New
York/New Jersey-approximately 10 percent. But as the chief executive of CSX Lines, one of the foremost
container-shipping companies, put it: "If you can smuggle heroin in containers, you may be able to smuggle in
a nuclear bomb." Effectively countering missile attacks will require technological breakthroughs well beyond
current systems. Success in countering covert delivery of weapons will require not just technical advances but a
conceptual breakthrough. Recent efforts to bolster border security are laudable, but they only begin to scratch
the surface. More than 500 million people, 11 million trucks and 2 million rail cars cross into the United States
each year, while 7,500 foreign-flag ships make 51,000 calls in U.S. ports. That's not counting the tens of
thousands of people, hundreds of aircraft and numerous boats that enter illegally and uncounted. Given this
volume and the lengthy land and sea borders of the United States, even a radically renovated and reorganized
system cannot aspire to be airtight.
More ev-mulitple opportunities in the cargo shipment process for WMD access
WENDY J. Keefer 4/21 2008 (Container Port Security: A Layered Defense Strategy to Protect The Homeland
and The International Supply Chain; CAMPBELL LAW REVIEW Vol. 30:139;
http://law.campbell.edu/lawreview/articles/30-1-139.pdf)
The rise of shipping containers, though beneficial to world trade and globalization, also creates security
concerns. These concerns stem from the limited scrutiny at ports of arriving cargo, the large volume of
containerized cargo arriving at ports around the world, and the very fact that closed containers do not lend
themselves to easy or economi- cally efficient inspection. In 2005, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan referred to
ports as a modern day “Trojan horse.”13 Other government officials voiced simi- lar concerns for the perceived
holes in overall port security.14 Maritime experts had been warning of the “Trojan Horse” style threat of shipping containers as well.15 Indeed, many quickly concentrated on the unique risks posed by container
shipments, shipping containers hav- ing also been characterized as a potential “poor man’s missile.”16 The
use of containers in the global supply chain involves a com- plex network of manufacturers, exporters,
importers, brokers, carriers and foreign customs and port officials. What ultimately arrives in a shipping
container shipped to a United States port depends on the actions and information provided by these
numerous entities and indi- viduals. Everyone from manufacturers to land carriers to middlemen freight
forwarders to customs brokers, terminal operators and port employees (including management, stevedores, and
longshoremen) at every port entered by the carrying vessel play a role in securing the cargo and the locations to
which it is sent.17 The many hands that access a single container create a number of significant container
security issues. Opportunities for security breaches occur primarily in the follow- ing stages of the shipping
process: (1) the packing process at the for- eign warehouse or factory; (2) the transport of the packed goods
from that location to the foreign port at which the goods will be loaded; and (3) the preparation of the cargo
manifest setting forth the contents and other information about the goods being shipped.18 Given these
oppor- tunities to tamper with the shipment process, container security efforts focus in large part on
container inspection and documentation, container seals, and the secure storage of containers. The many
steps in the shipment of goods via shipping container from manufacturer to end consumer provide
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opportunities for tamper- ing to petty criminals and terrorists alike. Unfortunately, the risks with which ports
and customs officials remain most familiar are those associated with normal criminal activity, not terrorism.
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Terrorism Advantage-Targeting Ports
Terrorists are shifting focus to target ports-multiple theoretical reasons and empirical
examples
RAND Project AIR FORCE, a division of the RAND Corporation, is the U.S. Air Force’s federally funded research
and development center for studies and analyses 2008 (The MaritimeDimension ofInternational
SecurityTerrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United States)
A further consideration has to do with the nature of maritime tar- gets themselves: Because they are out of
sight, they are generally out of mind (this is particularly true of commercial vessels). Thus, an attack on a ship is
less likely to elicit the same publicity—either in scope or immediacy—as a strike on land-based targets, which,
because they are fixed and typically located near urban areas, are far more media- accessible (although, as
argued below, this point may not apply with respect to contingencies involving heavily-laden cruise liners and
fer- ries).2 This consideration is important because terrorism, at root, is a tactic that can only be effective if it is
able to visibly demonstrate its salience and relevance through the propaganda of the deed.3 Rather like the
philosopher’s tree silently falling in the forest, if no one observes the event, does it have any reason for being?
In spite of these considerations, there has been a modest yet highly discernible spike in high-profile terrorist
incidents at sea over the past six years, the more notable of which are described in the appendix to this
monograph. In addition, there has been a spate of significant maritime terrorist plots that have been preempted
before execution. These planned strikes, most of which have been directly connected to al Qaeda and its
affiliates,4 included an aborted attack against the USS 2 Wilkinson, 1986, p. 34; Jenkins et al., 1986, p. 65. 3 For
a discussion on this aspect of the terrorist phenomenon, see Peter Chalk, West Euro- pean Terrorism and
Counter-Terrorism: The Evolving Dynamic, London: Macmillan, 1996, Chapter One. 4 Most of al Qaeda’s planned
maritime attacks were the brainchild of Abdel Rahim al- Nashiri (colloquially known as Ameer al Bahr, or “Prince
of the Seas”). Arrested in 2003, he admitted to being the mastermind behind the bombings of the USS Cole and
M/V Limburg as well as the chief architect of al Qaeda’s maritime terror agenda. His strategy involved four 
The Sullivans in January 2000,5 additional bombings of U.S. naval ships sailing in Singaporean, Malaysian, and
Indonesian waters, sui- cide strikes against Western shipping interests in the Mediterranean, small boat
rammings of supertankers transiting the Straits of Gibraltar, and attacks on cruise liners carrying Israeli tourists
to Turkey.6 Combined, these various incidents have galvanized fears in the West that terrorists, especially
militants connected with the interna- tional jihadist network, are moving to decisively extend operational
mandates beyond purely land-based theaters. These concerns have been particularly evident in the United
States, which has been at the fore- front of attempts to strengthen the global maritime security regime in the
post-9/11 era. Five main factors seem salient in rationalizing the presumed shift in extremist focus to waterbased environments. First, many of the vulnerabilities that have encouraged a higher rate of pirate attacks
also apply to terrorism, including inadequate coastal surveillance, lax port security, a profusion of targets, the
overwhelming dependence of maritime trade on passage through congested chokepoints (where ves- sels are
exposed to attacks), and an increased tendency to staff vessels with skeleton crews. Because these gaps and
weaknesses persist at a time when littoral states are devoting more resources to land-based main
components: ramming ships with explosive-laden Zodiacs as a ramming device (i.e., the same sort of attack
that was used against the Cole and Limburg); detonating medium- sized vessels and trawlers near warships,
cruise liners, or ports; crashing planes into large car- riers such as supertankers; and employing suicide divers
or underwater demolition teams to destroy surface platforms. See Eric Watkins, “Security—Al’Qa’eda Suspect
Admits Role in Limburg,” Lloyd’s List, January 21, 2003; Valencia, 2005a, p. 83; and “Al Qaeda Has Multi- Faceted
Marine Strategy,” Agence France Press, January 20, 2003. 5 The aborted strike on The Sullivans was carried out
as part of the 2000 millennium terror- ist plots. The plan called for the detonation of a small suicide boat as it
pulled alongside the U.S. vessel. The attack craft was so overloaded with explosives, however, that it sank,
causing the operation to be called off. 6 Bronson Percival, Indonesia and the United States: Shared Interests in
Maritime Security, Washington, D.C.: United States-Indonesia Society, June 2005, p. 9; Richardson, 2004, p. 19;
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Ong, 2005, p. 51; Murad Sezer, “Turkish Court Charges Suspected al-Qaeda Mil- itant,” Associated Press, August
10, 2005; and “Security Fears Keep Israeli Ships from Turkey,” The New York Times, August 9, 2005. Maritime
Terrorism 21  22 The Maritime Dimension of International Security security structures (as discussed above),
they are amplifying—in rela- tive terms—the attractive qualities of what is already a highly opaque operational
setting. In other words, these gaps and weaknesses provide extremists with an opportunity to move, hide, and
strike in a manner that is not possible in a terrestrial theater.7 Second, the growth of commercial enterprises
specializing in maritime sports and equipment has arguably provided terrorists with a readily accessible
conduit through which to avail themselves of the necessary training and resources for operating at sea.8 In
the south- ern Philippines, for example, members of the Indonesian-based Jemaah Islamyya (JI) network are
known to have enrolled in scuba courses run by commercial or resort diving companies. Members of the local
secu- rity forces widely believe that the main purpose for taking these lessons has been to facilitate underwater
attacks against gas and oil pipelines off the coast of Mindanao.9 Third, maritime attacks offer terrorists an
additional means of causing economic destabilization. One common scenario expressed by analysts and
government officials is an attack designed to shut down a port or block a critical sea-lane of communication
(SLOC) in order to disrupt the mechanics of the “just in time, just enough” global mari- time trade complex.10
Indicative of this line of thinking is the follow- ing commentary made by Michael Richardson, a senior analyst
with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore: The global economy is built on integrated supply
chains that feed components and other materials to users just before they 7 Author interviews with maritime
analysts and intelligence officials, Washington, D.C., Singapore, London, and Amsterdam, August–September
2005. 8 See, for instance, Jenkins et al., 1986, p. 67. 9 Author interviews with intelligence and law enforcement
personnel, Manila, May 2005 and Singapore, September 2005. What appears to have particularly attracted the
attention of regional authorities is that the alleged JI members actively sought training in deep-sea water
diving but exhibited little or no interest in decompression techniques.
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Terrorism Advantage-Targeting Ports
Specifically al Qaeda is targeting port attacks
RAND Project AIR FORCE, a division of the RAND Corporation, is the U.S. Air Force’s federally funded research
and development center for studies and analyses 2008 (The MaritimeDimension ofInternational
SecurityTerrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United States)
It is also worth bearing in mind that maritime terrorism, to the extent that it does have at least a residual
disruptive economic poten- tial, resonates with the underlying operational and ideological rationale of al
Qaeda and the wider global jihadist “nebula.” Indeed, attacking key pillars of the Western commercial,
trading, and energy system is a theme that, at least rhetorically, has become increasingly prominent in the
years since 9/11, and that is viewed as integral to the Islamist war on the United States and its major allies.
Portraying the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as a single defining point in exposing the
fallacy of American (financial) power,15 Bin Laden and his chief “lieutenant,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, have both
squarely put the thrust of their continuing campaign against Washington in the con- text of economic war.16
This was made explicitly apparent in a videostatement released by the al Qaeda emir in December 2004, when
he reflected on a guerrilla conflict in Afghanistan that had “bled Russia for ten years until it went bankrupt,”
affirming that al Qaeda is “con- tinuing in the same policy to make the US bleed profusely to the point of
bankruptcy.”17 Fourth, sea-based terrorism constitutes a viable means of inflict- ing “mass coercive
punishment” on enemy audiences. Cruise ships and passenger ferries are especially relevant in this regard,
largely because they cater to large numbers of people who are confined in a single physical space18 (which, like
aircraft, makes them ideal venues for car- rying out assaults aimed at maximizing civilian casualties), sail according to set and publicly available schedules (which provides transpar- ency in preattack planning), are
characterized by variable standards of dock-side security (something that is particularly true of ferries),19
remain vulnerable to post-departure interception (at least compared to civil aviation), and, in the case of
passenger ferries, have certain design features that make them susceptible to cataclysmic assault (vehicle ferries, for instance, are notoriously easy to capsize because they lack sta- bilizing bulkheads on their lower
car/truck decks).20 Moreover, because cruise ships cater to rich, middle-class American and European tour- ists,
these vessels provide the type of high-prestige, iconic target that would likely resonate with extremist Islamist
intent21 and elicit consid- erable media attention if decisively struck.22 The bombing of the SuperFerry 14 in the
Philippines graphically underscores how easily mass casualties could result from a concerted attack against
passenger shipping. The operation, which left more than 116 people dead, involved a total planning cycle of only
a couple months, was executed with a very crude improvised explosive device— 16 sticks of dynamite secreted
in a hollowed-out television set—and cost no more than PS19,000 (approximately $400) to pull off. As one
senior official with the Philippine Anti-Terrorism Task Force (ATTF) remarked, the incident demonstrated the
acute vulnerability of ferries to sabotage—one that could realistically spark copycat strikes by groups intent on
maximizing civilian damage with minimal expenditure.23 Finally, the expansive global container-shipping
complex offers terrorists a logistical channel that favors the covert movement of weap- ons and personnel. Most
commentators generally agree that terrorist contingencies involving this class of vessel are more likely to involve
exploitation of the cargo supply chain than attacks directed against carriers themselves. Merchant craft are not
only large, they also have a high waterline, which means that a considerable quantity of explosives would be
needed to cause a critical breach. Even if sufficient quanti-ties could be smuggled aboard hidden in a container,
there would be no way of ensuring that the targeted crate would be loaded and placed in a position that could
allow a bomb to be detonated with maximum effect.24 By contrast, leveraging container carriers for logistical
purposes is not only viable, but also relatively easy. This is largely because the international trading system is
deliberately designed to be as open and accessible as possible (to keep costs low and turnover high), which
nec- essarily means minimizing the disruptive impact of any security mea- sures thereby instituted. Reflecting
this, only two to five percent of containers shipped around the world are physically inspected at their port of
arrival.25 Simply put, the statistical probability of successfully smuggling a weapon or bomb is much greater
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than the probability of intercepting one.26 Just as importantly, the highly complex nature of the container- ized
supply chain creates a plethora of openings for terrorist infiltra- tion. Unlike other cargo vessels that typically
handle payloads for a single customer loaded at port, container ships deal with commodi- ties from hundreds
of companies and individuals that, in most cases, are received and transported from inland warehouses.27
Each point of transfer along this spectrum of movement is a potential source of vul- nerability for the overall
integrity of the cargo and provides extrem- ists with numerous opportunities to “stuff” or otherwise tamper
with boxed crates.28 Compounding the situation is the highly rudimentary nature of the locks that are used to
seal containers, the bulk of which consist of little more than plastic ties or bolts that can be quickly cut and
then reattached using a combination of superglue and heat.29
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Terrorism Advantage-Targeting Ports
Khan and other examples prove-international crime networks are targeting security
vulnerabilities in ports
WENDY J. Keefer 4/21 2008 (Container Port Security: A Layered Defense Strategy to Protect The Homeland
and The International Supply Chain; CAMPBELL LAW REVIEW Vol. 30:139;
http://law.campbell.edu/lawreview/articles/30-1-139.pdf)
One of the most unsettling, suspected uses of shipping containers was by former-Pakistan nuclear program
head, Abdul Qadeer Khan.54 Khan, who admitted to selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North
Korea55 is suspected of having used shipping containers to com- plete these sales, including a shipment
inspected in August 2003 in the Mediterranean.56 The shipment allegedly included the transport of elements
of a future Libyan nuclear plant.57 Moreover, terrorists may look to use legitimate, mislabeled cargo for their
own heinous purposes. Based on the often erroneous identity of the cargo within a container — whether due
to intentional deception or carelessness — numerous incidents of improperly handled hazard- ous materials
exist. For example, in 1992, a storm damaged the vessel Santa Clara I in waters off the eastern coast of the
United States.58 Some containers aboard the vessel contained magnesium phosphide, which when mixed
with air or water forms the highly reactive, flamma- ble gases phosphene and diphosphane.59 The containers
in which these compounds were shipped did not identify the cargo as hazardous contents.60 The danger
posed by the spill of the compounds into the water in the port of Baltimore was not realized until the vessel
reached its next port, Charleston, South Carolina.61
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Terrorism Advantage-Yes Nuclear
Terrorists have the means to detonate a nuclear device
Matthew Bunn, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at
the John F. Kennedy School of Government, November 2008 (Securing the Bomb 2008, p. v)
Terrorists are still seeking nuclear weapons—and al-Qaeda is reconstituting its ability to plan and conduct
complex operations in the mountains of Pakistan. If a technically sophisticated terrorist group could get the
needed nuclear materials, it might well be able to make at least a crude nuclear bomb—capable of turning
the heart of a modern city into smoldering ruins. The horror of a terrorist nuclear attack, should it ever occur,
would transform America and the world—and not for the better. But despite substantial progress in improving
nuclear security, some stockpiles of potential bomb material remain dangerously insecure. In Russia, there
have been major improvements in nuclear security—the difference between the security in place at many
nuclear sites today and the security in place in 1994 is like night and day. But Russia has the world’s largest
stockpiles of nuclear weapons and materials, located in the world’s largest number of buildings and bunkers;
some serious security weaknesses still remain, ranging from poorly trained, sometimes suicidal guards to
serious under-funding of nuclear security; and the upgraded security systems must face huge threats, from
insider theft conspiracies to terrorist groups who have shown an ability to strike in force, without warning or
mercy. In Pakistan, a relatively small nuclear stockpile, believed to be heavily guarded, faces even more
severe threats, both from nuclear insiders with violent Islamic extremist sympathies and from outsider attack,
potentially by scores or hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters. Some 130 nuclear research reactors around the world
still use highly enriched uranium (HEU) as their fuel, and many of these have only the most modest security
measures in place—in some cases, no more than a night watchman and a chain-link fence. The break-in by
armed attackers at the Pelindaba site in South Africa in November 2007—a site with hundreds of kilograms of
weapon-grade uranium—is a reminder that nuclear security is a global problem, not just a problem in the
former Soviet Union. And incidents such as the inadvertent flight of six nuclear warheads to Barksdale Air
Force Base make it clear that nuclear security requires constant vigilance, and that every country where these
stockpiles exist, including the United States, has more to do to ensure that they are effectively secured.
Terrorists will be able to steal nuclear material from Russia
Graham Allison, Harvard Government Prof, 2005 [The American Prospect, "The Gravest Danger," March, LN]
Russia's 12-time-zone expanse contains more nuclear weapons and materials than any country in the world,
including more than 8,000 assembled warheads and enough weapons-usable material for 80,000 more, much
of it vulnerable to theft. Thirteen years on, according to Department of Energy data, not even half of Russia's
nuclear weapons and materials have been secured to acceptable standards. These present attractive targets for
terrorists shopping for a bomb. In her confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice agreed, stating,
"I really can think of nothing more important than being able to proceed with the safe dismantlement of the
Soviet arsenal, with nuclear safeguards to make certain that nuclear-weapons facilities and the like are well
secured." But after America was attacked by bin Laden, what happened to U.S. spending and related efforts to
secure nuclear weapons? Funding for the critical Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program for
securing loose fissile material remained at about the same level. And the brute fact is that in Russia, fewer
potential nuclear bombs were secured in the two years after 9-11 than in the two years before. Nuclear
materials remain vulnerable to theft in a number of other countries as well. As inspectors have been
unraveling and retracing A.Q. Khan's global black-market network, we now know that Libya was not his only
customer. Clearly he traded nuclear secrets and technologies to the North Koreans for their assistance with
Pakistani missile programs, and inspectors are still searching for the results of his dozen trips to Iran in the '90s.
Although in the past four years some highly enriched uranium has been removed from five countries, bombsworth amounts of nuclear material remain at risky research reactors in more than 20 transitional and developing
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states, including Belarus and Uzbekistan. In some cases, there is little more protecting the weapons-quality
material than a padlock and an unarmed guard.
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Terrorism Advantage-Yes Nuclear
Additionally, lax security makes gaining access to nuclear material in Pakistan relatively
simple
Allison 2004 (Graham, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Prof of
Government at Harvard, former assistance Sec. Of Defense for policy, Nuclear Terrorism, p. 39-40)
Musharraf's alignment with the United States has brought him into confrontation not just with the Pakistani
people but with some of the most respected figures from the country's most powerful institutions. It is a
widely held belief among Pakistan's scientific and military elite that Pakistan, as the home of the first Islamic
bomb, has a duty to share its knowledge. General Hamid Gul, the former head of ISI, has been unrepentant in
his belief that Osama bin Laden was not responsible for 9/11 and that it is Pakistan's duty to develop an Islamic
nuclear infrastructure to protect Muslims in the future. In his own words, "We have the nuclear capability that
can destroy Madras; surely the same missile can do the same to Tel Aviv. Washington cannot stop Muslim
suicidal attacks. . . . Taliban are still alive and along with 'friends' they will continue the holy jihad against the
U.S."52 Just as troubling, in January 2004, the New York Times obtained a brochure advertising different types of
nuclear technology available to other nations from the Khan Research Laboratories. The booklet, emblazoned
with a Pakistani government stamp, was one of a batch that had been in circulation to the world's nuclear
aspirants for several years. Not until the brochure was leaked to the press did Musharraf's government
reluctantly call in Dr. Khan, who held the post of special adviser to the president, for questioning, leading very
quickly to his arrest, confession, and pardon—another attempt by Musharraf to walk the line between
addressing American security concerns and placating hard-line elements within his country. Further revelations
about the sale of nuclear materials and expertise to Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea (Khan made thirteen
visits to North Korea beginning in the 1990s)53 have brought these ominous developments to a head. The
nuclear sales took place either with Musharraf's approval or without his knowledge. It is unclear which
scenario is worse. Musharraf has also made a deal with the Islamist parties to step down as head of the
military by December 2004 in exchange for a vote of confidence to serve out his presidential term until 2007,
raising questions of whether he will be able to maintain control of the country without control of the Army.
Musharraf's dilemma is compounded by the fact that he is now under American pressure to take a more
conciliatory position on the Kashmir dispute with India, another political stand that contravenes public opinion
in Pakistan. Several terrorist organizations nominally focused on the Kashmir conflict are already operating
beyond Musharraf's control. One such group, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM), has been linked to several major
terror attacks, including the bombing of the Indian parliament in December 2001 and an attack in October
2000 on the local legislature in Indian-held Kashmir that killed thirty-eight people. JEM is a splinter group of an
older jihadist organization, Harkat-ulMujahideen, with close ties to Osama bin Laden. JEM has ties to the
Pakistani establishment as well: Brigadier Abdullah, the former head of the ISI's Kashmir department, is believed
to have played a critical role in promoting JEM when it broke away from Harkat.54 But JEM is hardly following
orders from Islamabad. Pakistan officially banned the group in 2002 but has had limited success in rooting it
out. American intelligence officials believe that JEM was behind two separate assassination attempts aimed at
Musharraf in December 2003, including an attempt by two suicide bombers to ram pickup trucks filled with
explosives into the president's motorcade on Christmas Day.55 Under these conditions, the emergence of a
splinter group armed with nuclear expertise and access from within the Pakistani establishment looks
increasingly feasible. We know that such a group would have the requisite organizational competence and
nuclear know-how. But it now seems they also have a plausible purpose to pursue nuclear terrorism, either to
express anger that Musharraf has become a puppet of the United States, to rid the country of the American
infidel, or to answer bin Laden's call "to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God."
Indeed, one can imagine elements within the military or nuclear establishment proudly concluding that they
are the only ones who can carry out bin Laden's vision.
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Terrorism Advantage-Yes Nuclear
Moreover, terrorists have multiple points of entry to the U.S., making delivery impossible to
stop
Allison, 2004 (Graham, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Prof of
Government at Harvard, former assistance Sec. Of Defense for policy, Nuclear Terrorism, p. 10-11)
Third, terrorists would not find it difficult to smuggle such a nuclear device into the United States. The nuclear
material in question is smaller than a football. Even an assembled device, like a suit-ease nuclear weapon,
could be sent in a Federal Express package, shipped in a cargo container, or checked as airline baggage. Of the
seven million cargo containers that arrive in U.S. ports each year, fewer than 5 percent are opened for
inspection. As the chief executive of CSX Lines, one of the foremost container-shipping companies, noted, "If
you can smuggle heroin in containers, you may be able to smuggle in a nuclear bomb."
Once the bomb has been delivered terrorists have the motive to detonate
Matthew Bunn, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at
the John F. Kennedy School of Government, November 2008 (Securing the Bomb 2008, p. v)
Do terrorists want nuclear weapons? For most terrorists, focused on small-scale violence to attain local
objectives, the answer is “no.” But for a small set of terrorists, the answer is clearly “yes.” Osama bin Laden
has called the acquisition of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction a “religious duty.”6 AlQaeda operatives have made repeated attempts to buy nuclear material for a nuclear bomb, or to recruit
nuclear expertise— including the two extremist Pakistani nuclear weapon scientists who met with bin Laden
and Ayman al-Zawahiri to discuss nuclear weapons. For years, al-Qaeda operatives have repeatedly expressed the desire to inflict a “Hiroshima” on the United States.7 Before al-Qaeda, the Japanese terror cult
Aum Shinrikyo also made a concerted effort to get nuclear weapons.8 With at least two groups going down this
path in the last 15 years, there is no reason to expect that others will not do so in the future. Rolf MowattLarssen, head of intelligence for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), testified to the U.S. Senate in the spring
of 2008 that “al-Qaida’s nuclear intent remains clear,” citing, among other things, bin Laden’s successful
effort, in 2003, to get a radical Saudi cleric to issue a religious ruling, or fatwa, authorizing the use of nuclear
weapons on American civilians.9 Mowatt -Larssen warned that the world’s efforts to prevent terrorists from
gaining the ability “to develop and detonate a nuclear weapon” are likely to be “tested” in “the early years of
the 21st century.”
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Terrorism Advantage-Yes Retal
The U.S. will target the state from which the nuclear material was acquired-this escalates to
nuclear apocalypse
Beljac 2008 (Marko, PhD at Monash University, Teaches at LaTrobe University and the University of
Melbourne, "The nuclear terror of Bush 'negligence policy", June 16th, Eureka Street, Vo 18 No 12,
http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=75850
It was not widely reported, but in February the Bush Administration enacted what may turn out to be one of the
most significant policy decisions it has made in response to 9/11. President Bush signed new presidential
guidance that provides an entirely new mission for US nuclear forces. The White House has effectively
developed a new policy on the deterrence of nuclear terrorism. The policy was announced in a little-noted
closed speech given by Stephen Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser, at Stanford University. He
stated that, 'as part of this strategy to combat nuclear terrorism, the President has approved a new declaratory
policy to help deter terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction against the United States, our friends,
and allies'. He also stated that, 'as many of you know, the United States has made clear for many years that it
reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force to the use of weapons of mass destruction against the
United States, our people, our forces and our friends and allies'. The phrase 'overwhelming force' has always
been understood to refer to the employment of nuclear weapons. The Bush Administration has seemingly
developed a far-reaching policy that is partly designed to deter the acquisition of fissile material by terrorists. It
would seek to deter al Qaeda indirectly by deterring state actors from providing assistance, such as knowingly
transferring fissile material to terrorists. But more may be at play here. The United States may actually have
developed a 'negligence doctrine' for the deterrence of nuclear terrorism. As former Bush Administration
official Elbridge Colby observed of the new policy, 'any and all thinking of participation, complicity, or
negligence in the face of a catastrophic attack against the United States or its allies should have reason to worry
about the retaliation that would follow'. If through nuclear forensics the fissile material used in a nuclear
terrorist attack were attributed to a Russian or Pakistani facility, the United States may well respond, under
the new policy, by striking Russia or Pakistan using nuclear weapons. This would be a proportionate attack,
most likely employing low-yield B61-11 nuclear weapons. A negligence doctrine would involve striking even if
the fissile materials were stolen, not just knowingly leaked, from one of their facilities on grounds that they
were 'negligent' in their handling of fissile materials. Most analysts argue that should fissile material be stolen
and used to fuel an improvised bomb it would most likely come from a Russian facility. The central aspect of any
deterrence posture is credibility — advocates of a negligence doctrine argue that this type of deterrence would
be credible because the United States has, or will soon have, a nuclear first strike capability against Russia. This
is extremely wishful thinking. By no means can the US be said to have a first strike capability. In fact, a
negligence doctrine increases the chance of what should properly be regarded as the leading security threat
facing the world, namely inadvertent nuclear war. Imagine if a nuclear weapon was detonated in New York
that employed fissile material attributed to a Russian nuclear facility, and that, immediately thereafter, the US
decided to adhere to a negligence policy and strike back with a limited low yield nuclear strike. Russia would
likely respond in kind. This would set off a chain reaction leading, at best, to limited and controlled exchanges
or, at worst, to an all out exchange. Quite literally, the Bush Administration may have handed al Qaeda the
keys to Armageddon. The negligence doctrine quite clearly violates the most elementary principles of natural
justice. It is clear that the civilian population of, say, Pakistan would in no way be liable for negligence. If
implemented — and policies such as this can create 'commitment traps' — the negligence doctrine will properly
be taken as a monumental act of injustice throughout the Islamic world, which would support al Qaeda's
political objectives. In the so-called 'war on terror' there is more to be gained through consideration of issues
such as Middle East policy and inter-cultural and religious dialogue than there is in military posturing.
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Overwhelming pressure from the public and within the gov prompts nuclear retaliation
Caitlin Talmadge, PhD candidate and member of the Security Studies Program in the Department of Political
Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Spring 2007 (Deterring a Nuclear 9/11, The Washington
Quarterly 30:2, Project Muse)
U.S. leaders also would want to emphasize that retaliation, perhaps in kind, perhaps through devastatingly
precise conventional attacks, would be strategically necessary and politically unavoidable in the aftermath of a
terrorist nuclear detonation. The U.S. government could not sit idly by, knowing the origin of a terrorist
nuclear weapon detonated on its soil, and not retaliate against the state(s) or substate organization(s)
responsible for it, especially if those states or organizations had a history of supporting terrorism. To do
otherwise would be to invite follow-on attacks and to allow the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans
to go unanswered. The American public would demand retribution, especially if the terrorists themselves
were nowhere to be found. Or so U.S. leaders could claim, whether it is true now or not. The more that U.S.
leaders publicly emphasize the possession of an attribution capability and a willingness to retaliate against those
who assist terrorists, the more the public will in fact expect such retaliation.
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Terrorism Advantage-Can Build the Bomb
Wrong, they could do it easily
Matthew Bunn, senior research associate in the Project on Managing the Atom in the Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Issues in Science
and Technology, Winter 2005, PP. 55-62
Second, if terrorists could obtain the HEU or plutonium that are the essential ingredients of a nuclear bomb,
making a bomb might well be within the capabilities of a sophisticated group. One study by the now-defunct
congressional Office of Technology Assessment summarized the threat: "A small group of people, none of
whom have ever had access to the classified literature, could possibly design and build a crude nuclear
explosive device . . . Only modest machine-shop facilities that could be contracted for without arousing
suspicion would be required."
Terrorists only need materials – construction and delivery aren’t a problem
Cirincione, (Senior Associate and Director for Non-Proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace), 2005 (Joseph, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy, 19 ND J. L. Ethics & Pub
Pol'y 339, lexis)
<One of the debating points in the 2004 Presidential Election was that John Kerry said he was going to get the
job done in the next four years, not in the next ten years as currently planned. The current administration is still
piddling along with budgets of about one billion dollars a year on these programs. Kerry said he would triple that
amount. More than that, there are these stockpiles of nuclear material out there in reactors in about forty
other nations. People have civilian research reactors that the Russians and we sold them during the 1950's and
1960's that use [*346] highly enriched uranium. The fuel is ideal for terrorist use - you can simply take it and
put it in a bomb. The hardest thing for a terrorist to do in constructing a nuclear weapon is getting the
material. Every step after that is easier for them and harder for us to stop. The designs are well known. If they
can get the material, either a softball sized chunk of highly enriched uranium, twenty-five kilograms, or about
four or five kilograms of plutonium, the designs are pretty well known. There is enough technology, and there
are enough scientists on the market that they can bribe or coerce to help. Once they put it in a package,
delivery is easy. As Kerry said during the campaign, most of our cargo is not inspected when it comes into this
country. All you need to do is put it on a cargo ship heading into lower Manhattan, and way before it gets to
customs you can detonate the device.>
Building the bomb is easy – almost no expertise required
Allison 2004 (Graham, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Prof of
Government at Harvard, former assistance Sec. Of Defense for policy, Nuclear Terrorism, p. 92-93)
National security experts agree that the most likely way terrorists will obtain a nuclear bomb will not be to
steal or purchase a fully operational device but to buy fissile material and construct their own. President Bush
was correct when he argued that if Saddam Hussein had obtained a softball-size lump of HEU, he "could have
a nuclear weapon in less than a year." With the same quantity of HEU, Al Qaeda or another terrorist group
could do the same. It took the genius of Albert Einstein and numerous other Nobel Prize–winning physicists to
imagine and construct the first nuclear weapon. But that was sixty years ago. Nonetheless, in the popular
imagination, the belief persists that building a nuclear weapon requires Manhattan Project—style science. Those
who work with nuclear weapons have always known better. David Lilienthal, the first chairman of the Atomic
Energy Commission, acknowledged in 1948 that the myth of a secret formula was "nothing less than a gigantic
hoax."22 And Theodore Taylor, the nuclear physicist who designed America's smallest and largest atomic
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bombs, has repeatedly stated that given fissile material, building a bomb is "very easy. Double underline. Very
easy."23
In 1979, Secretary of Energy James R. Schlesinger asked for a federal court injunction to prevent the publication
of an article in the Progressive magazine titled "The H-Bomb Secret."24 For only the second time in American
history—the first being the Nixon administration's attempted censorship of the Pentagon Papers—the
government sought to exercise "prior restraint" to block a publication it judged damaging to the national
interest. The article described the physics of the hydrogen bomb in such detail that it would have been classified
Top Secret if it had been a government document. But after a six-month court battle, the article appeared in the
Progressive exactly as originally written, complete with schematics of a thermonuclear weapon. It is now
available on the Internet.25 Recent revelations about A. Q. Khan's nuclear network demonstrated that
complete fission bomb designs are now available for sale on the black market.26 An official at the
International Atomic Energy Agency who reviewed plans confiscated in Libya remarked to the journalist
Seymour Hersh that the design in question was "a sweet little bomb" that would be "too big and too heavy for
a Scud, but it'll go into a family car"—a "terrorist's dream."
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Terrorism Advantage-Want the Bomb
You’re wrong-Al Qaeda actively seeking a nuclear weapon-multiple factors prove
Evan Montgomery, PhD candidate @ UVA and Research Fellow, 2009 (Nuclear Terrorism: Assessing the
threat, developing a response, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments)
Given the events of the past several years, it is hardly surprising that, at present, the threat of WMD terrorism
in general and nuclear terrorism in particular comes primarily from Osama bin Laden and his followers, who
have not only expressed a willingness to use WMD against their enemies, but who have also made repeated
— although largely unsuccessful — efforts to acquire unconventional weapons. Al Qaeda’s pursuit of
weapons of mass destruction has been well documented in recent years, as evidenced by a number of highly
publicized incidents, including the purchase of a container believed to contain uranium (but which was in fact
counterfeit) by a bin Laden representative in Sudan;55 bin Laden’s own reference to the acquisition of
weapons of mass destruction as a “religious duty;”56 his success at prompting a well-known Saudi cleric to
issue a fatwa (or religious opinion) sanctioning mass murder with WMD;57 the group’s claim to have
purchased several so-called suitcase nuclear weapons from former Soviet scientists;58 intelligence reports
over a period of several months in 2002 and 2003 indicating that al Qaeda was negotiating the purchase of
three Russian nuclear weapons;59 and a meeting that took place between bin willingness to use WMD
against their enemies, but have also made repeated efforts to acquire unconventional weapons. Laden,
Zawahiri, and two high ranking Pakistani nuclear scientists who “appear to have provided Al Qaeda a road
map to building nuclear weapons.”60 Initially, the group’s interest in WMD appears to have been driven by the
hope of deterring the United States from invading its sanctuary in Afghanistan by acquiring several nuclear
weapons, smuggling them into the United States, and using them to retaliate in the event of an American
attack.61 Over time this view changed, however, and the group began to consider unconventional weapons as
something that should be used in a first strike against its enemies.62 Bin Laden in particular was and perhaps
remains focused primarily on acquiring nuclear weapons, which have apparently been the subject of his
attention since at least 1992.63 Journalist Steve Coll describes how these weapons fit within bin Laden’s
worldview: Since the late 1980s and certainly since 1991, bin Laden has seen the United States as the principal
invader of the Muslim world because of its support for the Saudi Royal family, Israel and other Middle Eastern
governments he labels apostate. In often tedious debates with comrades during the 1990s, he has argued that
only by attacking distant America could al Qaeda hope to mortally wound the Middle East’s frontline
authoritarian governments. His inspiration, repeatedly cited in his writings and interviews, is the American
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he says shocked Japan’s fading imperial government into a
surrender it might not otherwise have contemplated. Bin Laden has said several times that he is seeking to
acquire and use nuclear weapons not only because it is God’s will, but because he wants to do to Ame
And – al Qaeda is different – they have no qualms about using nukes against the US
Matthew Bunn, Harvard Senior Research Associate, Managing the Atom Project, 2004 [Securing the Bomb: An
Agenda for Action, w/ Anthony Wier, May, http://www.nti.org/e_research/analysis_cnwmupdate_052404.pdf]
Reality: This conclusion is correct for the vast majority of the world’s terrorist groups. Focused on local issues,
seeking to become the governments of the areas now controlled by their enemies (and thus not wanting to
destroy those areas), needing to build political support that might be undermined by the horror and wanton
destruction of innocent life that would result from a nuclear attack, most terrorists probably would not want to
get and use a nuclear bomb even if they could readily do so.8 But al Qaeda is different. They are focused on a
global struggle, for which the immense power of nuclear weapons might be seen as necessary, not a local
battle for which such weapons are unneeded. They have gone to considerable lengths to justify to their
supporters and audiences the use of mass violence, including the mass killing of innocent civilians. And they
have explicitly set inflicting the maximum possible level of damage on the United States and its allies as one
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of their organizational goals. Al Qaeda’s spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, has argued that the group “has the
right to kill 4 million Americans—2 million of them children,” in retaliation for the deaths the group believes
the United States and Israel have inflicted on Muslims.9 Al Qaeda’s followers believe, in effect, that they
brought down the Soviet Union—that the mujahedeen’s success in forcing the Soviet Union from Afghanistan
was a key factor leading to the Soviet collapse. And they appear to believe that the United States, too, is a
“paper tiger” which can be driven to collapse—that the 9/11 attacks inflicted grievous damage on U.S.
economic power (Osama bin Laden once estimated the total cost at $1 trillion), and that still larger blows are
needed to bring the United States down. As bin Laden put it in a message to his followers in December 2001,
“America is in retreat by the grace of God Almighty and economic attrition is continuing up to today. But it
needs further blows. The young men need to seek out the nodes of the American economy and strike the
enemy’s nodes.” The notion that major blows could cause the collapse of the United States is, in essence, al
Qaeda’s idea of how it will achieve victory. A nuclear blast incinerating a U.S. city would be exactly the kind of
blow they want. Bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network have made their desire for nuclear weapons for
use against the United States and its allies explicit, by both word and deed. Bin Laden has called the
acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) a “religious duty.”12 Intercepted al Qaeda
communications reportedly have referred to inflicting a “Hiroshima” on the United States.13 Al Qaeda
operatives have made repeated attempts to buy stolen nuclear material from which to make a nuclear bomb.
They have tried to recruit nuclear weapon scientists to help them. The extensive downloaded materials on
nuclear weapons (and crude bomb design drawings) found in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan make clear the
group’s continuing desire for a nuclear capability.14 Detailed analysis of al Qaeda’s efforts suggests that, had
they not been deprived of their Afghanistan sanctuary, and had they acquired nuclear material, their quest for a
nuclear weapon might have succeeded within a few years— and the danger that it could succeed elsewhere still
remains. As President Bush has summarized the situation, “These same terrorists are searching for weapons of
mass destruction, the tools to turn their hatred into holocaust. They can be expected to use chemical, biological
and nuclear weapons the moment they are capable of doing so. No hint of conscience would prevent it.” Indeed,
the President has warned not only that al Qaeda is seeking weapons of mass destruction for use against the
United States and its allies, but that, even after the removal of their Afghanistan sanctuary, “the evidence
indicates that they are doing so with determination.” Moreover, al Qaeda and its far-flung network of affiliates
are not the only terrorists with such ambitions. Some statements by Chechen terrorists and documents seized
from them have also suggested an interest in large-scale nuclear terrorism—either by sabotage of a major
nuclear facility or use of a nuclear bomb—and Chechen terrorists have repeatedly indicated an interest in the
use of radiological weapons (including the placement of a container of radiological material in a Moscow park in
1995).
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Terrorism Advantage-Economy Impact
Successful attack shuts down the US economy in seconds
CFR January 2006 (Editorial; Targets for Terrorism: Ports; http://www.cfr.org/port-security/targetsterrorism-ports/p10215)
Could terrorists attack U.S. ports? Yes. Experts warn that U.S. seaports could be tempting targets for terrorists
bent on killing large numbers of people, grabbing media attention, and disrupting the U.S. economy. Port,
ferry, and cruise-ship terminals are often located in highly congested areas where large numbers of people
live and work. Liquefied natural gas terminals and refineries that produce highly volatile petrochemicals and
convert crude oil into gasoline and heating oil are also often nearby. Given the importance of foreign trade to
the U.S. economy, an attack that shut down a major American port for even a few days could devastate the
regional economy served by that port.
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***ECONOMY ADVANTAGE***
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Economy Advantage-Uniqueness
Aggressive economic decline coming now-multiple factors prove
Martin Crutsinger AP Economics Writer 6/27 (Weak US job market weighs on broader economy;
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2018540196_apuseconomy.html)
The sluggish job market is weighing on the U.S. economy three years after the Great Recession ended and it
doesn't look to be getting much better any time soon. A measure of the number of people applying for
unemployment benefits over the past month is at a six-month high, the government said Thursday. That
suggests June will be another tepid month for hiring. Sales of previously occupied homes fell in May, and
manufacturing activity in the Philadelphia region contracted for the second straight month in June. The
gloomy economic data sent stocks sharply lower. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 175 points in
afternoon trading. Broader indexes also tumbled. "It appears the slow-growth expansion will be slower," said
John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo Securities, in a note to clients. Thursday's raft of economic reports
was mostly disappointing: - Applications for unemployment benefits dipped last week to 387,000, from an
upwardly revised 389,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said. The four-week average, a less volatile
measure, rose to 386,250, the highest level since December. When applications are above 375,000, hiring is
likely to remain too weak to rapidly lower the unemployment rate. - Home sales fell 1.5 percent in May from
April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.55 million, the National Association of Realtors said. Sales are up
9.6 percent from a year ago, suggesting that the housing market is slowly improving. But the annual sales rate is
well below the 6 million that economists consider healthy. - The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank said that
its index of regional manufacturing activity fell sharply to -16.6 from -5.8. That's the lowest level in almost a
year. A reading below zero indicates contraction. Measures of new orders and shipments also plummeted. - A
measure of future U.S. economic activity rose in May to its highest level in four years, one of the few positive
signs Thursday. The Conference Board's index of leading economic indicators increased to 95.8. That's the
highest level since June 2008, which was six months into the recession. Still, prior to the recession, the index
routinely topped 100. The bad news echoed a more pessimistic outlook delivered by the Federal Reserve
Wednesday after its two-day policy meeting. The Fed sharply reduced its growth forecast to between 1.9
percent and 2.4 percent for the year. That's half a percentage point lower than the Fed's previous estimate in
April. In an effort to boost growth and hiring, the Fed said that it would extend a program intended to drive
down long-term U.S. interest rates. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke hopes that will encourage more borrowing and
spending. Hiring slowed sharply in April and May, raising concerns about the strength of the recovery.
Employers have added an average of only 73,000 jobs per month in April and May. That's much lower than
the average of 226,000 added in the first three months of this year. The report on unemployment
applications suggests it won't improve much in June, economists said. Some economists warned the weaker
job market could start to affect home sales, which until recently were starting to show some modest
improvement. Fewer first-time buyers, who are critical to a housing recovery, purchased homes in May. And
sales declined in every region of the country except the Midwest. "Not a surprise that existing home sales
took a step back in May," said Jennifer Lee, an economist at BMO Capital Markets. "Softening job growth could
slow the housing recovery."
Consumer confidence numbers prove
Bloomberg 6/26 (Consumer Confidence In U.S. Declines To A Five-Month Low;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-26/consumer-confidence-in-u-s-dropped-to-a-five-month-low-injune.html)
Confidence among U.S. consumers dropped in June for a fourth consecutive month as mounting concern over
jobs and incomes dimmed the outlook for spending. The Conference Board’s sentiment index fell to 62, a fivemonth low, from a revised 64.4 in May, figures from the New York-based private research group showed today.
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Another report showed home prices were stabilizing.The slide in confidence raises the risk that the slowdown
in hiring revealed by last month’s jobs report will cause households to retrench, restraining the spending that
accounts for about 70 percent of the economy. The weak labor market is overshadowing the benefit of the
lowest gasoline prices in five months, one reason why companies like Ford Motor Co. (F) are keeping an eye on
attitudes. “The employment situation continues to weigh on consumer minds,” said Yelena Shulyatyeva, a U.S.
economist at BNP Paribas in New York, who correctly forecast the confidence index. “Usually consumers react
to falling gasoline prices by increasing their spending, but this time around it looks like they’re a little bit
cautious.”
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Economy Advantage-Uniqueness
The neg’s evidence is based on snapshot economics-trending towards recession now
WSJ 6/11 (U.S. Economy Is In a Recession Right Now, Hussman Says;
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/06/11/u-s-economy-is-in-a-recession-right-now-hussman-says/)
From Hussman (MarketBeat’s emphasis included): By our analysis, the U.S. economy is presently entering a
recession. Not next year; not later this year; but now. We expect this to become increasingly evident in the
coming months, but through a constant process of denial in which every deterioration is dismissed as
transitory, and every positive outlier is celebrated as a resumption of growth. To a large extent, this downturn
is a “boomerang” from the credit crisis we experienced several years ago. The chain of events is as follows:
Financial deregulation and monetary negligence -> Housing bubble -> Credit crisis marked by failure to
restructure bad debt -> Global recession -> Government deficits in U.S. and globally -> Conflict between single
currency and disparate fiscal policies in Europe -> Austerity -> European recession and credit strains -> Global
recession. In effect, we’re going into another recession because we never effectively addressed the problems
that produced the first one, leaving us unusually vulnerable to aftershocks. Our economic malaise is the result
of a whole chain of bad decisions that have distorted the financial markets in ways that make recurring crisis
inevitable. In addition to U.S. economic troubles, Hussman isn’t surprised the euphoria surrounding Europe’s
latest bailout didn’t last long. With Spain being the fourth largest euro-zone economy, bailout terms suggest
Spain is “effectively being called on to lend to itself,” he says. Where the money comes from is anyone’s guess.
More ev-recent bank downgrades and economic data prove double-dip coming now
NY Post 6/25 (Eyeing a double dip;
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/eyeing_double_dip_JLk4zsyS2uc9CCtQ6WmV3N)
Sure, it’s always difficult predicting the economic future; that just a couple months ago we all thought
(including me on these pages) that we were heading for a sustained recovery, as job growth seemed to have
picked up steam and most financial gurus predicted that it was just a matter of time before the strong data
translated into meaningful wages and a more vibrant economy. But now we see just the opposite, at least
according to the latest data, and the prediction a slew of market strategists and investors made to me even
before last week’s round of bank “downgrades” by the raters at Moody’s Investors Service. Our low growth
and jobs woes can be traced to a number of factors, of course — from Europe’s mess and China’s slowdown to
the ongoing assault of higher taxes and increased regulations at the heart of Obama’s economic agenda. Bottom
line: We only limped out of recession, and the limp’s been getting worse the last few months. Now the
Moody’s actions might just be the final straw that pushes a barely growing economy into negative territory.
First, a little background: A bond rating is a measure of a company’s ability to repay its debt, given what’s known
about the company, the economy and the business environment. Moody’s assigns letter grades as part of this
assessment, with “Triple-A” being the highest, and a “C” for firms that look ready to default on their debt. Last
week’s actions against a slew of big banks, including some of the nation’s largest — JP Morgan, Citigroup,
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America — doesn’t mean that Moody’s is predicting Armageddon,
or anything close to the conditions that led to the banking collapse of 2008. What the rating agency is saying in
lowering these institutions’ ratings is that business conditions are weak — and weakening, something investors
should be taking into account when making choices as to where to put their money. Lots of people saw the
downgrades coming. In the runup to the announcement, bank shares plummeted. But then they recovered, as
many investors brushed off Moody’s warnings. Many had feared worse — Morgan Stanley shares, for example,
spiked on the news of its two-notch downgrade, because investors had expected a three-notch cut. Others
discounted the source: The raters at Moody’s didn’t see the 2008 financial crisis coming, or other smaller ones
before it. So why believe they’ve got some crystal ball on the banking business now? But major stock investors
didn’t do much better at picking winners and losers in the banking biz. In the runup to the 2008 meltdown, the
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shares of increasingly insolvent banks were bid higher on any whiff of good news. More important, the
substance of what Moody’s said largely rings true. By any measure, as Moody’s pointed out, banks do have
“significant exposure to the volatility and risk of outsized losses inherent to capital markets activities” given the
deteriorating situation in Europe, which goes beyond Greece to include basket cases like Italy and Spain. US
banks have been dealing with these countries for years; lent them money and insured their debt — actions that
rightly worry Moody’s. Again, that doesn’t mean we’re heading for another banking calamity, not according to
Moody’s or just about any market strategist I speak to. Our banks are much better capitalized and better
equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of their inherently erratic business than they were four years ago. But the
future of the US economy is still increasingly bleak. The downgrades are an indication of how bad things are
now, but could also be the final straw in pushing us back into recession.
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Economy Advantage-Efficiency Internal
Ports are the backbone of the US economy-largest single factor in multiple key sectors
Maritime Administration and USMTS; US Marine Transportation System; November 2007 (A Vision for
the 21st Century; http://www.marad.dot.gov/documents/Vision_of_the_21st_Century_10-29.pdf)
America’s network of waterways moves more than 2.3 billion tons of domestic and foreign cargo each year.
The top 50 ports in the U.S. handle about 84 per- cent of all waterborne domestic and international cargo
tonnage; more than 1.9 billion tons annually. In the coming years, demand at almost all U.S. ports will at least
double. These volumes were unimaginable at the dawn of the container era just 50 years ago. Indeed, the
marine transportation industry is the circulatory system of the global economy and will play an even greater
role in the U.S. economy as international trade continues to grow in importance. The marine transportation
industry is not just about the shipment of consumer goods: bulk commodities, such as grain; manufactured
products; raw materials, such as logs and lumber; and energy products. It begins with shipyards that build and
repair the vessels that operate in the Marine Transportation System. The infrastructure and many industries that
help sustain it constitute an enormous en- gine of economic growth on their own. These industries create high
paying, skilled jobs throughout the economy that depend on the Marine Transportation System to deliver the
goods of America. For example, the trade activity of the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach created
3.3 million jobs across the nation in 2005, a 200 percent increase from 1994. Nationally, state and local taxes
generated from trade activity grew from an estimated $6 billion in 1994 to more than $28 billion in 2005. The
U.S. commercial shipbuilding and repair industry adds billions of dollars to U.S. economic output annually.
The marine transportation industry even contributes to U.S. commercial aviation. The cruise ship industry is
among the largest purchas- ers of airline tickets; all those passengers have to get to their ships. Overall, the
Marine Transportation System supports 13 million jobs. The success story does not end there. Since 2000, the
total value of international trade has risen by over 40 percent and it is becoming a larger part of our national
economy. The combined value of foreign trade (imports and exports) represented 13 percent of GDP in 1990,
ris- ing to nearly 22 percent in 2006. If this trend continues, it is projected that the value of U.S. foreign trade
will be equivalent to 35 percent of the Nation’s GDP in 2020 and 60 percent in 2030. Marine transportation will
become even more important to our economy as 95 percent of America’s foreign trade is moved by ship.
And efficiency gains at ports themselves are key to realize full gains
John F. Frittelli Specialist in Transportation Resources, Science, and Industry Division 27 May 2005 (Port and
Maritime Security: Background and Issues for Congress; http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL31733.pdf)
Ships are the primary mode of transportation for
worldtrade.Shipscarryapproximately80%ofworldtradebyvolume.12 TheUnited States is the world’s leading
maritime trading nation, accounting for nearly 20% (measured in tons) of the annual world ocean-borne
overseas trade. Ships carry more than 95% of the nation’s non-North American trade by weight and 75% by
value. Trade now accounts for 25% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), up from 11% in 1970. Over the next
two decades, the total volume of domestic and international trade is expected to double. Given the
importance of maritime trade to the U.S. and world economies,
disruptionstothattradecanhaveimmediateandsignificanteconomicimpacts.13 By one estimate, the cost to the
U.S. economy of port closures on the West Coast due to a labor- management dispute was approximately $1
billion per day for the first five days, rising sharply thereafter.14 The container shipping system is designed for
speed and efficiency. Transportation services are a critical component of the global, low-inventory (i.e., justin-time) distribution model that many manufacturers have adopted. Most industries in the United States use
some imported components from overseas suppliers. By bringing parts to a plant just before they are needed
for assembly, manufacturers can save money on warehouse space and inventory carrying costs. Transport
efficiencies permit warehouse requirements to be minimized. Lean inventories in turn have contributed to
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business productivity. From 1980 to 2000, according to one study, business logistics costs dropped from 16.1%
of U.S. GDP to 10.1%.15
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Economy Advantage-Efficiency Internal
Boosting efficiency at ports is key to prevent devastating cargo congestion
Maritime Administration and USMTS; US Marine Transportation System; November 2007 (A Vision for
the 21st Century; http://www.marad.dot.gov/documents/Vision_of_the_21st_Century_10-29.pdf)
What about the cost of congestion? Every person in the country bears conges- tion’s heavy price: close to
$200 billion is incurred each year in lost revenue and wasted time and fuel, which is eventually passed on to
the American consumer. Savings gained from economies of scale and other efficiencies, such as advanced
vessel and cargo handling designs, are quickly wiped out if vessels are not fully loaded, there are delays in
loading or unloading ships, highways are gridlocked, or rail systems are at capacity. Congestion constrains not
only growth but distorts business decisions. The lack of reliability in the transportation infrastructure drives
up costs for retailers who must hold more inventory to counter supply chain delays. This can lead to increased
prices for goods, which has a negative impact on businesses, consum- ers and the U.S. economy. It means lost
export opportunities for American busi- nesses, particularly agricultural products. These are but some of the
problems congestion brings, but there are also solutions to them.
More ev
Maritime Administration and USMTS; US Marine Transportation System; November 2007 (A Vision for
the 21st Century; http://www.marad.dot.gov/documents/Vision_of_the_21st_Century_10-29.pdf)
To say that America’s marine transportation industry is just about ships and mariners is like saying that
commercial aviation is only about planes and pilots. As we move forward in the 21st century, a profound sea
change is taking shape. The marine transportation industry has become a highly sophisticated, global,
intermodal transportation network that is absolutely vital to America’s economy and continued prosperity.
Every day, thousands of vessels ply the world’s vast ocean highways and Ameri- ca’s waterways carrying
record quantities of consumer goods and cargo. But the journey today no longer begins and ends at a port. It
begins with construction of the ships that carry goods produced around the globe and can conclude at a department store’s receiving dock in Indianapolis or any other American city. Port-to-port grew into door-to-door
for the marine transportation industry. Amer- ica’s marine transportation industry led the intermodal
revolution and is the most interconnected of all forms of transportation. More than half a century ago,
America’s marine transportation industry pioneered the use of the container, now the standard instrument of
trade all over the world. It also paved the way for double-stacked trains and the development of door-to-door
logistical operations, software and tracking systems. This evolution has transformed the way we think about
the business of moving freight and people. It has completely altered the transportation landscape and the
role of transportation in our lives. Marine transportation is now a system of systems — an integrated
network, not just within the United States, but around the world. It must operate seamlessly. Taking full
advantage of America’s wealth of waterways, the Marine Transporta- tion System requires vessels of all kinds
suited to all kinds of cargo. It requires an advanced network of ports and terminals, fleets of trucks, rail cars
and barges to carry these goods to the customer. It requires highly trained personnel both ashore and afloat. It
needs support services and industries to keep the network up and running. It requires a highly complex
logistical choreography of man and machine, an in- frastructure of ship construction and repair facilities,
pinpoint scheduling and the ability to track and trace all assets 24/7 throughout the supply chain — whether
those assets are in the air, or on water or land. However, marine transportation is not just about physically
moving cargo and people across land and bodies of water great and small, but better managing the entire
shipment process. It is about providing greater efficiency, reliability and cost savings. It is meeting customer
expectations and providing world class customer service.
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Economy Advantage-Competitiveness Internal
The plan is key to boost US competitiveness-infrastructure spending is vital
Charles S. Luck IV is president & CEO of Luck Stone Corp., 2011 (Transportation: Infrastructure Key to
Competitiveness, www2.timesdispatch.com/news/commentary/2011/aug/28/tdcomm01-infrastructure-key-tocompetitiveness-ar-1267063/)
However, the ramifications of a failure to act would have a damaging impact on the current economy, the
fragile job market and our future ability to compete in the global marketplace. I think we will all agree that
fiscal responsibility is a virtue, and one that needs reintroduction north of the Potomac. But, infrastructure
investment is not just a line item on an expense statement, it's a calculated plan for the success of our nation
in the future and for the generations that follow us.It's not unlike saving for your child's college education. The
responsible approach is planning ahead for what will likely be the largest expense of their young lives.If you
start saving when your child is an infant, that investment will eventually mature to the point where it can
completely cover the cost of a good college education with minimal impact on your monthly budget.If you wait
until your child is a junior in high school to start saving for a college education, chances are you are going to be
submitting a much larger portion of your income to that savings plan — and will also have to borrow to
supplement what you couldn't save.* * * * *Our parents and grandparents decided in the 1950s to invest in our
future. In 1956, President Eisenhower championed an act that created the Interstate Highway System. At the
time it was meant to create a network of high-speed, limited-access roads that would facilitate the free flow of
people, commerce and military assets around the country. Many of those structures have reached the end of
their useful lives and are in desperate need of replacement and upgrades.We have used up the investment of
the generations that came before us, and now it's our turn to prepare the future for our children. Congestion in
urban areas is getting worse. Moving products to ports for international shipment is becoming more of a chore
as our infrastructure deteriorates. As a result businesses, whether foreign or domestic, no longer view the
United States as an option for the location of manufacturing or research facilities.We are losing ground to China
and India, which are spending 10 percent and 5 percent, respectively, of their GDP on infrastructure upgrades.
By comparison, the United States is currently spending 2 percent.Just like a child coming out of college with
student loans, we are leaving an infrastructure deficit for our children — and their ability to generate growth
and attract top jobs in the future will be at a significant disadvantage.
That’s the biggest internal link to growth and hegemony
Gelb 10 (Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior official in the state and defense
departments, is currently president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Fashioning a Realistic Strategy
for the Twenty-First Century,” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs vol.34:2 summer 2010
http://fletcher.tufts.edu/forum/archives/pdfs/34-2pdfs/Gelb.pdf)
LESLIE H. GELB: Power is what it always has been. It is the ability to get someone to do something they do not
want to do by means of your resources and your position. It was always that. There is no such thing in my
mind as “soft” power or “hard” power or “smart” power or “dumb” power. It is people who are hard or soft or
smart or dumb. Power is power. And people use it wisely or poorly. Now, what has changed is the composition
of power in international affairs. For almost all of history, international power was achieved in the form of
military power and military force. Now, particularly in the last fifty years or so, it has become more and more
economic. So power consists of economic power, military power, and diplomatic power, but the emphasis
has shifted from military power (for almost all of history) to now, more economic power. And, as President
Obama said in his West Point speech several months ago, our economy is the basis of our international power
in general and our military power in particular. That is where it all comes from. Whether other states listen to
us and act on what we say depends a good deal on their perception of the strength of the American economy.
A big problem for us in the last few years has been the perception that our economy is in decline.
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Economy Advantage-Infrastructure Internal
Infrastructure spending provides short and long term stimulus that boost key sectors and job
growth
Huff Post 14 October 2011 (U.S. Economy Needs More Federal Spending, Yale Economists Say;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/14/federal-spending-stimulus-yale-economistsrecommend_n_1011097.html)
As Yale University economists gathered on Thursday evening to discuss job growth strategies, many warned
that a failure to act aggressively risks the increasing possibility of many years of economic stagnation,
elevated joblessness and declining living standards. Some suggested that the government must act quickly to
put millions of Americans back to work with large-scale public projects, while warning that an inadequate
response risks a U.S. fate similar to Japan's so-called lost decade. After a collapse in housing prices and the
stock market, Japan in the 1990s suffered from a deflationary spiral that the government and central bank
enabled by not substantially increasing spending or lowering borrowing costs. Unemployment remained
elevated as consumer spending declined, and both people's debt and goods and services became more
expensive. "Think about Japan in 1989. It was a global powerhouse which many people thought would be
number one and dominate the world economy, and 20 years after ... it is off the economic map," said
economist Aleh Tsyvinski. "I am afraid that we are on the verge of something much greater and much more
problematic with the U.S. economy." Economist John Geanakoplos said the current predicament must be
viewed as a long-term problem that requires long-term solutions. He proposed that government officials set
up expert committees to investigate how to remake American infrastructure for the next 10 to 20 years,
building airports, trains and roads for the future rather than patching up old models. In the long run,
Geanakoplos said, infrastructure investment raises money for the government because those employed in
construction and those using the new infrastructure spend more and pay higher taxes. Both the government's
budget and the economy benefit, he said. Economist Robert Shiller agreed with Geanakoplos' prescription for
more infrastructure investment. "When we go through a crisis like this, it's a time for us to improve everything,"
Shiller said.
Infrastructure investment is key to economic competitiveness-ports are uniquely key to keep
up
Mr. Rendell, a Democrat, was governor of Pennsylvania from 2003 to 2011 August 11 2011 (Transportation
Spending Is the Right Stimulus;
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904140604576496430721692282.html)
During this time of economic uncertainty and record federal deficits, many question why America should
invest aggressively in infrastructure. The answer is simple: Whether it involves highways, railways, ports,
aviation or any other sector, infrastructure is an economic driver that is essential for the long-term creation of
quality American jobs. Unfortunately, our position as the world leader in infrastructure has begun to erode
after years of misdirected federal priorities. When it comes to transportation, Washington has been on
autopilot for the last half-century. Instead of tackling the hard choices facing our nation and embracing
innovations, federal transportation policy still largely adheres to an agenda set by President Eisenhower. As a
result, American citizens and businesses are wasting time, money and fuel. According to the Texas
Transportation Institute, in 2009 Americans wasted 4.8 billion hours sitting in traffic at a cost of $115 billion and
3.9 billion wasted gallons of gas. Meanwhile, nations around the world are investing in cutting-edge
infrastructure to make their transportation networks more efficient, more sustainable and more competitive
than ours. These investments have put them on a cycle of economic growth that will improve their standard
of living and improve their citizens' quality of life. Building America's Future Educational Fund, a national and
bipartisan coalition of state and local elected officials, of which we are members, recently issued a report on the
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subject, "Falling Apart and Falling Behind." It offers a sobering assessment of transportation-infrastructure
investments in the U.S. as compared to the visionary investments being made by our global economic
competitors. As recently as 2005, the World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. No. 1 in infrastructure economic
competitiveness. Today, the U.S. is ranked 15th. This is not a surprise considering that the U.S. spends only
1.7% of its gross domestic product on transportation infrastructure while Canada spends 4% and China spends
9%. Even as the global recession has forced cutbacks in government spending, other countries continue to
invest significantly more than the U.S. to expand and update their transportation networks. China has
invested $3.3 trillion since 2000, for example, and recently announced another $105.2 billion for 23 new
infrastructure projects. Brazil has invested $240 billion since 2008, with another $340 billion committed for the
next three years. The result? China is now home to six of the world's 10 busiest ports—while the U.S. isn't
home to one. Brazil's Açu Superport is larger than the island of Manhattan, with state-of-the-art highway,
pipeline and conveyor-belt capacity to ease the transfer of raw materials onto ships heading to China. To get
our nation's economy back on track, we must develop a national infrastructure strategy for the next decade.
This policy should be based on economics, not politics.
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Economy Advantage-Infrastructure Internal
Infrastructure investment generates unique multipliers that boost the economy
CBS News report 27 August 2011 (Obama seeks new infrastructure for job creation;
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-20098307.html)
When Moody's studied the 2009 stimulus package, infrastructure spending rated high. For every dollar spent,
$1.44 was returned to the economy. "Infrastructure projects have a large bang for the buck because they
employ a lot of people, they require a lot of material and inputs, so a lot of economic activity is generated by
those projects," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's.
More ev-it boosts job creation multipliers and long term aggregate demand
Media Matters 6/14 (U.S. Could Use More Infrastructure Spending, Not Less;
http://mediamatters.org/mobile/research/201206140001)
Spending On Infrastructure Is More Stimulative Than Tax Cuts For Wealthy. The Congressional Budget Office's
report on the estimated impact of the stimulus on the economy found that transferring money to state and
local governments for infrastructure spending had a multiplier effect as high as 2.2, while a one-year tax cut
for wealthy Americans had a much lower multiplier effect: Moody's: For Every Dollar Spent On Infrastructure
In 2009 Stimulus, $1.57 Was Returned To The Economy. In its July 2010 analysis of the stimulus, Moody's
Analytics found that every dollar of infrastructure spending resulted in $1.57 returned to the economy. It also
found that tax cuts had little stimulative value: EPI: "Infrastructure Spending Provides About 20-50% More
Stimulative Benefit Than Tax Cuts." In a January 2009 post about infrastructure spending as part of the stimulus
package, Ethan Pollack, policy analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, noted: As we have previously written
(see Pollack 2008), infrastructure spending provides about 20-50% more stimulative benefit than tax cuts,
mainly because households are likely to save the extra money rather than spend it back into the economy.
[Economic Policy Institute, 1/29/09] New America Foundation: "Long-Term Investment In Public Infrastructure
Is The Best Way Simultaneously To Create Jobs, Crowd In Private Investment." A study from the New America
Foundation found that infrastructure spending makes the economy more productive and would "generate a
multiplier of growth in other sectors of the economy": U.S. public infrastructure is in shambles and is rapidly
deteriorating. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the United States must spend $2.2 trillion
on infrastructure over the next five years to meet America's most basic infrastructure needs but that less than
half that is currently budgeted, leaving an approximately $1.2 trillion shortfall. A multi-year program designed
to close that infrastructure deficit would not only help fill the demand hole but make the economy more
productive and efficient in the long-term. Indeed, long-term investment in public infrastructure is the best
way simultaneously to create jobs, crowd in private investment, make the economy more productive, and
generate a multiplier of growth in other sectors of the economy. [New America Foundation, October 2011]
Infrastructure investment is unique in creating short term stimulus that generate long term
sustainability
NPR 8 December 2008 (Can Infrastructure Spending Rev Up The Economy?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97973470)
"It is not just the construction workers that show up on the site. It's the people who serve them lunch. They
also get a job boost. It's the truck drivers who deliver the materials. It's the accountants. All of these types of
jobs get created through a green investment agenda," said Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst and a co-author of the proposal. Pollin added that any massive increase in
government spending would create some jobs, no matter how the money is used. He favors building retrofits,
because they require a lot of workers here in the U.S. and because the resulting efficiency delivers a long-term
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payoff. "Even if we spend a lot more money than we actually end up needing in the short term, we're still
going to get the long-run benefits," Pollin said. "We will have made major investments towards creating the
clean energy economy that we all know we need."
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Economy Advantage-A2: Keynes Wrong
Consensus of experts proves we are correct, and there is no crowd out effect-the alternative
is a new Great Depression
Menzie Chen, prof @ La Follette School of Public Affairs, 9/11 2011 (Is this recovery or 1937 again?
http://www.businessinsider.com/is-this-recovery-or-1937-again-2011-9)
Intervention here: When I hear statements that "the stimulus failed", I think it important to recall that
between the election and inaugural day, business economists revised downward their estimates of GDP [2].
The proper metric is then to compare against the counterfactual as of the time of implementation, as
described in here,here and here....Some policymakers and economists believed that any government
intervention, even in so troubled an economy, was unjustified. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.) complained that
“the US government just won’t allow the correction the economy needs.” He invoked the recession of 1921,
which was deep but short, in Paul’s view because the government permitted insolvent companies to fail. “No
one remembers that one,” he averred. “They’ll remember this one, because it will last 15 years.”34 Paul’s view
was reminiscent of the position of the “liquidationists” of the early 1930s, who were led by Treasury Secretary
Andrew Mellon. Mellon’s advice to President Herbert Hoover was typical: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks,
liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate ... purge the rottenness out of the system.”35 The idea was almost
moralistic: bad loans, bad debts, bad businesses, and bad deals had to be exorcised before the economy could
right itself. Satisfying as such a scorched-earth policy might be (at least to those not caught in its path), few
serious economists or policymakers ever considered it.36Some theoretical objections to an active fiscal
stimulus were based on the view that government spending would inevitably be wasteful, providing no real
benefit to the population. Others emphasized the expectation that increased government spending would be
counteracted by an offsetting reduction in private spending. The budget deficits that would result from tax cuts
or more government spending would drive interest rates higher and reduce, or “crowd out,” private investment
and spending. The economists who held these positions were generally hostile to traditional Keynesian views,
especially because of the Keynesian inclination to assume that there were market failures that government
could correct...But among most economists, there was a general consensus on the desirability of some form of
active fiscal policy. In a February 2009 Wall Street Journal poll of economists, 68 percent said that the
proposed stimulus package was about the right size or too small. Only 31 percent said that it was too large.
Most economists in the policy and business circles viewed a stimulus package as something that could soften
the blows of a deep downturn and hasten the arrival of a recovery.38Well, we know about how much interest
rates have risen in response to the stimulus package [3] [4]. And with that decline in long term interest rates,
we know how much interest-rate-induced crowding out of investment has occurred: nil. Instead, the drama
we seem to be witnessing now is a replay of 1937 [Krugman], when policymakers overly worried about
inflation and deficits withdrew stimulus too early. Whether we will (re-)learn that lesson is the question of the
moment.
Keynesian economics only fails when stimuli are poorly designed-infrastructure funding
sparks a recovery
Nancy Gravatt, VP of Comm @ American Iron and Steel Institute, 2/24 2010 (AISI Commends Senator
Voinovich's Work,
http://www.steel.org/en/sitecore/content/Global/Document%20Types/News/2010/AISI%20Commends%20Sen
ator%20Voinovichs%20Work%20to%20Obtain%20Commitment%20on%20Highway%20Bill.aspx)
Providing federal funds for infrastructure projects provides jobs and revenue to state and local communities,
and has a positive impact on a wide array of individuals from steel producers, to suppliers, to manufacturers
of goods, all which will aid in the recovery of our national economy. Highway funding creates an employment
multiplier, and according to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), every $1 billion invested in federal
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highways supports nearly 35,000 American jobs. As nationwide unemployment stands at 9.7%, the
transportation bill would stimulate the economy, create jobs, rebuild our nation’s infrastructure, and truly be
the second stimulus package
Your ev is written by conservative media hacks
Media Matters, 9/9 2011(Conservative Media Criticism of Jobs Plan Off by Millions of Jobs,
http://mediamatters.org/research/201109090013)
Conservative media figures are citing the discredited myth that the stimulus failed to argue that President
Obama's jobs plan also will not help the economy. In fact, economic analysts have repeatedly said that the
2009 recovery act boosted the economy and increased employment, and economists estimate that Obama's
jobs plan is likely to add millions of jobs.
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Economy Advantage-A2: Keynes Wrong
The best economic and academic studies prove you are wrong-government stimulus is key to
job creation and boosting aggregate demand
Mett Separa and Adam Hersh, Center for American Progress, 9/8 2011 (Recovery Act Jobs Still Critical to
Our Economy, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/09/recovery_act_jobs.html)
Numerous nonpartisan economic and academic studies credit government economic spending between 2009
and 2011 for pulling our economy out of the deep, two-and-a-half-year Great Recession, which ended in June
2009, and the subsequently uneven economic recovery. The principal vehicle for that spending, the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was responsible for 2.4 million jobs each quarter from the months
after its passage in February 2009 to the present—jobs that would not otherwise have existed. Even though
nearly 85 percent of the total Recovery Act funds have now been spent, those dollars are continuing to flow
through the economy and mitigate the effects of the continuing drags on economic recovery.When Congress
debated the Recovery Act legislation in the winter of 2008-09, the private sector was shedding a record 700,000
to 800,000 jobs per month. The bursting of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial crisis threw the U.S.
economy into a free fall—a collapse that has since partially reversed itself thanks to the effects of the
Recovery Act.As the president and Congress consider further measures to help grow the economy and create
jobs, it is worth noting that evidence shows specific policies within the Recovery Act created specific jobs in
America. Aid to states and local governments kept teachers in schools and police officers on their beats, even
as tax revenues fell. An extension of unemployment benefits put money into the pockets of the long-term
unemployed, which in turn not only helped those individual families hardest hit by the Great Recession but also
helped keep dollars flowing into their local communities.Similarly, the extension of so-called COBRA health
benefits for workers who lost their jobs helped the unemployed access health care, undoubtedly mitigating the
well-documented negative health effects of unemployment. And money directed to the U.S. Department of
Agriculture provided unique aid to rural America by creating jobs that worked to upgrade public utilities and
community facilities and provide broadband connections to businesses and homes.The nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office credits the Recovery Act with increasing employment in the second quarter of
2011 by 1.4 million to 4 million jobs and reducing unemployment by between 0.5 percent and 1.6 percent.
Economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi estimate that the Recovery Act and other fiscal policies will result in
almost 2.7 million more jobs through the end of 2011. And without them the two economists estimate that
unemployment would stand at 11.4 percent and job losses would have totaled 10 million.The accompanying
chart demonstrates the overall employment effects of the Recovery Act as estimated by both CBO and Blinder
and Zandi in millions of full-time equivalent jobs, a measure that makes part-time and full-time employment
comparable regardless of the number of hours worked. At its peak, the Recovery Act is credited with an
average of 3.4 million jobs that would not otherwise have existed, a number that today stands at about 2.3
million American jobs.
Keynes was right-your cards are written by economic idiots
Paul Krugman, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science winner, 2 September 2009 (How Did Economists
Get it So Wrong? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?pagewanted=8&_r=1)
The spread of the current financial crisis seemed almost like an object lesson in the perils of financial
instability. And the general ideas underlying models of financial instability have proved highly relevant to
economic policy: a focus on the depleted capital of financial institutions helped guide policy actions taken
after the fall of Lehman, and it looks (cross your fingers) as if these actions successfully headed off an even
bigger financial collapse.Meanwhile, what about macroeconomics? Recent events have pretty decisively
refuted the idea that recessions are an optimal response to fluctuations in the rate of technological progress;
a more or less Keynesian view is the only plausible game in town. Yet standard New Keynesian models left no
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room for a crisis like the one we’re having, because those models generally accepted the efficient-market
view of the financial sector.There were some exceptions. One line of work, pioneered by none other than Ben
Bernanke working with Mark Gertler of New York University, emphasized the way the lack of sufficient collateral
can hinder the ability of businesses to raise funds and pursue investment opportunities. A related line of work,
largely established by my Princeton colleague Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and John Moore of the London School of
Economics, argued that prices of assets such as real estate can suffer self-reinforcing plunges that in turn
depress the economy as a whole. But until now the impact of dysfunctional finance hasn’t been at the core even
of Keynesian economics. Clearly, that has to change.VIII. RE-EMBRACING KEYNESSo here’s what I think
economists have to do. First, they have to face up to the inconvenient reality that financial markets fall far
short of perfection, that they are subject to extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds. Second, they
have to admit — and this will be very hard for the people who giggled and whispered over Keynes — that
Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions.
Third, they’ll have to do their best to incorporate the realities of finance into macroeconomics.Many economists
will find these changes deeply disturbing. It will be a long time, if ever, before the new, more realistic
approaches to finance and macroeconomics offer the same kind of clarity, completeness and sheer beauty
that characterizes the full neoclassical approach. To some economists that will be a reason to cling to
neoclassicism, despite its utter failure to make sense of the greatest economic crisis in three generations. This
seems, however, like a good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to
every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.”When it comes to the all-too-human problem of
recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that
everyone is rational and markets work perfectly. The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its
foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won’t be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of
being at least partly right.
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Economy Advantage-A2: Stimulus Failure Proves
Wrong-three reasons the Obama stimulus doesn’t implicate infrastructure spending writ
large
Economist 21 October 2010 (False expectations: The historic infrastructure investment that wasn’t
http://www.economist.com/node/17311851)
The stimulus bill’s spending on infrastructure may have been doomed to mediocrity from the start. First, and
most important, a relatively small share of the bill was actually devoted to infrastructure. Mr Obama called
the bill “the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower built an interstate
highway system in the 1950s.” But even on the broadest definition of the term, infrastructure got $150 billion,
under a fifth of the total. Just $64 billion, or 8% of the total, went to roads, public transport, rail, bridges,
aviation and wastewater systems. Second, hopes for an immediate jolt of activity were misplaced. The bill
prioritised “shovel-ready” plans. States did have a backlog of maintenance projects, such as repaving
dilapidated roads. Nevertheless, work moved more slowly than some Democrats expected. By October 2009
even the fastest programmes—those under the highway and transit headings—had seen work begin on just
$14.3 billion-worth of projects. Spending has since quickened. Of the money appropriated to transport, 83% has
now been allocated. But it is unclear that the money spent has been money spent well. The attempt to begin
work hastily meant that both good and bad projects have moved forward. Meanwhile the bill’s most notable
project, high-speed passenger rail, threatens to become a debacle. It is fun to imagine trains whizzing across
the heartland. But there is no urgent need for them. Freight companies worry that new passenger services
will simply increase congestion.
Infrastructure spending wasn’t actually part of the original Obama stimulus
Economists View 22 July 2008 (Infrastructure Spending and Stabilization Policy;
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/07/infrastructure.html)
I wish infrastructure spending had been part of the first stimulus package, many of us called for that so that
the stimulus would be distributed over time rather than concentrated over a small time period as with tax
rebates (a disadvantage of relying solely upon tax rebates as a stimulus measure). If infrastructure spending had
been part of the original package, then the implementation and effectiveness lags wouldn't be so much at
issue. However, it wasn't part of the package, though that would have been best, but that shouldn't stop us
now. Infrastructure spending can have an impact right away, it addresses the expected long, drawn out
recovery process for employment, and it also addresses problems with deteriorating infrastructure.
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Economy Advantage-A2: Fed Solves
Fed monetary action takes too long to solve-infrastructure spending is comparatively
preferable
Economists View 22 July 2008 (Infrastructure Spending and Stabilization Policy;
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/07/infrastructure.html)
I think Free Exchange has effectively handled the speed issue, i.e. the assertion that infrastructure spending
cannot hit the economy as fast as tax cuts, so let me turn to the assertion about monetary policy dominating
fiscal policy generally, and dominating spending on infrastructure in particular. Yes, monetary policy can be
implemented rapidly, but remember how monetary policy works. It lowers the interest rate or reduces credit
market imperfections stimulating investment in new plants and equipment, investment in new homes, that
sort of thing. It takes considerable time to plan and build a new factory or to refurbish an old one. People
don't build and buy houses over night (usually), that takes time too, since it's only new houses that contribute
to GDP. Thus, while monetary policy can be put into place overnight if necessary, it can be quite some time
before it impacts the economy. Stepping away from infrastructure spending for a moment and looking at
fiscal policy generally, the usual view on monetary versus fiscal policy lags is that monetary policy can be
implemented quickly, but the effects take considerable time to be realized - the peak effect can be as long as a
year and a half away and drawn out over a three year period according to many estimates. Fiscal policy takes
longer to implement due to factors cited above, but once in place, the effects are realized fairly quickly
(though it does take longer for infrastructure that must be planned and built from the ground up).
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Economy Advantage-2AC War Impact
First, economic decline kills democratic cooperation and spurs protectionism and a power
vacuum as US influence wanes. Their historical evidence doesn’t assume the withdrawal of a
unipolar hegemon, threats of transnational terrorism or authoritarian wars of distraction—
that’s the 1NC Friedberg evidence.
Second, economic decline undermines the key foundations of peace. Prefer our evidence
about the current international security climate
Mandelbaum 2010 (Michael, Professor Foreign Policy-Johns Hopkins University, The Frugal Superpower:
America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era, p. 105-8)
It is the dominance of peace, democracy, and free markets, supplemented and bolstered by the reassurance
that the United States supplies, that have made the twenty-first century a peaceful period—so far. But their
domination, and the global peace they underpin, are not necessarily destined to last forever; and the recent
turmoil in the global economy does raise the possibility that their era of dominance will turn out to be a short
one. The severe global economic downturn that the financial collapse of September 15, 2008, catalyzed
threatens not only the American role in helping to maintain peace in the world but also the foundations of the
stable twenty-first-century global security itself. The international economic and security systems are not,
after all, hermetically sealed off one from the other. To the contrary, each affects the other, and in the 1930s
economics had a profound—and profoundly malignant—effect on politics. The crisis of the global economy led
to the outbreak of the bloodiest episode in the history of international security, World War II, by bringing to
power in Germany and Japan the brutal governments that started that dreadful conflict. In the 1930s the
financial crash and the high unemployment that followed all over the world discredited the shaky democratic
governments in place in Germany and Japan, which fell from power. The fascist regimes that replaced them
proclaimed themselves models of governance for the rest of the world and did win admirers and imitators in
other countries. These regimes disdained democratic politics and practices extensive (although not, as in the
case of the Soviet Union, total) government control of economic affairs. Far from believing in peace, the two
enthusiastically embraced aggressive war for the purpose of expanding the territories under their sway and
subjugating—even, in some cases, attempting to exterminate—the people living there. Japan launched a brutal
campaign of conquest in China in 1931; in 1939 Germany embarked on the murderous acquisition of an Eastern
European empire and in the process conquered much of Western Europe as well. The two countries forged a
nominal alliance that included fascist Italy as well. During World War II they were known as the Axis powers.
Japan subdued much of Asia and Germany because the master of most of Europe before the two were finally
beaten, at great cost in blood and treasure, in 1945. Could anything like the ghastly experience of the 1930s
and 1940s occur in the twenty-first century? The precipitating event did, after all, repeat itself after a fashion:
the economic slump that began in 2008 became, by most accounts the most severe since the 1930s. And while
Germany and Japan have long since become firmly democratic in their politics and quasi-pacifist in their foreign
policies, two other countries could conceivably play the roles that the fascist powers assumed in the interwar
period. Those two countries are China and Russia. Each was, as the first decade of the new century ended, a
large and military formidable country that had the potential to upset existing political and economic
arrangements in East Asia and Europe, respectively. For much of the second half of the twentieth century the
two had been governed by communist regimes that aspired to spread their form of government, by force
when necessary.
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Third, the risk is a function of our internal links—if we win a big one, then there would be a
war
Mandelbaum 2010 (Michael, Professor Foreign Policy-Johns Hopkins University, The Frugal Superpower:
America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era, p. 111-2)
The unlikelihood of a full recurrence of all the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s does not, however, mean that
the global security order is certain to remain entirely free from threats of war in the years ahead. Avoiding the
worst of all possible futures does not guarantee the best of them. Even if China and Russia do not unleash
murderous campaigns of conquest, this does not mean that each will settle comfortably into a twenty-firstcentury routine as a staunch supporter of the post-Cold War security and economic orders. Each has
grievances, actual and potential, against the existing order of things. The extent to which either or both
choose to act on these grievances will matter a great deal. Those choices, in turn, will depend in part on the
strength of the American position in their respective regions, East Asia and Europe; and the economic
constraints on the United States will weaken that position in both places.
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Economy Advantage-2AC War Impact
GREEN AND SCHRAGE 2009 (Michael J Green is Senior Advisor and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies (CSIS) and Associate Professor at Georgetown University. Steven P Schrage is the CSIS
Scholl Chair in International Business and a former senior official with the US Trade Representative's Office,
State Department and Ways & Means Committee, Asia Times, 3-26,
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/KC26Dk01.html)
Facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, analysts at the World Bank and the US Central
Intelligence Agency are just beginning to contemplate the ramifications for international stability if there is
not a recovery in the next year. For the most part, the focus has been on fragile states such as some in Eastern
Europe. However, the Great Depression taught us that a downward global economic spiral can even have
jarring impacts on great powers. It is no mere coincidence that the last great global economic downturn was
followed by the most destructive war in human history. In the 1930s, economic desperation helped fuel
autocratic regimes and protectionism in a downward economic-security death spiral that engulfed the world
in conflict. This spiral was aided by the preoccupation of the United States and other leading nations with
economic troubles at home and insufficient attention to working with other powers to maintain stability
abroad. Today's challenges are different, yet 1933's London Economic Conference, which failed to stop the drift
toward deeper depression and world war, should be a cautionary tale for leaders heading to next month's
London Group of 20 (G-20) meeting. There is no question the US must urgently act to address banking issues and
to restart its economy. But the lessons of the past suggest that we will also have to keep an eye on those fragile
threads in the international system that could begin to unravel if the financial crisis is not reversed early in the
Barack Obama administration and realize that economics and security are intertwined in most of the critical
challenges we face. A disillusioned rising power? Four areas in Asia merit particular attention, although so far
the current financial crisis has not changed Asia's fundamental strategic picture. China is not replacing the US as
regional hegemon, since the leadership in Beijing is too nervous about the political implications of the financial
crisis at home to actually play a leading role in solving it internationally. Predictions that the US will be brought
to its knees because China is the leading holder of US debt often miss key points. China's currency controls and
full employment/export-oriented growth strategy give Beijing few choices other than buying US Treasury bills or
harming its own economy. Rather than creating new rules or institutions in international finance, or reorienting
the Chinese economy to generate greater long-term consumer demand at home, Chinese leaders are
desperately clinging to the status quo (though Beijing deserves credit for short-term efforts to stimulate
economic growth). The greater danger with China is not an eclipsing of US leadership, but instead the kind of
shift in strategic orientation that happened to Japan after the Great Depression. Japan was arguably not a
revisionist power before 1932 and sought instead to converge with the global economy through open trade and
adoption of the gold standard. The worldwide depression and protectionism of the 1930s devastated the newly
exposed Japanese economy and contributed directly to militaristic and autarkic policies in Asia as the Japanese
people reacted against what counted for globalization at the time. China today is similarly converging with the
global economy, and many experts believe China needs at least 8% annual growth to sustain social stability.
Realistic growth predictions for 2009 are closer to 5%. Veteran China hands were watching closely when millions
of migrant workers returned to work after the Lunar New Year holiday last month to find factories closed and
jobs gone. There were pockets of protests, but nationwide unrest seems unlikely this year, and Chinese leaders
are working around the clock to ensure that it does not happen next year either. However, the economic
slowdown has only just begun and nobody is certain how it will impact the social contract in China between
the ruling communist party and the 1.3 billion Chinese who have come to see President Hu Jintao's call for
"harmonious society" as inextricably linked to his promise of "peaceful development". If the Japanese example is
any precedent, a sustained economic slowdown has the potential to open a dangerous path from economic
nationalism to strategic revisionism in China too. Dangerous states It is noteworthy that North Korea,
Myanmar and Iran have all intensified their defiance in the wake of the financial crisis, which has distracted
the world's leading nations, limited their moral authority and sown potential discord. With Beijing worried
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about the potential impact of North Korean belligerence or instability on Chinese internal stability, and leaders
in Japan and South Korea under siege in parliament because of the collapse of their stock markets, leaders in the
North Korean capital of Pyongyang have grown increasingly boisterous about their country's claims to great
power status as a nuclear weapons state. The junta in Myanmar has chosen this moment to arrest hundreds of
political dissidents and thumb its nose at fellow members of the 10-country Association of Southeast Asian
Nations. Iran continues its nuclear program while exploiting differences between the US, UK and France (or the
P-3 group) and China and Russia - differences that could become more pronounced if economic friction with
Beijing or Russia crowds out cooperation or if Western European governments grow nervous about sanctions as
a tool of policy. It is possible that the economic downturn will make these dangerous states more pliable
because of falling fuel prices (Iran) and greater need for foreign aid (North Korea and Myanmar), but that may
depend on the extent that authoritarian leaders care about the well-being of their people or face internal
political pressures linked to the economy. So far, there is little evidence to suggest either and much evidence to
suggest these dangerous states see an opportunity to advance their asymmetrical advantages against the
international system. Challenges to the democratic model The trend in East Asiahas been for developing
economies to steadily embrace democracy and the rule of law in order to sustain their national success. But to
thrive, new democracies also have to deliver basic economic growth. The economic crisis has hit democracies
hard, with Japanese Prime Minister Aso Taro's approval collapsing to single digits in the polls and South Korea's
Lee Myung-bak and Taiwan's Ma Ying Jeou doing only a little better (and the collapse in Taiwan's exports particularly to China - is sure to undermine Ma's argument that a more accommodating stance toward Beijing
will bring economic benefits to Taiwan). Thailand's new coalition government has an uncertain future after two
years of post-coup drift and now economic crisis. The string of old and new democracies in East Asia has
helped to anchor US relations with China and to maintain what former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice
once called a "balance of power that favors freedom". A reversal of the democratic expansion of the past two
decades would not only impact the global balance of power but also increase the potential number of failed
states, with all the attendant risk they bring from harboring terrorists to incubating pandemic diseases and
trafficking in persons. It would also undermine the demonstration effect of liberal norms we are urging China
to embrace at home. Protectionism The collapse of financial markets in 1929 was compounded by protectionist
measures such as the Smoot-Hawley tariff act in 1932. Suddenly, the economic collapse became a zero-sum
race for autarkic trading blocs that became a key cause of war. Today, the globalization of finance, services and
manufacturing networks and the World Trade Organization (WTO) make such a rapid move to trading blocs
unlikely. However, protectionism could still unravel the international system through other guises. Already,
new spending packages around the world are providing support for certain industries that might be perceived
by foreign competitors as unfair trade measures, potentially creating a "Smoot-Hawley 2.0" stimulus effect as
governments race to prop up industries. "Buy American" conditionality in the US economic stimulus package
earlier this year was watered down somewhat by the Obama administration, but it set a tempting precedent for
other countries to put up barriers to close markets. Nations pushing the bounds of their trade commitments
could overload the circuits of a system that can take two years to determine violations - more than enough
time for a global meltdown. Climate change legislation is also likely to become a stalking horse for
protectionism as legislatures enthusiastically embrace punitive tariffs against Chinese or Indian goods that are
produced outside of the framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, competitive devaluation already being pursued by China in the view of some economists - could intensify international protectionism
and friction. Global trade has already contracted for the first time in over two decades and governments have
only just begun exploring unilateral measures that could cause further barriers. Meanwhile, trade liberalization
has stalled in the Doha Round of the WTO and the Obama administration has come into office expressing strong
reservations about major bilateral free trade agreements already negotiated with allies like South Korea and
Columbia. Even if the clarion call of protectionism does not lead to the kind of autarkic blocs that contributed
to war in the 1930s, it could still distract governments from collaboration on common threats and slow the
prospects for more rapid recovery. Don't worry, but be smart These danger signs do not mean that the worst
case scenarios are likely to happen even if the economic crisis extends beyond 2009, but history and
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contemporary trends both suggest that they could happen if we are not careful. Fortunately, we can learn from
past failings. We know that it is important to fight protectionism, and the US and its key allies can lead in that
effort at home and through the WTO, APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation grouping of nations], the Group
of Seven [leading industrialized nations] and [the broader] the G-20, or through other new or strengthened
alliances that might be built between committed partners. We know that offensive trade liberalization through
renewed efforts at the WTO or with the South Korea-US Free Trade Agreement would be the best defense of
all against protectionism. We know that it is important to provide economic assistance to fragile states like
Pakistan and through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund even amidst our own financial crises. We
know that it would be foolhardy to slash defense spending or to replace deterrence and strong alliances with
weak diplomatic arrangements as we did in the 1920s and 1930s. And we know that we need a global strategy
for revitalizing economic growth and recognizing its interconnections to security rather than seeking relative
gains through unilateral approaches.
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Economy Advantage-Hege Impact
The impact is great power conflict—economic growth is vital to sustain American primacy
Khalilzad 2011 — Zalmay Khalilzad, Counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, served as
the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations during the presidency of George W.
Bush, served as the director of policy planning at the Defense Department during the Presidency of George H.W.
Bush, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, 2011 (“The Economy and National Security,” National
Review, February 8th, Available Online at http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/259024, Accessed 0208-2011)
Today, economic and fiscal trends pose the most severe long-term threat to the United States’ position as
global leader. While the United States suffers from fiscal imbalances and low economic growth, the
economies of rival powers are developing rapidly. The continuation of these two trends could lead to a shift
from American primacy toward a multi-polar global system, leading in turn to increased geopolitical rivalry
and even war among the great powers.
The current recession is the result of a deep financial crisis, not a mere fluctuation in the business cycle.
Recovery is likely to be protracted. The crisis was preceded by the buildup over two decades of enormous
amounts of debt throughout the U.S. economy — ultimately totaling almost 350 percent of GDP — and the
development of credit-fueled asset bubbles, particularly in the housing sector. When the bubbles burst, huge
amounts of wealth were destroyed, and unemployment rose to over 10 percent. The decline of tax revenues
and massive countercyclical spending put the U.S. government on an unsustainable fiscal path. Publicly held
national debt rose from 38 to over 60 percent of GDP in three years.
Without faster economic growth and actions to reduce deficits, publicly held national debt is projected to
reach dangerous proportions. If interest rates were to rise significantly, annual interest payments — which
already are larger than the defense budget — would crowd out other spending or require substantial tax
increases that would undercut economic growth. Even worse, if unanticipated events trigger what economists
call a “sudden stop” in credit markets for U.S. debt, the United States would be unable to roll over its
outstanding obligations, precipitating a sovereign-debt crisis that would almost certainly compel a radical
retrenchment of the United States internationally.
Such scenarios would reshape the international order. It was the economic devastation of Britain and France
during World War II, as well as the rise of other powers, that led both countries to relinquish their empires. In
the late 1960s, British leaders concluded that they lacked the economic capacity to maintain a presence “east of
Suez.” Soviet economic weakness, which crystallized under Gorbachev, contributed to their decisions to
withdraw from Afghanistan, abandon Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and allow the Soviet Union to
fragment. If the U.S. debt problem goes critical, the United States would be compelled to retrench, reducing
its military spending and shedding international commitments.
We face this domestic challenge while other major powers are experiencing rapid economic growth. Even
though countries such as China, India, and Brazil have profound political, social, demographic, and economic
problems, their economies are growing faster than ours, and this could alter the global distribution of power.
These trends could in the long term produce a multi-polar world. If U.S. policymakers fail to act and other
powers continue to grow, it is not a question of whether but when a new international order will emerge. The
closing of the gap between the United States and its rivals could intensify geopolitical competition among
major powers, increase incentives for local powers to play major powers against one another, and undercut
our will to preclude or respond to international crises because of the higher risk of escalation.
The stakes are high. In modern history, the longest period of peace among the great powers has been the era
of U.S. leadership. By contrast, multi-polar systems have been unstable, with their competitive dynamics
resulting in frequent crises and major wars among the great powers. Failures of multi-polar international
systems produced both world wars.
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American retrenchment could have devastating consequences. Without an American security blanket,
regional powers could rearm in an attempt to balance against emerging threats. Under this scenario, there
would be a heightened possibility of arms races, miscalculation, or other crises spiraling into all-out conflict.
Alternatively, in seeking to accommodate the stronger powers, weaker powers may shift their geopolitical
posture away from the United States. Either way, hostile states would be emboldened to make aggressive
moves in their regions.
As rival powers rise, Asia in particular is likely to emerge as a zone of great-power competition. Beijing’s
economic rise has enabled a dramatic military buildup focused on acquisitions of naval, cruise, and ballistic
missiles, long-range stealth aircraft, and anti-satellite capabilities. China’s strategic modernization is aimed,
ultimately, at denying the United States access to the seas around China. Even as cooperative economic ties in
the region have grown, China’s expansive territorial claims — and provocative statements and actions following
crises in Korea and incidents at sea — have roiled its relations with South Korea, Japan, India, and Southeast
Asian states. Still, the United States is the most significant barrier facing Chinese hegemony and aggression.
Given the risks, the United States must focus on restoring its economic and fiscal condition while checking and
managing the rise of potential adversarial regional powers such as China. While we face significant challenges,
the U.S. economy still accounts for over 20 percent of the world’s GDP. American institutions — particularly
those providing enforceable rule of law — set it apart from all the rising powers. Social cohesion underwrites
political stability. U.S. demographic trends are healthier than those of any other developed country. A culture of
innovation, excellent institutions of higher education, and a vital sector of small and medium-sized enterprises
propel the U.S. economy in ways difficult to quantify. Historically, Americans have responded pragmatically, and
sometimes through trial and error, to work our way through the kind of crisis that we face today.
The policy question is how to enhance economic growth and employment while cutting discretionary spending
in the near term and curbing the growth of entitlement spending in the out years. Republican members of
Congress have outlined a plan. Several think tanks and commissions, including President Obama’s debt
commission, have done so as well. Some consensus exists on measures to pare back the recent increases in
domestic spending, restrain future growth in defense spending, and reform the tax code (by reducing tax
expenditures while lowering individual and corporate rates). These are promising options.
The key remaining question is whether the president and leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill have the will to
act and the skill to fashion bipartisan solutions. Whether we take the needed actions is a choice, however
difficult it might be. It is clearly within our capacity to put our economy on a better trajectory. In garnering
political support for cutbacks, the president and members of Congress should point not only to the domestic
consequences of inaction — but also to the geopolitical implications.
As the United States gets its economic and fiscal house in order, it should take steps to prevent a flare-up in
Asia. The United States can do so by signaling that its domestic challenges will not impede its intentions to check
Chinese expansionism. This can be done in cost-efficient ways.
While China’s economic rise enables its military modernization and international assertiveness, it also frightens
rival powers. The Obama administration has wisely moved to strengthen relations with allies and potential
partners in the region but more can be done.
Some Chinese policies encourage other parties to join with the United States, and the U.S. should not let these
opportunities pass. China’s military assertiveness should enable security cooperation with countries on China’s
periphery — particularly Japan, India, and Vietnam — in ways that complicate Beijing’s strategic calculus. China’s
mercantilist policies and currency manipulation — which harm developing states both in East Asia and
elsewhere — should be used to fashion a coalition in favor of a more balanced trade system. Since Beijing’s
over-the-top reaction to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese democracy activist alienated
European leaders, highlighting human-rights questions would not only draw supporters from nearby countries
but also embolden reformers within China.
Since the end of the Cold War, a stable economic and financial condition at home has enabled America to
have an expansive role in the world. Today we can no longer take this for granted. Unless we get our
economic house in order, there is a risk that domestic stagnation in combination with the rise of rival powers
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will undermine our ability to deal with growing international problems. Regional hegemons in Asia could seize
the moment, leading the world toward a new, dangerous era of multi-polarity.
And, maintaining a large power differential is key
Tellis 2009 — Ashley J. Tellis, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace specializing
in international security, defense and Asian strategic issues, Research Director of the Strategic Asia program at
NBR—the National Bureau of Asian Research, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, 2009 (“Preserving
Hegemony: The Strategic Tasks Facing the United States,” Global Asia, Volume 4, Number 1, Available Online at
http://globalasia.org/pdf/issue9/Ashley_J._Tellis.pdf, Accessed 09-13-2011, p. 55-56)
Second, and equally importantly, who wins in the ensuing struggle — whether that struggle is short or long,
peaceful or violent — is as important as by how much. This is particularly relevant because the past record
unerringly confirms that the strongest surviving state in the winning coalition usually turns out to be the new
primate after the conclusion of every systemic struggle. Both Great Britain and the United States secured their
respective ascendancies in this way. Great Britain rose through the wreckage of the wars with Louis XIV and with
Napoleon. The United States did so through the carnage of the hot wars with Hitler and Hirohito, finally
achieving true hegemony through the detritus of the Cold War with Stalin and his successors. If the United
States is to sustain this hard-earned hegemony over the long term, while countering as necessary a future
Chinese challenge should it emerge, Washington will need to amass the largest differential in power relative
not only to its rivals but also to its friends and allies. Particularly in [end page 55] an era of globalization, this
objective cannot be achieved without a conscious determination to follow sensible policies that sustain
economic growth, minimize unproductive expenditures, strengthen the national innovation system, maintain
military capabilities second to none and enjoin political behaviors that evoke the approbation of allies and
neutral states alike.
The successful pursuit of such policies will enable the United States to cope more effectively with near-term
challenges as well, including the war on terrorism and managing threatening regional powers, and will
ineluctably require — to return full circle — engaging the central tasks identified earlier as facing the new US
administration. These tasks involve the need to satisfactorily define the character of desirable US hegemony, the
need for sound policies that will renew the foundations of US strength, and the need to recover the legitimacy
of US purposes and actions. What is clearly implied is that the principal burdens facing the next US president
transcend Asia writ large. The success of these pursuits, however, will inevitably impact Asia in desirable ways,
even as the resolution of several specifically Asian problems would invariably contribute to the conclusive
attainment of these larger encompassing goals.
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Economy Advantage-Hegemony Good
Hegemony is critical to deter balancing-potential competitors won’t develop theories of
victory
Christopher Layne, Professor Texas A&M School of Government, 2009, International Security, Vol. 34, No. 1,
Summer, p. 159-60
Because it uniquely combines overwhelming economic and military power, the United States enjoys
unchallenged preeminence in the international system (pp. 34–35). Its huge military edge over potential
challengers dissuades others from competing against it. Moreover, combined with collective-action problems,
U.S. hard power advantages pose an insuperable barrier to states that might want to engage in external
balancing against the United States (pp. 35–37). Also, Brooks and Wohlforth say, other states will not balance
against the United States because the “threat” posed by a hegemonic—but geographically distant—United
States pales in comparison to the regional security threats that they confront in their own neighborhoods (pp.
39, 40–41). Brooks and Wohlforth also argue that there is no structurally induced soft balancing against the
United States. Although other states may favor “multipolarity” rhetorically, they simultaneously want to enjoy
the benefits of cooperation with the United States and, hence, will not balance against it (pp. 62–63, 71).
Primacy preserves a peaceful international order – military might prevents power struggles
and supports a peaceful economic order
Bradley Thayer, Assc. Prof., Department of Defense and Strategic Studies, Missouri State Univ., In Defense of
Primacy, The National Interest, November-December 2006, ln
A grand strategy based on American primacy means ensuring the United States stays the world's number one
power--the diplomatic, economic and military leader. Those arguing against primacy claim that the United
States should retrench, either because the United States lacks the power to maintain its primacy and should
withdraw from its global commitments, or because the maintenance of primacy will lead the United States into
the trap of "imperial overstretch." In the previous issue of The National Interest, Christopher Layne warned of
these dangers of primacy and called for retrenchment.1 Those arguing for a grand strategy of retrenchment are
a diverse lot. They include isolationists, who want no foreign military commitments; selective engagers, who
want U.S. military commitments to centers of economic might; and offshore balancers, who want a modified
form of selective engagement that would have the United States abandon its landpower presence abroad in
favor of relying on airpower and seapower to defend its interests. But retrenchment, in any of its guises, must
be avoided. If the United States adopted such a strategy, it would be a profound strategic mistake that would
lead to far greater instability and war in the world, imperil American security and deny the United States and
its allies the benefits of primacy. There are two critical issues in any discussion of America's grand strategy: Can
America remain the dominant state? Should it strive to do this? America can remain dominant due to its
prodigious military, economic and soft power capabilities. The totality of that equation of power answers the
first issue. The United States has overwhelming military capabilities and wealth in comparison to other states
or likely potential alliances. Barring some disaster or tremendous folly, that will remain the case for the
foreseeable future. With few exceptions, even those who advocate retrenchment acknowledge this. So the
debate revolves around the desirability of maintaining American primacy. Proponents of retrenchment focus a
great deal on the costs of U.S. action--but they fail to realize what is good about American primacy. The price
and risks of primacy are reported in newspapers every day; the benefits that stem from it are not. A GRAND
strategy of ensuring American primacy takes as its starting point the protection of the U.S. homeland and
American global interests. These interests include ensuring that critical resources like oil flow around the
world, that the global trade and monetary regimes flourish and that Washington's worldwide network of
allies is reassured and protected. Allies are a great asset to the United States, in part because they shoulder
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some of its burdens. Thus, it is no surprise to see NATO in Afghanistan or the Australians in East Timor. In
contrast, a strategy based on retrenchment will not be able to achieve these fundamental objectives of the
United States. Indeed, retrenchment will make the United States less secure than the present grand strategy
of primacy. This is because threats will exist no matter what role America chooses to play in international
politics. Washington cannot call a "time out", and it cannot hide from threats. Whether they are terrorists,
rogue states or rising powers, history shows that threats must be confronted. Simply by declaring that the
United States is "going home", thus abandoning its commitments or making unconvincing half-pledges to defend
its interests and allies, does not mean that others will respect American wishes to retreat. To make such a
declaration implies weakness and emboldens aggression. In the anarchic world of the animal kingdom,
predators prefer to eat the weak rather than confront the strong. The same is true of the anarchic world of
international politics. If there is no diplomatic solution to the threats that confront the United States, then the
conventional and strategic military power of the United States is what protects the country from such threats.
And when enemies must be confronted, a strategy based on primacy focuses on engaging enemies overseas,
away from American soil. Indeed, a key tenet of the Bush Doctrine is to attack terrorists far from America's
shores and not to wait while they use bases in other countries to plan and train for attacks against the United
States itself. This requires a physical, on-the-ground presence that cannot be achieved by offshore balancing.
Indeed, as Barry Posen has noted, U.S. primacy is secured because America, at present, commands the "global
commons"--the oceans, the world's airspace and outer space--allowing the United States to project its power far
from its borders, while denying those common avenues to its enemies. As a consequence, the costs of power
projection for the United States and its allies are reduced, and the robustness of the United States' conventional
and strategic deterrent capabilities is increased.2 This is not an advantage that should be relinquished lightly. A
remarkable fact about international politics today--in a world where American primacy is clearly and
unambiguously on display--is that countries want to align themselves with the United States. Of course, this is
not out of any sense of altruism, in most cases, but because doing so allows them to use the power of the
United States for their own purposes--their own protection, or to gain greater influence. Of 192 countries, 84
are allied with America--their security is tied to the United States through treaties and other informal
arrangements--and they include almost all of the major economic and military powers. That is a ratio of almost
17 to one (85 to five), and a big change from the Cold War when the ratio was about 1.8 to one of states aligned
with the United States versus the Soviet Union. Never before in its history has this country, or any country, had
so many allies. U.S. primacy--and the bandwagoning effect--has also given us extensive influence in
international politics, allowing the United States to shape the behavior of states and international
institutions. Such influence comes in many forms, one of which is America's ability to create coalitions of likeminded states to free Kosovo, stabilize Afghanistan, invade Iraq or to stop proliferation through the
Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). Doing so allows the United States to operate with allies outside of the UN,
where it can be stymied by opponents. American-led wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq stand in contrast to
the UN's inability to save the people of Darfur or even to conduct any military campaign to realize the goals of its
charter. The quiet effectiveness of the PSI in dismantling Libya's WMD programs and unraveling the A. Q. Khan
proliferation network are in sharp relief to the typically toothless attempts by the UN to halt proliferation. You
can count with one hand countries opposed to the United States. They are the "Gang of Five": China, Cuba, Iran,
North Korea and Venezuela. Of course, countries like India, for example, do not agree with all policy choices
made by the United States, such as toward Iran, but New Delhi is friendly to Washington. Only the "Gang of
Five" may be expected to consistently resist the agenda and actions of the United States. China is clearly the
most important of these states because it is a rising great power. But even Beijing is intimidated by the United
States and refrains from openly challenging U.S. power. China proclaims that it will, if necessary, resort to other
mechanisms of challenging the United States, including asymmetric strategies such as targeting communication
and intelligence satellites upon which the United States depends. But China may not be confident those
strategies would work, and so it is likely to refrain from testing the United States directly for the foreseeable
future because China's power benefits, as we shall see, from the international order U.S. primacy creates. The
other states are far weaker than China. For three of the "Gang of Five" cases--Venezuela, Iran, Cuba--it is an anti89
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U.S. regime that is the source of the problem; the country itself is not intrinsically anti-American. Indeed, a
change of regime in Caracas, Tehran or Havana could very well reorient relations. THROUGHOUT HISTORY,
peace and stability have been great benefits of an era where there was a dominant power--Rome, Britain or
the United States today. Scholars and statesmen have long recognized the irenic effect of power on the anarchic
world of international politics. Everything we think of when we consider the current international order--free
trade, a robust monetary regime, increasing respect for human rights, growing democratization--is directly
linked to U.S. power. Retrenchment proponents seem to think that the current system can be maintained
without the current amount of U.S. power behind it. In that they are dead wrong and need to be reminded of
one of history's most significant lessons: Appalling things happen when international orders collapse. The Dark
Ages followed Rome's collapse. Hitler succeeded the order established at Versailles. Without U.S. power, the
liberal order created by the United States will end just as assuredly. As country and western great Ral Donner
sang: "You don't know what you've got (until you lose it)." Consequently, it is important to note what those
good things are. In addition to ensuring the security of the United States and its allies, American primacy within
the international system causes many positive outcomes for Washington and the world. The first has been a
more peaceful world. During the Cold War, U.S. leadership reduced friction among many states that were
historical antagonists, most notably France and West Germany. Today, American primacy helps keep a number
of complicated relationships aligned--between Greece and Turkey, Israel and Egypt, South Korea and Japan,
India and Pakistan, Indonesia and Australia. This is not to say it fulfills Woodrow Wilson's vision of ending all
war. Wars still occur where Washington's interests are not seriously threatened, such as in Darfur, but a Pax
Americana does reduce war's likelihood, particularly war's worst form: great power wars. Second, American
power gives the United States the ability to spread democracy and other elements of its ideology of
liberalism. Doing so is a source of much good for the countries concerned as well as the United States because,
as John Owen noted on these pages in the Spring 2006 issue, liberal democracies are more likely to align with
the United States and be sympathetic to the American worldview.3 So, spreading democracy helps maintain
U.S. primacy. In addition, once states are governed democratically, the likelihood of any type of conflict is
significantly reduced. This is not because democracies do not have clashing interests. Indeed they do. Rather, it
is because they are more open, more transparent and more likely to want to resolve things amicably in
concurrence with U.S. leadership. And so, in general, democratic states are good for their citizens as well as for
advancing the interests of the United States. Critics have faulted the Bush Administration for attempting to
spread democracy in the Middle East, labeling such an effort a modern form of tilting at windmills. It is the
obligation of Bush's critics to explain why democracy is good enough for Western states but not for the rest,
and, one gathers from the argument, should not even be attempted. Of course, whether democracy in the
Middle East will have a peaceful or stabilizing influence on America's interests in the short run is open to
question. Perhaps democratic Arab states would be more opposed to Israel, but nonetheless, their people would
be better off. The United States has brought democracy to Afghanistan, where 8.5 million Afghans, 40 percent of
them women, voted in a critical October 2004 election, even though remnant Taliban forces threatened them.
The first free elections were held in Iraq in January 2005. It was the military power of the United States that put
Iraq on the path to democracy. Washington fostered democratic governments in Europe, Latin America, Asia
and the Caucasus. Now even the Middle East is increasingly democratic. They may not yet look like Westernstyle democracies, but democratic progress has been made in Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, the
Palestinian Authority and Egypt. By all accounts, the march of democracy has been impressive. Third, along with
the growth in the number of democratic states around the world has been the growth of the global economy.
With its allies, the United States has labored to create an economically liberal worldwide network
characterized by free trade and commerce, respect for international property rights, and mobility of capital
and labor markets. The economic stability and prosperity that stems from this economic order is a global public
good from which all states benefit, particularly the poorest states in the Third World. The United States created
this network not out of altruism but for the benefit and the economic well-being of America. This economic
order forces American industries to be competitive, maximizes efficiencies and growth, and benefits defense as
well because the size of the economy makes the defense burden manageable. Economic spin-offs foster the
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development of military technology, helping to ensure military prowess. Perhaps the greatest testament to the
benefits of the economic network comes from Deepak Lal, a former Indian foreign service diplomat and
researcher at the World Bank, who started his career confident in the socialist ideology of post-independence
India. Abandoning the positions of his youth, Lal now recognizes that the only way to bring relief to desperately
poor countries of the Third World is through the adoption of free market economic policies and globalization,
which are facilitated through American primacy.4 As a witness to the failed alternative economic systems, Lal is
one of the strongest academic proponents of American primacy due to the economic prosperity it provides.
Fourth and finally, the United States, in seeking primacy, has been willing to use its power not only to advance
its interests but to promote the welfare of people all over the globe. The United States is the earth's leading
source of positive externalities for the world. The U.S. military has participated in over fifty operations since the
end of the Cold War--and most of those missions have been humanitarian in nature. Indeed, the U.S. military is
the earth's "911 force"--it serves, de facto, as the world's police, the global paramedic and the planet's fire
department. Whenever there is a natural disaster, earthquake, flood, drought, volcanic eruption, typhoon or
tsunami, the United States assists the countries in need. On the day after Christmas in 2004, a tremendous
earthquake and tsunami occurred in the Indian Ocean near Sumatra, killing some 300,000 people. The United
States was the first to respond with aid. Washington followed up with a large contribution of aid and deployed
the U.S. military to South and Southeast Asia for many months to help with the aftermath of the disaster. About
20,000 U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines responded by providing water, food, medical aid, disease
treatment and prevention as well as forensic assistance to help identify the bodies of those killed. Only the U.S.
military could have accomplished this Herculean effort. No other force possesses the communications
capabilities or global logistical reach of the U.S. military. In fact, UN peacekeeping operations depend on the
United States to supply UN forces. American generosity has done more to help the United States fight the War
on Terror than almost any other measure. Before the tsunami, 80 percent of Indonesian public opinion was
opposed to the United States; after it, 80 percent had a favorable opinion of America. Two years after the
disaster, and in poll after poll, Indonesians still have overwhelmingly positive views of the United States. In
October 2005, an enormous earthquake struck Kashmir, killing about 74,000 people and leaving three million
homeless. The U.S. military responded immediately, diverting helicopters fighting the War on Terror in nearby
Afghanistan to bring relief as soon as possible. To help those in need, the United States also provided financial
aid to Pakistan; and, as one might expect from those witnessing the munificence of the United States, it left a
lasting impression about America. For the first time since 9/11, polls of Pakistani opinion have found that more
people are favorable toward the United States than unfavorable, while support for Al-Qaeda dropped to its
lowest level. Whether in Indonesia or Kashmir, the money was well-spent because it helped people in the wake
of disasters, but it also had a real impact on the War on Terror. When people in the Muslim world witness the
U.S. military conducting a humanitarian mission, there is a clearly positive impact on Muslim opinion of the
United States. As the War on Terror is a war of ideas and opinion as much as military action, for the United
States humanitarian missions are the equivalent of a blitzkrieg.
Loss of leadership causes nuclear wars, systemic global instability, and magnifies impacts
Ferguson 2004, Niall Ferguson, Professor, History, School of Business, New York University and Senior Fellow,
Hoover Institution, Stanford University, September-October 2004 (“A World Without Power” – Foreign Policy) p.
infotrac
So what is left? Waning empires. Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities.
These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might quickly find itself reliving. The
trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than the Dark Age of the
ninth century. For the world is much more populous--roughly 20 times more--so friction between the world's
disparate "tribes" is bound to be more frequent. Technology has transformed production; now human societies
depend not merely on freshwater and the harvest but also on supplies of fossil fuels that are known to be finite.
Technology has upgraded destruction, too, so it is now possible not just to sack a city but to obliterate it. For
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more than two decades, globalization--the integration of world markets for commodities, labor, and capital--has
raised living standards throughout the world, except where countries have shut themselves off from the process
through tyranny or civil war. The reversal of globalization--which a new Dark Age would produce--would
certainly lead to economic stagnation and even depression. As the United States sought to protect itself after
a second September 11 devastates, say, Houston or Chicago, it would inevitably become a less open society,
less hospitable for foreigners seeking to work, visit, or do business. Meanwhile, as Europe's Muslim enclaves
grew, Islamist extremists' infiltration of the EU would become irreversible, increasing trans-Atlantic tensions
over the Middle East to the breaking point. An economic meltdown in China would plunge the Communist
system into crisis, unleashing the centrifugal forces that undermined previous Chinese empires. Western
investors would lose out and conclude that lower returns at home are preferable to the risks of default abroad.
The worst effects of the new Dark Age would be felt on the edges of the waning great powers. The wealthiest
ports of the global economy--from New York to Rotterdam to Shanghai--would become the targets of
plunderers and pirates. With ease, terrorists could disrupt the freedom of the seas, targeting oil tankers,
aircraft carriers, and cruise liners, while Western nations frantically concentrated on making their airports
secure. Meanwhile, limited nuclear wars could devastate numerous regions, beginning in the Korean
peninsula and Kashmir, perhaps ending catastrophically in the Middle East. In Latin America, wretchedly poor
citizens would seek solace in Evangelical Christianity imported by U.S. religious orders. In Africa, the great
plagues of AIDS and malaria would continue their deadly work. The few remaining solvent airlines would
simply suspend services to many cities in these continents; who would wish to leave their privately guarded safe
havens to go there? For all these reasons, the prospect of an apolar world should frighten us today a great deal
more than it frightened the heirs of Charlemagne. If the United States retreats from global hegemony--its
fragile self-image dented by minor setbacks on the imperial frontier--its critics at home and abroad must not
pretend that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony, or even a return to the good old balance of
power. Be careful what you wish for. The alternative to unipolarity would not be multipolarity at all. It would be
apolarity--a global vacuum of power. And far more dangerous forces than rival great powers would benefit
from such a not-so-new world disorder.
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Economy Advantage-Balancing 2AC
Credible military threat reduces intervention, deters conflicts, and promotes sustainable
leadership
Robert Kagan, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Columnist for the
Washington Post, and Contributing Editor at the Weekly Standard and the New Republic, and William Kristol,
Editor and Publisher of the Weekly Standard, Spring 2000 (“The Present Danger” – National Interest) p.
ebscohost
A strong America capable of projecting force quickly and with devastating effect to important regions of the
world would make it less likely that challengers to regional stability will attempt to alter the status quo in
their favor. It might even deter them from undertaking expensive efforts to arm themselves for such a
challenge. An America whose willingness to project force is in doubt, on the other hand, can only encourage
such challenges. In Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East, the message we should be sending potential foes is:
“Don’t even think about it.” That kind of deterrence offers the best recipe for lasting peace, and it is much
cheaper than fighting the wars that would follow should we fail to build such a deterrent capacity.
Overwhelming hard power and resolve not only deters enemies, but prevents security
competition that causes balancing
Walter Russell Mead, Senior Fellow for United States Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations, 2004 (Power,
Terror, Peace, and War) p. 30
Over time, there has been a distinct shift in American strategic thinking toward the need for overwhelming
military superiority as the surest foundation for national security. This is partly for the obvious reasons of
greater security, but it is partly also because supremacy can have an important deterrent effect. If we achieve
such a degree of military supremacy that challenges seem hopeless, other states might give up trying. Security
competition is both expensive and dangerous. Establishing an overwhelming military supremacy might not
only go far to deter potential enemies from military attack, but it might also deter other powers from trying to
match the American buildup.
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Economy Advantage-Hegemony Sustainable
US Primacy is sustainable
Robert J. Lieber, Government Professor GWU, 2009, International Politics, Vol. 46, p. 136-7
Demography also works to the advantage of the United States. Most other powerful states, including China
and Russia as well as Germany and Japan, face the significant aging of their populations. Although the United
States needs to finance the costs of an aging population, this demographic shift is occurring to a lesser extent
and more slowly than among its competitors. Mark Haas argues that these factors in global aging ‘will be a
potent force for the continuation of US power dominance, both economic and military’ (Haas, 2007, p. 113).
Finally, the United States benefits from two other unique attributes, flexibility and adaptability. Time and
again, America has faced daunting challenges and made mistakes, yet it has possessed the inventiveness and
societal flexibility to adjust and respond successfully. Despite obvious problems, not least the global financial
crisis, there is reason to believe that America’s adaptive capacity will allow it to respond to future
requirements and threats. None of this assures the maintenance of its world role, but the domestic
underpinnings to support this engagement remain relatively robust. Thus for the foreseeable future, US
primacy is likely to be sustainable. America’s own national interest – and the fortunes of a global liberal
democratic order – depend on it.
US dominates the ability to power project
Stephen G. Brooks & William C. Wohlforth, Professors of Government- Dartmouth, 2008, World Out of
Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy, p. 28-9
These vast commitments have created a preeminence in military capabilities vis-à-vis all the other major powers
that is unique after the seventeenth century. While other powers could contest US forces near their
homelands, especially over issues on which nuclear deterrence is credible, the United States is and will long
remain the only state capable of projecting major military power globally. This capacity arises from “command
of the commons” –that is, unassailable military dominance over the sea, air, and space. As Barry Posen puts it,
“Command of the commons is the key military enabler of the US global power position. It allows the United
States to exploit more fully other sources of power including its own economic and military might as well as
the economic and military might of its allies. Command of the commons also helps the United States to
weaken its adversaries, by restricting their access to economic, military and political assistance….Command of
the commons provides the United States with more useful military potential for a hegemonic foreign policy
than any other offshore power has ever had.
Combination of military and economic potential means US primacy is historically
unprecedented
Stephen G. Brooks & William C. Wohlforth, Professors of Government- Dartmouth, 2008, World
Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy, p. 29-30
Posen’s study of American military primacy ratifies Kennedy’s emphasis on the historical importance of the
economic foundations of national power. It is the combination of military and economic potential that sets the
United States apart from its predecessors at the top of that international system (fig 2.1). Previous leading
states were either great commercial and naval powers or great military powers on land, never both. The
British Empire in its heyday and the United States during the Cold War, for example, shared the world with other
powers that matched or exceeded them in some areas. Even at the height of the Pax Britannica, the United
Kingdom was outspent, outmanned, and outgunned by both France and Russia. Similarly, at the dawn of the
Cold War the United States was dominant economically as well as in air and naval capabilities. But the Soviet
Union retained overall military parity, and thanks to geography and investment in land power it had a superior
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ability to seize territory in Eurasia. The United States’ share of the world GDP in 2006, 27.5 percent, surpassed
that of any leading state in modern history, with the sole exception of its own position after 1945 (when
World War II had temporarily depressed ever other major economy). The size of the US economy means that
its massive military capabilities required roughly 4 percent of its GDP in 2005, far less than the nearly 10
percent it averaged over the peak years of the Cold War, 1950-70, and the burden borne by most of the major
powers of the past. As Kennedy sums up, “Being Number One at great cost is one thing; being the world’s single
superpower on the cheap is astonishing.”
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Economy Advantage-A2: Economic Crisis
Recent economic crisis doesn’t end US primacy
Robert J. Lieber, Government Professor GWU, 2009, International Politics, Vol. 46, p. 135
The extraordinary financial crisis that has impacted the United States, Europe, large parts of Asia and much of
the rest of the world has provided the impetus for renewed predictions of America’s demise as the
preeminent global power. Of course, present problems are very serious and the financial crisis is the worst to
hit the United States and Europe since the great depression began some 80 years ago. The impact on real
estate, banking, insurance, credit, the stock market and overall business activity is quite severe, and a painful
recession is already underway. Yet by themselves, these developments do not mean that America will
somehow collapse, let alone see some other country assume the unique role it has played in world affairs.
Arguably, the impact of the crisis upon the US economy is actually less than for the major European powers.
For example, the $700 billion bailout for financial firms approved by Congress amounts to about 5 per cent of
the country’s annual gross domestic product, significantly less as a percentage than the burdens borne by
many countries. In addition, while the exchange rate of the euro declined sharply in the early months of the
crisis, as did the British pound, the Russian ruble and many other currencies, the dollar rose sharply in value as
foreign investors sought a safe haven for their funds. (Among the other G-8 currencies, only the Japanese yen
experienced a substantial rise.) The United States will eventually surmount the present crisis, the excesses that
helped to cause it will be corrected, and despite painful costs of adjustment, its economy and financial systems
will sooner or later resume a more normal pattern of activity and growth. The new Obama administration will
continue and even intensify cooperation with other leading countries in efforts to reform the international
economic and financial systems. These may or may not produce a new ‘Bretton Woods’ system, but
agreements will be reached and the United States necessarily will play a central role in this effort.
No economic power transition to China
Stephen G. Brooks & William C. Wohlforth, Professors of Government- Dartmouth, 2008, World
Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy, p. 132-3
Finally, even if China benefits more from enhanced global economic interdependence than the United States,
a power transition is simply not in the cards for many decades precisely because the United States now
occupies such a dominant power position in the system. The challengers that Gilpin discussed were great
powers with advanced economies at a comparable level of development to the hegemon. In those
circumstances, aggregate GDP is a far better index of power than in a case where the rising state has a very
large but comparatively poor population. As Chapter 2 established, the power gap between the United States
and China is currently immense, especially in military capabilities; no single factor, including globalization, can
wipe it away anytime soon.
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Economy Advantage-A2: Dollar Shift
US dollar won’t be replaced as the global currency
Stephen G. Brooks & William C. Wohlforth, Professors of Government- Dartmouth, 2008, World
Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy, p. 126-8
In fact, Pape’s scenario is highly improbable. For one thing, there is little reason to think that a switch to euro
oil pricing could occur in the policy-relevant future. In this regard, OPEC’s overall stance is most crucial. Over
the years, “OPEC has many times said that it would continue pricing oil sales in dollars only.” The general
aversion of OPEC to switch away from pricing oil only in dollars is grounded in concrete economic factors. The
various economic advantages of the dollar for OPEC would be less consequential if there were not downsides
associated with pricing oil in multiple currencies. Yet from a transactions cost standpoint, continuing to price oil
exclusively in dollars has a number of advantages. For these and other reasons, it thus appears that “OPEC is
unlikely to bring about or even try to shift markets to euro-priced oil.” The more important point is that even if a
switch to euro oil pricing eventually did occur, the practice of pricing oil in dollars is a very minor contributor
to the status of the dollar as the international reserve currency. Global trade flows—of which oil is obviously
just one element—are a tiny portion of global financial flows: the average daily turnover in foreign exchange
markets is now $3.2 trillion per day, while the value of world exports is just under $12 trillion per year.
Significantly, many of the core contributing factors to the dollar’s status as the reserve currency have the
weight of path dependency behind them. The dollar’s role as the reserve currency is intimately related to the
United States’ long-standing position as the largest military and economic power in the system. The dollar’s
status as the reserve currency is also a product of the deep, well-developed nature of US capital and money
markets: “Countries, or more precisely cities within countries, become financial centers when their markets in
financial assets are deep, liquid, and stable. Status as a financial center, once acquired, thus tends to sustain
itself. When a country succeeds in attracting a critical mass of transactions in the relevant securities, other
investors bring their business there to take advantage of the liquidity and depth of the market. Incumbency is
an advantage, and the United States is the leading incumbent financial center.” Furthermore, “network
externalities” make use of the dollar very attractive: the dollar has long been widely held (around two-thirds
of foreign exchange reserves are now held in dollars) and widely used, and “the more often a currency is used
in international transactions, the lower the costs associated with using that currency and hence the more
attractive is the currency for conducting international exchanges.”
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Economy Advantage-A2: Iraq
Four reasons Iraq doesn’t take out primacy
Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London,
2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 266-8
In the context of American primacy, it is worth recalling William Wohlforth’s observations on measuring power.
Four points argue that the days of American primacy and a unipolar world are not yet over. First, power as a
relational concept and power as resources are quite different concepts. That is, the ability to achieve certain
stated international ends or global public goods need not, of itself, reveal the relative power of a state. The
stalemate reached in Korea in the early 1950s, for instance, did not negate America’s superpower position in the
First Cold War. Similarly, America’s failed counterinsurgency in Vietnam did not bring into being a multipolar
world. Whether or when America “fails” in Iraq, that intervention is equally unlikely to usher in a new
multipolarity. America remains the world’s leading power “after Iraq.” It spends roughly as much on defense
as the rest of the world put together. The Pentagon’s budget bid for fiscal year 2008, of $578 billion,
represented approximately 4 percent of GDP, a low proportion by historical standards. Of course, the ability to
use those resources and the need to do so are contingent matters. American power has not been able to
establish a secure constitutional democracy in Iraq any more than it could decisively quell the communist
subversion of South Vietnam. But the fact of American primacy endures even in the face of a campaign that
did not secure its original objectives. The cardinal indicators of a challenge to that unipolar world – a
balancing of other powers against the superpower or a meaningful increase in rival powers’ defense spending
– have simply not occurred. Second, shifting the goalposts—evaluating US power by its ability to resolve global
problems from drug proliferation to climate change—does not offer a solid perspective. The US did not cease
to be superpower after the Bay of Pigs fiasco or on being ejected from the UN Commission on Human Rights.
The failure to intervene in Darfur will come to be regarded as a global abdication of responsibility to
international actors, just as Rwanda was previously. But it was not authored by Washington and it affects
American power not a jot. Third, relying on a single indicator is typically unreliable in evaluating national
power. To be sure, analysis of budget and trade deficits highlights possible weaknesses in the American
economy. But the economy is, on other indicators—growth, inflation, unemployment—in robust health.
Moreover, even in terms of the financial position of the US, growing interdependence means that those states
(notably China and Japan) that hold most in terms of dollar reserves are themselves exposed should they
abandon them. There exist few states with a relationship with the US (and all developed states have one) that
would not be materially disadvantaged if America suffered a serious economic downturn. Fourth, analysts
often overlook latent power – the degree to which resources can or could be mobilized by a government.
Despite America waging a global campaign since 9/11, it has been the military rather than the nation as a whole
that has been at war. The public has not been asked or required to make serious material sacrifices either to
secure the homeland or to assist the struggle against jihadism abroad. Taxes remain low, America has an
exclusively volunteer army, and fatalities in Iraq – while tragic—do not remotely brook comparison with those of
Vietnam, Korea, or the Second World War. In sum, America possesses ample reserves with which to defend its
global role and primacy, if needed.
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Economy Advantage-A2: Overstretch
This theory is flawed-it doesn’t account for potential resources and can’t apply independent
of counterbalancing
Stephen G. Brooks & William C. Wohlforth, Professors of Government- Dartmouth, 2008, World
Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy, p. 210-1
Imperial Overstretch. Paul Kennedy coined the term imperial overstretch to describe the fate of past leading
states whose “global interests and obligations” became “far too large for the country to be able to defend
them all simultaneously.” Mounting budget deficits, increased foreign indebtedness, and armed forces
stretched thin in Iraq led many analysts to warn that the United States was in danger of following suit. But these
first two strains are chiefly the result of domestic choices to cut taxes while increasing spending, while the latter
can largely be traced to the priority placed on the Pentagon’s force modernization plan over a significant
increase in the size of the army. Analysts who argue that the United States now suffers, or soon will suffer,
from imperial overstretch invariably fail to distinguish between latent power (the level of resources that could
be mobilized from society) and actual power (the level of resources a government actually chooses to mobilize).
In his original formulation of imperial overstretch, Kennedy had in mind a situation in which a state’s actual and
latent capabilities cannot cope with its existing foreign policy commitments. To date, there is virtually no
research on whether the United States faces this prospect. Part of the problem is that because the Bush
administration made no attempt to ask the public for greater sacrifice, there is no observable evidence of
whether it would be possible to extract more resources for advancing US foreign policy interests. The Cold
War experience indicates that the US public is capable of supporting, over long periods, significantly higher
spending on foreign policy than current levels. Yet this does not necessarily mean that the US public would be
willing to support a dramatic increase in foreign policy spending now if policymakers called for it. The larger
issue is that though IR scholars use the term, they have not theorized or researched imperial overstretch as a
constraint independent of counterbalancing. In the historical cases highlighted by Kennedy and others, leading
states suffered from imperial overstretch in significant part because they faced counterbalancing that
demanded more resources than they were able to extract domestically. As chapters 2 and 3 showed, the
United States does not face a counterbalancing constraint. This raises a key question of whether there are
limits to the US polity’s capacity to generate power in the absence of the threat posed by a geopolitical peer
rival. Lacking a focused research effort, scholars can now only answer with speculation.
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Economy Advantage-A2: Obama
US will retain committed to primacy
Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London,
2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 5-6
Notwithstanding their obvious dissimilarities, the parallels between the Truman and Bush presidencies are
instructive. The Bush presidency was the most important and controversial in American foreign policy since
Truman. But the demise of the Bush presidency marks not the repudiation of an aberrant or even
revolutionary disjuncture in foreign policy but the beginning of the end of the first phase in a Second Cold War
against Jihadist Islam. The past is, in this respect at least, truly prologue, even as this particular prologue has
now passed. Just as Truman left office with his popularity at its lowest ebb, his party charged with a
succession of foreign policy failures, and the nation mired in a seemingly unwinnable war, so Bush ends his
tenure with relatively few commentators either within or outside America mourning his exit. But, like Truman
before him, Bush’s imprint on American grand strategy, his joining a global war on Islamist terror and
establishment of policies at home and abroad to see America prevail in that war will remain substantially intact
under his successors. The central premises and prescriptions of the National Security Strategy (NSS)
documents of 2002 and 2006 will continue to shape American foreign policy in the new administration of 200913 and beyond.
Continuity of the terrorist threat and failure of multilateral alternatives make presidential
pursuit of primacy inevitable
Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London,
2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 293-4
For this reason, and despite the hopes of the liberal left and the predictions of realists, there is not a single
mainstream US politician with serious presidential ambitions who would choose the constraints of
multipolarity over the freedom of US primacy. It is inconceivable that a presidential candidate who seeks a
permission slip to act on behalf of American security could win the White House; in 2004, John Kerry’s reference
to “a global test” for US foreign policy should pass won him very few votes. Whilst building the United Nations
into the Second Cold War is fine in principle, the structural and political impediments to doing so are manifold
and, we confidently predict, quite beyond the remit of even the most tactically astute, rhetorically gifted, and
politically empowered American president. The European Union, likewise, offers the United States very little
in terms of enhanced military or diplomatic effectiveness. The freedom of action Bush enjoyed, which
included the freedom to botch disastrously the aftermath of the Iraq War, is one none of his successors will
sacrifice. Much as it pains Bush’s many detractors – on the right and the left – to acknowledge, a change of
administration in Washington will have no measurable effect on Islamist ideology, though it might on their
capacity; a sound policy will negate that capacity, a poor one will advance it. The Bin Laden camp waged war as
fiercely against Bill Clinton as it did against George W. Bush and will continue to do so against their successors.
A jihadist suicide bomber is supposedly afforded seventy-two virgins in heaven whether he kills Democrats or
Republicans. Because the frustrations and ambitions of the enemy are unlikely to change much over time we
should not expect the American response to those ambitions to alter very much either. Continuity of threat
will determine the continuity of American strategy. The imperative will be one few American presidents can
amend without risking catastrophe. We predict the next few will not try.
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Economy Advantage-A2: Bad Alliances
Non unique and US primacy can bring them around
Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London,
2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 136-7
Critics argue that only a hypocritical nation would urge the democratization of states like Afghanistan and Iraq
whilst sustaining the military dictatorships of Pakistan, the autocracy of Uzbekistan or the feudal theocracy of
Saudi Arabia. The war on terror is hardly unique in this regard. The First Cold War was replete with US
alliance-making of dubious moral character. Such an auditing of both cold wars misses the necessity of noseholding when facing an existential threat. In her famous Commentary article, the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick
argued that American foreign policy came most unstuck when it was guided by a naive moral compass. Jimmy
Carter was her case study. The fear, for her, was not that friendly dictators would be replaced by liberal
internationalists but by “less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion.” The logic applied to Iran in 1979 –
when a westward-looking dictator was overthrown by anti-American Islamists—applies today in places like
Pakistan. American interests are rarely served by abandoning friends on account of their moral turpitude.
This enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend approach explains why the US-Soviet wartime alliance of 1941-5 was
so effective, despite the less than pristine human rights record of Joseph Stalin, and why, in the First Cold War,
supporting Pinochet’s junta in Chile was preferable to allowing communist subversion across that continent.
Ultimately, as Kirkpatrick predicted, right-wing regimes, like Chile, transitioned into functioning, pro-western
democracies. The odds on this happening to Pakistan and Kazakhstan are perhaps long but only possible at all
if they remain within the US camp.
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Economy Advantage-A2: Multilaterialism Good
Multilateralism net worse-leads to inaction
Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London,
2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 38-9
Consistent with the purported moral sanctity of multilateralism is the belief that it is more effective
practically than the unilateralism of any one state. This is open to dispute on a number of fronts. If anything,
the lesson of post 1991 international crises is that if the US government does not act the EU is unlikely to do
so. US ambivalence over the Rwandan genocide (1994) goes some way to explaining—even if it does not
excuse—European inaction. It seems reasonable to argue that, without an American willingness to take on
Serbia in 1994-6 and 1999, EU leaders, as Alikja Izetbegovic, the president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, is alleged to
have said, “would have talked and talked until we are all dead.” Sometimes the multilateral imperative
(which of its very nature requires an illusive consensus) leads to a lethal inaction.
Primacy doesn’t trade-off with multilateral problem solving
Robert J. Lieber, Government Professor GWU, 2009, International Politics, Vol. 46, p. 134-5
Can American primacy be sustained? Threats from radical Islamist groups, nuclear proliferation, the potential
use of CBRN weapons and competition from authoritarian capitalist powers pose challenges that require
assertive American engagement. In addition, democratic allies and others have shown few signs of wanting to
forego the involvement of the North American ‘Goliath,’7 and despite heated rhetoric about ‘hyperpower’8
and real or imagined excesses of unilateralism, a good deal of multilateral cooperation has continued to take
place. The NSS of September 2002 included a much-overlooked endorsement of multilateralism and, at the
time, the Bush administration avidly sought to enlarge its coalition of the willing for the use of force against
Saddam. In recent years, there have been six-party talks with North Korea, deference to Germany, Britain and
France (the EU-3) for their ultimately unsuccessful negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, promotion
of the multilateral Proliferation Security Initiative aimed at strengthening the NPT, co-sponsorship with France
of UN Security Council Resolution 1559 calling for the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon, a massive
increase in funding to combat AIDS in Africa, an expanded NATO role in Afghanistan and UN mandates – UNSC
Resolutions 1546 (2004) and 1637 (2005) – for the US-led multinational force in Iraq.
International cooperation is dependent on unilateralism – it spurs countries into action
Michla Pomerance, Professor of International Law, Hebrew University, Spring 2002 (“U.S. Multilateralism, Left
and Right” – Orbis) p. ScienceDirect
More fundamentally, those who have understood the concept of "multilateralism" best have always
emphasized the dependence of multilateralism on unilateralism. Thus, the foremost American scholar of
international organization, Inis Claude (author of Swords into Plowshares), has written that despite the world’s
bias against unilateralism, "unilateralism … is, in fact, indispensable to effective multilateralism." "Effective
multilateralism starts with resolute unilateralism; the mission of the leader is not respectful deference to the
majority but determined pulling and hauling at it." Or as Thomas Friedman wrote in 1995: If the Clinton foreign
policy team has learned anything these past two years I hope it is this: there is no multilateralism without
unilateralism. Unless you first show people that you are ready to go alone, you will never have partners to go
with you …. Repeat after me: ‘The UN is us. The UN is us.’ From this perspective, the ones who were paying lip
service to multilateralism were not Bush and his Republican followers, who understood this important lesson
instinctively, but rather all those who insisted on untainted "humanitarian" motives for multilateral actions.
Theirs was a prescription for inaction and could provide its pretext.
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Economy Advantage-A2: Soft Power Good
No internal link from soft power to primacy
Stephen G. Brooks & William C. Wohlforth, Professors of Government- Dartmouth, 2002, Foreign
Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 4, July/August, p. 31
Historically, the major forces pushing powerful states toward restraint and magnanimity have been the limits of
their strength and the fear of overextension and balancing. Great powers typically checked their ambitions and
deferred to others not because they wanted to but because they had to in order to win the cooperation they
needed to survive and prosper. It is thus no surprise that today’s champions of American moderation and
international benevolence stress the constraints on American power rather than the lack of them. Political
scientist Joseph Nye, for example, insists that “[the term] unipolarity is misleading because it exaggerates the
degree to which the United States is able to get the results it wants in some dimensions of world politics. ...
American power is less effective than it might first appear.” And he cautions that if the United States “handles
its hard power in an overbearing, unilateral manner,” then others might be provoked into forming a balancing
coalition. Such arguments are unpersuasive, however, because they fail to acknowledge the true nature of
the current international system. The United States cannot be scared into meekness by warnings of inefficacy
or potential balancing. Isolationists and aggressive unilateralists see this situation clearly, and their domestic
opponents need to as well. Now and for the foreseeable future, the United States will have immense power
resources it can bring to bear to force or entice others to do its bidding on a case-by-case basis.
Hard power doesn’t trade-off
William H. Thornton, Professor Cultural Studies National Cheng Kung University, 2005, New
World Empire, p. 6-7
9/11 changed all that in a flash. The 1990s turned out to have been at best a respite between two warring
ages. It was made abundantly clear that order would not simply unfold, but would have to be imposed. In the
White House this revelation was so far from bad news that the challenge was not smiling too broadly in front of
the cameras. At home and abroad, security took full priority over all the things the administration wanted to
dispose of anyway. Securitization also enhanced the comparative advantage of America’s military supremacy—
this is at a time when its economic supremacy was flagging. That gain in hard power was not offset by any
major loss in soft power, since America was still swimming with the global tide. Just to make a point however,
Washington let the fact be known that it could go it alone or even swim against the tide if need be. NATO
responded to 9/11 by invoking for the first time a provision of its founding treaty that construes an attack on
any member as an attack on all. But, as if to put multilateralism in mothballs, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz curtly vetoed that collective action, saying that if the United States needed help, it would ask for it.
Libya proves necessity of hard power to make soft power effective
Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London,
2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 133-4
For others, including ourselves, coercive diplomacy played the more decisive role. Neoconservatives argued
that the example of regime change in Iraq forced Qadaffi’s U-turn—“Saddam was deposed, eight months ago,
on flimsy evidential grounds,” observed the Libyan leader, “just think what will become of me when the
Americans have absolute knowledge of my WMD capacity,” [F]ive days after we captured Saddam Hussein,”
noted Dick Cheney pointedly, “Qadaffi came forward and announced that he was going to surrender all of his
nuclear materials to the United States.” This “Libyan surrender,” concurred Charles Krauthammer, was the
product of “a clearly enunciated policy – now known as the Bush Doctrine – of targeting, by preemptive war if
necessary, hostile regimes engaged in terror and/or refusing to come clean on WMDs …Hussein did not get
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the message and ended up in a hole. Qaddafi got the message.” Ronald Reagan had, after all, bombed Tripoli
in April 1986 in reprisal for its sponsorship of terrorism. Precedent therefore tended to support the conclusion,
no doubt shared by the Libyan regime, that, through a 9/11-three Ts prism, the US would not balk at doing so
again, and more decisively.
The Libyan case is a classic example of liberal internationalists assuming everyone thinks like them. The regime,
according to them, responded to inducements to rejoin “the society of nations” rather than to the fear of
American violence. It was not the war on terror that accounted for Qadaffis’s conversion but his empathy with,
or threatened exclusion from, a liberal project. Bush was more realistic about why Libya changed course.
“Actions by the United States and our allies,” he said, “have sent an unmistakable message to regimes that
seek or possess weapons of mass destruction: Those weapons do not bring influence or prestige. They bring
isolation or otherwise unwelcome consequences.” These “unwelcome consequences” are perennially
undervalued, even eschewed, in liberal statecraft when, in reality, they are a form of hard power that makes
soft power possible. Neither works in isolation, both are only effective in tandem. As Jentleson and Whytock
conclude, “there is greater potential complementarity between force and diplomacy than more singular
advocates of one ore the other tend to convey.”
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Economy Advantage-A2: Anti-Americanism Turn
No link between anti-Americanism and hard power-only risk of a turn
Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London,
2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 198
Such perceptions reflect and reinforce a widespread view of America that is untroubled by dispassion and
balance. Any objective analysis of American military interventions can hardly cast Washington as a regional
villain or Islamophobic power. During the last half-century, in eleven of twelve major conflicts between
Muslims and non-Muslims, the US sided with the Muslim/Arab groups. American backing for Israel has been
the sole significant exception, with the US helping Israel to survive efforts from Arab states and terrorists to
remove it from the map. As Barry Rubin notes: “It has been the United States’ perceived softness in recent
years, rather than its bullying behavior, that has encouraged anti-Americans to act on their beliefs. After the
United States failed to respond aggressively to many terrorist attacks against its citizens, stood by while
Americans were seized as hostages in Iran and Lebanon, let Saddam Hussein remain in power while letting the
shah fall, pressured its friends and courted its enemies, and allowed its prized Arab-Israeli peace process to be
destroyed, why should anyone have respected its interests or fear its wrath?...further concessions will only
encourage even more contempt for the United States and make the anti-American campaign more
attractive…If Arab anti-Americanism turns out to be grounded in domestic maneuvering rather than American
misdeeds, neither launching a public relations campaign nor changing Washington’s policies will affect it… Only
when the systems that manufacture and encourage anti-Americanism fail will popular opinion also change.”
Soft power net more likely to provoke anti-Americanism
Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London,
2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 199
The tenacity with which febrile notions of American designs and influence win currency in the Islamic world is
remarkable. Indeed, this should be factored into discussions of American “soft” power winning “hearts and
minds.” As Bernard Lewis noted, when Khomeini and other fanatics labeled America the “Great Satan” they
chose their term carefully. Satan is a seducer more than he is a warrior. It is the power to tempt “good
Muslims” into a degenerate, infidel mindset and lifestyle that is the devil’s greatest threat. It is not what
America does that accounts for Muslim rage. To parrot this notion as a rational explanation, demanding a
change in policy that will then lead to cordial relations, is to ignore the reality that, for Islmaists, what
America is generates resentment, anger, and envy. It is this paradox (“Yankee go home! And take me with
you!) that, among other problems, precludes the success of a “hearts and minds”-based strategy. As Lewis
observed: “from the writings of Khomeini and other ideologists of Islamic fundamentalism, it is cleat that it is the
seductive appeal of American culture, far more than any possible hostile acts by American governments, that
they see as offering the greatest menace to the true faith and the right path as they define them. By
denouncing America as the Great Satan, the late Ayatollah Khomeini was paying an unconscious tribute to that
seductive appeal.” Given this, and the societal, economic, and political deficiencies that generate antiAmericanisms in the region, what can feasibly be done?
Radicalism not driven by US primacy
Robert J. Lieber, Government Professor GWU, 2009, International Politics, Vol. 46, p. 123-4
Another reason for concluding that the threat is deep-seated and long term has to do with the fundamental
sources of radical Islamism. Those who downplay the threat tend to argue that the most important causes stem
from specific provocations by America, Israel or the West, particularly the Iraq War, the American presence in
the Middle East, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the affront caused by ‘occupation’ of Arab or Muslim lands
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(see Pape, 2005a). Such interpretations not only do not take into account the far deeper origins of radical Islam,
but they also tend to over-simply the explanation of contemporary conflicts. In contrast, Assaf Moghadam of
the Olin Institute for Security Studies at Harvard has provided a compelling refutation of the idea that suicide
terrorism is primarily motivated by a resistance to ‘occupation.’ Instead he emphasizes the way in which it has
evolved into a ‘globalization of martyrdom’ (Moghadam, 2006; see also Doran, 2002). The fundamental causes
of radical jihadism and its manifestations of apocalyptic nihilism lie in the failure to cope successfully with the
disruptions brought by modernity and globalization and in the humiliation experienced, especially by parts of
the Arab–Muslim world, over the past four centuries. These reactions have been expressed at both individual
and societal levels. For example, in an implied reference to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and thus the end
of the Muslim Caliphate which had extended back some 13 centuries to the time of the Prophet, Osama bin
Laden’s October 2001 video invoked 80 years of Muslim ‘humiliation’ and ‘degradation’ at the hands of the West
(Al-Jazeera, 2001). In turn, the 2002 UN Arab Human Development Report has described the contemporary Arab
world as afflicted by profound deficits in freedom, in empowerment of women, and in knowledge and
information. These failures have, in some cases, been amplified by the experiences of individuals who have
become detached from one world and yet have been unable to integrate into another (see Lewis, 2002; Ajami,
2006; Murawiec, 2008). It is noteworthy too that the 9/11 attacks took place before the US-led invasion of
Iraq, and that terrorist strikes against American targets abroad were carried out in 1990s when the Israel–
Arab peace process seemed to be making real progress. Suicide terrorism elsewhere has had little to do with
‘occupation’ by the West or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Attacks in Bali, Mumbai, Istanbul, Jakarta,
Casablanca, Amman, the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the effort to blow up the Indian
parliament, the destruction of the Shiite golden dome mosque in Samarra, deadly Sunni–Shiite violence in Iraq,
mass casualty attacks on public transportation in London and trains in Madrid, and numerous interrupted plots
are among multiple indications not only of the wider threat posed by radical jihadism, but also of a deepseated and fundamental rage against modernity and those identified with it.
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***ADD-ONS***
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Readiness-2AC
A successful port attack would shatter military readiness
RAND Project AIR FORCE, a division of the RAND Corporation, is the U.S. Air Force’s federally funded research
and development center for studies and analyses 2008 (The MaritimeDimension ofInternational
SecurityTerrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United States)
Besides economic considerations, the marine transportation system plays an important role in U.S. national
security. The Depart- ments of Defense and Transportation have jointly designated 17 American ports—13 of
which also act as commercial trading hubs—as strategic because they are necessary to expedite major military
deploy- ments.1 In the view of the Government Accountability Office, if these terminals were decisively
attacked, “not only could ... civilian casual- ties be sustained, but DoD [Department of Defense] could also lose
precious cargo and time and be forced to rely heavily on its [already] overburdened airlift capabilities.”2
That’s key to hegemony-alternative is WMD warfare
Stump, US representative, September 25, 2000, [Bob, Roll Call, lexis]
So what should the military be ready for? First and foremost, it must be ready to defend our homeland. Over
the next decade, the military must prepare for conventional threats as well as chemical, biological and nuclear
threats to the nation. Given the fractious nature of the post-Cold War world, the U.S. military must also
prepare for threats from rogue nations seeking ways to threaten American interests without challenging a
superior conventional force. In many cases, such nations are developing ballistic missiles, making development
of a national missile defense system for the United States a priority. Unfortunately, earlier this month President
Clinton announced he would not go forward with plans to deploy an NMD system. In so doing, the President
delayed by at least one year the deployment of a system necessary for the defense of the U.S. homeland.
Reviving this initiative must be a top priority of the next administration and Congress. Second, the U.S. military
must be ready to fight and win large-scale conflicts. While some have questioned the current national military
strategy requiring that the U.S. military be capable of fighting two major regional conflicts almost
simultaneously, few question that the our forces must remain capable of thwarting aggression in Korea and
Southwest Asia. The ability to respond with credible force in these regions is generally accepted as a
responsibility that the United States must bear as the only remaining global superpower. Furthermore, if the
pundits are correct in their estimate that a regional hegemony will emerge in the coming decades, new
strategic realities may dictate that the U.S. military be capable of fighting a major conflict in yet another
theater. Third, in the event that our national security or national interests are threatened, the U.S. military
must be ready to rapidly address smaller regional conflicts before they spread into major ones. This "putting
out the fires" mission has become increasingly vital since the end of the Cold War, as tribal, ethnic, religious
and territorial conflicts are no longer checked by competing superpowers. Speed is of the essence in reacting to
such conflicts, making the ability to rapidly project force around the world a critical element in future force
plans.
And, readiness is key to avert global great power war
Donald Kagan, Professor of History and Classics at Yale, 1997, [Donald,†ORBIS,†Spring†1997,†p.†188-9]
America’s most vital interest therefore, is maintaining the general peace for war has been the swiftest, most
expensive, and most devastating means of changing the balance of international power. But peace does not
keep itself, although one of the most common errors in modern thinking about international relations is the
assumption that peace is natural and can be preserved merely by having peace-seeking nations avoid
provocative actions. The last three-quarters of the twentieth century strongly suggest the opposite conclusion:
major war is more likely to come when satisfied states neglect their defenses and fail to make active part in
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the preservation of peace. It is vital to understand that the current relatively peaceful and secure situation is
neither inevitable nor immutable. It reflects two conditions built up with tremendous effort and expense during
the last half century: the great power of the United States and the general expectation that Americans will be
willing to use that power when necessary. The diminution of US power would thus not be a neutral act that
would leave the situation as it stands. Instead, it would be a critical step in undermining the stability of the
international situation. Calculations based on the absence of visible potential enemies would immediately be
made invalid by Americaís withdrawal from its current position as the major bulwark supporting the world
order.
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Trade-2AC
Successful terrorist attack on a single port shatters global trade flows
John F. Frittelli Specialist in Transportation Resources, Science, and Industry Division 27 May 2005 (Port and
Maritime Security: Background and Issues for Congress; http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL31733.pdf)
Government leaders and security experts are worried that the maritime transportation system could be used
by terrorists to smuggle personnel, weapons of mass destruction, or other dangerous materials into the
United States. They are also concerned that ships in U.S. ports, particularly large commercial cargo ships or
cruise ships, could be attacked by terrorists. Experts are concerned that a large-scale terrorist attack at a U.S.
port could not only cause local death and damage, but also paralyze global maritime commerce. The 9/11
Commission reported that, “While commercial aviation remains a possible target, terrorists may turn their
attention to other modes. Opportunities to do harm are as great, or greater, in maritime and surface
transportation. Initiatives to secure shipping containers have just begun.”3
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Oil Shocks-2AC
Terrorists will target port vulnerabilities to attack oil tankers sparking massive supply shocks
Jonathan Medalia Specialist in National Defense Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division; 7 December
2004 (Port and Maritime Security: Potential for Terrorist Nuclear Attack Using Oil Tankers;
http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RS21997.pdf)
Terrorists could be expected to target a port that handled a large volume of oil and other goods and that had
a densely-populated area that tankers passed on their way through a harbor to an unloading terminal. Various
cities worldwide meet these criteria. If terrorists sought major economic damage while minimizing loss of life,
they might try to target the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, or LOOP, the only U.S. deepwater oil port that can
handle fully loaded supertankers. LOOP, 18 miles off the Louisiana coast, currently handles about 10% of U.S.
crude oil imports.
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LNG-2AC
Port security vulnerabilities make LNG attacks inevitable
Paul W. Parfomak and John Frittelli Resources, Science, and Industry Division of CRS 9 January 2007
(Maritime Security: Potential Terrorist Attacks and Protection Priorities;
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl33787.pdf)
Potential terrorist attacks on LNG tankers in U.S. waters have been a key concern of policy makers in ports
with LNG facilities because such attacks could cause catastrophic fires in port and nearby populated areas. The
Coast Guard’s FY2006 budget specifically requested funding for “additional boat crews and
screeningpersonnelatkeyLNGhubs.”96 Todate,no LNG tanker or land-based LNG facility in the world has been
attacked by terrorists. However, similar natural gas and oil assets have been favored terror targets
internationally. The attack on the Limburg, although an oil tanker, is often cited as an indication of LNG tanker
vulnerability. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) specifically included LNG tankers among a list of
potential terrorist targets in a security alert late in 2003.97 The DHS also reported that “in early 2001 there was
some suspicion of possible associations between stowaways on Algerian flagged LNG tankers arriving in
Boston and persons connected with the so-called ‘Millennium Plot’” to bomb targets in the United States.
While these suspicions could not be proved, DHS stated that “the risks associated with LNG shipments are real,
and they can never be entirely eliminated.”98 A 2004 report by Sandia National Laboratories concluded that
potential terrorist attacks on LNG tankers, could be considered “credible and possible.”99 The Sandia report
identified LNG tankers as vulnerable to ramming, pre-placed explosives, insider takeover, hijacking, or
external terrorist actions (such as a Limburg-type, missile or airplane attack).100 Former Bush Administration
counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke has asserted that terrorists have both the desire and capability to
attack LNG shipping with the intention of harming the general population.101
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Topicality
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Topicality-A2: In=Throughout
Dictionary.com No date
In: noun, verb, inned, in·ning. preposition 1. (used to indicate inclusion within space, a place, or limits): walking
in the park. 2. (used to indicate inclusion within something abstract or immaterial): in politics; in the autumn.
Encarta 2007 – Encarta World English Dictionary, 7 (“In (1)”, 2007,
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?refid=1861620513)
in [ in ] CORE MEANING: a grammatical word indicating that something or somebody is within or inside
something.
1. preposition indicates place: indicates that something happens or is situated somewhere
He spent a whole year in Russia.
2. preposition indicates state: indicates a state or condition that something or somebody is experiencing
The banking industry is in a state of flux.
3. preposition after: after a period of time that will pass before something happens
She should be well enough to leave in a week or two.
4. preposition during: indicates that something happens during a period of time
He crossed the desert in 39 days.
5. preposition indicates how something is expressed: indicates the means of communication used to express
something
I managed to write the whole speech in French.
6. preposition indicates subject area: indicates a subject or field of activity
She graduated with a degree in biology.
7. preposition as consequence of: while doing something or as a consequence of something
In reaching for a glass he knocked over the ashtray.
8. preposition covered by: indicates that something is wrapped or covered by something
The floor was covered in balloons and toys.
9. preposition indicates how somebody is dressed: indicates that somebody is dressed in a particular way
She was dressed in a beautiful suit.
10. preposition pregnant with: pregnant with offspring
The cows were in calf.
11. adjective fashionable: fashionable or popular
always knew which clubs were in
12. adjective holding power or office: indicates that a party or group has achieved or will achieve power or
authority
voted in overwhelmingly
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Topicality-A2: Investment=Must Build New
Chapman 2011 (Chapman and Cutler LLP, “The American Jobs Act and Its Impact on a National Infrastructure
Bank”, Client Alert, 9-29, http://www.chapman.com/media/news/media.1081.pdf)
Eligibility for financial assistance must be demonstrated to the satisfaction of AIFAʼs Board of Directors.
Generally, the applicantʼs request must meet the Actʼs definition of a transportation infrastructure project,
water infrastructure project, or energy infrastructure project. To be eligible, the project must have costs that are
reasonably anticipated to equal or exceed $100 million. However, rural infrastructure projects need only have
costs that are reasonably anticipated to equal or exceed $25 million.
-- Transportation Infrastructure: includes the construction, alteration, or repair, including the facilitation of
intermodal transit, of the following subsectors:
o Highways or roads
o Bridges
o Mass transit
o Inland waterways
o Commercial ports
o Airports
o Air traffic control systems
o Passenger rail, including high-speed rail
o Freight rail systems
-- Water Infrastructure: includes the construction, consolidation, alteration, or repair of the following
subsectors:
o Wastewater treatment facilities
o Storm water management systems
o Dams
o Solid waste disposal facilities
o Drinking water treatment facilities
o Levees
o Open space management systems
-- Energy Infrastructure: includes the construction, consolidation, alteration, or repair of the following
subsectors:
o Pollution reduced energy generation
o Transmission and distribution
o Storage
o Energy efficiency enhancements for public and commercial buildings
DeLauro 2011 (U.S. Representative, Legislation to Create a National Infrastructure Development Bank, H.R.
402, 1-24, http://www2.apwa.net//Documents/Advocacy/HR%20402.pdf)
(25) TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT.—The term ‘‘transportation infrastructure project’’ means
any project for the construction, maintenance, or enhancement of highways, roads, bridges, transit and
intermodal systems, inland waterways, commercial ports, airports, high speed rail and freight rail systems.
CBO 2008 (Congressional Budget Office, “Issues and Options in Infrastructure Investment”,
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/91xx/doc9135/05-16-infrastructure.pdf)
Current Spending on Infrastructure
Under any definition, “infrastructure investment” encompasses spending on a variety of projects. For present
purposes, it is useful to distinguish transportation, which receives the bulk of federal support, from other
types of infrastructure, such as utilities. Both types of assets promote other economic activities: An adequate
road, for example, facilitates the transport of goods from one place to another and thereby promotes economic
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activity; utilities that provide such services as electricity, telecommunications, and waste disposal are also
essential to modern economies. (Appendix A describes spending on research and development and on
education. Those categories form the basis for supporting intellectual and human capital, respectively, and can
provide benefits that are similar to those generated by infrastructure spending.)
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Topicality-A2: Investment=Must Build New
Anderson 2006 (Edward, Lecturer in Development Studies – University of East Anglia, et al., “The Role of
Public Investment in Poverty Reduction: Theories, Evidence and Methods”, Overseas Development Institute
Working Paper 263, March, http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/docs/1786.pdf)
1.3 Definitions
We define (net) public investment as public expenditure that adds to the public physical capital stock. This
would include the building of roads, ports, schools, hospitals etc. This corresponds to the definition of public
investment in national accounts data, namely, capital expenditure. It is not within the scope of this paper to
include public expenditure on health and education, despite the fact that many regard such expenditure as
investment. Methods for assessing the poverty impact of public expenditure on social sectors such as health and
education have been well covered elsewhere in recent years (see for example, van de Walle and Nead, 1995;
Sahn and Younger, 2000; and World Bank, 2002).
Law Depot 2008 (“Capital Expenditure”, 2-6, http://wiki.lawdepot.com/wiki/Capital_Expenditure)
Definition of "Capital Expenditure"
Capital expenditure is money spent to acquire or upgrade (improve) long term assets such as property,
buildings and machinery. Capital expenditure does not include the cost to merely repair such assets.
Buckley 2006 (Jeremiah, Attorney, Amicus Curiae Brief, Safeco Ins. Co. of America et al v. Charles Burr et al,
http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/briefs/06-84/06-84.mer.ami.mica.pdf)
First, the court said that the ordinary meaning of the word “increase” is “to make something greater,” which it
believed should not “be limited to cases in which a company raises the rate that an individual has previously
been charged.” 435 F.3d at 1091. Yet the definition offered by the Ninth Circuit compels the opposite
conclusion. Because “increase” means “to make something greater,” there must necessarily have been an
existing premium, to which Edo’s actual premium may be compared, to determine whether an “increase”
occurred. Congress could have provided that “ad-verse action” in the insurance context means charging an
amount greater than the optimal premium, but instead chose to define adverse action in terms of an “increase.”
That def-initional choice must be respected, not ignored. See Colautti v. Franklin, 439 U.S. 379, 392-93 n.10
(1979) (“[a] defin-ition which declares what a term ‘means’ . . . excludes any meaning that is not stated”). Next,
the Ninth Circuit reasoned that because the Insurance Prong includes the words “existing or applied for,”
Congress intended that an “increase in any charge” for insurance must “apply to all insurance transactions –
from an initial policy of insurance to a renewal of a long-held policy.” 435 F.3d at 1091. This interpretation
reads the words “exist-ing or applied for” in isolation. Other types of adverse action described in the Insurance
Prong apply only to situations where a consumer had an existing policy of insurance, such as a “cancellation,”
“reduction,” or “change” in insurance. Each of these forms of adverse action presupposes an already-existing
policy, and under usual canons of statutory construction the term “increase” also should be construed to
apply to increases of an already-existing policy. See Hibbs v. Winn, 542 U.S. 88, 101 (2004) (“a phrase gathers
meaning from the words around it”) (citation omitted).
Berechman 2002 (Yossi, Professor of Public Policy – Tel Aviv University, Transport and Economic
Development, p. 114)
4.1. Basic definitions
In the present context, "transportation investment" is defined as a capacity improvement or addition to an
existing network of roads, rail, waterways, huh terminals, tunnels, bridges, airports and harbors. The concept
of "resultant economic growth" is further considered to mean the long-run increase in economic activity in a
given geographical area, which can be ascribed to a specific transport investment and which confers welfare
improvements to the area's residents. Additionally, as explained later, it is also required that the growth benefits
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will be in addition to the direct transportation benefits from the investment and not merely their capitalised
value. Tin's latter condition is a fundamental one. fully discussed in section 5.2.
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Topicality-A2: Transportation=Vehicles
GC 2012 (Global Cargo & Commodities Limited, “Haulage & Transport”,
http://www.globalcargogh.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=44&Itemid=132)
The field of transport has several aspects; loosely they can be divided into a kind of infrasture, vehicles, and
operations. Infrastructure includes the transport networks (roads, railways, airways, waterways, canals,
pipelines, etc) that are used, as well as the nodes or terminals (such as airports, railway stations, bus stations
and seaports). The vehicles generally ride on the networks, such as automobiles, bicycles, buses, trains,
aircrafts. The operations deal with the way the vehicles are operated on the network and the procedures set
for this purpose including the legal environment (Laws, Codes, Regulations, etc) Policies, such as how to finance
the system (for e.g. the use of tolls or gasoline taxes) may be considered part of the operations.
Kahn 2006 (Ely, Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the National Security Staff – White House, and Roger
Shoemaker, “Transportation Sector Specific Plan”, Chemical Security Summit, 6-28,
http://www.ppt2txt.com/r/f892b8c5/)
The Transportation Sector is a vast, far-reaching, complex and diverse network system consisting of six distinct
modes:
Aviation: 450 commercial airports and 19,000 additional airfields
Highway: 4 million miles of roads and supporting infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, etc.)
Maritime: 41,300 vessels; 655 billion ton-miles of domestic commerce
Mass Transit: 6,000 public transportation systems; 21 billion passenger-miles
Pipeline Systems: Oil- 177,000 miles; 623 billion ton-miles; Natural Gas- 1.3 million miles of pipeline
Rail: 193,000 miles of track; 1.4 million freight cars, 1.4 trillion revenue ton-miles; 8 Class 1 and 552 additional
firms
Alshawi 2009 (Mustafa, Associate Dean – University of Salford and Chair – Iraq Institute for Economic
Reforms, “Concept and Background to Public Private Partnership (PPP) / Private Finance Initiative (PFI)”, 11-20,
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/50/33/47562550.pdf)
1 Infrastructure is defined as transportation infrastructure (roads, bridges, airports, ports, rail lines);
communications infrastructure; housing; and electricity generation and distribution. Infrastructure projects
can be “mega projects” (dams, coast-to‐coast highways, mega‐ports, large power plants) or much smaller
projects that can include communication franchises or limited highway spurs.
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***A2: POLITICS***
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A2: Obama Agenda Good-Defense
No spillover-issues are compartmentalized
Dickinson 2009 (Matthew Dickinson, prof of polisci at Middlebury, 5-26-09, “Sotomayor, Obama, and
Presidential Power,” http://blogs.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/2009/05/26/sotamayor-obama-andpresidential-power/
What is of more interest to me, however, is what her selection reveals about the basis of presidential power.
Political scientists, like baseball writers evaluating hitters, have devised numerous means of measuring a
president’s influence in Congress. I will devote a separate post to discussing these, but in brief, they often
center on the creation of legislative “box scores” designed to measure how many times a president’s
preferred piece of legislation, or nominee to the executive branch or the courts, is approved by Congress. That
is, how many pieces of legislation that the president supports actually pass Congress? How often do members of
Congress vote with the president’s preferences? How often is a president’s policy position supported by roll call
outcomes? These measures, however, are a misleading gauge of presidential power – they are a better
indicator of congressional power. This is because how members of Congress vote on a nominee or legislative
item is rarely influenced by anything a president does. Although journalists (and political scientists) often
focus on the legislative “endgame” to gauge presidential influence – will the President swing enough votes to
get his preferred legislation enacted? – this mistakes an outcome with actual evidence of presidential
influence. Once we control for other factors – a member of Congress’ ideological and partisan leanings, the
political leanings of her constituency, whether she’s up for reelection or not – we can usually predict how she
will vote without needing to know much of anything about what the president wants. (I am ignoring the
importance of a president’s veto power for the moment.)
Obama’s capital is super resilient
Ari Melber 2008 (November 10, The Nation, “Obama’s secret email network revealed”,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ari-melber/obamas-secret-email-netwo_b_142565.html)
So even after the gauzy honeymoon talk fades, when people start second-guessing how much "political
capital" Obama really has, there will be this resilient network of people committed to enacting the Obama
agenda. In a policy fight with Congress -- or a message battle with the press -- these are the people that will
take action to get Obama's back. They will call their neighbors, or their members of Congress. They'll knock on
doors, or storm local meetings. They'll write letters to the editor or, naturally, email and prod their networks.
They can also hold Obama accountable, of course, by using the same networked technology to pressure the new
administration. Peter Daou, a web strategist and former adviser to Hillary Clinton's campaign, raised that
prospect in the article:...Obama faced an intense backlash when he [changed his position on] the issue of
immunity for telecommunications companies that took part in the warrantless wiretapping program. "People
who have helped you reach this historic goal by self-organizing can also organize in opposition to your policies,"
[Daou] said. Obama supporters converted his website into a protest hub against his FISA position last summer, a
presidential campaign first that drew coverage from blogs, The Nation, and ultimately traditional media. They
can swiftly organize again. I think it will be even easier now, because traditional journalists are ready to jump
on these kind of stories, and media coverage is crucial to growing net movements. Activism focused on pushing
Obama, however, is not likely to be an immediate priority. After all, supporters are energized by this victory, and
there is a broad consensus on the short-term priorities of the economy and Iraq.
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A2: Obama Agenda Good-Turns
Multiple maritime security bills thump the DA and prove the plan is popular
The Hill 6/25 (House to push port-security measures this week; http://thehill.com/blogs/flooraction/house/234511-house-to-push-port-security-measures-this-week)
The House this week plans to pass a handful of bills aimed at requiring improved coordination between the
federal and state governments on port security, and an assessment of remaining security gaps at ports. The
Securing Maritime Activities Through Risk-based Targeting for Port Security Act, from Rep. Candice Miller (RMich.), would require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Coast Guard to cooperate
more in their efforts to ensure port security. It would also boost measures overseas to ensure safer cargo, and
encourage more cooperation between the federal and local levels. "In an era of tight budgetary times, we
must ensure that we are making the best use of limited taxpayer dollars," Miller said earlier this year when
she introduced her bill. "My legislation seeks to guard against these threats in a risk-based, coordinated way
that enhances the programs in place to protect our maritime borders."Her bill, H.R. 4251, would require DHS to
submit a plan for improved coordination to Congress by July 1, 2014. Another bill, from Rep. Janice Hahn (DCalif.), would require DHS to submit another report that assesses gaps in port security, as well as a plan for
addressing those gaps. Her bill, H.R. 4005, is the Gauging American Port Security (GAPS) Act. Also up this week is
H.R. 5889, the Nuclear Terrorism Conventions Implementation and Safety of Maritime Navigation Act. This bill
from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) would make it easier to capture suspected
terrorists at sea, and increases penalties against anyone trying to use weapons of mass destruction from or
against maritime vessels, or against fixed maritime platforms. The House is also expected to pass a bill that
would make it easier for workers in marine facilities or at sea to renew their Transportation Worker
Identification Credentials (TWICs). Currently, these workers have to appear twice at an enrollment center to get
this credential.
Only cuts to port security cost Obama capital-current debates prove
Homeland Security Today 3/22 (New Port Security Bill Would Help Prevent Threats From Reaching US
Shores As White House Seeks To Cut Coast Guard; http://www.hstoday.us/focused-topics/customsimmigration/single-article-page/new-port-security-bill-would-help-prevent-threats-from-reaching-us-shores-aswhite-house-seeks-to-cut-coast-guard/fe7804eb4ce2457a7b4991e9db40e787.html)
Meanwhile, though, two lawmakers said the Obama administration's call to slash more than $600 million from
the Coast Guard’s budget next year will seriously impair its ability to protect the nation's shorelines and ports.
Reps. John Mica (R-FL), chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and Frank LoBiondo (RNJ), chairman of the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee, Thursday wrote to the House
Appropriations Committee to express their concern that “President Obama’s reckless cuts to the service will
leave it unable to successfully perform its critical missions.” “We strongly oppose President Obama’s proposal
to slash this account,” Mica and LoBiondo wrote. “These cuts threaten the ability of the Coast Guard to protect
lives and property, defend our borders, and secure our ports, waterways, and coasts.” “This is not the first
time the Obama administration has proposed significant cuts for the Coast Guard,” said a statement from
Mica’s office. “Just weeks before the Gulf oil spill, the administration’s (fiscal year) 2011 budget proposed
eliminating more than 1,100 positions and additional Coast Guard assets. Prior to the disaster, Mica and
LoBiondo called those cuts a recipe for disaster, and are once again urging rejection of the administration’s
proposal for a second helping of Coast Guard budget cuts.” The administration’s budget proposal for next year
includes reducing the Coast Guard’s capital acquisitions account by nearly 20 percent below current levels.
“This account provides for the acquisition, construction and physical improvements of vessels, aircraft,
facilities and other assets essential to the Coast Guard’s ability to carry out its diverse missions,” Mica’s office
said. “More than 11 million cargo containers arrive in America’s ports every year which present the potential
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for dangerous materials to be smuggled into our country through the supply chain,” Miller said in an emailed
statement, adding, “port and maritime security are becoming increasingly essential components of a total
national security plan.”
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A2: Obama Agenda Good-Turns
Broad bipartisan support in the House for port security measures
Committee On Homeland Security 27 March 2012 (http://homeland.house.gov/press-release/househomeland-security-border-and-maritime-security-subcommittee-passes-smart-port)
Today, the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, chaired by Rep. Candice
Miller (R-MI), passed by voice vote, bipartisan legislation to secure our ports and better protect the homeland,
H.R. 4251. H.R. 4251, as amended, directs DHS components with maritime security responsibilities to improve
coordination and partner with other Federal, State and local law enforcement agencies, as well as appropriate
international entities, in order to enhance the Nation’s maritime security, implement risk based-methodology
to secure the global supply chain, and find cost savings. The SMART Port Security Act, also incorporates
several maritime provisions from H.R. 3116, the DHS authorization bill passed by the Full Committee last year
and builds on the SAFE Port Act of 2006 (P.L. 109-347). The legislation was introduced by Chairman Miller last
week. Miller said: “Recognizing the growing threat to the global supply chain, I introduced this legislation to
improve and update our laws governing our ports by enhancing security measures overseas before threats reach
our shores, to foster a collaborative environment between Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Coast
Guard in sharing port security duties, and to leverage the maritime security work of our trusted allies. Our
Nation’s maritime borders are equally as important as our southern and northern borders and each one is vital
to our global commerce and our national security. In an era of tight budgetary times, we must ensure that we
are making the best use of limited tax-payer dollars. My legislation seeks to guard against these threats in a
risk-based, coordinated way that enhances the programs in place to protect our maritime borders.”
Port security funding is unique and distinct from broader transportation fights in Congress
Joan M. Bondareff and Stephen C. Peranich 27 February 2012 (Journal of Commerce; Joan M. Bondareff is
of counsel specializing in marine transportation, environmental and legislative issues at the Blank Rome law firm
in Washington. Contact her at [email protected]. Stephen C. Peranich is senior adviser in Blank Rome’s
Government Relations practice;
http://www.blankromegr.com/siteFiles/Publications/4B042B5642B48AA2A98C6ECED7F5A70B.pdf)
Congress is struggling to pass a surface transportation reauthorization bill, which could include not only a
maritime title, but also a title on freight policy. At the end of the first session of the 112th Congress, the Senate
Committee on Environment and Public Works reported, in a bipartisan manner, a two-year, $109 billion surface
transportation reauthori- zation bill. The Senate bill includes a new title establishing a National Freight Program,
which makes freight rail and maritime projects eligi- ble for up to 10 percent of a state’s apportioned highway
funds. Now that the House has its own five-year, $260 billion reauthorization bill, we expect it to turn its
attention to the reauthorization of the Water Resources Development Act. If East and Gulf Coast ports are to
accommodate the depth of the new post-Panamax vessels, they will have to be dredged to at least 50 feet. Here
again, Con- gress, with its self-imposed earmark ban, can’t decide whether allocating funding for dredging at a
particular port or ports is an earmark or not. Until this issue is resolved, it’s hard to imagine passage of a
WRDA bill. Two other opportunities for port funding are the ever-popular TIGER grants and port secu- rity
grants. Congress appropriated $500 million for TIGER IV for fiscal 2012. Unfortunately, this is half the funds
that used to be appropri- ated for TIGER grants. Ports can compete for TIGER grants — and have been
somewhat suc- cessful in doing so — but they’re up against all other surface transportation projects, includ- ing
high-speed rail that has been favored with a $100 million set-aside.
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Broad bipartisan support in the Senate for the plan
Chris Strohm; staff writer for Government Executive; 7 March 2007 (Maritime security measure gathers
bipartisan support; http://www.govexec.com/defense/2006/03/maritime-security-measure-gathers-bipartisansupport/21312/)
A proposed overhaul of U.S. maritime security programs, including changes aimed at beefing up cargo
inspections at foreign and American ports, is rapidly drawing bipartisan support, Senate Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Monday. Collins and Sen. Patty Murray, DWash., told reporters they believe their "Greenlane Maritime Cargo Security Act" will address concerns that
have been raised in recent weeks since news broke that a Dubai company wants to manage port terminal
operations in the United States. Companion legislation will be introduced soon in the House by Homeland
Security Chairman Rep. Peter King, D-N.Y., Intelligence ranking member Jane Harman, D-Calif., and Rep. Dan
Lungren, R-Calif., said Collins, adding that she plans to hold a hearing on her own bill in late March, followed by
an April markup. The Collins-Murray bill would provide $835 million a year for maritime security using existing
fees collected by Customs and Border Protection. It would also require the Homeland Security Department to
take several steps to strengthen the government's efforts abroad and domestically. "Our goal is to make sure
that we know from the factory door to the retail store floor how the cargo has been handled at each step of the
supply chain," Collins said at a news conference. She and Murray want $400 million to be set aside annually for
port security grants, an approach that puts them at odds with Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff. For the
second year in a row, the Homeland Security Department has proposed eliminating grant programs in favor of
creating a $600 million Targeted Infrastructure Protection program, through which state and local governments
would compete for funds to pay for security in many areas, including ports, transit systems and chemical plants.
Massive GOP support for the plan in Congress
LAT 30 September 2006 (Congress OKs Port Security; http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/30/nation/naport30)
The port security measure, which would bring millions of federal dollars to the Los Angeles-Long Beach port
complex and other harbors, became a GOP priority after a political flap earlier this year over a Dubai company's
ill-fated attempt to manage facilities at several U.S. ports. The measure, which Bush is expected to sign,
authorizes $400 million a year in federal grants to ports for the next five years, requires minimum security
standards for the nearly 11 million cargo containers that enter U.S. ports each year and establishes a pilot
program at three foreign ports to scan all U.S.-bound cargo. It also sets up security training for waterfront
workers and mandates radiation detectors at major ports by the end of next year. And it establishes deadlines
for special identification cards to be issued to port workers after background checks. The measure was
approved by the Senate on a voice vote; the House approved it 409-2 early today. Rep. Jane Harman (DVenice), who along with Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River) sponsored the House version of the legislation, said,
"In a month that was supposed to be all about security, this measure is the only one we've considered that will
actually make America more secure." Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Senate Committee on
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, called the bill "a major leap ahead in our efforts to strengthen our
national security." The measure was voted on in the final, hectic hours of the pre-election session, in which
several security-related bills were sent to the president. The GOP is hoping to showcase its national security
credentials before the November election. As one of the last major bill moving through Congress before the
election, it became a magnet for other Republican priorities, including a measure cracking down on online
gambling that is a part of the party's election-year "values" agenda.
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King likes the plan
Representative Peter T King, Chairman, House Committee on Homeland Security Winter 2011 (Security of
America's ports too important to shortchange; http://www.aapaseaports.com/article.cgi?id=21013)
Without question, we all share an interest in ensuring that we have in place a multilayered, risk-based system
that enables goods to flow safely and securely through our nation's seaports. When I was the chairman of the
House Committee on Homeland Security in 2006, Congress passed the bipartisan SAFE Port Act [Security and
Accountability For Every Port Act of 2006], to bolster security at our ports by addressing vulnerabilities;
improving coordination among federal, state and local entities; and expanding security measures along the
entire maritime supply chain. A key piece of this legislation was the establishment of a risk-based port
security grant program authorized at $400 million per year. From 2007 through 2009, the grant program was
fully funded and has provided port owners and operators with about $1 billion to secure this critical
infrastructure from terrorism. For 2010, the Obama administration sought to cut the program by 40 percent,
to $250 million. The administration attempted to rationalize the cut by pointing to one-time funding from the
"stimulus," which ignores the point that our ports need a sustained, year-in/year-out funding stream for
security. In response, Congress appropriated $300 million. When it came time to allocate that $300 million
among the nation's ports, the Department of Homeland Security further exacerbated the problem by cutting
the funding to those ports that are most at risk. In fact, each of the seven Tier I, or highest-risk, ports saw its
2010 funding slashed. In total, DHS cut funding for these highest-risk ports by more than $45 million. The New
York City area saw its port security funding cut by 25 percent. Even nine years after the terrorist attacks of
Sept.11, 2001, killed thousands in New York City, it remains the top al-Qaeda target. New York was not alone on
the DHS chopping block, as other highest-risk port areas such as Puget Sound, New Orleans and San Francisco
Bay also saw their funding cut by a quarter. In addition to the port security grants, the U.S. Coast Guard plays a
vital role in our layered approach to keeping our ports secure. Yet, in 2010, the Obama administration
announced cuts of $340 million from the Coast Guard budget. Key to the Coast Guard's efforts are the
12Maritime Safety and Security Teams, or MSSTs, stationed at high-risk and other key ports to provide extra
security and rapid response in the event of a security threat. Unfortunately, this too was cut in the Obama
administration's most recent budget. The administration proposed to eliminate the MSSTs in New York City;
New Orleans; San Francisco; Anchorage; and Kings Bay, Ga., home of a U.S. Navy submarine base. It is especially
unbelievable -- in fact indefensible -- that the administration is trying to eliminate these critical assets. Ports are
critical for the flow of goods in and out of the country and are part of the U.S. economic engine. The world
witnessed terrorists exploit the maritime environment just two years ago when they succeeded in their threeday waterborne attack on Mumbai, India, that left more than 400 dead. We should be bolstering the layers of
security that we have put in place to protect our ports -- especially those at the highest risk. I will continue to
support a robust, risk-based grant program, continued Coast Guard security presence in our ports, and
improved coordination between the Department of Homeland Security and the port authorities that own our
nation's most important maritime infrastructure.
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Pre-existing HMFT allocation shields Obama from a fight in Congress
Richard Thompson, The Times-Picayune 3/8 (Bill proposing to use Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund to pay for
dredging has 181 co-sponsors;
http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2012/03/bill_proposing_to_use_harbor_m.html)
Charles Boustany Jr., R-Lafayette, who filed a bill in the House last year aiming to open up the multibilliondollar Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, a decades-old cache created by Congress to pay for maintenance work
at U.S. ports and harbors, pressed his case Wednesday in a letter to the U.S. House Budget Committee. "As a
result of deferred, underfunded maintenance, ships carrying American exports are forced to 'light load' at less
than maximum capacity, costing hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars per ship of reduced
cargo," Boustany wrote. "To not maintain these harors and ports impacts regional and national
commercereduces our economic competitiveness, and increases the risk of vessel groundings, collisions, and
pollution incidents." Congress has traditionally used much of the fund's money to offset general spending,
allocating about half of the more than $1 billion collected annually, Boustany has said. At the other end, many
elected officials and other observers have alluded to the fund in the past year as a silver bullet for addressing
budget shortfalls that has stalled dredging projects across the country, which has taken on a heighened
urgency as the multibillion dollar widening of the Panama Canal nears completition in 2014. As of this week,
the bill, known as the Realize America's Maritime Promise, or RAMP, act, had 181 co-sponsors.
More ev-even the Tea Party backs the plan due to HMFT funding
Dredging Today 5/9 (Senator Levin Leads Harbor Maintenance Effort
http://www.dredgingtoday.com/2012/05/09/senator-levin-leads-harbor-maintenance-effort-usa/)
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., led a bipartisan group of 27 senators seeking legislation to ensure that all funding
available in the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund is dedicated to harbor maintenance projects. The letter asks
Senate members of a House-Senate conference committee to strengthen harbor maintenance language
included in both the Senate and House versions of a surface transportation reauthorization bill. The letter points
out that despite a major backlog of harbor maintenance projects, less than half the fees charged to shippers
through the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund are spent on maintenance projects. Levin is the author of the
Harbor Maintenance Act (S.412), which would require spending the full amount available in the trust fund on
maintenance projects. Signing the letter were Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas; Richard Shelby, R-Ala.;
Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.; Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; Roger Wicker, D-Miss.; Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.;
Herb Kohl , D-Wis.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Ron Wyden, D-Ore.; Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.; Chris Coons, D-Del.; Al
Franken, D-Minn.; Mary Landrieu, D-La.; Ron Johnson, R-Wis.; Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; Rob Portman, R-Ohio;
Jean Shaheen, D-N.H.; Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.; Ron Kirk, R-Ill.; John Cornyn, R-Texas; Mark Begich, D-Alaska;
Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; James Webb, D-Va.; Mark Warner, D-Va.; Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; and Claire McCaskill, DMo.
Congress backs the plan
John F. Frittelli Specialist in Transportation Resources, Science, and Industry Division 27 May 2005 (Port and
Maritime Security: Background and Issues for Congress; http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL31733.pdf)
In its oversight role, Congress is examining the effectiveness of these programs in addressing the terrorist
threat, whether they are proceeding at sufficient pace, and whether enough resources are being provided to
implement these and other security initiatives. Some observers and Members of Congress are concerned that
initiatives to fill gaps in port security are not proceeding at a sufficient pace. TSA’s program to credential all
transportation workers and its effort to develop a “smart-box” to ensure the integrity of container shipments
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has also been criticized for moving forward too slowly. Some argue that the security funding provided to
seaports, especially when compared to the amount provided to airports, is woefully inadequate.
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A2: Obama Agenda Good-Winners Win
And, winners win
Singer 2009 3/3 (Jonathan, MY DD [Direct Democracy], http://www.mydd.com/story/2009/3/3/191825/0428)
Peter Hart gets at a key point. Some believe that political capital is finite, that it can be used up. To an extent
that's true. But it's important to note, too, that political capital can be regenerated -- and, specifically, that
when a President expends a great deal of capital on a measure that was difficult to enact and then succeeds,
he can build up more capital. Indeed, that appears to be what is happening with Barack Obama, who went to
the mat to pass the stimulus package out of the gate, got it passed despite near-unanimous opposition of the
Republicans on Capitol Hill, and is being rewarded by the American public as a result. Take a look at the
numbers. President Obama now has a 68 percent favorable rating in the NBC-WSJ poll, his highest ever showing
in the survey. Nearly half of those surveyed (47 percent) view him very positively. Obama's Democratic Party
earns a respectable 49 percent favorable rating. The Republican Party, however, is in the toilet, with its worst
ever showing in the history of the NBC-WSJ poll, 26 percent favorable. On the question of blame for the
partisanship in Washington, 56 percent place the onus on the Bush administration and another 41 percent place
it on Congressional Republicans. Yet just 24 percent blame Congressional Democrats, and a mere 11 percent
blame the Obama administration. So at this point, with President Obama seemingly benefiting from his
ambitious actions and the Republicans sinking further and further as a result of their knee-jerked opposition to
that agenda, there appears to be no reason not to push forward on anything from universal healthcare to
energy reform to ending the war in Iraq.
The turn outweighs the link-wins overwhelm costs
Lincoln Mitchel, Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics, Columbia University, 18 June 2009
(Time for Obama to Start Spending Political Capital, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lincoln-mitchell/time-forobama-to-start-s_b_217235.html)
Throughout his presidential campaign, but more notably, during his presidency, President Obama has shown
himself to have an impressive ability to accumulate political capital. During his tenure in the White House,
Obama has done this by reaching out to a range of constituencies, moderating some of his programs, pursuing
middle of the road approaches on key foreign policy questions and, not insignificantly, working to ensure that
his approval rating remains quite high. Political capital is not, however, like money, it cannot be saved up
interminably while its owner waits for the right moment to spend it. Political capital has a shelf life, and often
not a very long one. If it is not used relatively quickly, it dissipates and becomes useless to its owner. This is
the moment in which Obama, who has spent the first few months of his presidency diligently accumulating
political capital, now finds himself. The next few months will be a key time for Obama. If Obama does not spend
this political capital during the next months, it will likely be gone by the New Year anyway. Much of what
President Obama has done in his first six months or so in office has been designed to build political capital,
interestingly he has sought to build this capital from both domestic and foreign sources. He has done this by
traveling extensively, reintroducing to America to foreign audiences and by a governance style that has very
cleverly succeeded in pushing his political opponents to the fringes. This tactic was displayed during the effort to
pass the stimulus package as Republican opposition was relegated to a loud and annoying, but largely irrelevant,
distraction. Building political capital was, or should have been, a major goal of Obama's recent speech in Cairo as
well. Significantly, Obama has yet to spend any of his political capital by meaningfully taking on any powerful
interests. He declined to take Wall Street on regarding the financial crisis, has prepared to, but not yet fully,
challenged the power of the AMA or the insurance companies, nor has he really confronted any important
Democratic Party groups such as organized labor. This strategy, however, will not be fruitful for much longer.
There are now some very clear issues where Obama should be spending political capital. The most obvious of
these is health care. The battle for health care reform will be a major defining issue, not just for the Obama
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presidency, but for American society over the next decades. It is imperative that Obama push for the best and
most comprehensive health care reform possible. This will likely mean not just a bruising legislative battle, but
one that will pit powerful interests, not just angry Republican ideologues, against the President. The legislative
struggle will also pull many Democrats between the President and powerful interest groups. Obama must make
it clear that there will be an enormous political cost which Democrats who vote against the bill will have to
pay. Before any bill is voted upon, however, is perhaps an even more critical time as pressure from insurance
groups, business groups and doctors organizations will be brought to bear both on congress, but also on the
administration as it works with congress to craft the legislation. This is not the time when the administration
must focus on making friends and being liked, but on standing their ground and getting a strong and inclusive
health care reform bill. Obama will have to take a similar approach to any other major domestic legislation as
well. This is, of course, the way the presidency has worked for decades. Obama is in an unusual situation
because a similar dynamic is at work at the international level. A major part of Obama's first six months in office
have involved pursuing a foreign policy that implicitly has sought to rebuild both the image of the US abroad,
but also American political capital. It is less clear how Obama can use this capital, but now is the time to use it.
A cynical interpretation of the choice facing Obama is that he can remain popular or he can have legislative and
other policy accomplishments, but this interpretation would be wrong. By early 2010, Obama, and his party will,
fairly or not, be increasingly judged by what they have accomplished in office, not by how deftly they have
handled political challenges. Therefore, the only way he can remain popular and get new political capital is
through converting his current political capital into concrete legislative accomplishments. Health care will be
the first and very likely most important, test.
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A2: Elections-Defense
Nothing matters but the economy
NYT 2012 (Muddled Economic Picture Muddles the Political One, Too;
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/us/politics/economy-plays-biggest-role-in-obama-re-electionchances.html)
The final major economic turning point of President Obama’s first term seems to have arrived. The question is
which way the economy will turn. Job growth has picked up nicely in the last few months, raising the prospect
that the American economy is finally in the early stages of a recovery that will gather strength over time. But
with gas prices rising, the government cutting workers and consumers still deep in debt, some forecasters
predict that economic growth — and with it, job growth — will slow in coming months. Politically, the
difference between the two situations is vast. In one, Mr. Obama will be able to campaign on a claim, as he
has recently begun to do, that the country is back on track. In another, he will be left to explain that
recoveries from financial crises take years, and to argue that Republicans want to return to the Bush-era
policies that created the crisis — as he tried to argue, unsuccessfully, in the 2010 midterm election. His
approval rating has slipped again in some polls recently, with higher gas prices possibly playing a role. As a
result, the economic numbers over the next couple of months, including an unemployment report on April 6,
will have bigger political implications than the typical batch of data. The Federal Reserve acknowledged the
uncertainty in its scheduled statement on Tuesday, suggesting the economy had improved somewhat but still
predicting only “moderate economic growth.” Economists say the economy’s near-term direction depends
relatively little on Mr. Obama’s economic policies. The standoff over Iran’s nuclear program, the European
debt crisis and other events will most likely affect the economy more. But many American voters are still
likely to make their decision based on the economy. Historically, nothing — not campaign advertisements,
social issues or even wars — has influenced voters more heavily than the direction of the economy in an
election year. “If you could know one thing and you had to predict which party was going to win the next
presidential election,” Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, “you
couldn’t do better than knowing the change in economic growth.” Particularly important, Ms. Vavreck said,
were the first six months of an election year, when many voters form impressions that stick. Ultimately, the
2012 election may be close enough that other issues, like immigration or Afghanistan, will play a major role. But
the last two years make clear just how important the economy’s direction will be to Mr. Obama’s fortunes.
His approval ratings drifted down in early 2010, as job growth weakened and “recovery summer” — a White
House phrase that Mr. Obama’s aides would now prefer to forget — failed to materialize. His ratings rose as
growth picked in late 2010 only to fall again when job growth weakened in early 2011 as the Arab Spring
pushed up energy prices and the standoff between the president and Congress over the debt limit damaged
investor confidence. The pattern has repeated itself in recent months. As economic growth picked up late last
year and helped cause a surge in job growth, Mr. Obama’s approval ratings rose to a level that suggested he
would be the favorite this fall. Over the past three months, monthly job growth has averaged 245,000, a rate
that has generally led the incumbent party to win re-election. In only three races since World War II — in 1952
(when the popular Dwight D. Eisenhower was running), in 1968 (when the Vietnam War hobbled the Democrats)
and in 1976 (when Watergate hobbled the Republicans) — has the outcome been different from what the
economy’s direction would have suggested. In recent weeks, though, with slower economic growth and higher
gas prices, Mr. Obama’s rating has slipped in some polls. So far, job growth has not slowed, which has caused
some analysts to say that the latest drop in approval ratings may be something of a blip. Either way, the big
uncertainty is whether job growth slows substantially in coming months. More bullish forecasters point out that
Americans are starting to behave in ways that suggest they are finally leaving the financial crisis behind. The
government reported Tuesday that retail sales rose at a solid pace in February and the months leading up to it.
Companies — which have historically high profit margins — are adding workers at the fastest pace in more than
five years, as many begin to make up for deep cuts during the recession. And gas prices, for all of their
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psychological impact, do not have a major effect on many families’ budgets. In January, gasoline accounted for
only 3.6 percent of total consumer spending. Dean Maki, the chief United States economist at Barclays Capital,
argues that the economy’s strengths are more than enough to continue reducing the jobless rate. With many
baby boomers hitting their retirement age, Mr. Maki notes, the economy does not need to add as many jobs as
in the past to keep up with normal labor-force growth. Other forecasters argue, however, that job growth has
probably hit its high-water mark for 2012. The federal government is cutting workers, and state and local
employment is roughly flat. The dollar has risen, cutting into export growth. Households remain deeply
indebted, which will restrain spending. “I’m inclined to the more bearish camp,” said Nigel Gault, chief United
States economist at IHS Global Insight. For the rest of the year, Mr. Gault’s firm forecasts monthly job growth of
around 175,000. One significant factor may be weather. The warm winter has allowed households to spend less
on heating, while also causing people to travel more and go to the mall more. That economic lift will soon
disappear. If a solid recovery has finally taken hold and job growth remains above 200,000 a month, many
polling analysts and political scientists view Mr. Obama as a favorite. If oil prices rise much further, or
something else causes job growth to fall close to 100,000, he becomes the underdog. In the middle — if job
growth slows a bit, to something like 175,000 a month — the 2012 election has the makings of one of the closer
races in recent history.
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A2: Elections-Defense
This is proven by Obama’s approval ratings tracking with consumer confidence scores
The Guardian 6/20 (Forget Mitt Romney. The 2012 election is a referendum on Obama's economy;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/20/forget-mitt-romney-2012-election)
The day-to-day pattern of the campaign can be filled with twists and turns. We supposedly, but not really, saw
Romney amazed at fast-food technology. We saw Obama promise a new immigration policy for undocumented
immigrants under 30. But the reality is that 99% of this stuff distracts us from the state of the economy, the
key issue in this and most elections. If you're a middle-income family struggling to pay the bills, do you really
care whether Obama admittedly fudged some unimportant facts about his upbringing in his biography? Do
you care that Romney has a horse on the way to the Olympics? The fact is that voters are perfectly rational.
They make their decisions depending on the policies they believe will impact their lives. That can be the
economy, terrorism, or wars. They may not know the ins-and-outs of exactly what is driving the current
direction of the economy, but they know enough to rationally assign blame for what they perceive as failed
policies. This year, voters seem as rational as ever. Plenty of Democrats would argue, for example, that current
economic headwinds are still due to the policies pursued by George W Bush. Voters seem to have accepted that
message, at least in part. The problem is that this election isn't Bush v Obama. A majority may blame Bush for
the economic situation, but a majority also blames Obama. More so than in any recent election, Gallup has
found that approval of President Obama is linked closely with consumer confidence. When confidence rises,
Obama's approval climbs, and when it falls, Obama's approval rating drops. The major economic indicators
regarded as determining people's views of the economy are generally weak, though some are weaker than
others. Historically speaking, they point in the direction of a close election; but some point to the incumbent
losing. Job growth is among the most reliable indicators of economic improvement. So, when the Bureau of
Labor Statistics announced that only 69,000 new jobs had been added in May, I wondered out loud whether
Obama's approval would begin to drop. To me, that item of bad news would be enough to push the economic
perceptions of Americans. And now, the economic dial seems to have moved further backwards. Gallup reports
that for the first time since last summer, economic confidence has declined for three weeks in a row. Voters'
economic outlook, as opposed to current conditions, has also dropped to the lowest level since January.
We're not talking major decay, but in a close election this erosion of confidence could make the difference. So
far, there hasn't been a corresponding fall in Obama's approval rating. That may hold, as no relationship is
perfect. But I wouldn't count it: there was a similar lag when confidence began to pick up late last year, which
was followed only later by a pickup in Obama's approval ratings. This problem for Obama is that this election
is a referendum on his performance, as it is for most incumbents. Right now, his approval and disapproval
ratings roughly have parity, with perhaps a fraction more disapproving than approving. Since voters are voting
on the economy, additional economic angst is the last thing the president needs. It's rare that an incumbent
loses re-election, but the state of the economy is leaning slightly but perceptibly towards Obama being a oneterm president.
Obama’s national security policies don’t impact his re-election chances
Slate 2/8 2012 (Poll Shows Strong Support for Obama's National Security Policies;
http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2012/02/08/abc_wapo_poll_majority_support_obama_s_drone_use_guantanam
o_bay_decision.html)
The poll numbers suggest that Obama won't have to worry too much about an alienated base, at least on
national security issues, as his re-election campaign kicks into full gear. Still, the survey suggests he will have
his work cut out for him on other fronts: When asked if Obama deserves a second term, respondents were
split, with a narrow majority (53 percent) saying that he did.
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Nothing else matters but the economy
Washington Post 6/25 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-a-presidential-campaignwith-no-drama/2012/06/25/gJQAOCZp2V_story.html?wprss=rss_richard-cohen)
Why is this happening? Some of it no doubt is due to the traditional American antipathy toward politicians,
government and anything that lacks a goal post. We consider it a triumph of Jeffersonian democracy when 60
percent of us vote, but usually the figure is lower — 57.1 percent for president in 2008 and 37.8 percent in the
last congressional elections. Even the mass movement that brought Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House
and inaugurated the New Deal was the work of less than 60 percent of the electorate. But other factors are at
work this year. First and foremost is the paucity of really gripping issues. There is only one, the economy, and
it will do what it wants. If it improves, Barack Obama will win; if it worsens, Mitt Romney will win. Just to add
to the dreariness, the economy seems to reflect the candidates’ personalities. It gets a little bit better and then
a little bit worse and then maybe doesn’t move at all. Housing goes up and then down and then nowhere. Things
are better than they once were but worse than they used to be. The recession has receded, but the promised
boom has gone bust. This is the nowhere economy — neither boom nor bust nor much good to anyone.
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A2: Elections-Defense
The best data and polling proves
ABC News 3/18 (It's the Economy, Seamus; http://abcnews.go.com/Business/2012-presidential-electioneconomy-matters/story?id=15940088#.T-ooCmh9nww)
I've always been a political junkie. Since my earliest days as an observer and later as a participant in all things
electoral, the golden rule has not changed: Love thy neighbor's wallet as though it were your own. Americans
"vote their pocketbooks." I have always accepted it as a truism--doesn't everybody? Can't you just hear James
Carville whispering those four magic words into Bill Clinton's ear over and over and over again in 1992... "It's the
economy, stupid!" Yale economist Ray Fair has developed a model to predict presidential election results
which is based on economic considerations. It completely disregards social issues, moral questions, and
fashion statements like sweater vests. And it appears that this is indeed the metric to watch. A recent
Rasmussen report found in a national survey that 82 percent of likely American voters said that the economy
was the most important issue.
Even if other issues could matter both Obama and Romney will focus the campaign on the
economy
Reuters 6/15 (Obama says election will determine course of economy;
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/15/us-usa-campaign-obama-idUSBRE85C05O20120615)
President Barack Obama cast his re-election battle with Mitt Romney as a clash between starkly different
economic visions on Thursday and warned that his Republican rival would hollow out the middle class in a
speech that could set the tone for months of intense campaigning. Seeking to gain some footing after a string
of bad economic news and a political stumble, Obama said the November 6 election would put the United
States on one of two paths: an economy built on education and scientific research that delivers a broadly
shared prosperity, or a Republican approach that cuts taxes for the wealthy and undermines opportunity for
many others. "This November, you can remind the world how a strong economy is built - not from the top
down, but from a growing, thriving middle class," Obama told a crowd of 1,500 at a community college
gymnasium in Ohio, a politically divided state that could be key in determining who wins the November election.
Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was not ceding the battlefield to Obama.
Campaigning at the other end of Ohio, he struck first in a speech that ended four minutes before Obama took
the stage. With the economic recovery on the verge of stalling for the third summer in a row and Romney
having pulled even with the president in voter surveys, Democratic allies have worried Obama could lose the
election if he simply tried to convince voters they are better off than when he took office in 2009.
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The public is highly concerned with inadequate port security
Dana Blanton; Fox News March 02, 2006 (FOX Poll: Most Oppose Port Deal; Republicans Lose;
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,186634,00.html)
The controversy over the port deal has raised awareness of ports as a potential terrorist target. Over onequarter (28 percent) of the public considers ports to be the greatest risk — more so even than airports — for
being a target for terrorist attacks, up from 11 percent in 2002. All in all, half of Americans think U.S. ports are
safe today, which is significantly less than the 86 percent that thinks air travel is safe, but more than the 39
percent that believe the country’s borders are secure.
The plan will be spun as an anti-terrorism measure
LAT 30 September 2006 (Congress OKs Port Security; http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/30/nation/naport30)
The port security measure, which would bring millions of federal dollars to the Los Angeles-Long Beach port
complex and other harbors, became a GOP priority after a political flap earlier this year over a Dubai company's
ill-fated attempt to manage facilities at several U.S. ports. The measure, which Bush is expected to sign,
authorizes $400 million a year in federal grants to ports for the next five years, requires minimum security
standards for the nearly 11 million cargo containers that enter U.S. ports each year and establishes a pilot
program at three foreign ports to scan all U.S.-bound cargo. It also sets up security training for waterfront
workers and mandates radiation detectors at major ports by the end of next year. And it establishes deadlines
for special identification cards to be issued to port workers after background checks. The measure was
approved by the Senate on a voice vote; the House approved it 409-2 early today. Rep. Jane Harman (DVenice), who along with Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River) sponsored the House version of the legislation, said,
"In a month that was supposed to be all about security, this measure is the only one we've considered that will
actually make America more secure." Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Senate Committee on
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, called the bill "a major leap ahead in our efforts to strengthen our
national security." The measure was voted on in the final, hectic hours of the pre-election session, in which
several security-related bills were sent to the president. The GOP is hoping to showcase its national security
credentials before the November election. As one of the last major bill moving through Congress before the
election, it became a magnet for other Republican priorities, including a measure cracking down on online
gambling that is a part of the party's election-year "values" agenda.
And that shields Obama from any public blowback
Jennifer Agiesta; Associated Press Deputy Director of Polling 6/19 (Obama national security record gives GOP
limited opportunities to challenge commander in chief; http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-bcus--obama-nationalsecurity,0,308674.story)
President Barack Obama's not-so-secret counterterrorism fight against al-Qaida in Yemen and Somalia, the
killing of Osama bin Laden and strong hints of a cyber war against Iran give Republicans few openings to
challenge the commander in chief. This aggressive national security policy has undercut the derisive label
Republicans have successfully attached to Democrats in the past: the soft-on-defense Mommy Party. It has
been one of the most effective election-year cudgels for the GOP. Just eight years ago, President George W.
Bush capitalized on his tough response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and Iraq's Saddam Hussein to win a
second term. In a major assist to Bush's candidacy, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth used debunked claims to
undermine Democratic rival John Kerry's decorated Vietnam War record and cast him as "unfit to serve." In the
past 3½ years, Obama has waged a secret campaign against al-Qaida in two countries — one on the Arab
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peninsula, the other on Africa's east coast. The White House officially acknowledged the lethal attacks in Yemen
and Somalia in its semiannual report to Congress last Friday. Navy SEALs took out bin Laden in Pakistan in May
2011 while armed drones have pursued al-Qaida terrorists within the country, degrading the terrorist group. In
public opinion polls, Obama gets high marks for his record on national security, a stark contrast to his dismal
numbers on handling the nation's finances. An Associated Press-GfK poll conducted in May found that 64
percent approved of Obama's handling of terrorism and 53 percent approved of the way he's managing the
situation in Afghanistan. By contrast, less than half approved of his handling of the economy (46 percent),
unemployment (48 percent) or gas prices (30 percent). Republicans, who have successfully pummeled the
president on the economy, have made little headway on national security. "There's nothing like success to
quell criticism," said Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va. "I think the fact that there have been some successes, ranging
from spectacular, Osama bin Laden, to the utter decapitation of al-Qaida to the disruption of violent
insurgencies in Yemen, Somalia ... western parts of Pakistan has done much to quiet some of that criticism. ... I
think the Republicans are very hard-pressed to criticize that aspect of the president's foreign policy."
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***A2: KRITIKS***
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The alternative fails – critique alone impedes effective policymaking – reference to realism is
key to making choices intelligible to states
Lott 2004 [Anthony, Assistant Professor of Political Science @ St. Olaf College. Creating Insecurity. p. 46-7]
But the constructivist project has not been without its problems. Specifically, constructivism has been
considered policy-irrelevant. It offers us a way to understand and reflect on our world but does nothing to tell
us how to navigate that world. As a policy tool, constructivism would require a moral component. The ability to
construct a coherent understanding of world politics requires moral teachings that assist in making political
choices from that understanding. While some constructivists have demonstrated how reflection and critique can
be used to influence the political process, constructivism seems to complicate the policy making process rather
than assist it. As noted, security studies bridges the divide between theoretical investigation and policy
relevance. In order to offer something useful to the state, studies must accept many of the assumptions upon
which the state exists. The inability to provide policy direction makes the constructivist project as incomplete
an approach to security studies as realist thought, albeit for remarkably different reasons. In the following
chapter, I seek to engage both realists and constructivists in a more rigorous discussion of national security
studies. While neither realism nor constructivism presents a comprehensive approach to national security
studies, I hope to demonstrate that both are necessary components of a more sophisticated understanding of
the sources of insecurity.
Only the perm solves – merely critiquing security can’t tell us how to act – realist caution is
critical to realizing the political proposals mandated by the alternative without reifying
security constructions
Lott 2004 [Anthony, Assistant Professor of Political Science @ St. Olaf College. Creating Insecurity. p. 65-7]
In this section, I take realism and political constructivism to be two interpretations of international politics
capable of providing partial answers to an investigation of the sources of insecurity. Under an epistemological
constructivist umbrella, we can treat each interpretation as a rhetorical device that attempts to give meaning to
the social world. Each interpretation examines and emphasizes specific part of this social world. Realism's
negative vision and its focus on material aspects of power speak to the 'cautious paranoid' and demand that
state actors consider the dangerous consequences of their actions. Political constructivism's intersubjective
emphasis recognizes the possibility of ideational changes in constructed threats and enemy images. The
reflexive posture present in political constructivism recognizes the potential for embracing a richer and more
ethical political framework. In this security calculus, both approaches are deemed necessary in order to develop
a more comprehensive understanding of security. This discussion examines how a simultaneous investigation
of material capabilities and identity performances might proceed. The purpose is not to demonstrate how one
approach is more useful in the analysis of a particular security issue but rather to examine how both positions
might co-exist beneath a constructivist umbrella in the development of policy-relevant and theoretically
rigorous account of national security studies. By way of example, we might return to our earlier example
concerning the current U.S. war against terrorism. Our discussion above suggests that realists and political
constructivists develop quite different interpretations of this war. The question that concerns us is whether it is
possible to balance the interpretations that each approach provides in the hope of offering a more robust
analysis of this particular security issue. To begin, Paul Kowert notes correctly that `constructivists intent on
demonstrating the proposition that the world can be constructed in different ways have been loathe to explore
material constraints on it construction.' Clearly, the events of 11 September 2001 demonstrated significant
material constraints on the U.S. construction of its security. Returning to a realist critique of these events, an
external enemy had inflicted physical harm on the state. Responding to this danger, realists demonstrate how
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the capabilities of the United States can be brought to bear not only on those responsible, but on those that
might harness similar resources for a future attack. In the assessment of threat, realists take seriously the
requirements of the obligation owed by the state to its citizens. Protection from physical danger is a
requirement for individual pursuit of the good life. Of course, political constructivists take this discussion as yet
another example of the fact that 'the very idea of "national security" (which scholars help transmit, after all)
serves state interests.'58 No doubt, but realists are drawn to the fact that basic ontological security remains a
prerequisite for the success of daily life. If this notion holds prior to the terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington, DC, the ability to conceive of 'national security' issues makes its construction all the more
important after that date. Constructing national security matters within a realist vision of international politics
demonstrates the central position of the state in securing individual security. And, it does not follow that a
realist interpretation of politics that centralizes the state necessarily apologizes for the state. Critical realists
have attacked state policies on a number of issues as the applications below demonstrate. Moreover, and this
is a point which needs to be emphasized, when analyzing security issues from within our constructivist
epistemology, ‘[there] is nothing inherently "un-constructivist" in believing... that some constructions make
more sense in a given environment than do others.'59 The realist construction of and repetitive emphasis on
the classic security dilemma, the importance of self-help, and the presence of external threats, continues to
make a great deal of sense in the present international context. However, these realist constructs do not
provide us with a complete picture of this particular security matter. The simple assertion that absolute security
is a chimera places limits on what realists can offer to the state. A security program based on an ever-increasing
number of material capabilities in a continuously expanding field of security is both impractical and dangerous.
Founding a security policy on the eradication of material capabilities existing outside the state does not
demonstrate a terribly sophisticated understanding of the sources of insecurity. Simultaneous to a realist picture
of the global terrorist threat, we need to investigate the issue as it is understood by scholars working within the
political constructivist tradition. An investigation of identity performances (those of the United States and the
perceived 'other') can be undertaken in an effort to more accurately assess the success of the realist
interpretation. The critique provided by political constructivists is not simply a negative critique offering a
deconstruction of the realist interpretation. Political constructivists are also involved in reflection,
reconstruction, reconceptualization. 'Among other things, reconceptualization implies that well known,
neglected, or apparently irrelevant materials can be looked at from a different perspective and sometimes gain
new relevance for our attempts at making sense of world politics.'' As Campbell makes clear, 'the deconstruction
of identity widens the domain of the political to include the ways in which identity is constituted and contains an
affirmative moment through which existing identity formations are denaturalized and alternative articulations of
identity and the political are made possible.' For instance, when Edward Said undertook an examination of the
social construction of `orientalism' in the west, 'he also managed to reduce the power of the socially constructed
image of orientalism, thus having an impact on one world of our making.' When political constructivists
challenge socially constructed images of `others,' they are challenging the political policies that result from
those constructed images. As this occurs, actors involved in the political process are induced to reconsider
those policies in order to render them more coherent.
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The rhetorical device of realism is critical to influence states and policymakers and
conceptualize material dangers while resisting constructions of inevitability. The alternative
undermines policy-relevant conclusions capable of confronting real dangers. Only the perm
solvesLott 2004 [Anthony, Assistant Professor of Political Science @ St. Olaf College. Creating Insecurity. p. 156-161]
This project has endeavored to bring together two seemingly contradictory approaches to the study of security.
To date, the discipline has yet to provide a comprehensive analysis of the multiple sources of insecurity that
confronts states and a means to overcome them. Because the study of security bridges the divide between
theory and policy, it is imperative that a concept of security emerge that is both philosophically coherent and
policy relevant. The multiple sources of insecurity that influence the behavior of states require analysis if
more pacific (and secure) relations are to be had. Both realism and political constructivism offer necessary but
incomplete understandings of these sources of insecurity. When realism and political constructivism are treated
as more or less complete approaches to the study of security, the conclusions reached and policies offered are
potentially harmful to the state and its citizens. Security, like Janus himself, is two-faced. When Romans placed
Janus on the faces of their coins, they reminded each other of the need to cautiously look in all directions before
acting. Security theorists must learn to do the same before undertaking an analysis of state policy. Both a
material and an ideational consideration of the sources of insecurity are required if a state is to succeed in
formulating appropriate national security strategies. While realism necessarily demonstrates the potential
dangers that could befall a state in anarchy, it cannot be considered a complete rendition of international
relations. Realism provides a study of security with a proper understanding of the material threats that
influence state behavior. Their studies are rich in detail, offering the state an appropriate theoretical lens
through which to view threats and assess capabilities. But, realism is unable to account for the ideational
sources of insecurity that also threaten the state. If realism is treated as a comprehensive approach to security
management, the state can only achieve a sub-optimal level of security. In order for the precepts and principles
of realism to be useful to policy makers and security analysts, realism must be conceptualized a valuable
rhetorical tool to influence the policy maker. In this way, realists are the 'cautious paranoids' at the security
table. Re-conceptualizing realism as a rhetorical device –what Donnelly has termed an 'orienting set of
insights' or a 'philosophical orientation' – it emerges as a negative disposition requiring the attention of the
policy maker. Its principles become warnings and cautionary tales to be considered in the construction and
evaluation of national security policies. Moreover, because these warnings and cautionary tales develop out of
a brought theoretical discourse, they are grounded in a sophisticated logical argument. Unlike the state
assessment of material threats, realists do not sell or hype their negative vision of material threats. In this
work, it has been necessary to place realism within a broader constructivist epistemology in order to
understand how it serves to challenge state policy at one end of the international relations spectrum. The
governing laws common to previous studies grounded in positivism become strategic constraints within the
pages above. As well, 'the need for caution...' no longer becomes `confused with the invariance or inevitability
of that which demands caution.'2 Most importantly, realism comes to be seen as part of a larger security
critique. Similarly, studies employing political constructivism cannot be considered complete renditions of
national security issues. Their emphasis on identity and culture, and their alternative forms of analysis, provide
a necessary understanding of ideational threats and an emancipatory moment for changing state securitization.
However, these reflexive critiques do not demonstrate an understanding of the role that material threats play
in national security matters or the negative consequences of ignoring those material threats. Their alternative
analytic focus often rejects the traditional state 'security dilemma' and its corresponding policy needs. The
consistent deconstruction of identity performances and cultural givens may provide an opportunity for the
emergence of a more democratic ethos, but the state is often marginalized in the process. Such an occurrence
does not fulfill the requirements of a security framework that seeks theoretical rigor and policy relevance. It is a
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necessary (but insufficient) component of a more comprehensive understanding of security. The potentially
positive political vision that emerges from political constructivism balances the negative vision provided by
realism and suggests an opportunity to overcome culturally constructed threats. These rhetorical approaches
become complementary tools in the analysis of security rather than contradictory paradigms. Each approach
offers a partial understanding of insecurity. At each instance, the other approach is necessary in order to
balance the security analysis being offered. In this way, the discipline of Security Studies is offered a more
comprehensive means to understanding this `essentially contested concept.'' Previous approaches, whether
realist or constructivist, have placed ontological and epistemological barriers on the concept of security.
Seeking to remain relevant to the policy community, realists espousing a materialist ontology and state-centric
bias reduced threats to existential dangers accessible to an empiricist epistemology. In response, constructivists
challenged realism by deconstructing academic texts and policy statements to uncover hidden discourses and
expose traditional efforts as discursively constituted and ultimately malleable. If realism demonstrated the
importance of power in the national security calculus, constructivists demonstrated its 'necessary'
(re)production by actors involved in multiple speech-acts. If realists argued that a specific (material) condition –
tanks, bombs, hostile protests, etc. – was an existential threat, constructivists claimed an a priori establishment
of these physical 'things' in security terms. The result for the study of security was compelling. A schism in the
field separated those pursuing a traditional (state-centric and policy relevant) approach from those pursuing
an investigative critique.' Realists could claim to participate in the 'real world' while constructivists could claim
to be intellectually and morally distinguished. But, what has been the cost to the field of Security Studies and
the policies of the state? Ultimately, an investigation of the sources of insecurity must attempt to manage the
crises of human existence. Security is a necessary component to the construction of the good life. In an
international environment largely defined by the presence of states, security policies must be understandable
to those states. Policies must be designed that manage the security needs of all the relevant states in the
system. This is not a new challenge. It returns the discussion of security to the works of earlier realists. Balancing
the negative vision of realism with something positive engaged Carr, Herz, and others. In this way, these
scholars could 'insist on keeping 'realist' insights in dialectical tension with higher human aspirations and
possibilities.'5 The challenge of this project has been to find a framework wherein this dialectical tension can
move the study of security forward. Arnold Wolfers's conclusion that 'the ideal security policy is one that would
lead to a distribution of values so satisfactory to all nations that the intention to attack and with it the
problem of security would be minimized,' challenges students of security to more completely understand the
sources of insecurity. And this means something more than arguing over the concept of security. It means
analyzing, critiquing, and challenging power. It means recognizing that security analysts are political agents
involved in a political process. When done well, both realism and political constructivism resist the
Thrasymachian statements and policy orientations of policy makers. What I have attempted to demonstrate,
however, is that when they are viewed as components of a larger project, they provide a much more
comprehensive and devastating critique of state action. In today's world, the investigation of security that
balances the negative with the positive, the realist with the constructivist, is a possibility. It can be achieved by
investigating issues through the lens of the 'cautious paranoid' while simultaneously investigating the same
issues through the lens of the political constructivist. Both offer something valuable to a more robust
understanding of security and both are required if we are to achieve a more secure future. I applied this
theoretical approach, seeking to balance realism arm constructivism, to four pressing security issues that
currently animate U.S. security discourse. The discussions concerning unilateral BMD deployment, the drug war
in Colombia, globalization and protests from below, and the decision to go to war in Iraq suggest that a more
robust analysis of each issue – balancing the concerns of realists and political constructivists – can improve our
understanding of the security problem and present a stronger critique of the official state policy. Such findings
are important because, as has been discussed above, the state represents the most powerful international
actor in the system and maintaining the state as the central focus of security studies commits this approach to
a policy relevant critique. As the study of security bridges both theoretical inquiry and state policy
considerations, this work has attempted to remain firmly attuned to the world-view of the state. To reiterate, if
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the concept of security is to resonate, then it must be applicable to the political units capable of producing
system-wide effects because of their policies. Because the United States represents the most powerful actor
in international relations, it is important to examine how its security policies are created and transformed. As
chapters five through eight suggest, the United States has. paradoxically, created insecurity while attempting to
manage its security concerns. A balanced approach combining material and ideational issues offers a more
rigorous test for policies designed to enhance national security. By combining realist and political constructivist
positions on any given issue, analysts and policy makers are required to contemplate the requirements of two
very different political visions. Such an undertaking is far from complete. Additional studies might employ a
similar approach in order to investigate other issues designated 'security' topics by relevant actors. The official
American position towards non-nuclear rogues (Cuba. Libya, Syria, and possibly Venezuela) suggests a need to
balance concern for their material capabilities with an understanding of the U.S. construction of these states as
antagonistic actors. This requires that the security analyst look both to the material interests and the ideational
identities of the United States. In addition, American policy in the Middle East requires a thoroughgoing
analysis employing a more comprehensive approach to security. A realist critique of state policy in the Middle
East (one which measures the material capabilities of the states in the region and demonstrates how regional
balance of power issues influence state behavior) could be complemented by a political constructivist
interpretation of U.S. self/other constructs. Such a study could demonstrate how the works of Edward Said,
Noam Chomsky, and David Campbell,' might be supplemented by a realist discussion of U.S. interests in the
region. As the applications to this approach have suggested, an investigation of this matter might bring about a
more coherent policy package that offers the United States an opportunity to promote and encourage a more
democratic ethos at home and abroad. If this is deemed successful in demonstrating how the United States
creates insecurity by not fully understanding its security environment, it might also be used to investigate
security considerations for other states in the world. Regional hegemons, as well as minor powers, might benefit
from a more comprehensive understanding of their relative power capabilities and their identity performances.
A balanced understanding of the sources of insecurity provides a deeper critique of the security problematique
that emerges. Such an approach might prove valuable to states in the Middle East. For example, the Israeli need
for military defense might be examined in light of the Palestinian need for basic, ontological security. The
existential conditions for most Palestinians resemble the conditions present in South African townships during
Apartheid' or the conditions of peasant communities in rural Colombia today.' A robust study involving Israel
and its neighbors might improve the regional security environment by balancing realist and political
constructivist interpretations. It would challenge Israel to recognize how Palestinian ontological security is a
prerequisite for Israeli national security. Similarly, it would challenge Palestinians to recognize the security needs
of Israel as fundamentally important to their own security environment. In other regions, a study employing this
discussion may prove useful as well. The security situation between India and Pakistan continues to deteriorate.
Since both sides have refused to engage in a consistent and meaningful political dialogue, deciding instead to
propagate a military understanding of their security interests, their separate understandings of the situation
remains dangerously incomplete. The framework developed here provides a way for these states to investigate
both the material and cultural sources of their shared insecurity. Perhaps Simon Dalby is most accurate,
contending that the current debate in the field finds scholars 'contesting an essential concept.' Security is,
indeed, an essential concept. Without security, humans are unable to search for, obtain, or even imagine the
good life. Dalby summarizes the issue convincingly: security is a crucial term, both in the political lexicon of state
policy makers and among academics in the field of international relations. Precisely because of the salience of
security, the current debates about reformulating it provide, when read as political discourse in need of analysis
rather than as a series of solutions to problems, a very interesting way to come to grips with what is at stake in
current debates around world politics and the constitution of the post-Cold War political order." The challenge
for scholars is to conceptualize security in such a way that human beings are brought back in. The state, to be
sure, is the primary guarantor of security in the world today. This requires recognition of where the theorist
sits in relation to the state and what the theorist can do in resisting unsatisfactory claims of state
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securitization. By recognizing the Janus-like quality of security, scholars can come to understand the need to
balance material threats with those constructed through repetitive identity performances.
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A2: Security K (General)
Turn: Our scenario evaluations are crucial for responsible politics. Pure critique of security
practice is insufficient – we need to evaluate “as if” outcomes like the plan to realize ethical
counter-practices
Michael Williams, 2005 [Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Wales. The Realist
Tradition and the Limits of International Relations, p. 165-7]
Moreover, the links between sceptical realism and prevalent postmodern themes go more deeply than this,
particularly as they apply to attempts by post-structural thinking to reopen questions of responsibility and
ethics.80 In part, the goals of post-structural approaches can be usefully characterised, to borrow Stephen
White's illuminating contrast, as expressions of 'responsibility to otherness' which question and challenge
modernist equations of responsibility with a 'responsibility to act'. A responsibility to otherness seeks to reveal
and open the constitutive processes and claims of subjects and subjectivities that a foundational modernism has
effaced in its narrow identification of responsibility with a 'responsibility to act'.81 Deconstruction can from this
perspective be seen as a principled stance unwilling to succumb to modernist essentialism which in the name of
responsibility assumes and reifies subjects and structures, obscures forms of power and violence which are
constitutive of them, and at the same time forecloses a consideration of alternative possibilities and practices.
Yet it is my claim that the wilful Realist tradition does not lack an understanding of the contingency of practice
or a vision of responsibility to otherness. On the contrary, its strategy of objectification is precisely an attempt
to bring together a responsibility to otherness and a responsibility to act within a wilfully liberal vision. The
construction of a realm of objectivity and calculation is not just a consequence of a need to act —the framing
of an epistemic context for successful calculation. It is a form of responsibility to otherness, an attempt to
allow for diversity and irreconcilability precisely by — at least initially — reducing the self and the other to a
structure of material calculation in order to allow a structure of mutual intelligibility, mediation, and stability.
It is, in short, a strategy of limitation: a wilful attempt to construct a subject and a social world limited — both
epistemically and politically — in the name of a politics of toleration: a liberal strategy that John Gray has
recently characterised as one of modus vivendi.82 If this is the case, then the deconstructive move that gains
some of its weight by contrasting itself to a non- or apolitical objectivism must engage with the more complex
contrast to a sceptical Realist tradition that is itself a constructed, ethical practice. This issue becomes even
more acute if one considers Iver Neumann's incisive questions concerning postmodern constructions of identity,
action, and responsibility.83 As Neumann points out, the insight that identities are inescapably contingent and
relationally constructed, and even the claim that identities are inescapably indebted to otherness, do not in
themselves provide a foundation for practice, particularly in situations where identities are 'sedimented' and
conflictually defined. In these cases, deconstruction alone will not suffice unless it can demonstrate a capacity
to counter in practice (and not just in philosophic practice) the essentialist dynamics it confronts.84 Here, a
responsibility to act must go beyond deconstruction to consider viable alternatives and counter-practices. To
take this critique seriously is not necessarily to be subject yet again to the straightforward 'blackmail of-the
Enlightenment' and a narrow 'modernist' vision of responsibility.85 While an unwillingness to move beyond a
deconstructive ethic of responsibility to otherness for fear that an essentialist stance is the only (or most likely)
alternative expresses a legitimate concern, it should not license a retreat from such questions or their
practical demands. Rather, such situations demand also an evaluation of the structures (of identity and
institutions) that might viably be mobilised in order to offset the worst implications of violently exclusionary
identities. It requires, as Neumann nicely puts it, the generation of compelling 'as if' stories around which
counter-subjectivities and political practices can coalesce. Wilful Realism, I submit, arises out of an
appreciation of these issues, and comprises an attempt to craft precisely such 'stories' within a broader
intellectual and sociological analysis of their conditions of production, possibilities of success, and likely consequences. The question is, to what extent are these limits capable of success, and to what extent might they be
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limits upon their own aspirations toward responsibility? These are crucial questions, but they will not be
addressed by retreating yet again into further reversals of the same old dichotomies.
The alt causes ultranationalist and neorealist backlash – replicates the violence of the squo
Burke, lecturer at Adelaide University School of History and Politics, 2007
[Anthony, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other. pp.93]
Once we attempt to enact an ethics of responsibility that challenges existing political ontologies, especially
nationalist ones, a new danger appears: it seems unmooring. By playing out what Connolly calls 'a politics of
disturbance through which sedimented identities and moralities are rendered more alert to the deleterious
effects of their naturalisation upon difference' and 'a politics of enactment through which new possibilities of
being are propelled into established constellations', the new ethics produces uncertainty – political and
ontological. 'The politics of disturbance can backfire', he writes, 'inducing that identity panic upon which the
politics of fundamentalism feeds'.83 By antagonising conservatives and provoking them to cling to
fundamentalist certitudes, the deployment of such an ethics may unwittingly reinforce the very politics it is
seeking to transform. The Israeli settler lobby, and the US government's fundamentalist faith in the utility of
military violence as a panacea for insecurity and uncertainty, are powerful contemporary examples of this
problem. As Michael Barnett suggests, the post-Oslo process exacerbated such problems: the growing divisions
within Israeli society exemplified by Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in fact 'grew more severe, in no small measure
due to his secular and liberal response'.84
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Their critique of terrorism ties the hands of the United States–this appeasement prevents
action to stop genocide, terrorism, sexism, and other atrocities
HANSON 2004 (Victor Davis, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html)
Rather than springing from realpolitik, sloth, or fear of oil cutoffs, much of our appeasement of Middle Eastern
terrorists derived from a new sort of anti-Americanism that thrived in the growing therapeutic society of the
1980s and 1990s. Though the abrupt collapse of communism was a dilemma for the Left, it opened as many
doors as it shut. To be sure, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, few Marxists could argue for a state-controlled
economy or mouth the old romance about a workers’ paradise—not with scenes of East German families
crammed into smoking clunkers lumbering over potholed roads, like American pioneers of old on their way
west. But if the creed of the socialist republics was impossible to take seriously in either economic or political
terms, such a collapse of doctrinaire statism did not discredit the gospel of forced egalitarianism and resentment
against prosperous capitalists. Far from it. If Marx receded from economics departments, his spirit reemerged
among our intelligentsia in the novel guises of post-structuralism, new historicism, multiculturalism, and all the
other dogmas whose fundamental tenet was that white male capitalists had systematically oppressed
women, minorities, and Third World people in countless insidious ways. The font of that collective oppression,
both at home and abroad, was the rich, corporate, Republican, and white United States. The fall of the Soviet
Union enhanced these newer post-colonial and liberation fields of study by immunizing their promulgators from
charges of fellow-traveling or being dupes of Russian expansionism. Communism’s demise likewise freed these
trendy ideologies from having to offer some wooden, unworkable Marxist alternative to the West; thus they
could happily remain entirely critical, sarcastic, and cynical without any obligation to suggest something
better, as witness the nihilist signs at recent protest marches proclaiming: “I Love Iraq, Bomb Texas.” From
writers like Arundhati Roy and Michel Foucault (who anointed Khomeini “a kind of mystic saint” who would
usher in a new “political spirituality” that would “transfigure” the world) and from old standbys like Frantz
Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre (“to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an
oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time”), there filtered down a vague notion that the United
States and the West in general were responsible for Third World misery in ways that transcended the dull old
class struggle. Endemic racism and the legacy of colonialism, the oppressive multinational corporation and the
humiliation and erosion of indigenous culture brought on by globalization and a smug, self-important cultural
condescension—all this and more explained poverty and despair, whether in Damascus, Teheran, or Beirut.
There was victim status for everybody, from gender, race, and class at home to colonialism, imperialism, and
hegemony abroad. Anyone could play in these “area studies” that cobbled together the barrio, the West
Bank, and the “freedom fighter” into some sloppy global union of the oppressed—a far hipper enterprise than
rehashing Das Kapital or listening to a six-hour harangue from Fidel. Of course, pampered Western intellectuals
since Diderot have always dreamed up a “noble savage,” who lived in harmony with nature precisely because
of his distance from the corruption of Western civilization. But now this fuzzy romanticism had an updated,
political edge: the bearded killer and wild-eyed savage were not merely better than we because they lived apart
in a pre-modern landscape. No: they had a right to strike back and kill modernizing Westerners who had
intruded into and disrupted their better world—whether Jews on Temple Mount, women in Westernized dress
in Teheran, Christian missionaries in Kabul, capitalist profiteers in Islamabad, whiskey-drinking oilmen in Riyadh,
or miniskirted tourists in Cairo. An Ayatollah Khomeini who turned back the clock on female emancipation in
Iran, who murdered non-Muslims, and who refashioned Iranian state policy to hunt down, torture, and kill
liberals nevertheless seemed to liberal Western eyes as preferable to the Shah—a Western-supported anticommunist, after all, who was engaged in the messy, often corrupt task of bringing Iran from the tenth to the
twentieth century, down the arduous, dangerous path that, as in Taiwan or South Korea, might eventually lead
to a consensual, capitalist society like our own. Yet in the new world of utopian multiculturalism and knee-jerk
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anti-Americanism, in which a Noam Chomsky could proclaim Khomeini’s gulag to be “independent nationalism,”
reasoned argument was futile. Indeed, how could critical debate arise for those “committed to social change,”
when no universal standards were to be applied to those outside the West? Thanks to the doctrine of cultural
relativism, “oppressed” peoples either could not be judged by our biased and “constructed” values (“false
universals,” in Edward Said’s infamous term) or were seen as more pristine than ourselves, uncorrupted by
the evils of Western capitalism. Who were we to gainsay Khomeini’s butchery and oppression? We had no
way of understanding the nuances of his new liberationist and “nationalist” Islam. Now back in the hands of
indigenous peoples, Iran might offer the world an alternate path, a different “discourse” about how to organize
a society that emphasized native values (of some sort) over mere profit. So at precisely the time of these
increasingly frequent terrorist attacks, the silly gospel of multiculturalism insisted that Westerners have
neither earned the right to censure others, nor do they possess the intellectual tools to make judgments
about the relative value of different cultures. And if the initial wave of multiculturalist relativism among the
elites—coupled with the age-old romantic forbearance for Third World roguery—explained tolerance for early
unpunished attacks on Americans, its spread to our popular culture only encouraged more. This
nonjudgmentalism—essentially a form of nihilism—deemed everything from Sudanese female circumcision to
honor killings on the West Bank merely “different” rather than odious. Anyone who has taught freshmen at a
state university can sense the fuzzy thinking of our undergraduates: most come to us prepped in high schools
not to make “value judgments” about “other” peoples who are often “victims” of American “oppression.” Thus,
before female-hating psychopath Mohamed Atta piloted a jet into the World Trade Center, neither Western
intellectuals nor their students would have taken him to task for what he said or condemned him as
hypocritical for his parasitical existence on Western society. Instead, without logic but with plenty of romance,
they would more likely have excused him as a victim of globalization or of the biases of American foreign
policy. They would have deconstructed Atta’s promotion of anti-Semitic, misogynist, Western-hating thought,
as well as his conspiracies with Third World criminals, as anything but a danger and a pathology to be
remedied by deportation or incarceration.
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Terrorism itself is the problem, not some root cause—their argument relies on cultural
stereotypes and promotes unrestrained violence
ELSHTAIN 2007 (Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics
at the University of Chicago, The Price Of Peace: Just War in the Twenty-First Century, Edited by Charles Reed
and David Ryall)
Of course it is sometimes the case that elements of movements that resort to terrorism – say, the Irish
Republican Army – also develop a political arm and begin negotiating a political settlement. No political
solution is possible, however, when the destruction of innocent civilians and some fantastic notion, say, of
restoration of the classical caliphate, as in bin Ladenism, is the alleged aim. Thus, bin Laden, in fatwa after
fatwa, calls upon the faithful to kill ‘crusaders, Jews and infidels’ wherever and whenever they are found. He
disdains any distinction between Americans in uniform and those going about daily civilian life. His claim is
that to kill all Americans anywhere is a ‘duty for every Muslim . . . God willing, America’s end is near.’6
Terrorism is terrorism Before turning to the context of ethical evaluation and restraint within which just war
thinkers insist terrorism and measures used to combat it should be located, it is important to examine some
apologies for terrorism, that remove the onus of moral criticism and condemnation from those committed to
terrorist deeds. For there are some who insist now, as they have in the past, that the victims of terror
somehow ‘had it coming’. Others claim that those who resort to terror have no other option as they are in a
state of ‘rage’ as well as helplessness so they must use whatever weapons they can. Then, too, there is the
‘everybody does it’ claim. These lines of thought strip away a moral vocabulary of the sort required to make
crucial distinctions between rule-governed war making and terrorism. One often finds rationales for terrorist
acts that, in the rush to exculpate, wind up patronising those who resort to terrorism. As theologian David
Yeago writes: To suppose that the Islamic faith, or Arab culture, or poverty and the experience of oppression
somehow lead young men directly, of themselves, to be capable of flying an airliner full of passengers into a
building crowded with unsuspecting civilians is deeply denigrating to Muslims, to Arabs, and to the poor and
oppressed. It requires us to suppose that Muslims, or Arabs, or the poor lie almost beyond the borders of a
shared humanity, that however much we pity and excuse them, we cannot rely on them simply because they
are Muslims, Arabs, or oppressed to behave in humanly and morally intelligible ways. I would suggest that
this is a dangerous line of thought, however humanely motivated it may initially be.7 This is a powerful – and
controversial – argument and it warrants some unpacking. Often arguments that take the form of ‘they have
no other option’ are working with crude binary models of victim/victimiser or oppressor/ oppressed. If the
victimising is absolute on one side of the pair, it follows that victimisation is absolute. If this is so, then victims
will and must resort to anything they can to undo their ‘oppression’. The origins of such an approach
conceptually most likely lie with Hegel’s famous (or infamous) master/slave dialogue. More recently, this
argument is associating with a text that was a staple in third worldist ideological circles, namely, Franz
Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.8 Unsurprisingly, these sorts of arguments have resurfaced with Islamist
fanaticism and terrorism. But no one has thus far made a convincing case that ‘structural’ causes lie behind a
resort to terrorism – like poverty and desperation. It is, therefore, clear that we must look at terrorism not as
epiphenomenal to some underlying problem but as itself the problem. Poverty does not breed terrorism. The
vast majority of the poor never resort to terrorism. The attackers of 9/11 weremiddle class and reasonably
well educated. Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova have explored in depth the relationship, if any, between
economic deprivation and terrorism. They conclude that a ‘careful review of the evidence provides little
reason for optimism that a reduction in poverty or an increase in educational attainment would, by
themselves, meaningfully reduce international terrorism’. The issue is important, they aver, because drawing
a false causal connection between poverty and terrorism is potentially quite dangerous. We may be led to do
nothing about terrorism, and we may also lose interest in providing support for developing nations should the
terrorism threat wane. By ‘falsely connecting terrorism to poverty’, policy-makers, analysts and
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commentators only ‘deflect attention from the real roots of terrorism’, which are political, ideological and
religious.9 There is a huge gap between claiming that poverty ‘causes’ terrorism and acknowledging the ways
in which terrorist entities exploit various conditions, including desperation of all sorts. The key lies in the
word ‘exploit’. Terrorists exploit certain conditions. These conditions are part of the matrix out of which
terrorism grows. It does not follow that terrorism is caused by these conditions. Because terrorists exploit
certain conditions, it makes good sense for those who are victimised by terrorism to seek to ameliorate the
conditions out of which terrorism may flow. But this gets very tricky very fast, not only for the reasons noted
above, but because a good bit of al-Qaeda terrorism of the sort that stunned the United States and Great
Britain is the act of those who became ideologically inflamed actors within the very bosom of the society they
seek to destroy. In light of the enormous varieties of circumstances that may yield up terrorists, those
combating terrorism must in their response, first and foremost, concentrate on terrorism itself. Confronted
with a serial killer, the first thing police seek to do is to stop the violence. Attempting to discern what
particular concatenation of circumstances led to this particular person taking up serial killing comes later.
Urgency is added to this effort if one recognises that there are always unscrupulous political leaders who are
only too happy to exploit the very conditions that make terrorist recruitment easier. To alter the
circumstances is to alter their own fortunes, to the extent that they have profited from the misery of their
own people. Acknowledging this in no way removes responsibility from the shoulders of others, but what it
does do is to alert us to a kind of sacralisation of victimhood that invites exculpation when the ‘victim’
commits abhorrent acts. This is itself a patronising gesture that traffics in the most demeaning sorts of
cultural stereotypes.
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Any lack of resolve will not end the War on Terrorism but force us to rely on extreme
brutality—university criticism is the most likely path to a nuclear war
PETERS 2005 (Ralph, fmr US Army intel officer, prizewinning writer and strategist, New Glory, 72-75)
We all hope that we shall never have to use a nuclear weapon. But faced with implacable enemies determined
to destroy us, inadequate conventional measures increase the likelihood that we will eventually need to resort
to weapons of mass destruction ourselves. The use of such weapons seems unthinkable today, but sufficient
destruction wreaked against our homeland could bring about a rapid change of heart. We value our sense of
humanity, but we, too, will do whatever it takes to survive. In world of nuclear proliferation—which neither of
our political parties, nor our closest allies, have demonstrated the strength of will to stop—the chance that we
will live out our lives without witnessing at least a regional nuclear exchange is far lower than any one of us
might like. Weapons of mass destruction are ideal for enemies intent upon mass destruction. At least some
of our current and future enemies—Islamist fanatics—seek nothing less than the elimination of our country
and the destruction of civilization. They do not, and will not, have the strength to achieve their goal, but they
are likely to gain the capability to inflict losses on our society and economy far more painful than those of 9/11.
If we lack the fortitude to do whatever it takes to win we may be certain that our enemies do not share our
reticence. Despite the terrible dangers of the Cold War, the truth is that American and its allies have lived
through a golden age of safety. That age is now at an end. Despite our best efforts to secure our homeland, we
live in an age of vulnerability unprecedented since our frontier days. And the only enduring means to reduce
that vulnerability isn’t frisking Grandma at the airport. We must carry the struggle relentlessly to our enemies,
as we have done with broad success since 9/11. We can win the War on Terror. Or any other war. But only if
we are willing to fight for a long time to come. The losers in the War on Terror will be those who first despair.
Our fanatical enemies cannot defeat us. But we can defeat ourselves through a failure of will. The nonsense
that “victory isn’t possible today” is an absurdity foisted upon us by academics and pundits. Victory is always
possible. If we’re willing to pay the price. And if we are not we should not engage in military adventures that
only worsen the plight of a broken world. To do great good with the military you often must begin by doing
great harm to the enemies of the good. Sparing our enemies is not an act of virtue. Nor does it mean that
they will choose to spare us. It is essential that our military help civilian decision makers escape the cancerous
lies concocted by think tanks and university faculties about war. The military’s first domestic mission is
education: to help civilian decision makers unlearn the nonsense they have been taught throughout their
careers. If our uniformed leaders neglect this educational mission they will have no right to complain when their
advice is ignored in a crisis, when our troops are misused, and when the nation’s leaders leave our military
holding the (body) bag after things go wrong. Warfare is a bath of blood in a pool of horror. Any imagined
alternative is not war. The observations offered above sound cruel. But warfare is not kind. If we are unwilling
to accept that it is not enough to defeat an enemy technically, but that [they] he must be convinced of [their]
his defeat, we will continue to falter. The shock of an attack by our military in a general war should be so
overwhelming—so deadly, graphically destructive, and uncompromising—that the enemy, faced with
unbearable losses, loses his will to fight. When we face particularly tenacious enemies whose resolve to resist
does not waver we must be willing to destroy them. If we shrink from the acts of destruction necessary to
defeat an enemy thoroughly we will find ourselves suffering unnecessary casualties in a needlessly protracted
struggle. Even in comparatively benign peacekeeping operations we always should display overwhelming force.
No potential enemy should be allowed to calculate a chance of success for himself. In operations short of war
the appearance of irresistible strength can sometimes obviate the need to use that strength. But when we
allow ourselves to appear diffident we only compound our problems. Many strategic lessons come from the
schoolyard—no bully respects weakness, for example. Our ambition to do everything military cleanly, quickly,
and cheaply in political terms has brought us to the point where we are often better at encouraging our
enemies than we are at defeating them. Only strength is respected in the world beyond our shores. Not
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kindness, not wisdom, not the philosophical constructs so impressive to graduate students, but strength. A
strong state that allows itself to appear weak will be challenged by weak states hoping to appear strong.
There is no substitute for being feared. Paradoxically, we are undermined by our own capabilities. As we saw
in Iraq, even when stripped to a bare minimum of forces our military is so skilled that it can wage campaigns and
win conventional wars with breathtaking speed. But a swift war without attendant devastation inflicts no pain
on the enemy population—and often too little on the enemy’s combatants. It is not enough to win fast,
although speed is increasingly essential. The victory must be devastating. Under different circumstances and
against different opponents the amount of physical destruction required will vary widely. But while we may
wish to minimize friendly casualties, it’s a counterproductive absurdity to go to outlandish lengths to spare our
enemies. We must get rid of the notion that we can make our enemies love us. This sounds harsh to
American ears. But many of us will live to see our enemies commit such horrendous acts of brutality that the
fiercest observations offered here will become second nature to us. Once enough of our fellow citizens have
been slaughtered because of our fecklessness we will learn to kill with relish once again.
Turn/: Their alternative would only be replaced by a government that would impose these policies. Imagine how
quick there would be a new government if Obama all of a sudden said, “We’re no longer going to fight
terrorism”…
Kavka, Professor at U.C.-Irvine, 1987 [Gregory S., Moral Paradoxes of Nuclear Deterrence, p. 86-87]
The lesson of the kidney case seems to be that one can, at most, actively impose substantially lesser risks or
harms on other innocent people to protect oneself. Can this lesson be applied to national as well as individual
self-defense? One might contend that it cannot be, appealing for support to the hallowed ought-implies-can
principle. According to that principle agents, including nations, can only be obligated to act in ways they are
capable of acting. But, it may be suggested, nations are literally incapable of refraining from taking steps
believed to be necessary for national defense, even if these impose horrible risks or harms on outside
innocents. For any government that failed to undertake the requisite defensive actions (e.g., any government
that abandoned nuclear deterrence) would be quickly ousted and replaced by a government willing to under
take them.
Terrorism is a violent form of poltical communication; we need to understand it specifically
Crelinsten, 2002 [Ronald D., “Analysing Terrorism and Counter-terrorism: A Communication Model,”
Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 14. No .2 (Sunrmer), database, Crelenstein, p. 77-78]
Karl von Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is an extension of diplomacy by other means suggests that war
and diplomacy arc not distinct phenomena. but share common characteristics. When Martin Luther King Jr said
that the riot is the language of the unheard he suggested that rioting is a form of communication that people
adopt when other channels are blocked. Similarly. when we say that violence is the language of' the inarticulate,
what we mean is that violence is a form of communication used by those who cannot express what they feel in
words or written tracts and publications, so they 'act it out' in violent ways. So violence by the state or by the
non-state actor can be conceived as a form of communication that coexists with other firms of
communication, sometimes used in concert with them and sometimes in their stead. As such, violence and
terrorism possess a logic and a grammar that must be understood if we are to prevent or control then. In this
article, I shall make use of this concept of violence as communication to present a conceptual model that places
terrorism and counter-terrorism within the context of the broader social and political life of a nation, with all
its diverse institutions of social control and its variegated forms of social and political activity. I shall then expand
this model beyond the boundaries of the state to include the place of terrorism and counter-terrorism in
international and transnational politics as well.
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A2: Security K (Terror Talk)
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Turn/: Evil—
The label terrorism isn’t the problem, isn’t the polarization of good and evil under which it’s
deployed—the permutation and a strict interpretation of the word solves this deployment
Ivie, 2003 [Robert L., “Evil Enemy Versus Agonistic Other: Rhetorical Constructions of Terrorism,” The Review
of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 25:181–200, p. 182-184]
Rather than allying us with democracy, the rhetoric of evil makes us complicit with terrorism, for terrorism is
constituted in and sustained by a discourse of evil, especially in an era of what Robin Wright calls “sacred rage,”
Mark Juergensmeyer refers to as “religious violence,” Rahul Mahajan identifies as America’s “new crusade,” and
George W. Bush renders in apocalyptic overtones as America’s “calling, as a blessed country,” to protect and
preserve “God’s gift to humanity” from the “designs of evil men” who threaten to destroy freedom, liberty, and
civilization with weapons of mass destruction.5 “The president’s faith in faith [was] readily apparent,” writes
Laurie Goodstein, “in his determination to vanquish Saddam Hussein.”6 He sees himself as “an instrument of
Providence,” observes David Gergen from the perspective of a political veteran who has served Presidents
Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton.7 Such religious language and attitudes are dangerously divisive, warns Elaine
Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University: “If there is an axis of evil, that obviously places [President
Bush] in the axis of good, and also means that anyone who disagrees with the policies he is advocating is placed
on the other side.”8
To vow triumph over evil is to fall prey to what Jeffrey Simon labels “the terrorist trap” and thus to become
hopelessly entangled in self-perpetuating and escalating “dramas of international violence” which, in turn,
“erode our basic democratic values” and doom the people to death and destruction.9 As Bruce Hoffman
stresses, terrorism is “fundamentally and inherently political” and “ineluctably about power: the pursuit of
power, the acquisition of power, and the use of power to achieve political change.”10
Terrorism in our time exacerbates this already deadly politics of power by operating under a rhetorical spell of
sacred duties and diabolical enemies. One side’s devil is the other side’s saving grace in these dueling
discourses of good and evil. On both sides of the divide, the dialectic of rival religious visions transforms the act
of killing civilians and/or destroying life-sustaining infrastructures into a necessary and legitimate consequence
of exercising righteous force over a demonic antagonist. In this way, the rhetoric of evil masks the politics of
terrorism, a politics of coercion represented as a sacred mission, a secular politics of perpetrating physical
assaults on civilians to advance political purposes in the name of a higher order.11 The rhetorical mask of evil
makes it difficult for either partner in this escalating dance of death to detect the disturbing parallel between
terror and counter-terror. Thus, for instance, the Bush administration identifies terrorism as America’s enemy,
even defining it as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents,” and then baldly
warns that preemptive strikes taken by the U.S. to prevent the hostile acts of its adversaries should not be used
by the “enemies of civilization” as a “pretext for aggression.”12 One side’s terror and aggression is the other
side’s protective reaction. Yet “warfare against civilians” when “answered in kind” has been a “failed tactic”
throughout human history, writes Caleb Can, because it brings about “retaliation in kind” that “perpetuates a
cycle of revenge and outrage” and plants the seeds of the avenger’s eventual downfall, for “a nation must never
think that it can use . . . the agents of terror when con-venient and then be rid of them when they are no longer
needed” in the pursuit of political ends.13
By masking the politics of terror, the rhetoric of evil perpetuates the performance of violence. The ritual of
demonizing the enemy symbolically transforms death into salvation, earthly battles into a cosmic struggle, and
escalations of violence into an extermination of the evil Other. Both sides perform rituals of violence in
reciprocal acts of demonization that mark everyone as legitimate targets because even civilians are considered
to be consenting and contributing members of one evil order or the other. Thus, for example, today’s terrorism
is “blowback” from America’s “triumphalist” attitude and moralistic determination “to dominate the global
scene” by projecting its military power and extending its social, political, and economic system throughout the
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world, according to Chalmers Johnson; it is the lethal byproduct, he argues, of “reservoirs of resentment against
all Americans” for their arrogance and hegemony.14 This is the kind of resentment, according to Michael Doran,
that motivated many Muslims inside and outside of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network to place the United
States on a par with Genghis Khan. And, Doran reasons, bin Laden’s strikes against satanic America have
exploited existing resentment and fomented potential Islamic revolution by prompting U.S. military responses
that callously kill Muslims in a crusade against terrorism and thus look a lot like terror itself to the victims on the
ground.15
And shifting away from the rhetoric of evil allows us to get at the root of the problem
Ivie, 2003 [Robert L., “Evil Enemy Versus Agonistic Other: Rhetorical Constructions of Terrorism,” The Review
of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 25:181–200, p. 189-90]
Moreover, playing this deadly game is a constant distraction from seriously addressing the underlying causes
of terrorism and readjusting political expectations accordingly. As Paul Pillar has observed, from the
perspective of a former CIA deputy chief of counterterrorism, “If there is a ‘war’ against terrorism, it is a war
that cannot be won” because there is no fixed enemy, no clear beginning, nor any prospect of final victory, only
the hope that terrorism overall can be reduced and attenuated even though it remains a part of our lives.
Matters are only made worse by rankling allies, violating civil liberties, reinforcing Islamic distrust of the U.S.,
and ignoring the contributing factors of what George Lakoff calls conflicting worldviews and “cultures of
despair.”24 If the rhetoric of fighting an evil enemy, especially when reinforced by U.S. military might, economic
clout, and presidential resolve, lowers the threshold of war, trumps arguments for pursuing peaceful
resolutions, and masks America’s complicity in the spiraling cycle of violence, what alternative to this tragic
perspective might prove to be a more serviceable response to terrorism? How can the debate be reframed to
privilege the presumption of peace consistent with democratic values, to shift the burden of proof back to the
advocates of war, and to increase the force of arguments for diplomacy and against pre-emption? What kind of
a perspective might motivate a higher degree of appreciation for the complexities of the human condition, more
tolerance of differences, and greater resistance to the legitimization of coerced consent? What
conceptualization of the Other promotes the practice of democracy instead of playing the trump card of an evil
enemy to diminish and indefinitely defer democracy in the name of defending it? How can the rhetoric of
antagonism be transposed into the more constructive discourse of democratic agonistics? In the simplest terms,
what is being suggested here is that a basic shift of perspective, achieved by insisting on the primacy of
democracy, entails a wholly different order of priorities than the prevailing accent on evil. Rather than
reducing democracy to a convenient excuse for war—trading on it as a legitimizing symbol, protecting it as an
imperiled and vulnerable institution, restraining it as a risky practice in times of crisis, and promising it as the
prize of victory—advocates of pre-emption should be held squarely accountable to meeting the standard of
democracy and all that it entails. Similarly, those troubled by the prospect of war mutating into a routine
instrument of statecraft and creating a “post-911” dystopia of terror and counter-terror must rearticulate their
arguments to feature democratic criteria, repositioning the most salient corollaries of a robustly democratic
ethic at the forefront of political consciousness and with sufficient presence to displace an otherwise disquieting
image of evil.
A2: Security K-Perm 1AR
The permutation is necessary to navigate between the Scylla of inevitable war and the
Charybdis of the nation-state; critical realism solves
Michael Bess, Vanderbilt University Chancellor’s Prof of History, 1993 (Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom
Cloud: Four activist intellectuals and their strategies for peace, The University of Chicago Press, Conclusion)
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For the foreseeable future, the sovereign state as a political institution shows few signs of withering away; and
political theorists as diverse as Jean Bethke Elshtain and Hedley Bull have put forth convincing arguments that
this is not necessarily a bad thing. “So long as the international community consists of sovereign states,”
writes Elshtain,
War remains a possibility…[But] what is the alternative? Continuous eruption of murderous local conflicts,
whether tribal, familiar, ethnic, or religious wars that were enormously destructive and repressive prior to the
formation of states? The state is the guarantee of internal order. It has eliminated much of that conflict.
On the other hand, it appears equally valid to argue that the sovereign state is finding its functions in world
politics eroded simultaneously from “above” and “below”, and that this slow process may be increasing rather
than diminishing in momentum. Below the nation-state, the past four decades have witnessed an
unprecedented burgeoning of nongovernmental organizations-from advocacy groups for human rights to
religious societies, from professional association to ecological lobbies-effectively communicating with each other
and building themselves into truly global networks; in a similar vein, international economic competition has
prompted a rapid expansion of multinational business corporations, whose activities have now come to define a
new sphere of interests and endeavors quite separate from those of any single state. Meanwhile “above” the
nation-state, formal and institutionalized cooperation among governments, as in the European Community or
the North American Free Trade Area, has slowly but steadily grown since 1945. Thus, we are left with the
unavoidable task of steering between Scylla and Charybdis. The continued existence of nation-states poses
serious dangers, not the last of which are war and bureaucratic ossification; but such states also offer the
advantage of providing a well-established source of order amid the welter of competing groups in world
politics. The experience of the post-Cold War Yugoslavia wrenchingly demonstrates the painful truth that
“smaller” is not necessarily more beautiful. On the other hand, the erosion of the nation-state’s functions from
“above” and “below” appears to be a fundamental fact of twentieth-century history; it is a process that seems
inextricably entwined with the growth of new technologies for communication and transportation, and it
appears likely to continue, regardless of the hopes and fears that humans attach to it.
The middle line of the permutation is necessary to form a gradual bridge to complete
critique-the alternative links to a short term war DA
Michael Bess, Vanderbilt University Chancellor’s Prof of History, 1993 (Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom
Cloud: Four activist intellectuals and their strategies for peace, The University of Chicago Press, Conclusion)
The contrast here is not mere theoretical quibble; it represents a dispute between two fundamentally divergent
ways of thinking about the future. Although Howard makes it clear in his essay that he hopes the ethical
component in politics will grow larger in the future, his conceptual framework actually leaves no room for such a
constructive development. In his schema, the most plausible pathway for action remains the diagonal line,
halfway between “ethics” and “power,” whether ten years or one hundred years from today; any deviation
from that line will inevitably constitute a proportionate loss either of efficacy or moral rigor. Since the only
way to achieve efficacy is through “coercive capability,” the ratio between “coercive capability” and ethical
action must always remain roughly the same. Violence and the threat of violence, as crucial components of
this concept of power, must continue to play approximately the same role in tomorrow’s society as they
always have done in the past. On the other hand, if one adopts the alternative framework, in which at least two
kind of power confront the political actor, then the range of possibilities for the future becomes much wider. An
increase in cooperative or noncoercive forms of action would not necessarily imply a loss of effectiveness. As
with Kenneth Boulding’s example of postwar France and Germany, one can envision situations in which
formerly antagonistic peoples have come to regard coercive forms of conflict-resolution as unacceptable,
“taboo.” These two peoples continue to engage in a wide variety of transactions, effectively shaping their
common social environment, yet they carry out these transactions according to an ethos of mutual
accommodation rather than one of domination by one actor over the other. Over time, if such a cooperative
ethos indeed became more generalized, the range of violent solutions in international politics might be
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gradually narrowed. Although the possibility of violence would always exist, the probability of people resorting
to it would have diminished significantly. Thus, in this framework, coherent political forms that evolve toward
diminishing levels of coercion become at least conceivable. One simple way of picturing such a transition is
through the metaphor of a piano keyboard, in which the left edge represents the extreme coercive politics,
while the right edge represents the extreme of cooperative politics. At any given time, the range of human
interactions is likely to encompass a specific spectrum of keys and notes, corresponding to a specific
constellation of power relations among different individuals and peoples. The goal of a peace activist, in this
sense, would be to persuade as many people as possible to choose forms of power along the right side of the
keyboard, gradually shifting the “center of balance” from the left toward the right, from coercion to
cooperation. Although the option of coercion would always remain open, the frequency of cases in which
people resorted to it would then steadily decrease. To be sure, even if this optimistic picture became a reality,
renegade cases of aggression or violence would presumably still have to be countered with the tools of
coercion; but this would take place as part of a broader cooperative effort among a wide coalition of actors
seeking to restore the prevailing environment of cooperative conflict-resolution.
***A2: CPs***
A2: States CP-2AC
The perm solves best
RAND Project AIR FORCE, a division of the RAND Corporation, is the U.S. Air Force’s federally funded research
and development center for studies and analyses 2008 (The MaritimeDimension ofInternational
SecurityTerrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United States)
In whatever capacity the United States chooses to support or pro- mote anti-piracy and terrorism measures,
coordinating initiatives with other concerned littoral states and international organizations needs to be
emphasized as much as possible.9 Not only will this allow Wash- ington to offset some of the cost of its
assistance programs, it would also help to reduce latent perceptions that the general issue of mar- itime
security is exclusively tied to U.S. strategic priorities.10 Just as importantly, working with or through partner
countries and organiza- tions will give the U.S. government greater flexibility and latitude in developing
indigenous capabilities in sensitive areas and regions where strictly unilateral action would be difficult (or
impossible)—a potential reality in many parts of the Middle East, Persian Gulf, and South and Southeast Asia.
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No solvency:
a) funding-states legally can’t run deficits and the courts will enforce balanced budget
amendments
National Review 19 July 2011 (On Balanced-Budget Amendments;
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/272203/balanced-budget-amendments-michael-j-new)
However, enforceability is not among my main concerns. Right now, 49 states have balanced-budget
amendments. Obviously these amendments differ in terms of their stringency, but they all seem fairly well
enforced. In many cases, state balanced-budget amendments have resulted in politically damaging spending
cuts and tax hikes. I am sure that in these situations, many legislators and governors would have liked to
ignore these balanced-budget amendments, but they seemed to make a good faith effort to abide by them. I
really cannot think of any instances where state balanced-budget amendments were unenforced.
Interestingly, state courts have been very tough on other fiscal limits, but fairly supportive of balanced-budget
amendments. During a budget standoff in Nevada in 2003, the courts basically nullified Nevada’s
constitutional supermajority requirement for tax increases. However, they left Nevada’s balanced-budget
amendment intact.
b) Federal jurisdiction over sea port security
NC. Ariel Pinto and Ghaith Rabadi Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Old Dominion
University 2011 (US Port Security; Chapter 12)
The U.S. Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA), designed to protect U.S. ports and waterways from
terrorist attacks, was signed into law on November 25, 2002. The MTSA seeks to prevent security incidents in
the maritime supply chain, in particular, the port link in this chain. The MTSA also incorporated the
international security requirements found in the International Ship and Port Security (ISPS) Code that was
ratified earlier in 2002 by the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization (IMO). The ISPS Code is a risk
management code for securing ships and ports, e.g., monitoring the access and control of people and cargo to
ships and ports and ensuring the availability of security communications. The Code requires ports and marine
terminals, serving seagoing vessels of 500 gross tonnage and upwards, to have security plans, officers and
certain equipment in place (i.e., in order to comply with the Code) by July 1, 2004. Port security plans include
access control, responses to security threats and drills to train staff (Staff, 2004). On March 1, 2003 the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established. The DHS has federal responsibility for funding,
standards and strategies (to do so) for the security of ports and other transportation infrastructures. Further,
the U.S. Coast Guard was removed from the U.S. Department of Transportation and placed under the
authority of the DHS. The U.S. Coast Guard’s maritime security program includes, for example, the
deployment of Coast Guard personnel as “Sea Marshalls” aboard certain ships entering and leaving ports, the
creation of the High Interest Vessel Boarding Program and the establishment of port security zones around
ships and high-risk port facilities (to prevent sabotage or other subversive acts). Sea Marshals provide security
to a vessel’s pilot and crew during its transit while in port, thereby diminishing the potential for vessel hijacking.
Security zones protect port waterways, vessels and facilities from security incidents. The Coast Guard has also
established the Maritime Security Level (MARSEC) system to indicate the severity of a security threat: 1) level
one -- a threat is possible, but not likely; 2) level two -- terrorists are likely active in an area; and 3) level three -a threat is imminent to a given target. The DSH unit, the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP),
has established voluntary international security programs that are designed to provide point-of-origin to final
destination visibility and control over containerized freight movements. These voluntary programs include
the: 1) the Container Security Initiative (CSI), in which CBP works with foreign ports to identify potentially
dangerous shipments before they arrive in the U.S. and 2) the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C159
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TPAT), through which CBP provides streamlined clearance of cargo to shippers that establish appropriate
security procedures. The CSI is a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and a foreign port, whereby the foreign
port is to identify high risk containerized cargo and work with deployed CBP officers (at the foreign port) to
target such cargo. Under CSI, foreign ports are asked to pre-screen containers (for dangerous cargo) before they
are loaded onto U.S. bound ships. As of the first quarter of 2007, 50 foreign ports that handled 85 percent of
the container volume destined for the U.S. were designated as CSI ports. Benefits to the CSI program to CSI ports
include the reduction in: 1) delay times in the departure of export cargoes to the U.S. and 2) inspection times for
U.S. export cargoes.
A2: States CP-2AC
c) Federal channel security
Marinelink 7 March 2012 (Ports Urge Congress to Support Port Security Grants;
http://www.marinelink.com/news/congress-security-support342938.aspx)
At two separate Congressional hearings, representatives of the American Association of Port Authorities
(AAPA) emphasized the need for federal support for seaport security and maintenance and improvements to
federal navigation channels. Port industry leaders illustrated the challenges underfunding security and
dredging pose for national security and U.S. international competitiveness. As the House Appropriations
Committee begins work on the Fiscal Year 2013 budget, AAPA executives reminded Congressional leaders of the
critical role ports play for the nation – serving as a front line of defense on international borders and
facilitating overseas trade, 99 percent of which moves by water. Captain John Holmes, Deputy Executive
Director of Operations at the Port of Los Angeles, testified before the Homeland Security Subcommittee
regarding Port Security Grants within the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “The fiscal year 2012
funding level represents a 59 percent cut from the prior year and 75 percent less than the authorized level,”
Holmes stated. “This will harm our ability to expand protection of our maritime assets, carry out Port-Wide
Risk Management Plans, and fund federal mandates, such as installation of TWIC readers.” Kurt Nagle,
President and CEO, submitted testimony to the Energy and Water Subcommittee on the budget for the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers’ Civil Works program. The testimony focused on the need for full use of the Harbor
Maintenance Tax annual revenue for maintenance dredging and the need to adequately fund needed channel
deepening projects. “The federal government has a unique Constitutional responsibility to maintain and
improve the infrastructure which enables the flow of commerce, and much of that infrastructure in and
around seaports have been neglected for too long, particularly the capacity of the federal channels, which
affects the ports’ ability to move cargo efficiently into and out of the U.S,” Nagle wrote. “This hurts U.S.
business, hurts U.S. workers, and hurts our national economy.”
And federal funding is key to incentivize and stimulate private sector investment-that’s key
to sustainability
Donna Cooper is a Senior Fellow with the Economic Policy team at the Center for American Progress; 2/16
2012 (An Affordable Plan to Put Americans Back to Work Rebuilding Our Nation’s Infrastructure;
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/02/infrastructure.html)
Private investors have partnered with state or local governments to build roads, expand highway systems,
and build or repair bridges. Typically in this case the private investor pays the public entity upfront an
estimated market value for the transportation asset, and then is required under an agreement to cover the
cost of improving the asset. In addition, these agreements permit the investor to charge tolls or receive
dedicated tax payments while also establishing clear maintenance requirements. Investors enter into these
agreements where the tolls or dedicated taxes are projected to cover all costs and profits and are most
attractive to investors when the level of earnings has the potential to exceed projections. Federal credit
subsidies lower the overall project costs, which in turn reduces the pressure on tolls and/or dedicated taxes,
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which then has the positive results of making a project more politically and financially feasible. Private
investment in energy infrastructure works very differently. In this sector, investors expect public funds to reduce
the risk that their private market product cannot cover its costs in the short run. For instance, while a private
investor may be confident that they can recoup their costs and earn a profit from the construction of a wind
farm overtime, it can take several years before a wind farm is generating enough revenue to cover operating
costs plus debt and profits. Public financing reduces overall project costs and thereby shortens the length of
time that a private investor has to wait to begin to receive reasonable returns on an investment. In each of
these critical infrastructure sectors, increased federal resources made available in the form of credit subsidies
or tax expenditures can increase the level of private-sector investment. With this sort of federal support,
private investors borrow funds to pay for needed repairs or construction and get paid back over time. Our
plan estimates indicate that it’s reasonable to expect $60 billion a year in new privately financed
improvements in infrastructure annually if the right federal policies and economic conditions make possible
this level of investment.
A2: States CP-2AC
And federal funding is key to security coordination across ports and regions
Jon D. Haveman and Howard J. Shatz Public Policy Institute of California 2006 (Protecting the Nation’s
Seaports: Balancing Security and Cost; http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/r_606jhr.pdf)
One key optimizing issue involves the choice between prevention and recovery. Most port security efforts
after September 11 aimed to prevent a terrorist incident from disrupting the maritime transportation system,
with less attention paid to equally critical questions such as emergency response and system reconstitution.
Other issues involved the inclusion of labor in port security planning and the balance between East Coast, Gulf
Coast, and West Coast ports. Dockworkers have proven to be able eyes and ears at the terminals where ships
dock and cargo is moved. Yet, in some cases, they were initially excluded from port security planning
committees. Even now, tensions remain over the issue of creating secure identification cards for dockworkers,
truckers, and other port workers who may have checkered backgrounds, and even criminal records, but who do
not pose a terrorist threat. Additionally, it is not clear that federal programs are striking the right balance
between different regions of the country. Of the three major container port areas—Los Angeles–Long Beach,
New York–New Jersey, and Seattle- Tacoma—two are on the West Coast. Whether the West Coast ports have
been given security assets proportional to their importance and the threat they face is under debate by
policymakers. The regional inconsistency arises in the case of the allocation of port security grants. In 2003,
California ports handled 36 percent of all U.S. 18 waterborne imports and 49 percent of all waterborne
containerized imports by value. They handled a much smaller proportion of the weight of national imports
(11%) but more than 40 percent of containerized imports by weight. Despite the proportion of trade they
handle, California ports and others in the maritime industry had received only 19 percent of all federal portsecurity-related grant money by late 2005. This apparent misallocation is similar to the more general
allocation of homeland security funding, with federal formulas built in that have favored small states and
eschew risk-based measures.16 This has started to change at the federal level. DHS used risk-based measures
to select 35 areas as eligible for its fiscal year 2006 Urban Areas Security Initiative grants, one of several types of
homeland security grants the department dispenses. At a press conference announcing the grant competition,
DHS Secretary Chertoff said that the department would continue to design programs based on risk, as opposed
to fixed formulas, whenever the law allowed and would continue to advocate a risk-based approach to
programs.17 Lest state officials become indignant about grant formulas that favor small geographic areas,
California does exactly the same thing with the homeland security money given to it by the federal government.
In its allocation of $67.7 million of State Homeland Security Program grant money to counties in fiscal year 2005,
California used a formula in which it gave $100,000 to each county and then an additional $1.71 per person to
each county, resulting in actual allocations of $79.84 per person to sparsely populated Alpine County, $30.12 per
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Port Security Affirmative
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person to Sierra County, $12.08 per person to Modoc County, and only $1.72 per person to Los Angeles County.
The state used the same type of formula with $20.6 million in Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program
grants ($50,000 per county and then 49 cents per person per county), and $6.2 million in Emergency
Management Performance grants ($40,000 per county and 11 cents per person per county). Absent was any
recognition that threat, vulnerability, and criticality—the cornerstones of a risk-based security allocation
system—might not be correlated strongly with population, either positively or negatively.18 California’s
allocation of fiscal year 2005 port security grant program funds does allocate larger amounts to larger ports.
California ports that received more waterborne imports in 2003 tended to get more money from the state’s
2005 port security grant program, which is in turn funded with an allocation from the federal government.
Considering the tremendous disparity in port sizes, the grants are fairly even. It is again not clear to what extent
the state took account of threat, vulnerability, and criticality, as opposed to making sure that every port got
something (Table 1.1).
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