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SDI 2010
Hegemony Core
Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
Hege Core- SDI
Hege Core- SDI ................................................................................................................................. 1
===Uniqueness=== .......................................................................................................................... 2
Hegemony Up ............................................................................................................................................................... 2
Hegemony Up ............................................................................................................................................................... 3
Hegemony Up ............................................................................................................................................................... 4
Hegemony Down .......................................................................................................................................................... 5
Hegemony Down .......................................................................................................................................................... 6
Hegemony Down .......................................................................................................................................................... 7
Hegemony Sustainable .................................................................................................................................................. 8
Hegemony Sustainable .................................................................................................................................................. 9
Hegemony Unsustainable ............................................................................................................................................ 10
Hegemony Unsustainable ............................................................................................................................................ 11
Offshore Balancing Now ............................................................................................................................................. 12
====Hege Good==== .................................................................................................................... 13
Hege Good- Kagan ...................................................................................................................................................... 13
Hege Good- Khlilizad ................................................................................................................................................. 15
Hege Good- Thayer ..................................................................................................................................................... 16
Hege Good- Ferguson ................................................................................................................................................. 17
Hege Good- Prolif ....................................................................................................................................................... 18
----Ext. Prolif ............................................................................................................................................................... 19
Hege Good- Democracy .............................................................................................................................................. 20
----Ext. Democracy...................................................................................................................................................... 21
Hege Good- Economy ................................................................................................................................................. 22
----Ext. Economy......................................................................................................................................................... 23
Hege Good- Middle East War ..................................................................................................................................... 24
----Ext. Middle East War ............................................................................................................................................. 25
AT: Hege Bad- War .................................................................................................................................................... 26
AT: Hege Bad- War .................................................................................................................................................... 27
AT: Hege Bad- China War .......................................................................................................................................... 28
AT: Hege Bad- Russian War ....................................................................................................................................... 29
AT: Hege Bad- Terrorism ........................................................................................................................................... 30
AT: Offshore Balancing Frontline .............................................................................................................................. 31
AT: Offshore Balancing Frontline .............................................................................................................................. 32
====Hege Bad==== ....................................................................................................................... 33
Hege Bad- War ............................................................................................................................... 33
Hege Bad- War ............................................................................................................................................................ 35
Hege Bad- China War ................................................................................................................................................. 36
----Ext. China War ...................................................................................................................................................... 37
Hege Bad- Russia War ................................................................................................................................................ 38
Hege Bad- Terrorism................................................................................................................................................... 39
----Ext. Terrorism ........................................................................................................................................................ 40
Offshore Balancing Frontline ...................................................................................................................................... 41
----Ext. Offshore Balancing ......................................................................................................................................... 43
AT: Hege Good- War .................................................................................................................................................. 44
AT: Hege Good- Prolif ................................................................................................................................................ 46
AT: Hege Good- Prolif ................................................................................................................................................ 47
AT: Hege Good- Democracy ...................................................................................................................................... 48
AT: Hege Good- Economy ......................................................................................................................................... 49
AT: Hege Good- Economy ......................................................................................................................................... 50
AT: Hege Good- Middle East War.............................................................................................................................. 51
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SDI 2010
Hegemony Core
Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
===Uniqueness===
Hegemony Up
U.S. Hegemony is sustainable – The U.S. is dominant in every single sector – assumes Obama
Kreft 09
Kreft, Senior Policy Advisor at CDU, ’09
(Heinrich Kreft, senior foreign policy advisor to the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the german bundestag, The World Today, February 2009, p. 11)
Obama and his Republican opponent John McCain expressed the view that the United States was and ought
to remain the guarantor of international stability and the indispensable stabilising power. Against the backdrop of
the present financial and economic crisis and rekindled discussion about the decline of US power, it is easy to overlook the fact that
America is structurally superior to all other countries and will remain so for the foreseeable future. THE GEOGRAPHICAL
DIMENSIONS OF THE UNITED States, its material resources and human capital, its military strength and economic
competitiveness as well as its liberal political and economic traditions, are the ingredients of superiority. It has the capacity to heal
its own wounds like no other country. STRENGTHS The US not only possesses large deposits of natural resources and vast areas of
productive farmland, but also enjoys favourable medium- and long-term demographic trends. Thanks to immigration and a high birth rate, it has a young
population compared to Europe, Japan, Russia as well as China. This makes the burden of providing for an ageing population far less onerous. In spite of the present crisis, the
economy, which accounts for more than a quarter of the world's gross domestic product (GDP), is essentially vibrant. Over the past twenty five years,
its growth has been significantly higher than Europe's and Japan's; the economy is adaptable and more innovative than
any other. It is the most competitive globally, with particular strengths in crucial strategic areas such as
nanotechnology and bioengineering. The US has the best universities and research institutes and trains more engineers in relation
to its population than any other major economy. It invests 2.6 percent of its GDP in higher education, compared with 1.2 percent in Europe and 1.1 percent in Japan. President Barack
Obama's plan for more educational investment aims to maintain this advantage also against China, which is
increasing its higher education investments. In the military domain too, no other country comes close to
matching the capability of the US to project its power globally. America accounts for almost half of global
military spending, six times more than China, its only potential rival. Current defence spending, however, at 4.2 percent of GDP, is still far below
During the presidential election campaign, both Barack
the double-digit Cold War peak. Even if the cost of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan runs at an annual figure of $125 billion, this is less than one per cent of GDP and hence considerably lower
than the cost of the Vietnam war. In contrast to the 'hard power' of military strength, Iraq and the Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib problems have severely dented the image and thereby diminished
, the structural components of soft power remain intact, from US mass culture - the dominance
of American global communications such as the internet and television - to the unfailing appeal of its
universities.
its 'soft power'. Nevertheless
Obama is increasing what is already the largest funding of any military in the world
Elrick 09 (John, “Politicians should heed words of past war heroes”, The Barnstorm Patriot, June 26, 2009) //khirn
In fact, as SIPRI points out, the U.S. spent seven times more on its armed forces than the second-biggest spender, China (at $84.9
billion); and more than the next 14 countries combined. U.S. military spending alone accounted for 42 percent of the total $1.46 trillion
spent on arms by governments world-wide. While the growth in military spending has been ongoing for some
time, it was the 71-percent growth during the presidency of George W. Bush that caused worldwide arms
spending to be 45 percent greater than it was just a decade ago. It’s appropriate to ask: Are all these arms necessary and is the U.S. really all that safer after
spending so much more than all the other countries combined? The evidence from around the world would suggest we are less safe. Many on the right have argued, and continue to argue, that such
increases in defense spending are necessary to fight the threat of terrorism. But another former war hero from WW II, former senator from South Dakota and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate
we could
defend ourselves with a military budget half the current size, “the terrorist has no battleships, bombers, missiles,
tanks, organized armies or heavy artillery.” No, the reason we spend so much on the military isn’t because we need to for our defense, but rather, not unlike the Drug
War, the military-industrial complex has become a jobs program that must be maintained at all costs, even as it is
bankrupting the country and making the world a more dangerous place. Just as the prison guard lobby in California supplanted the teachers lobby
in size and clout, calling for increased spending on prisons and harsher drug crime sentences to help keep the prisons filled, there are now thousands of jobs in every
congressional district that depend on that ever-increasing military budget to maintain those weapon-making jobs
and keep all those military bases in the states and around the world open for business. Make no mistake, it is not just Bush and the
Republicans who want to keep unnecessarily increasing spending on arms. The Democrats are just as guilty. Even President Obama has
proposed an increase in the 2010 military budget that Congress approved. Of course, that didn’t satisfy Republican Sen. James Inhofe, who
George McGovern, makes the key point that while the terrorists are a danger, they are not a military problem. As he said in his June 1 Wall Street Journal opinion piece arguing
absurdly claimed that “President Obama is disarming America. Never before has a president so ravaged the military at a time of war.”
2
SDI 2010
Hegemony Core
Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
Hegemony Up
And there are no challengers
Brooks and W. Wohlforth, IR @ Dartmouth, ‘8 (World Out of Balance, Chapter 1, http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8784.pdf)
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET UNION marked the emergence of historically unprecedented U.S.
advantages in the scales of world power. No system of sovereign states has ever contained one state with
comparable material preponderance.1 Following its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the United States loomed so large on
the world stage that many scholars called it an empire,2 but the costly turmoil that engulfed Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein in
2003 quieted such talk. Suddenly, the limits of U.S. power became the new preoccupation. Many analysts began to compare the United States to Britain at the beginning of the twentieth
S.
century—an overstretched, declining, “weary Titan” that “staggers under the too vast orb of his fate.”3 [Footnote Begins] 1 This point has been stressed by political scientists, historians, and
Ikenberry observes that “since the end of the Cold War, the United States has emerged as
an unrivaled and unprecedented global superpower. At no other time in modern history has a single state loomed
so large over the rest of the world.” “Is American Multilateralism in Decline?” Perspectives on Politics 3 (2003): 533. Historian Paul Kennedy stresses: “A statistician
policymakers. Political scientist G. John
could have a wild time compiling lists of the fields in which the US leads. . . . It seems to me there is no point in the Europeans or Chinese wringing their hands about US predominance, and wishing
it would go away. It is as if, among the various inhabitants of the apes and monkeys cage at the London Zoo, one creature had grown bigger and bigger—and bigger—until it became a 500lb gorilla.”
“The Eagle Has Landed: The New U.S. Global Military Position,” Financial Times, February 1, 2002. And former secretary of state Henry Kissinger maintains, “The U.S. is enjoying a preeminence
unrivaled by even the greatest empires of the past. From weaponry to entrepreneurship, from science to technology, from higher education to popular culture, America exercises an unparalleled
ascendancy around the globe.” Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 17. [Text Continues] What accounts for this
sudden shift in assessments of American power? For most observers, it was not new information about material capabilities. As Robert Jervis observes, “Measured in any conceivable way, the
United States has a greater share of world power than any other country in history.”4 That statement was as accurate when it was written in 2006 as it would have been at any time after 1991, and
the primacy it describes will long persist, even if the most pessimistic prognostications about U.S. economic,
military, and technological competitiveness come true. For most scholars of international relations, what really changed after 2003
were estimates of the political utility of America’s primacy. Suddenly, scholars were impressed by the fact that
material preponderance does not always translate into desired outcomes. For many, theories of international relations (IR) that explain
constraints on the use of power were vindicated by American setbacks in Iraq and elsewhere. For more than three decades, much IR scholarship has been devoted to theories about how the
international environment shapes states’ behavior. 5 Applying them to the case at hand, scholars have drawn on each of the main IR theories—realism, institutionalism, constructivism, and
liberalism—to identify external (or “systemic”) constraints that undermine the value of the United States’ primacy, greatly restricting the range of security policies it can pursue. Scholars emphasize
variety of elements in the international system that constrain U.S. security policy: international institutions,
balancing dynamics, global economic interdependence, and legitimacy. The upshot is simple but portentous for
the contours of international politics in the decades to come: the political utility of U.S. material primacy is
attenuated or even negated by enduring properties of the international system. The purpose of this book is to undertake a systematic
evaluation of the external constraints that scholars have highlighted and thereby gain a better understanding of the United States’ global role. This entails answering four questions: Does the
United States face the imminent prospect of having its power checked by a balancing coalition of other great
powers? As it has become increasingly exposed to the international economy, has the United States become more
vulnerable to other actors’ attempts to influence its security policies? Is the United States tightly bound by the
need to maintain a good general reputation for cooperation in international institutions? Does the United States
need to adhere to existing rules to sustain legitimacy and thus maintain today’s international institutional order?
Our answer to each of these questions is no—a finding that overturns the scholarly conventional wisdom, according to which these factors strongly constrain
a
U.S. security policy. On the contrary, the unprecedented concentration of power resources in the United States generally renders inoperative the constraining effects of the systemic properties long
central to research in international relations.
3
SDI 2010
Hegemony Core
Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
Hegemony Up
Trends show strengthening U.S. hegemony
Smith 2010 (Perry a retired U.S. Air Force major general, is the author of six books, including Rules and Tools for Leaders Agusta chronicle,, In a troubled world, America still has a
multitude of strengths, accessed: 2/22/10, http://chronicle.augusta.com/2010-02-19/troubled-world-america-still-has-multitude-strengths?v=1266701777 DA 7/15/10)
With so much in the media that is gloom and doom, it might be useful to remind ourselves that America has
many fundamental strengths. Here is a listing of some of the political, economic, technological, cultural, creative and entrepreneurial factors that define the United
States today. Largest economy. At $14 trillion, our Gross National Product is the largest in the world. You must add up the three
next largest -- Japan ($5.5 trillion), China ($4.5 trillion) and Germany ($ 4 trillion) -- to get to America's total. Best military. Although our services have faced many stresses since 9-11, the
U.S. military excels in many ways. The only military with a genuine worldwide reach, it has more combat experience than the military
of any other nation. Best alliance/coalition potential. Our ability to find coalition partners has been especially helpful to us in
countering terrorism (even the Russians and Chinese assist), and in the war in Afghanistan. Best brain/talent sponge. If you live in another country, are
really smart and want to get both a great education and an enlightening work experience, the United States will,
in most cases, be your first choice. More and better entrepreneurs. It seems to be in our genes. Productive work force. Whereas Japan led the
way in the past, recent analyses by a number of international agencies rank the United States first. Ability to bounce back from major setbacks. Just think of what we
have faced in the past 70 years -- Pearl Harbor, 1941; Korea, 1950-53; Sputnik, 1957; Vietnam, 1965-1975; Watergate, 1974; the 9-11 attacks, 2001; and the Great Recession, 2007-2009.
Venture capital availability. If you are German, Japanese, Chinese or Brazilian with a great idea or a new invention, finding venture capital within your own nation is very hard.
Communications reach and cultural influence. Beginning in the 1940s, America has surpassed all others in reaching even
the most remote parts of the world. Natural resources. America's supply of coal and natural gas is enormous. In
addition, the potential of solar power is huge. Unlike northern Europe, Russia and northern China, America has a great amount of sunshine. Being windy is another American
asset. The English language. For almost 100 years, English has been dominant. Computer power. Led by such corporations as Google,
EMC, Cisco, IBM and Intel, America holds the top spot in gross computer power. Culture of lifetime learning. Americans have a great love of learning. A
high percentage of mature Americans, often encouraged by company policies on pay and promotions, pursue college and postgraduate education. Technical colleges. These colleges are a treasure for
Agricultural
sector. Only the Brazilians come close to the productivity of the American farmer. Contributions of philanthropies. It is not just Bill and Melinda Gates who give away money with
great skill. Foundations in the CSRA help make our community a better place to live, work and enjoy our lives. Birth rate of 2.1. This ideal birth rate, combined with our ability to attract
so many talented and hard working people from other nations, should ensure that we will meet the challenges of the future. Diversity. Having so many of us coming from different national,
ethnic, religious and linguistic groups allows America to interact comfortably with the world's many cultures. Nanotechnology, biotechnology and genome
research. America leads the world. Fundamental optimism. Americans continue to have high confidence in their ability to solve problems, as well as to get things done and done well.
those seeking good jobs. The CSRA has two first-rate schools, Augusta Tech and Aiken Tech. Universities. Sixty-six of the 100 top universities in the world are American.
This probably is our greatest strength. I would like to close on a personal note. In the more than 75 years that I have had the blessing of being an American, only twice have I been pessimistic about
America's future. First, in the period between the Pearl Harbor attack and the Battle of Midway (I had witnessed the attack, and in the months following I read lots of scary headlines about Wake
Island, Guam, Malaya, Singapore and Bataan). Second, in 1969 when I returned from Vietnam and observed America in turmoil. In sum, sustained pessimism can create a death spiral for any
organization or institution. Tough-minded realism with an overlay of optimism is the key to our future.
US Heg is high
Bandow 10 (Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the CATO institute. He worked as special assistant to President Reagan and editor of the political magazine Inquiry. He writes regularly for
leading publications such as Fortune magazine, National Interest,Wall Street Journal, and Washington Times. He holds a J.D. from Stanford University.)
The U.S. dominates the world as never before. American ideals helped topple the
Soviet empire. The U.S. possesses the largest and most productive economy, far outdistancing any rival, as well
as undoubted military supremacy. The U.S. accounts for one-third of the world's defense outlays and has the
most advanced equipment, best variety of forces and largest number of allies. Indeed, the U.S. and its friends are
responsible for 80% of world defense spending. Washington's potential enemies--Cuba, Iraq, North Korea--are
pathetic. Possible future rivals like China and Russia are years away from offering effective competition
There's no other reason to hike defense spending.
4
SDI 2010
Hegemony Core
Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
Hegemony Down
Heg is collapsing – the economy, China expansion and cuts in the defense budget
Layne and Schwarz 9/29/09 (Christopher, professor of government at Texas A&M and a consultant to the National Intelligence Council and Benjamin, literary and national
editor of the Atlantic, 2009, “Twilight of Pax Americana”, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-schwarz29-2009sep29,0,4375015.story)
The international order that emerged after World War II has rightly been termed the Pax Americana; it's a Washington-led arrangement that has maintained political stability and promoted an open
Today, however, the Pax Americana is withering, thanks to what the National Intelligence Council in a recent report described as a
"global shift in relative wealth and economic power without precedent in modern history" -- a shift that has accelerated
enormously as a result of the economic crisis of 2007-2009. At the heart of this geopolitical sea change is China's robust
economic growth. Not because Beijing will necessarily threaten American interests but because a newly powerful China by necessity means a
relative decline in American power, the very foundation of the postwar international order. These developments remind us that changes in the global
balance of power can be sudden and discontinuous rather than gradual and evolutionary. The Great Recession isn't the cause of
global economic system.
Washington's ebbing relative power. But it has quickened trends that already had been eating away at the edifice of U.S. economic supremacy. Looking ahead, the health of the U.S. economy is
exploding federal deficits
could ignite runaway inflation and undermine the dollar
threatened by a gathering fiscal storm:
that
. To avoid
these perils, the U.S. will face wrenching choices. The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve have adopted policies that have dramatically increased both the supply of dollars circulating in
the U.S. economy and the federal budget deficit, which both the Brookings Institution and the Congressional Budget Office estimate will exceed $1 trillion every year for at least the next decade. In
the
enormous unfunded liabilities for entitlement programs and the cost of two ongoing wars, and you can see that
America's long-term fiscal stability is in jeopardy. As the CBO says: "Even if the recovery occurs as projected and stimulus bill is allowed to expire, the country
the short run, these policies were no doubt necessary; nevertheless, in the long term, they will almost certainly boomerang. Add that to the persistent U.S. current account deficit,
will face the highest debt/GDP ratio in 50 years and an increasingly unsustainable and urgent fiscal problem." This spells trouble ahead for the dollar. The financial privileges conferred on the U.S.
by the dollar's unchallenged reserve currency status -- its role as the primary form of payment for international trade and financial transactions -- have underpinned the preeminent geopolitical role of
the United States in international politics since the end of World War II. But already the shadow of the coming fiscal crisis has prompted its main creditors, China and Japan, to worry that in coming
years the dollar will depreciate in value. China has been increasingly vocal in calling for the dollar's replacement by a new reserve currency. And Yukio Hatoyama, Japan's new prime minister, favors
Washington will need to
control inflation through some combination of budget cuts, tax increases and interest rate hikes. Given that the last two options
would choke off renewed growth, the least unpalatable choice is to reduce federal spending. This will mean radically scaling
back defense expenditures, because discretionary nondefense spending accounts for only about 20% of annual
federal outlays. This in turn will mean a radical diminution of America's overseas military commitments,
transforming both geopolitics and the international economy. Since 1945, the Pax Americana has made international economic interdependence and
Asian economic integration and a single Asian currency as substitutes for eroding U.S. financial and economic power. Going forward, to defend the dollar,
globalization possible. Whereas all states benefit absolutely in an open international economy, some states benefit more than others. In the normal course of world politics, the relative distribution of
power, not the pursuit of absolute economic gains, is a country's principal concern, and this discourages economic interdependence. In their efforts to ensure a distribution of power in their favor and
at the expense of their actual or potential rivals, states pursue autarkic policies -- those designed to maximize national self-sufficiency -- practicing capitalism only within their borders or among
Historically, the only way to secure international
integration and interdependence has been for a dominant power to guarantee the security of other states so that
they need not pursue autarkic policies or form trading blocs to improve their relative positions. This suspension of international politics through hegemony has been the
countries in a trading bloc. Thus a truly global economy is extraordinarily difficult to achieve.
fundamental aim of U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s. The U.S. has assumed the responsibility for maintaining geopolitical stability in Europe, East Asia and the Persian Gulf, and for keeping open
the lines of communication through which world trade moves. Since the Cold War's end, the U.S. has sought to preserve its hegemony by possessing a margin of military superiority so vast that it
Financially, the U.S. has been responsible for managing the global economy by
acting as the market and lender of last resort. But as President Obama acknowledged at the London G-20 meeting in April, the U.S. is
no longer able to play this role, and the world increasingly is looking to China (and India and other emerging market states) to be the
locomotives of global recovery. -- Going forward, the fiscal crisis will mean that Washington cannot discharge its
military functions as a hegemon either, because it can no longer maintain the power edge that has allowed it to
keep the ambitions of the emerging great powers in check. The entire fabric of world order that the United States
established after 1945 -- the Pax Americana -- rested on the foundation of U.S. military and economic preponderance. Remove
the foundation and the structure crumbles. The decline of American power means the end of U.S. dominance in
world politics and the beginning of the transition to a new constellation of world powers.
can keep any would-be great power pliant and protected.
5
SDI 2010
Hegemony Core
Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
Hegemony Down
Americans hegemonic dominance as come to an end, Middle Eastern states are becoming
increasing less subservient and complacent to its intervention
The New Nation 6-25-10 Engr. Mirza Ferdous Alam http://nation.ittefaq.com/issues/2010/06/25/news0989.htm
After the collapse of Soviet Union, the US took the global leadership as the lone super power and bestowed itself with the responsibility to
look after the world affair with commanding posture. The responsibility includes meddling in geopolitical issue which the
US thinks related to its interest and interest of its allies. From American perspective, its interest spreads in many
dimensions all over the world and the directives in resolving those must be falling in line of its choosing. For the
last couple of years perception of developing countries vis-à-vis America has been changing, especially in the
Middle East due to America's special "rock solid" relation with the state of Israel and over enthusiasm for the countries ruled by dictators. In the post recession new
world order, the US appears to have lost the edge of hegemonic weight. It is not winning wars in recent time,
putting itself into quagmire in two wars waged by them unilaterally, not achieving success in resolving important
world affairs despite repeated rhetoric of success by its diplomats and not managing its domestic economy
efficiently which is flooded with toxic assets arouse due to credit crunch of housing bubble. Consequently, the developing countries of the
world are not very keen to provide unconditional support to the US dictates any more. From the point of view of these upcoming
countries, " risk of paying price for not obeying American directives is a distant possibility". The massive show of flexing muscle over
brain burst a global perception bubble about America's intentions, capabilities and reason. With the massive burden of National Debt of 13 trillion
Dollars on top of its shoulder, the US has been bogged down in war in two fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Benefit cost
analysis after many years of military campaign in these regions will not reveal encouraging numbers for the war pundits who inspired and influenced President Bush Junior to get into the mess.
The prevailing state of affairs within the US and ever deteriorating war situation appears to curtail its ability to
launch more major wars in the area, although appetite for waging war seems very much engrossed in the mindset of the remnants of neocon hawks within the Obama
Administration. In this precarious situation, the US can go for another war with only borrowed money from either China or Saudi Arabia. The prospective donors do not seem to have the generosity
to invest money in America's potential new war project!
Hege Down- Self defeating Economic Policies and Public Perception
Layne 5-10-10 (Christopher, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 1995-1996, Graceful Decline http://amconmag.com/article/2010/may/01/00030/, 7/13/10)
But America is increasingly unable to play the hegemon’s assigned role. Militarily, a hegemon is responsible for stabilizing key regions and
A
hegemon is supposed to solve international crises, not cause them. It is supposed to be the lender of last resort,
not the biggest borrower. Faced with wars it cannot win or quit and an economy begging rescue, the United
States no longer fits the part. Still, many in the mainstream foreign-policy community see these as temporary setbacks and believe that U.S. primacy will endure for years to
come. The American people are awakening to a new reality more quickly than the academy. According to a December 2009 Pew survey, 41 percent of
the public believes that the U.S. plays a less important and powerful role as a world leader less than it did a
decade ago The epoch of American dominance is drawing to a close, and international politics is entering a period of transition: no longer unipolar but not yet fully multipolar. President
Barack Obama’s November 2009 trip to China provided both substantive and emblematic evidence of the shift. As
the Financial Times observed, “Coming at a moment when Chinese prestige is growing and the U.S. is facing
enormous difficulties, Mr. Obama’s trip has symbolized the advent of a more multi-polar world where U.S.
leadership has to co-exist with several rising powers, most notably China.” In the same Pew study, 44 percent of Americans polled said that
China was the leading economic power; just 27 percent chose the United States. Much of America’s decline can be attributed to its own selfdefeating policies, but as the U.S. stumbles, others—notably China, India, and Russia—are rising. This shift in
the global balance of power will dramatically affect international politics: the likelihood of intense great-power
security competitions—and even war—will increase; the current era of globalization will end; and the post-1945
Pax Americana will be replaced by an international order that reflects the interests, values, and norms of
emerging powers.
guarding the global commons. Economically, it offers public goods by opening its domestic market to other states, supplying liquidity for the world economy, and providing the reserve currency.
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SDI 2010
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Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
Hegemony Down
U.S. Hegemony is unstable due to economic burdens
New American Foundation 10 (Michael Lind, Michael Lind is Policy Director of New America’s Economic Growth Program. He is a co-founder of the New America
Foundationtaught at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins, March 30, “The U.S. Is Stuck in the Cold War”
http://growth.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2010/the_us_is_stuck_in_the_cold_war_29951 6/26/10 RCM)
the security half of America's global strategy is headed for a crash as well. Since the end of the Cold War, the
U.S. has mindlessly sought to fill every power vacuum from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf to Central Asia,
while spending far less on the military than it did in the Cold War. The U.S. has gone into debt to finance the
Iraq and Afghan wars. You don't have to be a grand strategist to figure out that extending territorial commitments
without commensurately expanding funding and troop levels is a formula for strategic and perhaps national
bankruptcy. By declaring that the new deficit commission would not consider any cuts in military spending, only in entitlement spending, President Obama reflected the
preferences of America's policy elite. Its members would gladly cut Social Security and Medicare in order to pay
for bases and "nation-building" abroad. In the same way, for half a century, America's foreign-policy elite
tolerated the targeted deindustrialization of America by Asian mercantilist states, as long as those countries did
not challenge America's global military hegemony.
Meanwhile,
Hege Down- World Hostile to American Values despite Obama Overtures
Watson 2010 (Allan, Department of Geography, Staffordshire University, UK, “US hegemony and the Obama Administration: Towards a New Word Order,” Antipode Vol. 42 No. 2
pg. 243 DA: 7-14-10)
US hegemony looks extremely vulnerable, and it is less in command of a world that looks entirely more
closed and hostile to American values. This condition is in part due to a legacy of isolation from the international
community and European allies, relationships which Obama must rebuild if he truly wishes to build a new American age.
Obama has spoken openly about the task of relationship rebuilding, but while his words may suggest a
multilateral approach, his focus has been very much on US global “leadership”: To renew American leadership in the world, I intend to
Currently,
rebuild the alliances, partnerships, and institutions necessary to confront common threats and enhance common security. Needed reform of these alliances and institutions will not come by bullying
other countries to ratify changes we hatch in isolation. It will come when we convince other governments and peoples that they, too, have a stake in effective partnerships . . . America cannot meet
the threats of this century alone, and the world cannot meet them without America . . .We must lead the world, by deed and by example (Obama 2007).
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Hegemony Sustainable
Heg is sustainable –multipolarity is nowhere on the horizon
Brooks and Wohlforth 9 (Stephen, Professor of Government at Dartmouth, William C, Professor of Government and Chair of the Department of Government at Dartmouth,
March/April 2009,
“Reshaping the World Order”, EBSCO)
the conventional wisdom is that the world is rapidly
approaching the end of the unipolar system with the United States as the sole superpower. A dispassionate look at the facts shows
that this view understates U.S. power as much as recent talk of empire exaggerated it. That the United States weighs more on the traditional scales of
world power than has any other state in modern history is as true now as it was when the commentator Charles
Krauthammer proclaimed the advent of a “unipolar moment” in these pages nearly two decades ago. The United States continues
to account for about half the world’s defense spending and one-quarter of its economic output. Some of the
reasons for bearishness concern public policy problems that can be fixed (expensive health care in the United States, for example),
whereas many of the reasons for bullishness are more fundamental (such as the greater demographic challenges faced by the United States’ potential
rivals). So why has opinion shifted so quickly from visions of empire to gloomy declinism? One reason is that the
United States’ successes at the turn of the century led to irrational exuberance, thereby setting unreasonably high
standards for measuring the superpower’s performance. From 1999 to 2003, seemingly easy U.S. victories in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq led some to
Only a few years ago, pundits were absorbed in debates about American “empire.” Now,
conclude that the United States could do what no great power in history had managed before: effortlessly defeat its adversaries. It was only a matter of time before such pie-in-the-sky benchmarks
Afghanistan and Iraq dashed illusions of omnipotence, but these upsets hardly displaced the United States
as the world’s leading state, and there is no reason to believe that the militaries of its putative rivals would have
performed any better. The United States did not cease to be a superpower when its policies in Cuba and Vietnam failed in the 1960s; bipolarity lived on for three decades. Likewise,
the United States remains the sole superpower today. Another key reason for the multipolar mania is “the rise of
the rest.” Impressed by the rapid economic growth of China and India, many write as if multipolarity has already returned. But such
pronouncements mistake current trajectories for final outcomes—a common strategic error with deep psychological roots. The greatest concern in the
proved unattainable. Subsequent difficulties in
Cold War, for example, came not from the Soviet Union’s actually attaining parity with the United States but from the expectation that it would do so in the future. Veterans of that era recall how the
launch of Sputnik in 1957 fed the perception that Soviet power was growing rapidly, leading some policymakers and analysts to start acting as if the Soviet Union were already as powerful as the
A state that is rising should not be confused with one that has risen, just as a state that is declining should
not be written off as having already declined. China is generally seen as the country best positioned to emerge as a
superpower challenger to the United States. Yet depending on how one measures GDP, China’s economy is between 20 percent and
43 percent the size of the United States’. More dramatic is the difference in GDP per capita, for which all
measures show China’s as being less than 10 percent of the United States’. Absent a 1930s-style depression that spares potential U.S. rivals,
the United States will not be replaced as the sole superpower for a very long time. Real multipolarity—an international
system of three or more evenly matched powers—is nowhere on the horizon. Relative power between states shifts slowly. This
tendency to conflate trends with outcomes is often driven by the examination in isolation of certain components
of state power. If the habit during the Cold War was to focus on military power, the recent trend has been to single out economic output. No declinist tract is complete
without a passage noting that although the United States may remain a military superpower, economic
multipolarity is, or soon will be, the order of the day. Much as highlighting the Soviet Union’s military power meant overlooking the country’s economic and
technological feet of clay, examining only economic output means putting on blinders. In 1991, Japan’s economy was two-thirds the size of the United
United States.
States’, which, according to the current popular metric, would mean that with the Soviet Union’s demise, the world shifted from bipolarity to, well, bipolarity. Such a partial assessment of power will
produce no more accurate an analysis today. Nor will giving in to apprehension about the growing importance of nonstate actors. The National Intelligence Council’s report Global Trends 2025
nonstate actors are nothing
new—compare the scale and scope of today’s pirates off the Somali coast with those of their eighteenth-century predecessors or the political power of today’s multinational corporations with that
of such behemoths as the British East India Company—and projections of their rise may well be as much hype as reflections of reality.
And even if the power of nonstate actors is rising, this should only increase the incentives for interstate
cooperation; nonstate threats do not affect just the United States. Most nonstate actors’ behavior, moreover, still revolves around influencing the
decisions of states. Nongovernmental organizations typically focus on trying to get states to change their policies, and the
same is true of most terrorists.
grabbed headlines by forecasting the coming multipolarity, anticipating a power shift as much to nonstate actors as to fast-growing countries. But
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Heg is sustainable and good – alternatives fail and structural advantages
Lieber 9
(Robert J. Lieber, Professor of Government at Georgetown University, “Persistent primacy and the future of the American era”, International Politics (2009) 46, 119–139. doi:10.1057/ip.2008.44 )
effective alternatives to the role played by the United States tend to be inadequate or absent altogether, and
neither the UN, nor other international bodies such as the EU, the African Union, the Arab League or the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations offer an effective substitute. As Robert Kagan has observed, ‘American predominance
does not stand in the way of progress toward a better world. It stands in the way of regression toward a more
dangerous world’ (Kagan, 2007). In short, on the demand side, there is an ample need for America’s active engagement. What then about the
supply side? The domestic costs and complications are evident but need to be weighed in context. The long-term reality of external threats creates a
motivation for engagement abroad, as does the possibility of future attacks on the US homeland. During the 2008 presidential
campaign, and despite a heated domestic political climate and sharp disagreement about Iraq and the foreign policy of the Bush administration, none of the leading candidates
of either party called for dramatic retrenchment. In addition, they largely concurred on the need to increase the size of
the armed forces. Indeed, and unlike the Vietnam era, popular support for the troops has been widespread, even among many critics of the Iraq war. Constraints on the capacity of
adversaries also need to be taken into account. Russia under Putin has put pressure on its immediate neighbors and seeks to rebuild
its armed forces, but Moscow’s ability to regain the superpower status of the former Soviet Union remains
limited. The Russian armed forces remain mostly in weakened condition, the total population is half that of the USSR and declining by 700 000
per year, male life expectancy is barely 60 years of age, the economy is overwhelmingly dependent on revenues from oil and natural gas and thus vulnerable to softening world market prices. The
long-term stability of its crony capitalism and increasingly authoritarian political system is uncertain. China,
despite extraordinary economic growth and modernization, will continue to depend on rapid expansion of trade
and the absorption of vast numbers of people moving from the countryside to the cities. It may well become a
major military challenger of the United States, first regionally and even globally, but only over the very long term. 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
In general,
interest – and the fortunes of a global liberal democratic order – depend on it.
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Hegemony Unsustainable
Even if the US physically can remain its dominance, perception of financial weakness makes
hege unsustainable.
Ferguson, 10 [ March/April, Niall, “Complexity and Collapse”, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at
the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, p. ebsco]
If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, rather than cycling sedately from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon, what are the implications
debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time -- it is a precipitous and unexpected fall
that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. All
the above cases were marked by sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties
with financing public debt. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly, indeed, as the United States
contemplates a deficit for 2009 of more than $1.4 trillion -- about 11.2 percent of GDP, the biggest deficit in 60
years -- and another for 2010 that will not be much smaller. Public debt, meanwhile, is set to more than double in the coming decade, from $5.8
trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in 2019. Within the same timeframe, interest payments on that debt are forecast to leap from eight percent of federal revenues to 17 percent. These
numbers are bad, but in the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial, if not more so. In
imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future
power. The fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to weaken a
long-assumed faith in the United States' ability to weather any crisis. For now, the world still expects the United
States to muddle through, eventually confronting its problems when, as Churchill famously said, all the alternatives have been
exhausted. Through this lens, past alarms about the deficit seem overblown, and 2080 -- when the U.S. debt may reach staggering proportions -- seems a
long way off, leaving plenty of time to plug the fiscal hole. But one day, a seemingly random piece of bad news -- perhaps a negative
report by a rating agency -- will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be
not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but also the public at large,
not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when
its component parts lose faith in its viability. Over the last three years, the complex system of the global economy flipped
from boom to bust -- all because a bunch of Americans started to default on their subprime mortgages, thereby
blowing huge holes in the business models of thousands of highly leveraged financial institutions. The next
phase of the current crisis may begin when the public begins to reassess the credibility of the monetary and fiscal
measures that the Obama administration has taken in response. Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus
can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such
measures will lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. As Thomas Sargent, an economist who pioneered the idea of rational
for the United States today? First,
expectations, demonstrated more than 20 years ago, such decisions are self-fulfilling: it is not the base supply of money that determines inflation but the velocity of its circulation, which in turn is a
function of expectations. In the same way, it is not the debt-to-GDP ratio that determines government solvency but the interest rate that investors demand. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations
change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece -- it happened there at the end of last year,
, a shift in expectations about monetary and fiscal policy could force a
reassessment of future U.S. foreign policy. There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process: if
interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue, military expenditure is the item most likely to be
cut because, unlike mandatory entitlements, it is discretionary. A U.S. president who says he will deploy 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and then, in 18 months' time, start withdrawing
plunging the country into fiscal and political crisis. Finally
them again already has something of a credibility problem. And what about the United States' other strategic challenges? For the United States' enemies in Iran and Iraq, it must be consoling to know
that U.S. fiscal policy today is preprogrammed to reduce the resources available for all overseas military operations in the years ahead
.
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Hegemony Unsustainable
Structural Financial Problems makes US Hege Unsustainable
Layne 5-1-10 (Christopher, Christopher Layne is Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A&M’s George H.W. Bush School of Government & Public Service.
He is author of The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present and, with Bradley A. Thayer, American Empire: A Debate. “Graceful Decline: The end of Pax
Americana” http://amconmag.com/article/2010/may/01/00030/ DA: 7/14/10)
China’s economy has been growing much more rapidly than the United States’ over the last two decades and
continues to do so, maintaining audacious 8 percent growth projections in the midst of a global recession. Leading economic
forecasters predict that it will overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, measured by overall GDP, sometime around
2020. Already in 2008, China passed the U.S. as the world’s leading manufacturing nation—a title the United States had
enjoyed for over a century—and this year China will displace Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. Everything we know about the
trajectories of rising great powers tells us that China will use its increasing wealth to build formidable military
power and that it will seek to become the dominant power in East Asia. Optimists contend that once the U.S. recovers
from what historian Niall Ferguson calls the “Great Repression”—not quite a depression but more than a recession—we’ll be able to answer the Chinese challenge.
The country, they remind us, faced a larger debt-GDP ratio after World War II yet embarked on an era of sustained
growth. They forget that the postwar era was a golden age of U.S. industrial and financial dominance, trade
surpluses, and persistent high growth rates. Those days are gone. The United States of 2010 and the world in which it lives are far different from
those of 1945. Weaknesses in the fundamentals of the American economy have been accumulating for more than three
decades. In the 1980s, these problems were acutely diagnosed by a number of writers—notably David Calleo, Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Samuel Huntington, and James Chace—who
predicted that these structural ills would ultimately erode the economic foundations of America’s global
preeminence. A spirited late-1980s debate was cut short, when, in quick succession, the Soviet Union collapsed, Japan’s economic bubble burst, and the U.S. experienced an apparent
economic revival during the Clinton administration. Now the delayed day of reckoning is fast approaching.
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Offshore Balancing Now
Obama’s turning in now, offshore balancing is the best strategy to maintain primacy
Walt 9/28/09 (Stephen, Professor of International Relations at Harvard University, “Why we don't need another "National Strategy" document”,
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/09/27/why_we_dont_need_another_national_strategy_document)
Obama administration hasn't offered us its version of our "national security strategy" yet, and despite everything I just said, I'm beginning to wish they weren't
will look a lot like the Clinton administration's versions, and consist of a long "to-do" list drawn from familiar
liberal interventionist dogma. But more importantly, this is one of those periods where the main features of U.S. grand strategy may not
be easy to talk about openly and honestly. In simple terms, what Obama seems to be attempting is a wide-ranging
process of selective retrenchment. This is hardly surprising, because the Bush administration got us badly overcommitted and
refused to raise taxes to pay for it. So Obama is getting us out of Iraq, and appears to be rethinking his approach
to Afghanistan. He's making constructive concessions to a number of potential adversaries (such as Russia), in order to
gain their support on more pressing issues (such as Iran) He's telling his Secretary of Defense to rein in defense costs,
emphasizing diplomacy at every turn, and letting everyone know that Uncle Sam isn't going to solve all the
world's problems all by itself. He's not retreating to Fortress America, of course, but he and his team aren't swaggering around saying
that America is the "indispensable nation" either. Given the mess he inherited from Bush and the need to repair
America's public finances, this approach makes eminently good sense. But when you're s great power engaged
in a process of retrenchment, you probably don't want advertise that fact in your official statement of "national
security strategy." If you do, you'll just get a lot of flak from hardliners, who still haven't figured out that the previous eight years was mostly a
disaster and that U.S. resources aren't infinite. And a few minor adversaries may decide to test your limits, and you'd rather not have to waste time responding. Spelling things out
explicitly might also make some Americans nervous, because they've gotten used to America being #1 and
they've forgotten that the best way to stay there is to get others to do the heavy lifting instead of trying to do it all
ourselves. Obama should stick to his present course -- as subtly and quietly as possible -- and when it's time to fulfill that Section 603 requirement, he should ask his advisors to write up a
The
compelled to do so by law. For one thing, I suspect it
strategy statement that does not spell out what is really going on. And if they can make it sufficiently boring so that nobody pays much attention, so much the better.
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====Hege Good====
Hege Good- Kagan
US leadership prevents multiple scenarios for nuclear conflict – prefer it to all other
alternatives
Kagan 07
Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace [Robert “End of Dreams, Return of History” Policy Review
(http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/8552512.html#n10)]
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
Finally, there is the United States itself. As a matter of national policy stretching back across numerous administrations, Democratic and Republican, liberal and conservative,
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
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 only on the goodwill of peoples but also on
daily to shape the behavior of billions of people around the globe.
American power. 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
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 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
thought, but
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
Even under the umbrella of unipolarity, regional conflicts involving the large powers may erupt.
powers.
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,
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
could draw in other great powers, including the United States.
[Continued with no texted removed]…
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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
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 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.
world, practically ensures a heavy American military presence in the region, both on the seas and on the ground.
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Hege Good- Khlilizad
Extinction
Khalilzad, Rand Corporation 95 (Zalmay Khalilzad, Spring 1995. RAND Corporation. “Losing the Moment?” The Washington Quarterly 18.2, Lexis.)
Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the
a world in which the U
S
exercises leadership
best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because
nited tates
would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world
would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of
regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of
another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the
attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar
balance of power system.
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Hege Good- Thayer
Heg promotes democracy and that solves great power wars
Thayer 6 (Bradley A., Prof of Defense and Strategic Studies @ Missouri State University, “In Defense of Primacy.,” National Interest; Nov/Dec2006 Issue 86, p32-37)
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
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.
more likely to align with the United States and be sympathetic to the American worldview.( n3) So, spreading democracy helps maintain U.S. primacy. In addition,
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Hege Good- Ferguson
Collapse of US hegemony causes a global power vacuum resulting in nuclear war
Ferguson 04 professor of history at New York University's Stern School of Business and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (Niall, “A World without Power”,
Foreign Policy )
Certainly, one can imagine the
world's established powers—the United States, Europe, and China—retreating into their own regional spheres of
influence. But what of the growing pretensions to autonomy of the supranational bodies created under U.S. leadership after the Second World War? The United Nations, the International
Could an apolar world today produce an era reminiscent of the age of Alfred? It could, though with some important and troubling differences.
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (formerly the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) each considers itself in some way representative of the “international
community.” Surely their aspirations to global governance are fundamentally different from the spirit of the Dark Ages? Yet universal claims were also an integral part of the rhetoric of that era. All
the empires claimed to rule the world; some, unaware of the existence of other civilizations, maybe even believed that they did. The reality, however, was not a global Christendom, nor an all-
The reality was political fragmentation. And that is also true today. The defining characteristic
of our age is not a shift of power upward to supranational institutions, but downward. With the end of states'
monopoly on the means of violence and the collapse of their control over channels of communication, humanity
has entered an era characterized as much by disintegration as integration. If free flows of information and of
means of production empower multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations (as well as
evangelistic religious cults of all denominations), the free flow of destructive technology empowers both criminal
organizations and terrorist cells. These groups can operate, it seems, wherever they choose, from Hamburg to Gaza. By contrast, the writ of the international community is not
embracing Empire of Heaven.
global at all. It is, in fact, increasingly confined to a few Page 5 strategic cities such as Kabul and Pristina. In short, it is the nonstate actors who truly wield global power—including both the monks
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 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
and the Vikings of our time. So
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
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
preferable to the risks of default abroad.
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
If the United States retreats from global hegemony
today a great deal more than it frightened the heirs of Charlemagne.
— 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
. 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
careful what you wish for
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Hege Good- Prolif
Hege key to solve Prolif
Mandelbaum ‘5
[Michael, Professor and Director of the American Foreign Policy Program at Johns Hopkins The Case for Goliath: How America Acts As the World’s Government in the Twenty-First Century, p. 3941]
American forces remained in Europe and East Asia because the countries located in these two regions wanted them there, even if they did not always say so clearly or even explicitly. They wanted
them there because the American presence offered the assurance that these regions would remain free of war and, in the case of Europe, free of the costly preparations for war that had marked the
The American military presence was in both cases a confidence-building measure, and if that presence were withdrawn, the countries in both regions would feel less confident that no threat to their security would appear. They would, in all likelihood, take steps to
compensate for the absence of these forces. Those steps would surely not include war, at least not in the first instance. Instead, since the American forces serve as a hedge against
uncertainty, some of the countries of East Asia and Europe might well seek to replace them with another source of hedging. A leading candidate for that role would be
nuclear weapons of their own.9 The possession of nuclear weapons equips their owner with a certain leverage, a geopolitical weight that,
twentieth century.
unless somehow counterbalanced, can confer a political advantage in dealing with countries lacking them. Like the relationship between employer and employee, the one between a nuclear-weapon
state and a non-nuclear-weapon state has inequality built into it, no matter how friendly that relationship may be. During the Cold War, the American military presence, and the guarantee of
protection by the mighty nuclear arsenal of the United States that came with it, neutralized the nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China accumulated. Russia and
China retain nuclear stock-piles in the wake of the Cold War, and with the end of the American military presence in their regions, several of their non-nuclear neighbors—Germany, Poland, Japan,
South Korea, and Taiwan, for example—might feel the need to off-set those stockpiles with nuclear forces of their own. Perhaps the process of replacing American nuclear armaments with those of
other countries, if this should take place, would occur smoothly, with Europe and East Asia remaining peaceful throughout the transition. But this is not what most of the world believes. To the
The
United States has made the prevention of nuclear proliferation one of its most important foreign policies, and its efforts to this
contrary, the spread of nuclear weapons to countries that do not already have them is widely considered to be the single greatest threat to international tranquillity in the twenty-first century.
end constitute, like reassurance, a service to the other members of the international system.
Nuclear Proliferation Causes Extinction
Utgoff 02
Victor Utgoff, Deputy Director of the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis, SURVIVAL, Fall,2002, p. 87-90
proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shootouts will have a substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at
hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild
West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear 'six-shooters' on their hips, the world may
even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the
bodies of dead cities or even whole nations.
In sum, widespread
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----Ext. Prolif
Heg solves proliferation in the hands of allies, rogue states, and terrorist groups
Mandelbaum ‘5
[Michael, Professor and Director of the American Foreign Policy Program at Johns Hopkins – The Case for Goliath: How America Acts As the World’s Government in the Twenty-First Century, p.
189-191]
The greatest threat to their security that the members of the international system did face in the new century, one that the United States had devoted considerable resources and political capital to
containing and that a serious reduction in the American global rule would certainly aggravate, was the spread of nuclear weapons. Nuclear proliferation poses three related dangers. The first is that,
in the absence of an American nuclear guarantee, major countries in Europe and Asia will feel the need to
acquire their own nuclear armaments. If the United States withdrew from Europe and East Asia, Germany might
come to consider it imprudent to deal with a nuclear-armed Russia, and Japan with a nuclear-armed China,
without nuclear arms of their own. They would seek these weapons in order to avoid an imbalance in power that
might work to their disadvantage. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by such affluent, democratic, peaceful countries would not, by itself, trigger a war. It could, however,
trigger arms races similar to the one between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It would surely make Europe and East Asia less comfortable places, and relations among
United States
exerted itself to thwart to the extent of threatening a war in North Korea and actually waging one in Iraq and that
the recession of American power would increase: the possession of nuclear armaments by "rogue" states,
countries governed by regimes at odds with their neighbors and hostile to prevailing international norms. A nuclearthe countries of these regions more suspicious, than was the case at the outset of the twenty-first century. The spread of nuclear weapons poses a second danger, which the
armed Iraq, an unlikely development after the over-throw of Saddam Hussein's regime, or a nuclear-armed Iran, a far more plausible prospect, would make the international relations of the Persian
Gulf far more dangerous. That in turn would threaten virtually every country in the world because so much of the oil on which they all depend comes from that region.' A nuclear-armed North Korea
Especially if the United States withdrew from the region, South
Korea and Japan, and perhaps ultimately Tai-wan, might well decide to equip themselves with nuclear weapons
of their own. A North Korean nuclear arsenal would pose yet a third threat: nuclear weapons in the hands of a
terrorist group such as al Qaeda. Lacking the infrastructure of a sovereign state, a terrorist organization probably could not construct a nuclear weapon itself. But it
could purchase either a full-fledged nuclear explosive or nuclear material that could form the basis for a device
that, while not actually exploding, could spew poisonous radiation over populated areas, killing or infecting many thousands
of people.' Nuclear materials are potentially available for purchase not only in North Korea but elsewhere as well.
would similarly change the international relations of East Asia for the worse.
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Hege Good- Democracy
Heg promotes democracy
Thayer 6 (Bradley A., Prof of Defense and Strategic Studies @ Missouri State University, “In Defense of Primacy.,” National Interest; Nov/Dec2006 Issue 86, p32-37)
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
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.
more likely to align with the United States and be sympathetic to the American worldview.( n3) So, spreading democracy helps maintain U.S. primacy. In addition,
Democracy solves extinction
Diamond 95
Larry Diamond, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, December, PROMOTING DEMOCRACY IN THE 1990S, 1995, p. http://www.carnegie.org//sub/pubs/deadly/diam_rpt.html //
Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem,
appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the
weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty and openness. The
experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with
one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically
"cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism
against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable,
open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible
because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments.
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----Ext. Democracy
Heg promotes democracy
Lieber ‘5
[Robert J., Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century, p. 49-50]
American power
goes hand in hand with the promotion of democratic principles can be found in the policy pronouncements of U.S. Presidents from Woodrow Wilson to John F.
Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton (whose 1993 inaugural address proclaimed, "Our hopes, our hearts, our hands, are with those on every continent who are building
democracy and freedom. Their cause is America's cause"). This combination of values reflects both a belief in universal ideals ("The United States," the NSS declares,
This aspiration embodied deep-seated themes within American history and evoked long-standing beliefs about foreign policy. In particular, the idea that the exercise of
"must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere") and a judgment that promoting these principles abroad not only benefits citizens of other
The National Security
Strategy committed the United States to "actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of
the world." This objective was driven by the belief that the fundamental cause of radical Islamic terrorism lies in the absence of democracy, the prevalence of authoritarianism, and the lack of
countries, but also increases U.S. national security by making foreign conflicts less likely because democracies are unlikely to attack one another.
freedom and opportunity in the Arab world. In the past, this idea might have been dismissed as political rhetoric. But after September 11, even the United Nations in its 2002 Arab Human
Development Report and in subsequent reports in 2003 and 2005, defined the problem similarly and called for the extension of representative institutions and basic human freedoms to the Muslim
Middle East. A Bush speech to the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003 provided an elaboration that was both moral and strategic in its commitment to democratization, while
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack
of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the
expense of liberty."
criticizing half a century of policies that had failed to make this a priority: "
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Hege Good- Economy
Heg secures the economy, 5 reasons
Boot ‘6
(Max, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, 4-10, The Weekly Standard, “Power for Good; Since the end of the Cold War, America the Indispensable”, L/N)
the United States provides the security essential for international commerce by,
policing Atlantic and Pacific shipping lanes. Second, the United States safeguards the extraction and export of Middle Eastern oil, the
lifeblood of the global economy. Third, in the monetary realm, the United States has made the dollar "the world's 'reserve' currency"
and supplied loans to "governments in the throes of currency crises." Fourth, the United States has pushed for the expansion of international
trade by midwifing the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other instruments of liberalization. And fifth, by
providing a ready market for goods exported by such countries as China and Japan, the United States "became the indispensable supplier
of demand to the world."
Mandelbaum also points to five economic benefits of American power. First,
for instance,
Economic collapse leads to nuclear war
The Baltimore Examiner 9 [“Will this recession lead to World War II,” 2/26, http://www.examiner.com/x-3108-Baltimore-RepublicanExaminer~y2009m2d26-Will-this-recession-lead-to-World-War-III]
Could the current economic crisis affecting this country and the world lead to another world war? The answer may be
found by looking back in history. One of the causes of World War I was the economic rivalry that existed between the nations of Europe. In the
19th century France and Great Britain became wealthy through colonialism and the control of foreign resources. This forced other up-and-coming nations (such as Germany) to be more competitive
After the Great Depression ruined the economies of Europe in the 1930s, fascist
movements arose to seek economic and social control. From there fanatics like Hitler and Mussolini took over Germany and Italy and led them both into
World War II. With most of North America and Western Europe currently experiencing a recession, will competition for resources and
economic rivalries with the Middle East, Asia, or South American cause another world war? Add in nuclear
weapons and Islamic fundamentalism and things look even worse. Hopefully the economy gets better before it
gets worse and the terrifying possibility of World War III is averted. However sometimes history repeats
itself.
in world trade which led to rivalries and ultimately, to war.
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----Ext. Economy
Heg solves economic collapse – the Great Depression proves
Mandelbaum ‘5
[Michael, Professor and Director of the American Foreign Policy Program at Johns Hopkins The Case for Goliath: How America Acts As the World’s Government in the Twenty-First Century, p.
192-195]
Although the spread of nuclear weapons, with the corresponding increase in the likelihood that a nuclear shot would be fired in anger somewhere in the world, counted as the most serious potential
consequence of the abandonment by the United States of its role as the world's government, it was not the only one. In the previous period of American international reticence, the 1920s and 1930s,
the global economy suffered serious damage that a more active American role might have mitigated. A twenty-first-century American retreat could have similarly adverse international economic
The economic collapse of the 1930s caused extensive hardship throughout the world and led indirectly
to World War II by paving the way for the people who started it to gain power in Germany and Japan. In retrospect, the Great Depression is widely believed to
consequences.
have been caused by a series of errors in public policy that made an economic downturn far worse than it would have been had governments responded to it in appropriate fashion. Since the 1930s,
acting on the lessons drawn from that experience by professional economists, governments have taken steps that have helped to prevent a recurrence of the disasters of that decade.' In the face of
Fiscal and monetary crises have evoked rescue efforts rather
than a studied indifference based on the assumption that market forces will readily reestablish a desirable
economic equilibrium. In contrast to the widespread practice of the 1930s, political authorities now understand that putting up barriers to imports in an attempt to revive domestic
reduced demand, for example, governments have increased rather than cut spending.
production will in fact worsen economic conditions everywhere. Still, a serious, prolonged failure of the international econo my, inflicting the kind of hardship the world experienced in the 1930s
(which some Asian countries also suffered as a result of their fiscal crises in the 1990s) does not lie beyond the realm of possibility. Market economies remain subject to cyclical downturns, which
public policy can limit but has not found a way to eliminate entirely. Markets also have an inherent tendency to form bubbles, excessive values for particular assets, whether seventeenth century
Dutch tulips or twentieth century Japanese real estate and Thai currency, that cause economic harm when the bubble bursts and prices plunge. In responding to these events, governments can make
errors. They can act too slowly, or fail to implement the proper policies, or implement improper ones. Moreover, the global economy and the national economies that comprise it, like a living
organism, change constantly and sometimes rapidly: Capital flows across sovereign borders, for instance, far more rapidly and in much greater volume in the early twenty-first century than ever
before. This means that measures that successfully address economic malfunctions at one time may have less effect at another, just as medical science must cope with the appearance of new strains of
Most importantly, since the Great Depression, an active American international
economic role has been crucial both in fortifying the conditions for global economic well-being and in coping
with the problems that have occurred, especially periodic recessions and currency crises, by applying the lessons
of the past. The absence of such a role could weaken those conditions and aggravate those problems. The overall American
influenza against which existing vaccines are not effective.
role in the world since World War II therefore has something in common with the theme of the Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life, in which the angel Clarence, played by Henry Travers, shows
James Stewart, playing the bank clerk George Bailey, who believes his existence to have been worthless, how life in his small town of Bedford Falls would have unfolded had he never been born.
it is with the United States and its role as the world's
government. Without that role, the world very likely would have been in the past, and would become in the future, a less secure and less prosperous place. The abdication by the United
George Bailey learns that people he knows and loves turn out to be far worse off without him. So
States of some or all of the responsibilities for international security that it had come to bear in the first decade of the twenty-first century would deprive the international system of one of its
principal safety features, which keeps countries from smashing into each other, as they are historically prone to do. In this sense, a world without America would be the equivalent of a freeway full of
cars without brakes. Similarly, should the American government abandon some or all of the ways in which it had, at the dawn of the new century, come to support global economic activity, the world
economy would function less effectively and might even suffer a severe and costly breakdown. A world without the United States would in this way resemble a fleet of cars without gasoline.
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Hege Good- Middle East War
US presence in the Mid East is key to oil security that prevents great power wars
Mead ‘8
(Walter Russell, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, "Why we're in the gulf" 1-1, http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110011063)
The end of America's ability to safeguard the Gulf and the trade routes around it would be enormously damaging--and
not just to us. Defense budgets would grow dramatically in every major power center, and Middle Eastern politics would
be further destabilized, as every country sought political influence in Middle Eastern countries to ensure access to oil in the resulting free for all. The potential
for conflict and chaos is real. A world of insecure and suspicious great powers engaged in military competition over vital interests
would not be a safe or happy place. Every ship that China builds to protect the increasing numbers of supertankers needed to bring oil from the
Middle East to China in years ahead would also be a threat to Japan's oil security--as well as to the oil security of India and Taiwan. European
cooperation would likely be undermined as well, as countries sought to make their best deals with Russia, the Gulf states and other
oil rich neighbors like Algeria. America's Persian Gulf policy is one of the chief ways through which the U.S. is trying to build a peaceful world and where the exercise of American
power, while driven ultimately by domestic concerns and by the American national interest, provides vital public goods to the global
community. The next American president, regardless of party and regardless of his or her views about the wisdom of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, will necessarily make the security of
the Persian Gulf states one of America's very highest international priorities.
Middle East War Goes Nuclear
Steinbach
2002
John
, DC Iraq Coalition, ISRAELI WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: A THREAT TO PEACE, March
, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/STE203A.html
Meanwhile, the existence of an arsenal of mass destruction in such an unstable region in turn has serious implications for future arms control and disarmament negotiations, and even the threat of
Should war break out in the Middle East again,... or should any Arab nation fire missiles against Israel, as the Iraqis did, a
nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability." and Ezar Weissman, Israel's current President said "The
nuclear issue is gaining momentum(and the) next war will not be conventional." Russia and before it the Soviet Union has long been a major(if not
the major) target of Israeli nukes. It is widely reported that the principal purpose of Jonathan Pollard's spying for Israel was to furnish satellite images of Soviet targets and other
nuclear war. Seymour Hersh warns, "
super sensitive data relating to U.S. nuclear targeting strategy. (Since launching its own satellite in 1988, Israel no longer needs U.S. spy secrets.) Israeli nukes aimed at the Russian heartland
seriously complicate disarmament and arms control negotiations and, at the very least, the unilateral possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is enormously destabilizing, and dramatically lowers the
threshold for their actual use, if not for all out nuclear war. In the words of Mark Gaffney, "... if the familiar pattern(Israel refining its weapons of mass destruction with U.S. complicity) is not
reversed soon- for whatever reason- the
deepening Middle East conflict could trigger a world conflagration."
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----Ext. Middle East War
Heg key to Middle East stability—history proves
Christopher ‘4
(Warren, New York Times staff writer, http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0B14F93C5D0C738FDDAB0994DC404482, 12-20)
America has always been the indispensable party for progress in the Middle East. The brilliant efforts of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in
1974 and 1975 brought about Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai and the peninsula's return to Egypt. President Jimmy Carter's legendary endeavors at
Camp David in 1978 produced the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, which was supported by American financial assistance to both countries. That aid continues to yield returns
today. And when Israel and Jordan negotiated a peace accord in July 1994, King Hussein, the present King's father, told me that the
negotiations could not have succeeded without tangible support from the United States, which was forthcoming in the form of debt
forgiveness and military equipment. But meaningful American involvement at this critical time will require more than words and dollars -it must take the form of action. It will not be enough for President Bush to make broad policy statements, however eloquent. It will also require something beyond telephone diplomacy
by Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice. Reliance on these hands-off methods promises a continuation of the past four years'
failures.
The Middle East requires outside intervention for stability—Heg prevents arms races and
conflict
Joffe ‘7
(Josef, Ph.D. in government, professor of political science at Stanford, “The Case for Restraint,” http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=333&MId=16)
But for a great power, alas, there is more to security than just the physical ability to stave off invasion and defeat. Great powers seek order beyond their borders, and rightly so, because they have
because U.S. guarantees relieve allies of
the need to protect themselves, such “extended security” builds regional order by inhibiting intra-area rivalry and armsracing. We don’t really want an unrestrained arms race between China and Japan in the Pacific, do we? Or between Israel and Egypt. Another vital interest
grows from a precautionary principle. Posen not only wants to retract the U.S. umbrella from Japan and Germany, or from Israel and Egypt; he also wants the United States to quit the Middle
East. This requires faith in a sanguine assumption: that this region stretching from Beirut to Kandahar is capable of balancing itself. It never has been able to do so, as
the strife-torn post-Ottoman history of this area demonstrates. It has always required an outside balancer. Nor is the Middle East like Vietnam or
Somalia, which could be safely abandoned. It is the strategic arena of the 21st century, replete with allies who must be sheltered and enemies who must be chastened. Hence, whatever
other vital interests. Protecting critical allies is such a vital interest. First, because it preserves influence. Second, precisely
the fate of the U.S. presence in Iraq, bases will have to be kept: informal ones like Haifa, formal ones like Qatar, Oman and Kuwait. In fact, in the penultimate moment of truth with Iran, all of Israel
oil and gas—strategic resources par excellence, whose flow will not be regulated
by market forces alone, as the Russians and Chinese so well understand. So “hands off” and “over the horizon”—Great Britain’s historical
recipe, plus nukes—will not add up to a post-Iraq grand strategy. Especially since Britain’s behind was twice saved by the United States—when Albion so grievously
miscalculated the European balance of power in the first and third decades of the 20th century. But who will save the American posterior once the chickens of aloofness come home to roost? A
great power must carry great burdens, or it stops being one.
will be one big stationary aircraft carrier for the United States. Let’s add a “minor” item like
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AT: Hege Bad- War
Err towards hegemony being sustainable and good – their impact turns are exaggerated
Wohlforth 07 (William, Prof and Chair of Dept. of Government @ Dartmouth, Spring, “Unipolar stability: the rules of power analysis”, Harvard International Review, Vol. 29, No. 1)
The larger problem with conflating power-as-resources with power-as-influence is that it leads to a constant
shifting of the goalposts. The better the United States becomes at acquiring resources, the greater the array of
global problems it is expected to be able to resolve, and the greater the apparent gap between its material
capabilities and the ends it can achieve. The result is an endless raising of the bar for what it takes to be a unipolar
power. Samuel Huntington defined a unipolar state as one able “effectively to resolve all important international
issues alone, and no combination of other states would have the power to prevent it from doing so.” This is an
extraordinary standard that essentially conflates unipolarity with universal empire. Great European powers did
not lose great power status when they failed to have their way, in, for example, the Balkans in the nineteenth century. In turn, the United States did not
cease to be a superpower when it failed to overthrow Fidel Castro in the 1960s. The fact that Washington cannot prevent Hugo Chavez from thumbing his nose at US power is interesting and perhaps
.
even important, but it does not have bearing on the polarity of the international system Defining power as the ability to solve whatever global problem is currently in the headlines virtually
. Assessing
active attempts by the United States to employ its power capabilities may well be the most misleading way to
think about power. This approach inevitably leads to a selection bias against evidence of the indirect, “structural”
effects of US power that are not dependent upon active management. Many effects that can be attributed to the
unipolar distribution of power are developments that never occur: counter-balancing coalitions, Cold War-scale arms
races, hegemonic rivalry for dominance, security dilemmas among Asian powers, and decisions by Japan and others to nuclearize.
Clearly, assessing unipolarity’s potential effects involves weighing such non-events against the more salient
examples in which active attempts to use power resources are stymied. But the selection bias goes much further. Not only are nonevents downplayed in comparison to salient events that appear to demonstrate the powerlessness of the United
States, but patterns of events that do go its way are often missed. Consider, for example, how often Washington’s failure to have its way in the United
Nations is cited as compared to its experience in the IMF. And, even in the United Nations, a focus on highly contested issues, such as the attempt at a second resolution
authorizing the invasion of Iraq, fails to note how the institution’s entire agenda has shifted to address concerns, such as terrorism, that
are particularly important to the United States.
guarantees highly volatile prognostications about polarity. This sort of headline chasing led to talk of “empire” in 2002 and 2003, just as it feeds today’s multipolar mania
Primacy’s inevitable - Obama will never change grand strategy
Walt 9
(Stephen, Robert and Rene Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard University, previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, resident associate of the
Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, November, “Restoring Solvency”, http://www.americanreviewmag.com/articles/restoringsolvency)
It is by now a cliché to observe that Barack Obama took office facing the greatest challenge of any United States
president since Franklin Roosevelt. The US economy had been in free-fall since the northern summer of 2008, the nation’s image around the world had taken a beating over
the previous eight years. Obama inherited a losing war in Iraq, a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and a wide array of unresolved foreign policy problems. No president in living memory had
In his first 100 days, Obama
taken office with so much to solve and such limited room to manoeuvre. The new president wasted little time in responding.
pushed through an
ambitious economic recovery program that included a major fiscal stimulus package, a controversial plan to buy up toxic assets in the banking industry, a limited bail-out for automobile
launched a dizzying set of foreign policy initiatives. After
six months, Obama almost seemed to be the miracle worker his campaign had promised. As former advisor to President Clinton,
manufacturers and proposals for a new regulatory regime for Wall Street. At the same time, he
William Galston, commented after Obama’s first 100 days: “If he’s right, our traditional notion of the limits of the possible—the idea that Washington can only handle so much at one time—will be
appearances can be deceiving, and this is almost certainly the case when it comes to foreign
policy. Although Obama has made a number of positive moves, his actions to date are more style than substance.
To be blunt, anyone who expects Obama to produce a dramatic transformation in America’s global position is
going to be disappointed. There are three reasons why major foreign policy achievements are unlikely. First, the
big issue is still the economy, and Obama is going to focus most of his time and political capital there. Success in this area
is critical to the rest of his agenda and to his prospects for re-election in 2012. Second, Obama is a pragmatic centrist and his foreign policy team is
made up of mainstream liberal internationalists who believe active US leadership is essential to solving most
international problems. Although they will undoubtedly try to reverse the excesses of the Bush administration, this group is unlikely to undertake a
fundamental rethinking of the US’s global role. Third, and most important, there are no easy problems on
Obama’s foreign policy “to-do” list. Even if he was able to devote his full attention to these issues, it would be
difficult to resolve any of them quickly. In terms of grand strategy, his ultimate aim must be to bring US commitments back into alignment with its interests and
blown to smithereens.” Yet
resources—to restore what Walter Lippmann termed “solvency” to US foreign policy. This broad goal can be achieved by extricating the nation from some current obligations, by improving
Obama will try to keep US commitments
within bounds and to improve relations with several adversaries, while taking symbolic steps to repair the
damage the Bush administration did to the country’s global reputation. But he is unlikely to achieve any farreaching breakthroughs. The foreign policy agenda at the end of his first term is likely to look a lot like it does today. To see why, let us look more closely at the crises he faces.
relations with adversaries, by getting other states to bear a greater share of America’s burden, or a combination of all three.
26
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Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
AT: Hege Bad- War
Primacy is flexible and inevitable – any problems can be fixed
Haas 9
(Lawrence J, former White House strategist and award-winning journalist, Summer, “Letter from Washington: Don’t Bet on America’s Decline”,
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya/article.php?article=314)
Declinism, as it applies to America, has a rich tradition but, to date, a history of failed prophecy. Like the cicadas that blanket Washington’s trees
and sidewalks every 17 years, the declinists rear their heads about once a generation, propagating the latest versions of their
thesis, showcasing evidence of America’s creeping weakness – from economic stagnation to military setback to diplomatic reversal. From a momentary
setback or perhaps a string of them for the United States, the declinists offer visions of long-term corrosion. The intellectual parlour game is as old as the Republic.
Europeans widely expected the ‘American experiment’ to fail. British contempt for the young nation led to the War of 1812. Nor did America’s rise to
global behemoth by the late 19th Century deter the doomsday-ers. If anything, they grew bolder. No sooner had the United States emerged victorious from World War II than critics lamented Soviet
supremacy in the Cold War that had just begun. ‘We’ve lost the peace,’ John Dos Passos wrote in early 1946 in Life. ‘Friend and foe alike look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly
they are disappointed in you as an American.’ Mao’s victory in China in 1949, America’s stalemate in Korea in the early 1950s, Soviet suppression of Hungary in 1956, Moscow’s launch of Sputnik
in 1957, and candidate John Kennedy’s warning of a U.S.-Soviet ‘missile gap’ in 1960 all seemed to prove that history favoured communism over capitalism. American prosperity and Kennedy-era
optimism provided a short respite from further declinism. The U.S. debacle in Vietnam, North Korea’s capture of the USS Pueblo, Soviet and Cuban adventurism in Africa, Iran’s seizure of the U.S.
embassy in Tehran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and America’s economic struggles in the 1970s painted the United States as a helpless giant. President Nixon transformed declinism into
national policy, seeking détente with the Soviets to ease U.S. entry into a new world of balance with the Soviet Union, Europe, China, and Japan. President Carter reinforced decline fever, lamenting
our ‘crisis of confidence’ in his ‘malaise’ speech. After President Reagan sought to reassert U.S. supremacy, launching a military build-up and confronting the Soviets in hotspots the world over,
Yale’s Paul Kennedy warned (in his best-selling The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) of America’s ‘imperial overstretch,’ in which our global obligations would surpass our ability to finance
America’s victory in the Cold
War mocked declinism, but recent events have ignited its rebirth. Today’s declinists includes veterans of past battles, notably Kennedy, and new
them. Other declinists of the period included David Calleo (Beyond American Hegemony) and Walter Russell Mead, (Mortal Splendor).
players – Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World), Charles Kupchan (The End of the America Era), Francis Fukuyama (America at the Crossroads), Andrew Bacevich (The Limits of Power), and
a host of government offcials and journalists. They write books and op-eds and appear on TV and radio, reviewing America’s missteps while suggesting they presage a more multi-polar world. For
some, like Kennedy, declinism is a life’s work, as his recent Wall Street Journal oped, ‘American Power Is on the Wane,’ makes clear. For others, it’s a step along an intellectual journey. While
Fukuyama moved from Western triumphalism (in his The End of History and the Last Man of 1992) to declinism, Mead moved the other way, predicting recently in the New Republic that America
declinists do not agree on what will cause
America’s relative downfall. For some, it’s Iraq that strained our military and displayed the limits of U.S. power. For those who acknowledge America’s startling
turnaround in Iraq, it’s Afghanistan that will engulf America in a Vietnam-style quagmire. For others, today’s economic
crisis exposed the excesses of U.S.-led capitalism. Their prescription – more governmental regulation that will weaken the leader of the free-market pack. For still others, it’s China’s
rise and Russia’s resurgence, the first of which will shift global power to the East and the second of which will
restrict U.S. activity abroad. And for others, it’s no one event or U.S. error but instead the unsustainable nature of
U.S. unipolarity and the inevitable rise of nations or blocs to counteract it. Questions for today’s declinists Well, maybe. But,
declinists have a few questions to answer. Why will today’s economic distress and military challenge bring
America’s decline when prior challenges of greater magnitude did not? What would a post-America world look
like, and why should we buy the starry-eyed hopes of America’s fiercest critics that a U.S. retreat would make
the world more peaceful and more just? Who or what will supplant the United States atop the world stage, especially
when no alternative nation or bloc seems ready to assume the mantle? To be sure, the United States faces big challenges, probably the most complex set in decades. On
will emerge from today’s global economic crisis in a stronger position atop the international power rankings. Today’s
the economic front, businesses are shedding jobs, credit is frozen, financial institutions are teetering, stocks are weak, and consumer confidence is collapsing. On the military front, America’s armed
forces are strained, Afghanistan offers no easy solution, and exploding budget deficits will encourage Obama and Congress to seek the first defense cuts of the post-9/11 period. On the diplomatic
front, the United States will try to convince Iran to scrap its nuclear program, to improve its relations with Pakistan while targeting the Taliban and al-Qaeda strongholds in the Northwestern
prospects for
continued U.S supremacy look brighter. The economy has not reached the depths of the 1981-82 recession and – to
state the obvious – it will eventually recover. The issue is how bad things will get and when the recovery will arrive. Economists project unemployment will top nine percent
before it’s over, the turnaround will not begin until at least the end of 2009, and it may take years to restore strong growth. As for defense, even with cuts, the gap between
annual U.S. expenditures and those of any other nation remains huge. Moreover, the United States spends just four percent of its Gross Domestic
territories, and to strengthen its ties to its European allies even as it clashes with them over strategy and military contributions in Afghanistan. But step back a bit, and
Product on defense and international affairs, a historically low figure – compared to, for instance, 10 percent under President Kennedy. It has fewer active duty troops than in the 1950s, drawn from a
The notion that America can’t afford its military obligations has never been less true. Not long
ago, nations or blocs that were ready to challenge America seemed plentiful. Today, each is plagued with
problems. China is reeling from the global economic crisis, with rising unemployment and smouldering domestic discontent. Russia is
suffering from the dramatic drop in oil prices, the resulting squeeze on governmental revenues, and deep-seated social and economic problems. Iran and
Venezuela, America’s two loudest nemeses, are also reeling from low oil prices, forcing their leaders to address surging
economic woes and stabilize their own rule. A united Europe, with a combined military and foreign policy, remains a pipe dream.
Today, despite its problems America remains the world’s ‘goliath,’ in the words of Michael Mandelbaum. It is the go-to power for
maintaining peace, ensuring global commerce, and responding to humanitarian disasters. U.S. security treaties
encompass more than half of the world. As Robert J. Lieber put it, ‘In many instances, and particularly in urgent and dire
cases such as the Balkan crises, the choice boils down to this: either the United States will act or no one will.’
We should not expect that reality to change any time soon.
population that’s twice as large.
27
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Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
AT: Hege Bad- China War
US Hege deters China and leads to stabilization allowing a political solution to be brokered.
Odgaard 2001
(Liselotte, Asst Prof, of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark, “Deterrence and Co-operation in the South China Sea”, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Aug 1, lexis)
The South China Sea constitutes a first line of defence for the littoral states of Southeast Asia. As a consequence,
they cannot afford to ignore the worst-case scenario of conflict involving China. The majority of the Southeast
Asian states have embarked on a modernization of their naval capabilities, aimed at developing a deterrent force as well as a force capable of
engaging in military operations at sea. However, the financial crisis of the late 1990s delayed some of these efforts, making the
Southeast Asian states more reliant on bilateral defence arrangements, in particular with the United States. The main
countries in the U.S. network of military co-operation agreements are Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. In substitution of the permanent base arrangements during the Cold War, U.S. troops
In general, the military agreements facilitate training, exercises, and
interoperability, permitting the United States to be seen to be engaged in Southeast Asia as a flexible regional
balancer. The United States shares the widespread perception within Southeast Asia that China's moves in the
South China Sea indicate that it might have expansionist intentions. Thus, the United States has maintained its
strategy of forward deployment. However, China is a power of second rank compared with the United States, and as such, is no immediate threat to the latter. Therefore,
have resumed joint exercises with the Philippines from 2000.
Washington prefers that the regional states settle their disputes without its involvement as long as these do not pose a threat to U.S. interests. Although the United States looks at China's Spratly
policy as an indication of its possible bid for regional hegemony, it is not prepared to play an active part in the Spratly dispute unless freedom of navigation through Southeast Asian waters is
threatened. At the same time, the United States maintains its support for the ASEAN position on the non-use of force concerning dispute settlement in the South China Sea. Thus, the U.S. policy on
the Spratlys may be characterized as guarded non-involvement. American reservations about direct involvement in the Spratly dispute do not imply that cordial relations between the United States
and China are on the agenda. On the contrary, since 1999, the relationship between the two powers has suffered a downturn because of Chinese opposition to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) air strikes in Yugoslavia, the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and accusations of Chinese military espionage in the United States. The Administration of George W.
Bush is unlikely to call for a revival of the idea of a strategic partnership with China. Bush describes China as a strategic competitor. [4] In line with this hardening of U.S. policy towards China,
Bush has voiced strong support for a theatre missile defence (TMD) system covering Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Technological constraints are likely to force Bush to moderate his position on
such defence plans. However, U.S. reassurances that research and development on the TMD will continue only leaves China with the option of proceeding with military modernization to build up its
This geostrategic picture suggests that co-operation on managing the regional balance of power is
not on the cards. Instead, a structure of deterrence appears to be in the making. Deterrence is directed at the
intentions of opponents: if the existence of deterrent forces are seen to prevent the opponent from achieving gains through aggression, the opponent will refrain from attack.
Thus, the power-projection capabilities of the various states are constrained by a mutual display of force between
the United States and the Southeast Asian states on the one hand, and China on the other. A structure of
deterrence does not operate on the basis of cooperation between opposing powers. Nor can deterrence be equated
with violence and volatility. On the contrary, the consolidation of a structure of deterrence in the South China
Sea may provide Southeast Asia with the level of military security and reassurance necessary to allow for the
development of stronger co-operative ties with China
deterrence capabilities.
History proves no risk of China war—their cards are all hype
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries, 04-29-09, “China unlikely to engage in military confrontation,” Jakarta Post,
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2005/03/12/china-unlikely-engage-military-confrontation.html
Given America's monopoly or huge technological lead in key areas like stealth bombers, aircraft carriers, long-range sensors, satellite surveillance and even
infantry body armor, Goss's warning is misleading and self-serving. China cannot project a serious military force even 200 miles
(km) from home, while American forces utterly dominate China's ocean frontiers, many thousands of miles (kilometers) from the United States. But
the drumbeat of warnings about China's ""military build-up"" continues. Just the other week U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was worrying again about the expansion of
the Chinese navy, which is finally building some amphibious landing ships half a century after Beijing's confrontation with the non-Communist regime on the island of Taiwan began. And Senator
Richard Lugar, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned that if the European Union ends its embargo on arms sales to China, the U.S. would stop military technology sales to
Europe. It will come as no surprise, therefore, that the major U.S. defense review planned for this year will concentrate on the rising ""threat"" from China, or that this year for the first time the joint
U.S.-Japanese defense policy statement named China as a ""security concern"", or that the Taiwan government urged the ""military encirclement"" of China to prevent any ""foreign adventures"" by
Beijing. It comes as no surprise -- but it still makes no sense. China's defense budget this year is 247.7 billion yuan: Around US$30 billion at the official exchange rate. There are those in
Washington who will say that it's more like $60 billion in purchasing power, but then there used to be ""experts"" who annually produced hugely inflated and frightening estimates of the Soviet
defense budget. Such people will always exist: to justify a big U.S. defense budget, you need a big threat. It's true that 247.7 billion yuan buys an awful lot of warm bodies in military uniform in the
low-wage Chinese economy, but it doesn't actually buy much more in the way of high-tech military systems. It's also true that the Chinese defense budget has grown by double-digit increases for the
past fourteen years: This year it's up by 12.6 percent. But that is not significantly faster than the Chinese economy as a whole is growing, and it's about what you have to spend in order to convert
. It would be astonishing if China chose NOT to modernize its armed
forces as the rest of the economy modernizes, and the end result is not going to be a military machine that towers above all others. If you project the current growth rates of
what used to be a glorified peasant militia into a modern military force
military spending in China and the United States into the future, China's defense budget catches up with the United States about the same time that its Gross Domestic Product does, in the late 2030s
As to China's strategic intentions, the record of the past is reassuring in several respects. China has almost never
been militarily expansionist beyond the traditional boundaries of the Middle Kingdom (which do include Tibet in the view of most Chinese), and its
border clashes with India, the Soviet Union and Vietnam in the first decades of Communist rule generally ended with a voluntary Chinese withdrawal from the
disputed territories. The same moderation has usually applied in nuclear matters. The CIA frets that China could have a
hundred nuclear missiles targeted on the United States by 2015, but that is actually evidence of China's great restraint. The first
or the early 2040s.
Chinese nuclear weapons test was forty years ago, and by now China could have thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on the U.S. if it wanted. (The United States DOES have thousands of nuclear
Beijing regime is obsessed with economic stability, because it fears that a severe downturn would trigger social and
The last thing it wants is a military confrontation with its biggest trading partner, the United States. It will go
on playing the nationalist card over Taiwan to curry domestic political favor, but there is no massive military
build-up and no plausible threat of impending war in East Asia.
warheads that can strike Chinese targets.) The
political upheaval.
28
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Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
AT: Hege Bad- Russian War
No chance of U.S.-Russia war
Perkovich 3
(George Perkovich, Vice President for Studies–Global Security and Economic Development at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March/April 2003, Foreign Affairs)
As for Russia, a full-scale war between it and the United States now seems inconceivable. Given the desires for
larger cuts in nuclear forces that Russia displayed in negotiating the 2002 Moscow Treaty, Russia hardly seems enough
of a threat to justify the size and forward-leaning posture of America's present arsenal.
No scenario for any conventional war going nuclear between the U.S. and Russia
Manning 00
(Robert Manning, Former C.V. Starr Senior Fellow for Asia Studies, and Director, Asia Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, March 10, 2000, The Washington Post)
We don't want to go any lower because we need these weapons for nuclear deterrence, according to State Department spokesman James Rubin. But how many nukes do we need for deterrence to be
credible? China, which President Clinton has talked of as a "strategic partner," has a grand total of 20 - count them - strategic warheads that could hit the United States. Nuclear wannabes like North
During the
Cold War, it was not hard to envision a conventional war in Europe escalating into nuclear conflict. But today it is
difficult to spin a plausible scenario in which the United States and Russia escalate hostilities into a nuclear
exchange. Russia has no Warsaw Pact, and not much of a conventional force to speak of. Yet U.S. nuclear planners still base their targeting
Korea, Iran, and Iraq would have only a handful if they did manage to succeed in joining the nuclear club. Russia, which has 6,000 strategic warheads, is no longer an adversary.
plans on prospective Russian targets, though no one will say so.
US-Russian Nuclear War Does Not Escalate
Martin, 82
(Brian, Published in Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, 1982, pp. 287-300. “Critique of Nuclear Extinction”, http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/82jpr.html, CH)
Limited nuclear war in the periphery. A war breaks out in the Middle East, and resort is made to nuclear
weapons, killing a few hundred thousand people. The United States and the Soviet Union place their nuclear
forces on the highest alert. As the tension continues to build up, a state of emergency is declared in the US.
Normal democratic procedures are suspended, and 'dissidents' are rounded up. A similar process occurs in many
countries allied militarily to the US, and also within the Soviet bloc. A return to the pre-crisis state of affairs does
not occur for years or decades. As well as precipitating bitter political repression, the crisis contributes to an
increased arms race, especially among nonnuclear and small nuclear powers, as no effective sanctions are applied to those who used nuclear
weapons. Another similar limited nuclear war and superpower crisis becomes likely ... or perhaps the scene shifts to scenario b or c. (b) Limited nuclear war between the superpowers. A
limited exchange of nuclear weapons between the US and the Soviet Union occurs, either due to accident or as
part of a threat-counterthreat situation. A sizable number of military or civilian targets are destroyed, either in the
US or the Soviet Union or in allied states, and perhaps 5 or 10 million people are killed. As in scenario a, states
of emergency are declared, political dissent repressed and public outrage channelled into massive military and
political mobilisation to prepare for future confrontations and wars. Scenario c becomes more likely. (c) Global nuclear war. A massive
nuclear exchange occurs, killing 200 million people in the US, Soviet Union and Europe. National governments,
though decimated, survive and apply brutal policies to obtain economic and military recovery, brooking no
dissent. In the wake of the disaster, authoritarian civilian or military regimes take control in countries relatively
unscathed by the war, such as Australia, Japan and Spain. The road is laid to an even more devastating World War IV. Many other similar
scenarios could be presented. One feature of these scenarios is familiar: the enormous scale of physical
destruction and human suffering, which is only dimly indicated by the numbers of dead and injured, whether this
is hundreds, or hundreds of millions. This destruction and suffering is familiar largely because many people have repeatedly warned of the human consequences of
nuclear war. What has been almost entirely absent from peace movement analysis and planning is any consideration of the political consequences of nuclear war. In this paper I critically
analyse the idea that nuclear war will kill most people on earth, and present some possible reasons for the
prevalence of this and related beliefs. I argue that exaggerated ideas about nuclear war are both a cause and
an effect of a limited political analysis which underlies much activity directed towards eliminating nuclear war. Some readers may feel that in criticising the idea of
(a)
nuclear extinction I thereby become an apologist for the military. To this I respond as follows. First, if peace activists ho ld or promote exaggerated views about nuclear war, these need to be justified
on some grounds such as political necessity. This has not been done. Indeed, I argue that beliefs in extinction through nuclear war are counterproductive for the peace movement. Second, the test of a
peace activist should be political and social effectiveness in helping people move together towards a world without war, not the extremity of one's views about the consequences of nuclear war.
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Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
AT: Hege Bad- Terrorism
Only Heg can prevent WMD terrorism
Schmitt ‘6
[Gary, Resident scholar and director of the Program on Advanced Strategic Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, “Is there any alternative to U.S. primacy?” The Weekly Standard, Books &
Arts, Vol. 11 No. 22, February, Lexis]
The United States and the West face a new threat--weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists-and, whether we like it or not, no power other than the United States has the capacity, or can provide the decisive leadership, required to handle
this and other critical global security issues. Certainly not the United Nations or, anytime soon, the European Union. In the absence of American primacy, the international order
<The core argument itself is not new:
would quickly return to disorder. Indeed, whatever legitimate concerns people may have about the fact of America's primacy, the downsides of not asserting that primacy are, according to The
critics "tend to dwell disproportionately on problems in the exercise of [American] power
rather than on the dire consequences of retreat from an activist foreign policy," Lieber writes. They forget "what can happen in the absence of such power.">
American Era, potentially far more serious. The
Terrorists don't have the technological knowledge to create nuclear weapons
Kamd ‘96
(Karl-Heinz, head of the security policy section of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Sankt Agustin,July, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, p. L/N)
Obtaining weapon-grade fissile material is only the first step in building a nuclear bomb, weapons require a host of other "exotic" raw
materials. And the amount of fissile material needed descends on the level of accessible technology. As a rule, the more basic the design of a nuclear weapon, the more
fissile material required. It is true that some weapons need no more than a single kilogram of plutonium, but these are weapons produced only
they require technologies like super compression, which have
not vet been mastered by other Western nuclear cowers, let alone by any nongovernmental, nuclear aspirants. Apart
from producing or obtaining fissile material, the production of a weapon requires highly qualified personnel with special know-how in the fields of
in the huge nuclear laboratories of the superpowers, the United States and Russia, and
physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and electronics. Special technical apparatus and complex components are needed that cannot be purchased off the shelf. This applies in particular to plutonium
. It is almost absurd to fear terrorist bombs made from smuggled
plutonium. More basic nuclear weapon design so-called "gun-type" devices use only uranium. And gun-type designs require masses of fissile
material--quantities that go far beyond any amount that has reportedly been offered on a black market.
components, which must be machined to exacting technical demands
Terrorist groups can’t produce nuclear weapons
Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies ‘06
(April, 2006, p. http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/f1a6_4.html)
It is very doubtful that any terrorist group could produce a nuclear weapon on its own without assistance from a state nuclear program.
Acquiring and enriching uranium, or creating plutonium in a nuclear reactor, is an extremely expensive and
difficult process, requiring expensive equipment and sophisticated techniques. Even if a terrorist group were able to acquire enough
weapons-grade HEU or plutonium, it is still a technically demanding and expensive task to put together even a
simple nuclear device. Producing a chemical or, terrorism weapon would be far easier for terrorists to accomplish than creating a nuclear weapon.
Terrorists can’t build a nuclear bomb- you should assign this zero risk
Rothstein, Auer and Siegel 2004 (Linda editor, Catherin, Managing editor, and Jonas, Assistant editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, BAS, November/December,
http://www.thebulletin.org/articalr.phpart_ofn=nd04rothstein)
Could terrorists produce an entirely do-it yourself nuclear bomb/ Fabricating fissile material, highly enriched
uranium (HEU) or separated plutonium is exceedingly labor and resource intensive—and both activites present many
opportunities for detection. Terrorist produced fissile material is so extremely unlikely that its safe to call it
impossible.
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Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
AT: Offshore Balancing Frontline
Calls for offshore balancing are hopelessly optimistic – the only grand strategy is key to
primacy
McDonough 9 (David. S. McDonough, Fellow at the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at Dalhousie University, “Beyond Primacy: Hegemony and ‘Security Addiction’ in U.S. Grand
Strategy”, Winter 2009, Orbis, ScienceDirect)
Posen and Ross's four-fold typology of strategic choices offers an admirable clarification of the key positions of an otherwise esoteric debate. Yet the reification of these options carries the danger
Layne, for example, argues that American grand strategy has essentially been concerned
with maintaining U.S. strategic preponderance. Selective engagement still envisions a forward strategic presence to balance potential competitors and preserve
American hegemony, and cooperative security would only further reify an American centered institutional order. A grand strategy of "offshore balancing," which
incorporates neo-isolationist prescriptions with a more active role as the "balancer of last resort," is advocated as an antidote to visions of
hegemonic grandeur. Layne's vision is decidedly optimistic on the potential benefits of an eventual multipolar environment, even as it prescribes a smaller,
maritime- oriented military and the dismantlement of entangling alliances.' 3 It is difficult to deny that both primacy and selective
engagement take the preservation of American strategic preponderance as a conceptual starting point. Primacists
are simply more optimistic on the continued vitality of American power, and are, therefore, reluctant to rely on
other countries to provide regional counterweights to any challenger. Even supporters of cooperative security
have grown to share this appreciation for American hegemony. In this light, the Clinton administration's willingness to embrace elements of these
different approaches, rather than an aberration from an undisciplined presidency, seems to be a more natural condition arising from conflating American unipolarity and its liberal strategic culture .
that similarities can be overlooked. Christopher
Your turns are inevitable and balancing is impossible – other nations will always perceive the
US as the hegemon
Drezner 09
(Daniel W., Professor of International Politics at Tufts and a senior editor at The National Interest, 7/15/ 09, “The False Hegemon,” http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=21858)
While the Obama administration and the American people might be content with the notion of America as just another country, this sentiment raises some uncomfortable questions. There is the
is America really just one of many nations? Despite everything that has befallen the United States during this decade, the fact remains that
by standard metrics—GDP, military might, cultural attraction—the United States is far and away the most
powerful country in the world. This fact is so glaring that even academics are starting to acknowledge it. Stephen Brooks and William
Wohlforth wrote an entire book on the durability of American unipolarity. World Politics published a special issue this year on the nature of the unipolar era. The rest of the world
certainly seems to treat America as the hegemonic power, for good or ill. According to the New York Times, Latin America is
waiting for the United States to break the deadlock in Honduras. Vladimir Putin is incapable of giving a foreignpolicy speech in which he does not blast American hegemony as the root of all of Russia’s ills. While Chinese
officials talk tough about ending the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency, its leaders also want America to solve the current economic crisis
and to take the lead on global warming in the process. It’s not just foreign leaders who are obsessed with American hegemony. Last week, in an example of
true hardship duty, I taught a short course in American foreign policy at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. The students in my class represented a true cross section of
nationalities: Spaniards, Germans, Brits, Estonian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Thai, Ghanaian, Kenyan,
Turkish, Belgian, Mexican, Nicaraguan and, yes, even Americans. I cannot claim that my students represent a scientific cross section of nonfactual one:
Americans (one of them complained that I did not rely on Marxism as a structural explanation for American foreign policy). Still, by and large the students were bright, well informed about world
affairs and cautiously optimistic about President Obama. That said, a persistent trend among my students was their conviction that the U.S. government was the world’s puppeteer, consciously
manipulating every single event in world politics. For example, many of them were convinced that George W. Bush ordered Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to precipitate last year’s war
with Russia. The Ghanaian students wanted to know why Obama visited their country last week. The standard “promotion of good democratic governance” answer did not satisfy them. They were
convinced that there had to be some deeper, potentially sinister motive to the whole enterprise. Don’t even ask what they thought about the reasons behind the war in Iraq. To be sure, the United
States is a powerful actor; the government is trying to influence global events (and Americans are not immune to their own misperceptions). And good social scientists should always search for
underlying causes and not take rhetoric at face value. Nevertheless, the belief in an all-powerful America hatching conspiracies left and right frequently did not jibe with the facts. For many of these
Ironically, at the moment when many Americans are
questioning the future of U.S. hegemony, many non-Americans continue to believe that the U.S. government is
diabolically manipulating events behind the scenes. Going forward, the persistence of anti-Americanism in the
age of Obama might have nothing to do with the president, or his rhetoric or even U.S. government actions. It
might, instead, have to do with the congealed habits of thought that place the United States at the epicenter of all
global movings and shakings. The tragedy is that such an exaggerated perception of American power and purpose is occurring at precisely the moment when the United States
will need to scale back its global ambitions. Indeed, the external perception of U.S. omnipresence will make the pursuit of a more
modest U.S. foreign policy all the more difficult. The Obama administration has consciously adopted a more
modest posture in the hopes of improving America’s standing abroad. If the rest of the world genuinely believes
that the United States causes everything, however, then the attempt at modesty will inevitably fail.
students, even apparent policy mistakes were merely examples of American subterfuge.
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AT: Offshore Balancing Frontline
Offshore balancing kills US credibility and invites challenges
Thayer ‘7
(Bradley A., Associate Prof in Dept. of Defense and Strategic Studies @ Missouri State U, “American Empire: A Debate”, pg. 24-25)
A large part of what makes primacy such a success is that other countries know where the United States stands, what it will defend, and that it will be involved in disputes, both great and small.
other countries have to respect the interests of the United States or face the consequences. Offshore
balancing incurs the risks of primacy without its benefits. It pledges that the United States will defend its
interests with air power and sea power, but not land power. That is curious because we could defend our interests
with land power but choose not to, suggesting our threat to defend is not serious, which weakens our credibility
and invites challenges to the interests of the United States. Offshore balancing increases the probability of conflict for the United States. It
raises the danger that the interests of the United States will be challenged not only from foes like China and Iran,
but, perversely, also from countries now allied with the United States like Japan and Turkey.
Accordingly,
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====Hege Bad====
Hege Bad- War
Hegemony causes global war
Kolko, historian of modern warfare, THE AGE OF WAR: THE UNITED STATES CONFRONTS THE WORLD, 2006, p. 173-6
the United States has the will to maintain a global foreign policy and to intervene
everywhere it believes necessary. Today and in the near future, the United States will make the decisions that will lead to war or peace, and the fate of much of the world is
Gabriel
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, only
largely in its hands. It possesses the arms and a spectrum of military strategies all predicated on a triumphant activist role for itself. It believes that its economy can afford interventionism and that the
American public will support whatever actions necessary to set the affairs of some country or region on the political path it deems essential. This grandiose ambition is bipartisan, and details
notwithstanding, both parties have always shared a consensus on it. The obsession with power and the conviction that armies can produce the political outcome a nation's leaders desire is by no
means an exclusively American illusion. It is a notion that goes back many centuries and has produced the main wars of modern times. The rule of force has been with humankind a very long time,
But unlike the leaders of most European nations or Japan, US leaders
have not gained insight from the calamities that have so seared modern history. Folly is scarcely a US monopoly, but resistance to learning
and the assumptions behind it have plagued its history for centuries.
when grave errors have been committed is almost proportionate to the resources available to repeat them. The Germans learned their lesson after two defeats, the Japanese after World War II, and
both nations found wars too ehausting and politically dangerous. The United States still believes that if firepower fails to master a situation, the solution is to use it more precisely and much more of
Wars are at least as likely today as any time over the past century. Of
the proliferation of nuclear technology and
other means of mass destruction have also made large parts of the world far more dangerous. Deadly local wars
with conventional weapons in Africa, the Balkans, Middle East, and elsewhere have multiplied since the 1960s.
it. In this regard it is exceptional—past failures have not made it any wiser.
great importance is the end of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and Moscow's restraining influence elsewhere. But
Europe, especially Germany, and Japan, are far stronger and more independent than at any time since 1945, and China's rapidly expanding economy has given it a vastly more important role in Asia.
Ideologically, communism's demise means that the simplified bipolarism that Washington used to explain the world ceased after 1990 to have any value. With it, the alliances created nominally to
resist communism have either been abolished or are a shadow of their original selves; they have no reason for existence. The crisis in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), essentially,
reflects this diffusion of all forms of power and the diminution of US hegemony. Economically, the capitalist nations have resumed their rivalries, and they have become more intense with the
growth of their economies and the decline in the dollar—which by 2004 was as weak as it has been in over fifty years. These states have a great deal in common ideologically, but concretely they are
increasingly rivals. The virtual monopoly of nuclear weapons that existed about a quarter-century ago has ended with proliferation.?, Whether it is called a "multipolar" world, to use French president
Jacques Chirac's expression in November 2004, in which Europe, China, India, and even eventually South America follow their own interests, or something else, the direction is clear. There may or
may not be "a fundamental restructuring of the global order," as the chairman of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) National Intelligence Council presciently reflected in April 2003, but the
Terrorism
and the global economy have defied overwhelming US military power: "Our smart bombs aren't that smart."'
Wars, whether civil or between states, remain the principal (but scarcely the only) challenge confronting
humanity in the twenty-first century. Ecological disasters relentlessly affecting all dimensions of the environment are also insidious because of the unwillingness of the
crucial nations—above all the United States—to adopt measures essential for reversing their damage. The challenges facing humanity have never been so
complex and threatening, and the end of the Cold War, although one precondition of progress, is scarcely reason for complaceriby or optimism. The problems the world confronts
conclusion was unavoidable "that we are facing a more fluid and complicated set of alignments than anything we have seen since the formation of the Atlantic alliance in 1949."
far transcend the communist-capitalist tensions, many of which were mainly symptoms of the far greater intellectual, political, and economic problems that plagued the world before 1917—and still
US interventions can lead to open-ended commitments in both duration and effort.
exist. Whatever the original intention,
They may
last a short time, and usually do, but unforeseen events can cause the United States to spend far more resources than it originally anticipated, causing it in the name of its credibility, or some other
doctrine, to get into disastrous situations that in the end defeat the United States. Vietnam is the leading example of this tendency, but Iraq, however different in degree, is the same in kind.
Should the United States confront even some of the forty or more nations that now have terrorist networks, then
it will in one manner or another intervene everywhere, but especially in Africa and the Middle East. The consequences of
such commitments will be unpredictable. The United States has more determined and probably more numerous enemies today than at any time, and many of those who hate it are ready and able to
inflict destruction on its shores. Its interventions often triumphed in the purely military sense, which is all the Pentagon worries about, but in all too many cases they have been political failures and
. Its virtually instinctive activist mentality has caused it to get into situations
where it often had no interests, much less durable solutions to a nation's problems, repeatedly creating disasters
and enduring enmities. The United States has power without wisdom and cannot, despite its repeated
experiences, recognize the limits of its ultrasophisticated military technology. The result has been folly and
hatred, which is a recipe for disasters. September 11 confirmed that, and war has come to its shores. That the United States end its selfappointed global mission of regulating all problems, wherever, whenever, or however it wishes to do so, is an
essential precondition of stemming, much less reversing, the accumulated deterioration of world affairs and wars.
eventually led to greater US military and political involvement
We should not ignore the countless ethical and other reasons it has no more right or capacity to do so than any state over the past century, whatever justifications they evoked. The problems, as the
history of the past century shows, are much greater than the US role in the world: but at the present time its actions are decisive, and whether there is War or peace will be decided far more often in
Washington than any other place. Ultimately, there will not be peace in the world unless all nations relinquish war as an instrument of policy, not only because of ethical or moral reasoning but
A precondition of peace is for nations not to attempt to impose their
visions on others, adjudicate their differences, and never to assume that their need for the economic or strategic resources of another country warrants interference of any sort in its
internal affairs. But September 11 proved that after a half-century of interventions the United States has managed to
provoke increasing hatred. It has failed abysmally to bring peace and security to the world. Its role as a rogue superpower and its
because wars have become deadlier and more destructive of social institutions.
promiscuous, cynical interventionism has been spectacularly unsuccessful, even on its own terms. It is squandering vast economic resources, and it has now endangered the physical security of
Americans at home. To end the damage the United States causes abroad is also to fulfill the responsibilities that US politicians have to their own people. But there is not the slightest sign at this point
that voters will call them to account, and neither the AMerican population nor its political leaders are likely to agree to Rich far-reaching changes in foreign policy. The issues are far too grave to
The world will be safer to the extent that US alliances are dissolved and it is
isolated, and that is happening for many reasons, ranging from the unilateralism, hubris, and preemptory style of the Bush administration to the fact that since the demise of communism, the
wait for US attitudes and its political process to be transformed.
world's political alignments have changed dramatically. Communism and fascism were both outcomes of the fatal errors in the international order and affairs of states that World War I spawned. In
part, the Soviet system's disintegration was the result of the fact it was the aberrant consequence of a destructive and abnormal war, 11,);t at least as important was its leaders' loss of confidence in
socialism. And suicidal Muslims are, to a great extent, the outcome of a half-century of US interference in the Middle East and Islamic world, which radicalized so many young men and women
ready to die for faith. Just as the wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 created Bolsheviks, the repeated grave errors of the United States, however different the context or times, have produced their own
abnormal, negative reactions. The twenty- first century has begun very badly because the United States continues with its aggressive policies. They are far more dangerous than those of the twentieth
century. The destructive potential of weaponry has increased exponentially, and many more people and nations have access to it. What would once have been considered relatively minor foreign
policy problems now have potentially far greater consequences. It all augurs very badly. The world has reached the most dangerous point in recent, or perhaps all of, history. There are threats of war
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and instability unlike anything that prevailed when a Soviet-led bloc existed. Even if the United States abstains from interference and tailors its actions to fit this troubled reality, there will be serious
problems throughout much of the world. Internecine civil conflicts will continue, as well as wars between nations armed with an increasing variety of much more destructive weapons available from
outside powers, of which the United States remains, by far, the most important source. Many of these conflicts have independent roots, and both principles and experiences justify the United States
US
leaders are not creating peace or security at home or stability abroad. The reverse is the case: its interventions
have been counterproductive, and its foreign policy is a disaster. Americans and those people who are the objects of successive administrations'
staying out of them and leaving the world alone. Both the American people and those involved directly will be far better off without foreign interference, whatever nation attempts it.
efforts would be far better off if the United States did nothing, closed its bases overseas and withdrew its fleets everywhere, and allowed the rest of world to find its own way. Communism is dead,
and Europe and Japan are powerful and both can and will take care of their own interests. The United States must adapt to these facts. But if it continues as it has over the past half-century,
attempting to satisfy its vainglorious but irrational ambition to run the world, then there will be even deeper crises and it will inflict wars and turmoil on many nations as well as on its own people.
all states that have gone to war over the past centuries have not achieved the objectives for
which they sacrificed so much blood, passion, and resources. They have only produced endless misery and
upheavals of every kind.
And it will fail yet again, for
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Hegemony causes war – imperial aspirations produce geopolitical backlash
Layne, 03 – Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The
Independent Institute,
(Christopher, The American Conservative "The Cost of Empire" October 3rd, http://www.amconmag.com/article/2003/oct/06/00007/)
Perhaps the proponents of America’s imperial ambitions are right and the U.S. will not suffer the same fate as
previous hegemonic powers. Don’t bet on it. The very fact of America’s overwhelming power is bound to
produce a geopolitical backlash—which is why it’s only a short step from the celebration of imperial glory to the recessional of imperial power. Indeed, on its present course,
the United States seems fated to succumb to the “hegemon’s temptation.” Hegemons have lots of power and
because there is no countervailing force to stop them, they are tempted to use it repeatedly, and thereby
overreach themselves. Over time, this hegemonic muscle-flexing has a price. The cumulative costs of fighting —or
preparing to fight—guerilla wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asymmetric conflicts against terrorists (in the Philippines,
possibly in a failed Pakistan, and elsewhere), regional powers (Iran, North Korea), and rising great powers like
China could erode America’s relative power—especially if the U.S. suffers setbacks in future conflicts, for
example in a war with China over Taiwan.
The pursuit of primacy causes global savage wars for peace – it makes conflict inevitable.
Layne, 7 –Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The
Independent Institute, (Christopher, "The Case Against the American Empire," American Empire: A Debate, Published by Routledge, ISBN 0415952034, p. 54-55)
primacy and empire is a strategy that will lead to bad consequences for the United States. Rather
than bringing the United States peace and security, the pursuit of primacy and empire will result in a geopolitical
backlash against the United States. It already has. The 9/11 attacks were a violent reaction against America’s
primacy—and specifically against its imperial ambitions in the Middle East. Similarly, the quagmire in Iraq also
is a direct consequence of U.S. imperial aspirations. And it will not end there. Because it is premised on the
belief that the United States must embark on assertive policies to bring about regime change by imposing
democracy abroad, the pursuit of primacy and empire will drag the United States into otherwise avoidable wars—what
one proponent of the strategy has termed "savage wars for peace." Looking ahead, if the United States continues to follow its
current strategy of primacy and empire, it almost certainly will find [end page 54] itself on a collision course with Iran
(and possibly North Korea and Syria) and—more importantly—China.
In this chapter, I argue that
Heg makes military aggression inevitable
Layne 06 Associate Professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University
[Christopher “The Peace of Illusions” (p. 152-153)]
the United States could succumb-and, arguably, has-to the "hegemon's temptation." The hegemon's
caused by the imbalance of power in its favor. Conscious both of its overwhelming military superiority and of the fact that no other great powers are
capable of restraining its ambitions, a hegemon easily is lured into overexpansion. When it comes to hard power, hegemons have it,
and seldom can resist flaunting it-especially when the costs and risks of doing so appear to be low.72 Thus, we should expect a unipolar hegemon to
initiate many wars and to use its military power promiscuously. From this perspective, it is not surprising that since the cold war the United
States has-in addition to Afghanistan and Iraq-intervened in such peripheral places as Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and
Kosovo while simultaneously extending its military reach into Central Asia, the Caucasus region, and East
Central Europe (all areas never previously viewed as ones where the United States had important interests). The very nature of hegemonic power
predisposes dominant powers to overexpand in order to maintain their leading position in the international system. As Gilpin observes,
There is another road to U.S. overextension:
temptation is
a hegemon earns its prestige-others' perceptions of the efficacy of its hard power capabilities-by using military power successfully to impose its will on others. When a hegemon wields its military
, hegemons believe that the
frequent use of force has a potent deterrent, or dissuasive, effect on other states. Clearly, U.S. policymakers believe
this to be the case. Thus, after extolling the displays of America's military virtuosity in Afghanistan and Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that those wars should be a
power conspicuously, others are put on notice that the prudent course of action is to accommodate its dominance rather than challenging it. In effect
warning to other states: "If you put yourself in the shoes of a country that might decide they'd like to make mischief, they have a very recent, vivid example of the fact that the United States has the
, a paradox to the hegemon's temptation: overexpansion leads to "imperial overstretch"
and counterhegemonic balancing-the combined effect of which is hegemonic decline. Strategically, hegemons
usually end up biting off more than they can chew.
ability to deal withthis."74 There is, of course
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Hege Bad- China War
US primacy ensures conflict with China
Layne 07 Visiting Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute (Christopher “American Empire: A Debate” (p 75)]
So what should the United States do about China? If the United States persists with its strategy of primacy, the odds of a Sino-American
conflict are high. Current American strategy commits the United States to maintaining the geopolitical status quo
in East Asia, a status quo that reflects American primacy. The United States' desire to preserve the status quo, however,
clashes with the ambitions of a rising China. As a rising great power, China has its own ideas about how East
Asia's political and security order should be organized. Unless U.S. and Chinese interests can be accommodated, the potential for future
tension—or worse—exists. Moreover, as I already have demonstrated, the very fact of American primacy is bound to produce a
geopolitical backlash—with China in the vanguard—in the form of counter-hegemonic balancing. Nevertheless, the United
States cannot be completely indifferent to China's rise.
Encroaching into China’s sphere of influence leads nuclear conflagration
Eland 05
Ivan Eland - Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute, Former Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute - 4/11/05 (“Coexisting with a Rising China,”
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1494)
Although China is an autocratic state, it still has legitimate security interests. The United States would be smart to show some empathy with those concerns. In recent years, as the United States has
become alarmed at China’s expanded military spending, the Chinese have also become alarmed at large increases in the U.S. defense budget and U.S. attacks on the sovereign nations of Serbia and
Iraq. Many Chinese see the threat of an expanding U.S. empire that aims at encircling China and preventing its legitimate rise to great power status. To lessen such perceptions and reduce the chance
of conflict between the two nuclear-armed nations, the United States should retract its forward military and alliance posture in Asia, including repudiating any implied commitment to defend Taiwan.
With large bodies of water as moats and the most formidable nuclear arsenal in the world, the United States hardly needs a security perimeter that stretches across the entire Pacific Ocean to protect it
. If the United States continues to maintain an outdated Cold War-style empire, it is bound to come into
needless conflict with other powers, especially China. Instead of emulating the policies of pre-World War I Britain toward Germany, the United States should
take a page from another chapter in British history. In the late 1800s, although not without tension, the British peacefully allowed the fledging United States
to rise as a great power, knowing both countries were protected by the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean that separated them. Taking advantage of that same kind separation by a major
ocean, the United States could also safely allow China to obtain respect as a great power, wicth a sphere of
influence to match. If China went beyond obtaining a reasonable sphere of influence into an Imperial Japanesestyle expansion, the United States could very well need to mount a challenge. However, at present, little evidence
exists of Chinese intent for such expansion, which would run counter to recent Chinese history. Therefore, a U.S. policy of coexistence,
rather than neo-containment, might avoid a future catastrophic war or even a anuclear conflagration.
from China
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----Ext. China War
US Hegemony causes War with China
Layne
Christopher
, Prof Intl Relations at Texas A&M,
The Peace of Illusions, p. 187
2006
it would avoid implementing an overtly confrontational policy toward China. It is hardly surprising (indeed, it parallels in many
China—the largest and potentially most powerful state in Asia—is seeking a more assertive political,
military, and economic role in the region and even challenging America’s present dominance in East Asia. This
poses no direct threat to U.S. security, however. Doubtless, Japan, india, Russia (and perhaps Korea) may be worried about the implications of
China’s rapid ascendance. But this is precisely the point of offshore balancing: because China potentially poses a direct threat to them—not to the United States—they should bear the
responsibility of balancing against Chinese power. The United States should avoid policies that inflame Sino-Arnerican relations. That means a hand-off attitude
In addition
ways America’s own emergence as a great power) that
with respect to China’s internal policies. The United States lacks the power to transform China into a liberal democracy. Trying to do so serves only to poison relat ions with Beijing. Finally,
Washington should declare unequivocally that the Taiwan issue is a purely internal Chinese matter. Taiwan’s unresolved status is the legacy of a civil war that ended on the mainland in 1949. It is
worth recalling that before the outbreak of the Korean War, Secretary of State Dean Acheson recommended that the United States extricate itself from the unfinished business of the Chinese civil war
going to war to defend Taiwan’s selfstyled
independence makes sense only as a pretext for fighting a preventive war with China. This is something the
United States should avoid. The United States should leave the containment of China to the emerging multipolar
power balance in Asia.
and leave Taiwan to its fate. More than a half-century later, the United States finally should do so. For the United States,
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Hege Bad- Russia War
Hegemony sparks US-Russian nuclear war
Chomsky, 2003 (Noam. Institute Professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at MIT. “Failed States.” Pages 14-16)
The probability of “apocalypse soon” cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity. While speculation is pointless, reaction to the
“stark and dreadful and inescapable” choice Einstein and Russell described definitely is not. On the contrary, reaction is urgent, particularly in the United States, because of Washington’s primary
The chances of an accidental, mistaken or unauthorized
nuclear attack might be increasing,” warns former senator Sam Nunn, who has played a leading role in efforts to reduce the threat of nuclear war. “We are
running an unnecessary risk of an Armageddon of our own making,” Nunn observes, as a result of policy choices that leave “America’s
survival” dependent on “the accuracy of Russia’s warning systems and its command and control.” Nunn is
referring to the sharp expansion of US military programs, which tilt the strategic balance in ways that make
“Russia more likely to launch upon warning of an attack, without waiting to see if the warning is accurate.” The
threat is enhanced by the fact that “the Russian early warning system is in serious disrepair and more likely to give a false
warning of incoming missiles. US reliance on “the high-alert, hair-trigger nuclear posture… allows missiles to be launched within
minutes,” forcing “our leaders to decide almost instantly whether to launch nuclear weapons once they have
warning of an attack, robbing them of the time they may need to gather data, exchange information, gain perspective, discover an error and avoid a catastrophic mistake.” The
risk extends beyond Russia – and also China if it pursues the same course. Strategic Bruce Blair observes that “the early warning and control problems plaguing Pakistan, India
and other nuclear proliferators are even more acute.” Another serious concern, discussed in technical literature well before 9/11, is that nuclear weapons may sooner or
later fall into the hands of terrorist groups, who might use these and other weapons of mass destruction with lethal effect. Those prospects are being advanced by Bush
administration planners, who do not consider terrorism a high priority, as they regularly demonstrate. Their aggressive militarism has not only led Russia to expand
significantly its offensive capacities, including more lethal nuclear weapons and delivery systems, but is also inducing the
Russian military to transfer nuclear weapons constantly across Russia’s vast territory to counter mounting US threats. Washington planners are surely aware
that Chechen rebels, who had already stolen radioactive materials from nuclear waste plants and power stations, have been casing “the railway system and
special trains designed for shipping nuclear weapons across Russia.” Blair warns that “this perpetual motion [within Russia]
creates a serious vulnerability, because transportation is the Achilles’ heel of nuclear weapons security,” ranking in
danger right alongside maintaining strategic nuclear forces on hair-trigger alert. He estimates that every day “many hundreds of Russian nuclear weapons
are moving around the countryside.” Theft of one nuclear bomb “could spell eventual disaster for an American
city, [but this] is not the worst-case scenario stemming from nuclear gamesmanship.” More ominously, “the seizure of a ready-to-fire strategic long range
nuclear missile or a group of missiles capable of delivering bombs to targets thousands of miles away could be
apocalyptic for entire nations.” Another major threat is that terrorist hackers might break into military communication
networks and transmit launch orders for missiles armed with hundreds of nuclear warheads – no fantasy, as the Pentagon learned a
few years ago when serious defects were discovered in its safeguards, requiring new instructions for Trident submarine launch crews. Systems in other countries are much less reliable. All of
this constitutes “an accident waiting to happen,” Blair writes; an accident that could be apocalyptic.
role in accelerating the race to destruction by extending its historically unique military dominance. “
Russian resurgence causes global instability and WMD use
Cohen, Ph.D, Senior Policy Analyst, Heritage Foundation Reports, 1-25-97
Much is at stake in Eurasia for the U.S. and its allies. Attempts to restore its empire will doom Russia's transition to a
democracy and free-market economy. The ongoing war in Chechnya alone has cost Russia $ 6 billion to date (equal to Russia's IMF and World Bank loans for 1995).
Moreover, it has extracted a tremendous price from Russian society. The wars which would be required to restore the Russian empire would
prove much more costly not just for Russia and the region, but for peace, world stability, and security. As the former Soviet arsenals are spread throughout the
NIS, these conflicts may escalate to include the use of weapons of mass destruction. Scenarios including unauthorized
missile launches are especially threatening. Moreover, if successful, a reconstituted Russian empire would become a major
destabilizing influence both in Eurasia and throughout the world. It would endanger not only Russia's neighbors, but also the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the
Ariel
Middle East. And, of course, a neo-imperialist Russia could imperil the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf. n15 Vladimir Zhirinovsky, mouthpiece for the most irredentist elements in the Russian
Domination of the Caucasus would bring Russia closer to the Balkans, the
Mediterranean Sea, and the Middle East. Russian imperialists, such as radical nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, have resurrected the old dream of obtaining a warm
port on the Indian Ocean. If Russia succeeds in establishing its domination in the south, the threat to Ukraine, Turkey, Iran, and Afganistan will
increase. The independence of pro-Western Georgia and Azerbaijan already has been undermined by pressures from the Russian armed forces and covert actions by the intelligence and
security and military services, constantly articulates t his threat.
security services, in addition to which Russian hegemony would make Western political and economic efforts to stave off Islamic militancy more difficult. Eurasian oil resources are pivotal to
economic development in the early 21st century. The supply of Middle Eastern oil would become precarious if Saudi Arabia became unstable, or if Iran or Iraq provoked another military conflict in
the area. Eurasian oil is also key to the economic development of the southern NIS. Only with oil revenues can these countries sever their dependence on Moscow and develop modem market
economies and free societies. Moreover, if these vast oil reserves were tapped and developed, tens of thousands of U.S. and Western jobs would be created. The U.S. should ensure free access to
these reserves for the benefit of both Western and local economies
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Hege Bad- Terrorism
Heg causes terrorism
Layne 06 Associate Professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University
(Christopher “The Peace of Illusions” (p. 190-191)
The events of 9/11 are another example of how hegemony makes the United States less secure than it would be if it followed
an offshore balancing strategy. Terrorism, the RAND Corporation terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman says, is "about power: the pursuit of power, the acquisition of power, and use of power to achieve
political change."86 If we step back for a moment from our horror and revulsion at the events of September 11, we can see that the attack was in keeping with the Clausewitzian paradigm of war:
force was used against the United States by its adversaries to advance their political objectives. As Clausewitz observed, "War is not an act of senseless passion but is controlled by its political
September 11 represented a violent counterreaction to America's geopolitical-and cultural-hegemony. As the strategy expert
: It is 'hardly likely that Middle Eastern radicals would be hatching
schemes like the destruction of the World Trade Center if the United States had not been identified so long as the
mainstay of Israel, the shah of Iran, and conservative Arab regimes and the source of a cultural assault on
Islam.89 U.S. hegemony fuels terrorist groups like al Qaeda and fans Islamic fundamentalism, which is a form of
"blowback" against America's preponderance and its world role.90 As long as the United States maintains its
global hegemony-and its concomitant preeminence in regions like the Persian Gulf-it will be the target of politically motivated terrorist
groups like al Qaeda. After 9/11, many foreign policy analysts and pundits asked the question, "Why do they hate us?" This question missed the key point. No doubt,
there are Islamic fundamentalists who do "hate" the United States for cultural, religious, and ideological reasons.
object."88
Richard K. Betts presciently observed in a 1998 Foreign Affairs article
And even leaving aside American neoconservatives' obvious relish for making it so, to some extent the war on terror inescapably has overtones of a "clash of civilizations:' Still, this isn't-and should
Fundamentally 9/11 was about geopolitics, specifically about U.S. hegemony. The
United States may be greatly reviled in some quarters of the Islamic world, but were the United States not so
intimately involved in the affairs of the Middle East, it's hardly likely that this detestation would have manifested
itself in something like 9/11. As Michael Scheurer, who headed the CIA analytical team monitoring Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, puts it, "One of the greatest dangers for
not be allowed to become-a replay of the Crusades.
Americans in deciding how to confront the Islamist threat lies in continuing to believe-at the urging of senior U.S. leaders-that Muslims hate and attack us for what we are and think, rather than for
what we do."91
It is American policies-to be precise, American hegemony-that make the United States a lightning rod for Muslim
anger
Terrorism Causes Extinction
Sid-Ahmed, political analyst 04 (Mohamed, Managing Editor for Al-Ahali, “Extinction!” August 26-September 1, Issue no. 705, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/705/op5.htm)
What would be the consequences of a nuclear attack by terrorists? Even if it fails, it would further exacerbate the
negative features of the new and frightening world in which we are now living. Societies would close in on themselves, police measures would be stepped
up at the expense of human rights, tensions between civilisations and religions would rise and ethnic conflicts would proliferate.
It would also speed up the arms race and develop the awareness that a different type of world order is imperative if humankind is to survive. But the still more critical
scenario is if the attack succeeds. This could lead to a third world war, from which no one will emerge victorious. Unlike
a conventional war which ends when one side triumphs over another, this war will be without winners and losers. When nuclear pollution infects the whole
planet, we will all be losers.
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----Ext. Terrorism
US Hege causes interventionism, inflaming terrorism.
Layne 5-10-10 (Christopher, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 1995-1996, Graceful Decline http://amconmag.com/article/2010/may/01/00030/, 7/13/10)
With respect to Islamic terrorism, we need to keep our priorities straight. Terrorism is not the most pressing nationalsecurity threat facing the United States. Great powers can be defeated only by other great powers—not by nonstate terrorists
or by minor powers. The U.S. needs to be careful not to pay more attention to Islamic terrorists than to emerging great
powers. Here the Obama administration and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates are getting it wrong. Although many in the U.S. foreign-policy community—
especially the counterinsurgency lobby, based at the Center for a New American Security, and the American Enterprise Institute—call for the U.S. to “win” the war on terror, there can be
no decisive victory over terrorism. The trick is finding the right strategy to minimize its effects on American
security. The strategy of the Bush and Obama administrations—invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan—is exactly
the wrong approach. The U.S. is bad at counterinsurgency. Foreign occupying powers seldom are good at it,
which is the main reason big powers usually lose these kinds of small wars. The U.S. also is not good at nationbuilding. Rather than quelling terrorism, a long-term foreign military presence in places like Iraq and Afghanistan inflames
nationalism and anti-Americanism.
Terrorists aren’t deterred by military power because it falls out of asymmetric power
calculations
Eland 08 senior fellow at the Independent Institute
(ivan, Mediterranean Quarterly Volume 19, Number 3, Summer 2008, Back to the Future: Rediscovering America’s Foreign Policy Traditions
During the Cold War, at least a plausible argument could be made for some [End Page 94] US intervention overseas to counter Soviet encroachment. But the Cold War is long over, the Soviet rival is
The only type of attack that cannot be
deterred by the US nuclear arsenal is that from terrorists — as was demonstrated on 9/11. Retaliation for US interventionism in the
in the dustbin of history, and the gains from interventionism have been drastically reduced while the costs have skyrocketed.
Arab-Muslim world is al Qaeda’s primary motive for attacking the United States. Specifically, Osama bin Laden’s biggest gripes are with US — that is, non-Muslim — occupation of Muslim lands
Because conventional and nuclear military power have very little utility
in stopping terrorist attacks and because the United States has an open society, with thousands of miles of
borders and many possible targets, homeland security efforts will likely have only limited effect. Naturally, in the short term,
the utmost effort should be made to capture or kill bin Laden and eradicate al Qaeda, but in the long term the only way to effectively deal with anti –
United States terrorism is to reduce the motivation of terrorists to attack America in the first place. Poll after poll
in the Muslim world indicates that Muslims like US political and economic freedoms, technology, and even
culture but hate US meddling in their world. Thus, practicing military restraint, rather than interventionism,
would make Americans safer at home. Protecting its citizens and property should be the first goal of any government, but the US quest for an informal global empire
and meddling in their politics by supporting corrupt dictators and Israel.
actually undermines this objective. Empire does not equal security — in fact, it sabotages it.
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Offshore Balancing Frontline
Heg stops offshore balancing that’s key to preventing regional wars, financial crises,
terrorism and proliferation
Mearsheimer 08 (John, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and coauthor of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, December 31, “Pull Those Boots Off
The Ground”, http://www.newsweek.com/id/177380/output/print)
the United States is in deep trouble
As the new President takes office,
in the Middle East. Despite Obama's promises to withdraw from Iraq, the debacle there shows no
sign of ending soon, and it has made America's terrorism problem worse, not better. Meanwhile, Hamas rules in Gaza, Iran's stature is on the rise and Tehran is quickly moving to acquire a nuclear
deterrent—which, despite a lot of tough talk, the United States and its allies have been unable to prevent. And America's image throughout the Middle East is at an all-time low. All this is a direct
Bush hoped he could implant democracy in the Middle East
by using the U.S. military to topple the unfriendly regime in Baghdad—and maybe those in Damascus and Tehran, too—and replace
them with friendly, democratic governments. Things didn't work out well, of course, and it's now vital that the new president devise a radically
different strategy for dealing with this critical part of the world. Fortunately, one approach has proved effective in the past and could serve
America again today: "offshore balancing." During the cold war, this strategy enabled Washington to contain Iran and
Iraq and deter direct Soviet intervention in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. As a Middle East policy, offshore balancing may be
less ambitious than Bush's grand design was—no one promises it will lead to an "Arab spring"—but it will be much more effective at
protecting actual U.S. interests. So what would it look like? As an offshore balancer, the United States would keep its military
forces—especially its ground and air forces—outside the Middle East, not smack in the center of it. Hence the term "offshore." As
for "balancing," that would mean relying on regional powers like Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia to check each other.
Washington would remain diplomatically engaged, and when necessary would assist the weaker side in a
conflict. It would also use its air and naval power to signal a continued U.S. commitment to the region and would
retain the capacity to respond quickly to unexpected threats, like Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But—and this is the key point—the United
States would put boots on the ground in the Middle East only if the local balance of power seriously broke down
and one country threatened to dominate the others. Short of that, America would keep its soldiers and pilots "over the
horizon"—namely at sea, in bases outside the region or back home in the United States. This approach might strike some as cynical after Bush's lofty rhetoric. It would do little to foster
result of the Bush administration's misguided policy of regional transformation. George W.
democracy or promote human rights. But Bush couldn't deliver on those promises anyway, and it is ultimately up to individual countries, not Washington, to determine their political systems. It is
Offshore balancing, moreover, is
nothing new: the United States pursued such a strategy in the Middle East very successfully during much of the cold war. It
hardly cynical to base U.S. strategy on a realistic appraisal of American interests and a clear-eyed sense of what U.S. power cannot accomplish.
never tried to garrison the region or transform it along democratic lines. Instead, Washington sought to maintain a regional balance of power by backing various local allies and by developing the
capacity—in the form of the Rapid Deployment Force (RDF), which brought together five Army and Marine divisions, seven tactical fighter wings and three aircraft-carrier battle groups—to deter or
intervene directly if the Soviet Union, Iraq or Iran threatened to upend the balance. The United States helped Iraq contain revolutionary Iran in the 1980s, but when Iraq's conquest of Kuwait in 1990
Offshore
balancing has three particular virtues that would be especially appealing today. First, it would significantly
reduce (though not eliminate) the chances that the United States would get involved in another bloody and costly war like
Iraq. America doesn't need to control the Middle East with its own forces; it merely needs to ensure that no other country does. Toward that end, offshore balancing would
reject the use of military force to reshape the politics of the region and would rely instead on local allies to
contain their dangerous neighbors. As an offshore balancer, the United States would husband its own resources and intervene only as a last resort. And when it did, it would
finish quickly and then move back offshore. The relative inexpensiveness of this approach is particularly attractive in the current
climate. The U.S. financial bailout has been hugely expensive, and it's not clear when the economy will recover. In
this environment, America simply cannot afford to be fighting endless wars across the Middle East, or anywhere else. Remember that
threatened to tilt things in Baghdad's favor, the United States assembled a multinational coalition centered on the RDF and smashed Saddam Hussein's military machine.
Washington has already spent $600 billion on the Iraq War, and the tally is likely to hit more than $1 trillion before that conflict is over. Imagine the added economic consequences of a war with
Iran. Offshore balancing would not be free—the United States would still have to maintain a sizable expeditionary force and the capacity to move it quickly—but would be a lot cheaper than the
Second, offshore balancing would ameliorate America's terrorism problem. One of the key lessons of the
past century is that nationalism and other forms of local identity remain intensely powerful, and foreign
occupiers generate fierce local resentment. That resentment often manifests itself in terrorism or even large-scale
insurgencies directed at the United States. When the Reagan administration put U.S. troops in Beirut following Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, local terrorists
alternative.
responded by suicide-bombing the U.S. Embassy in April 1983 and the U.S. Marine barracks in October, killing more than 300. Keeping U.S. military forces out of sight until they are needed would
Third, offshore balancing would reduce fears in Iran and Syria that
the United States aims to attack them and remove their regimes—a key reason these states are currently seeking
weapons of mass destruction. Persuading Tehran to abandon its nuclear program will require Washington to address Iran's legitimate security concerns and to refrain from
minimize the anger created by having them permanently stationed on Arab soil.
issuing overt threats. Removing U.S. troops from the neighborhood would be a good start. The United States can't afford to completely disengage from the Middle East, but offshore balancing would
this strategy would encourage
contending regional powers to compete for the United States' favor, thereby facilitating a strategy of divide-andconquer. A final, compelling reason to adopt this approach to the Middle East is that nothing else has worked. In the early
make U.S. involvement there less threatening. Instead of lumping potential foes together and encouraging them to join forces against America,
1990s, the Clinton administration pursued a "dual containment" strategy: instead of using Iraq and Iran to check each other, the United States began trying to contain both. This policy guaranteed
only that each country came to view the United States as a bitter enemy. It also required the United States to deploy large numbers of troops in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The policy fueled local
resentment, helped persuade Osama bin Laden to declare war on America and led to the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1996, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 and, eventually, 9/11. Shortly
after 9/11, the Bush administration jettisoned dual containment in favor of regional transformation. When Baghdad fell, it briefly seemed that Bush just might succeed. But the occupation soon
faltered, and America's position in the region went from bad to worse. The new president's only hope for extricating America from the resultant mess is to return to the one Middle East strategy that's
worked well in the past. In practical terms
, an offshore-balancing strategy would mean ending the Iraq War as quickly as possible
Instead of threatening Iran with preventive war—an approach that's
while working to minimize the bloodshed there and throughout the region.
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[Continued- with no texted removed]…
Crowe-Hammond-Schirmer
only fueled Tehran's desire for nuclear weapons and increased the popularity of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—the new administration
should try to cut a deal by offering Iran security guarantees in return for significant and veri-fiable limits on its
nuclear-enrichment program. The United States should also take its sights off the Assad regime in Syria and push
both it and Israel to reach a peace agreement. This strategy wouldn't eliminate all the problems the United States faces in the Middle East. But it would
reduce the likelihood of future disasters like Iraq, significantly reduce America's terrorism problem and
maximize Washington's prospects of thwarting nuclear proliferation. It would also be considerably less expensive in both human and financial
terms. There are no foolproof strategies in international politics, but offshore balancing is probably as close as we can get.
Terrorism Causes Extinction
Sid-Ahmed, political analyst 04 (Mohamed, Managing Editor for Al-Ahali, “Extinction!” August 26-September 1, Issue no. 705, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/705/op5.htm)
What would be the consequences of a nuclear attack by terrorists? Even if it fails, it would further exacerbate the
negative features of the new and frightening world in which we are now living. Societies would close in on themselves, police measures would be stepped
up at the expense of human rights, tensions between civilisations and religions would rise and ethnic conflicts would proliferate.
It would also speed up the arms race and develop the awareness that a different type of world order is imperative if humankind is to survive. But the still more critical
scenario is if the attack succeeds. This could lead to a third world war, from which no one will emerge victorious. Unlike
a conventional war which ends when one side triumphs over another, this war will be without winners and losers. When nuclear pollution infects the whole
planet, we will all be losers.
Middle East War Goes Nuclear
Steinbach, DC Iraq Coalition, ISRAELI WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: A THREAT TO PEACE, March 2002, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/STE203A.html
the existence of an arsenal of mass destruction in such an unstable region in turn has serious implications
for future arms control and disarmament negotiations, and even the threat of nuclear war. Seymour Hersh warns, "Should
war break out in the Middle East again,... or should any Arab nation fire missiles against Israel, as the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable
except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability." and Ezar Weissman, Israel's current President said "The nuclear issue is gaining momentum(and the) next
war will not be conventional." Russia and before it the Soviet Union has long been a major(if not the major) target of Israeli nukes. It is
John
Meanwhile,
widely reported that the principal purpose of Jonathan Pollard's spying for Israel was to furnish satellite images of Soviet targets and other super sensitive data relating to U.S. nuclear targeting
strategy. (Since launching its own satellite in 1988, Israel no longer needs U.S. spy secrets.) Israeli nukes aimed at the Russian heartland seriously complicate disarmament and arms control
negotiations and, at the very least, the unilateral possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is enormously destabilizing, and dramatically lowers the threshold for their actual use, if not for all out
nuclear war. In the words of Mark Gaffney, "... if the familiar pattern(Israel refining its weapons of mass destruction with U.S. complicity) is not reversed soon- for whatever reason- the
deepening Middle East conflict could trigger a world conflagration."
Economic collapse leads to nuclear war
The Baltimore Examiner 9 [“Will this recession lead to World War II,” 2/26, http://www.examiner.com/x-3108-Baltimore-RepublicanExaminer~y2009m2d26-Will-this-recession-lead-to-World-War-III]
Could the current economic crisis affecting this country and the world lead to another world war? The answer may be
found by looking back in history. One of the causes of World War I was the economic rivalry that existed between the nations of Europe. In the
19th century France and Great Britain became wealthy through colonialism and the control of foreign resources. This forced other up-and-coming nations (such as Germany) to be more competitive
After the Great Depression ruined the economies of Europe in the 1930s, fascist
movements arose to seek economic and social control. From there fanatics like Hitler and Mussolini took over Germany and Italy and led them both into
World War II. With most of North America and Western Europe currently experiencing a recession, will competition for resources and
economic rivalries with the Middle East, Asia, or South American cause another world war? Add in nuclear
weapons and Islamic fundamentalism and things look even worse. Hopefully the economy gets better before it
gets worse and the terrifying possibility of World War III is averted. However sometimes history repeats
itself.
in world trade which led to rivalries and ultimately, to war.
Nuclear Proliferation Causes Extinction
Utgoff 02
Victor Utgoff, Deputy Director of the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis, SURVIVAL, Fall,2002, p. 87-90
proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shootouts will have a substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at
hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild
West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear 'six-shooters' on their hips, the world may
even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the
bodies of dead cities or even whole nations.
In sum, widespread
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----Ext. Offshore Balancing
Hege Decline will be violent- only thing to smooth the transition is take action now in a
coordinated move to offshore balancing.
Layne 5-10-10 (Christopher, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 1995-1996, Graceful Decline http://amconmag.com/article/2010/may/01/00030/, 7/13/10)
In coming years, the U.S. will be under increasing pressure to defend the dollar by preventing runaway inflation. This
will require it to impose fiscal self-discipline through some combination of budget cuts, tax increases, and interest-rate hikes. Given that the last two options could
choke off renewed growth, there is likely to be strong pressure to slash the federal budget. But it will be almost impossible to
make meaningful cuts in federal spending without deep reductions in defense expenditures. Discretionary non-defense domestic
spending accounts for only about 20 percent of annual federal outlays. So the United States will face obvious “guns or butter” choices. As Kirshner puts
it, the absolute size of U.S. defense expenditures are “more likely to be decisive in the future when the U.S. is under pressure to make real choices about taxes and spending. When
borrowing becomes more difficult, and adjustment more difficult to postpone, choices must be made between
raising taxes, cutting non-defense spending, and cutting defense spending.” Faced with these hard decisions, Americans will
find themselves afflicted with hegemony fatigue. The United States will be compelled to overhaul its
strategy dramatically, and rather than having this adjustment forced upon it suddenly by a major crisis, the U.S.
should get ahead of the curve by shifting its position in a gradual, orderly fashion. A new American global
posture would involve strategic retrenchment, burden-shifting, and abandonment of the so-called “global
counterinsurgency” being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a first step, the U.S. will need to pull back from its current security
commitments to NATO, Japan, and South Korea. This is not isolationism. The United States undertook the defense of these regions under conditions very different
from those prevailing today. In the late 1940s, all were threatened by the Soviet Union—in the case of South Korea and Japan, by China as well—and were too weak to defend themselves. The U.S.
did the right thing by extending its security umbrella and “drawing a line in the sand” to contain the Soviet Union. But these commitments were never intended to be permanent. They were meant as
a temporary shield to enable Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea to build up their own economic and military strength and assume responsibility for defending themselves. There are several
explanations for why the U.S. did not follow through with this policy. Fundamentally, during the Pax Americana there was no need. As the U.S. declines, however, it will be compelled to return to its
original intent. If we remember that an eventual pullback was the goal of U.S. policy, strategic retrenchment in the early 21st century looks less like a radical break than a fulfillment of strategic goals
American policy should seek to compel our
allies to assume responsibility for their own security and take the lead role in providing security in their regions.
To implement this strategic devolution, the U.S. should disengage gradually from its current commitments in
order to give an adequate transition period for its allies to step up to the plate. It should facilitate this transition
by providing advanced weapons and military technology to friendly states in Europe and Asia.
adopted in the late 1940s. Burden-shifting—not burden-sharing—is the obvious corollary of strategic retrenchment.
And we have to transition now, must reject’s the aff’s hold on exceptionalism—violent
decline is inevitable in that mindset.
Layne 5-10-10 (Christopher, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 1995-1996, Graceful Decline http://amconmag.com/article/2010/may/01/00030/, 7/13/10)
These assumptions invest American foreign policy with a tendency to see the world in terms of good versus evil.
And because the U.S. looks through this prism, it believes it has the obligation to prevail in this global struggle.
America’s security and way of life are purportedly endangered by the existence of hostile ideologies anywhere in
the world because peace and freedom are allegedly indivisible. Intervention is thus the United States’ default in
foreign policy. We attempt to tame the world by exporting democracy because—we are told—democracies do
not fight each other. We export our model of free-market capitalism because—we are told—states that are economically
interdependent do not fight each other. We work multilaterally through international institutions because—we are told—these promote cooperation and trust among states.
None of these propositions is self-evident. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that they are wrong. But they are illusions that
“express the deepest beliefs which Americans, as a nation, hold about the world.” So we cling to the idea that our
hegemony is necessary for our own and everyone else’s security. The consequence has been to contribute to the
very imperial overstretch that is accelerating the United States’ decline. Because that U.S. enjoyed such vast
superiority for such a long time, it had the luxury of acting on its delusions without paying too high a price. (That is, if
you discount the 58,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial or the tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel who have suffered disfiguring wounds or been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.) But as my
When you are big, strong,
and powerful, you can afford to make the same dumb mistakes over and over again. But when your power
declines, you begin to pay a price for repeating your mistakes.” U.S. decline means that in the 21st century, the United
States will pay a high price if it endlessly repeats its mistakes. To change our foreign policy—to come to grips
with the end of the Pax Americana—we first need to change the way we see the world.
graduate school mentor, Kenneth Waltz, one of the towering figures in the study of international politics, used to tell us about American foreign policy, “
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AT: Hege Good- War
Hegemony causes global war
Kolko, historian of modern warfare, THE AGE OF WAR: THE UNITED STATES CONFRONTS THE WORLD, 2006, p. 173-6
the United States has the will to maintain a global foreign policy and to intervene
everywhere it believes necessary. Today and in the near future, the United States will make the decisions that will lead to war or peace, and the fate of much of the world is
Gabriel
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, only
largely in its hands. It possesses the arms and a spectrum of military strategies all predicated on a triumphant activist role for itself. It believes that its economy can afford interventionism and that the
American public will support whatever actions necessary to set the affairs of some country or region on the political path it deems essential. This grandiose ambition is bipartisan, and details
notwithstanding, both parties have always shared a consensus on it. The obsession with power and the conviction that armies can produce the political outcome a nation's leaders desire is by no
means an exclusively American illusion. It is a notion that goes back many centuries and has produced the main wars of modern times. The rule of force has been with humankind a very long time,
But unlike the leaders of most European nations or Japan, US leaders
have not gained insight from the calamities that have so seared modern history. Folly is scarcely a US monopoly, but resistance to learning
and the assumptions behind it have plagued its history for centuries.
when grave errors have been committed is almost proportionate to the resources available to repeat them. The Germans learned their lesson after two defeats, the Japanese after World War II, and
both nations found wars too ehausting and politically dangerous. The United States still believes that if firepower fails to master a situation, the solution is to use it more precisely and much more of
Wars are at least as likely today as any time over the past century. Of
the proliferation of nuclear technology and
other means of mass destruction have also made large parts of the world far more dangerous. Deadly local wars
with conventional weapons in Africa, the Balkans, Middle East, and elsewhere have multiplied since the 1960s.
it. In this regard it is exceptional—past failures have not made it any wiser.
great importance is the end of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and Moscow's restraining influence elsewhere. But
Europe, especially Germany, and Japan, are far stronger and more independent than at any time since 1945, and China's rapidly expanding economy has given it a vastly more important role in Asia.
Ideologically, communism's demise means that the simplified bipolarism that Washington used to explain the world ceased after 1990 to have any value. With it, the alliances created nominally to
resist communism have either been abolished or are a shadow of their original selves; they have no reason for existence. The crisis in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), essentially,
reflects this diffusion of all forms of power and the diminution of US hegemony. Economically, the capitalist nations have resumed their rivalries, and they have become more intense with the
growth of their economies and the decline in the dollar—which by 2004 was as weak as it has been in over fifty years. These states have a great deal in common ideologically, but concretely they are
increasingly rivals. The virtual monopoly of nuclear weapons that existed about a quarter-century ago has ended with proliferation.?, Whether it is called a "multipolar" world, to use French president
Jacques Chirac's expression in November 2004, in which Europe, China, India, and even eventually South America follow their own interests, or something else, the direction is clear. There may or
may not be "a fundamental restructuring of the global order," as the chairman of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) National Intelligence Council presciently reflected in April 2003, but the
Terrorism
and the global economy have defied overwhelming US military power: "Our smart bombs aren't that smart."'
Wars, whether civil or between states, remain the principal (but scarcely the only) challenge confronting
humanity in the twenty-first century. Ecological disasters relentlessly affecting all dimensions of the environment are also insidious because of the unwillingness of the
crucial nations—above all the United States—to adopt measures essential for reversing their damage. The challenges facing humanity have never been so
complex and threatening, and the end of the Cold War, although one precondition of progress, is scarcely reason for complaceriby or optimism. The problems the world confronts
conclusion was unavoidable "that we are facing a more fluid and complicated set of alignments than anything we have seen since the formation of the Atlantic alliance in 1949."
far transcend the communist-capitalist tensions, many of which were mainly symptoms of the far greater intellectual, political, and economic problems that plagued the world before 1917—and still
US interventions can lead to open-ended commitments in both duration and effort.
exist. Whatever the original intention,
They may
last a short time, and usually do, but unforeseen events can cause the United States to spend far more resources than it originally anticipated, causing it in the name of its credibility, or some other
doctrine, to get into disastrous situations that in the end defeat the United States. Vietnam is the leading example of this tendency, but Iraq, however different in degree, is the same in kind.
Should the United States confront even some of the forty or more nations that now have terrorist networks, then
it will in one manner or another intervene everywhere, but especially in Africa and the Middle East. The consequences of
such commitments will be unpredictable. The United States has more determined and probably more numerous enemies today than at any time, and many of those who hate it are ready and able to
inflict destruction on its shores. Its interventions often triumphed in the purely military sense, which is all the Pentagon worries about, but in all too many cases they have been political failures and
. Its virtually instinctive activist mentality has caused it to get into situations
where it often had no interests, much less durable solutions to a nation's problems, repeatedly creating disasters
and enduring enmities. The United States has power without wisdom and cannot, despite its repeated
experiences, recognize the limits of its ultrasophisticated military technology. The result has been folly and
hatred, which is a recipe for disasters. September 11 confirmed that, and war has come to its shores. That the United States end its selfappointed global mission of regulating all problems, wherever, whenever, or however it wishes to do so, is an
essential precondition of stemming, much less reversing, the accumulated deterioration of world affairs and wars.
eventually led to greater US military and political involvement
We should not ignore the countless ethical and other reasons it has no more right or capacity to do so than any state over the past century, whatever justifications they evoked. The problems, as the
history of the past century shows, are much greater than the US role in the world: but at the present time its actions are decisive, and whether there is War or peace will be decided far more often in
Washington than any other place. Ultimately, there will not be peace in the world unless all nations relinquish war as an instrument of policy, not only because of ethical or moral reasoning but
A precondition of peace is for nations not to attempt to impose their
visions on others, adjudicate their differences, and never to assume that their need for the economic or strategic resources of another country warrants interference of any sort in its
internal affairs. But September 11 proved that after a half-century of interventions the United States has managed to
provoke increasing hatred. It has failed abysmally to bring peace and security to the world. Its role as a rogue superpower and its
because wars have become deadlier and more destructive of social institutions.
promiscuous, cynical interventionism has been spectacularly unsuccessful, even on its own terms. It is squandering vast economic resources, and it has now endangered the physical security of
Americans at home. To end the damage the United States causes abroad is also to fulfill the responsibilities that US politicians have to their own people. But there is not the slightest sign at this point
that voters will call them to account, and neither the AMerican population nor its political leaders are likely to agree to Rich far-reaching changes in foreign policy. The issues are far too grave to
wait for US attitudes and its political process to be transformed.
The world will be safer to the extent that US alliances are dissolved and it is
isolated, and that is happening for many reasons, ranging from the unilateralism, hubris, and preemptory style of the Bush administration to the fact that since the demise of communism, the
world's political alignments have changed dramatically. Communism and fascism were both outcomes of the fatal errors in the international order and affairs of states that World War I spawned. In
part, the Soviet system's disintegration was the result of the fact it was the aberrant consequence of a destructive and abnormal war, 11,);t at least as important was its leaders' loss of confidence in
socialism. And suicidal Muslims are, to a great extent, the outcome of a half-century of US interference in the Middle East and Islamic world, which radicalized so many young men and women
ready to die for faith. Just as the wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 created Bolsheviks, the repeated grave errors of the United States, however different the context or times, have produced their own
abnormal, negative reactions. The twenty- first century has begun very badly because the United States continues with its aggressive policies. They are far more dangerous than those of the twentieth
century. The destructive potential of weaponry has increased exponentially, and many more people and nations have access to it. What would once have been considered relatively minor foreign
policy problems now have potentially far greater consequences. It all augurs very badly. The world has reached the most dangerous point in recent, or perhaps all of, history. There are threats of war
and instability unlike anything that prevailed when a Soviet-led bloc existed. Even if the United States abstains from interference and tailors its actions to fit this troubled reality, there will be serious
problems throughout much of the world. Internecine civil conflicts will continue, as well as wars between nations armed with an increasing variety of much more destructive weapons available from
outside powers, of which the United States remains, by far, the most important source. Many of these conflicts have independent roots, and both principles and experiences justify the United States
staying out of them and leaving the world alone. Both the American people and those involved directly will be far better off without foreign interference, whatever nation attempts it.
US
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leaders are not creating peace or security at home or stability abroad. The reverse is the case: its interventions
have been counterproductive, and its foreign policy is a disaster. Americans and those people who are the objects of successive administrations'
efforts would be far better off if the United States did nothing, closed its bases overseas and withdrew its fleets everywhere, and allowed the rest of world to find its own way. Communism is dead,
and Europe and Japan are powerful and both can and will take care of their own interests. The United States must adapt to these facts. But if it continues as it has over the past half-century,
attempting to satisfy its vainglorious but irrational ambition to run the world, then there will be even deeper crises and it will inflict wars and turmoil on many nations as well as on its own people.
all states that have gone to war over the past centuries have not achieved the objectives for
which they sacrificed so much blood, passion, and resources. They have only produced endless misery and
upheavals of every kind.
And it will fail yet again, for
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AT: Hege Good- Prolif
Heg cause prolif
Weber et al 07 Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute for International Studies at the University of California-Berkeley
(Steven with Naazneen Barma, Matthew Kroenig, and Ely Ratner, Ph.D. Candidates at the University of California-Berkeley and Research Fellows at its New Era Foreign Policy Center, [“How
Globalization Went Bad,” Foreign Policy, Issue 158, January/February,)
states try to balance power. They protect themselves by joining
In today's unipolar world, every nation from Venezuela to North Korea is
looking for a way to constrain American power. But in the unipolar world, it's harder for states to join together to
do that. So they turn to other means. They play a different game. Hamas, Iran, Somalia, North Korea, and Venezuela are not going to become allies anytime soon. Each
is better off finding other ways to make life more difficult for Washington. Going nuclear is one way. Counterfeiting U.S. currency is another. Raising uncertainty about oil
supplies is perhaps the most obvious method of all. Here's the important downside of unipolar globalization . In a world with multiple great powers, many of these
threats would be less troublesome. The relatively weak states would have a choice among potential partners with which to ally, enhancing their
influence. Without that more attractive choice, facilitating the dark side of globalization becomes the most effective means of constraining American power. SHARING GLOBALIZATION'S
BURDEN The world is paying a heavy price for the instability created by the combination of globalization and unipolarity, and the United States is bearing most of the burden. Consider the
case of nuclear proliferation. There's effectively a market out there for proliferation, with its own supply (states willing
to share nuclear technology) and demand (states that badly want a nuclear weapon). The overlap of unipolarity with globalization ratchets up
both the supply and demand, to the detriment of U.S. national security. It has become fashionable, in the wake of the Iraq war, to comment on
Axiom 3 is a story about the preferred strategies of the weak. It's a basic insight of international relations that
groups that can hold a hegemonic threat at bay. But what if there is no viable group to join?
the limits of conventional military force. But much of this analysis is overblown. The United States may not be able to stabilize and rebuild Iraq. But that doesn't matter much from the perspective of
a government that thinks the Pentagon has it in its sights. In Tehran, Pyongyang, and many other capitals, including Beijing, the bottom line is simple: The U.S. military could, with conventional
No country in the world can dream of challenging U.S. conventional military power.
But they can certainly hope to deter America from using it. And the best deterrent yet invented is the threat of nuclear
retaliation. Before 1989, states that felt threatened by the United States could turn to the Soviet Union's nuclear
umbrella for protection. Now, they turn to people like A.Q. Khan. Having your own nuclear weapon used to be a luxury. Today, it is fast becoming a
necessity. North Korea is the clearest example. Few countries had it worse during the Cold War. North Korea was surrounded by feuding, nuclear armed
communist neighbors, it was officially at war with its southern neighbor, and it stared continuously at tens of thousands of U.S. troops on its border. But, for 40 years, North Korea
didn't seek nuclear weapons. It didn't need to, because it had the Soviet nuclear umbrella. Within five years of the Soviet
collapse, however, Pyongyang was pushing ahead full steam on plutonium reprocessing facilities. North Korea's founder, Kim II
force, end those regimes tomorrow if it chose to do so.
Sung, barely flinched when former U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration readied war plans to strike his nuclear installations preemptively. That brinkmanship paid off. Today North Korea is
likely a nuclear power, and Kim's son rules the country with an iron fist. America's conventional military strength means a lot less to a nuclear North Korea. Saddam Hussein's great strategic blunder
place. How would things be different in a multipolar world? For starters, great powers could
split the job of policing proliferation, and even collaborate on some particularly hard cases. It's often forgotten now that,
during the Cold War, the only state 'with a tougher nonproliferation policy than the United States was the Soviet
Union. Not a single country that had a formal alliance with Moscow ever became a nuclear power. The Eastern bloc was
full of countries with advanced technological capabilities in every area except one— nuclear weapons. Moscow simply wouldn't permit it. But today we see the uneven and
inadequate level of effort that non-superpowers devote to stopping proliferation. The Europeans dangle carrots at Iran, but they are
was that he took too long to get to the same
unwilling to consider serious sticks. The Chinese refuse to admit that there is a problem. And the Russians are aiding Iran's nuclear ambitions. When push comes to shove, nonproliferation today is
almost entirely America's burden.
Proliferation will be slow
Waltz
Kenneth
, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, v1 n1, Winter/Spring
http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/gjia/gjia_winspr00f.html, accessed 8/11/02
It is now estimated that about twenty–five
2000,
countries are in a position to make nuclear weapons rather quickly. Most
countries that could have acquired nuclear military capability have refrained from doing so. Most countries do not need them. Consider
Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa. Argentina and Brazil were in the process of moving toward nuclear military capability, and both decided
against it–wisely I believe–because neither country needs nuclear weapons. South Africa had about half a dozen warheads and decided to
destroy them. You have to have an adversary against whom you think you might have to threaten retaliation, but
most countries are not in this position. Germany does not face any security threats–certainly not any in which a
nuclear force would be relevant. I would expect the pattern of the past to be the
which one or two states per decade gradually develop nuclear weapons.
same as the pattern in the future, in
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AT: Hege Good- Prolif
Impacts empirically denied – 13 countries have proliferated without war
Sechser
2008, “Nuclear Weapons,” http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/tsechser/Sechser-Haas-2009.pdf
Todd S.
, Professor at the University of Virginia, Dec 30,
The idea that the United States should aggressively pursue nuclear nonpro-
liferation rests in part on a widespread belief that the spread of nuclear
weapons would destabilize international
: nuclear weapons proliferated to thirteen states1during the six decades
since the dawn of the nuclear age,yet the world has not witnessed a single preventive or preemptive nuclear war,
accidental nuclear attack, or instance of nuclear terrorism. Motivated by this striking observation, scholars known as
“proliferation optimists”have suggested that nuclear proliferation may,in fact,exert a stabilizing force on
international pol- itics. They argue that nuclear states new and old will be highly motivated to avoid taking actions that might risk nuclear conflict. The core ofthe
optimists’position is that the cost ofa nuclear war would be so grave that even the world’s most risk-prone leaders will
find themselves reluctant to risk fighting one. As one prominent optimist, Kenneth N. Waltz, has argued,nuclear states quickly recognize that engaging in
aggressive or risky behavior that could prompt nuclear retaliation is “obvious folly”(Sagan and Waltz 2003, 154). Because a nuclear conflict could place a
state’s very survival at risk,national leaders have powerful incentives to manage their arsenals with care and
caution. Moreover, according to this view,even a few nuclear weapons constitute such a powerful deterrent to aggression that they obviate the need for high levels of spending on
conventional arms. According to the optimists, then, the spread of nuclear weapons is likely to deter large-scale wars, restrain
conventional-arms races, and produce greater international stability.
relations. But this pessimistic view
confronts one incontrovertible fact
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AT: Hege Good- Democracy
Empirically, democracy promotion fails to create real democracies
Rose 01; (Richard, chair in politics at the University of Aberdeen, “Democratization Backwards: The Problem of Third-Wave Democracies, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 31, No.
2, Apr., 2001, pp. 331-354, JSTOR)
conventional influences, such as the introduction of free elections, have not
created political regimes that match the standards of established democracies. Within five years Samuel Huntington
moved from characterizing the late twentieth century as the third wave of democratization to proclaiming The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.' Larry Diamond's
global review of Developing Democracy emphasizes a growing 'gap between electoral and liberal democracy'.2
The World Movement for Democracy proclaims that its primary priority is 'deepening democracy beyond its
electoral form' .3 Constructive critics of third-wave democracies are not worried about the gap between an ideal
democracy and existing polyarchies that concerns Robert Dahl. Their anxieties focus on daily violations of the
rule of law, corruption and unaccountable government.
A spectre is haunting contemporary studies of democratization:
(or at least, not yet)
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AT: Hege Good- Economy
Hegemony causes economic collapse – current economic crisis proves
Eland, 9 – Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute, Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, B.A. Iowa State University,
M.B.A. in Economics and Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Washington University,
(Ivan, The Independent Institute, “How the U.S. Empire Contributed to the Economic Crisis”, May 11 th, http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2498)
only a few—prescient commentators have questioned whether the U.S. can sustain its informal global
empire in the wake of the most severe economic crisis since World War II. And the simultaneous quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan are
leading more and more opinion leaders and taxpayers to this question. But the U.S. Empire helped cause the meltdown in the first place. War has
a history of causing financial and economic calamities. It does so directly by almost always causing inflation—that is,
too much money chasing too few goods. During wartime, governments usually commandeer resources from the private sector
into the government realm to fund the fighting. This action leaves shortages of resources to make consumer
goods and their components, therefore pushing prices up. Making things worse, governments often times print money to
fund the war, thus adding to the amount of money chasing the smaller number of consumer goods. Such “makebelieve” wealth has funded many U.S. wars. For example, the War of 1812 had two negative effects on the U.S. financial system. First, in 1814, the federal
A few—and
government allowed state-chartered banks to suspend payment in gold and silver to their depositors. In other words, according Tom J. DiLorenzo in Hamilton’s Curse, the banks did not have to hold
sufficient gold and silver reserves to cover their loans. This policy allowed the banks to loan the federal government more money to fight the war. The result was an annual inflation rate of 55 percent
in some U.S. cities. The government took this route of expanding credit during wartime because no U.S. central bank existed at the time. Congress, correctly questioning The Bank of the United
States’ constitutionality, had not renewed its charter upon expiration in 1811. But the financial turmoil caused by the war led to a second pernicious effect on the financial system—the resurrection of
the bank in 1817 in the form of the Second Bank of the United States. Like the first bank and all other government central banks in the future, the second bank flooded the market with new credit. In
1818, this led to excessive real estate speculation and a consequent bubble. The bubble burst during the Panic of 1819, which was the first recession in the nation’s history. Sound familiar? Although
President Andrew Jackson got rid of the second bank in the 1830s and the U.S. economy generally flourished with a freer banking system until 1913, at that time yet another central bank—this time
We have seen that war ultimately causes the creation of both economic problems
and nefarious government financial institutions that cause those difficulties. And of course, the modern day U.S.
Empire also creates such economic maladies and wars that allow those institutions to wreak havoc on the
economy. The Fed caused the current collapse in the real estate credit market, which has led to a more general
global financial and economic meltdown, by earlier flooding the market with excess credit. That money went
into real estate, thus creating an artificial bubble that eventually came crashing down in 2008. But what caused
the Fed to vastly expand credit? To prevent a potential economic calamity after 9/11 and soothe jitters
surrounding the risky and unneeded U.S. invasion of Iraq, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan began a series of interest rate
cuts that vastly increased the money supply. According to Thomas E. Woods, Jr. in Meltdown, the interest rate cuts culminated in the
extraordinary policy of lowering the federal funds rate (the rate at which banks lend to one another overnight, which usually determines other interest rates)
to only one percent for an entire year (from June 2003 to June 2004). Woods notes that more money was created between 2000 and 2007 than in the rest of U.S. history. Much of this
excess money ended up creating the real estate bubble that eventually caused the meltdown. Ben Bernanke, then a Fed governor,
the Federal Reserve System—rose from the ashes.
was an ardent advocate of this easy money policy, which as Fed Chairman he has continued as his solution to an economic crisis he helped create using the same measures. Of course, according to
Osama bin Laden, the primary reasons for the 9/11 attacks were U.S. occupation of Muslim lands and U.S. propping up of corrupt dictators there. And the invasion of Iraq was totally unnecessary
because there was never any connection between al Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein, and even if Saddam had had biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons, the massive U.S.
So the causal arrow goes from these imperial behaviors—and
blowback there from—to increases in the money supply to prevent related economic slowdown, which in turn
caused even worse eventual financial and economic calamities. These may be indirect effects of empire, but they
cannot be ignored. Get rid of the overseas empire because we can no longer afford it, especially when it is partly
responsible for the economic distress that is making us poorer.
nuclear arsenal would have likely deterred him from using them on the United States.
Economic Collapse Doesn’t Cause war
Miller 2000 (Morris, Adjunct professor of Administration at U of Ottawa, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, v 25 no 4 pg 277)
The question may be reformulated. Do wars spring from a popular reaction to a sudden economic crisis that exacerbates poverty and growing disparities in wealth
and incomes? Perhaps one could argue, as some scholars do, that it is some dramatic even or sequence of such events leading to the exacerbation of poverty that, in turn, leads to this deplorable
denouement. This exogenous factor might act as a catalyst for a violent reaction on the part of the people or on the part of the political leadership who would then possibly be tempted to seek a
According to a study under taken by Minxin Pei and Ariel
Adesmik of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, there would not appear to be any merit in this hypothesis. After studying ninety-three
episodes of economic crisis in twenty-two countries in Latin America and Asia in the years since the Second World War they concluded that: Much of the conventional
wisdom about the political impact of economic crises may be wrong… The severity of economic crisis—as measured in
terms of inflation and negative growth- bore no relationship to the collapse of regimes (or in democratic states, rarely) to an outbreak of
violence… In the cases of dictatorships and semi democracies, the ruling elites responded to crises by increasing repression (thereby using one form of violence to abort another).
diversion by finding or, if need be, fabricating an enemy and setting in train the process leading to war.
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AT: Hege Good- Economy
The economy is resilient – no risk of a downturn
Dawson, US Treasury Deputy Secretary for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Compliance Policy, 1-8-04 (Michael, Remarks at the Conference on Protecting the Financial Sector and
Cyber Security Risk Management, “Protecting the Financial Sector from Terrorism and Other Threats,” http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/js1091.htm
The American economy is resilient. Over the past few years, we have seen that
resilience first hand, as the American economy withstood a significant fall in equity prices, an economic
recession, the terrorist attacks of September 11, corporate governance scandals, and the power outage of August
14-15. There are many reasons for the resilience of the American economy. Good policies – like the President’s Jobs and Growth
Initiative – played an important part. So has the resilience of the American people. One of the reasons are economy is so resilient is that
our people are so tough, so determined to protect our way of life. Like the economy as a whole, the American
financial system is resilient. For example, the financial system performed extraordinarily well during the power
outage last August. With one exception, the bond and major equities and futures markets were open the next day at their regular trading hours. Major market participants were also well
Fortunately, we are starting from a very strong base.
prepared, having invested in contingency plans, procedures, and equipment such as backup power generators. The U.S. financial sector withstood this historic power outage without any reported loss
This resilience mitigates the economic risks of terrorist attacks and other disruptions, both to
the financial system itself and to the American economy as a whole.
or corruption of any customer data.
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AT: Hege Good- Middle East War
Hege Causes Middle East War
Preble 2003
(Chrsitopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at CATO and Former U.S. Navy Officer, CATO Policy Analysis, “After Victory: Toward a New Military Posture in the Persian Gulf”, p.
Online: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa477.pdf)
the Middle East need not be stabilized by an overwhelming American military presence. U.S. troops
provide a greater level of security than what regional actors might choose to provide. To the extent that American
troops have become a lightning rod for anti-American extremists, however, U.S. troops have been a notably
destabilizing influence. In short, there is a middle ground between U.S. hegemony and total chaos wherein stability
can exist without the presence of thousands of American troops and without generating an anti- American, antidemocratic backlash
On a broader level,
Alt causes – geography, Islam, globalization
Goldberg 9 Jeffrey, an Atlantic national correspondent, January/February 2009, “After Iraq,” http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/goldberg-mideast/2
The British, together with the French, gave the world the modern Middle East. In addition to manufacturing the country now called Iraq, the grand Middle East
settlement shrank Turkey by the middle of the 1920s to the size of the Anatolian peninsula; granted what are now Syria and Lebanon to the French; and kept Egypt under British control. The
British also broke Palestine in two, calling its eastern portion Trans-Jordan and installing a Hashemite prince,
Abdullah, as its ruler, and at the same time promising Western Palestine to the Jews, while implying to the Arabs there that it was their land, too. As the historian David Fromkin puts it in A Peace to
End All Peace, his definitive account of the machinations among the Great Powers that resulted in the modern map of the Middle East, the region became what it is today both because the European
in and France failed to ensure that the dynasties, the states, and the political system
that they established would permanently endure. Of course, the current turbulence in the Middle East is attributable also to
factors beyond the miscalculations of both the hubristic, seat-of-the-pants Bush administration and the hubristic, seat-of-the-pants French and British empires. Among other things, there is the
crisis within Islam, a religion whose doctrinal triumphalism—Muslims believe the Koran to be the final, authoritative word of God—is undermined daily by the global balance of
power, with predictable and terrible consequences (see: the life of Mohammed Atta et al.); and there is the related and continuing crisis of globalization, which
drives people who have not yet received the message that the world is now flat to find solace and meaning in
their fundamental ethnic and religious identities
powers undertook to re-shape it and because Brita
Middle East wars don’t escalate- history disproves.
Satloff
Rober
is the Washington Institute’s executive director, December 21,
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=2549
2006, “the Iraq study group: Assessing its regional conclusions,”
The report’s greatest analytical leap of faith is the ntion that all the key issues in the Middle East are
“inextricably linked.” In the past, it was believed that the export of the Iranian revolution would undermine proWest regimes throughout the Middle East, or that failure to resolve the Israli Palestine conflict would spark a regional war.
Today, the idea of linkage implies that Sunni-Shiite violence will spread throughout the region. The problem with all these theories is that there is
no evidence to back them up. To the contrary, military success in the Gulf does not translate into diplomatic
success in the Arab-Israeli arena. The Madrid process had a promising opening session, but when it came down to bargaining it ran up against the reality of the IsreliPalestine differences. Furthermore, there is no evidence that local disasters translate into regional disasters. Ayatolah Ruholla
Khomeini’s Iran failed to export the revolution despite national efforts. There is no evidence to suppor the
proposition that Israeli-Palestinian violence has substantial regional repercussions, let alone that it can lead to
regional war. The years 2000 to 2003 saw the worst period of Israeli Palestinian relations, but the regional
implication was zero. Not one state threatened to fight Israel, the arab street did not rise to protest, and no Arab regime’s stability was threatened. The United states
should not view the Middle East as an organic unit. Iraq’s problems are primarily Iraqi in origin and Iraqi in solution. Iran alone poses a serious challenge, and
the Israeli Palestinainan problem is important to solve because it’s the right thing to do.
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