1AC – Attribution – LASA BL
1AC – Cyberattacks ADV
The advantage is CYBERATTACKS –
Scenario one is CYBER ESCALATION –
Cyberattacks against NATO are escalating now – destroys cohesion and deterrence.
Black and Lynch 20 [James Black, European Lead, Space Enterprise Initiative; Research Leader; Alice Lynch, Former
Security and Defence Analyst, RAND Europe; “Cyber Threats to NATO from a Multi-Domain Perspective”; NATO Cooperative
Cyber Defence Center of Excellence (CCDCOE); 2020; https://ccdcoe.org/uploads/2020/12/7Cyber_Threats_NATO_Multidomain_Perspective_ebook.pdf]//eleanor ***modified for ableist language
NATO’s adversaries have explicitly recognised the vulnerabilities inherent in the Alliance’s
growing dependence on networks, cyberspace, satellite technologies and the EMS. They now seek to
exploit these vulnerabilities through their own variations on multi-domain concepts (Nakasone & Lewis, 2017; Schneider,
2019). NATO Allies are not alone in adopting a multi-domain understanding of the future battlespace. While not explicitly embracing the lexicon of US MDO, adversaries nonetheless express
emerging concepts are increasingly made manifest through joint operations,
investment priorities and force and capability development initiatives. This section examines how selected non-NATO nations,
principally Russia and China, are approaching multi-domain thinking in theory and in practice. It also considers how each is integrating
the cyber domain into its systems thinking, providing an understanding of how cyber threats to NATO are
evolving both in terms of hostile intent and capability. 1) Russian Federation Cyberspace forms part of Russia’s
strategy of harnessing multi-domain synergies through its interrelated concepts of ‘new-type war’,
‘reflexive con- trol’ and ‘disorganisation’, which together seek to create strategic conditions for
prevailing over the US and NATO. Russian doctrine , activities, force structures and capability
development efforts indicate that Moscow is refining and beginning to implement variations on multidomain thinking. Observing the evolution of network-centric warfare within NATO since AirLand Battle, Russia is seeking to leverage synergies
across physical and virtual domains to contest NATO above and below the threshold of armed conflict,
creating favourable conditions to seize the advantage in the initial period of war (IPW) (Greisemer, 2018).7 To achieve this,
Russian doctrine emphasises exploiting new technologies and asymmetric means to counter perceived
Western advantages, highlighting opportunities arising from cyberspace, alongside the electronic,
information and space domains. This asymmetric thinking is expressed through Russia’s concept of ‘new-type war’, which focuses on integration across domains to
similar themes in their own languages. These
achieve information superiority and shape strategic conditions through ‘reflexive control’. Reflexive control is the practice of manipulating the adversary’s perceptions and decision-making
This seeks to exploit
NATO’s weaknesses with minimal use of kinetic force, achieving maximum effect with minimal use
of Russia’s resources (Galeotti, 2016). Reflexive control is employed in conjunction with the interrelated concept of ‘disorganisation’, a strategy of disrupting or degrading an
processes through the deliberate construction of information flows to deceive, persuade, coerce and otherwise influence the opponent (Adamsky, 2015).
opponent’s C2 networks to hinder their ability to coordinate or integrate across multiple domains, thus providing Russia with decision advantage and increased likelihood of victory (Adamsky,
Cyberspace is viewed as an important enabler, integrator and multiplier. Within ‘new-type war’, the information domain and
exploitation of cyberspace and the EMS are viewed as the means through which Russia can achieve crossdomain synergy and exercise reflexive control creating time, space and manoeuvre advantage for Russian
forces while disorganising NATO. For example, during sub-threshold operations or in the IPW, cyber espionage can elicit valuable intelligence on adversary
2015).
operations in other domains and during operations, targeted cyber attacks can disrupt the adversary’s networked C2 systems. At the strategic level, cyber activities support information operations
Cyberspace thereby provides new
methods for disrupting and degrading NATO’s networked information and communication systems to
achieve Russia’s operational and strategic objectives within and across multiple domains (Kilcullen, 2020). Recent
Battalion Tactical Group (BTG) operations in Ukraine provide practical examples of how Russia seeks to exploit
to confuse, influence or mislead target audiences and undermine NATO’s cohesion and will-to-fight (Sprang, 2018).
cyberspace to operationalise its own variation on multi-domain concepts (Sprang, 2018). Within Russia’s new integrated approach to warfare, BTG commanders are provided with
capabilities across domains to achieve a specific operational effect. This includes enablers such as EMS capabilities, previously siloed within what used to be an inflexible force structure
In multiple confrontations with Ukrainian forces,8 Russia deployed cyber capabilities in concert
with other weapons spanning the domains including uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and ground forces under a single battalion commander. To achieve a combined effect,
Russian forces first disrupted Ukrainian communications and decision-making through targeted cyberattacks and jamming. With Ukrainian C2 compromised, UAS conducted detailed reconnaissance and target acquisition against Ukrainian positions, enabling devastating longrange rocket and tube artillery strikes (Griesemer, 2018). Russia has also made tactical use of cyber, electronic and information warfare alongside
conventional forces to achieve multi-domain effects in Syria, both targeting pro-democracy, Kurdish and Islamic State fighters and interfering with the US-led coalition’s operations in and
(Griesemer, 2018).
around Syria (McLeary, 2018). The alleged use of cyber attacks and jamming of GPS signals during TRJE18 are further evidence of Russia’s willingness to use offensive cyber and EW
capabilities to disrupt NATO operations, with cascading effect across multiple domains (Tigner, 2018). Most recently, military exercises in the Central and Southern Military Districts as part of
One of ‘the key
features of the manoeuvres was to use [multi-domain] force groupings to commence and repel a ‘global
strike’ from a simulated adversary’ representing the US or NATO and to organise Russia’s counter-action
as a ‘multi-sphere operation’ (mnogosfernoy operatsii— seen by observers as “apparently the Russian General Staff’s interpretation of the US term, ‘multi-domain
operations’”) (McDermott, 2020). These conceptual developments and real-world applications illustrate how Russian commanders increasingly use
cyber-attacks to create windows of opportunity for success in the early stages of a conflict, while also
enabling the execution of offensive tasks in other domains to achieve victory (Sprang, 2018).
Kavaz 2020 have provided perhaps the most explicit public acknowledgement of Russia’s ambition to implement its own variant on multi-domain concepts.
Putin’s cyberattacks cause nuclear command, control, and communications
entanglement.
Whyte ’22 [Christopher; March 31; assistant professor of homeland security and emergency
preparedness in the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia
Commonwealth University; World Politics Review, “Cyber and Nuclear Threats Make for a Dangerous
Mix in Ukraine,” https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/30439/cyber-and-nuclear-make-for-adangerous-mix-in-the-ukraine-war]
To say that the world is closer to the brink of nuclear war today than at any time since the Cuban Missile
Crisis of 1962 feels less controversial by the day. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently told media
representatives that the “prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility.”
Certainly, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been signaling a willingness to at least consider the nuclear option. In
late February, he raised the readiness level of Russia’s nuclear response force, stating that Western interference in the ongoing war in Ukraine
will result in “consequences greater than any you have faced in history.” And despite calming messaging from the Biden administration, further
Russian mobilizations—including the deployment of nuclear missile launchers to Siberia and nuclear submarines to the Barents Sea for supposed
“drills”—have continued to stoke public fears over nuclear weapons’ use. Even Russia’s recent pledge not to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine has
done little to calm fears about the potential use of tactical nuclear devices, with many claiming the statement is nothing more than an attempt to
bolster Moscow’s negotiating position.
Amid these rising nuclear tensions, there is one dimension of potential escalation that has not yet received much
public attention: that of a cyber-enabled nuclear event. It’s time for policymakers to consider whether cyber operations affecting
elements of nuclear command, control and communications, or NC3, systems could prompt nuclear escalation in the current crisis.
Experts across the West have been scrambling to place Putin’s threats, both tacit and explicit, in strategic and political
context in order to gauge the possibility of a nuclear escalation leading to nuclear war. Others still have more narrowly—and perhaps more
realistically—focused their analysis on what strong nuclear threats mean for fraught international engagement with Russia, and on whether Putin
is likely to authorize the use of any nuclear weapons at all.
On the digital side of things, experts
on cyber conflict have thus far narrowly focused their attention on the non-
nuclear aspects of tactics being employed in the war. Scholars rightly predicted that the “cyber blitzkrieg” anticipated by many pundits
was unlikely, pointing out that, contrary to popular portrayals, cyber instruments actually make for poor tools of coercion and battlefield
augmentation. By contrast, the entry of so many nonstate and semi-state cyber forces into the conflict on both sides, including nearly 300,000
volunteers coordinated by the Ukrainian government and a pro-Russia equivalent calling itself “Killnet,” was less expected.
Even given so much robust analysis of the ongoing war, the
nuclear tie-in has remained curiously underexamined . This
is particularly concerning given the manner in which scholars have in recent years suggested that the logic of cyber warfare could
undermine the logic of nuclear deterrence under highly specific circumstances.
Overall, experts are right to dismiss the threat of a so-called “cyberwar,” a fantastical scenario that contradicts what we know about the strategic
and operational functions of cyber instruments. But could
escalation in the current crisis?
cyber operations affecting elements of NC3 prompt nuclear
Perhaps.
The conflicting logics of cyber and nuclear warfare, when considered in the context of the present crisis, suggest real reasons to be concerned
about the possibility of a cyber-enabled nuclear escalation.
Off the bat, it’s important to remember that several elements involved in that question could present themselves in a range of ways. Nuclear
escalation itself could take a number of forms, from additional escalatory rhetoric or mobilization to the actual use of a nuclear weapon.
Likewise, a cyber operation impacting NC3 systems—which essentially comprise the networks of intelligence sensors, communications systems,
other early warning assets and arms control mechanisms that underlie a country’s nuclear deterrent forces—could be an actual attempt to interfere
with a nation’s deterrent capability by means of disrupting or taking over an element of its command system. That could be perceived by the
targeted party as a prelude to a preemptive strike. But it could also be something as simple as an exploratory probe not intended to subvert system
functions. Significantly, these different attacks could be hard to differentiate from the defensive perspective and so misinterpretation is entirely
possible.
While countries like Russia and the United States have historically reacted with caution to nuclear provocations, uncertainties borne of the current
crisis might diminish that inclination. Such uncertainties could also encourage Russian leaders to lend less weight to the cyber attribution
problem—that is, the difficulty inherent in identifying the party responsible for a cyber-attack that, even under ordinary circumstances,
complicates efforts to organize an appropriate response.
Even more concerning than the uncertainties bound up in interpreting certain cyber actions is the oft-cited and well-documented vulnerabilities of
most states’ NC3 systems. Scholars have noted that NC3
doubt that American
weaknesses are widespread and, at times, quite glaring. There’s little
or Russian second-strike capabilities could be made to function effectively in the event
of a nuclear war. But both sides’ reliance on a blend of new and legacy technologies to coordinate a complex detection, analysis and strike
apparatus for nuclear weapons virtually guarantees errors in how these systems function as a whole. For example, in the past, American forces
have lost contact with launch systems for hours due to faulty circuitry. At other times, they have detected false launches because legacy
machinery was mishandled by operators.
These base conditions are cause for at least minimal concern. Both the probability of either side’s NC3 systems being vulnerable to some form of
cyber compromise and the possibility that either
side might mistakenly believe its NC3 is being targeted by hostile
foreign cyber operations clearly create the potential for a cyber-enabled nuclear event where perceived cyber-preemption against NC3
leads directly to either coercive or real military escalation.
Admittedly, the stakes of nuclear weapons’ use suggest that escalation is not an especially likely outcome most of the time, even given these
known issues. But unique circumstances might change this calculus. In particular, the
conflicting logics of cyber and nuclear
warfare, when considered in the context of the present crisis, suggest real reasons to be concerned.
Nuclear and cyber forces are polar opposites with regard to their operational features. The former relies on open signaling to
“warn” adversaries about potential consequences in order to generate a deterrent effect. The latter typically banks on secrecy, exploiting
the element of surprise to avoid giving an opponent the opportunity to upgrade their defenses. The combination of the two creates unusual
commitment problems, where the coercive
brinksmanship usually on display in nuclear contests might be absent as
one side tries to use cyber instruments to neutralize the other’s NC3. Importantly, with cyber in the mix,
the side that detects cyber activity targeting NC3 will likely also notice that the attempted breach was
done in secret, creating new uncertainties over how they might respond to such an attack.
In addition to the potential weaknesses of NC3 systems, the unique
political dynamics currently on display in Moscow, where
Putin seems to be both isolated and dependent on politicized intelligence that has effectively undermined his
decision-making, complicates this game of nuclear chicken. Given the difficult intelligence assessments and operational decisions
that any government trying to reconcile cyber and nuclear logics in real-time will be required to make, this is worrisome to say the least.
And Russia’s many obvious logistical
failures in launching its invasion are cause for further concern. After all,
objectively assessing the risks of cyber-enabled nuclear interference requires having the ability to locate
potential NC3 compromises and to mitigate any that are found. This means robust intra-service communication and
deployment of expertise, neither of which has been on prominent display in Moscow when it comes to the
invasion of Ukraine.
The range of cyber
forces arrayed against Putin’s government in the current crisis also represents a potential source of further
uncertainty that could produce cyber-prompted nuclear escalation. In addition to Ukraine’s cyber forces, which are active
against Russian targets of all stripes, Kyiv has benefited from massive Western support for its operations in cyberspace, including from hacktivist
elements to hundreds of thousands of volunteers that are being coordinated by Ukrainian state auspices.
Added to this is the fact that, in addition to military equipment, Kyiv has been receiving non-battlefield aid from NATO member states,
particularly those that are most geographically proximate, including Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. There is clearly a narrow situation
here in which Russian
leadership, under the current internal political conditions, may see possible Western intention in
cyber events involving NC3 or related systems.
Escalation is likely---accidents, fog of war, and wargame simulations prove – causes
nuclear war.
Schneider ’22 [Jacquelyn; March 7; Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University;
Foreign Affairs, “The Biggest Cyber Risk in Ukraine? How Russian Hacking Could Threaten Nuclear
Stability,” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-03-07/biggest-cyber-risk-ukraine]
Why the apparent restraint? It is almost impossible to know exactly why (or if) the Russians have indeed held back. Perhaps cyber-operations
have been attempted and failed; perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin has held his cyber-capabilities in reserve, saving them for later. Or
maybe cyber-operations have taken place, but their effect—which is often virtual and not clearly attributed—will take longer to materialize.
What is known is that the conflict is far from over, and the next question becomes whether cyber-operations could play a larger role as the war
turns more violent. It is likely that the next stage of conflict will more than ever be defined by planes, tanks, artillery, and soldiers. It seems
unlikely, given the amount of indiscriminate damage currently being inflicted by Russia, that cyber-operations will escalate the violence of the
campaign within Ukraine. That said, could
cyber-operations lead to horizontal escalation, drawing NATO into the
fight, for example? Or, given that the United States and Russia are the world’s largest nuclear powers, could cyber-operations
escalate to the worst possible outcome— nuclear war ? Recent wargaming research suggests that cyber-exploits
into nuclear command and control may be enticing for states looking to neutralize a nuclear escalation
threat in the midst of a conventional war, and that actors may underestimate the danger of these exploits and
vulnerabilities to nuclear stability .
GETTING PULLED IN
One way cyber-operations could lead to escalation is by pulling the United States or NATO into the conflict. Mark
Warner, the Democratic senator from Virginia, warned in late February that potential Russian cyberattacks on critical infrastructure in Ukraine
could have accidental spillover effects on NATO countries—for instance if a Russian cyberattack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure caused an
outage in a NATO neighbor like Poland. This could inadvertently trip Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, which states that an armed attack
against one member state will be considered an attack against them all. This would be uncharted waters for NATO, which only recently publicly
stated that cyberattacks might invoke Article 5 and is still ambiguous about what types of cyberattack—which range from virtual outages to data
manipulations to physical damage (in extremely rare circumstances)—might be serious enough for NATO to respond with conventional
retaliation.
The Biden administration has warned that the United States would respond to cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure, such as the country’s
electrical grid or water supply (although officials stopped short of saying how the United States would respond). So far, the United States has
answered previous cyberattacks with either sanctions, law enforcement actions, or the confiscation of cryptoassets. None of these options seem
likely to deter Putin at this point, and so the Biden administration may find itself in an unprecedented position of having few credible options to
threaten Russia. It is certainly possible that Putin, facing a conventional war that he thinks he might lose, could attack critical infrastructure in the
United States or other NATO countries in the hope that their citizens will push their governments to abandon Ukraine. The financial sector, in
particular, would seem to be a logical target for Russian cyberattacks, given the damage that Western economic actions have already done to the
Russian economy.
It is difficult to create widespread and long-lasting effects with cyberattacks, however, and the financial sector is the best equipped and most
advanced cyber-defender in the world. Plus, research I’ve conducted with Sarah Kreps, director of the Cornell Tech Policy Lab, finds that the
American public views cyberattacks as qualitatively different from conventional means of warfare—more akin to economic sanctions than
bombs. Thus, cyberattacks are unlikely to provoke the kind of retaliation or emotional response that would pull the United States or its NATO
allies into a war with Russia. What’s more, the United States can probably withstand the short-term damage to critical infrastructure that a
Russian cyberattack might create, and such attacks might actually increase resolve to support Ukraine. This means a deliberate choice by Russia
to use cyberattacks against the United States or NATO to “escalate to dominate”—deliberately ratcheting up the pressure to force Washington to
back off—would likely fail.
A more troubling scenario involves accidental escalation from cyber-operations—that is, when critical
infrastructure is unintentionally damaged by a cyberattack or when a cyberattack is misattributed to
Russia (or the U nited S tates). This is especially dangerous for civilian infrastructure that also serves military or security purposes—for
example, harming a refugee train by using a cyberattack targeting railroads also used to move troops and supplies to the front. Plus, a jumble
of actors has jumped into this space, from criminal syndicates to cyber-militias to hacker collectives such as
Anonymous. That increases the chances that one of these players will target civilian infrastructure, and
misattribution to either Russia or the United States could needlessly trigger retaliation .
WHEN CYBER GOES NUCLEAR
By far the most dangerous form of escalation is the possibility that a cyber-operation increases the
likelihood of nuclear war. How likely is such a scenario? No one may know if Russia has a
cyberweapon that can target nuclear weapons (or, for that matter, whether the United States does), but there are theories
and some data about how the cyber-realm might affect nuclear stability.
American policymakers have generally recognized that attempting
to interfere with nuclear command, control, and
communications could lead to dangerous incentives for states to launch nuclear weapons
preemptively . Threats to nuclear command and control, for example, could leave states so fearful about
their second-strike capability (the ability to launch a nuclear weapon in retaliation against an attacker) that in the midst of a
conflict they would feel compelled to use nuclear weapons preemptively . Some scholars have warned that attacks
against nuclear command-and-control systems could make it impossible to control nuclear war and keep it
limited , leading to inadvertent nuclear Armageddon . Despite these fears about the dangers of attacking nuclear
command and control, there was never an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union (and subsequently Russia) to not attack
each other’s nuclear command, control, and communications.
Would Russia, or even the U nited S tates and its allies, launch a cyberattack against an enemy’s nuclear
command-and-control system if they could? And how might that capability affect nuclear instability? Beginning in 2017, my team at
the Naval War College and the Hoover Institution ran a wargame that explored this very question. It
took place over three years and included 580 players from across the world—predominantly nuclear, cyber, and military experts
ranging from former heads of state to military officers to industry leaders. In our simulations, we found that teams who were told they
possessed cyber-exploits against nuclear command-and-control systems overwhelmingly used them. Because cyberoperations can be denied and are covert and virtual, players appeared to believe that they did not pose too
great a risk of escalation. The tools seemed too valuable not to use, especially because they have a quick expiration date, with
vulnerabilities quickly patched once discovered.
Scenario two is COHESION –
NATO is moving towards public attribution but internal confusion prevents any
further response – that destroys cohesion – the US has sufficient capabilities but
only joint info sharing makes it legit.
Porter and Jordan 19 [Christopher Porter is the chief intelligence strategist of cybersecurity company FireEye and a
nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council; Klara Jordan is director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic
Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.; “Don’t Let Cyber Attribution Debates Tear Apart the NATO Alliance”;
Lawfare; February 14, 2019; https://www.lawfareblog.com/dont-let-cyber-attribution-debates-tear-apart-nato-alliance]//eleanor
NATO , and more ad hoc arrangements, such as what the Cyber Deterrence Initiative
imagines, will require members to share intelligence and eventually, to the best of their ability and perhaps in different
domains, contribute to joint action against a presumably well-armed foreign aggressor. States including the United States, the
United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Denmark have publicly declared their willingness to lend
sovereign offensive cyber effects to deter, defend against and counter the full spectrum of threats. Sharing
intelligence and information is a key element of NATO’s core decision-making process enshrined in
Article 4 of the Washington Treaty. Political consultations are part of the preventive diplomacy between member states, but they are
also an avenue to discuss concerns related to the security threats member states face . These consultations can
be a catalyst for reaching a consensus on policies to be adopted or actions to be taken—including those
on the use of sovereign cyber effects to support a NATO operation. The alliance has a track record of collective action
Therein lies the rub. Both formal alliances, such as
and cooperative security measures. For example, Operation Active Endeavour helped to deter, disrupt and protect against terrorist activity in the
Mediterranean in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in solidarity with the United States. For the seventh time, the Atlantic Council’s
Cyber Statecraft Initiative will be among the organizations privileged to organize an event on the sidelines of the Feb. 15–17 Munich Security
Conference. This year in particular, the Atlantic Council’s event, “Defending Human Dignity: Limiting Malicious Cyber Activity Through
Diplomacy,” will complement the topics high on the agenda of the main conference, such as transatlantic collaboration, the consequences of a
resurgence of great power competition and the future of arms control. In the United States, the
greatest failures of response and
deterrence to foreign aggression in cyberspace have not been caused by a lack of intelligence, capability
or imagination. Rather, U.S. policy has been serviceable in theory but impotent in practice because of an
inability to translate technical findings and intelligence into public support for sufficiently tough
responses ordered by elected political leaders. North Korea’s repeated operations targeting U.S.
companies and critical infrastructure have been met with public skepticism over their culpability, limiting
the strength of retaliatory options needed to deter further events. Chinese cyber economic espionage continued for years
despite widespread knowledge of China’s activities because political leaders found it difficult to confront Beijing without undermining U.S.
companies in return.
Russian information operations did not sow enough doubt to mislead experts, but they
succeeded in exacerbating the partisan polarization of an already-divided electorate and its leaders. That
inability to translate the findings of cyber experts into public sentiment and therefore political action
has sidelined America’s cyberwarriors , by far the most technologically advanced and well-resourced in the world. Imagine
the political response of an ally that is asked to burden-share in response to cyber aggression but is
probably much closer to any resulting kinetic fight than the United States. Now imagine the response of
that ally when it’s being asked to take causus belli on faith: The United States is presenting attribution
for a cyberattack elsewhere in the world, but perhaps is depending on the ally lacking critical details
due to classification, and is presenting that information alongside a request for help that might well put
the ally in the crosshairs of its own cyberattack or lethal action. How can allies with different
capabilities to collect, analyze and understand intelligence be part of a consensus on using sovereign
cyber effects to support a NATO operation? How can a commander achieve a common operational
picture to authorize the use of sovereign effects in a NATO operation if all the allies are not on the same page with
respect to critical attribution and other technical information needed for a use of effect in an operation? We all know what a tank
looks like on a shared satellite image, but if you ask three cyber experts to interpret the attribution for a set of indicators, you are likely to get at
least four answers. For
most U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere, there is simply a dearth of technical know-how
within the government when
it comes to cyber attribution and operations. This is already a challenge for the
United States, with a massive defense budget, Silicon Valley innovation and an educated workforce to pull into government service. But for
many U.S. allies, tech-savvy public servants will have long fled for the private sector, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and academia
before reaching ministerial positions. To its credit, the U.S. National Cyber Strategy does propose capacity-building measures to support allies.
This means building up law enforcement, intelligence, and military operational and investigative capability. But even
with successful
capacity-building programs, many nations could, in a crisis, end up in the same place the United States
is—with good options stuck on the shelf while political leaders and their electorates lack a critical mass of
informed voters to trust, understand and act on expert findings. For countries weighing whether to risk
their own blood and treasure in support of an ally’s cyber attribution findings, this hurdle could
well prove insurmountable if not addressed well before a crisis emerges . Many such countries will no
doubt recall being burned when placing too much confidence in U.S. technical and human sources without
an ability to evaluate the evidence for themselves, as with the Iraq weapons of mass destruction findings.
Unilateral attribution destroys cohesion
Porter and Jordan 19 [Christopher Porter is the chief intelligence strategist of cybersecurity company FireEye and a
nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council; Klara Jordan is director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic
Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.; “Don’t Let Cyber Attribution Debates Tear Apart the NATO Alliance”;
Lawfare; February 14, 2019; https://www.lawfareblog.com/dont-let-cyber-attribution-debates-tear-apart-nato-alliance]//eleanor
NATO’s essential and enduring purpose is to safeguard the freedom and security of all its members by
political and military means. Tolerating cyberattacks, especially those deliberately targeting civilians and the political
legitimacy of governments—without the alliance having the capability to jointly discuss attribution and have the
confidence to act and assist one another—undermines this core purpose of the alliance. Likewise, pursuing
only deterrence and response without an active role for the alliance in reaching peaceful diplomatic agreements with
potential adversaries abrogates member responsibilities to their citizens but is impossible without a common
language and operational picture to discuss enforcement of such agreements. The U.S. is stronger with allies,
and with attention to these issues its cybersecurity can be too.
Russia’s government will exploit divisions between NATO members to instigate
nuclear crises---extinction.
Kulesa ’18 [Lukasz; February 2018; Research Director at the European Leadership Network; European
Leadership Network, “Envisioning a Russia-NATO Conflict: Implications for Deterrence Stability,”
http://www.jstor.com/stable/resrep17437]
Escalation: Can a NATO - Russia conflict be managed?
Once a conflict was under way, the “fog of war” and rising unpredictability would inevitably set in,
complicating the implementation of any predetermined theories of escalation, deescalation and inter-conflict
management. The actual dynamics of a conflict and the perceptions of the stakes involved are extremely difficult to
predict. Simulations and table-top exercises can give only limited insights into the actual decision-making processes and
interactions.
Still, Russian
military theorists and practitioners seem to assume that a conflict with NATO can be managed and
controlled in a way that would bring it to a swift end consistent with Russian aims. The Russian theory
of victory would seek to exploit weak points in an Alliance war effort. Based on the conviction that
democracies are weak and their leaders and populations are risk-averse, Russia may assume that its threats of
horizontal or vertical escalation could be particularly effective. It would also try to bring home the notion
that it has much higher stakes in the conflict (regime survival) than a majority of the NATO members involved, and
thus will be ready to push the boundaries of the conflict further. It would most likely try to test and exploit
potential divisions within the Alliance, combining selective diplomacy and activation of its
intelligence assets in some NATO states with a degree of selectivity in terms of targets of particular attacks.
Any NATO-Russia conflict would inevitably have a nuclear dimension. The role of nuclear weapons
as a tool for escalation control for Russia has been thoroughly debated by experts, but when and how Russia
might use (and not merely showcase or activate) nuclear weapons in a conflict remains an open question. Beyond
catch phrases such as “escalate to de-escalate” or “escalate to win” there are a wider range of options for Russian
nuclear weapon use . For example, a single nuclear warning shot could be lethal or non-lethal. It could be
directed against a purely military target or a military-civilian one. Detonation could be configured for an
EMP effect. A “false flag” attack is also conceivable. These options might be used to signal escalation and
could significantly complicate NATO’s responses.
Neither NATO nor its member states have developed a similar theory of victory. Public NATO documents stipulate the general goals for the
Alliance: defend against any armed attack and, as needed, restore the full sovereignty and territorial integrity of member states. It
is less
clear how far the Alliance would be willing to escalate the conflict to achieve these goals, and what
mechanisms and means it would use while trying to maintain some degree of control over the conflict.
The goals and methods of waging a conflict with Russia would probably have to be limited in order to avoid a
massive nuclear exchange. Such limitations would also involve restrictions on striking back against targets on Russian
territory. But too narrow an approach could put too much restraint on NATO’s operations: the Russian regime’s
stability may ultimately need to be threatened in order to force the leadership into terminating the conflict.
NATO would thus need to establish what a proportional self-defence response to Russian actions would involve, and to what extent cyber
operations or attacks against military targets in quite different parts of Russia would be useful as tools of escalation to signal NATO’s resolve.
Moreover, individual NATO Allies, especially those directly affected by Russia’s actions, might pursue their individual strategies of escalation.
With regards to the nuclear dimension in NATO escalation plans, given the stakes involved, this element would most likely be handled by the
three nuclear-weapon members of the Alliance, with the US taking the lead. The existence of three independent centres of nuclear decisionmaking could be exploited to complicate Russian planning and introduce uncertainty into the Russian strategic calculus, but some degree of “P3”
dialogue and coordination would be beneficial. This coordination would not necessarily focus on nuclear targeting, but rather on designing
coordinated operations to demonstrate resolve in order to keep the conflict below the nuclear threshold, or bring it back under the threshold after
first use.
Relying on concepts of escalation control and on lessons from the Cold War confrontation might be misleading.
The circumstances in which a Russia-NATO conflict would play out would be radically different from
the 20th century screenplay. Moreover, instead of gradual (linear) escalation or salami tactics escalation, it is
possible to imagine surprizing “leap frog” escalation, possibly connected with actions in different domains (e.g. a
cyberattack against critical infrastructure). Flexibility, good intelligence and inventiveness in responding to such developments would be crucial.
Conflict termination
Russian and NATO assumptions regarding conflict termination would most likely not survive the first
hours of an actual conflict. Both sides are capable of underestimating the resolve of the other side to
prevail in a conflict and the other side’s willingness to commit the necessary resources and endure the costs, especially
once both sides start committing their political capital and resources and the casualties accumulate.
NATO cohesion checks numerous existential crises.
Gallagher ’19 [Mike and Colin Dueck; January 2019; Representative for Wisconsin’s Eighth District
in the U.S. House of Representatives; Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George
Mason University; National Review, “The Conservative Case for NATO,”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/nato-western-military-alliance-bolsters-american-interests/]
The conservative case for NATO is not that it strengthens liberal world order. Rather, the conservative case for NATO is that it bolsters American
an age of great-power competition , as identified by the Trump administration, America’s Western
alliance provides the U.S. with some dramatic comparative advantages. The United States, Canada, and
their European allies have a number of common interests and common challenges with regard to Beijing, Moscow, terrorism,
cyberattacks, migration, nuclear weapons, and military readiness. NATO is the one formal
alliance that allows for cooperation on these matters. It is also the only alliance that embodies America’s civilizational ties
with Europe — a point forcefully made by President Trump when he visited Poland in 2017. Properly understood, NATO helps keeps
America’s strategic competitors at bay, pushing back on Russian and Chinese influence . In all of these ways,
the U.S. alliance system in Europe is a bit like oxygen. You may take it for granted , but you’ll miss it when it’s
gone.
national interests. In
1AC – Plan
Plan: The United States federal government should substantially increase
information sharing with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, specifically, for
the purpose of coordinating public attribution of cyberattacks.
1AC – Solvency
Public attribution SOLVES –
First, DISRUPTION – attribution disrupts personnel and attacker’s offensive cyber
ecosystems.
Bateman 22 [Jon Bateman is a senior fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.; “The Purposes of U.S. Government Public Cyber Attribution”; Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace; March 28, 2022; https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/28/purposes-of-u.s.-government-public-cyberattribution-pub-86696]//eleanor***modified for gendered language
Second, public
attribution can aim to deter or disrupt the individual cyber actors, mid-level government
officials, and units or companies responsible for conducting cyber operations. Eichensehr calls this “micro-level
deterrence,” because it targets a foreign government’s subordinate personnel and organizations rather than its
national leadership.19 For example, then associate deputy attorney general Sujit Raman said in 2019 that “the prospect of
criminal indictment can help deter some cyber actors from engaging in such conduct in the first place.”20
The viability of micro-level deterrence—and the manner in which it might work—will depend in part on the structures and incentives that exist
within foreign states’ offensive cyber programs. For some individual cyber actors, public
attribution can bring a frightening
level of international notoriety and foreclose future opportunities in the legitimate cybersecurity
industry. Further, indictments and sanctions can limit travel or financial opportunities. These possibilities
may dissuade some individuals from working for their government or accepting certain sensitive taskings.
(Other cyber actors, however, may wear these punishments as badges of honor.) And for some mid-level government cyber officials, public
attribution indicates their failure to ensure adequate operational security and oversight, which could cause
internal embarrassment and draw criticism from superiors. (This assumes the cyber operation was not intended to be discovered.)
The exposed cyber organizations may need to conduct temporary operational stand-downs, internal
reviews, or counterintelligence investigations. They may choose to cut ties with publicly named individual cyber actors, viewing
them as compromised. Cyber organizations may decide to impose burdensome new oversight measures and
make costly changes in tactics or infrastructure to avoid future public attributions. All this creates
friction and distrust within a state’s offensive cyber ecosystem . Such costs would be too small to achieve macrolevel deterrence. But, according to Raman, they “can make it more difficult for states to recruit the [hu]manpower
and resources for cyber-attacks, and raise the cost of engaging in malicious cyber activity.”21 In other words,
public attribution can cause modest, occasional disruptions and inefficiencies for the exposed state. As with macro-level deterrence, micro-level
deterrence could extend to individuals and organizations beyond those exposed in a public attribution, including cyber actors in other states. To
this end, U.S.
public attribution statements often highlight the United States’ “capability to remove the
Internet’s cloak of anonymity” and the intention to hold state-sponsored hackers accountable “no matter
who they are, where they are, or what country’s uniform they wear.”22 In theory, then, the public attribution of a North
Korean cyber operation could help convince an Iranian not to join a state-sponsored hacking organization.
Second, DETERRENCE BY DENIAL – motivates improved defense which
eliminates the incentive for attacks.
Bateman 22 [Jon Bateman is a senior fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.; “The Purposes of U.S. Government Public Cyber Attribution”; Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace; March 28, 2022; https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/28/purposes-of-u.s.-government-public-cyberattribution-pub-86696]//eleanor
Finally, public
attribution can provide information that enables and motivates potential victims and the
cybersecurity community to better defend themselves. For example, the White House statement on the Microsoft Exchange
hack stated that “by exposing the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China’s] malicious activity, we are continuing the Administration’s efforts to
inform and empower system owners and operators to act.”23 Some U.S. experts
call this “deterrence-by-denial ,” because
better defense can prevent foreign cyber operations from achieving their goals and thus potentially
reduce the motivation to conduct them . Even if deterrence-by-denial is not achieved, public attribution
can still aim to improve cyber defenses. The most direct way to “inform and empower” cyber defenders is for the U.S. government
to share detailed technical information about malicious cyber operations and actors—for example, malware samples, indicators of compromise,
public attribution
can enhance their impact in several ways. Eichensehr notes that “understanding who the attacker is can shed
light on intruders’ likely targets and goals,” helping cyber defenders anticipate and prepare for cyber
actors’ moves.24 Public attribution can also illuminate the stakes: potential victims may choose to invest
more resources to prevent compromise by a named adversary state. Finally, public attribution can help to
capture media coverage and thereby get more cyber defenders to pay attention to a technical release. The
and other tactical signatures. These technical information releases do not inherently require public attribution; however,
effectiveness of public attribution in achieving deterrent, disruptive, and defensive goals is difficult to assess. An accurate evaluation would
require access to detailed intelligence about foreign states’ and cyber actors’ evolving intentions and reactions to U.S. public attributions. This
information, if it exists, is not publicly available. In its absence, independent
analysts can use indirect data to assess the
efficacy of public attribution. For example, they can examine publicly reported trends in state-sponsored cyber operations to see if
public attribution appears to have a demonstrable effect. But public disclosures of cyber operations by private companies and governments
provide a very limited, fragmentary view of true trends. Moreover, it is hard to isolate the impact of public attribution from many other causal
factors. In sum, the deterrent value of public attribution remains an open question.
Third, COHESION – security cooperation builds international partnerships and
motivates collective deterrence.
Bateman 22 [Jon Bateman is a senior fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.; “The Purposes of U.S. Government Public Cyber Attribution”; Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace; March 28, 2022; https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/28/purposes-of-u.s.-government-public-cyberattribution-pub-86696]//eleanor
In recent years, the United States has increasingly sought to undertake public attribution jointly with other states (so-called collective
attribution).26 For example, in 2018, seven nations including the United States publicly attributed the NotPetya cyber attack to Russia.27 By
acting collectively alongside other nations, the United States seeks to magnify the deterrent impacts of its
public attributions. Beyond deterrence, joint attributions can provide Washington with a vehicle for
building and strengthening international partnerships on cyber issues. In 2021, the U.S. public attribution of
cyber activities by China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) was joined by what the U.S. government called “an unprecedented group of allies
and partners — including the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and NATO.”28 A senior U.S.
attribution helped to build support among these partners “to
enhance and increase information sharing, including cyber threat intel and network defense information
with public and private stakeholders, and expand diplomatic engagement to strengthen our collective
administration official suggested that this collective
cyber resilience and security cooperation .” Likewise, the official emphasized that “it’s the first time NATO has
condemned PRC cyber activities,” while also noting that “NATO [was also] adopting a new cyber
defense policy for the first time in seven years.” As this example shows, joint public attribution can help
international partners build a shared understanding of cyber threats and provide a rallying point to
motivate and organize more concrete collective cyber efforts.
Fourth, RETALIATION -- forces allies to communicate and coordinate collective
cyber responses
Rose Gottmoeller et al, 22 (6/26/22; Rose Gottemoeller is the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at Stanford
University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hoover Institution Research Fellow,
MA from George Washington University’s school of affairs; Maj. Kathryn Hedgecock, U.S. Army, is an
assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at West Point, PhD in Political Science from
Stanford University; Maj. Justin Magula, U.S. Army, is an Army strategist in the Strategic Landpower
and Futures Group at the U.S. Army War College, MA in International public policy from John’s
Hopkins; Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of
Chicago; PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan; “Engaging with emerged and
emerging domains: cyber, space, and technology in the 2022 NATO strategic concept”; Defence Studies
Volume 22, 2022, Issue 3, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14702436.2022.2082955)
Communication
Communication is central to properly integrating cyber and space into the NATO Strategic Concept and
contributes to the resilience of and within the Alliance. Communication about cyber, space, and EDT
should purposefully occur with two audiences in mind: intra-Alliance communication among member
states and extra-Alliance communication intended for NATO’s adversaries and partners.
Intra-Alliance communication must focus on three primary objectives: 1) reducing technical barriers for political decision makers to facilitate
their response to rapidly evolving space and cyber development; 2) creating common understanding among member states at varying degrees of
capabilities; 3) eliminating stove-piping of complex technologies. The technical nature of these domains can intimidate or create high barriers to
entry for political decision makers. Decision makers must be able to understand crises to manage them. NATO must seek to integrate experts who
can serve as the translators between decision makers and technicians in the field to facilitate consensus and development within cyber and space
domains. Intra-alliance communication and knowledge sharing can also help overcome disparities among member states who have differential
capabilities. Additionally, intra-Alliance communication between conventional domains and the cyber, space and EDT operational and policy
cells will further integrate these new domains into the fabric of the Alliance.
Extra-Alliance communication must: 1) enhance credibility of deterrence through clear, credible
guarantees of punishment and communication of NATO’s capabilities (Lonergan and Montgomery 2022)
and 2) collectively attribute perpetrators and disclose discovered vulnerabilities to improve the resilience
of these domains. Deterrence relies on a clear understanding of cost–benefit analysis (Lindsay and
Gartzke 2018). NATO must clearly communicate their capabilities and the range of potential
consequences so adversaries understand the costly nature of attempting to overcome NATO’s defensive
capabilities and the high costs by way of punishment should they succeed. Communication strategies
should emphasize the resolve of NATO in addressing cyber, space, and EDT threats and, most essentially,
the political will to respond to a cyber or space attack. These external communication strategies harden
the deterrent by bolstering credibility of a response without tying their hands to a specific response.
Moreover, communication through public attribution, as was illustrated in the 2020 Microsoft Exchange
Hack (Connolly 2021), demonstrates consensus about the identity of the perpetrator and increases costs
for cyber adversaries (Egloff 2020; Egloff and Smeets 2021; Hedgecock 2021). Taken together, intraAlliance communication improves the resilience of the Alliance and enhances Cooperative Security and
Crisis Management. While extra-Alliance communication serves to bolster the Collective Defense.
Cooperation
The cyber and space domains have often been interpreted as public commons. As a result, these commons are difficult to govern and serve as the
intersection of public and private actors. NATO must seek to lead cooperation within the Alliance, across partnership states, and with private
actors to maintain a scientific edge (Rugolo and Monic 2022). NATO currently supports the Industry Cyber Partnership to improve Allies’
network security and increase resilience. This industry partnership must be replicated in a NATO Industry Emerging Technology Partnership, to
facilitate a competitive edge in capabilities that are on the horizon or not fully realized in the operational security environment. The agreement to
establish Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) for civil-military cooperation at the 2021 Brussels Summit, is a step in
the right direction. Once established, cooperation must also be facilitated across partnership hubs within NATO to prevent stove piping of
innovation. Additionally, it is critical that these innovation centers encourage partnerships across the entire spectrum of private industry, from
Finally,
intra-Alliance cooperation requires intelligence sharing and capability development among member states
to ensure that the Alliance continues to meet the challenges of the strategic environment. One example of
intra-Alliance cooperation that compliments NATO’s efforts is the European Union’s initiatives to bolster
cybersecurity. The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity’s efforts to improve capacity, cooperation,
and a whole-of-society approach to cybersecurity ultimately bolster NATO’s deterrence by denial by
hardening the attack surface of Europe.
startups and garage innovators to large scale private corporations with extensive scale research and development (Kosal 2022).
Recommendations
In keeping with the current NATO essential core tasks- Collective Defense, Crisis Management, Cooperative Security- and the structure of the
existing Strategic Concept, we submit several recommendations for consideration in 2022 NATO Strategic Concept:
In discussions of the Security Environment within the forthcoming Strategic Concept, NATO must enhance the discussion of cyber, space, and
EDT. We recommend that NATO change the language from “cyber attack” to “cyber operation” to capture the wide spectrum of activities that
subvert and erode state power including cyber espionage and cyber-enable information operations
In discussions of the Collective Defense, we recommend that NATO address how the space domain fits
within the context of defense and deterrence, while also acknowledging the critical role that space plays
in maintaining communications and interoperability among Allies. NATO must also incorporate public
attribution of cyber operations as a political and strategic tool that can bolster the collective defense and
cooperative security of member states. We recommend that NATO reach consensus on a threshold that constitutes an “attack
against all” in the cyber and space domain. Allies must also decide whether to only communicate the existence of the threshold or to publicly
reveal the threshold upon which a member may invoke Article 5.
In discussions of Cooperative Security, NATO must distinguish between emerged and emerging technologies, categorizing cyber operations as an
emerged technology (Kosal 2022). NATO should strive to remain on the “bleeding edge” of scientific development by continuing to establish
cooperative partnerships with private industry, including support of start-up organizations to enhance NATO’s competitive edge. NATO can
enhance collective defense among member states by fostering partnerships through science diplomacy oriented toward emerging threats
(Breedlove and Kosal 2019). Finally, NATO must mitigate risks associated with interoperable emerging technologies that rely on the cyber and
space domains.
Lastly, in discussions of Crisis Management, NATO should include countering the threat of misinformation and cyber-enabled information
operations in the crisis management spectrum. Member states should seek consensus on how to best respond to actions short-of-war that erode the
political integrity, capabilities, and security of member states. NATO must also facilitate communication intra-alliance to address rapidly
unfolding crises facilitated by cyber-enabled technologies.
Conclusion
Since the publication of NATO’s last Strategic Concept, the security environment has become increasingly contested in the domains of cyber and
space. While NATO has demonstrated a commitment to addressing these emerged and emerging threats through operational efforts and policy
planning, it is now essential that cyber, space and EDTs are sufficiently integrated into the broader 2022 NATO Strategic Concept. As NATO
seeks to uphold its essential tasks of Collective Defense, Crisis Management and Cooperative Security, member states and the Alliance must
become ever more resilient by adopting a shared strategic culture that embraces technological complexity, aspires to be on the “bleeding edge,”
and moves to address these often-ambiguous threats with a common understanding. This will be best accomplished through consensus on actions
short-of-force, consensus on what actions in cyber and space justify invoking Article 5, intra and extra-Alliance communication of capabilities
and thresholds, and cooperation with industry partners. These tenants provide resilience and adaptability necessary to achieve NATO’s success
and durability in this new strategic era.
The sweeping association of “anti-imperialism” as “anti-Western” results in alliance
with autocratic regimes, justifies bloodshed against civilians, and recreates UScentrism. Saying “interventions always bad” with no alternative justifies the same
imperialism they claim to critique.
Al-Shami 18 – British-Syrian activist, has worked with the human rights movement in Syria and across in the Middle East. She is the coauthor of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (Pluto, 2016, 2018) and a founding member of Tahrir-ICN, a network that aimed to
connect anti-authoritarian struggles across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe [Leila, “The ‘anti-imperialism’ of idiots - Leila Al-Shami”
4/14/2018, https://libcom.org/article/anti-imperialism-idiots-leila-al-shami, DKP] edited, language
The first thing to note from the three major mobilisations
of the western ‘anti-war’ left is that they have little to do with
ending the war. More than half a million Syrians have been killed since 2011. The vast majority of civilian
deaths have been through the use of conventional weapons and 94 per cent of these victims were killed by
the Syrian-Russian-Iranian alliance. There is no outrage or concern feigned for this war, which followed the regime’s brutal
crackdown on peaceful, pro-democracy demonstrators. There’s no outrage when barrel bombs, chemical weapons
and napalm are dropped on democratically self-organized communities or target hospitals and rescue
workers. Civilians are expendable; the military capabilities of a genocidal, fascist regime are not. In fact the
slogan ‘Hands off Syria’ really means ‘Hands off Assad’ and support is often given for Russia’s military intervention. This was evident yesterday at a demonstration
organized by Stop the War UK where a number of regime and Russian flags were shamefully on display.
This left exhibits deeply authoritarian tendencies, one that places states themselves at the centre of
political analysis. Solidarity is therefore extended to states (seen as the main actor in a struggle for liberation) rather than
oppressed or underprivileged groups in any given society, no matter that state’s tyranny. Blind to the social war
occurring within Syria itself, the Syrian people (where they exist) are viewed as mere pawns in a geo-political chess
game. They repeat the mantra ‘Assad is the legitimate ruler of a sovereign country’. Assad – who inherited a dictatorship from his father and has never held, let
alone won, a free and fair election. Assad – whose ‘Syrian Arab Army’ can only regain the territory it lost with the
backing of a hotchpotch of foreign mercenaries and supported by foreign bombs, and who are fighting, by
and large, Syrian-born rebels and civilians. How many would consider their own elected government legitimate if it began carrying
out mass rape campaigns against dissidents? It’s only the complete dehumanization of Syrians that makes such a position even possible.
It’s a racism that sees Syrians as incapable of achieving, let alone deserving, anything better than one of the most
brutal dictatorships of our time.
For this authoritarian left, support is extended to the Assad regime in the name of ‘anti-imperialism’. Assad is
seen as part of the ‘axis of resistance’ against both US Empire and Zionism. It matters little that the Assad
regime itself supported the first Gulf war, or participated in the US illegal rendition programme where
suspected terrorists were tortured in Syria on the CIA’s behalf. The fact that this regime probably holds the dubious
distinction of slaughtering more Palestinians than the Israeli state is constantly overlooked, as is the fact that it’s
more intent on using its armed forces to suppress internal dissent than to liberate the Israeli-occupied Golan.
This ‘anti-imperialism’ of idiots is one which equates imperialism with the actions of the US alone. They
seem unaware that the US has been bombing Syria since 2014. In its campaign to liberate Raqqa from Daesh all international norms of war and considerations of
proportionality were abandoned. Over 1,000 civilians were killed and the UN estimates that 80 per cent of the city is now uninhabitable. There were no protests
organized by leading ‘anti-war’ organizations against this intervention, no calls to ensure that civilians and civilian infrastructure were protected. Instead they
adopted the ‘War on Terror’ discourse, once the preserve of neo-cons, now promulgated by the regime, that all opposition to Assad are jihadi terrorists. They
turned a blind eye to Assad
filling his gulag with thousands of secular, peaceful, pro-democracy demonstrators
for death by torture, whilst releasing militant-Islamists from prison. Similarly, the continuing protests held in liberated areas in
opposition to extremist and authoritarian groups such as Daesh, Nusra and Ahrar Al Sham have been
ignored. Syrians are not seen as possessing the sophistication to hold a diverse range of views. Civil society activists (including many amazing women), citizen
journalists, humanitarian workers are irrelevant. The entire opposition is reduced to its most authoritarian elements or seen as mere conduits for foreign interests.
This pro-fascist left seems blind to [ignores] any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It
combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it
means for westerners – only white men have the power to make history. According to the Pentagon there are currently
around 2000 American troops in Syria. The US has established a number of military bases in the Kurdish-controlled north for the first time in Syria’s history. This
should concern anyone who supports Syrian self-determination yet pales in comparison to the tens
of thousands of Iranian troops and
Iranian backed Shia militias which are now occupying large parts of the country, or the murderous
bombing raids carried out by the Russian air force in support of the fascist dictatorship. Russia has now
established permanent military bases in the country, and has been handed exclusive rights over Syria’s oil and
gas as a reward for its support. Noam Chomsky once argued that Russia’s intervention could not be considered imperialism because it was invited
to bomb the country by the Syrian regime. By that analysis, the US’s intervention in Vietnam was not imperialism either, invited as it was by the South-Vietnamese
government.
A number of anti-war
organizations have justified their silence on Russian and Iranian interventions by arguing that
‘the main enemy is at home’. This excuses them from undertaking any serious power analysis to
determine who the main actors driving the war actually are. For Syrians the main enemy is indeed at
home – it’s Assad who is engaging in what the UN has termed ‘the crime of extermination’. Without being aware of their own
contradictions many of the same voices have been vocally opposed (and rightly so) to Israel’s current assault on peaceful demonstrators in Gaza. Of course, one
of the main ways imperialism works is to deny native voices. In this vein, leading western anti-war
organizations hold conferences on Syria without inviting any Syrian speakers.
The other major political trend to have thrown its weight behind the Assad regime and organize against US, UK and French strikes on Syria is the far right. Today,
the discourse of fascists and these ‘anti-imperialist leftists’ is virtually indistinguishable. In the US, white
supremacist Richard Spencer, alt right podcaster Mike Enoch and anti-immigration activist Ann Coulter are all opposing US strikes. In the UK former BNP leader Nick
Griffin and Islamophobe Katie Hopkins join the calls. The
place where the alt-right and alt-left frequently converge is around
promoting various conspiracy theories to absolve the regime of its crimes. They claim chemical
massacres are false flags or that rescue workers are Al Qaeda and therefore legitimate targets for attack. Those spreading such reports
are not on the ground in Syria and are unable to independently verify their claims. They are often
dependent on Russian or Assad state propaganda outlets because they ‘don’t trust the MSM’ or Syrians directly affected.
Sometimes the convergence of these two seemingly opposite strands of the political spectrum turns into
outright collaboration. The ANSWER coalition, which is organizing many of the demonstrations against a strike on Assad in the US, has such a history.
Both strands frequently promote Islamophobic and anti-Semitic narratives. Both share the same talking points and same memes.
There are many valid reasons for opposing external military intervention in Syria, whether it be by the US, Russia, Iran or Turkey. None of these states are acting in
the interests of the Syrian people, democracy or human rights. They act solely in their own interests. The US, UK and French intervention today is less about
protecting Syrians from mass-atrocity and more about enforcing an international norm that chemical weapons use is unacceptable, lest one day they be used on
westerners themselves. More foreign bombs will not bring about peace and stability. There’s little appetite to force Assad from power which would contribute to
in opposing foreign intervention, one needs to come up with an alternative
to protect Syrians from slaughter. It’s morally objectionable to say the least to expect Syrians to just
shut up and die to protect the higher principle of ‘anti-imperialism’. Many alternatives to foreign military intervention
have been proposed by Syrians time and again and have been ignored. And so the question remains, when diplomatic options
have failed, when a genocidal regime is protected from censure by powerful international backers, when
no progress is made in stopping daily bombing, ending starvation sieges or releasing prisoners who are
being tortured on an industrial scale, what can be done.
ending the worst of the atrocities. Yet
I no longer have an answer. I’ve consistently opposed all foreign military intervention in Syria, supported Syrian led process to rid their country of a tyrant and
international processes grounded in efforts to protect civilians and human rights and ensure accountability for all actors responsible for war-crimes. A negotiated
settlement is the only way to end this war – and still seems as distant as ever. Assad
(and his backers) are determined to thwart any
process, pursue a total military victory and crush any remaining democratic alternative. Hundreds of
Syrians are being killed every week in the most barbaric ways imaginable. Extremist groups and
ideologies are thriving in the chaos wrought by the state. Civilians continue to flee in their thousands as
legal processes – such as Law No.10 – are implemented to ensure they will never return to their homes. The international
system itself is collapsing under the weight of its own impotence. The words ‘Never Again’ ring hollow. There’s no major people’s movement which stands in
solidarity with the victims. They are instead slandered, their suffering is mocked or denied, and their
voices either absent from discussions
or questioned by people far away, who know nothing of Syria, revolution or war, and who arrogantly
believe they know what is best. It is this desperate situation which causes many Syrians to welcome the US, UK and France’s action and who now
see foreign intervention as their only hope, despite the risks they know it entails.
I won’t lose any sleep over targeted strikes aimed at regime military bases and
chemical weapons plants which may provide Syrians with a short respite from the daily killing. And I
will never see people who place grand narratives over lived realities, who support brutal regimes in
far off countries, or who peddle racism, conspiracy theories and atrocity denial, as allies.
One thing is for sure –
NATO cab be a force for good – western logic ignores Eastern European agency and
the nuance of Russian aggression.
Manheim 22 (Linda Mannheim, PhD researcher at the University of Westminster, 4-4-2022, "F*ck Leftist Westsplaining!," TheNation,
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ukraine-russia-european-left, LASA-CSK)
Central and East European progressives
do not view Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “return to the Cold War”—a
framing primarily promoted by Russia and some of the US left. “Given that the only combatants on the ground are
Russian invaders and Ukrainian defenders, the implication that this is a battle between the U.S. and Russia over
influence is ridiculous,” Jan Smoleński and Jan Dutkiewicz wrote in their essay about Western pundits who speak over voices from the East European left.
parallels between alliances now and alliances during the Cold War , wrote Ukrainian historian Taras
ignore “a fundamental difference between the current conflict and the Cold War . If the West has
not changed much politically since the Cold War, the other side of the conflict, Russia, has changed dramatically.”
Commentators who try to draw
Bilous,
So, too, has Eastern Europe. The world in which Central and East European activists came of age was post-Communist. Some are organizing in
countries that have right wing governments. These activists’ progressive politics belong to 21st-century social change movements.
Bilous is a contributing editor of Commons, a left Ukrainian journal about economy, politics, history and culture. In a city under artillery attack, he wrote “A letter to
the Western Left from Kyiv” calling out DSA International Committee’s “shameful statement
failing to say a single critical word against
Russia.”
“ US-centric
explanations are outdated ,” wrote Volodymyr Artiukh, in an essay for Open Democracy. “I see how the Western left
is doing what it [does] best: analysing the American neo-imperialism, the expansion of NATO. It is not enough anymore as it does not explain the
world that is emerging from the ruins of Donbas and Kharkiv’s main square. The world is not exhaustively described as shaped by or reacting
upon the actions of the US.”
When we spoke about his essay on Zoom, Artiukh, a Ukrainian anthropologist specializing in labor and migration, said he feels “heavily indebted to the US scholars
and left wing activists in elaborating my own perspective, which is anti-capitalist.… So my appeal was a gesture of friendship.”
to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine comes from people with diverse
experiences and backgrounds. However, all of the writers offered examples of the Western left’s denial of East European
agency (for example, suggesting that Ukraine must be a “buffer zone”). Many noted the Western left’s fixation on Ukraine’s far right; the
The Central and East European left’s response
far right is indeed a problem, but has less political power in Ukraine than in many other countries in Europe, they point out. No one accepted the assertion that
Russia viewed “NATO encroachment” as a security threat (though Artiukh noted Russia does perceive NATO
as a political and cultural threat).
when each country decides to apply for
membership. And they emphasize that decision belongs to the citizens of those countries—not to former colonial powers.
Many in the East European left have felt obliged to point out that “NATO expansion” only comes about
NATO —and in general being part of the West—is protecting millions
of people from potential Russian invasion . Calling this ‘NATO expansion’ while just typing in the comfort of
your home in New York or London” means you have not understood the perspectives of people in Eastern
Europe.
They are not uncritical of NATO, but, said Brom “the reality is that
Avoiding complex discussions in favor of monolithic criticisms of NATO is Western
imperialism. It’s important to understand regional perspectives. Defending Russia
aggression and ignoring authoritarian threats make NATO worse.
Kushi 22 [Sidita Kushi; PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bridgewater State
University and a Non-Residential Fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies (CSS) at the Fletcher School
of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. She has also served as a research director at the Center for
Strategic Studies, where she led the Military Intervention Project (MIP). She is the author of a range of
academic articles on military interventions, intrastate conflict, Eastern European Politics, as well as the
gendered dynamics of economic crises, published in Comparative European Politics, European Security,
and International Labour Review, Mediterranean Quarterly, amongst others. Her co-authored book on
U.S. military interventions across history is forthcoming in 2022 from Oxford University Press. Sidita
also contributes to public scholarship within outlets such as the Washington Post, openDemocracy, and
Euractiv; 6-11-2022; "In Eastern Europe, NATO Is No Imperialist Force"; National Interest;
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/eastern-europe-nato-no-imperialist-force-202891; KL]
In the wake of Russia’s war against Ukraine, demand for NATO membership has spiked once again, even
in the historically neutral countries of Finland and Sweden. Further south, Bosnia and Herzegovina and
Kosovo are also desperately seeking a fast track to NATO membership.
Many in the West see NATO as a tool of U.S. imperialism and empire, and in important ways it is.
NATO has afforded the United States the legitimacy to militaristically intervene abroad, most notably in
the case of Libya in 2011. NATO is both a cause and effect of the United States’ global hegemony via its
grand strategy of primacy, despite the end of Cold War rivalries.
In the post-Cold War era, however, NATO did not grow simply because the United States dictated it.
On the contrary, foreign demands for security assurances have consistently spurred NATO’s
enlargement long before Russia’s war in Ukraine.
NATO’s eastward enlargement is member-driven. Yet, both pro-NATO and anti-NATO Western
commentators and analysts often ignore Eastern European regional voices. They reduce Eastern
Europeans to objects without agency that the West may choose to act upon.
Unless scholars and policymakers delve into the regional complexities and the demand-side of NATO
membership in earnest, they will miss important dynamics at play and make it harder to steer or
predict future U.S. foreign policy trends. They will continue to understand world politics only through
the preferences and choices of Western leaders.
A more complete picture of NATO’s trajectory in the twenty-first century emerges only when allowing
room for the agency of other countries and citizens. Even a more restrained U.S. foreign policy requires
an assessment of why there remains so much local demand for NATO, which is partially driven by the
West’s complicity in spurring authoritarian regimes in Europe.
NATO Membership Was Popular in Eastern Europe
It is now clear to even casual observers why countries bordering Russia have sought NATO membership,
often with high public support at every step of the way. These countries have been ringing the alarm on
escalating Russian aggression for decades.
And still, prominent Western voices, from conservative libertarians and European leftists to American
neorealists and Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, blame NATO’s eastward expansion for Russia’s
aggression. They claim that Ukraine’s nonalignment is a core national interest for Russia. The
Democratic Socialists of America even released a statement blaming Western imperialist expansion for
stoking Russia’s legitimate fears. Of course, Russian foreign policy perpetuates this same narrative.
But as neo-realist John Mearsheimer has himself admitted, Ukraine presents a vital national interest to
Russia because “Putin is a 19th Century man.” In other words, Ukraine’s NATO aspirations are only
threats to Russian core interests when seen through the lens of its imperial past and renewed
imperialistic ambitions. Also telling is Putin’s recent statement on Sweden and Finland’s pending
NATO membership applications. He proclaimed that Russia “has no problem … these countries do not
pose a direct threat to Russia.” Only Ukraine poses a problem. Yet, neither Ukraine nor NATO
directly threatens Russia’s borders, sovereignty, or physical survival in any clear way. Moreover,
until now, Ukraine had little chance of joining NATO in the coming years. Therefore, it is
imperialism, not core interests or NATO enlargement, that drives Russian aggression in Ukraine.
These prominent voices do not consider that Russian aggression has been the primary reason Baltic
and Eastern European countries have sought NATO’s protection. At its most basic iteration, Russia aims
to halt NATO expansion to preserve a privileged sphere of influence and domination in Eastern
Europe. In contrast, Eastern European countries seek NATO membership to ensure their survival as
sovereign nation-states against a regional imperial power. NATO, with all its flaws, has been a
guarantor of sovereignty for its European members.
It is not surprising that new members have shown strong public support for NATO prior to accession.
As shown in the table below, ten out of eleven countries that joined NATO in the 2000s did so with
public support over 50 percent, often even over 70 percent, prior to membership. The only country that
bucked this trend was Montenegro, which at the time of polling in 2017 was divided between proWestern and pro-Russian factions.
Public opinion data taken from the Pew Research Center in 2021 continues to show strong, consistent
support for NATO among Eastern European and Balkan countries.
Note: Publicly-available poll sources hyperlinked within the table. Most recently available data prior to
the accession of the country listed.
Therefore, it is misleading to use the language of NATO “expanding into” the Czech Republic, Hungary,
and Poland in 1999, the Baltic countries in 2004, and then the Balkan states in 2009 and onward.
Furthermore, NATO
is not a monolith . Member states disagree ardently at times, even
against key U.S. demands as in the case of the 2003 intervention in Iraq, where NATO had no
involvement given member objections.
In trying to condemn Western imperialism, such passive language perpetuates imperialist notions and
withholds agency from non-Western citizens.
Eastern and Southern European countries actively sought membership in the alliance, prioritizing
NATO accession in their foreign and domestic policies for decades. When these countries finally joined
the alliance, many citizens cheered in relief.
Even countries that do not directly border Russia are enthusiastic about NATO membership, particularly
in the Western Balkans. This is because the United States is not the only imperialist power afoot.
The Case for NATO in the Western Balkans
While Western imperialism should be condemned, so should the non-Western variety. In Eastern Europe,
it was the Soviet Union that embodied the worst of imperialism. Today it is Russia, with its numerous
military invasions and occupations in the region since 1999.
In the Western Balkans, the United States and NATO have not posed an existential threat to the citizens
of Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, and Kosovo. Instead, these citizens worry
about threats to their homelands stemming from regional hegemons and revisionist powers, including
Russia, Serbia, and Turkey.
For instance, in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia, citizens and leaders fear the rise of a
revisionist Serbia echoing the aspirations of a Serbian-led Yugoslavia, now called Serb World. The
genocides and gruesome wars of the 1990s remain fresh and terrifying reminders of such existential
fears, as mass graves of civilian victims, continue to be uncovered. For others, it is the rise of a
revisionist Turkey, renewed land grabs, the suppression of minority rights in Greece, or fears of a
Russian-backed coup in Montenegro that spark dread. The youngest state in the region, Kosovo, fears for
its very survival as it vies for United Nations (UN) recognition against Serbia’s derecognition campaigns
and hyper-nationalist mobilizations, as well as Russia’s opposition.
Balkan and Eastern European support for NATO membership originates from a history of oppression
by regional powers, prompting strong demands for external protection. Any scholar or policymaker
who does not acknowledge this local reality will reproduce incomplete perspectives or worse,
promote accounts that hollow out local agency.
Even Anti-Imperialists Cite Imperialist Solutions
Discussing NATO enlargement within Eastern Europe and the Balkans without delving into
the complexities of regional history and politics is an imperialist project .
When Western actors explain NATO membership through the lens of Western machinations and
blame European states for their NATO aspirations, they are really saying that Eastern European and
Balkan countries should be content to serve as buffer states between empires and accept their lot as
second-class nations.
Ironically, even when famous scholars such as Mearsheimer critique U.S. imperialism and militarism,
they still manage to promote a world in which only the United States has agency and only the United
States’ great power rivals matter.
The West can engage in self-criticism of its foreign policy without blaming the victims of other
imperialist powers. In fact, the West can begin its moral reckoning by understanding and accepting how
its accommodation of Russia and other local aggressors has inflamed regional fears and magnified
demands for NATO enlargement.
For instance, by buying Russian energy on Russia’s terms and remaining mute or even legitimizing
Russia’s invasions of its weaker neighbors, the United States and European Union have perpetuated
corruption and authoritarianism in Russia and Europe. By propping up authoritarian “ethnocrat”
leaders in the Western Balkans in the name of regional stability, the West has inflamed regional
imperialists, encouraged separatist agendas, and exacerbated instability and tension. All of this only fuels
regional demands for NATO protection.
Instead of blaming the victims of another imperialist power, the West should focus on its own complicity
in enabling regional aggressors.
Other countries have agency in international relations; NATO membership proves it. Any account that
portrays NATO’s eastward expansion only through the lens of Western politics dismisses Eastern
European and Balkan countries as powerless pawns of empire.
Descriptions of Russia has a “victim” of US military overreach is interest
convergence with Russian propaganda and disinformation operations designed to
legitimize Putin’s new authoritarianism and his reclamation of Russia’s historical
empire under the guise of combating the supposed “fascism” of Western
organizations.
Marcus Kolga 19, Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Centre for Advancing Canada’s
Interests Abroad, international award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, digital
communications strategist, and a leading Canadian expert on Russian and Central and Eastern European
issues, co-founder and publisher of UpNorth.eu, an online magazine that features analysis and political
and cultural news from the Nordic and Baltic region, was awarded the Estonian Order of the White Star
by President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, “Stemming the Virus: Understanding and Responding to the Threat
of Russian Disinformation,” Macdonald-Laurier Institute, January 2019,
https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/files/pdf/20181211_MLI_Russian_Disinformation%20PAPER_FWeb.pdf
Global Research
Disinformation feeding into confirmation bias is not, exclusively a problem of the extreme right; narratives are often
sourced from extreme leftist websites too. In Canada, one notorious website is Global Research . Based in Montreal and run
by Michel Chossudovsky, a retired professor of economics (emeritus) from the University of Ottawa,
Global Research publishes articles that support Kremlin positions as well as those of many other
authoritarian regimes around the world.
Extremely critical articles about NATO and the West’s foreign policy feature prominently on Global
Research, alongside articles that support extremist views about Zionism, Freemasonry, and other global
conspiracy theories .6 Chossudovsky’s website is part of a broader global online network called the “4th
Media” (Chung 2014), which is a Chinese-registered website that includes various Kremlin state-funded outlets,
including R ussia T oday, the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), and others.
Chossudovsky is a contributor to the Russian extremist nationalist platforms geopolitica.ru and Katehon
(Chossudovsky 2017). These sites are run by the extremist right-wing nationalists Aleksandr Dugin and Leonid
Savin . Dugin , who is listed as a contributor to Global Research, is also famous for being the foreign policy
advisor to Vladimir Putin , the so-called “Putin’s Rasputin” (Meyer and Ant 2017). The site’s author search tool also brings up other
contributors to Canadian national newspapers who have supported the Kremlin’s positions in the past.7
Another noteworthy contributor to Global Research is John Helmer (Welch and Helmer 2018), who initiated the January 2017 media
frenzy around Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather’s involvement with the occupying Nazi regime in Poland during the
be traced “through a maze of cranks,
propagandists and Putin fanciers” until it reached mainstream media. The story has been broadly identified as a
Russian disinformation campaign. Recent articles on Helmer’s blog also promote other Kremlin positions, including
the claim that the Skripal affair – which involved the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the UK using the Russian Novichok
nerve agent – was a UK government conspiracy to incriminate Russia (Helmer 2018).
Second World War. According to Maclean’s columnist Terry Glavin (2017), the story can
Russian Government-Sponsored and Pro-Regime Platforms
John Helmer is also a regular contributor to a well-known anti-Semitic (Collins 2018), pro-Kremlin media platform called Russia Insider. In
addition to promoting the Russian takeover of Ukraine, the website features a section called “The Jewish Question” (Russia Insider 2018). In
2018, Russia Insider’s editor Charles Bausman claimed that “the ones shrieking the loudest (about Russian election interference) are mostly Jews,
and disproportionately female,” and that “the whole ‘Fake News’ phenomenon is fundamentally Jewish.” Of note, Bausman is a frequent guest on
RT.
Strategic Culture is another noteworthy Russian media platform that is closely connected to the Kremlin, despite claims of being independent.
According to publicly available documents, the Strategic Culture Fund is based in Moscow and its president is Yuri Prokofiev, a former
Communist Party chief and one of the leaders of the attempted August 1991 coup against former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Strategic
Culture is also listed as a partner of the official journal of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Affairs (2018). A selection of
their articles clearly shows the platform’s anti-NATO and pro-Kremlin bent.8 Other conspiracybased websites that justify the actions of the
Kremlin include 21st Century Wire, Consortium News, New Eastern Outlook, Veterans Today, Counter Punch, and InfoWars.
Russia Today
Russia Today (RT) casts a wide net intended to confuse and manipulate a broad general western audience. In 2010, RT had limited availability,
and broadcast was limited to major hotel chains on the US east coast and some cable television systems. In a Russian government-commissioned
2014 Nielsen survey of Washington, DC area viewers, RT was shown to be among the top-viewed international news programs, competing with
the BBC. Subsequent surveys have apparently demonstrated growth in other markets, including in Canada (RT 2018a).
In 2008, Kremlin propaganda was considered a problem largely for post-Soviet nations, such as Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, and Ukraine.
Western warnings about Russian propaganda were shrugged off as “Russophobia” or the “hysteric paranoia”
of diaspora groups (Robinson 2018).
Yet RT, with its millions of followers and blatant propaganda messaging, is a serious threat to the integrity of a healthy western information
environment. Addressing this threat requires serious consideration by western governments, including raising media literacy rates, warning the
public about the psychologically manipulative nature of RT’s content, and producing effective alternatives.
RT was set up by Vladimir Putin in 2005 to counter what his regime believed was the West’s hegemony in the global media environment. It
receives nearly $400 million in annual funding and serves 100 countries in Spanish, French, and Arabic, and with tailored North American and
UK programming. Today, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan has “described the outlet as an unofficial ‘soft power’ branch of the Russian
Defense Ministry.” She also went on to label RT as an “info-weapon” (Davis 2018). RT news programming is specifically crafted to provide a
media narrative for the Kremlin’s positions on foreign policy and to sow doubts about the governments, values, and democracy in the West.
In November 2017, RT had reportedly complied with a US Justice Department request that all media networks whose primary funding is by
foreign states register under the Foreign Agents Restoration Act (Rudnitsky 2017). Britain’s OFCOM has opened several investigations into RT’s
broadcasts of false information and news over the past few years (Waterson 2018).
Truth and accuracy remain largely fluid concepts for RT’s editors. While the organization makes every attempt to wrap itself in the veneer of a
legitimate news organization, RT is largely focused on promoting views supporting the Kremlin’s narratives. The world, viewed through the RT
lens, is a confusing and upside-down world, where mass murdering dictators like Bashar al-Assad are heroes and 9/11 was an inside job. Those
who question Kremlin policy are frequently labelled fascists or worse.
Avoiding or ignoring RT isn’t as simple as it may sound. RT boasts 2 million YouTube subscribers and is available to most North American
cable TV viewers on their basic news packages – in Canada it is on Rogers 177. Over the past years, RT has engaged in mass promotion of their
content on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook (Solon 2017). Targeted advertising on social media is cheap and effective. For as
little as $15, ads can target up to hundreds of thousands of viewers. With a budget of $100,000, tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of viewers
can be exposed to messaging. While overall cable viewership of RT may be low, general exposure to Kremlin narratives online is high and
dangerously unavoidable.
In Canada, RT is available on most basic cable news packages and is frequently made available on basic cable, including Rogers (until August
2018; see Rogers Community Forums 2018), Bell, and other major TV providers. According to the Globe and Mail, Canadian cable companies
were reportedly paid to carry RT on their systems instead of earning money from subscribers (Robertson 2017).
Canadian issues are covered by RT’s local correspondent, Alex Mihailovich, who was once a reporter for the now defunct Canadian Sun News
Network. In 2014, an online petition asked Sun News to fire the anchor “for violating Canada’s hate propaganda law, by broadcasting hate speech
and defamatory fact-twisting in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” (Canadians for Truth and Transparency in Broadcasting 2013).
Mihailovich frequently comments on Canadian issues for RT and his Twitter feed is generally biased towards supporting Kremlin positions.
One of RT’s anchors, Sophie Shevardnadze (2014), hosts a talk program on the Russian network and recently had former Canadian Defence
Minister Paul Hellyer on her show. Hellyer claims that extraterrestrial aliens live among us and insists that the government is keeping evidence of
alien life on Earth secret, which reinforces the Kremlin narrative that our government should not be trusted .
Hellyer’s interview has nearly one million views on YouTube. Many will be shocked a former Canadian defence minister is publicly promoting
such absurd conspiracy theorist nonsense.
For the Kremlin, the sophisticated, toxic mix of white and black propaganda creates a win-win situation. Such
interviews reinforce the paranoid beliefs of those who are predisposed to believing conspiracy theories.
For the broader audience, doubts are also cast about high-ranking government leaders and their positions.
Sputnik
The rebranded RIA Novosti press agency, Sputnik, has a considerably smaller audience than RT. Sputnik presents its propaganda as news, and
for laypeople, the content may appear innocuous. A recent Sputnik article included a feature on Faith Goldy, an extreme right-wing Toronto
mayoral candidate and media personality, which claimed that tourists visiting Toronto hotels were complaining about refugees (Sputnik 2018a).
In other jurisdictions, the Kremlin has used its media channels to promote similar candidates in order to exacerbate divisions and disrupt political
processes.
Authors who contributed to Kremlin-supported conspiracy theory platforms are also featured as “expert” commentators on Sputnik. During
Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests, Global Research founder Michel Chossudovsky attempted to provide western credibility to the Kremlin position
on Sputnik, telling them: “The New York Times has been spinning right from the beginning . . . that it [Ukraine] is the flowering of democracy. .
. . Well, it’s a bloody lie . . . it’s the flowering of neo-Nazism” (Sputnik 2015b). Also of note, in October 2017, Sputnik published an article
(Sputnik 2017c) criticizing Canada’s decision to adopt international Magnitsky legislation, which targets human rights abusers with targeted
sanctions. Repeal of this legislation has become a Kremlin foreign policy priority.
Sputnik recently purchased a radio station in Washington, DC, which broadcasts throughout the Metro DC area and is also available on the
Sputnik website. Sputnik claims to have made the radio station “available to listeners in DC so that they can form their own opinion instead of
relying on rumors and stories spread by certain media outlets” (Sputnik 2017b). One example is the “Fault Lines” program, hosted by Garland
Nixon and Lee Stranahan. Nixon claims to be a “progressive Democrat” but has a Twitter profile photo of him speaking on Fox News (Sputnik
News 2017a). Nixon’s co-host, Lee Stranahan, has a colourful biography that includes several years at Breitbart and a background in erotic
photography (Dickerson 2017). In 2017, Stranahan was quoted as saying, “I’m on the Russian payroll now, when you work at Sputnik you’re
being paid by the Russians.” As he continued, “I don’t have any qualms about it. Nothing about it really affects my position on stuff that I’ve had
for years now” (Gray 2017).
Russian Language State Media and Local Media in Canada
Aside from RT, Russian state media is available to most Russian-speaking communities in the western world. For many of the 400,000 people of
Russian heritage living in Canada, Russian state media channels – NTV, RTVi, and Russia 1 (Planeta RTR in Canada) – are the primary sources
of news. Moreover, this news carries a strong pro-Kremlin bias that is anti-western, anti-democratic, and anti-Canadian.
Russian state media actively demonizes NATO and other key western institutions and rejects the values
of tolerance , moderation, and democracy fundamental to the core of the nation. For instance, Russian television news promotes
discrimination against the LGBT community (York 2013; Cooper 2018). It also promotes completely fabricated news stories, including that the
downing of MH17 was the fault of the Ukrainian armed forces. On the
Euromaidan protests, historian Timothy Snyder has described how
Russian state media “presented the protest as part of a larger gay conspiracy ,” labelling it “Gayeuromaidan.”
Snyder went on to say, “The Ukrainian regime instructed its riot police that the opposition was led by a larger
Jewish conspiracy. Meanwhile, both regimes informed the outside world that the protestors were Nazis .
Almost nobody in the West seemed to notice this contradiction ” (Snyder 2014).
The Russian-speaking communities
in Canada and the West have been bombarded by this outrageous and
hateful propaganda , tainting their own perspectives and possibly contributing to them becoming unwitting relays
for the Kremlin’s narratives . In Canada, this could, in part, explain the Russian community’s decision to rally around
commemorations promoted by the Putin regime, to troll critics in the West, and influence Canadian policy-makers, media, and elections.
Real, independent alternatives to Russian state media exist. Independently-owned newspapers, radio programs, and television shows are printed
and broadcast at the national level in Canada. However, they are not immune from Kremlin intimidation. An advertiser with a local RussianCanadian newspaper, Russian-Canadian Info, received death threats nailed to his office door in 2014–2015 for publicly supporting the
Euromaidan protests. The threat of intimidation from Moscow and the Russian embassy in Ottawa always looms for any critics of the Kremlin’s
policies, especially Russian-language reporters. These independent journalists and media outlets represent a real credible hope for a mainstream
alternative for Russian-speaking Canadians. The Canadian government should support expanded and higher-quality third language news
programming as a solution.
Social Media Amplifiers: Trolls and bots in Canada
Beginning in 2007, the Kremlin began experimenting with social media platforms as tools to amplify propaganda and force their foreign policy
positions.9 Trolling and social media manipulation are not new Kremlin tactics. Vladimir Putin’s agents have had a decade to experiment and
hone their expertise – most importantly to manipulate the domestic Russian debate, and secondly to interfere and disrupt foreign debates, policy,
and democratic processes.
In 2013, members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, lead among them Yevgeny Prigozhin (Lister Sciutto and Ilyushina 2017), established the
Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, better known as the “Troll Factory.” The impact of these trolls on Canada in comparison to the
United States is relatively limited. Of the 3 million tweets released, just 8000 mention Canadian issues. No tweets, according to a file linked from
a CBC report, received more than one retweet, making their impact difficult to assess (Rocha 2018a; Rocha 2018b). However, closer analysis of
the Twitter accounts linked to known Kremlin proxy groups operating in Canada paints a different picture.
Among the most active and largest trolling accounts in the Canadian Twittersphere is the Russian Embassy in Canada (@RussianEmbassyC). Its
tweets are relayed to its 14,000 followers on Twitter and generally target Canadian policy-makers and critics of the Putin regime as well as
NATO and other western institutions. Tweets by the Embassy seem to be retweeted by other Kremlin accounts, making the Russian Embassy in
Canada a main social media propaganda hub for the Russian Foreign Ministry and Presidential Administration.
[[TWEETS OMITTED]]
In late 2018, we analysed the content of a number of high-profile Canadian (or seemingly Canadian) Twitter accounts connected to the Russian
Embassy by using open source tools to download, cross reference and conduct keyword analysis on the tweets. In total, we examined 17,847
tweets from 14 accounts that demonstrated a clear pro-Kremlin bias; all are inter-connected with each other and with known Kremlin propaganda
outlets. The accounts demonstrate a pro-regime bias in their tweets and have retweeted news from Russian state media and known propaganda
outlets. At the time, the total aggregate number of followers for these accounts was 42,373. It should be noted that only the latest 2500 tweets
from each account were available for download. Active accounts, where the user tweets up to 40 times per day, only go back to late spring and
early summer 2018, while less active accounts go back to 2015.
Among the tweets are over 200 mentions of Justin Trudeau, 87 mentions of Chrystia Freeland, retweets of known false news, such as the
debunked “Lisa” rape story from Germany – in which a Russian-German girl who had disappeared from Germany was falsely reported by
Russian media to have been raped by Arab migrants – and multiple tweets promoting the falsification of the downing of MH17. Not all the tweets
directly targeted Canadian politicians or issues, but most were clearly directed at influencing policy direction and opinion. At least 40,000
viewers were exposed, given that the sampled accounts have an aggregate total of 42,373 followers (around 2000 of which are shared). Using
publicly available tools, we can conservatively estimate that the reach of these tweets, in terms of impressions, are into the millions.
The activity of online proxies, bots, and trolls focused on amplifying pro-Kremlin narratives is equal, if not greater, on Facebook. At least 35
Facebook pages or groups are run by profiles that are ostensibly based in Canada and have posted content that is anti-western, anti-NATO, antiUkrainian, or that amplifies Kremlin narratives. These groups have such names as: “Vladimir Putin - A Fighter & Strategist Against
USA/EU/NATO Imperialism,” “Victory Day Canada,” “Russians in America,” “Russian Global Community,” “USA/EU Corporate Media Lies
& Deception: Betraying Own People,” and others. Some of the groups exceed 20,000 members. Collectively, these groups have 94,789 members.
Many of these Facebook groups also seem to be linked to the Russian Congress of Canada in some fashion. Specifically, the most prominent and
prolific administrator of these mostly Canadian groups is named Lina Kazakova. She is also the administrator to a group run by Russian Congress
of Canada Facebook page (Russian Community of Canada 2018). Of note, the administrator also shares the name of a board member listed for
the Russian Congress of Canada (Industry Canada 2018c). Profiles connected to the Russian Congress of Canada seem to control nearly half of
the pro-Kremlin Canadian Facebook groups and pages.
Fascists and Zionists: Disfiguring historical facts to justify foreign policy
In 2016, Russian state media captured footage of a man covered with Nazi tattoos at an annual commemoration of Estonian soldiers who died on
the Tannenberg Line. This event commemorated those who resisted against the Soviet Red Army as the Germans retreated in 1944. For Russian
state media, these images were proof the event was, as the Kremlin always claimed, an Estonian neo-Nazi rally. However, in 2016, Estonian State
Police (KAPO) revealed that the man was not Estonian at all, but rather sent from Russia to pose as a “local Nazi activist.” According to KAPO,
“the Kremlin-controlled media was naturally eager to pick this up as an example of events in Estonia. As they had to send in an activist to play
the role, it showed that the label was difficult to stick and the methods suggest desperation” (2017, 8).
The distortion and falsification of history is a critical component of Vladimir Putin’s domestic and foreign strategy. The Putin regime’s
legitimacy depends on the presence of powerful enemies that, they claim, are seeking to undermine and destroy Russia; Putin is presented as the
only Russian leader capable of protecting his country and its people.
A classic Soviet tactic was to label all western adversaries as “fascists”; a propaganda tradition revived
and expanded by the Putin regime. The fascist label is an extremely useful tool. Russians see it as
synonymous with “enemy.” When applied by the state, it requires little in the way of explanation and is
simply accepted . In the West, the term has been used interchangeably with “Nazi” to better inflict the greatest amount of propaganda
damage.
In the post-war era, Soviet
propagandists labeled refugees who fled the Baltic State s and other areas controlled by the
Soviet Union as “fascists.” Community leaders who emerged in the diaspora were often characterized as “Hitlerites” and “fascists” (Leivat
2018). Today, the term is applied liberally to anyone who disagrees with the Putin regime. Ukraine’s Euromaidan uprising has
been characterized as a western-supported “fascist” coup (and simultaneously as a Jewish and gay conspiracy) (Snyder
2014). Defending Russians against fascists (Oliphant 2014) was also used to justify the Kremlin’s illegal
annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine. Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia featured a similar
justification (Economist 2008). Russia’s aggressive, neo-imperialist, crypto-Soviet foreign policy is then
framed as part of Russia’s struggle against fascism .
To ensure its effectiveness, the Kremlin adopted a long-term strategy in the early 2000s to rehabilitate Soviet history, including the bloody legacy
of Joseph Stalin. In 2007, newly-issued Russian high-school history textbooks praised Stalin’s leadership (Nemtsova 2010). In 2017, a poll of
Russians chose Stalin as “most outstanding” figure in world history followed by Vladimir Putin (Filipov 2017). When asked by filmmaker Oliver
Stone about the western perception of Stalin, Putin equated criticism of Stalin with an attack on Russia: “it seems to me that excessive
demonization of Stalin is one of the means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia” (Parfitt 2017).
Part of the Kremlin’s strategy has been the manipulation of historic celebrations, specifically the defeat of Nazi Germany on May 9, 1945 (other
allied nations celebrate on May 8). Putin’s “Cult of Victory” (Prokopeva 2017) presents the Soviet defeat of fascism as an accomplishment
beyond mythical proportions. As Russian sociologist Denis Volkov has said, “the use of the cult of victory for propaganda goals naturally adds up
to the acquittal of Stalin” (Filipov 2017). In contrast to the somber and dignified events that take place among allied nations, Russia’s Victory
Day has been transformed into a mass choreographed rally for Stalinist imperialism, its triumph over fascism, and the Soviet occupation of much
of Central and Eastern Europe.
The march of the “Immortal Regiment,” which have become part of these Victory Day celebrations, is a Kremlin organized and funded event that
takes place in cities around the world, including in Canada. Members of the local Russian diaspora dress in Red Army costumes and march in
elaborate parades that include Stalinist and Soviet paraphernalia and symbols. At recent Toronto Victory Day rallies, for instance, small children
were dressed in Red Army uniforms as props to glorify Soviet might.10 To the millions of victims and their families who suffered under Soviet
repression, these events stir up unspeakable traumas passed from generation to generation.
These rallies organized in Canada, the US, and Europe are designed as propaganda events intended to manipulate our general understanding of
history and our views on foreign policy. Local Kremlin proxy groups and organizers invite local politicians to attend. By participating, these
politicians and dignitaries often unintentionally legitimize the groups that organize them and the false historical narratives that they promote.
Russian Victory Day and the associated historical propaganda fulfill key Kremlin propaganda objectives:
1. unify the Russian diaspora by tapping into emotional Soviet nostalgia and harnessing the influence of this group;
2. provoke Canadian victims of Soviet terror and discredit diaspora groups critical of Putin by labelling them “fascists”;
3. delegitimize claims of sovereignty of those states formerly occupied by the Soviet Union and thereby undermine their participation
in NATO and the EU;
4. legitimize modern foreign policy as part of the eternal fight against fascism;
5. legitimize domestic repression as part of the historic struggle against fascism; and
6. create a common label for the enemies of the Russian state.
A Common Cause to Unite Pro-Putin Compatriots
To help unify its diaspora, known as the “Russian World,” the Kremlin supports worldwide events that focus on “historical trauma and nostalgic
memories of Soviet greatness” (Lucas and Pomerantsev 2016, 8). This necessarily includes the rehabilitation of Stalin and denial of the Soviet
occupation and repression across much of Europe. The Kremlin’s present version of Russian history focuses on the military strength of Stalin and
claims that the Soviet Union was a benevolent liberator and the tens of thousands of civilians deported to Gulag were, in fact, fascists.
Undermining Other Diaspora Groups
In Canada, there are around four million people of Central and Eastern European heritage. Many came to Canada fleeing Soviet and Nazi terror,
and many have been critical of the Putin regime’s foreign policies. These organizations, including the Central and Eastern European Council, the
Baltic Federation, Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Polish Canadian Congress, and others, have raised awareness of the nature of the Putin regime
in Canada and helped shape an effective foreign policy towards Russia that is consistent with Canadian values.
The Central and Eastern European community’s support for the Euromaidan movement, criticism of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policies, and the
Kremlin’s organization of Victory Day events have also earned them the label of “fascists” by pro-Kremlin media and trolls (Sanders 2017).
Delegitimizing claims of sovereignty
One of Vladimir Putin’s primary foreign policy objectives is to undermine the cohesion of NATO and the European
Union. Baltic membership in NATO and Ukrainian and Georgian aspirations to join the transatlantic
organization are based on the fact that they are sovereign nations. Russian history highlights the
factually correct Soviet liberation of these nations in the Second World War from Nazi occupation.
However, this is where the truth ends and a toxic mix of denial, falsification, and propaganda take
over .
In 2017 NATO produced a short documentary about the history of the Baltic Forest Brothers, a resistance
movement against the Soviets (NATO 2017). The Russian government reacted immediately to discredit it ,
with Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova (2017) writing: “Forest Brothers were created on the basis
of fascist remnants who collaborated with German occupational authorities.” She went on to dismiss the freedom
fighters as pawns of Western intelligence . Dmitry Rogozin, Russian Deputy PM and founder of the extremist nationalist party
Rodina, referred to the Forest Brothers as “heirs of Hitler’s remnants” (Barojan and Nimmo 2017).
Anyone who challenged or resisted the Soviet occupation is labelled fascist, in an effort to discredit them and the cause of Baltic independence.
By denying the occupation of the former Soviet republics, Kremlin propagandists seek to legitimize
renewed Russian claims of hegemony over the Baltic and former Soviet region . In the case of Crimea,
Russia justified the illegal annexation through historic claims. The fabricated Russian narrative about the
Baltic states voluntarily joining the Soviet Union in 1940 may one day also be used as a similar
pretext.
Legitimizing Russian Foreign and Domestic Policies
The Putin regime’s legitimacy and its domestic and foreign policies are largely dependent on the myth of Great
Soviet power and its eternal struggle against fascism . As demonstrated in the case of the Russian neo-Nazi in Estonia, the
Putin regime is so desperate to find fascist enemies that it is willing to create them if necessary.
An important Kremlin theme is the notion that “Western governments are fascists.” According
to pro-Kremlin media, foreign
adversaries like NATO are imperialist organizations (Stryker 2017) run by the American fascists (Pear 2018).
Domestic Russian human rights and anti-corruption NGOs that are critical of the Kremlin are viewed as
“foreign agents” and shut down when funding from western entities is discovered (Human Rights Watch 2018).
It can even be seen at annual political indoctrination summer camps for Nashi youth – a pro-Putin political youth movement that was encouraged
by the Kremlin and considered a government-organized NGO. At
a Nashi camp in 2008, for example, effigies of the heads
of leading Putin critics were placed on wooden pikes, each wearing a Nazi cap (Bäckman 2010). The intent is
to discredit pro-democracy leaders as fascists in order to further legitimize Putin’s hold on power.
Putin’s regime is NOT a victim of some conspiratorial red scare.
Anne Applebaum 20, American journalist and historian, has written extensively about Marxism–
Leninism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe, has worked at The
Economist and The Spectator, and was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post, winner
of the Pulitzer Prize, Senior Fellow of International Affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she co-directs LSE Arena, “A KGB Man to the
End,” Atlantic, September 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/catherinebelton-putins-people/614212/
It was december 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and in Dresden, crowds were gathering outside the headquarters of the Stasi, the East German
secret police, shouting insults and demanding access. Nearby, frantic KGB officers—the Soviet advisers whom the Stasi had long referred to as
“the friends”—were barricaded inside their villa, burning papers. “We destroyed everything,” remembered one of those officers, Vladimir Putin.
“All our communications, our lists of contacts and our agents’ networks … We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.”
Toward evening, a group of protesters broke away from the Stasi building and started marching toward the KGB villa. Panicked, Putin called the
Soviet military command in Dresden and asked for reinforcements. None were forthcoming. “I got the feeling then that the country no longer
existed. That it had disappeared,” Putin told an interviewer years later. “It was clear the union was ailing. And it had a terminal disease without
a cure—a paralysis of power.” The shock was total, and he
never forgot it.
For hundreds of millions of people, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great triumph: The moment marked the end of hated dictatorships and the
beginning of a better era. But for the KGB officers stationed in Dresden, the political revolutions of 1989 marked the end of their empire and the
beginning of an era of humiliation. In interviews, Putin has returned to that moment—the
moment when reinforcements did not
come—always describing it as a turning point in his own life. Like Scarlett O’Hara shaking her fist at a blood-red sky,
Putin swore , it seems, to dedicate his life to restoring his country’s glory.
But Putin’s cinematic depiction of his last days in Dresden captures only part of what happened. As Catherine
Belton demonstrates in Putin’s People, large chunks are missing from his story and from the stories of his KGB
colleagues —the other members of what would become, two decades later, Russia’s ruling class . As the title
indicates, Belton’s book is not a biography of the Russian dictator, but a portrait of this generation of security agents . And many
of them were not , in fact, entirely shocked by the events of 1989.
On the contrary, some of them had been preparing already. In August 1988, a high-ranking official from Moscow arrived in East
Berlin and began recruiting German sleeper agents, who continued to work with the KGB, or rather the institutions that replaced the KGB, even
after the reunification of Germany and the fall of the Soviet Union itself. At about the same time, the KGB was also setting
up the
offshore accounts, fake businesses, and hidden “black cash” funds that would, in the 1990s, propel some of
its members to great wealth and power . From 1986 to 1988, for example, the Stasi transferred millions of marks to a
network of companies in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Singapore, all run by an Austrian businessman named Martin
Schlaff. He and his companies would reemerge years later, Belton writes, as “central cogs in the influence op eration s
of the Putin regime.”
The KGB’s Dresden team may have also played another role in the organization’s careful preparations for a post-Communist future. Precisely
because the city was a backwater—and thus uninteresting to other intelligence agencies—the
KGB and the Stasi organized
meetings in Dresden with some of the extremist organizations they supported in the West and around
the world. One former member of the Red Army Faction—the West German terrorist organization, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang,
that killed dozens of people during its heyday—told Belton that one of its most notorious final actions was planned with the help of the KGB and
the Stasi in Dresden. In late November 1989, Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman of Deutsche Bank, died after a bomb hit his car. Herrhausen was,
at that time, a close adviser to the German government on the economics of reunification, and a proponent of a more integrated European
economy. Why him? Perhaps the KGB had its own ideas about how reunification should proceed and how the European economy should be
integrated. Perhaps Russia’s secret policemen didn’t want any rivals messing things up. Or perhaps they wanted, as their successors still do, to
create havoc in Germany and beyond.
Belton does not prove Putin’s personal involvement in any of these projects, which isn’t surprising. The Russian leader has gone to great lengths
to conceal his real role during the four and a half years he spent in Dresden. But throughout her book, which will surely now become the
definitive account of the rise of Putin and Putinism, she adds enough new details to establish beyond doubt that the
future Russian
president was working alongside the people who set up the secret bank accounts and held the meetings
with subversives and terrorists . More important, she establishes how, years later, these kinds of projects came to
benefit him and shape his worldview . Building on the work of others—Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely
Rise of Vladimir Putin, Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, Steven Lee Myers’s The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of
Vladimir Putin, and Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, among many books on this subject—Belton, a former
Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, incorporates crucial new material from interviews with former KGB operatives, Kremlin insiders, and
bankers in various countries. She shows that Putin may have been burning documents in Dresden, but he never lost touch with the people, the
tactics, or the operations launched by the KGB at that time.
Step by step, Belton demonstrates how the
future president made full use of KGB methods, contacts, and
networks at each stage of his career. She describes the famous swindle he ran in St. Petersburg in the ’90s, selling oil
abroad on the city’s behalf, supposedly to buy food for its inhabitants; instead the profits went to create a hardcurrency slush fund —known in Russian criminal slang as an obschak—much of which financed other operations and
eventually enriched Putin’s friends. Later, Putin won the confidence of the Russian oligarchs of President Boris
Yeltsin’s era, in part by promising them immunity from prosecution after Yeltsin resigned; once he took power, he
eliminated them from the game, arresting some throughout the early 2000s and chasing others out of the country. In the years that he has
been president, his cronies have launched a series of major operations—the Deutsche Bank “mirror trading” scheme, the Moldovan
“laundromat,” the Danske Bank scandal—all of which used Western banks to help move stolen money out of Russia. Similar schemes continue to
the present day.
But the
pivotal political event for Putin took place in 20 05, when a pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko, came
to power in Ukraine after a street revolution. The Russian president blamed these events on American money
and the CIA (an organization that, for better or worse, never had anything like that kind of influence in Ukraine). “It was the worst
nightmare of Putin’s KGB men that, inspired by events in neighboring countries, Russian oppositionists funded by the West would seek to topple
Putin’s regime too,” Belton writes. “This was the
dark paranoia that colored and drove many of the actions they were
to take from then on.” Not coincidentally, this scenario—pro-Western-democracy protesters overthrowing a corrupt and unpopular
regime—was precisely the one that Putin had lived through in Dresden . Putin was so upset by events in Kyiv that he
even considered resigning, Belton reports. Instead, he decided to stay on and fight back, using the only methods he
knew.
Although the American electorate awoke to the reality of Russian influence operations only in 2016, they had begun more than a decade earlier,
after that first power change in Ukraine. Already in 2005, two of Putin’s closest colleagues, the oligarchs Vladimir Yakunin and Konstantin
an “alternative” to democracy and integration all
across Europe . With the help of intermediaries and friendly companies, and more recently with the assistance of troll farms
and online disinformation operations, they promoted a whole network of think tanks and fake
“experts.” Sometimes they aided existing political parties—the National Front in France, for example, and the Northern League in Italy—
and sometimes they helped create new ones, such as the far-right Alternative for Germany. The most important funder of the British
Brexit campaign had odd Russian contacts. So did some cabinet ministers in Poland’s supposedly anti-Russian,
hard-right government , elected after a campaign marked by online disinformation in 2015.
Malofeyev, had begun setting up the organizations that would promote
“separatists” who would later launch a war in eastern Ukraine got their start around 2005
too, with an even more apocalyptic result . Russian propaganda deliberately sought to divide Ukraine and polarize its citizens, while
The pro-Russian
Russian corruption reached deep into the economy. Within a decade, the Russian operations in Ukraine led to mass violence. Some of the
Ukrainians who attended Kremlin youth camps or joined the Eurasian Youth movement during the 2000s—often funded by the “charities”
created by Malofeyev, Yakunin, and others—took part in the storming of Donetsk’s city-administration buildings in 2014, and then in the horrific
Russian-Ukrainian war, which has disrupted European politics and claimed more than 13,000 lives. Russian soldiers, weapons, and advisers fuel
the fighting in eastern Ukraine even now.
All of these
Russian-backed groups, from refined Dutch far-right politicians in elegant suits to the
Donetsk thugs, share a common dislike for the E uropean U nion, for NATO, for any united concept of
“the West,” and in many cases for democracy itself . In a very deep sense, they are Putin’s ideological answer
to the trauma he experienced in 19 89. Instead of democracy, autocracy; instead of unity, division;
instead of open societies, xenophobia . Amazingly, quite a few people, even some American conservatives, are
taken in by Russian tactics. It is incredible, but a group of cynical, corrupt ex-KGB officers with access to vast
quantities of illegal money —operating in a country with religious discrimination, extremely low church
attendance, and a large Muslim minority—have somehow made themselves into the world’s biggest
promoters of “Christian values,” opposing feminism, gay rights, and laws against domestic violence,
and supporting “white” identity politics. This is an old geopolitical struggle disguised as a new culture
war . Yakunin himself told Belton, frankly, that “this battle is used by Russia to restore its global position .”
Ultimately, all of these tactics had their culmination in the career of Donald Trump . In the last chapter of Putin’s People,
Belton documents the activities of the biznesmeny who have circled around Trump for 30 years, bailing him out, buying apartments in his
buildings for cash, offering him “deals,” always operating in “the half-light between the Russian security services and the mob, with both sides
using the other to their own benefit.” Among them are Shalva Tchigirinsky, a Georgian black marketeer who met Trump in Atlantic City in 1990;
Felix Sater, a Russian with mob links whose company served, among other things, as the intermediary for Trump buildings in Manhattan, Fort
Lauderdale, and Phoenix; Alex Shnaider, a Russian metals trader who developed the Trump hotel in Toronto; and Dmitry Rybolovlev, an
oligarch who purchased Trump’s Palm Beach mansion in 2008 for $95 million, more than double what Trump had paid for it in 2004, just as the
financial crisis hit Trump’s companies.
While many of these stories have been written before, Belton puts them in the larger context. The hard truth is that Trump
was not
exceptional . He was just another amoral Western businessman, one of many whom the ex-KGB elite
have promoted and sponsored around the world, with the hope that they might eventually be of some
political or commercial use. Many of these bets didn’t pay off, but in 2016, Putin finally hit the jackpot: His
operatives helped elect an American president with long-standing Russian links who would not only sow chaos , but
systematically undermine America’s alliances, erode American influence, and even, in the spring of 2020,
render the American federal government dysfunctional, damaging the reputation of both the U.S. and
democracy more broadly.
A huge success for Putin’s people has proved a terrible tragedy for the rest of the world—a tragedy that also
touches ordinary Russians. In her epilogue, Belton notes that in seeking to restore their country’s significance, Putin’s KGB cronies have
repeated many of the mistakes their Soviet predecessors made at home. They have once again created a calcified,
authoritarian political system in Russia, and a corrupt economy that discourages innovation and entrepreneurship. Instead of
experiencing the prosperity and political dynamism that still seemed possible in the ’90s, Russia is once again impoverished and apathetic. But
Putin and his people are thriving—and that was the most important goal all along .
Any embrace of totalitarian Putinism is NOT an isolated piece of scholarship---it’s
part and parcel of a reactionary anti-imperialism that flattens any US intervention
into an undifferentiated theory of colonial mapping, and has caused the death,
gassing, displacement, and torture of millions to whom it denies agency.
Oz Katerji 20, British-Lebanese freelance journalist focusing on conflict, human rights & the Middle
East, and former Lesvos project coordinator for British charity Help Refugees, “Dogmatic antiimperialism: How the left learned the wrong lessons from Iraq,” 8/25/2020,
https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2020/08/25/dogmatic-anti-imperialism-how-the-leftlearned-the-wrong-les
The Iraq War was one of the most catastrophic and disastrous military interventions in modern history, so it has had a
lasting impact on the British electorate's view on foreign policy.
There are some good reasons for that. Even conservative estimates place the death toll from the invasion and the civil war that
followed it - one that arguably continues to this day - in the hundreds of thousands. Most of those deaths were not directly attributable to the
international coalition, but many were nevertheless an indirect result of the invasion.
There are some bad reasons too. For many in Britain, the Iraq War is the prism through which they view
all foreign policy. It has created a policy vacuum totally divorced from empathy and solidarity
towards the victims of international conflicts.
A recent video published by the Labour left campaign group Momentum, fronted by Labour councillor and NEC member Yasmine Dar, was
indicative of the problem. The video - tweeted alongside the statement "to stop refugees, we need to stop creating refugees" - actively denied
agency to the very people it claimed to defend.
Leaving aside for one moment the fact that a supposedly left-wing political group framed their message around finding a way to "stop" refugees an utterly futile task that only gives succour to right wing narratives about immigration - the arguments made by Dar were fundamentally
misleading.
Dar argued that the majority of refugees arriving in the UK come from Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria or Libya - countries that have experienced some form of UK military involvement over the last two decades.
This is simply not true . In fact, according to the Migration Observatory, the majority of asylum seekers in the UK in 2018 were from
Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, Pakistan and Albania. Syria and Libya were not even in the top ten. This fact, however, would have immediately pierced Dar's
narrative that British foreign policy is somehow the reason that the "majority" of refugees are fleeing their countries at all.
There wasn't even any mention of the fact that the
majority of migrants heading to Europe from Libya aren't victims
of the Libya conflict, but are actually fleeing other parts of Africa . British bombs have nothing to do with it.
During the video, images
of Iraq and Libya played out while Dar spoke. For her argument, they were interchangeable . But
a UN Security Council-mandated No Fly Zone enacted to prevent Gaddafi from slaughtering his own
people is not the same as a UN S ecurity C ouncil -rejected invasion and occupation.
The idea that a progressive foreign policy requires Britain to use its power and influence to protect civilians,
rather than turn a blind eye to [ignore] their suffering, seems anathema to this way of thinking.
"In
a lot of cases, not only do we support dictators, but we've put them there in the first place ," Dar said,
before spending the rest of the video discussing Britain's role in the overthrow of Iran's Mossadegh in 1953 - as
if one of the main reasons for conflict in the region can be blamed solely on events that happened 67
years ago , and as if British foreign policy hasn't moved on from Churchill.
If we're assessing the situation honestly, no regional country has been more responsible for the Middle
Eastern refugee crisis than Iran , but that won't fit into a Momentum video that lays the blame squarely at the feet of the British
government.
massacres committed in Syria, Yemen and Iraq by Iran's sectarian militias have displaced
millions of civilians across the Middle East. The Iranian regime has been forcibly conscripting Afghan Hazara refugee children and sending
The
them to fight in Syria. I am not sure how any video about today's refugee crisis can spend so much time discussing the 1953 coup without as
much as a passing mention of Iran's sectarian involvement in regional wars, including the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians - deaths
which Dar prefers to attribute to British foreign policy.
I wish I could say Dar was an isolated case on the left, but this
foreign policy rot is far more pervasive than that. The legacy
of the Iraq War has left a generation of supposedly progressive people [ignoring] turning a blind eye to some
of the most heinous atrocities of the 21st century, based on the idea that tolerating mass murder is
preferable to preventing it .
This misreading of the Iraq conflict is widespread , particularly on the political left . The war is often cited as one of
the main reasons that younger voters were so attracted to Jeremy Corbyn's brand of anti-imperialist politics.
This narrative acts as if only the far left opposed Iraq, just as it had opposed all foreign interventions during the period. In fact, there were far
more persuasive arguments against the war from more mainstream sources. The
Iraq War was not a humanitarian military
intervention. There was no r esponsibility- to - p rotect element in the conflict. The intel ligence regarding weapons of mass destruction
was wilfully distorted to ramp up the threat level and pacify political opposition to the war.
That situation cannot be compared with the wars in Syria and Libya, where dictators launched wars
against their own people, who were defenceless from the coming onslaught and looked to Western
powers for protection - protection which, in the case of Syria, never came.
Despite many young, left-leaning people having strong opinions about the conflict in Iraq, too many are
totally ignorant of the facts and history of conflicts in the Middle East and too few are bothered to learn. An
increasingly conspiratorial strand of so-called 'anti-imperialism', one which routinely dehumanises and
denies agency to Middle Eastern civilians, has further poisoned the debate .
Allegations about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction in 2003 may have proved false, but it
is demonstrably
true that Bashar al- Assad has repeatedly used chemical weapons against the Syrian people .
Every time footage of these atrocities reached the West, many of those people who grew up in this strand
of 'anti-imperialist' politics responded to the images of dead and dying children, frothing at the mouth
from nerve agent poisoning, in the same way they would the 'dodgy dossier' . The suggestion that something
should be done to protect them saw supposed progressives abandon all semblance of compassion and warn
those expressing grief that they were being hoodwinked by the same people who 'manufactured consent' for Iraq.
This political camp has grown proud of its ignorance. It sees no need to learn more about the Middle
East or the conflicts raging within it. Why learn about the decades of human misery inflicted upon the
people of Libya or Syria when you can instead just dismiss it all as propaganda?
There are few more wilfully anti-intellectual movements in the world than dogmatic anti-imperialism, an
ideology that essentially instructs its adherents to ignore the voices and views of local populations in
favour of pro-regime conspiracism regurgitated by cosplaying revolutionary communists .
Conspiracism and war crimes denial has now deeply embedded itself in the Western left, alongside the
total abandonment of any semblance of a progressive foreign policy.
For many, it is irrelevant that the calls for civilian protection measures in Libya and Syria came from
Libyan and Syrian civilians themselves. Democratic revolutions are routinely rejected or dismissed
because they require a level of self-reflection that many decided they no longer needed to do after Iraq.
The truth is that, whether Britain is involved or not, conflicts will continue to rage across the world. There is no way to "stop" refugees, just as
there is no way for Western military power to police the world.
But far from deciding to look away from this, we need to take it on. I do not understand how any
progressive can look at the barbarity in Syria, with nearly a million dead and 12 million displaced, and
state that Britain could have alleviated civilian suffering by doing less for the Syrian people, rather than more.
If we want to help refugees, we have to understand that we can not "stop" them. If we want to stop conflicts, we have to
understand that
the people in those countries need our help .
We must refuse to act on Russian propaganda and preserve the possibility for
contingent use of Western influence in service of liberation.
Chris Dunnett 14, Ukraine Crisis Media Center, “Putin’s Unlikely Allies on the Left ,” Uacrisis.org, 828-2014, https://uacrisis.org/en/8461-putins-unlikely-allies-left
Vladimir Putin’s
appeal to right-wingers in the West is mostly self-explanatory. Putin’s tough guy image,
traditionalism, and homophobia meet receptive ears among many in the more radical European and American
right. Eurosceptic far-right political parties have close relations with the Kremlin and have vocally defended
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Curiously, non-mainstream leftist groups in the West have also formed
a tacit alliance with the Kremlin in the information war against Ukraine, often defending Russia’s actions. The fringe
left has teamed up with the far-right in siding with Russia in the ongoing information war.
The leader of the French far-right Front National, Marie Le Pen, has said that her party together with Vladimir Putin are “defending common
values” and the “Christian heritage of European civilization.” Similarly, the leader of the United Kingdom’s right-wing populist party UKIP,
Nigel Farage, has praised Putin’s foreign policy by claiming that the EU has “blood on its hands” for its policy in Ukraine. Figures on the fringe
Pat Buchanan . Writing on a
conservative blog, Buchanan defended Putin’s actions in Ukraine and panned the West for “ capitulation to a sexual
revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity , pornography , homosexuality , feminism , abortion , [and]
same-sex marriage .”
of the American right have also praised Putin, including former Republican presidential candidate
If the relationship between Putin’s Russia and the ultraconservative Western fringe is at least politically understandable, given their similar
worldviews, the left’s defense of an oligarchic and ultraconservative Russia make much less sense . Pro-Putin
leftists are probably best embodied in the personage of Stephen Cohen, an American Sovietologist turned Putin apologist at leftist magazine The
far past the point of mere devil’s advocate , parroting Putin’s talking points such as
that the Ukrainian nation doesn’t exist and that EuroMaidan was a Western coup . In yet another example,
Alan Grayson, an American Congressman and left-wing firebrand, previously said that the U nited S tates
should thank Putin for the annexation of Crimea from “this artificial entity called the Ukraine.”
Nation. Cohen has gone
The Kremlin and the fringe left share a disdain for American foreign policy, NATO, and other flagship
Western military and political institutions. The Iraq War was an important turning point in
alienating young people from mainstream politics and gaining followers for “alternative media”
sources such as Democracy Now!, Truth-out, and other web-based sources with questionable credibility. Add in years of
highly coordinated propaganda from R ussia T oday, which explicitly targets disaffected Westerners, and
there’s an unwitting alliance of Kremlin policymakers and Western leftists . Russia Today’s biggest
breakthrough was the Occupy Wall Street protests, as it devoted significant coverage of these events as a propaganda tool to gain a following for
its network. Many
people outside of the political mainstream increasingly used R ussia T oday as a media
platform , consuming not only coverage of the Occupy movement, but also other world events from the Kremlin slant.
Russia Today and other alternative
news sources focus on the failings of politics in the U nited S tates and the
West, while conveniently ignoring much more disturbing developments elsewhere. The Syrian
government has killed nearly 200,000 of its own citizens? It must be the West’s fault. Anti-authoritarian
protests challenge a corrupt and undemocratic government in Venezuela? The CIA must be to trying to
unseat a leftist government. And so it is for Ukraine , too.
Fringe political groups in the West are primarily concerned with challenging their own governments, and are eager to share a platform with the
Kremlin when they share the same interests, even if not the same values. Today, the Russian government has managed to maintain established
ties to the far-left, while simultaneously gaining huge influence within Europe’s resurgent right. In
tandem with the attractive
aesthetics of propaganda outlet RT, an entire generation of people disaffected with the West, its politics and
economy, are unconsciously consuming a carefully designed Russian narrative .
Combating the appeal of conspiracy theories and fringe media outlets in the West is a difficult proposition, but
is ultimately a battle that begins at home . The appeal of fringe political ideologies have many causes, but are ultimately rooted
in real problems—income inequality, unemployment, and unresponsive politics. Just as Ukraine’s best defense against Russian aggression is the
reform of its decrepit economy and corrupt political system, the information war is best waged through reform in the West. Ukrainians risked
It would be a
shame of historic dimensions if Europe, and by extension the rest of the West, fails to fulfill its own ideals.
their lives on Maidan because of what Europe symbolizes as a place of tolerance, representative politics, and stability.
2AC
Case
IR scholarship regarding the liberal order is not irredeemably racist
Gideon Rose 16, editor of Foreign Affairs, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,
March/April 2016, “Review of, ‘White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American
International Relations,’” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2016-02-16/whiteworld-order-black-power-politics-birth-american
seeks to bridge the “vast gulf divid[ing] international relations
from Africana studies,” bringing the “racism [of the discipline of international relations] to light.”
Conventional narratives of the field’s history, he argues, trace it to the rise of realism and national
security concerns in the years around World War II, adding a few historical thinkers, such as Thucydides,
to claim a timeless intellectual pedigree. But this ignores both the extensive mainstream scholarship of the
first decades of the twentieth century that dealt with colonialism and racial issues and the pioneering work
of African American writers in what he calls “the Howard School.” Consigning both to the memory hole, he says, paints
In this interesting and important yet flawed book, Vitalis
a distorted picture of the discipline’s origins and nature, obscuring the role that international relations scholarship has played in the construction
and perpetuation of white Western dominance. These are major claims, and some of them hold up better than others. Vitalis
is correct to
shine a spotlight on the forgotten academic work of the first third of the twentieth century and offers a timely reminder of just how
prevalent racialized thinking was and how central a role imperialism— as opposed to straightforward
great-power relations —played in global affairs. Back then, for example, “policy relevance” in political
science often meant figuring out how to train good colonial administrators. Vitalis also provides a service by telling
the story of scholars such as Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, and Rayford Logan, enriching readers’ understanding of midcentury intellectual
debates over U.S. foreign policy and tracing how racism operated inside various professional institutions. Vitalis is less
convincing , however, in casting his analysis as an indictment of the postwar discipline of international relations,
let alone its contemporary incarnation . To get there, one has to share his politics. Vitalis sees a project of U.S.
imperial domination playing out over the course of the past century, with the “subjection” continuing
today, “through new-old policies of intervention, tutelage, and targeted killings in new-old zones of
anarchy and civilization deficit.” Given such a reading of U.S. foreign policy, it is not surprising that he believes “the history of
ideas, institutions, and practices [in the field] has a constitutive role in their present forms and functions”—or that he sees today’s mainstream
international relations scholars as handmaidens of an evil national security state and as the direct descendants of their racist predecessors of a
century ago. Scorning the notion that the postwar liberal international order represents anything particularly new or admirable, Vitalis scores a
few points in noting how long it took for some earlier
social and racial hierarchies, both international and domestic, to erode. But he
refuses to accept the fact that they have indeed eroded . One is left wanting more analysis of how and why the attitudes and patterns of
domination Vitalis describes gave way over time, and how the midcentury theorists and practitioners of the liberal
international order understood and handled the paradoxes of its halting and inconsistent implementation.
There is no monolithic IR – the field is reflexive and effective – its track record of
prediction proves. AND, sweeping criticisms of a fragmented field of research don’t
answer the specificity of our studies.
Dan Reiter 15. Professor of Political Science at Emory University. “Scholars Help Policymakers Know
Their Tools.” War on the Rocks. 8-27-2015. https://warontherocks.com/2015/08/scholars-helppolicymakers-know-their-tools/
This critique is both narrowly true and narrow in perspective. Context
is of course important, but foreign policy choices are
not sui generis, there are patterns across space and time that inform decision-making . Policymakers recognize
this and routinely draw lessons from history when making foreign policy decisions. As noted below, policymakers in other areas such as
broader scholarship can
improve foreign policy performance, as evidenced by the ability of IR academics to build on their own
work to predict outcomes, including for example forecasting the lengths of the conventional and
insurgency phases of the U.S.–Iraq conflict in the 2000s. But, even if one were to accept the limits of general work, there is a
development and public health routinely rely on broader, more general studies to craft policy. And,
growing body of academic work that evaluates foreign policy tools as applied to a specific country or region. These studies ask questions such as
whether: Development projects reduced insurgent violence in Afghanistan; Drone strikes reduced insurgent violence in Pakistan; Development
programs increased civic participation and social capital in Sudan; Building cell phone towers in Iraq reduced insurgent violence; Attempts to
reintegrate combatants into society in Burundi succeeded; Security sector reform in Liberia increased the legitimacy of the government there;
Road projects in India reduced insurgent violence; We can understand peacekeeping’s failure in Congo; Israel’s targeted assassinations reduced
violent attacks from militants. This is not by any means a dismissal of professional intelligence work. Academics are not intelligence analysts:
They do not have access to contemporary intelligence data, nor are they generally trained to do things like examine the latest satellite photos of
North Korean nuclear activities and make judgments about North Korea’s current plutonium production. And certainly, academic IR work can
never replace professional intelligence work. But the best policy decisions marry timely, specific intelligence with academic work that has a more
general perspective. A third critique is that much of this academic work on foreign policy tools is unusable by policymakers because it is too
quantitative and technically complex. Here, echoing a point made by Erik Voeten, there
is a danger in not appreciating the
importance of rigorous research design, including sophisticated quantitative techniques, for
crafting effective policy . Sophisticated research design is not the enemy of effective policy, it is
critically necessary for it. Certainly, the current academic focus on building research designs that permit
causal inference speaks exactly to what policymakers care about the most: if implementing a certain
policy will cause the desired outcome. Or, put differently, bad research designs make for bad public policy .
A classic example is school busing. In the 1960s and early 1970s, some cities adopted voluntary integration
programs for public schools, in which families could volunteer to bus their children to schools in neighborhoods with different racial
majorities. Policymakers used the favorable results for the voluntary programs to make the improper
inference that mandatory busing policies would also work. The result was bad public policy and violence
in the streets. Sophisticated technical methods can improve our ability to make causal inferences, and can
help solve other empirical problems . Consider that the heart of successful counterinsurgency is, according to U.S. military doctrine,
winning the support of the population. Assessing whether certain policies do win public support requires collecting
opinion data. A conventional method for measuring popular opinion is the survey, but of course, individuals in insurgency-stricken areas
may be unwilling to reveal their true opinions to a survey-taker out of fear for their personal safety. Methodologists have crafted
sophisticated techniques for addressing this issue, improving our ability to measure public support for the
government in these areas. These techniques have been used to assess better the determinants of public support in insurgency-affected
countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India. Going forward, we will continue to need advanced methodologies to
address pressing policy questions. Consider the U.S. military’s commitment to gender integration. The implementation of this
commitment will be best informed if it rests on rigorous social science that address outstanding questions. Is there a Sacagawea effect, in which
mixed gender units engaged in counterinsurgency are more effective than male-only units? How might mixed gender affect small unit cohesion in
combat? How might mixed gender units reduce the incidence of sexual assault, both within the military and of assault committed by troops
against civilians? Certainly,
other areas of public policy understand the importance of rigorous research
design. Economic and development policy communities read the work of and employ economics Ph.D.s.
Policymakers incorporate the findings of sophisticated studies on policy areas such as microfinance,
gender empowerment, and foreign aid, knowing the best policy decisions must incorporate these
studies’ findings. Or consider public health policy. Lives are literally on the line as decision-makers must make
decisions about issues such as vaccinations, nutritional recommendations, and air quality .
Policymakers know they must use sophisticated technical studies executed by epidemiologists and other
public health academics to craft the best policies. Critics will argue that some U.S. policymakers remain alienated from
contemporary academic IR work, with the suggestion that if IR academics let go of an obsession with technique, they will then be better able to
connect with policymakers and help them craft better policy. I agree that IR academics need to find ways to communicate their results in clear,
non-technical language. But the
technical components of the work need to be there . Stripping them out
directly undermines the ability of the research to give the right kinds of policy recommendations . Let
me conclude by noting that I am sympathetic to the concern that IR academics should think about the big picture as well as smaller questions, the
forest of grand strategy as well as the trees of foreign policy tools.
IR academics have the potential to make real
contributions to big picture debates , to think hard about the essence of grand strategy by assembling a framework that effectively
nature of the IR subfield and its integration of political economy and
security, and its ability to think about structure as well as units, make it especially well positioned to
consider these broad questions. The ability of IR academics to contribute to contemporary foreign policy debates is one of many
reasons why political science should retain the subfield of IR and resist the temptation to replace the traditional
empirical subfields of IR, comparative, and American with new subfields of conflict, political economy, behavior,
and institutions. Like good carpenters, foreign policymakers need to know their tools. Rigorous IR research is
the only way to evaluate them effectively .
integrates foreign policy means and ends. The
2ac 1
Extinction outweighs.
Plummer ’15 — Theron; Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Anne's College, University of
Oxford. They specialize in ethical theory, and are particularly interested in problems about the nature,
aggregation, and distribution of well-being, the relevance of numbers in ethics, and the normative
significance of persons. May 18, 2015; “Moral Agreement on Saving the World”; University of Oxford,
Practical Ethics; http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/05/moral-agreement-on-saving-the-world/;
//CYang
There appears to be lot of disagreement in moral philosophy. Whether these many apparent disagreements
are deep and irresolvable, I believe there is at least one thing it is reasonable to agree on right now,
whatever general moral view we adopt: that it is very important to reduce the risk that all intelligent
beings on this planet are eliminated by an enormous catastrophe, such as a nuclear war. How we might
in fact try to reduce such existential risks is discussed elsewhere. My claim here is only that we —
whether we’re consequentialists, deontologists, or virtue ethicists — should all agree that we should try
to save the world.
According to consequentialism, we should maximize the good, where this is taken to be the goodness,
from an impartial perspective, of outcomes. Clearly one thing that makes an outcome good is that the
people in it are doing well. There is little disagreement here. If the happiness or well-being of possible
future people is just as important as that of people who already exist, and if they would have good lives, it
is not hard to see how reducing existential risk is easily the most important thing in the whole world.
This is for the familiar reason that there are so many people who could exist in the future — there are
trillions upon trillions… upon trillions.
There are so many possible future people that reducing existential risk is arguably the most important
thing in the world, even if the well-being of these possible people were given only 0.001% as much
weight as that of existing people. Even on a wholly person-affecting view — according to which there’s
nothing (apart from effects on existing people) to be said in favor of creating happy people — the case for
reducing existential risk is very strong. As noted in this seminal paper, this case is strengthened by the
fact that there’s a good chance that many existing people will, with the aid of life-extension technology,
live very long and very high quality lives.
You might think what I have just argued applies to consequentialists only. There is a tendency to assume
that, if an argument appeals to consequentialist considerations (the goodness of outcomes), it is irrelevant
to non-consequentialists. But that is a huge mistake. Non-consequentialism is the view that there’s more
that determines rightness than the goodness of consequences or outcomes; it is not the view that the
latter don’t matter. Even John Rawls wrote, “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences
into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.” Minimally
plausible versions of deontology and virtue ethics must be concerned in part with promoting the good,
from an impartial point of view. They’d thus imply very strong reasons to reduce existential risk, at
least when this doesn’t significantly involve doing harm to others or damaging one’s character.
What’s even more surprising, perhaps, is that even if our own good (or that of those near and dear to us)
has much greater weight than goodness from the impartial “point of view of the universe,” indeed even if
the latter is entirely morally irrelevant, we may nonetheless have very strong reasons to reduce existential
risk. Even egoism, the view that each agent should maximize her [their] own good, might imply strong
reasons to reduce existential risk. It will depend, among other things, on what one’s own good consists in.
If well-being consisted in pleasure only, it is somewhat harder to argue that egoism would imply strong
reasons to reduce existential risk — perhaps we could argue that one would maximize her expected
hedonic well-being by funding life extension technology or by having herself cryogenically frozen at the
time of her bodily death as well as giving money to reduce existential risk (so that there is a world for her
to live in!). I am not sure, however, how strong the reasons to do this would be. But views which imply
that, if I don’t care about other people, I have no or very little reason to help them are not even minimally
plausible views (in addition to hedonistic egoism, I here have in mind views that imply that one has no
reason to perform an act unless one actually desires to do that act).
To be minimally plausible, egoism will need to be paired with a more sophisticated account of well-being.
To see this, it is enough to consider, as Plato did, the possibility of a ring of invisibility — suppose that,
while wearing it, Ayn could derive some pleasure by helping the poor, but instead could derive just a bit
more by severely harming them. Hedonistic egoism would absurdly imply she should do the latter. To
avoid this implication, egoists would need to build something like the meaningfulness of a life into wellbeing, in some robust way, where this would to a significant extent be a function of other-regarding
concerns (see chapter 12 of this classic intro to ethics). But once these elements are included, we can
(roughly, as above) argue that this sort of egoism will imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk. Add
to all of this Samuel Scheffler’s recent intriguing arguments (quick podcast version available here) that
most of what makes our lives go well would be undermined if there were no future generations of
intelligent persons. On his view, my life would contain vastly less well-being if (say) a year after my
death the world came to an end. So obviously if Scheffler were right I’d have very strong reason to reduce
existential risk.
We should also take into account moral uncertainty. What is it reasonable for one to do, when one is
uncertain not (only) about the empirical facts, but also about the moral facts? I’ve just argued that there’s
agreement among minimally plausible ethical views that we have strong reason to reduce existential risk
— not only consequentialists, but also deontologists, virtue ethicists, and sophisticated egoists should
agree. But even those (hedonistic egoists) who disagree should have a significant level of confidence that
they are mistaken, and that one of the above views is correct. Even if they were 90% sure that their view
is the correct one (and 10% sure that one of these other ones is correct), they would have pretty strong
reason, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, to reduce existential risk. Perhaps most disturbingly
still, even if we are only 1% sure that the well-being of possible future people matters, it is at least
arguable that, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, reducing existential risk is the most important
thing in the world. Again, this is largely for the reason that there are so many people who could exist in
the future — there are trillions upon trillions… upon trillions. (For more on this and other related issues,
see this excellent dissertation).
Rational realism is the best way to understand state behavior.
Glaser 18 (Charles, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington. “A
Realist Perspective on the Constructivist Project” in Mariano E. Bertucci, Jarrod Hayes, and Patrick
James eds. Constructivism Reconsidered. University Michigan Press. 181-196.
Wendt’s effort to explore the possibility that international anarchy can produce a much wider range of outcomes than is suggested by Waltz is a
productive move. Whether extensive security cooperation is possible under anarchy is the central question posed by structural IR theories.
Moreover, a variety of historical examples that run counter to Waltz’s claim about the persistent presence of competition—including restraint and
cooperation between powerful states, and substantial military capabilities that do not generate substantial insecurity—indicate the need for a more
encompassing theory. Wendt’s
focus on social variables, however, masks the potential of structural realist
and rational theories to explain variation in states’ policies under anarchy and thereby incorrectly
suggests that realist theories are incapable of explaining broad and basic variation in states’ strategies in
the face of anarchy. In fact, Wendt is explicit on this critical issue:
The real question is whether the fact of anarchy creates a tendency for all such interactions to realize a single logic at the macro-level. In the
Neorealist view they do: anarchies are inherently self-help systems that tend to produce military competition, balances of power, and war.
Against this I argue that anarchy can have at least three kinds of structure at the macro-level, based on what kind of roles—enemy, rival, and
friend—dominate the system.19
To appreciate why structural realism can explain and predict cooperation but that this possibility is
overlooked by Waltz, we need to return to his core argument. It turns out that the logic of Waltz’s arguments
requires the introduction of another variable: a state’s information about the opposing state’s motives .
Waltz holds that although states may have motives beyond security, their international behavior can be understood largely by assuming that they
are seeking only security. If, however, all
states knew that all the other states were security seekers (and if all states knew
that this is what the others knew), then the international system should not generate competition. This uncertainty
about the opposing state’s type lies at the core of the security dilemma, and, closely related, the security
dilemma lies at the center of structural realism’s ability to explain competition.20 If states did not face a security
dilemma, security seekers could always achieve their core objective while adopting policies that avoided generating competition. Once the
importance of uncertainty about motives is made explicit, including it as a variable is the natural next step
for the rational theory.
A key point for our discussion here is that structural
realism, or at the least the more general rational theory that logically flows from it, is
no longer a purely material theory . This matters because it means that distinguishing realist and
constructivist theories in terms of material versus ideational arguments—a broad category that is typically
understood to include information, norms, and causal ideas—no longer creates a sharp divide .
Including information about motives as a
key variable in a rational realist theory opens the door to arguments that address much of the terrain
also covered by Wendt’s structural constructivism. More specifically, the rational realist theory (1) explores the
nature of interactions that can enable states to revise their assessments of the opposing state’s type and thereby
generate more cooperative or more competitive policies, providing a more straightforward explanation
than Wendt’s changes in interests, (2) explains international cooperation under anarchy as a result of information
in combination with material factors instead of Wendt’s focus on identities , and (3) shows that Wendt has
both exaggerated and underestimated the potential for international cooperation, the former by
The implications reach beyond mere characterizations and definitions, however.
underplaying the role of material factors in constraining states’ choices and the latter by relying on states’
collective interests instead of pure security seeking, which is more neutral regarding cooperation. The
remainder of this section sketches these points.21
First, the realist theory provides an alternative explanation of how states’ interactions can influence their relationship and, in turn, their behavior.
Wendt argues that interaction between states is the key to their understandings of self and other, and that interactions play a central role in
determining whether the international system is competitive or cooperative. He holds that interaction cannot play this important role in realist
theories, because “realists would probably argue that each should act on the basis of worst-case assumptions about the other’s intentions,
justifying such an attitude as prudent in view of the possibility of death from making a mistake.”22 This is a reasonable reading of Waltz; since
he barely touches on a possible role for information about the opposing side, assuming the worst can be seen as implicitly running through his
formulation. Offensive realism makes fully explicit the requirement for states to assume the worst about opposing states.23 Contrary to this
position, however, rational states should not assume the worst when facing uncertainty about their adversary’s motives and intentions. Instead, at
least from a standard expected utility perspective, a state should consider the probability that the opposing state is a revisionist/greedy type as
opposed to status quo/security type. The state should also consider the danger if the opposing state is a greedy type; many types of cooperation
would not put the state at great risk, that is, death is not always, or even usually, the cost of misjudging the adversary’s motives. These arguments
lie at the core of the rationalist realist theory that includes information as a key variable defining a state’s international environment, which in turn
enables the theory to fully integrate the security dilemma into its arguments.
Given this realist formulation, states’ interactions can influence their understanding (their information) of the opposing state’s motives. When a
state takes an action that would be more likely to be taken by a security-seeking state than by a greedy state, the opposing state should positively
update its prior estimate of the probability that the state has security motives. Because
states have an incentive to mislead
adversaries , the opposing state should only find useful information when the state’s action is costly, that is, when
the state’s action is a “costly signal.” This occurs when a specific cooperative action would be more
costly for a greedy state than for a security-seeking state. Wendt describes a similar process of interaction but emphasizes
different changes and relies on different types of arguments— symbolic interactionism—not rational updating made possible by costly signals.
His arguments describe how states’ interactions can change their interests and identities, which in turn support cooperation in anarchy. The
rationalist explanation has the advantage of greater simplicity—it holds interests constant, does not involve the creation of social structures, and
does not require changes in interests—while appearing to explain essentially the same international phenomenon.
Second, the rational realist theory explains that anarchy can generate a variety of outcomes—including various degrees of competition,
cooperation, and mixtures of the two—that have much in common with Wendt’s three anarchies. According to the rational theory, whether a
securityseeking state should choose cooperation over competition depends on both material variables, which include the state’s power and
offensedefense variables, and information variables, which capture what a state knows about its adversary’s motives.24 Material variables largely
determine the military capabilities a state can acquire, given the opposing state’s ability to build military forces of its own. They determine the
types of military missions that states will be able to perform and their relative prospects for performing them successfully.
Information variables influence a state’s expectations about its adversary’s behavior, including reactions to the state’s own policies. The theory
explains that when defense has the advantage—that is, when holding territory or maintaining the capabilities required for deterrence are relatively
easy—states can achieve high levels of security without engaging in intense competition. When offense and defense are distinguishable—that is,
when the forces that support offensive missions would contribute less (or more) to defensive missions—states may be able to choose forces and
strategies that signal benign motives and to use arms control to increase the feasibility of defensive force postures. Information variables also
influence the prospects for cooperation. A state that believes the opposing state is likely to be a security seeker should be more willing to run the
risks of restraint and cooperation. These strategies have the potential to generate positive political spirals, which can in turn make states willing to
choose military strategies that pose smaller risks to others’ security.
In short, the
rationalist theory describes the conditions under which anarchy can produce cooperative
international security policies and relatively peaceful international politics. It both corrects Waltz’s
conclusion about the general tendency for anarchy to generate competition and shows that Wendt’s social
structure is unnecessary to produce this result. Again, the rationalist theory has the advantage of being
more straightforward, less complex, and more parsimonious than Wendt’s constructivist alternative.
Third, and related, the rationalist theory shows that Wendt is both too pessimistic and too optimistic, in different ways, about the prospects for
cooperation under anarchy. On the pessimistic side, the rationalist theory shows that cooperation is possible without introducing “friends,” that is,
states that have collective identities in which they value each other’s security as well as their own. According to the rational realist argument, the
states’ international situation is doing most of the work; nonfriends—security seekers that do not value others’ security—have fundamental
preferences that are relatively neutral between cooperation and competition. In contrast, collective identities and altruistic preferences play a
central role in the constructivist argument, and it views them as necessary for deep cooperation. My
point here is not that
considering the impact of collective identities is analytically flawed, but that relying on collective
identities to make extensive cooperation possible is a significantly weaker finding regarding the potential
of anarchy to allow and support cooperation. If, as seems likely, pure security seekers are much more
common than friends , then Wendt is pessimistic about cooperation under anarchy, in that he finds the possibility of cooperation
existing under narrower, less common conditions.
At the same time, however, Wendt
is overly optimistic about the prospects for cooperation because he fails to
adequately incorporate the constraints that information and material factors can impose on states’
policies. A strength of the rational realist theory is that it explicitly explains how both material
variables and information variables influence the prospects for cooperation, and how they interact. In
contrast, Wendt’s social theory does not bring in material factors and thereby implicitly ignores the
constraints they could impose. Wendt is partially correct in arguing that “History matters. Security dilemmas are not acts
of God; they are effects of practice.”25 States, however, do not get to choose their history at the time they
are making forward-looking decisions. Of course, in the past they did have partial control over it via the policy choices they made,
although these were constrained by information and material factors. At the time of a new choice, however, the past and its related
history are fixed and thereby impose severe constraints on states’ practice/choices. Their interactions may
start under information conditions that prevent them from overcoming material conditions that make
cooperative policies too risky. Moreover, these information conditions could reflect previous material conditions that required the
security-seeking state to compete, thereby signaling greedy motives, which contributed to the initial information from which the states begin this
round of interaction. Consequently, although
certainty or near certainty that the opposing state is a security seeker
could be sufficient to eliminate the security dilemma under even very dangerous material conditions,
states will not always have this information. Moreover, a state can face material conditions—for example,
offense dominance —that make cooperation too risky , even when the state believes that adversary is probably a securityseeking state. In short, states can face constraints that require them to choose competitive policies , which
can make the security dilemma still more severe and cooperation a still worse option .
Cap is good:
Capitalism is sustainable and solves warming.
Ogutonye, 21—Policy Lead, Science & Innovation Unit, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
(Olamide, “Should Tech Make Us Optimistic About Climate Change?,”
https://institute.global/policy/should-tech-make-us-optimistic-about-climate-change, dml)
In the middle of a climate emergency, it is challenging to stay upbeat. Yet the good news is that investment
in climate technology
has continued to grow since the early 2010s. US-listed companies involved with providing technology solutions
that support global decarbonisation have consistently outperformed the average since 2019 (Figure 7). Venture
capital (VC) investment in the sector grew tenfold between 2013 and 2018, representing five times the growth rate of the overall VC
market. By comparison, the growth rate of VC investment in Artificial Intelligence was a third of climate tech between 2013 and 2018 although
public investment in climate technology research has
continued to grow too. In 2019, government research and development funding for energy technologies alone
stood at $30 billion , with around 80 per cent of it aimed at low-carbon solutions.
AI is renowned for its uptick within the same timeframe. Beyond VC,
In addition to the positive role of technology, political
leaders are increasingly showing a willingness to make
ambitious commitments on climate. The Paris Agreement is a case in point. The international treaty was adopted in 2015 and
ratified internationally within a year – a much quicker pace than its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, which took eight
years. The Paris deal grew into a political snowball , galvanising further commitment from most of the
world’s leading emitters and arguably becoming the most symbolic climate event of the 21st century. The US withdrawal from
the Paris Agreement in 2019 dealt a political blow to the global pact although the decision, since reversed by President Biden, did not
resonate or last long enough to have any major impact.
The Biden-Harris administration has already indicated
that it will not sit on the fence but will instead revive the
country’s leadership on climate action. In the UK and elsewhere , similar efforts can be observed as
more countries commit to some form of net zero target . More than 100 countries have pledged a
commitment towards net zero, with estimates suggesting that over 70 per cent of global GDP and 55 per cent of
CO2 emissions are now covered by a similar target. A Climate Action Tracker Report indicates that the cumulative
effect of countries’ pledges to the Paris Agreement – if kept and fully achieved – could keep global temperature rise below 2.1°C
by 2100, putting the stated goal of 1.5°C within striking distance .
As explored in our recent Institute paper, there are also important insights for politicians in terms of applying lessons from the Covid-19
pandemic to the climate emergency. Although the pandemic is different in scale, complexity and timeline, it offers an immediate window into
how policy leaders can adapt and make decisions in order to better support climate innovation. Countries can also apply the “recovering better
together” principles outlined by the UN, which calls for a commitment to climate-related actions as economies recover from the Covid-19
More than 60 countries , including high emitters , are already making an explicit promise to
link their nationally determined contributions ( NDC ) to Covid-19 recovery , supported by the United Nations Development
Programme’s Climate Promise programme. Countries in the Global South are equally aligning their climate mission
with international support for various NDC support programmes. A green recovery can cut the level of 2030
emissions to 25 per cent lower than projections based on pre-Covid commitments and put the world close to a
slowdown.
2°C pathway. The pandemic has also highlighted the significance of tech innovation, not least in record-breaking vaccine delivery but also in the
suite of digital solutions developed for contact tracing, compliance monitoring and management of health-care records.
The global financial landscape is evolving to become more responsive to climate innovation. Since they were
first issued in 2007, green bonds have grown into what is now estimated to become a $1 trillion market . Analysts expect as
much as $500 billion of green bonds this year as the EU raises capital for its Covid recovery fund. From target-linked to transition bonds,
innovations in this green market are being used to bring projects in energy , transport , buildings and
other economic sectors to life. Investor-led initiatives such as Climate Action 100+, whose members control over $50
trillion of assets, are actively using funds to ensure the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters
commit to climate action. Other investor networks are pursuing a similar agenda, including Europe’s Institutional
Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC) and Australia and New Zealand’s Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC). Humanity’s
competence in technology and innovation will be central to the race in mitigating and tackling climate
change.
Capitalism solves war.
Mousseau, 19—Professor in the School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs at the
University of Central Florida (Michael, “The End of War: How a Robust Marketplace and Liberal
Hegemony Are Leading to Perpetual World Peace,” International Security, Volume 44, Issue 1, Summer
2019, p.160-196, dml)
Is war becoming obsolete? There
is wide agreement among scholars that war has been in sharp decline since
reject the idea that this trend
the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, even as there is little agreement as to its cause.1 Realists
will continue, citing states' concerns with the “security dilemma”: that is, in anarchy states must assume that any state that can
attack will; therefore, power equals threat, and changes in relative power result in conflict and war.2 Discussing the rise of China, Graham
Allison calls this condition “Thucydides's Trap,” a reference to the ancient Greek's claim that Sparta's fear of Athens' growing power led to the
Peloponnesian War.3
there is no Thucydides Trap in international politics. Rather, the world is moving rapidly
toward permanent peace, possibly in our lifetime . Drawing on economic norms theory,4 I show that what
sometimes appears to be a Thucydides Trap may instead be a function of factors strictly internal to
states and that these factors vary among them. In brief, leaders of states with advanced market-oriented
economies have foremost interests in the principle of self-determination for all states, large and small,
as the foundation for a robust global marketplace. War among these states, even making
preparations for war, is not possible, because they are in a natural alliance to preserve and protect
the global order . In contrast, leaders of states with weak internal markets have little interest in the global
marketplace; they pursue wealth not through commerce, but through wars of expansion and demands
for tribute . For these states, power equals threat, and therefore they tend to balance against the power of all states. Fearing stronger
states, however, minor powers with weak internal markets tend to constrain their expansionist
inclinations and, for security reasons, bandwagon with the relatively benign market-oriented
powers .
This article argues that
I argue that this
liberal global hierarchy is unwittingly but systematically buttressing states' embrace of
market norms and values that, if left uninterrupted, is likely to culminate in permanent world
peace, perhaps even something close to harmony. My argument challenges the realist assertion that great
powers are engaged in a timeless competition over global leadership, because hegemony cannot exist among great
powers with weak markets; these inherently expansionist states live in constant fear and therefore normally balance against the strongest state and
its allies.5 Hegemony
can exist only among market-oriented powers, because only they care about global
order. Yet, there can be no competition for leadership among market powers, because they always
agree with the goal of their strongest member (currently the United States) to preserve and protect the global
order based on the principle of self-determination. If another commercial power, such as a rising China,
were to overtake the United States, the world would take little notice, because the new leading power
would largely agree with the global rules promoted and enforced by its predecessor. Vladimir Putin's Russia, on
the other hand, seeks to create chaos around the world. Most other powers, having market-oriented economies, continue to abide by the
hegemony of the United States despite its relative economic decline since the end of World War II.6
To support my theory that domestic factors determine states' alignment decisions, I analyze the voting preferences of members of the United
Nations General Assembly from 1946 to 2010. I find that states
with weak internal markets tend to disagree with the
foreign policy preferences of the largest market power (i.e., the United States), but more so if they are major
powers or have stronger rather than weaker military and economic capabilities. The power of states with
robust internal markets, in contrast, appears to have no effect on their foreign policy preferences, as
market-oriented states align with the market leader regardless of their power status or capabilities . I
corroborate that this pattern may be a consequence of states' interest in the global market order by finding
that states with higher levels of exports per capita are more likely than other states to have preferences aligned
with those of the United States; those with lower levels of exports are more likely to have interests that do not align
with the United States, but again more so if they are stronger rather than weaker.
Liberal scholars of international politics have long offered explanations for why the incidence of war may decline, generally beginning with
the assumption that although the security dilemma exists, it can be overcome with the help of factors
external to states.7 Neoliberal institutionalists treat states as like units and international organization as an external condition.8 Trade
interdependence is dyadic and thus an external condition .9 Democracy is an internal factor, but theories of democratic
peace have an external dimension: peace is the result of the expectations of states' behavior informed by the images that leaders create of each
other's regime types.10 In contrast, I show that the
security dilemma may not exist at all and how peace can emerge in
anarchy with states pursuing their interests determined entirely by internal factors .11
Alt is either a coup or election campaign; both are impossible. Directly indicts Foster.
Tyler Hansen 21, Economics PhD Candidate, October 2021, "Three Essays on The Political Economy of
Global Inaction on Climate Change,” University of Massachusetts Amherst Economic PhD Program,
Doctoral Dissertations, 2334, https://doi.org/10.7275/23620313, pacc
A revolution
would entail halting capital accumulation , the central process of capitalism. The wealth of the capitalist
class—those who own most of society's productive resources—would be appropriated, and society's surplus would be
controlled collectively by either (1) the workers who produced it, (2) the community in which it was produced, or (3) the entire society. Wealth and
income caps would be required to prevent further capital accumulation of individuals and groups.
Private wealth is protected by property laws and law enforcement. These laws would have to be
changed, which would require control of political institutions. In a democracy like the U.S., control of these
institutions can come through elections or by directly taking power, i.e., a coup d'etat—removing current elected
(and unelected) officials from their positions of power. Both cases would require a mass anti-capitalist movement. Revolutionaries, including
Foster and
Malm , tend to frown upon the electoral approach, which is a longer-term reformist approach.22 Thus, I will assume that they are in favor of building a
mass anti-capitalist movement and directly taking power. To be successful, they would have to take
control of the military, which would otherwise put an end to the attempted revolution .
In the event that a revolution is successful, the revolutionaries would then have to re-build the economic, political, and legal institutions
that make up organized human society. There would be counter-revolution attempts by the former political and
economic elites and their supporters, and likely by external forces (i.e., other countries ). In the U.S., for example, they
would have to deal with Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the 74 million people who voted for Donald
Trump in the 2020 election. They would also have to establish relationships with international trading
partners to ensure that they can sufficiently provide for the entire population . Finally, they would have to
implement policies to reduce CO2 emissions in line with the 1.5-2 °C warming target, and create enforcement
mechanisms to deal with those who do not follow the policies, e.g., fossil fuel producers and
counterrevolutionaries .
Given the scale and timeframe for addressing climate change, the revolution approach is extremely
unlikely to find success. Moreover, its short-term strategy, i.e., what to do before a revolution, is unnecessarily restrictive—it rejects all policies that
do not go against the "logic of capital." Thus, like the degrowth approach, the revolution approach would make climate stabilization exceedingly difficult.
Empirical evaluation concludes the revolution is impossible.
Dr. David Calnitsky 21, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Western University,
Sociology PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 8/8/2021, “The Policy Road to Socialism,”
Critical Sociology, Sage Online
I do not, however, think that the revolutionary road is implausible. Rather, it is
impossible , at least inside the rich capitalist
democracies. And between the implausible and the impossible the choice is clear.
Again, this can be framed as an empirical
hypothesis: You do not see revolutions in developed capitalist
democracies . As Przeworski and Limongi (1997) have written, there has never been a revolution in a moderately middleclass democracy (see also Przeworski, 2019). Drawing on a thousand years of data , cumulatively collected across 37
democratic countries, they show that not one had collapsed with a per-capita GDP higher than that of
Argentina in 1976. Among countries with half that figure, collapse was exceedingly rare. Even a modest GDP brings with it an enormous amount of
regime stability. These
data in fact include any kind of regime collapse; narrowing the data to socialist
revolution makes the empirical case against it even more impressive . Any case for revolution must begin by
acknowledging rather than ignoring this evidence.
To look at this question in a different way, I draw on the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive, which contains information on revolutions (rather than
government collapse) for over 200 countries since 1919. Their definition of revolution is very broad (see footnote 7) and includes “attempts” to overthrow
government as well as “unsuccessful” rebellions. The data were compiled from newspaper sources and warrants caution, but nonetheless constitutes the most
systematic evidence available for these questions. In Figure 9, I present the GNP per capita distribution of revolutions, from 1919, where GNP is first available, to the
present. By considering only those country-years with revolutions I reduce the observation count from 17,520 to 184. Unlike Przeworski, I do not further restrict the
data to democracies. The graph displays an extreme skew: The vast, overwhelming majority of cases of revolutionary threat occur in countries with a per capita GNP
below $5,000 USD. For reference, the figure for the US in the data is about $65,850 in 2019. The hypothesis above—that we do not see revolutions in developed
democracies—seems borne out by the evidence.
figure
Figure 9. Histogram of country-years with revolutions.
Source: Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive. Data drawn from 200 plus countries between 1919 and 2018 are then restricted to country-years (N = 184) in
which there were “revolutions,” as well as a “major government crisis” and “anti-government protests.”
Why exactly is this true and what are the mechanisms to explain it? Why is the revolutionary strategy impossible for a country like the US? There are, at bottom,
three reasons, each of which stands alone as a sufficient condition to snap the last threads of one’s revolutionary faith.23 The first two suggest that revolution is
unachievable, and the last suggests that even if it is achievable, socialism by revolutionary means is unachievable. The
revolutionary road is
closed on the following grounds:
(1)
Workers do not want it
(2)
Capitalists would sooner grant reforms
(3)
A smashed state is more likely to result in tyranny than deep democracy
Not only has there never been a successful revolution in a developed democracy, there has never
been a working class that has wanted one (e.g. Erikson and Tedin, 2015; Sassoon, 1996).24 There are no clear cases where the dominant
inclination of the working class in a developed democracy was revolutionary. Recall that the above graph also includes attempts and unsuccessful cases. It is selfevident that workers have not joined revolutionary groups en masse at any point in the context of a rich democracy. Nor were their aspirations to join such groups
thwarted by violence or ideology. When gains inside a capitalist democracy are available—either individual or collective ones, and this has been true even through
the neoliberal period, where median living standards have continued to (slowly) go up and not down—it is not worth risking everything for an uncertain future
(Thewissen et al., 2015).25 More important than the dynamic point is the static one: When standards of living are moderately high, as shown in Figure 9, the modal
worker has more to lose than her chains. This is not an argument against socialism; but to revise Werner Sombart, the life raft of revolution really was shipwrecked
on shoals of roast beef and apple pie.
Therefore, the reasons workers are not revolutionary are materialist in character. Explaining their reformist politics does not require appeal to venal trade union
leaders or false consciousness. Most
people wish to minimize risk in their lives, and revolution involves taking on
colossal risks . For example, home-ownership in the developed world hovers around 70%; this means that a
lot of people have a lot to lose .
By contrast, the materialist case for revolution proposes that people favor it when their expected post-revolutionary standards of living are greater than their
current standard (Roemer, 1985). But when we add moderate risk- and loss-aversion the calculation changes (Kahneman and Tversky, 1991). Say you have a low
income, but own a few assets, maybe a house, a car, and perhaps you also have a child; what risk profile would you require to gamble your modest holdings for an
uncertain future which might be better but might be worse?
Even if you are certain that the probability of better is greater
than the probability of worse, you have to envision workers as a class of inveterate gamblers to take
the bet. Moderately cautious people who prefer a bird in the hand will still view the downside risk as too great.
Equal gains and losses are not experienced equally. This is the loss aversion phenomenon . But the assumption
of a population confident about improved standards of living—and a willingness to take risky strategies to achieve them—is itself unwarranted. This is the risk
aversion phenomenon. The modal worker is of course correct to suspect that her
post-revolutionary welfare is uncertain; socialists
after all do
not have satisfactory answers to the problems of coordination, motivation, and innovation
under socialism (for attempted answers that are provocative and oftentimes brilliant, see Albert, 2004; Cottrell and Cockshott, 1992; Corneo, 2017;
Roemer, 1994; and Wright and Hahnel, 2016). When one compares the status quo to a future where both heaven and
hell are seemingly plausible, it is perfectly rational that people everywhere would abandon the barricades . And
abandon them they did.
Now perhaps the revolutionaries have persuaded us that negative outcomes are far-fetched, that we are very confident that revolution will usher in, eventually, the
land of milk and honey. It is still the case that in this model the promised land will only be reached after a social breakdown of unknown duration: A complete
overhaul in the organization of production will lead to some middle period of deteriorating material welfare as capitalists rapidly exit the economy. This means
chaos and uncertainty, but it could also mean war. The interregnum could last a year, but it might last two decades, and however optimistic we are about the end
point, we cannot in advance know how long this interim phase will persist. In the meantime, revolutionary enthusiasm will wane, erstwhile supporters will decamp,
a “stay-the-course” electoral strategy will be outflanked by competitor parties promising a return to normalcy, and the desire to consolidate gains will make the
authoritarian impulse greater. From a materialist perspective, the uncertain passage through what Przeworski (1986) calls the “transition trough” makes the journey
less appealing.26
To my mind, these factors explain why
all working classes in all developed democracies have been decidedly
reformist in orientation. The reason why revolutionary socialism has always been marginal in rich capitalist
economies—and will always be outflanked by reform-oriented socialism—is that only the latter consistently deliver high (and
standards of living and low (and usually decreasing) levels of risk. As long as the Mad Max world of
catastrophic collapse can be avoided, reform-oriented parties will always better capture the enthusiasm of
poor and working people.
usually increasing)
Thus, when we try to explain the non-revolutionary attitudes of our working-class friends and family, we do not need to lean on the false consciousness account, for
there is a more parsimonious materialist explanation. As such, any case for revolution must be non-materialist in character: You can be a materialist or a
revolutionary, but not both.
This is the dilemma the revolutionaries must consider: Revolution
is only possible when the forces of production are
underdeveloped, but it can only be successful when they are sufficiently developed to make socialism
(or communism) objectively viable.27 As Elster (1986) has argued, the circumstances under which revolutions spark and succeed never coincide.
What about the capitalists? Under these circumstances, it is reasonable to expect that they will
fight far harder against a revolution
than they would against reformist drives. Indeed, ignoring the response from capitalists violates Elster’s first law of political rationality: Never
assume your opponent is less rational than you. If revolution were the alternative, employers would grant every
imaginable reform , from far higher taxes to the rejiggering of power relations in the workplace. In a mugging, most people will
surrender their wallet before their life .
Actors in the
state ought to respond in more or less the same way—that is, as long as you admit your adversary the competence to read the situation as well as
you. If our theory of the state suggests that it acts on behalf of the capitalist class, its apparatchiks would anticipate and
preempt any revolutionary crusade with a cocktail of concession and repression . And while it will certainly contest
reforms, it
will devote all of its resources to break the revolution. Nonetheless, this means that revolutionaries can play a crucial
role, even if it is not to foment revolution. Militancy is a powerful strategy to foment reform (for an argument about the history of social democracy along these
lines, see Piketty, 2014).
Thus far, the main reason revolution is off the table is because no one wants it—not workers, nor employers, nor the state.
The third point above asks us to imagine the prospects for revolutionary success even if we ignore the wrinkle that workers have neither an interest nor capacity to
make it. But let us pretend they did:
Why then would we imagine that total social breakdown would prompt a deepening
of democracy rather than authoritarian entrenchment? This happy outcome has never before
emerged in the wake of social collapse, and there is little reason why the final showdown with the
American military ought to produce fertile ground for deepening democracy in all spheres of life. In fact, evidence from
the General Social Survey suggests that in response to recession and economic downturn people tend to become less altruistic and less concerned with questions of
fairness.28 After situations of economic crisis, voters tend to shift to the right (Lindvall, 2014). The old union song cries out that “we can bring to birth a new world
from the ashes of the old,” but life is not birthed on ash. None of the historical case studies track this narrative, and indeed everything we know about human
psychology suggests that social devastation makes people more, not less, prone to demagoguery. This means that
even if a revolution were
achievable, it is probably undesirable .
The argument I have thus far laid out against revolution contends only that it is off the table in middle-class democracies. I have in mind social dynamics within
developed capitalist democracies, countries “like the US,” but the premise no longer holds true if we imagine a society that has already suffered some sort of
catastrophic societal disintegration—at that point all bets are off. We are of course now talking about a world we are not living in, but it is worth considering the
thought experiment nonetheless.
It is possible that America, after some world-historic environmental or economic collapse, begins to look something more like Russian feudalism than contemporary
developed capitalism. Revolution then might again be on the table, but the context of desperation and scarcity in this scenario gives little reason to expect it would
incubate an egalitarian democratic society. The
historical evidence is unambiguous: None of the communist
revolutions of the 20th century ushered in deeply democratic egalitarian social structures. Not only are there
no examples , but there are also no clear mechanisms on offer.
The fact that this scenario generates an interest in bringing about an egalitarian society by means of revolution does not mean there will be a capacity to do so. The
theory is little more than “where there is a will there is a way.” But, as Elster (1980: 124) argues, the general interests of society do not secrete the conditions for
their fulfillment. Interests and capacities need not overlap.
There is a final reason to be skeptical of non-evolutionary strategies: The highly dubious premise that the system we erect the morning after will actually work. A
socialist economy, if plopped down tomorrow, would be so rife with unintended consequences and pathologies that it
is easy to imagine a democracy voting its way back into capitalism . This is true even if we believe (mistakenly, in my view)
that the socialist calculation debate is solvable in the age of big data (Morozov, 2019). Interlocutors in the calculation debate have had very little to say about the
politics of transition. Indeed, it
is hard to imagine success of any kind without a slow and incremental transformation,
experimenting with bits and pieces along the way—as we have been doing for the past century. An experimental
approach is likely the only way to avoid devastating blunders that undermine the whole project .
Moments of institutional upheaval and big change may at times be necessary, but to be successful they will have to rest on a foundation of smaller changes that
have been tested.
Utopian fiat is a voter for fairness and education – debating the goals of an alt instead of
its mechanism isn’t reciprocal and makes it impossible to be aff – kills real-world agency
by disincentivizing imagined solutions to problems.
International fiat is a voter – alt fiat of international fiat bad for education and fairness – skews the debate
since it’s a moving target and impossible to answer
Private actor fiat is a voter
Agathangelou reduces groups to stereotypes and reproduces imperial IR.
Christopher Murray 20, PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations at the London
School of Economics, “Imperial dialectics and epistemic mapping: From decolonisation to antiEurocentric IR,” European Journal of International Relations 2020, Vol. 26(2) 419–442.
Then there are definitions of epistemic difference based on ‘lived experience’. Although an
improvement on territorial or raciological accounts, the ascription of cultural difference to a generic
lived experience or social subjectivity can also reduce groups of people to stereotypes and monolithic
value sets. This is evident in the work of some scholars who take Fanon primarily as a source of
‘epistemic blackness’, without fully addressing his concerns about racialisation and the geopolitical
dimensions of decolonisation. For example, the philosopher Lewis R. Gordon writes that ‘Fanon’s
body. . . is a subtext of all his writings. ... Anxiety over embodiment is a dimension of Western
civilization against which Fanon was in constant battle. The body, he laments, is a denied presence, and
black people are a denied people’ (Gordon, 2015: 8). Even in as sophisticated an analysis of Fanon as
Gordon’s, there is a danger of essentialism through the association of black identity with a particular
way of thinking. For Fanon, black people were not so much universally ‘denied’ as relegated to
certain roles within a social hierarchy – the French empire most specifically. Blacks could be of
higher or lower status, but race was the basis for social relegation, which alienated the subject from
a full, dynamic humanity. For Fanon, every particular experience is an instantiation of the
universal, and his analysis of his own experience is a demand to be recognised as a fellow human with
an equal stake in humanity. Blackness is not a generalisable perspective from which we can derive a
non-Western knowledge, but a reminder to pay attention to the social and historical specificity of
relation.9
Embodiment arguments are usually the vehicle for Fanon’s presence in IR, and are often accompanied
with the claim that non-Westerners have profoundly different ways of practising politics or being
modern. For example, Vivienne Jabri (2014) invokes Fanon to theorise the ‘embodied presence’ of
non-Western agency within international order. Anna Agathangelou (2016) links different aspects of
Fanon’s revolutionary dialectics to his conception of the subjugated black body. She is particularly
interested in how Fanon’s conception of racial experience might present alternatives or ‘different’
ways of doing politics (Agathangelou, 2016: 111; cf. Sekyi-Otu, 2009). In a similar argument, John M.
Hobson contrasts the ‘different critique’ of ‘African-American Marxists’, including Du Bois, with ‘white
Eurocentric institutional thinkers’ like Leonard Woolf (Hobson, 2012: 17, n. 20). However, the difference
is not as stark as Hobson might hope. It is true that Woolf’s anti-racism was qualified by a belief in elite
institutional development, but so was Du Bois’s anti-imperialism.10 Areas of overlap are, thus, obscured
by the assumption that there are ‘black’ and ‘white’ ideas, which can be mapped onto generic ‘black’
and ‘white’ social realities.
Aside from its dubious reliability, the problem with epistemic mapping is essentially the same as the
problem with the ethnicised counter claims of Du Bois or Senghor: it is too amenable to the purposes
of imperial ordering and elite representation. It creates and services the two worlds of Said’s
orientalist divide, rather than building an agenda based on analytical approaches that constructively
problematise the divide.
Liberal root cause of war is an ahistoric myth – their “Empire” impact can’t explain
why Western intervention happened in Libya and Iraq but not in Yemen
Benno Gerhard Teschke 11, IR prof at the University of Sussex, “Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl
Schmitt's international political and legal theory”, International Theory (2011), 3 : pp 179-227
For at the centre of the heterodox – partly post-structuralist, partly realist – neo-Schmittian analysis stands the conclusion of The Nomos: the thesis of a structural and
continuous relation between liberalism and violence (Mouffe 2005, 2007; Odysseos 2007). It suggests that, in sharp contrast to the liberal-cosmopolitan programme of
‘perpetual peace’, the geographical expansion of liberal modernity was accompanied by the intensification and de-formalization of war in the international
construction of liberal-constitutional states of law and the production of liberal subjectivities as rights-bearing individuals. Liberal
world-ordering
proceeds via the conduit of wars for humanity, leading to Schmitt's ‘spaceless universalism’. In this perspective, a straight line is
drawn from WWI to the War on Terror to verify Schmitt's long-term prognostic of the 20th century
as the age of ‘neutralizations and de-politicizations’ (Schmitt 1993). But this attempt to read the history of
20th century international relations in terms of a succession of confrontations between the carriernations of liberal modernity and the criminalized foes at its outer margins seems unable to
comprehend the complexities and specificities of ‘liberal’ world-ordering, then and now . For in the
cases of Wilhelmine, Weimar and fascist Germany, the assumption that their conflicts with the Anglo-American liberal-capitalist
heartland were grounded in an antagonism between liberal modernity and a recalcitrant Germany outside its
geographical and conceptual lines runs counter to the historical evidence. For this reading presupposes that late-Wilhelmine
Germany was not already substantially penetrated by capitalism and fully incorporated into the capitalist world economy, posing the question of whether the causes of
WWI lay in the capitalist dynamics of inter-imperial rivalry (Blackbourn and Eley 1984), or in processes of belated and incomplete liberal-capitalist development, due
to the survival of ‘re-feudalized’ elites in the German state classes and the marriage between ‘rye and iron’ (Wehler 1997). It also assumes that the late-Weimar and
early Nazi turn towards the construction of an autarchic German regionalism – Mitteleuropa or Großraum – was not deeply influenced by the international
ramifications of the 1929 Great Depression, but premised on a purely political–existentialist assertion of German national identity. Against a reading of the early 20th
century conflicts between ‘the liberal West’ and Germany as ‘wars for humanity’ between an expanding liberal modernity and its political exterior, there is more
evidence to suggest that these confrontations
were interstate conflicts within the crisis-ridden and nationally uneven
capitalist project of modernity. Similar objections and caveats to the binary opposition between the Western discourse of liberal humanity against
non-liberal foes apply to the more recent period. For how can this optic explain that the ‘liberal West’ coexisted (and keeps
coexisting) with a large number of pliant authoritarian client-regimes (Mubarak's Egypt, Suharto's Indonesia, Pahlavi's
Iran, Fahd's Saudi-Arabia, even Gaddafi's pre-intervention Libya, to name but a few), which were and are actively managed
and supported by the West as anti-liberal Schmittian states of emergency, with concerns for liberal
subjectivities and Human Rights secondary to the strategic interests of political and geopolitical stability
and economic access? Even in the more obvious cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, now, Libya, the idea that Western intervention has
to be conceived as an encounter between the liberal project and a series of foes outside its sphere seems to
rely on a denial of their antecedent histories as geopolitically and socially contested state-building
projects in pro-Western fashion, deeply co-determined by long histories of Western anti-liberal colonial and post-colonial legacies. If these states (or social forces
within them) turn against their imperial masters, the conventional policy expression is ‘blowback’. And as the Schmittian analytical
vocabulary does not include a conception of human agency and social forces – only friend/enemy
groupings and collective political entities governed by executive decision – it also lacks the categories
of analysis to comprehend the social dynamics that drive the struggles around sovereign power and
the eventual overcoming , for example, of Tunisian and Egyptian states of emergency without US-led
wars for humanity . Similarly, it seems unlikely that the generic idea of liberal world-ordering and the
production of liberal subjectivities can actually explain why Western intervention seems improbable in
some cases (e.g. Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen or Syria) and more likely in others (e.g. Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq , and Libya).
Liberal world-ordering consists of differential strategies of building, coordinating, and drawing liberal and anti-liberal states into the Western orbit, and overtly or
covertly intervening and refashioning them once they step out of line. These
are conflicts within a world, which seem to push the
term liberalism beyond its original meaning. The generic Schmittian idea of a liberal ‘spaceless
universalism’ sits uncomfortably with the realities of maintaining an America-supervised ‘informal
empire’, which has to manage a persisting interstate system in diverse and case-specific ways. But it is
this persistence of a worldwide system of states, which encase national particularities, which renders challenges to American supremacy possible in the first place.
At: campbell
a.
NATO inevitable – only a question of US leadership making it effective.
Savage 17 – Pat Savage is a Master’s Student in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown
University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. His concentration is in U.S. National Security
Policy, and his research focuses primarily on Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, and the former-Soviet
Union. (Gssr, "NATO Without America: A Grim Prognosis," Georgetown Security Studies Review, 3-142017, https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2017/03/14/nato-without-america-a-grim-prognosis/,
Accessed 7-24-2022, LASA-SC)
Statements made by candidate and now-President Donald Trump on the US commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have
caused much consternation
throughout the alliance over the past year. President Trump has previously suggested that
US support for NATO should be conditional on nations paying their fair share, with former-President Obama
assuring the world after the election that Mr. Trump would be fully committed to the alliance.[i] Since taking office, President Trump has
vacillated on support for NATO. He contradicted Defense Secretary James Mattis by stating NATO is obsolete, but then made an about-face to
declare support for the alliance.[ii] NATO has
weathered its share of crises over its nearly 70 years of existence.
While unlikely in the short term, it is worth considering whether the alliance could survive without the
unconditional backing of the U nited S tates given President Trump’s unclear intentions.
On paper, NATO has the potential to be
viable as a collective security organization without the United States. Remove the
U nited S tates from the equation and NATO retains 27 member states with nearly 600 million people[iii] and a combined nominal
GDP of almost $ 20 trillion .[iv] This should be more than adequate to build a self-sufficient military
infrastructure. A majority of NATO’s members are also deeply connected both politically and economically through the European Union.[v]
In the long term, a NATO without the United States may not only be feasible, but desirable. However , these rosy structural facts belie
a more troublingly reality in NATO’s immediate future.
When looking at NATO’s short-term
viability, the picture is far less positive without the substantial commitment of the
United States. The most obvious item of concern if the US were to leave or moderate its commitment to NATO in the short term
would be sheer manpower . In 2016, the alliance had a combined troop strength of around 3.1 million active duty personnel.
Without the United States, that immediately drops by nearly half to somewhere below 1.9 million personnel.[vi] This
ignores thousands of pieces of military equipment that would no longer support NATO, including armored
vehicles, aircraft, and ships. Granted, Russia—the most prominent threat to NATO—has significantly cut down its active duty forces in
recent years, estimated at just over 900,000 active duty personnel in 2016.[vii] However, the exact number of reservists Russia has
at its disposal is unknown, and could be anywhere from 2 to 20 million personnel depending on the scale of a call up.[viii] While
NATO forces may have an advantage in training, equipment, and organization, past a certain point quantity surpasses quality. Russia
has also been increasing efforts to update its military arsenal, purchasing new weapons and equipment to close that gap as
well.[ix]
The more important question, however, may be who
would assume the burden of leadership for the alliance in the
absence of the United States. Among the most influential of NATO’s members, there is no obvious candidate to take the
lead if the United States were to step aside, and all the obvious candidates face their own significant political issues at home and
abroad. The United Kingdom’s relationship with continental Europe has been strained in the aftermath of its vote to leave the
EU. Its relationship will be further tested in the months and years to come as that process plays out.[x] Germany’s President-elect, former
Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has broken with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coalition with a more
conciliatory tone towards Russia. He has criticized NATO policies on sanctions and military exercises.[xi] Meanwhile,
France remains in a constant state of high alert following a string of terrorist attacks over the past several years—a threat it
is not alone in facing—with new plots being uncovered and thwarted in February and troops remaining deployed on the streets.[xii]
These existing political issues are aggravated by the fact that the UK, Germany, and France all face populist or nationalist surges in their
domestic politics, a trend seen across Europe. The UK Independence Party played an instrumental role in Britain’s decision to leave the EU.
National Front candidate Marine Le Pen is highly likely to make it to the second round of the French presidential election this year. The
Alternative for Germany party of Frauke Petry and Jorg Meuthen seems poised to gain its first seats in the Bundestag following elections this fall.
Among a laundry list of controversial policy positions, these parties have tended to either have highly critical views of NATO, close ties to
Russia, or both.[xiii] While the United States is obviously not without its own domestic political issues, the relative size, power, and strength of
its institutions all put it in a better position to simultaneously deal with such issues and wrangle NATO at the same time. It is questionable
if
Britain , France , or Germany would be able to do the same if the mantle of leadership fell upon them.
If the United States were to leave NATO in the next four years, even if the alliance were not to collapse
immediately, the ensuring vacuum would call into question its short-term survivability . But even if President Trump
does not truly plan to leave NATO, the longer the doubt over continued US participation, the greater damage this
uncertainty creates. It encourages political forces within member states not consistent with NATO’s
values and it may encourage potential adversaries to undertake provocative and aggressive actions. It is
critical that President Trump be more consistent and clear in voicing his desire to remain in the alliance, and
frame whatever criticisms he has of NATO—which are not baseless—in the context of improving the alliance. It is also critically important that
the President strive to set a better domestic political example for NATO allies as they face increasing levels of political instability and uncertainty
of their own. More than his own approval ratings may be riding on his ability to be a unifying political figure.
b. Key to deter Russia – absent strong attribution standards, Russia seeks to
exploit weapoints in the alliance – that’s Kulsea
c. The 1AC is Westplaining NATO bad without a viable alternative – both sidesism is wrong – voting AFF is alignment with fascism
Brom 22 – Co-Editor at Freedom News, lifelong anarchist [Zosia, “Fuck leftist westplaining,” 3/4/2022,
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2022/03/04/fuck-leftist-westplaining/]
This text isn’t exclusively about the ongoing Russian invasion in Ukraine either as much as it is about a
much wider trend in Western leftism. You can apply the points raised below not only to the discourse around Eastern Europe and the so-called
post-Soviet world. Similar themes were, disgracefully, displayed in the leftist discussion around the Syrian War, for example. Large parts of the left,
supported by their glorious leader Jeremy Corbyn, struggled to identify who is in charge of the vast majority of the war
crimes committed in Syria (Spoilers: it was, ofc, Assad supported by Putin). But, while back in the day I partook in some Syria
solidarity actions, I also do not think it is my place to speak about this conflict. There are better people to do this, and if they are so inclined then I can say: be my
guest.
This text was written with consultations with other Eastern European comrades. I am signing it with my name, mainly so you can then give me the joy of an
accusation of myself being CIA-funded or something, but be informed that many East Europe leftists are on the same page here, and we have been discussing it for a
while now.
This text will be a bit chaotic and I request you put up with this. Like most Eastern Europeans, I have spent the past week or so living in some kind of haze, where
news cycles really last 24hrs, there is no sleep, and your phone rings constantly. Some of my friends, those from Central and Eastern Europe mostly, want to share
their worries, they are organising support networks, collecting money, publishing How-To-Flee-Ukraine guides in multiple languages, cooking, driving scared and
exhausted people to their temporary accommodation. Many, rightfully, share their disgust in the differences in how the Polish state and society (and wider, European
states and societies) approach another “refugee crisis” just a bit further north, on the Belarusian parts of the Polish border, or the “refugee crisis” in other parts of
Europe. Some are facing the very real possibility of finding themselves in combat soon. Some worry about their family currently in a war zone, some are in this war
zone themselves. All are angry. All are sad to the point you are unlikely to understand.
While you are exchanging hot takes on Twitter, we are busy.
Every day, I wake up and the first thought in my head is: the
Russian Army is invading Ukraine. After a few days of a sluggish
parade, it looks like they are now seriously aiming at Kyiv. I have never thought I will be coming up with such sentences in a
present tense. It is terrifying. You, the Westerners, will never get it. Partially because most of yous have a completely different
experience of history, and it is that of living your life in a dominating country. Partially because you can’t be arsed to listen, and you never were. It is just simply
inconvenient for you to give an idea that won’t fit to your already established view of the World a thought, and let’s face it, deep down most of you think that your
ideas and your concepts are better, and more legit.
Western exceptionalism is a worm in your brain, a worm you pretend to escape, only to
parade your yankee, Queen of England ignorance around. You are better and more legit. You have better insights. You are used to being listened to. You not gonna
use Google translate, because how come things are not in English, the terror!
But the Westerners call too, so I do my best explain the basic stuff I grew up with and some of the stuff that was passed on to me by the generations of trauma. Or
the worst: they want to explain to me how this is a NATO created
conflict , or, if they happen to feel more generous, they come up with some kind of “both sides to blame” rhetoric.
what is the correct pronunciation of Kharkiv. Or,
Look, Ukrainians are waving national flags, FASCISTS! If we could erase and dismiss your entire regions as easily as you do ours we absolutely would, sadly the
internet is once again, also pretty much controlled by your lot. Well done – direct action right now would be log off, at least our timelines would be polluted less.
Your lack of knowledge on the issues of Russia and the rest of the world formerly behind the Iron Curtain
is, frankly, astonishing, surprising and the lack of curiosity – shameful. In London and the wider UK, you got comrades
coming from all these countries that joined the EU since 2004 and apparently you have never bothered to even attempt to understand what we are about. We were
good for some things, mainly, in the leftist reflection of the mainstream trope of a “Polish builder” or “Lithuanian cleaner” (good, hard-working, simple people), we
The unique
version of Orientalism that you hold towards us, seeing as either simpletons, or racist, primitive, but
honourable – you know exactly what we mean, admit it.
were good for more hands-on stuff. But never good enough for actually having opinions: apparently even about the stuff we grew up with.
I came to the UK in 2004: 18 years ago. Culturally, it was and still is a very bizarre experience and maybe one day I will write another rant about it. One of the aspects
of it is the tolerance, or simply embracement, of the Soviet imagery and sentiments (the sentiments and imagery, let me point out, that do not belong to you). At some
point, you guys made Red London, a Stalinist page, the most popular leftist FB page in the country. You tolerate giant portraits of Stalin and Mao on Mayday
marches, and fucking hell, in 2017 you tolerated the flag of something called Syrian Social Nationalist Party being sported on Mayday march in London, despite it
looking fascist AF even without any knowledge on Syria.
To you it’s all a joke to put on a mug or your other merch. Fuck you.
You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a
turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of “antiimperialist” hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the
Russian empire and beyond. Similarily, in your heads, NATO and other Western organisations are always
on the wrong side, and always perpetrators of everything bad in this world. You could, ofc, google it, but who would bother
if you have such intellectual figures as Noam Chomsky with his disgraceful, relativising stances to tell you what to think.
In the weeks coming to the Russian invasion, the Westerners contributed a fair few texts to Freedom and in them, they tried to push this narrative. I rejected them all
as they were dishonest and frankly gaslight-y. In response, one of you, someone I published before, got back to me, asking “where have you been in the past 20
years?” and “‘Being Polish’ is no kind of response at all”. Ofc, in their mind, “being British” is enough to have strong opinions on the issues affecting other nations,
and other people’s borders. As we know, it usually ends really well when British people do this, innit.
So, let me tell you a few things about Eastern Europeans and NATO and Russia.
We see NATO in a completely different, and I dare say much more nuanced way. We are not fans of it, and we can agree with you on many, many reasons to criticise
you say “Fuck NATO” or “End NATO expansion”, what I hear is that you do not care about
the safety and wellbeing of my Eastern European friends, family and comrades. You are happy to put my mum at risk for
it. But when
cheap political points you would not even be able to act on, you bastards!
When you talk about “expansion”, with everything this word implies, really, you are referring to this process in which Eastern Europe, for the reason of other
countries making decisions over our heads in 1945, quite literally tip-toed around Russia petitioning it to allow us do what we wanted to do. Eventually, this resulted
in Russia signing something called the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation. This happened in
May 1997 and Russia, finally, agreed to what you are now calling “expansion” provided that certain conditions are met. These conditions effectively made us secondclass members of NATO, but hey ho, that is all we could get and we went for it. Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary joined NATO in 1999, the Baltic countries
followed in 2004. And for now, I want them to stay there, and it doesn’t have much to do with politics tbh. It is a self-preservation instinct, but this is another thing
you will just not get. You talk more about “NATO expansion” than you talk about the fact that you are the funding members of it.
talk about how you desire to stop “NATO expansion” but you don’t really mention what,
exactly, would be a viable alternative to it. This is not acceptable at all, it just shows your privilege of
growing up in a country where your life story was not littered with, how exciting, tantrums and aggressions of
various scales of this great, unpredictable force that assumes it can throw its way anywhere where there is
no NATO. So tell me, how exactly will you assure our safety? What is this NATO alternative you are advocating for? Have you
Further, you
considered asking us what we think of it? Or did you just decide, as you did many times in your history, and to many other countries you felt superior towards, that it
will be you, and your leaders, who will be setting the cards on the table, and we just need to submit? Did you already take out your ruler to make straight lines on the
map, except that this time it will be the map of the place where I grew up?
And this is beyond Personal is Political – what is most enraging is that the people doing the Westplaining are absolutely the same
ones that will cry over Trump over Twitter, but will not lift a finger to get his yilk out! You are not some soldiers, you are cowards! And when you are a coward, the
only self-respect you may have is some moral virtue, or superiority. It
may get you followers, but it costs lives, it costs faith, it costs
political disorientation, it reproduces docility. Antifascism is protecting people from individuals with
structural power. Right now that is Putin. If you are protecting his hegemony over his vast and
increasing empire , if you are What Abouting into helplessness , you are part of the aggressor. So pick up a weapon, or organise a
fundraiser, or welcome a refugee, but even more preferably at this point – shut the fuuuuck up. Log out, touch grass, leave this war with people that actually know
what they’re fighting for. You’re fighting for likes – it’s humiliating – to the left in general, and to future generations who will be left demoralised, rather than inspired
to fight for a world sans dictators. Yes, your leaders are some of them, so take care of taking them down. Sadly we seldom even trust the leaders you’d put in their
place. This is the level of faith that you’re losing. Look in the mirror, destroy the imperialist exceptionalist cop inside your head. Good luck.
Or, at the very least, learn how to pronounce our names properly. JFC.
d. NATO no longer does “out-of-area” combat missions – the only times they do
activities are done through norm promotion and soft balancing
Mihalache 17, Oana-Cosmina, Political Science at the National School for Political and Administrative Studies, Bucharest, “NATO’s
‘Out of Area’ Operations: A Two- Track Approach. The Normative Side of a Military Alliance,” Croatian International Relations Review, vol.
23, no. 80, 11/27/2017, pp. 233–258
For more than six decades , NATO has been the leading actor in terms of collective defence in the EuroAtlantic space. Part of a framework that was tributary to the bipolar logic that shaped the entire Cold War period, the military alliance — whose basis was laid
in April 1949 in Washington DC — was then counterbalanced by the Warsaw Pact created in 1955 as a competing alliance. The division on the West-East axis was
also exerted in terms of political propensities, the security umbrella provided by NATO representing an important stability factor that allowed post-war European
political integration, one of the three main purposes assumed by the military alliance. In fact, the assumption that the only purpose of NATO was to stand as an
opposing pole to the Soviet threat was the main reason for deeming it obsolete and antiquated once the Soviet Union was dismantled. Still, the US was from the
beginning disposed to keep its military presence on European soil, even though the Soviet threat would disappear. The American officials intended to keep their
commitment towards Europe long term, as NATO was seen as an instrument of the US hegemonic strategy on the Old Continent. Indeed, Christopher Layne, one the
proponents of the offshore balancing strategy,1 noted that the behaviour towards Europe was not indicative of such a strategy, with no intent to retire militarily once
the Cold War logic lost its meaning (2011: 148– 149). In accordance with the stated purpose of this paper, the strategy of offshore balancing does not explain the
redesign of NATO’s strategic purpose, nor the US and EU burden sharing, nor the former’s leading role in some of the missions, as will be discussed later.
In a multipolar world, threats, too, have diversified and now the main crises in which the US and
Europe are involved have their roots outside the Euro-Atlantic space . Even if the only time the famous
Article 5 was invoked was after the attack on 9/11, the main concentration of effort in terms of ensuring
security has been seen in the eastern border of the Alliance or in its ‘near abroad’, which conveys the image of a
regional alliance with global ambitions.
Recent crises that have threatened security on European soil — namely the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and the terrorist attacks that saw hundreds
of victims in 2015 alone, to which we can add the proliferation of non-state actors and non-conventional weapons, the nationalist contagion that threatens the EU from
the inside, and the unresolved crisis in the Middle East with spill-over effects — have all challenged the role of NATO in ensuring security on its eastern flank.
NATO’s continuous efforts to adapt its strategy and capabilities to the new regional and global
security environment are of paramount importance for both the allies and the regions outside its perimeter
which can become targets for an ‘out of area’ operation. While some argue that collective defence
should remain the core task of the alliance, others press for a holistic approach towards new threats and a
widening of the security agenda , thus adding a normative aspect into the security melting pot. This
would imply a different strategic calculus for each different security situation, as the balancing behaviour vis-à-vis a
single threat — the USSR — is no longer applicable to the new security environment. The formation of alliances is, in the view of
Hans Morgenthau, “the most important manifestation of the balance of power” (1948: 137). In a realist vein, he explains the balance of power as a behaviour aimed
either to decrease the power of the stronger or to increase the power of the weaker. Apart from alliance formation, other methods to achieve it are divide and rule,
compensations or armaments (1948: 134–137). This provides an explanation for why the United States and the states of Western Europe formed an alliance at the end
of the 1940s, namely in order to prevent an invasion from the Soviet Union. However, realist theories that deal with great power behaviour in the case of decline —
called power transition theories — failed to predict the end of the Cold War, and thus realists tried to adapt their theories to the post-Cold War environment (Lebow
1994: 251).
This paper contends that in
this new security paradigm, the behaviour of NATO is based on model promotion,
norms diffusion and a soft balancing behaviour, as a new Strategic Concept proved and as will be detailed.
In 2014, the Wales Summit Declaration reinforced one of the ‘3Cs’ defining the three core tasks of the Alliance since the 2010 Strategic Concept, namely collective
defence, as the most important task of the Alliance (Major 2015: 2). “The greatest responsibility of the Alliance is to protect and defend our territories and our
populations against attack, as set out in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty” (NATO 2014). The other two Cs are crisis management and cooperative security, the
former being the main security framework comprising strategic tools for NATO operations outside its borders. According to Cohen, the broad concept of crisis
management includes both conflict prevention and crisis response (Cohen and Mihalka 2015: 17–18), with a shift in focus from reactive defence to prevention and
diplomacy. We can therefore argue that NATO
has become a promoter of stability outside its borders and therefore an active
diffuser of norms, values and security
, while trying to define its proper role between that of a regional alliance and a global one.
One of the purposes of this paper is to unfold the idea that the missions in which NATO engaged on its periphery, starting with Bosnia and Kosovo and then Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to name but the most important and large-scale ones, highlight the normative scope of this military
alliance, while at the same time marking a shift in the key priorities of the Alliance. In order to achieve the stated purpose, one idea of departure is that the ‘out of area’ missions in which NATO has engaged can be approached from a two-track perspective: a normative one with regard to
enlarging the scope of engagement and a role of agenda setting for NATO, as these conflicts have contributed to better shaping the role of the Alliance in the light of new threats and challenges.
From a methodological point of view, this paper will be based on qualitative research, namely analysis of the content of docu ments, employing comparative analysis in order to highlight the change in role for NATO. The argument will start from the assumption that the security agenda of the
Alliance was widened as a response to the numerous crises — in number and the variety of threats involved — that loomed over its periphery, requiring answers distinct from a sole military aspect. The second part of the argument will focus on the idea that NATO has surpassed its regional
role, demonstrating a strategic pendulum that situates it between a regional and a global focus. This part of the paper will involve employing some theoretical aspects that were first developed in the study of Europeanization to explain the diffusion of norms and valu es. Before concluding, the
focus will shift between the two sides of the coin when it comes to “out of area” operations, arguing that the lessons from each intervention were sometimes incorporated into success in the next one, while at other times they were dismissed and led to a loss of legitimacy within the Alliance. This loss of legitimacy can also be explained
through the lack of credibility for an intervention in the first place, as was the case in Iraq, after the coalition forces did not manage to find the weapons of mass destruction allegedly developed by the Saddam regime on which the intervention was initially based (Mahnken and Keaney 2007: 246).
NATO 2.0: ‘out of area’, towards a normative community
This part will develop the argument that successive interventions abroad sparked the need for a redefining of purpose in terms of both terms of engagement and a departure from a strategy of path dependency. This implied taking steps towards the creation of a normative community and leaning towards a strategy of norms balancing, namely a strategic framework devised to counteract
diverse threats by model promotion. Unlike the balance of threats approach imposed by the structural conditions during the Cold War, this paper argues that the ‘out of area’ operations pushed NATO to adopt a model of response to threats that is preventive in scope rather than reactionary, as previously indicated with regard to the 2010 Strategic Concept.
Initially based on a membership of 12 states when it was founded in 1949 with the signing of the Washington Treaty, NATO now comprises 28 states, bound by, some argue, a transatlantic security community of shared values and common interests (Kroenig 2015: 50–52). After the Soviet threat no longer posed the greatest danger to Western security, and the threat looming from Russia
was one in a basket of threats different in nature and scope, NATO’s security agenda began to focus on its ‘near abroad’, whether it was about the ex-communist spheres of influence or the area outside the traditional sphere of influence as defined by Article 6 of the founding Treaty. The process of ‘uploading’ stability outside its perimeter began just after the Cold War ended, with the
enlargement policy and the intervention in Bosnia Herzegovina to resolve an ethnically motivated conflict. After a decade, NATO raised worries about “leaving the continent” by expanding its missions, undertaking counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and fighting against piracy threats far in the Gulf of Aden and Horn of Africa. In many of the conflicts in which NATO
undertook reconstruction or stabilization missions — Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, Afghanistan — the emerging vacuum of power in the conflicts’ aftermath was replenished with extremist forces. This made the deployment of troops for post-conflict stabilization not only an institutional inertia or an undertaking to justify NATO’s post-Cold War scope, but a necessity. The modelling of
the new NATO role thus arose from the need to construct a counter-narrative for different threats that loomed in areas of strategic interest. The concept of normative power was used by Ian Manners with relation to EU’s foreign policy, and in this regard he mentions many factors that influence the process of norm diffusion, being contagion, informational diffusion, procedural diffusion,
transference, overt diffusion and the cultural filter (2002: 244–245). He also mentions that the process of norm diffusion took place with almost no physical force. In the case of NATO, a shift in strategy that accompanied the campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan marked the leaning towards a normative and civilian rather than purely military-based approach. More precisely, the
Commander of ISAF troops in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, advised reducing the level of violence (NATO Headquarters 2009). This led to the creation of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams aimed at providing security for the civilian population and promoting a certain approach towards quelling the violence (Marston 2008: 231).
Starting from the dichotomy outlined by Barry Buzan (1997) regarding the security agenda — that between traditionalists, who argue in favour of keeping the focus on military threats, and wideners, fervent supporters of keeping the security framework open to threats in the economic, environmental or societal realms — we can move on to assess the expanding NATO agenda. In this
of
area’ operations have long moved ahead of strict military interventions that keep the state as a referent
object for security. The intervention in Libya (authorized by the UN Security Council in 2011 as per Resolution 1973) can be
viewed as an example of a humanitarian intervention driven by the NATO principle of “responsibility to
protect” ( R2P ) (Kuperman 2013: 105), with a focus on protecting civilians , and so on human security. In fact, this reorientation of
regard, the analysis will focus on a change in the Alliance’s purpose from that of military defence to peace-keeping and humanitarian interventions, thus comprising the diffusion of norms and values with a Western imprint.
Drawing on the experience in Libya, we can say that ‘out
purpose was initiated in the 1990s, as the end of the Cold War pushed for a shift in the strategic development towards non-Article 5 crisis management (Webber 2009:
1).
However, this change in focus cannot be approached in isolation from other developments, such as the advanced techniques and changing nature of military affairs, as
the greater mechanization of war also brought greater civilian damage and increased difficulty in protecting the population — hence the efforts for rehabilitation that
followed. On top of that, two interventions, namely Vietnam (on the part of US mainly) and Iraq, marked a shift in public support for wars, as the atrocities against the
civilian population horrified public opinion in the member countries. In the case of the Iraq war, for example, public support waned between 2003 and 2006, with 80
per cent of the US population supporting the war initially and 60 per cent claiming that things were going in the wrong direction in 2006 (Pirnie and O’Connel 2008:
17). The need for humanitarian intervention was looming. The literature supporting the idea that the mechanization of war made the great powers like the United
States less effective in small wars — due to factors like the great burden for the population and difficulty in intelligence gathering (Caverley 2010: 122) — seemed to
support the idea that a counterbalancing effort was needed, on humanitarian and moral grounds, to further justify the interventions and counterinsurgency actions of a
military alliance. We can thus argue that the evolution in military affairs also acted as a catalyst with regard to a new approach towards crisis for NATO. Due
to
the increasingly asymmetrical nature of the conflicts in which NATO was involved during out of area
operations, the development of its normative nature and humanitarian assistance arm can be
considered a complementary toolkit meant to address challenges in a holistic way. In the case of
Kosovo , for example, the air campaign brought a new perspective for looking at this kind of intervention. More
precisely, it showed the impossibility of inflicting casualties on NATO and a new type of coercion brought
by the massively asymmetrical nature of the cost and benefit balance: NATO had zero casualties during
the air campaign and air power proved to be an important factor in the capitulation of Belgrade (Byman and Waxman 2000). On the one
hand, in order for an alliance to survive, the benefits shared among its members must exceed the costs: in the case of the air campaign in Kosovo, the benefit of
winning was not adumbrated by the cost in casualties. Indeed, “securing assistance from others is less expensive than providing its own forces at the margin”, as
Morrow (1993: 214) notes, but benefits became less and less quantifiable in the new strategic approach of NATO.
The mahatma card doesn’t apply - Mahatma about commodification – not aff don’t sell personal data but
share very specific forensic intel with allies which isn’t a commodification
1AR
Capitalism is antiracist.
Paul F. deLespinasse 20. Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian
College. “Capitalism no friend to racism”. https://www.gazettetimes.com/news/local/paul-fdelespinasse-capitalism-no-friend-to-racism/article_85bac3a8-805b-587d-97250e10f09547a8.amp.html
Some people argue that eliminating racism requires getting rid of capitalism. But racism existed before
capitalism developed. Since racism exists in non-capitalist societies, capitalism can't be blamed for it.
True, in
some ways capitalism is friendly to racism.
Capitalism combines mostly free markets with predominantly private ownership of the means of production, except for land and other natural
resources. (Privately owned natural resources aren't essential characteristics and must probably be abandoned if capitalism is to survive. The
alternative isn't governmental ownership of natural resources, but ownership by the public, with government acting as a trustee for it.)
In a market economy people are free to enter into voluntary associations, created by mutual consent, to exchange
or transfer inducements. People can hire and be hired, buy and sell, mostly at mutually agreed-upon prices.
Mutual consent being required, racists can refuse to enter voluntary associations with members
They can refuse to hire them, sell to them or buy from them.
of the target race.
Racism is rooted in stereotyping, assuming that "when you have seen one (person of a certain race), you have seen them all." Since all
individuals are unique, stereotyping is stupid, but freedom includes freedom to act stupidly.
To this extent capitalism is racism's ally.
But there is another side to this story.
Although capitalism's freedom allows people to indulge their prejudices, it makes them pay for doing
so . Their economic interest would be to hire the best available people without considering their race and
to sell to all willing customers. Not doing this reduces their income.
Since buyers and sellers want to make the best deals possible, capitalism pushes society away from racist
behavior even though it won't immediately eliminate racist thinking. A notable example was a well-known bigot who
owned a sports team and hired black athletes because she wanted her team to win.
Racist thinking, though, should be undermined by capitalism's encouragement of voluntary associations
between people of different races. Personal relations can undermine people's tendency to think in
terms of stereotypes.
The American South was not capitalistic before the Civil War . Slaves did not give their consent to be associated
with their owners. Their association was involuntary, not voluntary. They were kept in bondage by sanctions —government's power of the
sword.
Capitalism didn't come to the South even after the Civil War. Once the attempted "reconstruction" reforms
ended, state governments prevented the normal anti-racist capitalistic tendencies from working.
Segregation made it illegal for white people and black people to enter into many kinds of voluntary
associations with one another, to work together, to go to school together, even to marry. The fact that governments enacted such
legislation indicates their fear that people otherwise would associate with those of different races.
These restrictions
clearly violated the basic essence of capitalism : freedom of voluntary association by mutual
consent of the parties. Racist societies are not expressions of capitalism, but its contradiction .
And they violated a fundamental requirement of good government: the rule of law. Genuine laws must be general rules of action and cannot
impose sanctions on people on the basis of their race.
Some more recent legislation attempting to force bigots to stop discriminating on the basis of race also contradicts the basic capitalistic
principle. How can people be forced to enter voluntary associations without their consent when such associations, by definition, require mutual
consent?
It is no wonder that today's very well-intended antidiscrimination law is such a conceptual mess. (Open accommodation — first come, first
served — laws, however, seem to work well.)
Although capitalism enables bigots to discriminate, it makes them pay an economic price in the form of
lost business and lost opportunities to employ the best people. Economic interest tends to pull people
together.
Capitalism and racism are basically deadly enemies .
Markets solve sustainability and are the only way to solve warming
Adler 22, Jonathan H. Adler is the Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and Director of the
Coleman Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law;
"How Markets Make Economic Growth Sustainable," Reason, 3-30-2022,
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/03/30/how-markets-make-economic-growth-sustainable/, Accessed 4-212022, LASA-SC
Fifty years ago, researchers at MIT produced The Limits to Growth, a report on how existing economic trends foretold environmental ruin. Left
unchecked, the authors
predicted, expanding populations and economic growth would exhaust global resources and
ultimately prompt civilizational collapse . The models upon which Limits was based suggested that global reserves of copper, silver,
lead, tin, zinc, and petroleum would have all run out by now, and the world would be struggling to find enough arable land to feed a population of
over 7 billion people. Without governmental efforts to change global trends, "[t]he most probable result will be a rather sudden and
uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity," the authors warned. As should be obvious, the predictions
offered in
The Limits to Growth (and other contemporary doomsayers) were wildly off the mark . Among other things, they failed to
account for how markets respond to scarcity , producing incentives for efficiency and innovation , so
that we may do more with less. In short, the authors failed to understand why markets encourage sustainability. Those
predicting imminent depletion of global resources and exhaustion of the earth's carrying capacity also failed to predict what
is arguably the most important -- and under-appreciated -- positive environmental trend of the 21st century:
Dematerialization of modern economies. The same economic incentives which forestalled resource exhaustion have
actually enabled people to do more with less throughout the developed world. This dramatic development is
chronicled in Andrew McAfee's book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources — and
Dematerialization may be the most
important , yet unsung, example of environmental progress in the 21st century. It is commonplace to observe that the
What Happens Next, which I reviewed for Regulation. Here is an excerpt from my review:
relentless drive to do more with less has led to more efficient resource use, so that a soda can today is made with a fraction of the metal required
50 years ago. But dematerialization is not merely a story about increased efficiency or per‐capita reductions. What
is now being observed
represents a fundamental decoupling of resource consumption from economic growth, such that as mature
economies grow, they not only use fewer resources per unit of output, but they also consume fewer resources
overall. In short, economic growth in the most developed nations increasingly coincides with a net reduction in resource
consumption. Let that sink in. It is not merely that we are using resources more efficiently in countries like the United States. It's also that
we are actually using fewer total resources year-over-year. The United States uses less gold, steel, aluminum, copper, stone,
cement, and even paper than it did at the start of this centur
y, despite the continued increase in gross domestic product. Annual consumption of all but six of the 72 resources tracked
by the U.S. Geological Service are " post peak ." We also use less fertilizer and water while growing more crops. Plastic
consumption is up, as is energy use, but these two appear to have been decoupled from population and economic
growth as well. How does this dematerialization occur? Some examples may be useful. The dematerialization of soda cans is relatively easy
to grasp, particularly for those of us who can remember the heavier cans of the 20th century. Aluminum cans weighed 85 grams when introduced
in the 1950s. By 2011, the average can was under 13 grams. Cans today are not only thinner and lighter, they are produced more efficiently, with
fewer separate sheets of metal. Substitution can be an even more powerful source of dematerialization. Consider
telecommunications. A single fiber optic cable made from less than 150 pounds of silica can carry the same volume of information as multiple
1‑ton copper cables. And were that not enough, satellite and wireless technologies enable us to bypass the use of physical cables altogether. We
can communicate more and yet use vastly less material to do so. This not only saves copper, but other resources too.
Think of all the paper saved by e‑mail, e‑banking, and e‑readers. Not only did neo-Malthusians not
predict these developments, they failed to recognize that such trends would be driven by private
markets, and not governmental regulation. We do more with less not because of government regulation or
administrative direction, but because of capitalism and technology . These are the dominant forces driving
dematerialization in the most developed countries and they could unleash similar gains in the rest of the world . We
"want more all the time, but not more resources," McAfee notes. We want more of what resources can provide, and one way to get more is to do
more with less. Market
capitalism both facilitates and enhances the underlying incentives that drive efficiency gains
and technological advance. This not only leads to dematerialization but also promotes "critical aspects of well‐being," including health
and prosperity. Unfortunately, these trends are not universal. While we consume fewer resources in developed nations, these trends have not (yet)
taken hold in many developing countries, which often lack well-functioning market economies. We have also not observed equivalent trends in
many forms of pollution, largely because emissions are not priced the way consumption is. An
entrepreneur who figures out how
to produce widgets while using less copper gains an economic advantage, as the copper must be paid for.
An entrepreneur who figures out how to emit fewer particulates or nitrogen oxides does not, as emitting such pollutants is not meaningfully
priced and contemporary regulations rarely create meaningful incentives for emission reductions on the margin. Understanding
what has
encouraged and allowed for dematerialization at the same time that populations have expanded and economies have grown is essential
if these trends are to be replicated in developing countries and if we are to meet contemporary
environmental challenges , including climate change . A suite of policies designed to replicate the same market dynamics
that have led dematerialization could spur meaningful decarbonization . Ill-conceived policies, on the other hand, could
actually do more harm than good. This is but one more reason policymakers should be more interested in fiscal instruments than regulatory
mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Another article in the same issue of Regulation as my More from Less review notes that
greenhouse gas emissions in the United States may have peaked in 2005, and that GHG emissions appear to initially
increase , but then decline , with economic growth. Such trends are not observed, however, in less-developed and less-marketoriented economies, such as China. The authors, Bruce Yandle and Jody Lipford, think this indicates that domestic GHGs could
continue to decline going forward, even without new government policies . This may be so, but the reductions are
nowhere near what would be achieved if carbon emissions were priced and there were more powerful market incentives for market
decarbonization. Greater
market incentives for decarbonization could also lead to the development and
deployment of low-carbon technologies that could facilitate emission reductions in other countries as
well, and given that climate change is a global concern, such measures will be necessary if atmospheric
stabilization is to be achieved. The bottom line is that competitive markets create powerful incentives for
efficient and sustainable resource use. Market-driven innovation has made it possible to provide for more
people using fewer resources. Such environmental successes are often ignored because there is no policymaker or program than can
take credit for them. They are the result of market processes, not governmental direction or design.