1nc t – exemption
A. Interpretation – the aff must increase the number of visas or expand beneficiary eligibility – providing
an exemption is contextually distinct
AILA, 06 – American Immigration Lawyers’ Association (Position Paper, “Eliminating the Employment-Based Visa Backlog: Vital
to America’s Economic Competitiveness.” http://www.klc-ltd.com/pdf/Visa_Backlogs.pdf)
The second piece of EB-related legislation AILA supports is the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act (S. 1033), sponsored
by Senators McCain and Kennedy. This legislation would:
• exempt immediate relatives of U.S. citizens from visa quotas
• increase the number of EB visas to 290,000 • recapture unused visa numbers from prior years
Exemptions don’t alter the cap – leaves the process intact
H1Bvisa.info, 10 – “The USA - H1B Work Visa Program - Explained and Made Easy How to Find and Obtain H1B Jobs and Visa
Sponsorship.” http://www.h1bvisa.info/h1b_cap___quota)
The number of new H1B visas issued each year in the United States is subject to an annual congressionallymandated quota. Each H1B quota applies to a particular Financial year which begins on October 1. Applications for the upcoming
Financial Year are accepted beginning on the preceding April 1 (or the first working day after that date). Those beneficiaries not
subject to the annual quota are those who currently hold H1B status or have held H-1B status at some point in the past six years and
have not been outside the United States for more than 365 consecutive days. This annual quota has had a significant impact on the IT
industry. It has generally been set at 65,000 visas per year, with some exceptions for workers at exempt organizations like universities
and colleges (note: contrary to popular belief, non-profit organizations are not automatically exempt, but may be so if affiliated with a
university or college). In 2000, Congress permanently exempted H1B visas going to Universities and Government Research
Laboratories from the quota. During the early years of this quota in the early 1990s, this quota was rarely actually reached. By the
mid-1990s, however, the quota tended to be filled each year on a first come, first served basis, resulting in new H-1Bs often being
denied or delayed because the annual quota was already filled. In 1998 the quota was increased first to 115,000 and then, in 2000, to
195,000 visas per year. During the years the quota was 195,000, it was never reached. In FY 2004, the quota reverted to 90,000 when
the temporary increase passed by Congress in 1999 expired. Since then, the quota is again filling up rapidly every year, making H1B's
again increasingly hard to get. More recently, the basic quota was left at 65,000 but with an additional 20,000 visas possible for
foreign workers with U.S. advanced degrees. In FY 2007, beginning on October 1, 2006, the entire quota of visas for the year was
exhausted within a span of less than 2 months on May 26, 2006, well before the beginning of the financial year concerned. The
additional 20,000 Advanced Degree H1B visas were exhausted on July 26. For FY 2008, the entire quota was exhausted before the
end of the first day on which applications were accepted, April 2. Under USCIS rules, the 123,480 petitions received on April 2 and
3 that were subject to the cap were pooled, and then 65,000 of these were selected at random for further processing. The additional
20,000 Advanced Degree H-1B visas for FY 2008 was exhausted on April 30. In its annual report on H1B visas released in November
2006, USCIS stated that it approved 131,000 H1B visas in FY 2004 and 117,000 in FY 2005. The inflation in
numbers is because H-1B visas can be exempt from the caps if the employer is a University or Research Lab.
This is a voting issue –
First, limits – there are thousands of industries that the aff could choose to exempt –
Second, ground – lets the aff circumvent the core of the topic since they only make minor modifications to
who actually gets visas. They don’t have to make any actual change to the visa process – this means we
can never get generic links to the heart of the literature on the visa process
T has to be a voting issue – otherwise the aff would win every round on a new, non-topical aff – your
ballot sets a precedent for what the community considers topical
1NC (Free Trade Version)
GOP will win the House now.
Nate Silver, NYT, “G.O.P. Now Projected to Gain 53 House Seats,” 10/27/2010, http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/choppy-day-in-houseforecast-projected-g-o-p-gains-inch-forward-to-53-seats/#more-2783
Republicans strengthened their position in a couple of districts that received fresh polling from The Hill. In particular, John Spratt, the longtime
Democratic incumbent in South Carolina’s 5th congressional district, was shown 10 points behind the Republican, Mick Mulvaney. Because the district had not
received polling in some time, the poll has a lot of influence on Mr. Spratt’s forecast. The model now gives him just a 12 percent chance of holding his seat, a sharp
decline from 53 percent yesterday.
The chances for two other Democrats, John Salazar in the Colorado 3rd district, and Baron Hill in the Indiana 9th, also dropped on The Hill’s
polling.
But the same set of polls contained good news for other Democrats whom it tested, like Leonard Boswell in the Iowa 3rd district, and the
two Democratic incumbents in the Dakotas, Earl Pomeroy and Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin, although both Mr. Pomeroy and Ms. Herseth-Sandlin are still rated as
underdogs in the model.
Another Democrat to see her odds improve today was Colleen Hanabusa in the Hawaii 1st district, who was given a 5-point lead in a new poll that ordinarily has a
strong Republican lean. Ms. Hanabusa is one of two Democrats favored to knock off a Republican incumbent, along with Cedric Richmond of the Lousiana 2nd district
in New Orleans.
The Democrats’ position on the generic ballot also improved slightly, particularly with a Marist College poll showing them in an overall tie with Republicans among
likely voters, a better result than most other recent polls.
But this improvement was offset by a series of downgrades made by CQ Politics, which changed its ratings in a
couple dozen races, almost all of the changes favoring Republicans. The model gives a heavy emphasis to the race ratings issued by
CQ and the three other agencies that it tracks.
Overall, the
model resolved these changes in favor of Republicans, who added one more seat to their projected
total for the second evening in a row. The model’s best guess is that the new Congress will be composed of 203
Democrats and 232 Republicans: a net gain of 53 seats for the G.O.P.
B. Action on immigration is key to Dem victories.
Lawrence, 8/12/10 – Washington, DC-based immigration policy specialist (Stewart J. “Obama and Latinos.” Counterpunch.
http://www.counterpunch.org/lawrence08122010.html)
President Obama’s
decision to sue Arizona over its proposed immigration enforcement law may have reflected the administration’s honest
judgment that such laws are repugnant and violate federal authority. But the lawsuit was also calculated election-year politics, a way of
stigmatizing the GOP, and rallying the liberal faithful, especially Latinos. A Gallup poll in June found that
Latinos were increasingly disaffected from Obama and his policies, while the President’s favorability rating with Whites and Black
was unchanged. From a high of 69% in January, Obama's rating with Latinos had fallen 12 points to 57%. Among Spanish-speaking Latinos, the drop was even more
According to Gallup, the slide was largely due to Obama’s failure to pursue comprehensive immigration
reform, a cause that is near and dear to the country’s fastest-growing ethnic constituency, which some pollsters rightly refer
to as the “sleeping giant” of American politics.
But thus far the Obama gambit isn’t working - and that spells trouble. According to the most recent polls, a
majority of Latinos - nearly 60%, in fact - are still disappointed with his handling of immigration. Unless that
perception is reversed, the Democrats face electoral disaster this November.
Without a strong Latino turnout in at least 30-35 congressional races where their votes could sway the outcome,
the GOP is almost certain to recapture the House, regaining control of the key committee and subcommittee
chairmanships that will shape the nation's policy agenda – including immigration - leading up to 2012. And Republicans could also win a
precipitous: 25%.
majority of the governorships and state legislatures which would allow them to dominate the upcoming federal redistricting process, influencing the composition of the
House for at least another decade – perhaps two.
C. GOP win is key to block cap and trade.
John Juech, Garten Rothkopf, “The 2010 Midterm Elections: Races to Watch, What It Means for Energy Policy,” 7/22/2010, http://www.gartenrothkopf.com/grenergy-climate-briefs/the-2010-midterm-elections-races-to-watch-what-it-means-for-energy-policy.html
With the Midterm elections now one-hundred and three days away, the weak economy driving the political conversation, increasing concerns over longterm deficits, and a growing sense that Democrats will suffer significant losses in the upcoming election, debates
over climate and energy policy are likely to be upended once again. Whether or not the Republicans regain control of the House or Senate,
or both, increased gridlock is likely, as President Obama’s policy goals run into a new Congress with more elected
Republicans running on platforms skeptical of carbon pricing or emissions controls (and eagerly planning to do what they can
to cut back on spending). Today’s announcement by Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) was merely a recognition of the fact that
comprehensive plans will have to be set aside in favor of a pared down set of agenda items that could actually
pass.
In the first of a series on the implications of the 2010 Midterm elections, today’s GR Energy and Climate brief takes a look at the Midterm elections, focusing
on key bellwether states, and assessing the impact of the forthcoming elections on energy and climate policy.
D. Cap and trade collapses global trade.
Nader and Heaps – 12/7/08 (Ralph, consumer advocate and three-time presidential candidate, and Toby, coordinator of Option 13, a campaign to help
broker a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, “Junk Cap-and-Trade,” http://www.counterpunch.org/nader12052008.html)
If President Barack Obama wants to stop the descent toward dangerous global climate change, and avoid the trade anarchy that current approaches to this problem will
invite, he should take Al Gore's proposal for a carbon tax and make it global. A
tax on CO2 emissions -- not a cap-and-trade system -offers the best prospect of meaningfully engaging China and the U.S., while avoiding the prospect of unhinged
environmental protectionism. China emphatically opposes a hard emissions cap on its economy. Yet China must be part of any climate
deal or within 25 years, notes Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, its emissions of CO2 could amount to twice the combined emissions of
the world's richest nations, including the United States, Japan and members of the European Union. According to the world authority on the subject, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it will cost $1.375 trillion per year to beat back climate change and keep global temperature increases to less than
Cap-and-traders assume, without much justification, that one country can put a price on
carbon emissions while another doesn't without affecting trade or investment decisions. This is a bad assumption, given false
two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
comfort by the Montreal Protocol treaty, which took this approach to successfully rein in ozone-depleting gases. Chlorofluorocarbons are not pervasive like greenhouse
Good intentions to limit big polluters in some countries but
not others will turn any meaningful cap into Swiss cheese. It can be avoided by relocating existing and new
production of various kinds of CO2-emitting industries to jurisdictions with no or virtually no limits. This is known as
carbon leakage, and it leads to trade anarchy. How? The most advanced piece of climate legislation at the moment, the
Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, contains provisions for retaliatory action to be taken against imports
from carbon free-riding nations. Married with the current economic malaise, the temptation to slide into a
righteous but runaway environmental protectionism -- which Washington's K Street lobbyists would be only too
happy to grease -- would almost certainly lead to a collapse of the multilateral trading system. This scenario was
gases (GHGs); nor was the economy of 1987 hyperglobalized like ours today.
presented to the world's trade ministers last December at the United Nations climate talks in Bali by David Runnalls of the International Institute for Sustainable
Development. True, trade
anarchy might reduce emissions via a massive global depression. But there would be a lot of
collateral damage.
E. Global nuclear war
Copley News Service, December 1, 1999, “Commentary”
For decades, many children in America and other countries went to bed fearing annihilation by nuclear war. The specter of nuclear winter freezing the life out of planet Earth seemed very real. Activists protesting the World
nations join together in groups like the WTO not just to further
their own prosperity, but also to forestall conflict with other nations. In a way, our planet has traded in the threat
of a worldwide nuclear war for the benefit of cooperative global economics. Some Seattle protesters clearly fancy themselves to be in the mold of
Trade Organization's meeting in Seattle apparently have forgotten that threat. The truth is that
nuclear disarmament or anti-Vietnam War protesters of decades past. But they're not. They're special-interest activists, whether the cause is environmental, labor or paranoia about global government. Actually, most of the
demonstrators in Seattle are very much unlike yesterday's peace activists, such as Beatle John Lennon or philosopher Bertrand Russell, the father of the nuclear disarmament movement, both of whom urged people and
nations to work together rather than strive against each other. These and other war protesters would probably approve of 135 WTO nations sitting down peacefully to discuss economic issues that in the past might have been
As long as nations are trading peacefully, and their economies are built on exports to other
countries, they have a major disincentive to wage war. That's why bringing China, a budding superpower, into the WTO is so important. As exports to the United States
settled by bullets and bombs.
and the rest of the world feed Chinese prosperity, and that prosperity increases demand for the goods we produce, the threat of hostility diminishes. Many anti-trade protesters in Seattle claim that only multinational
corporations benefit from global trade, and that it's the everyday wage earners who get hurt. That's just plain wrong. First of all, it's not the military-industrial complex benefiting. It's U.S. companies that make high-tech
goods. And those companies provide a growing number of jobs for Americans. In San Diego, many people have good jobs at Qualco mm, Solar Turbines and other companies for whom overseas markets are essential. In
Foreign trade today accounts for 30 percent of our gross
domestic product. That's a lot of jobs for everyday workers. Growing global prosperity has helped counter the
specter of nuclear winter. Nations of the world are learning to live and work together, like the singers of anti-war songs once imagined.
Those who care about world peace shouldn't be protesting world trade. They should be celebrating it .
Seattle, many of the 100,000 people who work at Boeing would lose their livelihoods without world trade.
CP 1NC
The United States federal government should exempt non-Russians from the employment-visa quota and
preference category system if they hold an advanced degree in science or technology from a school in the
United States.
The Russians are trying to push more spies in the country – legal residency is key
Hennessy and Knight ‘10 (Peter and Richard, 17 August, “Russia's intelligence attack: The Anna Chapman
danger”, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10986334)
**Cites Stephen Lander, former Director-General of M15**
But that's not how everyone saw it. Sir Stephen Lander, Director-General of MI5 until 2002, has told a BBC Radio 4 documentary,
Why Russia Spies, that the very existence of a ring of Russian "illegals" (spies operating without diplomatic cover) is no laughing
matter. "The fact that they're nondescript or don't look serious is part of the charm of the business," he says. "That's why the Russians
are so successful at some of this stuff. " They're able to put people in those positions over time to build up their cover
to be useful. They are part of a machine... And the machine is a very professional and serious one." Illegal and invisible The
use of illegals, says Lander, is a menacing type of espionage, perfected by the Russians during the Cold War. "They were posted
into the West with one of two roles," he says. "One, to build up long-term cover with the eventual intention over
many years to get a position in a government machine somewhere in the West, where they could spy for good.
"The other role was to be a head agent of a network of spies who had been recruited by others, perhaps the
legal residency, and were run from a third country by an illegal - still an intelligence officer, but not under any official
cover." To British intelligence, the fact that Russia is still prepared to fund and deploy illegals against the West is a cause for concern,
not least because illegals are extremely difficult to uncover. Sir Gerry Warner, former deputy chief of the Secret Intelligence Service,
MI6, says illegals are heavily deployed in Russia's neighbouring states, like Ukraine and Georgia. "If they wanted to have illegals they
could have them here," says Warner, "I've no doubt about that. Whether they would think it worthwhile, I simply don't know."
Whether there are Russian illegals in Britain or not - and if there are, they are unlikely to be detected, Sir Gerry says - there is no
doubt that "legal" Russian spies, those operating under diplomatic cover, are mounting an intelligence attack here. In fact,
that attack is about as intense now as it was at the height of the Cold War. "If you go back to the early 90s, there was a
hiatus," says Lander. "Then the spying machine got going again and the SVR [formerly the KGB], they've gone back to their old
practices with a vengeance. "I think by the end of the last century they were back to where they had been in the Cold
War, in terms of numbers."
Russian spies will disable our military and our nuclear arsenal
Rifat ‘10 (Tim, is the world’s leading expert on RV and RI, Unlike all other RV/RI companies, has never
worked for any government. He is therefore able to give you the real RV and RI technology –
RV Science. See FBI warnings, Last modified March 19, “US psi-spies”,
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vision_remota/esp_visionremota_9c.htm)
News of this massive Russian paranormal-warfare research projects eventually filtered out to the West. It was thought by CIA analysts
that the Soviets might be capable of telepathically controlling the thoughts of leading US military and political
leaders, as well as being able to remotely kill US citizens. Telekinesis could be used to disable US hardware
such as computers, nuclear weapon systems and space vehicles. The report stated: ‘The major impetus behind the
Soviet drive to harness the possible capabilities of telepathic communication, telekinetics, and bionics are said to
come from the Soviet military and the KGB.’ No wonder they were worried!
Telekinesis is real – Psi-warfare leads to our destruction
Rifat ‘6 (Tim, is the world’s leading expert on RV and RI. Unlike all other RV/RI companies, has never
worked for any government. He is therefore able to give you the real RV and RI technology – RV Science. See
FBI warnings, Last modified 3/24, “Conclusion”,
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vision_remota/esp_visionremota_9j.htm)
It seems from the standpoint of conventional science, that the concept of remote viewing cannot possibly exist.
Unfortunately, there are numerous declassified CIA and DIA documents amounting to tens of thousands of pages, which
catalogue the U.S. government’s top secret remote viewing programme. First hand corroboration about the U.S.
military’s secret RV projects, comes from actual military remote viewers such as Joe McMoneagle and Lyn Buchanan, who now teach
the general public remote viewing. More extraordinary are the declassified documents released by the U.S. government
which document the Soviet paranormal warfare programme which are reproduced in full in appendices i and ii; they mention
psychotronics giving the capability to Russian Psi-warriors to remotely influence, effect electronics by
telekinesis and even remotely kill. These documents are freely available under the American Freedom of Information Act, and
the author recommends that the serious researcher look at these papers. The concept that the superpowers engaged in an inner space
arms race using Psi-warriors seems far fetched, but sometimes truth is stranger than fact. It is alleged that both U.S. and
Russian psychic warriors engaged in a secret paranormal war, remotely influencing and remotely killing each other. There is some
mention of there being a seventy percent failure rate in the training of remote influencers, these trainees being driven mad by the
hypnosis and drug regimens needed to induce these high level Psi-abilities. David Morehouse mentions this remote influencing
programme in his account of his military remote viewing training. The ramifications of this knowledge that remote viewing
and Psi-warfare not only actually exist, but have a long history of development by the superpowers, leads to a
rather disturbing new vision of recent history and the advent of the new millennium which will be dominated by Psi. If humanity and
its nation states develop more and more powerful weapon systems such as: HAARP, the billion watt ionispheric heater, based in
Alaska, Russian beam weapons, Chinese nuclear and biological weapons, the ability to remotely view these top secret installations is
secondary, to the ability to remotely influence the politicians and generals which control these awesome weapon systems. It does
nor matter how powerful the weapon may be, if the brain that controls it can be remotely influenced. The
advent of Psi-warfare leads to a dramatic new turn in the way future wars will be fought.
1NC
Text: The United States National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform should vote to require
inclusion in its formal recommendations that the United States federal government should exempt
graduates from accredited universities in the United States from the employment-visa quota and
preference category system if they hold an advanced degree in science or technology.
Non Binding Debt Commission recommendations overcomes political opposition – fast tracked up or
down vote means it will pass – sequencing means it avoids politics
Roberts ’10
(Steve, editor @ US News and World Report, Prof Political Communication @ GW, Contra Costa Times, 3/9)
But there is a model for how to stop the country's headlong rush toward fiscal ruin. It's called BRAC, an acronym
for Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission. That's typical Washington jargon, but it's also a rare bipartisan idea that
actually worked. In the late 1980s, the Pentagon found itself with a huge inventory of unneeded military bases.
The obvious answer was to close them. But every installation meant jobs and revenue for a local community, and
every lawmaker representing one of those communities freaked out at the thought of losing federal dollars. In a rare burst of
self-knowledge, Congress realized it was too spineless to resist such protests. So in 1990, it passed a law creating a
new procedure. The Pentagon would draw up a list of installations slated for closure; that list would be passed on to a BRAC, an
independent, bipartisan commission appointed by the president. The BRAC could revise the Pentagon's recommendations and the
lobbying at that point was furious but once the panel approved a final hit list, Congress had to ratify or reject the entire
package. No amendments, no horse-trading, no political maneuvering allowed. The result: Close to 400
redundant installations were shuttered during five rounds of BRAC deliberations that ended in 2005. The lesson: Take
the same concept, and apply it to an even thornier political problem the soaring budget deficit. Normally, we would hate the idea of a
commission that usurps the role of duly elected legislators. And many similar panels have tried and failed to force Congress to make
unpopular decisions. But the legislative process has collapsed, and the price of inaction is too high. It's time to try a new approach. A
bipartisan group of senators recently proposed a BRAC-like body to recommend a new set of tax and spending policies. Fifty-three
lawmakers voted yes, seven shy of the number needed to break a filibuster. Hard-liners on both sides teamed up to kill the bill and
demonstrate, once again, why a commission is now so essential. Anti-tax zealots opposed the idea because any feasible compromise
would require significant revenue increases; big-spending liberals yelped about the threat to social spending. Two conclusions are
obvious: Both sides are wrong, and Congress cannot stand up to either one. President Barack Obama recognized this truth and
turned to Plan B: a commission created by executive order, not law. He's appointed two superb public servants to head the
effort Democrat Erskine Bowles, chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from
Wyoming. Their recommendations are due Dec. 1, and congressional leaders have promised to follow the BRAC model
and bring the measure to the floor for an up-or-down vote.
1NC
New comprehensive immigration reform will pass after the elections
Wong ‘9-15 (Robert Menendez pushes immigration reform in tough climate, SCOTT WONG ,9/15/10 4:05
PM EDT, Politico http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42232.html
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) is promising to introduce a major immigration reform bill this month, even as the
volatile issue promises to be a nonstarter in this political season for Democrats who want to avoid even more
controversial votes. His announcement Wednesday, before about 200 pro-immigration activists at a church near Capitol Hill, came a day after Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) signaled he would try to pass a separate bill next week providing citizenship to young, undocumented immigrants if they attend
college for two years or join the military. Sources familiar with the Menendez bill said it would include border security provisions, employment verification, a
temporary-worker program and a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants now living in the U.S. “A journey of a 1,000 miles begin with a single step,”
said Menendez, the Senate’s lone Hispanic member. “There can be no chance if there is no legislation. The reality is that legislation gives the process, the vehicle by
which to garner support and to move forward.” But Menendez, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, conceded that the election would make it
difficult to get any real floor time for an immigration debate this fall. Menendez and two vocal reform backers in the House — Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and Nydia
Velazquez (D-N.Y.) – said they would meet with President Barack Obama Thursday afternoon to request his support for the new legislation and the immigrant-student
bill, known as the DREAM Act. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday the president backed the act as a senator and that the Obama administration
supports it now. “Certainly it’s our hope that working with Congress we can see progress on that,” Gibbs said. “And none of that will replace what has to happen from a
comprehensive level and a comprehensive perspective to deal with the issues around immigration reform.” Reid said he would attach the DREAM Act as an
amendment to the annual defense spending bill, though that proposal has been met with fierce opposition from Republicans who accuse Democrats of trying to excite
their Hispanic base before the Nov. 2 elections. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) blasted the legislation on the Senate floor on Wednesday, saying it provides amnesty for
lawbreakers and an economic incentive that encourages more illegal immigration. “The DREAM Act would grant amnesty to millions of immigrants who have entered
the U.S. illegally,” he said. Menendez said he’s yet to secure any support from Republicans for his legislation, something he needs to overcome the 60-vote threshold to
advance the bill in a possible lame-duck session. “The
elections make for a difficult context to be able to get people to focus on
this but it is my hope that we will be able to amass support before the elections and we can seek to galvanize it
after the elections,” Menendez said. “Certainly what I will introduce in the Senate will have plenty of
Republican ideas in it.” Menendez’s bill is similar to a proposal Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) rolled out earlier this year in
an op-ed in The Washington Post. Graham, however, has since taken a tougher stand against illegal immigration, and vowed not to support the DREAM Act as an
amendment. If the Senate fails to pass the amendment, the DREAM Act could be included in the Menendez bill. "When the Democratic leadership says they're going to
bring up the defense bill and put the Dream Act on it as an amendment, well that is very offensive to me. Obviously their actions are all about politics,” Graham said in
a statement. “Democrats are trying to check a box with Hispanic voters at the expense of our men and women in uniform,” he added. “It's very unfortunate they are
planning to use the defense bill in such a fashion." The Reid proposal was met with derision from members of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, which opposes a
path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. “The DREAM Act is a nightmare for the American people,” said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, a caucus member and the top
Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. “It is an assault on law-abiding, taxpaying American citizens and legal immigrants.” Gutierrez
said the new
Menendez legislation would be a companion bill to the one he introduced in the House last year. That bill has
more than 100 co-sponsors, all Democrats. “We need a bill introduced, something people can get behind, something
the president can say, ‘That’s what I want passed,’” Gutierrez told reporters. “That’s how legislation gets done
here.” Just blocks from the Capitol, faith and immigration leaders from as far as Arizona and Hawaii packed the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, and cheered
when Menendez vowed to press forward with a bill. But they warned that this was only the first step. “A legislative show is not going to be
acceptable,” Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, told POLITICO. “ We expect Democrats and Republicans to
lead the nation forward in fixing the broken immigration system.” Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for
Community Change, one of the event’s organizers, described a newfound momentum for backers of comprehensive immigration
reform. “Months ago, pundits in D.C. wrote us off and left us for dead,” he said. “Well, we have a message for
them: We are back.”
Piecemeal reform destroys comprehensive reform
Young ’10 (Comprehensive Immigration Reform—Dead, Dismembered, or Alive? Posted February 17, 2010
by Patrick Young, Esq.
There are also calls for abandoning the Comprehensive Immigration Reform effort and instead trying to pass
sections of the bill piecemeal. Frankly, in 1999, when comprehensive reform was first proposed as the entire
agenda for the immigrant rights movement, I believed that piecemeal was the way to go. I did not believe that
passage of a comprehensive package was possible. In addition, my experience as an advocate told me that a piecemeal approach could
accomplish much without the serious negative trade-offs that comprehensive reform would demand. But my position was not the majority
position, and the broad movement adopted comprehensive immigration reform and emblazoned it on its banner.
Over the next decade, the treasure and efforts of the immigrant rights community around the United States were
devoted to crafting and passing far-reaching legislation that would address the United States’ immigration needs
for decades. While that effort has not yet succeeded, it is too soon to declare it failed. It may also already be too
late to break up the Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill and pass smaller pieces of legislation like the
DREAM Act and AgJobs separately. Many supporters of reform will melt away if the comprehensive bill is
abandoned—they signed on for the whole package. And piecemeal legislation will be met with the same
arguments against legalizing a portion of the undocumented that have been voiced against legislation that would
enable larger earned legalization. In addition, to secure passage of the DREAM Act and AgJobs, so many
concessions will have to be made that little may be left to trade if we try to revive legalization. Analysts in
Washington say that there is still a slim chance for reform this year. With other prospects looking even dimmer than pressing on with
our current strategy, it would seem that the immigrant rights movement’s last best hope is to press the Democrats hard with the threat that a failure to push reform will
lead to Latino electoral defections and simultaneously embarrass the president into assuming the role of Reformer-in-Chief that we once thought fit him naturally. We
also need to be realistic about what a reform bill will look like if one is introduced by Senator Schumer in the next 50 days. It will not be perfect, and attacks on it for its
flaws will likely condemn immigration reform to the legislative graveyard. Any
reform bill will need to satisfy the two to six
Republicans we need for passage. Pulling out the elements of any compromise Schumer arranges will doom the
bill. For those of us outside the Beltway, we need to keep the pressure on. This year there have already been more than 160 proreform events. More than 300,000 people have communicated with Congress and the President in support of reform. Churches, city councils, unions, and community
groups have passed hundreds of resolutions in support of reform. Here on Long Island, the Workplace Project has collected more than 5,000 pro-immigrant postcards,
Long Island Immigrant Alliance’s call-in day to Schumer’s office got wide support, and Long Island Wins’ e-mail campaigns have generated more than 2,500
communications with our elected officials. These efforts have won over more than half of the Senate to reform already. Since the
time horizon for winning reform is limited to the next several months, we must continue to push hard in the knowledge that while victory may be difficult even with the
greatest effort, defeat
will be certain if we give up.
The overwhelming consensus indicates immigration reform is key to heg and the economy—economically
and perceptually.
Council on Foreign Relations ‘9 (CFR's immigration policy task force - 19 independent experts co-researching
domestic immigration policy in the US, "Broken Immigration System Risks Serious Damage to U.S. National
Interests, Warns CFR Task Force", 7/8/2009,
http://www.cfr.org/publication/19743/broken_immigration_system_risks_serious_damage_to_uswea_national_i
nterests_warns_cfr_task_force.html?breadcrumb=%2Fissue%2F27%2F)
"The continued failure to devise and implement a sound and sustainable immigration policy threatens to weaken
America’s economy, to jeopardize its diplomacy, and to imperil its national security," concludes a new Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR) Independent Task Force co-chaired by former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former White House chief of
staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty. "The stakes are too high to fail," says the report. " If the United States continues to
mishandle its immigration policy, it will damage one of the vital underpinnings of American prosperity and
security, and could condemn the country to a long, slow decline in its status in the world." For this reason, the report
urges: "The United States needs a fundamental overhaul of its immigration laws." U.S. Immigration Policy contends that America has
reaped tremendous benefits from opening its doors to immigrants, as well as to students, skilled employees and others who may only
live in the country for shorter periods of time. But it warns that “the continued inability of the United States to develop
and enforce a workable system of immigration laws threatens to undermine these achievements." Directed by CFR
Senior Fellow Edward Alden, the CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy reflects the
consensus of a bipartisan group of eminent leaders in the fields of immigration policy, homeland security,
education, labor, business, academia and human rights. The group urges Congress and the Obama administration to
move ahead with immigration reform legislation that achieves three critical goals: Reforms the legal immigration system so
that it operates more efficiently, responds more accurately to labor market needs, and enhances U.S.
competitiveness; Restores the integrity of immigration laws through an enforcement regime that strongly discourages employers
and employees from operating outside that legal system, secures America’s borders, and levies significant penalties against those who
violate the rules; Offers a fair, humane, and orderly way to allow many of the roughly twelve million migrants
currently living illegally in the United States to earn the right to remain legally. According to the report, the
high level of illegal immigration in the country is increasingly damaging to U.S. national interests—"[it] diminishes respect
for the law, creates potential security risks, weakens labor rights, strains U.S. relations with its Mexican
neighbor, and unfairly burdens public education and social services in many states." But it contends that "no
enforcement effort will succeed properly unless the legal channels for coming to the United States can be made to work better."
Therefore, "the U.S. government must invest in creating a working immigration system that alleviates long and
counterproductive backlogs and delays, and ensures that whatever laws are enacted by Congress are enforced thoroughly and
effectively." The Task Force lays out a series of concrete, realistic recommendations for legislation and administrative reforms that
would be part of an immigration policy that better serves America’s national interests: -Comprehensive immigration reform: A new
effort to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill should be a first-tier priority for the Obama administration and Congress, and
should be started without delay. -Attracting skilled immigrants: The United States must tackle head-on the growing competition
for skilled immigrants from other countries, and make the goal of attracting such immigrants a central component of its immigration
policy. The report urges an end to the hard caps on employment-based immigrant visas and skilled work visas in favor of a more
flexible system, the elimination of strict nationality quotas, and new opportunities for foreign students earning advanced degrees to
remain in the United States after they graduate. -National security: The Task Force calls for minimizing visa restrictions that impede
scientific collaboration, noting that America’s long-term security depends on maintaining its place as a world leader in science and
technology. The administration should also permit a broader effort by the U.S. military to recruit recent
immigrants who are not yet citizens or green card holders, so as to bolster U.S. military capabilities. -Employer enforcement:
The Task Force supports a mandatory system for verifying those who are authorized to work in the United States, including a
workable and reliable biometric verification system with secure documents. Tougher penalties should be levied against those who
refuse to comply. It calls employer enforcement "the single most effective and humane enforcement tool available to discourage
illegal migration." -Simplifying, streamlining, and investing in the immigration system: Congress and the Obama administration
should establish a high-level independent commission to make recommendations for simplifying the administration and improving the
transparency of U.S. immigration laws. The government must redouble its efforts to reduce backlogs and other unnecessary delays by
investing in the personnel and technology necessary for handling visa and immigration applications efficiently. -Improving
America’s image abroad: The administration and Congress should launch a comprehensive review of the current security-related
restrictions on travel to the United States, with an eye toward lifting restrictions that do not significantly reduce the risk of terrorists or
criminals entering the country.
American decline threatens extinction – withdrawal would be the largest mistake in the history of
geopolitics***
Thayer 2007 (Bradley A. Thayer, Associate Professor in the Dept. of Defense and Strategic Studies at
Missouri State University) American Empire: A Debate, “Reply to Christopher Layne” p 118
To abandon its leadership role would be a fundamental mistake of American grand strategy. Indeed, in the great
history of the United States, there is no parallel, no previous case, where the United States has made such a titanic grand strategic
blunder. It would surpass by far its great mistake of 1812, when the young and ambitious country gambled and declared war against a mighty empire, the British, believing London was too distracted by the tremendous events on the Continent—the
formidable military genius of Napoleon and the prodigious threat from the French empire and its allies--to notice while it conquered Canada. The citizens of the United States cannot pretend
that, by weakening ourselves, other countries will be nice and respect its security and interests. To suggest this
implies a naiveté and innocence about international politics that would be charming, if only the consequences of
such an opinion were not so serious. Throughout its history, the United States has never refrained from acting boldly to secure its interests. It should not be timid now. Many times in the
great history of the United States, the country faced difficult decisions—decisions of confrontation or appeasement--and significant
threats--the British, French, Spanish, Germans, Italians, Japanese, and Soviets. It always has recognized those threats and faced them down, to emerge
victorious. The United States should have the confidence to do so now against China not simply because to do so maximizes its power and security or ensures it is the
dominant vice in the world's affairs, but because it is the last, best hope of humanity.
Semiconductors
1. The US industry is strong and growing – dominates the global market.
Semiconductor Industry Association, “Doubling Semiconductor Exports Over the Next Five Years,” 6/17/2010,
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=19&ved=0CE8QFjAIOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.siaonline.org%2Fgalleries%2FPublications%2FDoubling_Exports_Paper_0610.pdf&rct=j&q=United%20States%20semiconductor%20industry%20offshore%20suppliers
&ei=HbTFTP3FBoL48AbfzbmbBg&usg=AFQjCNFuaZKVqhT5xYyAjiGalikcWwfJVA&cad=rja
The SIA collects data on U.S. headquartered companies sales in a number of product and regional markets. The
U.S. industry’s share of the
worldwide semiconductor market share has been in the high 40 percents since 1996, and was 51 percent in 2009
(See Table 1, Row 4). The U.S. is particularly strong in microprocessors and microperipherals (82% worldwide share in 2009) and
analog (62% share), and weaker in memory (22% share) and discrete devices (28% share). The 58 percent U.S. share in the U.S. market is
higher than its 49 percent share in markets outside the U.S., although in 2009 its share in the U.S. market
dropped but increased in markets outside the U.S. market. (See Table 1, row 6-8).
2. Alt causes –
a. Taxes
Dewey & LeBoeuf, 9 leading global law firm providing clients with both local and cross-border solutions, more than 1,100 lawyers in 26 offices in 15
countries, (“MAINTAINING AMERICA’S COMPETITIVE EDGE: GOVERNMENT POLICIES AFFECTING SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY R&D AND
MANUFACTURING ACTIVITY,” Report prepared for the Semiconductor Industry Association, March,
http://www.choosetocompete.org/downloads/Competitiveness_White_Paper.pdf
Further tax reductions abroad make U.S. burden heavier. U.S. competitiveness as an investment location for
semiconductor firms is further undermined by substantial tax and financial incentives widely available to
semiconductor companies locating abroad. Investment location decisions are not made solely based on the availability of tax and related investment
incentives. Proximity to the customer and market size tied to purchasing power of the domestic population, fit with
the multinational’s global supply chain, and certain other factors critical to semiconductor companies, such as
intellectual property protection and the ability to influence global-standards-setting activities, all factor into the
decision-making process. However, when other factors in the decisionmaking process are roughly equal and when a firm has already
fully exploited its domestic market, tax and other financial incentives are critical determinants in the decision whether
and where to locate overseas. As ties binding U.S. semiconductor manufacturers to the United States are
frayed and attenuated, these government incentives overseas gain in importance and accelerate the push to locate
overseas.
b. Export controls
Richard Van Atta, et al., Institute for Defense Analysis, Mark Bittmann, Paul Collopy, Bradley Hartfield, Bruce Harmon, Marshall Kaplan, Nicolas
Karvonides, Michael J. Lippitz, Jay Mandelbaum, Michael Marks, Malcolm Patterson, Kay Sullivan, “Export Controls and the U.S. Defense Industrial Base,” January
2007, http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=17&ved=0CEYQFjAGOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.acq.osd.mil%2Fip%2Fdocs%2Fida_studyexport_controls_%2520us_def_ib.pdf&rct=j&q=United%20States%20semiconductor%20industry%20offshore%20suppliers&ei=HbTFTP3FBoL48AbfzbmbBg&usg=
AFQjCNFpNnV9qD8HRocdAbipipWN23afcQ&cad=rja
US-based IC, SME and materials firms depend on exports. For US-based IC firms, much of their market is serving
electronics products manufacturers (both US and foreign-owned) located outside of the US. For SME and materials firms, this is due to
rapid growth of advanced IC manufacturing in Taiwan, China and Korea (a significant portion of which is due to foreign direct investment by US-based firms). Some
observers of the US semiconductor industry are concerned about this migration as well as the loss of US
commercial participation in certain SME segments. Disparities in application of export controls by the US relative
to its Wassenaar partners is said to exacerbate the problem by restricting US industry in accessing rapidly growing Asian
markets, without conferring any national security benefit, due to the ability of the Chinese to access comparable technologies from Europe and Japan.
Semiconductor industry leaders have called on the US government to address these disparities as part of a broader effort to respond to purported unfair trade practices
by foreign governments, organizations, or firms.
This study found that, since the inception of Wassenaar, US-based IC, SME and materials companies have not been severely impacted by export controls, but this may
not be the case going forward. US
implementation of semiconductor export controls burdens US semiconductor
companies with more conditions on foreign sales and longer and less predictable waiting periods for license
approval than that faced by competitors in Europe or Japan selling comparable products, but licenses are rarely
denied. Companies contacted by this study and published reports cite only a handful of instances where sales were lost to a foreign competitor due to delays or
conditions in US export licensing. However, staffing requirements and the administrative burden of export controls represent a unilateral cost to US industry relative to
its foreign competitors. The
costs of compliance are rising and threaten to become a competitive disadvantage to
USbased firms in the increasingly competitive international semiconductor industry. More importantly, licensing delays and
uncertainties threaten to give US suppliers a reputation for being unreliable partners in the lean, “just in time,” worldwide supply chains that increasingly characterize
high technology industries. Implementation of “deemed exports”—a license that must be obtained before providing to foreign nationals information related to
controlled technologies—has led some companies to no longer hire Chinese researchers and other controlled foreign nationals due to the risk and difficulty of
complying with these regulations. Many of these talented individuals are doubtless hired by foreign competitors.
3. Advanced semiconductors play a very small role in military tech, and the DOD is the only buyer.
Richard Van Atta, et al., Institute for Defense Analysis, Mark Bittmann, Paul Collopy, Bradley Hartfield, Bruce Harmon, Marshall Kaplan, Nicolas
Karvonides, Michael J. Lippitz, Jay Mandelbaum, Michael Marks, Malcolm Patterson, Kay Sullivan, “Export Controls and the U.S. Defense Industrial Base,” January
2007, http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=17&ved=0CEYQFjAGOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.acq.osd.mil%2Fip%2Fdocs%2Fida_studyexport_controls_%2520us_def_ib.pdf&rct=j&q=United%20States%20semiconductor%20industry%20offshore%20suppliers&ei=HbTFTP3FBoL48AbfzbmbBg&usg=
AFQjCNFpNnV9qD8HRocdAbipipWN23afcQ&cad=rja
For the purposes of this sector study, the
“semiconductor industry” comprises firms producing semiconductor materials,
semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME), and semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs).9 Worldwide revenues in 2005
were $31 billion, $34 billion, and $227 billion, respectively. The semiconductor industry is widely viewed as “strategic,” supporting
economic growth through innovative clusters of electronics and broader information technology (IT) firms (such as in “Silicon Valley”), as well providing high valueadded exports and high-wage employment. Beyond the economic importance of the semiconductor industry, today’s
dominant US conventional
military capabilities derive from the US Department of Defense’s relative success in fostering and exploiting
semiconductor-based computer, communication and sensor networks for military purposes. Advantages in “network
centric warfare” based on advanced electronics, is assumed in much of current US defense strategy and planning.
While electronics and IT are critical to US military capabilities, the most advanced ICs today play a
relatively small role, and the US Department of Defense (DoD) is a niche player in the market. With a few
exceptions in areas such as sensors and intelligence systems, the ICs embedded within today’s most advanced military systems tend
to be far from commercial state-of-the-art. Nevertheless, the US government has sought to prevent adversaries from accessing the most advanced
ICs, SME and materials through the CCL, administered by the US Department of Commerce. Radiation hardened (RADHARD) ICs used in nuclear and space systems
are controlled by the Department of State through the ITAR. US export controls are coordinated internationally through the “Wassenaar Arrangement on Export
Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies,” which came into force in 1996 as successor to the Soviet-era “Coordinating Committee for
Multilateral Export Controls” (CoCom).
No impact to terror:
A. No WMD terrorism- they see it as counterproductive.
Brad Roberts, Inst Dfnse Analyses, and Michael Moodie, Chem & Bio Arms Cntrl Inst, ‘2 (Defense
Horizons 15, July)
The argument about terrorist motivation is also important. Terrorists generally have not killed as many as
they have been capable of killing. This restraint seems to derive from an understanding of mass casualty
attacks as both unnecessary and counterproductive. They are unnecessary because terrorists, by and
large, have succeeded by conventional means. Also, they are counterproductive because they might
alienate key constituencies, whether among the public, state sponsors, or the terrorist leadership group.
In Brian Jenkins' famous words, terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead. Others
have argued that the lack of mass casualty terrorism and effective exploitation of BW has been more a
matter of accident and good fortune than capability or intent. Adherents of this view, including former
Secretary of Defense William Cohen, argue that "it's not a matter of if but when." The attacks of
September 11 would seem to settle the debate about whether terrorists have both the motivation and
sophistication to exploit weapons of mass destruction for their full lethal effect. After all, those were
terrorist attacks of unprecedented sophistication that seemed clearly aimed at achieving mass casualties-had the World Trade Center towers collapsed as the 1993 bombers had intended, perhaps as many as
150,000 would have died. Moreover, Osama bin Laden's constituency would appear to be not the "Arab
street" or some other political entity but his god. And terrorists answerable only to their deity have proven
historically to be among the most lethal. But this debate cannot be considered settled. Bin Laden and his
followers could have killed many more on September 11 if killing as many as possible had been their
primary objective. They now face the core dilemma of asymmetric warfare: how to escalate without
creating new interests for the stronger power and thus the incentive to exploit its power potential more
fully. Asymmetric adversaries want their stronger enemies fearful, not fully engaged--militarily or
otherwise. They seek to win by preventing the stronger partner from exploiting its full potential. To kill
millions in America with biological or other weapons would only commit the United States--and much of
the rest of the international community--to the annihilation of the perpetrators.
B. No retaliation to terrorism
John Mueller, Professor Political Science - Ohio State University, ‘5 (Conflict Studies Conference,
psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/jmueller/NB.PDF)
However, history clearly demonstrates that overreaction is not necessarily inevitable. Sometimes, in
fact, leaders have been able to restrain their instinct to overreact. Even more important, restrained
reaction--or even capitulation to terrorist acts--has often proved to be entirely acceptable politically.
That is, there are many instances where leaders did nothing after a terrorist attack (or at least
refrained from overreacting) and did not suffer politically or otherwise.
No china:
US-China conflict won’t go nuclear
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania) September 9/29, 2004
U.S. military capacity is now so overstretched by the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts that a Chinese move to
realize its own top strategic objective, the scooping up of Taiwan to complete the hat trick with Hong Kong and
Macao, would find the United States hard-pressed to be able to respond at all. A U.S. threat of a nuclear attack
on China -- with China's inevitable nuclear counterstrike -- would be so wildly unacceptable in political terms in
the United States itself as to be out of the question for any U.S. administration. The idea of causing Los Angeles to disappear because China had seized
Taiwan would be a trade-off that no American leader would even dare contemplate. America is lucky so far that China has not yet sought to match its economic reach in Asia with a
corresponding assertion of political influence. That doesn't mean that Asia will inevitably become a sphere of Chinese dominance. What will happen instead -- what is already happening, in
fact -- is that other Asian powers such as Japan, Korea and India will increasingly take steps to check Chinese power by increasing their own military capacity. In other words, what was a
situation in which the United States stood between Japan and Korea and the imposition of Chinese influence will now become one in which those countries will become more dependent on
their own resources to defend themselves. The response of the Koreans could be said to be a move toward resolving the problems between South and North Korea to enable them to present a
united front to the Chinese. The response of Japan that can be expected will be limited remilitarization. The health and peace of the region will depend on the degree to which the competition
among these countries will be economic, rather than political and military. What will this modification of the balance of power in Asia mean for the United States? First of all, none of this will
happen tomorrow. The extension of China's reach and the Japanese and Korean response will be gradual and spread out across the years, although there may well be some pinpricks at the
. The Chinese themselves will avoid direct confrontation with the United States at all costs.
It is not their way. Conflict between the two countries would be asymmetrical in the extreme in any case.
Basically, the two can't attack each other. Nuclear warfare is out. The million-man People's Liberation Army
isn't portable. The Chinese are definitely not into terrorism.
extremities sooner rather than later
Intel failure:
Pre-emption inevitable
Continetti 08 Associate Editor of the Weekly Standard [Matthew “If we don't maintain world order, who will?”
LA Times, March 4th (http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-antlecontinetti4mar04,1,2482677.story?ctrack=4&cset=true)]
Today's prompt asks us, "Is interventionism an organic plank of conservatism, or is it the cancer that's
destroying it?" I am going to take issue with the way the question is framed. Not only is "interventionism" not
"destroying" conservatism, there is also nothing particularly "conservative" about interventionism. For the
United States, whether it likes it or not, periodically intervening in a world order that it has done so much to
establish is the only game in town. The job of conservatives is to ensure that those interventions are aligned
with American interests and ideals. The ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a belligerent Iran seeking
nuclear weapons, an unresolved Korean peninsular crisis, a rising China and an autocratic, aggressive Russia
have made many Americans anxious about the world and our place in it. But there is no escaping U.S. global
involvement. Foreign policy writers Robert Kagan and Ivo Daalder calculate that the United States intervened
in other countries' affairs "with significant military force" every 18 months on average between 1989 and 2001.
Since 2001, the United States has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq; sent troops to the Philippines and Liberia; and
conducted missile strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. American military commitments extend from
Colombia to Kosovo to Japan. Including proposed supplemental appropriations for the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the Bush administration has budgeted more than $600 billion in defense spending for fiscal year
2009. As is often pointed out, that amount is about the same as the combined defense budgets of the next 12 to
15 nations.
Pre-emption increases the credibility of American hegemony.
Zbigniew Brzezinski (Counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a professor of foreign
policy @ Johns Hopkins) 2004 “The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership” p 216
The alternative approach to defining Americas central strategic challenge is to focus more broadly on global
turmoil in its several regional and social manifestations—of which terrorism is a genuinely menacing
symptom—in order to lead an enduring and enlarging alliance of like-minded democracies in a comprehensive
campaign against the conditions that precipitate that turmoil. To this end, the magnetic success of America's
democracy and its outward projection through a humane definition of globalization would reinforce the
effectiveness and legitimacy of America's power and enhance U.S. ability to overcome—together with others—
both the consequences and the causes of global turmoil.
NMD:
A. Long range missiles fail – all the major countries could defeat them
UCS 9 (Union of Concerned Scientists, the leading U.S. science-based nonprofit organization, Missile Defense
No Answer to North Korean Missiles, 4-3-9, http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/missile-defense-noanswer-0216.html) LE
If North Korea's upcoming satellite launch is successful, it will represent a significant step for the nation's missile program, but it does
not mean that North Korea has a missile that could carry a nuclear weapon to intercontinental range, according to the Union of
Concerned Scientists (UCS). Nor does it mean that the United States should bolster its missile defense capability. "Whether or not
North Korea's satellite launch is successful, missile defense advocates are likely to use it to argue for a boost in spending on missile
defense," said David Wright, co-director of UCS's Global Security Program. "But missile defense is not the answer to longrange missile development by North Korea or other countries." Wright, a physicist, pointed out that government and
independent technical studies have concluded that decoys and other countermeasures can defeat anti-missile systems.
These analyses show that any country that is capable of developing and building a long-range missile and nuclear
weapon also would have the technologies to deploy effective countermeasures. Moreover, he added, a September
1999 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on foreign missile developments noted that " Russia and China each have
developed numerous countermeasures and probably are willing to sell the requisite technologies." "Given the
U.S. missile defense system's high profile, any country developing missiles to fire at the United States would
incorporate decoys in its missile design," Wright said. "And it is highly unlikely the United States would know
details about the decoys before an attack, giving any attacker the advantage of surprise." The technical reality is that
missile defense is not an effective way to stop a missile attack once an attack has been launched, Wright said. "If U.S. policymakers
believe a missile attack is a significant security threat, it is irresponsible for them to advocate missile defense as a realistic response.
Doing so could create a false sense of security, divert defense dollars from more important uses, and reduce any incentive to develop
more effective measures to reduce a missile threat."
B. Iran has no nukes - NIE
MacAskill 7 [Ewen MacAskill, Guardian's Washington DC bureau chief. He was diplomatic editor from
1999-2006, chief political correspondent from 1996-99 and political editor of the Scotsman from 1990-96,
“US spies give shock verdict on Iran threat”, 12/3/2007,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/03/iran.usa]
US intelligence agencies undercut the White House today by disclosing for the first time that Iran has not been
pursuing a nuclear weapons development programme for the last four years. The disclosure makes it harder for
President George Bush and the vice-president, Dick Cheney, to make a case for a military strike against Iran next year. It also makes
it more difficult to persuade countries such as Russia and China to join the US, Britain and France in imposing a new round of
sanctions on Tehran. The national security estimate which pulls together the work of the 16 US intelligence
agencies, today published a declassified report revising previous assessments of Iran's weapons programme.
"Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons programme suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear
weapons than we have been judging since 2005," it said. Bush and Cheney have been claiming that Tehran is
bent on achieving a nuclear weapon. The British government, which is planning to discuss the report with its
US counterparts over the next few days, has also repeatedly said it suspects Iran of seeking a nuclear weapons
capability. The Iranian government insists it is only pursuing a civilian nuclear programme. The US national
security estimate disclosed that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 and had not restarted
it.
C. North Korean war won’t escalate or go nuclear
Meyer ‘03
(Carlton, Editor – G2 Military, The Mythical North Korean Threat, http://www.g2mil.com/korea.htm)
Even if North Korea employs a few crude nuclear weapons, using them would be suicidal since it would invite
instant retaliation from the U nited S tates. North Korea lacks the technical know-how to build an Inter c ontinental
B allistic M issile, despite the hopes and lies from the National Missile Defense proponents in the USA. North Korea's industrial
production is almost zero, over two million people have starved in recent years, and millions of homeless nomads threaten internal
revolution. The US military ignores this reality and retains old plans for the deployment of 450,000 GIs to help defend South Korea,
even though the superior South Korean military can halt any North Korean offensive without help from a single American soldier.
American forces are not even required for a counter-offensive. A North Korean attack would stall after a few intense days
and South Korean forces would soon be in position to overrun North Korea. American air and naval power along
with logistical and intelligence support would ensure the rapid collapse of the North Korean army.
North Korean conflict extremely unlikely
Meyer ‘03
(Carlton, Editor – G2 Military, The Mythical North Korean Threat, http://www.g2mil.com/korea.htm)
The chance of a Korean war is extremely unlikely. North Korean leaders realize they have no hope of success
without major backing from China or Russia. The previous South Korean President, Kim Dae Jung,
encouraged peace and visited North Korea. The two countries are reconnecting rail lines and sent a combined
team to the Olympics. Even the United States is providing $500 million dollars a year in food to the starving
North Koreans. The new South Korean President, Roh-Moo-hyun was elected on a peace platform and
suggested US troops may be gone within ten years.
BMD Bad:
A. BMDPre-emptive escalation inevitable – Bush doctrine
Roston 10 [Michael, Newsbroke, “Will Obama repudiate the Bush Doctrine or won’t he?”, May 26, 2010,
http://trueslant.com/level/2010/05/26/will-obama-repudiate-the-bush-doctrine-or-wont-he/]
Since President Obama was elected in November 2008, it remained unclear whether or not he endorsed the Bush doctrine as it was
defined in the 2002 National Security Strategy. Vice President Biden gave some remarks in a July 2009 interview which I argued inched uncannily
close to the view articulated in President Bush’s National Security Strategy. And when Obama at last reveals his National Security Strategy, we’re
supposed to have a clearer picture of whether or not he believes in the right of anticipatory self-defense. Except, so far, we don’t know where he’s going with it. The AP
got a peek at a summary of the Obama National Security Strategy, and there does not appear to be a clear answer to this question in what they read, although they’re not
willing to say so: The National Security Strategy will be the first produced under President Barack Obama, laying out his goals. The document, like those from
other presidents, is purposely vague. The AP obtained the summary ahead of document’s planned release by the White House this week. The strategy was
expected to walk away from a position held by Bush that the United States could or should undertake pre-emptive wars. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy posited
that doctrine, and the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq made good on it. via Associated Press. ‘Was expected to’ is not the same as ‘will walk away from.’ Clearly
where the Bush doctrine is concerned, Obama’s handlers kept the strategy’s contents close to their vests. I would think there is
they will offer some language that is perhaps watered down, but in no way repudiates the Bush
doctrine. Other national security watchers portray a similar lack of clarity on which way Obama will be taking the Bush doctrine. Over at Foreign Policy, Will
only one reason for that –
Inboden writes that there is no clear repudiation of the Bush doctrine: Some media coverage, such as Peter Baker’s New York Times article, attempts to portray the
speech as a “repudiation” or at least distancing from the Bush administration’s grand strategy, and makes much of the fact that he did not emphasize “unilateral
American power” or affirm “pre-emption” or “prevention.” Baker is one of the very best, and best-sourced, White House correspondents around, so it may be that his
article reflects some additional background conversations with Obama administration staff attempting to advance a particular message. But at least when it comes to the
text of the speech, here I think Baker’s article overshoots. For example, in the midst of discussing the importance of international cooperation, Obama described
American leadership in “steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice” — in other words, a polite way of saying that American power and influence will
continue to shape the international order. Or the fact that President Obama did not explicitly affirm the possibility of the preemptive use of force does not mean that his
Administration actually rejects it. As historian John Gaddis has shown, since the days of John Quincy Adams (while Secretary of State to James Monroe), American
presidents have reserved, and sometimes used, the right to take action against looming threats. Unless President Obama were to explicitly reject the possibility of ever
using force in a preemptive or preventive manner to protect the nation (highly unlikely), it will remain an option within American national security doctrine. Keeping
with the theme that if you don’t repudiate it, it remains an option, Spencer Ackerman points to Obama’s actions in the past year, and sees a pretty clear reliance on tools
from President Bush’s utility shed in the mix: At West Point, Obama argued that al-Qaeda’s “small men on the wrong side of history” ought not to “scare us” into
“discard[ing] our freedoms.” But Obama’s first 18 months in office have featured a series of civil-libertarian compromises, from retaining the military commissions for
terrorist trials he opposed as a senator to embracing a framework for indefinite detention without charge for terrorism detainees even beyond those at the Guantanamo
Bay detention facility he has yet to convince Congress to close. He has expanded the previous administration’s use of remotely-piloted aircraft to launch missiles at
terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan to places like Yemen, where a new al-Qaeda affiliate has trained operatives to attack the U.S. homeland, and even claimed
the right to kill an American citizen suspected of involvement with al-Qaeda without due process. The drones once targeted the seniormost extremists, but anecdotal
evidence suggests the administration is using them on a lower echelon of terrorist as well. Looking at these perspectives, you can expect the Obama National Security
Strategy to be packaged with a lot of spin. Without saying outright that the Bush doctrine has been tossed aside, Obama officials will
tell the press that preventive military action against gathering threats is no longer the the focus on of America’s strategy.
But while something is not the focus of his plans, all the pie-in-the-sky rhetoric about international cooperation does not
forestall the Obama administration from acting very Bush-like whenever should it have the desire to. And that means as far
as our nation is concerned, the Bush doctrine is still on the books.
NMD Causes Global Arms Race, Weapons Prolif, And Space Weps
CAMILLE GRAND, Institut français des Relations internationales (IFRI), Paris. Lecturer, Institut d’études
politiques de Paris, and Ecole spéciale militaire, and Adviser for arms control and non-proliferation at the
French Ministry of Defense. 01 "NMD and arms control: a European view."
http://www.mi.infn.it/~landnet/NMD/grand.pdf [JWu]
Analysts opposing NMD and European leaders have written numerous pieces, and made numerous statements
demonstrating a genuine concern that, if mishandled, NMD could or would jeopardize 30 years of arms control
efforts. French President Jacques Chirac stated that NMD is “of a nature to retrigger a proliferation of weapons,
notably nuclear missiles.”3 German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder expressed a similar view when he said,
“Neither economically, nor politically, can we afford a new round of the arms race.”4 According to these views,
the worst-case arms control scenario is that NMD deployment by the US will be followed by Russia’s
withdrawal from major arms treaties and verification regimes (the INF Treaty, the tactical nuclear regime of
1991, START), as well as its development of greater offensive and defensive capabilities. China would also
block further arms control efforts and increase the expansion of its nuclear forces, followed by India and
Pakistan. Additionally, Russia and China could loosen their already weak export controls and deliberately
accelerate missile and WMD technology proliferation. “States of concern” could engage in a missile buildup to
try to challenge the emerging NMD and local TMD programs. This would lead to a renewed interest and
potential arms race among the major powers in more modern offensive capabilities and counteroptions
including space-based weapons. Many would therefore share the view expressed at the 2000 NPT review
conference by Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh that NMD “could run counter to efforts to halt the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” \
Proliferation leads to a global nuclear war.
Taylor 6 [Theodore B., Chairman of NOVA. July 6 2006, “Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,”
http://wwwee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/chapters/taylor.html] JL
Nuclear proliferation - be it among nations or terrorists - greatly increases the chance of nuclear violence on a
scale that would be intolerable. Proliferation increases the chance that nuclear weapons will fall into the hands
of irrational people, either suicidal or with no concern for the fate of the world. Irrational or outright psychotic
leaders of military factions or terrorist groups might decide to use a few nuclear weapons under their control to
stimulate a global nuclear war, as an act of vengeance against humanity as a whole. Countless scenarios of this
type can be constructed. Limited nuclear wars between countries with small numbers of nuclear weapons could
escalate into major nuclear wars between superpowers. For example, a nation in an advanced stage of "latent
proliferation," finding itself losing a nonnuclear war, might complete the transition to deliverable nuclear
weapons and, in desperation, use them. If that should happen in a region, such as the Middle East, where major
superpower interests are at stake, the small nuclear war could easily escalate into a global nuclear war.
B. China perceives NMD as a threat—application to Taiwan
Huntley and Brown ‘1
(Robert and Wade L Nautilus Institute Volume 6, Number 3 January 2001
http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol6/v6n03taiwan.html)
China’s concerns over both NMD and TMD, while differentiated and nuanced, fall generally into three categories. A
major Chinese concern is TMD’s potential application to Taiwan. Many in Beijing believe that only China’s threat to
use force deters an overt declaration of independence by Taiwan. Though many analysts doubt that China could
successfully invade Taiwan to suppress independence, Taiwan is clearly vulnerable to China’s short-range missile force.
Deployment of TMD in or near Taiwan would reduce China’s ability to use missile threats to politically intimidate
Taiwan’s leaders. Moreover, any U.S. role in such deployment would signal (to both Taipei and Beijing) a greater
likelihood of U.S. military support of Taiwan in the event of overt conflict. Thus, China worries that TMD deployment would
bolster Taiwanese independence sentiments
That’s nuke war
Eland 05
Ivan Eland - Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute, Former Director of Defense Policy Studies at the
Cato Institute - 4/11/05 (“Coexisting with a Rising China,” http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1494)
Although China is an autocratic state, it still has legitimate security interests. The United States would be smart to show some empathy
with those concerns. In recent years, as the United States has become alarmed at China’s expanded military spending, the Chinese
have also become alarmed at large increases in the U.S. defense budget and U.S. attacks on the sovereign nations of Serbia and Iraq.
Many Chinese see the threat of an expanding U.S. empire that aims at encircling China and preventing its legitimate rise to great
power status. To lessen such perceptions and reduce the chance of conflict between the two nuclear-armed nations, the United States
should retract its forward military and alliance posture in Asia, including repudiating any implied commitment to defend Taiwan. With
large bodies of water as moats and the most formidable nuclear arsenal in the world, the United States hardly needs a security
perimeter that stretches across the entire Pacific Ocean to protect it from China . If the United States continues to maintain an
outdated Cold War-style empire, it is bound to come into needless conflict with other powers, especially China.
Instead of emulating the policies of pre-World War I Britain toward Germany, the United States should take a page from another
chapter in British history. In the late 1800s, although not without tension, the British peacefully allowed the fledging United
States to rise as a great power, knowing both countries were protected by the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean that separated them.
Taking advantage of that same kind separation by a major ocean, the United States could also safely allow China to obtain
respect as a great power, wicth a sphere of influence to match. If China went beyond obtaining a reasonable
sphere of influence into an Imperial Japanese-style expansion, the United States could very well need to mount
a challenge. However, at present, little evidence exists of Chinese intent for such expansion, which would run
counter to recent Chinese history. Therefore, a U.S. policy of coexistence, rather than neo-containment, might avoid a
future catastrophic war or even a anuclear conflagration.
C. NMD causes development of hair-trigger space weapons that threatens utter annihilation
Mitchell ‘1
(Gordon, Associate Prof of Comm at U Pittsburgh, “ISIS Briefing on Missile Defense”, No. 6, July,
www.isisuk.demon.co.uk/0811/isis/uk/bmd/no6_paper.html)
As defense analyst Daniel Gonzales notes, a prerequisite to deployment of space control weaponry '… may well be a
determined effort to develop a national ballistic missile defense system and a related decision to renegotiate key elements of the
ABM Treaty or to abrogate the treaty entirely. Until then, it is difficult to see how robust anti-ASAT weapon systems could be
developed, tested and fielded'.31 Since any US attempt to overtly seize military control of outer space would likely stir up massive
political opposition both home and abroad, defence analyst James Oberg anticipates that 'the means by which the placement of
space-based weapons will likely occur is under a second US space policy directive — that of ballistic missile
defense… This could preempt any political umbrage from most of the world's influential nations while positioning the US as a
guarantor of defense from a universally acclaimed threat'. 32 In this scenario, ABM Treaty breakout, conducted under the
guise of missile defence, functions as a tripwire for unilateral US military domination of the heavens. A buildup
of space weapons might begin with noble intentions of 'peace through strength' deterrence, but this rationale glosses over the tendency
that '… the presence of space weapons…will result in the increased likelihood of their use'.33 This drift toward usage
is strengthened by a strategic fact elucidated by Frank Barnaby: when it comes to arming the heavens, 'anti-ballistic missiles and antisatellite warfare technologies go hand-in-hand'.34 The interlocking nature of offense and defense in military space technology stems
from the inherent 'dual capability' of spaceborne weapon components. As Marc Vidricaire, Delegation of Canada to the UN
Conference on Disarmament, explains: 'If you want to intercept something in space, you could use the same capability
to target something on land'. 35 To the extent that ballistic missile interceptors based in space can knock out enemy missiles in
mid-flight, such interceptors can also be used as orbiting 'Death Stars', capable of sending munitions hurtling through the
Earth's atmosphere. The dizzying speed of space warfare would introduce intense 'use or lose' pressure into strategic
calculations, with the spectre of split-second attacks creating incentives to rig orbiting Death Stars with
automated 'hair trigger' devices. In theory, this automation would enhance survivability of vulnerable space weapon platforms.
However, by taking the decision to commit violence out of human hands and endowing computers with authority to make war,
military planners could sow insidious seeds of accidental conflict. Yale sociologist Charles Perrow has analyzed
'complexly interactive, tightly coupled' industrial systems such as space weapons, which have many sophisticated components
that all depend on each other's flawless performance. According to Perrow, this interlocking complexity makes it
impossible to foresee all the different ways such systems could fail. As Perrow explains, '[t]he odd term "normal
accident" is meant to signal that, given the system characteristics, multiple and unexpected interactions of failures are
inevitable'.36 Deployment of space weapons with pre-delegated authority to fire death rays or unleash killer
projectiles would likely make war itself inevitable, given the susceptibility of such systems to 'normal
accidents'. It is chilling to contemplate the possible effects of a space war. According to retired Lt. Col. Robert M. Bowman, 'even
a tiny projectile reentering from space strikes the earth with such high velocity that it can do enormous damage
— even more than would be done by a nuclear weapon of the same size!'. 37 In the same Star Wars technology touted as
a quintessential tool of peace, defence analyst David Langford sees one of the most destabilizing offensive weapons ever conceived:
'One imagines dead cities of microwave-grilled people'.38 Given this unique potential for destruction, it is not hard to imagine that any
nation subjected to space weapon attack would retaliate with maximum force, including use of nuclear,
biological, and/or chemical weapons. An accidental war sparked by a computer glitch in space could plunge the
world into the most destructive military conflict ever seen.
D. NMD would cause Russia to pull out of the INF treaty and deploy tactical nuclear weapons, leading
the U.S. to follow suit
Philip Coyle, Senior Adviser to the World Security Institute, and Victoria Swanson, Professor in the graduate International
Relations program at St. Mary's University and analyst at the Center for Defense Information, Spring 2008, “Missile Defense
Malfunction: Why the Proposed U.S. Missile Defenses in Europe Will Not Work,” Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 12, No. 1
[Bapodra]
Also linked to the proposed U.S. missile defenses are Russia's vague threats over the past several years to pull out of
the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This treaty banned a whole range of ballistic missiles (those
with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers, as well as ground-launched cruise missiles), and has held up even after the Soviet
Union dissolved into its separate republics. Again, this is an idea that has been floated by Russian officials for the past several years,
but also again, they seem to be latching on to the U.S. missile defense system in Europe as their primary motivating
factor. The initial reason for the INF Treaty was that intermediate-range missiles were considered highly
destabilizing, as their short flight times meant they could wreak devastation very quickly and made a retaliatory response almost
automatic. Because of the specific dangers inherent in intermediate-range ballistic missiles, there has even been talk about
internationalizing the INF Treaty and trying to get other countries in unstable parts of the world to sign it as a way of creating
confidence-building measures. However, if Russia pulls out of the INF, it would be almost impossible to convince
other countries to sign onto the treaty, and the U.S. incentive to continue to follow its provisions would be
vastly reduced.
The result is escalation to full-scale nuclear war
Jan Lodal, Former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, National Security Council, The Price of Dominance: The New
Weapons of Mass Destruction and Their Challenge to American Leadership, 2001, p. 23 [Bapodra]
Many of the 12,000 US and 20,000 Soviet tactical nuclear weapons were more powerful than the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki bombs. A tactical nuclear war would have killed tens or perhaps hundreds of millions, even without escalating
to an all-out strategic nuclear exchange. But such a war probably would have escalated. Tactical nuclear weapons
would not have led to a decisive outcome on the battlefield, but their use would have broken the taboo against
nuclear weapons. At some point, one side would begin to lose the tactical nuclear war. With a large strategic
nuclear force in reserve, the losing side would have a strong incentive to escalate the war and use strategic
forces in an attempt to regain the military initiative.
E. TMD pressures Russia to attack with TNWs escalating to a full-scale nuclear war
Richard Weitz October 07, 2007, (World Politics Review, "Will Russia Deploy Nuclear Weapons in Belarus?")
As part of its proclaimed "asymmetric response" to Washington's decision to deploy BMD systems in Eastern Europe, Russia
might base tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) on short-range missiles in Belarus to threaten these assets in a future
conflict. Surikov's statement could easily have been a trial balloon by Moscow and Minsk to assess the international reaction to such
a deployment. Widely overlooked amidst the denials was the concurrent assertion of Russian Col. Gen. Vladimir Verhkovtsev, head
of the 12th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, that Moscow would not consider negotiating restrictions on Russia's sizable
TNW arsenal unless France and the United Kingdom as well as the United States participate in any such discussions. Since Russian
policymakers know that achieving a consensus on such a delicate issue among Paris, London, and Washington is unlikely, they
evidently are seeking to preserve a free hand in this area. No existing arms control agreement covers TNWs, which
generally are defined as nuclear weapons systems having a range of less than 500 kilometers. After the end of the Cold War, Russia
and the United States eliminated many of their TNWs -- and removed others from deployment on ships and with other operational
combat units -- in accord with the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNI) of 1991-92. Since then, however, the Russian military has
objected to further TNW-related arms control measures. According to multiple sources, the Russian armed forces possess
thousands of TNWs, and its commanders do not appear eager to give them up. In theory, Russian military doctrine allows
Russian commanders to use these weapons for several purposes. For example, Russian strategists have discussed detonating a
limited number of nuclear weapons -- perhaps just one -- to induce an adversary to end ("de-escalate" in Russian terminology) a
conventional military conflict with Russia. The selective strike would seek to exploit the inevitable "shock and awe" effect associated
with nuclear use to cause the targeted decision makers to weigh the risks of nuclear devastation more heavily. This strategy exploits
the fear that, after one nuclear explosion, the prospects of further detonations increase substantially. Initiating nuclear use would
underscore the seriousness with which the Russian government viewed the situation and encourage the other side to de-escalate the
conflict. The most commonly discussed contingency for a "de-escalation" mission is a NATO decision to intervene against a Russian
military ally (e.g., Belarus) or on behalf of a non-member country (e.g., Georgia) in a conflict with Russia. The Russian military
rehearsed such a scenario in their June 1999 "Zapad-99" ("West-99") exercises. After Russian conventional forces proved unable to
repulse an attack on Russia and Belarus, Russian nuclear forces conducted limited strikes against the posited enemy. In 1993,
moreover, the Russian government abandoned its declared pledge not to employ nuclear weapons first in a conflict, effectively
establishing a justification in Russian doctrine for initiating nuclear use. The statement brought Russia's declared strategic posture into
line with that of Britain, France, and the United States (but not China). These NATO countries have never renounced the right to
resort to nuclear weapons first in an emergency. Actually exploding a nuclear device in a conflict would prove problematic. On
the one hand, it could terminate the conflict in Russia's favor. On the other, it could lead to potentially, even larger-scale,
nuclear use if the other side considered the detonation a prelude to additional nuclear strikes and decided to escalate first.
Russian officials would probably attempt to underscore the strike's limited nature -- by using a low-yield TNW, for instance -- to
minimize the risks of further escalation. In addition, Russian strategists have long considered using limited nuclear
strikes to alter the course of a conventional conflict that Russia risked losing. The January 2000 National Security Concept,
for example, implied that Russia could use TNWs to resist a conventional attack without engendering a full-scale nuclear exchange. A
related function of Russian nuclear forces would be to prevent other countries from escalating a conventional conflict to a nuclear war.
In such a scenario, Russia could threaten to retaliate disproportionately should an adversary employ nuclear weapons to try to alter a
conventional battle in its favor. Even after one party has initiated a limited nuclear exchange, Russian commanders might attempt to
control further escalation by issuing nuclear threats, showing restraint, or pursuing other "nuclear signaling." The problem with
attempting to exercise escalation control under combat conditions is that such tactics risk uncontrolled nuclear war. In theory,
other possible firebreaks between non-nuclear operations and uncontrolled nuclear escalation might also exist. These could include
attempts to enforce distinctions between strikes against either side's national homelands (hence the value of launching Russian attacks
from Belarus against U.S. facilities in Poland) as opposed to less critical third areas, between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, or
even between nuclear strikes against military and civilian targets. The most plausible line for limiting escalation, however, remains
that between using and not using nuclear weapons at all.
Hege Frontline
Can’t solve entrepreneurship – plan causes diploma mills
Miano 09 [John Miano has been with the Center for Immigration Studies since 2008 and his area of expertise is in guest worker programs, particularly in how
they affect the technology work force. Mr. Miano has a BA in Mathematics from The College of Wooster and a JD from Seton Hall University. Mr. Miano is also the
founder of the Programmers’ Guild, an organization committed to advancing the interests of technical and professional workers; “No Green Cards for Grads”, July 20,
http://www.cis.org/miano/grads]
What Mr. Frank advocates is tantamount to granting universities the ability to sell U.S. immigration benefits.
How much is a green card worth on the open market? If Mr. Frank had his way, we would soon find out. The U.S. would
have quickie graduate programs spring up all over. Fourth tier and for-profit universities would set up programs
tailored to foreign students. The ability of universities to sell immigration benefits could justify high tuition
prices for such programs. Consider the simplest case. U.S. universities could market graduate programs to people who already have a PhD or MS from foreign institutions.
Take one or two courses at the U.S. school and get an MS degree in the exact same field. The university could
even include it as part of the package employment. What Mr. Frank has completely lost in his call for foreign
student to remain in the U.S. is the benefit gained from such students returning home. Foreign students create a
pool of people who have learned about American and Americans in general. When they return home they serve as
American ambassadors to the world. If foreign students remain in the U.S., our national investment in them
(financial investment that could have been used to fund education for Americans) is squandered.
Immigrants don’t leave because of our visa restrictions
Vivek Wadhwa et al 9 Executive in Residence Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University Senior Research
Associate Labor & Worklife Program, Harvard Law School AnnaLee Saxenian Dean and Professor School of
Information University of California, Berkeley Richard Freeman Herbert Asherman Chair in Economics,
Harvard University Director, Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School Director, Labor Studies
Program, National Bureau of Economic Research Gary Gereffi Director, Center on Globalization, Governance
& Competitiveness, Professor Sociology Department Duke University Alex Salkever Visiting Researcher
Masters of Engineering Management Program Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University, “America’s Loss
Is the World’s Gain”, Kauffman Foundation, March,
http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/americas_loss.pdf)
We find that, though
restrictive immigration policies caused some returnees to depart the United States, the most
significant factors in the decision to return home were career opportunities, family ties, and quality of
life. Demographic characteristics Here are some of the characteristics of the returnees we surveyed and some comparisons with the population of Indian and Chinese
immigrants in the United States in 2006. • The vast majority were relatively young. The average age of Indians was 30, and of Chinese was 33. •
The majority (89.8 percent of Indians and 72.4 percent of Chinese) were male; most (72.7 percent of Indians and 67.1 percent of Chinese) were married; and most (59.5
percent of Indians and 58.6 percent of Chinese) had no children. • They were highly educated, with degrees primarily in management, technology, or science. Fifty-one
percent and 40.8 percent respectively of Chinese respondents held Masters and PhD degrees. Of Indian respondents, 65.6 percent held Masters and 12.1 percent held
PhD degrees.2 • A comparison of our sample with national data on Indian and Chinese immigrants shows that these returnees are at the very top of the educational
distribution for these highly educated immigrant groups—precisely the kind of people that our earlier research has shown make the greatest contribution to the U.S.
economy and business and job growth. Visa status of returnees • A third (32.2 percent) of the Chinese respondents were in the United States on student visas, in
comparison with about a fifth (20.2 percent) of Indians. 19.8 percent of the Chinese and 48.0 percent of the Indians were on temporary work visas. • Even those who are
permanently settled in the U.S. choose to return. 26.9 percent of Indian respondents and 34 percent of Chinese respondents held green cards or U.S. Citizenship. •
Most returnees did not appear to be motivated by visa issues. Seventy-six percent indicated that
considerations regarding their visa did not contribute to their decision to return to their home country.
Reasons for coming to and for leaving the U.S. The returnees cited career, education, and quality of life as the main reasons to come to the United States. • Amongst the
strongest factors bringing these immigrants to the U.S. were professional and educational development opportunities. Of Indian and Chinese respondents, 93.5 percent
and 91.6 percent respectively said that professional development was an important3 factor, and 85.9 percent and 90.5 percent respectively said that 2 This difference in
the level of educational attainment between highly skilled Indian and Chinese immigrants to the U.S. is consistent with the findings of comparable surveys. See
Saxenian (2002). 3 In the text, percentages of responses given as “important” are those to which respondents answered “somewhat important”, “very important”, or
“extremely important”; percentages of responses given as “unimportant” are those to which respondents answered “not very important” or “not at all important”. 3
America’s Loss Is the World’s Gain educational development was important in their decision to migrate to the United States. • Other key factors were quality-of-life
concerns, better infrastructure and facilities, and better compensation. The majority (67.4 percent of Indians and 69.1 percent of Chinese) said that the availability of
jobs in their home countries was not a consideration in their decision to migrate to the United States. Returnees cited career and quality of life as the main reason to
return to their home country rather than stay in the United States. • The commonest professional factor (86.8 percent of Chinese and 79.0 percent of Indians) motivating
workers to return home was the growing demand for their skills in their home countries. • A significant majority (84.0 percent of Chinese and 68.7 percent of Indians)
believed that their home countries provided better career opportunities. Furthermore, 87.3 percent of Chinese and 62.3 percent of Indians saw better career opportunities
in their home countries than in the United States. • Financial compensation was a factor important to 62.1 percent of Chinese and 49.2 percent of Indian returnees.
Social/family factors Family considerations are strong magnets pulling immigrants back to their home countries. Care for aging parents was considered by 89.4 percent
of Indians and 79.1 percent of Chinese respondents to be much better in their home countries. Family values were also considered to be better in their home countries by
79.7 percent of Indians and 67.0 percent of Chinese. Additionally, 88.0 percent of Indians and 76.8 percent of Chinese reported that the opportunity to be close to
family and friends was better at home.
Turn- The plan causes backlash against F1 visas and labor certification guts solvency
Tiger, 08 (Joseph Tiger, The Author Is A J.D. Candidate At The Georgetown University Law Center. He
Graduated From Georgetown University In 2006 With A Degree In Economics. While In High School, He
Earned An Associate Degree In Mathematics From The Santa Rosa Junior College, California, In 2003, ReBending The Paperclip: An Examination Of America's Policy Regarding Skilled Workers And Student Visas,
Spring 2008, 22 Geo. Immigr. L.J. 507)
Offering all students green cards but not H-1B visas would be even more problematic. If all students were made
automatically eligible for EB status upon graduation, acceptance at an American university would, in essence,
constitute a near guarantee of future citizenship. Thus, to maintain its power to control citizenship, the
government would have to exercise even stricter control over the granting of student visas. These procedural
hurdles could act as a disincentive if not an actual barrier to foreign students interested in studying at American
universities. n197 Additionally, working under a green card has procedural hurdles of its own, not associated
with the H-1B visa program (notably, labor certification). As such, foreign students who do not wish to stay in
the United States beyond a temporary period of work would face the choice of accepting the green card and
becoming a permanent resident, or leaving immediately upon the termination of F-1 status.
No worker shortage – their ev is based on false allegations by corporations.
Gene Nelson, IT professional, “Foreign workers take jobs away from skilled Americans,” 8/21/ 2008, http://www.numbersusa.com/content/node/1304
Wealthy advocates of H-1B visas have industriously worked to keep this employer-designed program hidden
from middle-class Americans, who are outraged when they learn how it harms them.
In 2002, Nobel economics laureate Milton Friedman correctly identified the 1990 H-1B visa program as a "government subsidy" because
it allows employers access to imported, highly skilled labor at below-market wages.
False allegations of worker shortages have been a popular approach. But American colleges and universities
graduate four to six times the number of students needed to fill openings in technology fields that are generated
by retirements and business expansion.
Econ is growing now
Jack Phillips, Epoch Times, “Beige Book: US Economy Growing Modestly,” 10/21/2010, http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/44624/
The US Federal Reserve's Beige Book, released on the afternoon of Wednesday Oct. 20, highlighted that the nation’s economic
activity has been rising “at a modest pace” between September and October. The Beige Book gives an overall report of
the 12 Federal Reserve Districts in the US. Overall activity remains somewhat limited in the districts but is
showing signs of progress has emerged. “Manufacturing activity continued to expand, with production and new
orders rising across most Districts,” the report said. “Demand for non-financial services was reported to be stable to
modestly increasing overall. Consumer spending was steady to up slightly, but consumers remained pricesensitive, and purchases were mostly limited to necessities and non-discretionary items.”
Companies won’t use the plan to hire – they’re hoarding cash
Jia Lynn Yang, Washington Post, “U.S. companies buy back stock in droves as they hold record levels of cash,” 10/7/2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/10/06/AR2010100606772.html?hpid=topnews
For months, companies
have been sitting on the sidelines with record piles of cash, too nervous to spend. Now
they're starting to deploy some of that money - not to hire workers or build factories, but to prop up their share
prices. Sitting on these unprecedented levels of cash, U.S. companies are buying back their own stock in droves. So far this year, firms
have announced they will purchase $273 billion of their own shares, more than five times as much compared with this time last year, according to Birinyi Associates, a
stock market research firm. But the
rise in buybacks signals that many companies are still hesitant to spend their cash
on the job-generating activities that could produce economic growth. Some companies are buying back shares partly because they don't want to invest
in developing new products or services while consumer demand remains weak, analysts said. "They don't know what they want to do with all the cash they're sitting
on," said Zachary Karabell, president of RiverTwice Research. Historically
low interest rates are also prompting some companies to
borrow to repurchase shares. Microsoft, for instance, borrowed $4.75 billion last month by issuing new bonds at rock-bottom interest rates and announced
it would use some of that money to buy back shares. The company already has nearly $37 billion in cash, but much of that money is being held by its
operations overseas. The tech company is reluctant to repatriate the money, because it would get hit with a huge
corporate tax bill. A share buyback is a quick way to make a stock more attractive to Wall Street. It improves a closely watched
metric known as earnings per share, which divides a company's profit by the total number of shares on the market. Such a move can produce a sudden
burst of interest in a stock, improving its price.
Global collapse has become impossible – the rise of central banks has made a 1930s repeat impossible.
Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, “The Secrets of Stability,” 12/12/2009, http://www.newsweek.com/2009/12/11/the-secrets-of-stability.html
One year ago, the
world seemed as if it might be coming apart. The global financial system, which had fueled a great
expansion of capitalism and trade across the world, was crumbling. All the certainties of the age of globalization—about the virtues of
free markets, trade, and technology—were being called into question. Faith in the American model had collapsed. The financial
industry had crumbled. Once-roaring emerging markets like China, India, and Brazil were sinking. Worldwide trade was shrinking to a degree not seen
since the 1930s. Pundits whose bearishness had been vindicated predicted we were doomed to a long, painful bust, with cascading failures in sector after sector, country
after country. In a widely cited essay that appeared in The Atlantic this May, Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, wrote: "The
conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump 'cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.' This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be
worse than the Great Depression." Others
predicted that these economic shocks would lead to political instability and
violence in the worst-hit countries. At his confirmation hearing in February, the new U.S. director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair,
cautioned the Senate that "the financial crisis and global recession are likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging-market nations over the next year."
Hillary Clinton endorsed this grim view. And she was hardly alone. Foreign Policy ran a cover story predicting serious unrest in several emerging markets. Of one thing
One year later, how much has the world
really changed? Well, Wall Street is home to two fewer investment banks (three, if you count Merrill Lynch). Some regional banks
have gone bust. There was some turmoil in Moldova and (entirely unrelated to the financial crisis) in Iran. Severe problems
remain, like high unemployment in the West, and we face new problems caused by responses to the crisis—soaring debt and fears of
inflation. But overall, things look nothing like they did in the 1930s. The predictions of economic and political
collapse have not materialized at all. A key measure of fear and fragility is the ability of poor and unstable
countries to borrow money on the debt markets. So consider this: the sovereign bonds of tottering Pakistan have returned 168 percent so far this
year. All this doesn't add up to a recovery yet, but it does reflect a return to some level of normalcy. And that
rebound has been so rapid that even the shrewdest observers remain puzzled. "The question I have at the back
of my head is 'Is that it?' " says Charles Kaye, the co-head of Warburg Pincus. "We had this huge crisis, and now we're back to
business as usual?" This revival did not happen because markets managed to stabilize themselves on their own. Rather, governments, having
learned the lessons of the Great Depression, were determined not to repeat the same mistakes once this
crisis hit. By massively expanding state support for the economy—through central banks and national
treasuries—they buffered the worst of the damage. (Whether they made new mistakes in the process remains to be seen.) The extensive social
safety nets that have been established across the industrialized world also cushioned the pain felt by many. Times are still tough, but things are
nowhere near as bad as in the 1930s, when governments played a tiny role in national economies. It's true that
the massive state interventions of the past year may be fueling some new bubbles: the cheap cash and
government guarantees provided to banks, companies, and consumers have fueled some irrational exuberance in
stock and bond markets. Yet these rallies also demonstrate the return of confidence, and confidence is a very
powerful economic force. When John Maynard Keynes described his own prescriptions for economic growth, he believed government action could provide
everyone was sure: nothing would ever be the same again. Not the financial industry, not capitalism, not globalization.
only a temporary fix until the real motor of the economy started cranking again—the animal spirits of investors, consumers, and companies seeking risk and profit.
Beyond all this, though, I believe there's
a fundamental reason why we have not faced global collapse in the last year. It is
the same reason that we weathered the stock-market crash of 1987, the recession of 1992, the Asian crisis of
1997, the Russian default of 1998, and the tech-bubble collapse of 2000. The current global economic system is
inherently more resilient than we think. The world today is characterized by three major forces for stability, each reinforcing the other and each
historical in nature.
Worker shortages are crucial to refocus businesses to adaptive strategies – this is a bigger internal link to
the economy
Eleanor Bloxham, CEO of The Value Alliance and Corporate Governance Alliance, “How companies can fill the skilled worker gap -- start training them again!”
10/6/2010, http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/05/news/economy/joblessness_training_hiring_practices.fortune/index.htm
Joblessness erodes our national optimism, our enthusiasm for innovation, as well as our overall economic
outlook and it leads to the wealthiest nation in the world having a poverty problem. Some of the solutions to
joblessness are intractable and complex. Others are more manageable, like for instance, better utilization of the huge idled
workforce just waiting for another job in this country. Among the recent issues being discussed with respect to U.S.
joblessness is the number of available jobs for which there are no skilled applicants. But, like the mortgage modeler who came
to believe that housing prices couldn't go down, we
may not be operating with the right model when it comes to our views
on hiring and training. Being able to find people with precisely the right skills to step into a job is a relatively new assumption, historically speaking. Does
this model of filling jobs really serve us? Will it help us solve U.S. joblessness? Thirty years ago, computer companies hired pools of
programmers and engineers who did not know how to write code when they were hired but who were expected
to learn on the job. Requiring previous Fortran and machine language experience wasn't the norm in those days, and the best programmers may not have even
had the opportunity to learn those languages in college. Rather, finding smart people who would learn and put their aptitude to work was the goal. Fast forward to
today when many companies have allowed software -- and the companies that make software -- to rule their businesses. Rather
than thinking through what's actually crucial in running a business, companies have become accustomed to
buying software from enterprise software companies like Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500), SAP (SAP), and IBM (IBM, Fortune 500 ), and organizing
their business practices around the less-than-robust thinking required to run the programs. Then, when laying out job
descriptions, instead of looking for someone who has handled certain challenges or achieved certain goals,
companies simply require several years of experience with that particular accounting, or CRM, or invoicing, or HR suite, and
tend to look at little else. It's not only software firms that have hijacked the thinking inside U.S. business; consultant models have done so also.
Management techniques like TQM, Lean, and Six Sigma are quite valuable, but it's the concepts behind these programs
rather than an automaton following them that is important. Yet, again, in developing job descriptions, firms persist
in requiring specific experience in those particular techniques. Why is this? Because just as in the time of rising housing prices the
mortgage models seemed to work fine, in the time of nearly full employment, requiring specifics was easy and convenient. The need for businesses to work together to
shoulder this responsibility of sustained unemployment was not critical, the way it is today. Time to retool the hiring process Just as mortgage firms
have had to retool, so must companies, with board oversight, rethink the recruiting process. The human-resource function has always been one of the least recognized
and least addressed in U.S. businesses. The first place to start is with those who recruit. Companies and boards need to ensure that their
recruiters are people who can think beyond the keywords of software programs and recognize real talent, who can understand that someone right out of college-or
someone in their 50s, 60s, or 70s-may have as much to bring to the company as a disgruntled 30- or 40-year-old with the specific experience that the job description
asked for. Reconsidering
recruiting systems is important not only for our current situation of joblessness and
economic malaise, it's also important in strengthening our firms. Future software packages will change-what was
necessary before is obsolete now-and firms need employees who can bridge that gap, not people who know only one thing
very well, and resist change or innovation. Companies will need people who can imagine the future and can
meet whatever new challenge this changing world brings. Creating a resilient and enthusiastic staff with diverse experiences is important
both in the C-suite and on the shop floor. It begins with boards recognizing that their role in creating the economy includes
ensuring that the recruiting practices of the firms they oversee are not convenience- and short-term oriented but
rather are aimed at building a core of individuals who can carry the firm through unforeseen changes. Those
individuals may or may not have six years of Six Sigma and two years of SAS. Those valuable employees, if they can think, can easily learn those skills. But it's the
thinking that ultimately will matter -- to the firm and collectively to our economic growth.
Innovation’s high now
Tom Price, Miller-McCune Magazine, “U.S. Challenged for High-Tech Global Leadership,” 3/13/2010, http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/u-schallenged-for-high-tech-global-leadership-10818/
Despite negative trends, U.S. R&D continues to lead the world by a large margin. In 2007, America’s $369 billion
R&D spending exceeded all of Asia’s $338 billion and all of the European Union’s $263 billion. The United States spent
more than the next four countries — Japan, China, Germany and France — combined. America’s share of all high-tech
manufacturing has risen — and it continues to lead the world — even though the U.S. share of exports has
declined. That’s because the United States consumes so much of its product domestically. The United States
makes nearly a third of the world’s high-tech goods, compared with the European Union’s 25 percent and China’s 14 percent. It’s the
world leader in communications, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and aerospace. It trails only the EU in scientific instruments
and China in computers. U.S. inventors obtained 81,000 U.S. patents in 2008, more than double Japan’s 35,000 and all of Europe’s 23,000. America’s 49 percent share
inventors also led in what the report calls “high-value” patents — those that were
given protection by the EU and Japan as well as by the United States. The U.S. share of 30 percent was down from 34 percent in 1997.
China obtained just about 1 percent of both kinds of patents. But its scientists have become the second-most-prolific contributors to
of those patents dropped from 55 percent in 1995. U.S.
scholarly journals, another area in which the United States continues to lead the world. The globalization of science is illustrated by the worldwide growth in many
measures of scientific prowess, no matter which countries dominate, the board said. For example, high-tech exports more than tripled to $2.3 trillion worldwide between
1995 and 2008. The estimated number of researchers increased to 5.7 million in 2007 from 4 million in 1995. Global R&D expenditures totaled $1.1 trillion in 2007, up
Foreign
corporations actually invested more in U.S.-based research ($34 billion) in 2006 than U.S. firms invested
overseas $28.5 billion. Both more than doubled since 1995.
from $525 billion in 1996. Cross-boarder co-authorship also increased from 8 percent of scientific articles published in 1988 to 22 percent in 2007.
Heg doesn’t solve conflict
Hachigan and Sutphen 2008
(Nina and Monica, Stanford Center for International Security, The Next American Century, p. 168-9)
In practice, the strategy of primacy failed to deliver. While the fact of being the world’s only superpower has
substantial benefits, a national security strategy based on suing and ratiaing primacy has not made America
more secure. America’s military might has not been the answer to terrorism, disease, climate change, or
proliferation. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea have become more dangerous in the last seven years, not less. Worse
than being ineffective with transnational threats and smaller powers, a strategy of maintaining primacy is
counterproductive when it comes to pivotal powers. If America makes primacy the main goal of its national
security strategy, then why shouldn’t the pivotal powers do the same? A goal of primacy signals that sheer
strength is most critical to security. American cannot trumpet its desire to dominate the world military and then
question why China is modernizing its military.
No impact to the transition
Ikenberry 08 professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University (John, The Rise of China
and the Future of the West Can the Liberal System Survive?, Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb)
Some observers believe that the American era is coming to an end, as the Western-oriented world order is replaced by one increasingly
dominated by the East. The historian Niall Ferguson has written that the bloody twentieth century witnessed "the descent of the West" and "a reorientation of the world"
toward the East. Realists go on to note that as China gets more powerful and the United States' position erodes, two things are likely to happen: China will try to use its
growing influence to reshape the rules and institutions of the international system to better serve its interests, and other states in the system -- especially the declining
hegemon -- will start to see China as a growing security threat. The
result of these developments, they predict, will be tension,
distrust, and conflict, the typical features of a power transition. In this view, the drama of China's rise will feature an increasingly
powerful China and a declining United States locked in an epic battle over the rules and leadership of the international
system. And as the world's largest country emerges not from within but outside the established post-World War II international order, it is a drama that will end
with the grand ascendance of China and the onset of an Asian-centered world order. That course, however, is not inevitable. The rise of China
does not have to trigger a wrenching hegemonic transition. The U.S.-Chinese power transition can be very different
from those of the past because China faces an international order that is fundamentally different from those that past
rising states confronted. China does not just face the United States; it faces a Western-centered system that is open, integrated,
and rule-based, with wide and deep political foundations. The nuclear revolution, meanwhile, has made war among
great powers unlikely -- eliminating the major tool that rising powers have used to overturn international systems
defended by declining hegemonic states. Today's Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join. This
unusually durable and expansive order is itself the product of farsighted U.S. leadership. After World War II, the United States did not simply establish itself as
the leading world power. It led in the creation of universal institutions that not only invited global membership but also
brought democracies and market societies closer together. It built an order that facilitated the participation and
integration of both established great powers and newly independent states. (It is often forgotten that this postwar order was
designed in large part to reintegrate the defeated Axis states and the beleaguered Allied states into a unified international system.) Today, China can gain full access to
and thrive within this system. And if it does, China will rise, but the Western order -- if managed properly -- will live on.
Threats are always exaggerated – multiple warrants
Layne, Associate Professor, 1997
(Christopher Layne, Visiting Associate Professor at Naval Postgraduate School, “From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America’s Future Grand Strategy”,
International Security, Vol. 22 Issue. 1 Summer 1997).
The security/interdependence nexus results in the exaggeration of threats to American strategic interests because it requires the
United States to defend its core interests by intervening in the peripheries. There are three reasons for this. First, as Johnson points out, order-maintenance
strategies are biased inherently toward threat exaggeration. Threats to order generate an anxiety “that has at its center the fear of the
unknown. It is not just security, but the pattern of order upon which the sense of security depends that is threatened.” Second, because the strategy of
preponderance requires U.S. intervention in places that concededly have no intrinsic strategic value, U.S.
policymakers are compelled to overstate the dangers to American interests to mobilize domestic support for
their policies. Third, the tendency to exaggerate threats is tightly linked to the strategy of preponderance’s
concern with maintaining U.S. credibility.
Latent power can sustain Heg
Wohlforth ‘7 (William, Prof and Chair of Dept. of Government @ Dartmouth, “Unipolar stability: the rules of power analysis”, Harvard International Review,
Vol. 29, No. 1, Spring)
US military forces are stretched thin, its budget and trade deficits are high, and the country continues to finance its profligate ways by borrowing from abroad--notably
from the Chinese government. These developments have prompted many analysts to warn that the United States suffers from " imperial overstretch." And if
US power is overstretched now, the argument goes, unipolarity can hardly be sustainable for long. The problem with this argument is that it fails
to distinguish
between actual and latent power. One must be careful to take into account both the level of resources that can be mobilized and the degree to which a
government actually tries to mobilize them. And how much a government asks of its public is partly a function of the severity of the challenges that it faces. Indeed, one
can never know for sure what a state is capable of until it has been seriously challenged. Yale historian Paul Kennedy coined the term "imperial overstretch" to describe
the situation in which a state's actual and latent capabilities cannot possibly match its foreign policy commitments. This situation should be contrasted with what might
be termed "self-inflicted overstretch"--a
situation in which a state lacks the sufficient resources to meet its current foreign policy commitments in
the short term, but has untapped latent power and readily available policy choices that it can use to
draw on this power. This is arguably the situation that the U nited S tates is in today. But the US government has not attempted to
extract more resources from its population to meet its foreign policy commitments. Instead, it has moved strongly in the opposite direction by slashing personal and
corporate tax rates. Although it is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and claims to be fighting a global "war" on terrorism, the United States is not acting like a
country under intense international pressure. Aside from the volunteer servicemen and women and their families, US citizens have not been asked to make sacrifices for
the sake of national prosperity and security. The country could clearly devote a greater proportion of its economy
to military spending: today it spends only about 4 percent of its GDP on the military, as compared to 7 to 14 percent during the peak years of the Cold
War. It could also spend its military budget more efficiently, shifting resources from expensive weapons systems to boots on the
ground. Even more radically, it could reinstitute military conscription, shifting resources from pay and benefits to training and equipping more soldiers. On the
economic front, it could raise taxes in a number of ways, notably on fossil fuels, to put its fiscal house back in order. No one knows for sure what would
happen if a US president undertook such drastic measures, but there is nothing in economics, political science, or history to suggest that such policies would be any less
likely to succeed than China is to continue to grow rapidly for decades. Most of those who study US politics would argue that the likelihood and potential success of
such power-generating policies depends on public support, which is a function of the public's perception of a threat. And as unnerving as terrorism is, there is
nothing like the threat of another hostile power rising up in opposition to the United States for mobilizing public support.
With latent power in the picture, it becomes clear that unipolarity might have more built-in self-reinforcing
mechanisms than many analysts realize. It is often noted that the rise of a peer competitor to the United States might be thwarted by the
counterbalancing actions of neighboring powers. For example, China's rise might push India and Japan closer to the United States--indeed, this has already
happened to some extent. There is also the strong possibility that a peer rival that comes to be seen as a threat would create strong incentives for the U nited S tates
to end its self-inflicted overstretch and tap potentially large wellsprings of latent power.
Competitiveness isn’t key to hege
Reihan Salam, Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation, “ROBERT PAPE IS OVERHEATED,” 1/21/ 2009,
http://www.theamericanscene.com/2009/01/21/robert-pape-is-overheated
Pape spends a lot of time demonstrating that U.S. economic output represents a declining share of global output,
which is hardly a surprise. Yet as Pape surely understands, the more relevant question is how much and how readily can economic
output be translated into military power? The European Union, for example, has many state-like features, yet it
doesn’t have the advantages of a traditional state when it comes to raising an army. The Indian economy is taxed in a
highly uneven manner, and much of the economy is black — the same is true across the developing world. As for
China, both the shape of the economy, as Yasheng Huang suggests, and its long frontiers, ₪ stopped here at 08:25 ₪ as
Andrew Nathan has long argued, pose serious barriers to translating potential power into effective power. (Wohlforth and Brooks
give Stephen Walt’s balance-of-threat its due.) So while this hardly obviates the broader point that relative American economic power is eroding — that was the whole
idea of America’s postwar grand strategy — it is worth keeping in mind. This
is part of the reason why sclerotic, statist economies can
punch above their weight militarily, at least for a time — they are “better” at marshaling resources. Over the long run,
the Singapores will beat the Soviets. But in the long run, we’re all dead. And given that this literature is rooted in the bogey of long-term coalition warfare, you can see
why the unipolarity argument holds water. At the risk of sounding overly harsh, Pape’s understanding of “innovativeness” — based on the number of patents
filed, it seems — is
crude to say the least. I recommend Amar Bhidé‘s brilliant critique of Richard Freeman, which I’ll be talking about a lot. Pape cites
The “global diffusion of technology” is
real, and if anything it magnifies U.S. economic power. “Ah, but we’re talking about the prospect of coalition warfare!” The global
diffusion of technology is indeed sharply raising the costs of military conquest, as the United States discovered in Iraq. The
declining utility of military power means that a unipolar distribution of military power is more likely to persist.
Zakaria, who was relying on slightly shopworn ideas that Bhidé demolishes in The Venturesome Economy.
And yes, it also means that unipolar military power is less valuable than it was in 1945.
npolarity now and inevitable
ass ‘8 [Richard. Pres of CFR. “What Follows American Dominion?” The Financial Times, 16 April 08. lexis]
The unipolar era, a time of un-precedented American dominion, is over. It lasted some two decades, little more than a moment in
historical terms. Why did it end? One explanation is history. States get better at generating and piecing together the human, financial and technological
resources that lead to productivity and prosperity. The same holds for companies and other organisations. The rise of new powers cannot be stopped. The result is an
ever larger number of actors able to exert influence regionally or globally.
It is not that the US has grown weaker, but that many other
entities have grown much stronger. A second reason unipolarity has ended is US policy. By both what it has done and what it has failed to do, the US
has accelerated the emergence of new power centres and has weakened its own position relative to them. US energy policy (or the lack thereof) is one driving force
behind the end of unipolarity. Since the first oil shocks of the 1970s, US oil consumption has grown by some 20 per cent and, more important, US imports of petroleum
This growth in demand for foreign oil has
helped drive up the world price from just over $20 a barrel to more than $100 a barrel. The result is an
enormous transfer of wealth and leverage to those states with energy reserves. US economic policy has played a role as well. President George W. Bush
products have more than doubled in volume and nearly doubled as a percentage of consumption.
has fought costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, allowed discretionary spending to increase by 8 per cent a year and cut taxes. The US fiscal position declined from a
surplus of more than $100bn in 2001 to an estimated deficit of about $250bn in 2007. The
ballooning current account deficit is now more
than 6 per cent of gross domestic product. This places downward pressure on the dollar, stimulates inflation and contributes
to the accumulation of wealth and power elsewhere in the world. Poor regulation of the US mortgage market and the credit crisis it spawned have exacerbated these
problems. Iraq
has also contributed to the dilution of American primacy. The conflict has proved to be an expensive
war of choice - militarily, economically and diplomatically, as well as in human terms. Years ago, the historian
Paul Kennedy outlined his thesis about "imperial overstretch", which posited that the US would eventually
decline by overreaching, just as other great powers had. Prof Kennedy's theory turned out to apply most
immediately to the Soviet Union, but the US - for all its corrective mechanisms and dynamism - has not proved
to be immune. Finally, unipolarity's end is not simply the result of the rise of other states and organisations or of the failures and follies of US policy. It is also a
consequence of globalisation. Globalisation has increased the volume, velocity and importance of cross-border flows of just about everything, from drugs, e-mails,
greenhouse gases, goods and people to television and radio signals, viruses (virtual and real) and weapons. Many of these flows take place outside the control of
governments and without their knowledge. As a result ,
globalisation dilutes the influence of big powers, including the US. These
same flows often strengthen non-state actors, such as energy exporters (who are experiencing a dramatic increase in wealth),
terrorists (who use the internet to recruit and train, the international banking system to move resources and the global transport system to move people), rogue
states (which can exploit black and grey -markets) and Fortune 500 companies (which quickly move personnel and investments). Being the strongest
state no longer means having a near-monopoly on power. It is easier than ever before for individuals and groups to accumulate and project substantial power. All of this
raises a critical question: if unipolarity is gone, what will take its place? Some predict a return to the bipolarity that characterised international relations during the cold
war. This is unlikely. China's military strength does not approximate that of the US; more important, its focus will remain on economic growth, a choice that leads it to
seek economic integration and avoid conflict. Russia may be more inclined towards re-creating a bipolar world, but it too has a stake in co-operation and, in any event,
lacks the capacity to challenge the US. Still others predict the emergence of a modern multipolar world, one in which China, Europe, India, Japan and Russia join the
US as dominant influences. This view ignores how the world has changed. There are literally dozens of meaningful power centres ,
including regional powers, international organisations, companies, media outlets, religious movements, terrorist organisations, drug cartels and non-governmental
organisations. Today's
world is increasingly one of distributed, rather than concentrated, power. The successor to
unipolarity is neither bipolarity or multipolarity. It is non-polarity.