I affirm the resolution: The United States ought not provide military aid to authoritarian regimes.
For the clarification of the round, I offer the following definitions:
Military aid is help which is used to assist a country or its people in its defense efforts, or to
assist a poor country in maintaining control over its own territory.
An authoritarian regime is a government that concentrates political power in an authority not
responsible to the people.
I will be valuing democracy this round. [Honor?]
My value criterion is something about helping people on an international scale.
Contention 1: Moral obligation
The United States of America has long been considered a bastion of democracy. The leader of
the free world. The place where freedom rings. And while that has not always been the case, the values
of freedom and democracy are certainly the ones we have touted and claimed to defend in our long
history.
Up through now, it surely seems our country has found the right values to try to uphold. Indeed,
our country is among the youngest in this world, but our constitution is far from it. Ratified in 1788, our
constitution and by extension our government are the oldest in the world. The rights and freedoms
codified therein, along with those in the Bill of Rights, have served to sustain our great nation far beyond
anyone’s imagining.
It is by these freedoms our nation has both survived and thrived. Our democratic government,
coupled with the right to free speech and press, has allowed discussion on each and every conflict we
find ourselves embroiled within. And while democracy may be slow, may be loud, and may be angry, it
may also have a way of coming up with a solution to its problems just about every time.
Make no mistake that I stand before you today under the pretense that the United States has
never failed to uphold its values, or that there has been any lack of hypocrisy on the part of the people
of the government for which it stands. We have not. We have failed time and time again. But our values,
our standards, and our promises remain.
[Jefferson 76] We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.
**Pause**
How is it, if we hold these truths to be self-evident, that we could recognize a state which
openly proclaims its opposition to said rights? A government with no responsibility to the people? A
regime, whose policy contradicts the very axioms that our nation is built upon?
It can’t be done. One of these two things must be refuted. And by providing military aid to
authoritarian regimes, we knowingly deny the truths we say we hold to be self-evident. Our
responsibility in proclaiming the rights of man is due to the man, not to his oppressor. Our obligation to
defend the weak does not belong to a strong man. To uphold the promises for which we stand, we
cannot be the mechanism by which people are oppressed.
Contention 2: Providing military aid to authoritarian governments causes pain.
There are some very simple problems with giving guns and money to authoritarian regimes.
Firstly, in the definition thereof. An authoritarian regime has no responsibility to its people. An
authoritarian regime is bound by nothing, and the only reason we could possibly give them military aid
would be on the hope that the regime would use it for the benefit of its people.
It is here that our second problem arises. It takes a certain kind of person to run an authoritarian
government. A certain kind of crazy person. Who comes to mind when we think of famous dictators?
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Tojo… not a particularly good list to be on. Not a single one of the world’s most
widely known dictators is known for his virtue, but rather for his evil. Even today’s modern dictators
appear clinically unstable, from Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman’s murder of a
Turkish journalist to China’s general secretary Xi Jinping’s ban on Winnie the Pooh because citizens were
comparing their rather pudgy builds.
These are the kinds of people we given money and weapons to. We provide military aid to cruel,
insane people on a hope. This is the equivalent of walking into a hospital for the criminally insane and
giving a convicted serial killer a machete, on the hope that he will use it to slice deli meat for his
sandwich.
It is painfully clear that military dictators are not to be trusted under any circumstance. No
matter how noble the act might seem, the chance for pain and suffering is always too great, and we
would be better off taking matters into our own hands.
I give you an example. I take it we can all agree that the defeat of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis in
WWII was a good thing? What I would like to make clear is that the manner in which his defeat was
brought about was most certainly not a good thing.
The Allied Powers consisted mainly of Western democratic giants the like of the United States,
Great Britain and France. However, with Germany fighting a perhaps ill-advised two-front war, the Allies
found an unlikely ally: the Soviet Union.
Now the Soviet Union at the time was a through-and-through authoritarian state led by the
fearsome Joseph Stalin. Given the turmoil in the region after the Communist Revolution and subsequent
civil war, the USSR was seriously lacking military equipment, so the United States funded much of their
war effort. The results seemed to be good. The Soviets turned back the Nazis at Stalingrad after a brutal
northern winter and chased the Nazis out of war-torn Eastern Europe and back into Berlin.
Nothing is apparently wrong here. The genocidal Nazi Germany has been pushed out of the
territory they have terrorized for years and put down after a mighty struggle at Berlin. What is often
overlooked, however, is that while the Nazis may not have been able to successfully complete their
plans in Eastern Europe, the Soviets finished the job for them.
So before we go lauding the Soviet effort in WWII, we ought to realize exactly how much pain
their newfound guns and money caused. That despite what seemed like a perfect and infallible
opportunity to rid Eastern Europe of authoritarianism, American military aid only served to cement it.
Our guns and money were spent on the oppression, torture, rape, and murder of millions of people.
And that is something we simply cannot have.