Democracy Promotion/Soft
Power—Affirmative
Tentative 1AC
1AC—Democracy Advantage
Global democracy is under threat—the international image of democracy is
the crucial variable
Walker 15 - Christopher Walker is Executive Director of the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for
Democratic Studies, a leading center for the analysis and discussion of the theory and practice of democratic development. (“The
Authoritarian Resurgence,” Journal of Democracy, Volume 26, Number 2, p. 21, Project Muse, April 2015) STRYKER
Attentive readers of this journal will have already noticed that NED’s
International Forum for Democratic
Studies is engaged in a study of what we have varyingly labeled the “ world movement
against democracy” or the “authoritarian resurgence.” This project is divided
into two parts—one focusing on the countries that have been leading this resurgence, and
a second examining some of the key “soft-power” arenas in which they have been
seeking to weaken democracy . The first article generated by this project, Andrew J. Nathan on “China’s
Challenge,” appeared in our January 2015 issue. In the pages that follow, we offer readers essays on four other major
authoritarian countries—Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Saudi Arabia—that are seeking
both to gain ascendancy in their respective regions and to undercut the rules-based
institutions that have been instrumental in setting global democratic norms. These regimes may
disagree on many things, but they share the objective of obstructing the advance of democracy and weakening the influence of democratic
principles in the world. Lilia Shevtsova analyzes the transformation of Russia’s kleptocratic regime into something far more belligerent and
dangerous, and explains how Vladimir Putin’s new foreign policy is raising the stakes and reshaping the landscape in Europe and Eurasia.
Javier Corrales shows that Venezuela under Hugo Chávez’s successor Nicolás Maduro
has seen a “turn toward
greater autocracy.” Abbas Milani evaluates the underpinnings of the clerical authoritarian regime in Iran, and in a companion
piece Alex Vatanka looks at how Tehran is actively projecting its influence throughout its
neighborhood. Frederic Wehrey examines Saudi Arabia, Iran’s great regional rival, and the
negative impact of Saudi policies on democracy. Over the past decade, these regimes have proven
adept at refining their techniques of repression and control. But all four of them have
been buoyed by high oil revenues, and it remains to be seen how they will fare if the price of oil remains at sharply lower
levels over an extended period of time. The authors of these essays explain the threat posed by these resurgent
authoritarians, but also identify their inherent political and economic weaknesses, including rampant corruption. The established
democracies have been slow to recognize the increasingly determined challenge from
today’s authoritarians, perhaps because they hope that these regimes will be undone by their flaws. But given the
resilience that the authoritarians have displayed so far, it would be rash for the
democracies to underestimate the seriousness of the dangers that they pose.
Surveillance undermines the perceived viability of democracy
The Economist 13 - (“America against democracy,” http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/07/secretgovernment 7/9/2013) STRYKER
REVELATIONS in the wake of Edward Snowden's civil disobedience continue to roll in.
The New York Times reports that the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as the FISA court, "has quietly
become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance
issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years
to come..." How is the FISA court like a shadow Supreme Court? Its interpretation of the constitution is treated by the federal
government as law. The Times reports: In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use
in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved
out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and
seizures, the officials said. Of course, there are important differences. None of the judges of the FISA court were vetted by Congress.
They were appointed by a single unelected official: John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court. And then there's the fact that
"the
FISA court hears from only one side in the case—the government—and its findings
are almost never made public." A court that is supreme, in the sense of having the final say, but where arguments are only
ever submitted on behalf of the government, and whose judges are not subject to the approval of a
democratic body , sounds a lot like the sort of thing authoritarian governments set up when they make a half-hearted attempt
to create the appearance of the rule of law. According to the Times, Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, "said he
was troubled by the idea that the court is creating a significant body of law without hearing from anyone outside the government, forgoing
the adversarial system that is a staple of the American justice system." I'm troubled, too. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal adds some
meat to the story by reporting that "The
National Security Agency’s ability to gather phone data on
millions of Americans hinges on the secret redefinition of the word 'relevant'". In classified
orders starting in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that "relevant" could be broadened to permit an entire database of records on millions
of people, in contrast to a more conservative interpretation widely applied in criminal cases, in which only some of those records would
likely be allowed, according to people familiar with the ruling."Relevant"
has long been a broad standard, but
the way the court is interpreting it, to mean, in effect, "everything," is new, says Mark Eckenwiler, a
senior counsel at Perkins Coie LLP who, until December, was the Justice Department's primary authority on federal criminal surveillance
law.[...]Two senators on the Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Mark Udall (D., Colo.), have argued repeatedly that there
was a "secret interpretation" of the Patriot Act. The senators' offices tell the Journal that this new interpretation of the word "relevant" is
what they meant. Think about that. Doesn't that suggest to you that Messrs Wyden and Udall were afraid they might be subject to some sort
of censure or reprisal were they to share with the public specific details about the official interpretation of the law to which the public is
subject? And those specific details were about the interpretation of "relevant"? Now that that cat's out of the bag, I guess we're in danger?
All this somehow got me thinking of the doctrine of "democracy promotion", which was
developed under George W. Bush and maintained more or less by Barack Obama. The doctrine is
generally presented as half-idealism, half-practicality. That all the people of the Earth, by
dint of common humanity, are entitled to the protections of democracy is an inspiring principle .
However, its foreign-policy implications are not really so clear. To those of us who are sceptical that America has the authority to intervene
whenever and wherever there are thwarted democratic rights, the advocates of democracy-promotion offer a more businesslike proposition.
It is said that authoritarianism, especially theocratic Islamic authoritarianism, breeds anti-American terrorism, and that swamp-draining
democracy-promotion abroad is therefore a priority of American national security. If
you don't wish to asphyxiate on
poison gas in a subway, or lose your legs to detonating pressure-cookers at a road-race, it
is in your interest to support American interventions on behalf of democracy across the
globe. So the story goes. However, the unstated story goes, it is equally important that American
democracy not get out of hand. If you don't want your flight to La Guardia to end in a
ball of fire, or your local federal building to be razed by a cataclysm of exploding
fertiliser, you will need to countenance secret courts applying in secret its own secret
interpretation of hastily drawn, barely debated emergency security measures, and to
persecute with the full force of the world's dominant violent power any who dare afford a
glimpse behind the veil. You see, democracy here at home must be balanced against the
requirements of security, and it is simply too dangerous to leave the question of this
balance to the democratic public. Open deliberation over the appropriate balance would require saying something
concrete about threats to public safety, and also about the means by which those threats might be checked. But revealing such information
would only empower America's enemies and endanger American lives. Therefore, this is a discussion Americans can't afford to have.
Therefore, the
power to determine that this is a discussion the public cannot afford to have
cannot reside in the democratic public. That power must reside elsewhere, with
the best and brightest, with those who have surveyed the perils of the world and know what it takes to meet them. Those deep
within the security apparatus, within the charmed circle, must therefore make the decision, on America's behalf, about how much
democracy—about how much discussion about the limits of democracy, even—it is safe for Americans to have. This
decision will
not be effective, however, if it is openly questioned. The point is that is not up for debate. It is crucial, then, that
any attempt by those on the inside to reveal the real, secret rules governing American life be met with overwhelming, intimidating
retaliation. In order to maintain a legitimising democratic imprimatur, it is of course important that a handful of elected officials be brought
into the anteroom of the inner council, but it's important that they know barely more than that there is a significant risk that we will all
perish if they, or the rest of us, know too much, and they must be made to feel that they dare not publicly speak what little they have been
allowed know. Even senators. Even senators must fear to describe America's laws to America's citizens. This
is, yes,
democracy-suppression , but it is a vitally necessary arrangement. It keeps you and your adorable kids and even your
cute pet dog alive. Now, I don't believe I've heard anyone make this argument, no doubt because the logic of the argument cuts against it
being made. Yet it seems similar reasoning must underpin the system of secret government that has emerged from the examination of Mr
Snowden's leaks, and I cannot help but suspect that something along these lines has become the unspoken, unspeakable doctrine of Mr
Obama's administration. Yet I remember when the Mr Obama
announced this: My Administration is
committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work
together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public
participation, and collaboration . Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and
effectiveness in Government. That would have been some real democracy-promotion , right
here in the homeland. What happened? Is it naive to think Mr Obama really believed this stuff? I'll admit, with some
embarrassment, that I'd thought he did believe it. But this "commitment" has been so thoroughly forsaken one is forced to consider whether
What kind of message are
we sending about the viability these democratic ideals—about openness,
transparency, public participation, public collaboration? How hollow must American
it was ever sincere. It has been so thoroughly forsaken one wonders whether to laugh or cry.
exhortations to democracy sound to foreign ears? Mr Snowden may be responsible for having
exposed this hypocrisy, for having betrayed the thug omertà at the heart of America's domestic democracy-suppression
programme, but the hypocrisy is America's . I'd very much like to know what led Mr Obama to change his mind, to
conclude that America is not after all safe for democracy, though I know he's not about to tell us. The matter is settled. It has been decided,
and not by us. We can't handle the truth.
The plan sends the signal of credibility on democracy—domestic
surveillance is both sufficient and necessary
Katulis 9 - Brian Katulis is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who served on the State Department’s policy planning
staff in the last years of the Clinton administration after living and working on the ground for the National Democratic Institute in Egypt
and the Palestinian territories. (“Democracy Promotion in the Middle East and the Obama Administration,”
https://www.tcf.org/assets/downloads/tcf-Katulis.pdf 2009) STRYKER
More broadly, the
United States should take steps to restore habeas corpus and bring wiretap
surveillance efforts back into the framework of the rule of law in the United
States. Sending the signal that the United States is cleaning up its act on these
fronts is a necessary step for reviving U.S. credibility on democracy
promotion in the Middle East. Without some progress on these measures, anything
else that the new administration tries to do on democracy promotion—whether it is political party
building or civil society support, or any of the other traditional programs in the U.S. toolbox—will likely yield few results
because of the substantial credibility gap. The new administration needs to send a
clear message that the United States intends to practice what it preaches by
adhering to the legal obligations it assumed in the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, the Convention against Torture, and other human rights treaties. Strengthening the legal framework for rule of law
will require not only action on the part of the Obama administration but also engagement by leaders in the U.S. Congress. How the United
States reintroduces itself to the world—keeping its national security policy in line with the highest human rights standards—will set the
framework for how U.S. actions on the democracy promotion front are perceived throughout the Middle East.
Only domestic policy changes can make democracy promotion effective
Al-Rodhan 14 - Nayef Al-Rodhan is director of the Centre for the Geopolitics of Globalization and Transnational Security at the
Geneva Centre for Security Policy. (“Reforming Democracy and the Future of History: To spread Democracy,
democratic nations must look inward first .” http://www.theglobalist.com/reforming-democracy-andthe-future-of-history/ 6/14/2014) STRYKER
In 1975, a report prepared by the Trilateral Commission, The Crisis of Democracy, signaled the pessimism
and defeatism prevailing in Western democracies at the time about the future and
sustainability of democracy. The report reflected a deep economic downturn, as well as social and political turmoil. This
crisis of democracy was tightly connected with concerns about “monopoly capitalism,” rampant materialism and corruption. Four
decades later, democracy is again in a state of crisis. This comes as somewhat of a
surprise, given that successive waves of democratization have touched every region of the
world over the past 40 years. What is becoming evident now is that an opposite trend has
emerged. Democracy has in fact been in retreat for years, as many repressive
governments became even more repressive, civil liberties were dropped and the
military was empowered in many countries. The state of democracy today In the early 1990’s, the end of the Cold War had
brought the revalidation of democracy with great vigour as the most representative form of government. Yet this exuberance has been
counterbalanced with criticism of its failings and shortcomings. Democracies
guarantee political freedom, the
rule of law, human rights and a platform for citizens to engage in the political process.
Yet, in practice, democracies feature numerous inadequacies. Inequality, economic disparity,
disempowerment, lack of opportunity, infringements of civil liberties, ethnic, social and cultural discrimination, corruption and opaque
honor titles systems are all present, and apparently not antagonistic to democracies. Globally, democracies have also acted in ways that
Irresponsible conduct, including
unwarranted invasions , toleration of brutality, genocide, misuse of the UN veto system at the expense of global
harmony and peace, as well geopolitical machinations or meddling in the affairs of weaker states — these are all traits that have
characterized the foreign conduct of major democratic states at some point. Inequality alienates
Western democracies like the United States, United Kingdom or France — traditionally considered
“advanced democracies ” — experience acute inequalities, and even cases of abject poverty. In 2009, a U.S. government
suggest an outright renunciation of their principles at home.
report pointed to the dramatic increase in hunger and food insecurity. About 50 million people were identified as having suffered food
insecurity at some point during the previous year. One in five people in the United Kingdom are also identified as falling below the poverty
line. Growing inequality is at times reinforced by, and an enabler of, shrinking opportunity. This fuels disillusionment and low political
participation. As Joseph Stiglitz has noted, “The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal
security — they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever
empathy they may once have had.” Corporate financing of political campaigns have reinforced this, hijacking the democratic process. It
further alienates voters who feel they are excluded from a process that is beyond their control. The role of money in politics is worth singling
out as a major problem with democratic governance. Its effects are truly worrisome, especially when there is little transparency and
regulatory mechanisms to limit the distorting role of money in politics. A check is worth a thousand words The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010
decision in the “Citizens United” case openly enshrined the right of unlimited campaign spending, giving corporations, associations and
billionaire donors the freedom to heavily and undemocratically influence government, perversely as an expression of their free speech. The
“super PACs” have blurred the line between the personal and the political. They reinforce and perpetuate the rotation of policymakers in the
U.S. Congress and the executive branch, many of whom are already part of the wealthiest 1% (and, under any circumstance, remain kept in
office by money from the top 1%). Whatever constraints existed to this practice, they were expunged earlier in 2014 when the Supreme
Court opened the door to even more money in politics by striking down the aggregate contribution limits for campaigns. The decision
means, in very practical terms, that one single donor can contribute millions of dollars to political candidates or campaigns and thereby dim
the prospect of new entrants, ideas or challengers to the political arena. Finally, the
sense of disillusionment with
democracy in its current form has been reinforced with disclosures of large-scale
government surveillance, violations of privacy and civil liberties . The claim of
sweeping authority over the right to collect personal data is harmful to core liberties.
Overseeing the overseers and keeping states’ need to know in balance with the safeguard
of privacy and civil liberties remains a challenge. Reforming democracy Opinion polls across
many continents reflect this current dissatisfaction with democracy. These forms of
disillusionment indicate the need to embrace a paradigm that goes beyond political
freedom and addresses the basic human need for dignity. Democracy guarantees political freedom and
rights. Yet it is not incompatible with marginalization, exclusion, poverty, disempowerment or disrespect. The triumph of a liberal
democratic order as a final destination of history and historical ideas, as once predicted by the “end of history”, needs a serious reevaluation. A
greater emphasis on human dignity and a governance model that places
dignity at the center can halt the current disenchantment with democracy . A
more feasible paradigm is an approach I call Sustainable History. It focuses on dignity rather than just freedom. And it allows for
reconciling accountable governance with various political cultures.
Democracy promotion is effective—the US model is crucial
Fukuyama and McFaul 7 - Francis Fukuyama is a professor of international political economy and director of the
International Development Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. Michael McFaul
is a Hoover Senior Fellow, a professor of political science, and director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at
Stanford University. He is also a nonresident associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of TWQ's
editorial board. (“Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/washington_quarterly/v031/31.1fukuyama.html 2007) STRYKER
Restoring the U.S. Example Inspiration for democrats struggling against
autocracy and a model for leaders in new democracies are two U.S. exports now in
short supply . Since the beginning of the republic, the U.S. experiment with democracy has
provided hope, ideas, and technologies for others working to build
democratic institutions . Foreign visitors to the United States have been impressed by what they have seen, and U.S.
diplomats, religious missionaries, and businesspeople traveling abroad have inspired others by telling the story of U.S. democracy. In
the second half of the twentieth century, during which the United States developed
more intentional means for promoting democracy abroad, the preservation
and advertisement of the U.S. democratic model remained a core instrument .
[Impact]
[Affirmative specific solvency]
Uniqueness
Uniqueness—Democracy Promotion
Western democracy is in decline
Diamond 15 - Larry Diamond is founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and director of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development,
and the Rule of Law. (“Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy, Volume 26, Number 1, p. 140-153, Project Muse,
January 2015) STRYKER
Perhaps the
most worrisome dimension of the democratic recession has been the
decline of democratic efficacy, energy, and self-confidence in the West, including the
United States. There is a growing sense, both domestically and internationally, that
democracy in the United States has not been functioning effectively enough to
address the major challenges of governance. The diminished pace of legislation, the vanishing ability of Congress
to pass a budget, and the 2013 shutdown of the federal government are only some of the indications of a political system (and a broader
body politic) that appears increasingly polarized and deadlocked. As a result, both
public approval of Congress and
public trust in government are at historic lows. The ever-mounting cost of election campaigns, the surging role of
nontransparent money in politics, and low rates of voter participation are additional signs of democratic ill health. Internationally,
promoting democracy abroad scores close to the bottom of the public’s foreign-policy priorities. And the
international
perception is that democracy promotion has already receded as an actual priority
of U.S. foreign policy.
The US is failing in the task of democracy promotion—budget and
international image
Dettmer, ’14, (Jamie, journalist and broadcaster, “Obama’s Budget Fails Democracy
Promotion Abroad,” The Daily Beast, 06.12.14,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/12/obama-s-budget-fails-democracypromotion-abroad.html)//erg
The Obama administration is proposing to omit a longstanding legislative provision aimed at preventing American foreign
aid being blocked or manipulated by repressive foreign leaders. The proposed removal from the administration’s budget
and appropriations request for next fiscal year of a provision instructing the Secretary of State not to seek the prior
approval of host governments when funding nonprofits and civil society groups overseas is
infuriating American democracy-promotion and human-rights activists, who argue the
omission marks a retreat in U.S. leadership. They warn the Obama administration is in
effect signaling to repressive regimes that they can dictate where U.S. democracypromotion and human rights money goes in their countries—a problem the provision introduced a
decade ago was meant to combat. “This is turning the clock back to when the State Department would avoid funding civil
society groups blacklisted by their governments,” says Cole Bockenfeld, director of Advocacy at the Project on Middle East
Democracy, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit. He claims the omission will feed into perceptions the
Obama administration is quietly giving up on promoting democracy, especially when it
comes to the Middle East. American democracy and human-rights groups have long
charged that the Obama administration has been schizophrenic [inconsistent] in its
approach to democracy advocacy and support: retreating from a “freedom agenda” and
surreptitiously diminishing the Bush-era focus on democracy while at the same time
talking up its commitment to democracy promotion. In a May 2011 speech, President Obama pledged
to elevate the promotion of democracy and human rights to key pillars of America’s foreign policy, insisting they would
not be treated as secondary interests. Obama aides bristle at claims that the administration has been
decreasing funding for democracy and governance promotion and support. Speaking in
Poland last week during a European visit, President Obama once again pledged to support democracy movements around
the world. In a passionate speech he promised, “Wherever people are willing to do the hard work of building democracy—
from Tbilisi to Tunis, from Rangoon to Freetown—they will have a partner.” Democracy-promotion advocates
say there is an increasing disconnect between the rhetoric and practice. They acknowledge
Obama has a difficult task—especially when it comes to the post-Arab Spring Middle East—in trying to balance U.S.
strategic and national security interests with promotion of democracy and human rights advocacy, and that political
setbacks in the region have not helped.
International perception proves US is backing off in democracy promotion—
especially in the Middle East
Dettmer, ’14, (Jamie, journalist and broadcaster, “Obama To Cut Middle East
Democracy Programs,” The Daily Beast, 01.02.14,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/02/obama-administration-plansdecrease-in-funding-for-middle-east-democracy-promotion.html)//erg
A planned decrease by the Obama administration in funding for democracy promotion and
election support in the Middle East is prompting alarm among activists. They say cuts are likely to be more
severe than first realized and that the White House appears to be giving up on democracy in the
region and downgrading its advancement as a policy priority. In the run-up to Christmas, State
Department officials briefed American non-profits funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
about cuts in funding. They were told no money was being earmarked for democracy and
governance assistance programs in Iraq and that, for Egypt, the administration was adopting a wait-and-see
approach until after a January 15 referendum on a newly-drafted constitution. No extra funding for democracy
promotion is being earmarked for Libya, whose transition from autocracy following the
toppling of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi has been plagued by lawlessness. USAID
democracy programs there were cut by about half last year, following the assault on the U.S.
consulate in Benghazi that led to the deaths of ambassador Christopher Sevens and three other Americans. The total
amount of foreign assistance requested by the Obama administration for the Middle East and North Africa for fiscal year
2014 is $7.36 billion, a nine percent decrease from FY2013. Of that, $298.3 million has been requested to support
democracy and governance programming across the region, a cut of $160.9 million from FY 2013. But those briefed last
month by State Department officials say the decrease in funding is likely in effect to be harsher and that it may be masked
when the administration goes through with plans to re-categorize so-called D&G funding by combining it with
development programs. That will make it difficult to follow what actually has been spent on democracy promotion. “We
had expected big cuts in D&G to the region soon,” says Cole Bockenfeld, director of Advocacy at the Project on Middle East
there was already a widespread
perception that this administration was giving up on promoting democracy
in the Middle East, and major cuts to democracy funding will further
confirm those fears.” Overall, he says, “there is clearly a diminished focus on democracy
best illustrated by Obama’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly.” "There was
Democracy, a Washington DC-based non-profit. “In many ways,
already a widespread perception that this administration was giving up on promoting democracy in the Middle East, and
major cuts to democracy funding will further confirm those fears." In that September 24 speech the President stressed
mutual security interests shared by the U.S. and countries in the region and was criticized for seemingly downplaying
democracy. When it came to Egypt, Obama made no explicit reference to standards for human rights, despite the ongoing
violent dispersal by the Egyptian security forces of demonstrators protesting the ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood’s
Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected head of state in Egyptian history.
Political setbacks make American democracy promotion no longer
credible—plan generates credibility
Dettmer, ’14, (Jamie, journalist and broadcaster, “Obama To Cut Middle East
Democracy Programs,” The Daily Beast, 01.02.14,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/02/obama-administration-plansdecrease-in-funding-for-middle-east-democracy-promotion.html)//erg
For the region as a whole, the President cited four key American interests in the Middle East—
confronting aggression from the region aimed at the U.S., maintaining an unhindered
flow of oil, confronting jihadists and terrorist networks, and preventing the proliferation
of weapons of mass destructions. The promotion of democracy and human rights came in as a fifth fiddle.
Democracy campaigners say the United States has national interest stakes in promoting
democracy and assisting countries trying to transition from autocracy can help them
overcome challenges. The decrease in overall foreign assistance to the region is due in large part to the budget
challenges the U.S. is facing and the federal sequester. But the shift away from democracy promotion is
made clear in the President’s budget request, which sees the proportion devoted to security assistance
programs in foreign aid earmarked for the Middle East increase from 69 percent to 80 percent. Pro-democracy advocates
acknowledge Obama has a difficult task in the Middle East, trying to balance U.S. strategic
and national security interests with the promotion of democracy—and that political
setbacks in the region have not helped . But Thomas Carothers, a noted authority on international
democracy support, says the Obama administration has always been lukewarm about democracy promotion, partly
because of its association with the neo-conservative policies and freedom agenda of the Bush era. “The administration
never made a big push to increase money for democracy and governance in the Middle East after the Arab Spring,” says
Carothers, a vice president at the Washington DC-based think tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He
points out that D&G money for Iraq in Obama’s first term was a holdover from earmarks by the Bush administration,
adding, “it is notable the administration has never developed a democracy strategy for the
Middle East and this further reduction of emphasis on democracy reflects how the Arab
Spring has turned into a series of security headaches for the administration. The
challenge the administration has not solved is how to become a credible
pro-democracy actor in the region.” In briefings, State Department officials have told democracy
advocates that they are too narrowly focused. “Administration officials favorite phrase these days is that, ‘you have to
widen the aperture,’” says Bockenfeld. “They say we are looking at democracy promotion too narrowly, when we focus on
building up civil society groups or provide technical election support. They say if you do women empowerment programs
or if you do economic opportunity programs, that all feeds into the bigger picture of democracy. They are pushing them
altogether to brush over these cuts to democracy programs.” Some activists argue the pullback from democracy promotion
reflects an administration fear about antagonizing governments in the region. Others say that with democracy
enlargement in the region faltering, the Obama administration is eager to shield itself from any blame for the Arab Spring
failing.
Global democracy is declining—overall transition to more authoritarian and
repressive government
Kagan, ’14, (Robert, senior fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy
in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, “Is Democracy in Decline? The Weight of
Geopolitics,” Brookings Institute, Journal of Democracy, January 2015,
http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2015/01/democracy-in-decline-weight-ofgeopolitics-kagan)//erg
These are relevant questions again. We live in a time when democratic nations are in retreat in the
realm of geopolitics, and when democracy itself is also in retreat. The latter phenomenon
has been well documented by Freedom House, which has recorded declines in freedom
in the world for nine straight years. At the level of geopolitics, the shifting tectonic plates have yet to produce
a seismic rearrangement of power, but rumblings are audible. The United States has been in a state of
retrenchment since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. The democratic nations of Europe,
which some might have expected to pick up the slack, have instead turned inward and all
but abandoned earlier dreams of reshaping the international system in their image. As for
such rising democracies as Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Africa, they are neither rising as fast as once anticipated nor
yet behaving as democracies in world affairs. Their focus remains narrow and regional. Their national identities remain
shaped by postcolonial and nonaligned sensibilities—by old but carefully nursed resentments—which lead them, for
instance, to shield rather than condemn autocratic Russia’s invasion of democratic Ukraine, or, in the case of Brazil, to
prefer the company of Venezuelan dictators to that of North American democratic presidents. Meanwhile, insofar as
there is energy in the international system, it comes from the great-power autocracies,
China and Russia, and from would-be theocrats pursuing their dream of a new caliphate
in the Middle East. For all their many problems and weaknesses, it is still these autocracies and these
aspiring religious totalitarians that push forward while the democracies draw back, that
act while the democracies react, and that seem increasingly unleashed while the
democracies feel increasingly constrained. It should not be surprising that one of the side effects of
these circumstances has been the weakening and in some cases collapse of democracy in
those places where it was newest and weakest. Geopolitical shifts among the reigning great powers, often
but not always the result of wars, can have significant effects on the domestic politics of the smaller and weaker nations of
the world. Global democratizing trends have been stopped and reversed before.
Democracy is not inevitable
Kagan, ’14, (Robert, senior fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy
in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, “Is Democracy in Decline? The Weight of
Geopolitics,” Brookings Institute, Journal of Democracy, January 2015,
http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2015/01/democracy-in-decline-weight-ofgeopolitics-kagan)//erg
Consider the interwar years. In 1920, when the number of democracies in the world had doubled in the aftermath of the
First World War, contemporaries such as the British historian James Bryce believed that they were witnessing “a natural
trend, due to a general law of social progress.”[1] Yet almost immediately the new democracies in
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland began
to fall. Europe’s democratic great powers, France and Britain, were
one rich and healthy democratic power, the
United States, had retreated to the safety of its distant shores. In the vacuum came Mussolini’s rise
suffering the effects of the recent devastating war, while the
to power in Italy in 1922, the crumbling of Germany’s Weimar Republic, and the broader triumph of European fascism.
Greek democracy fell in 1936. Spanish democracy fell to Franco that same year. Military coups overthrew democratic
governments in Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Japan’s shaky democracy succumbed to military rule and then
to a form of fascism. Across three continents, fragile democracies gave way to authoritarian forces
exploiting the vulnerabilities of the democratic system, while other democracies fell prey to
the worldwide economic depression. There was a ripple effect, too—the success of fascism in one
country strengthened similar movements elsewhere, sometimes directly. Spanish fascists received military assistance from
the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. The result was that by 1939 the democratic gains of the previous forty years had
been wiped out. The period after the First World War showed not only that democratic gains could be reversed, but that
democracy need not always triumph even in the competition of ideas. For it was not just that democracies had been
overthrown. The very idea of democracy had been “discredited,” as John A. Hobson observed.[2]
Democracy’s aura of inevitability vanished as great numbers of people rejected the idea
that it was a better form of government. Human beings, after all, do not yearn only for freedom, autonomy,
individuality, and recognition. Especially in times of difficulty, they yearn also for comfort,
security, order, and, importantly, a sense of belonging to something larger than
themselves, something that submerges autonomy and individuality—all of which
autocracies can sometimes provide, or at least appear to provide, better than
democracies. In the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist governments looked stronger, more energetic and efficient, and
more capable of providing reassurance in troubled times. They appealed effectively to nationalist, ethnic, and tribal
sentiments. The many weaknesses of Germany’s Weimar democracy, inadequately supported by the democratic great
powers, and of the fragile and short-lived democracies of Italy and Spain made their people susceptible to the appeals of
the Nazis, Mussolini, and Franco, just as the weaknesses of Russian democracy in the 1990s made a more authoritarian
government under Vladimir Putin attractive to many Russians. People tend to follow winners, and between the wars the
democratic-capitalist countries looked weak and in retreat compared with the apparently vigorous fascist regimes and
with Stalin’s Soviet Union. It took a second world war and another military victory by the Allied democracies (plus the
Soviet Union) to reverse the trend again. The United States imposed democracy by force and through
prolonged occupations in West Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, and South Korea. With the victory of the democracies and
the discrediting of fascism—chiefly on the battlefield—many other countries followed suit. Greece and Turkey both moved
in a democratic direction, as did Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. Some of the new nations
born as Europe shed its colonies also experimented with democratic government, the most prominent example being
India. By 1950, the number of democracies had grown to between twenty and thirty, and they governed close to 40 percent
of the world’s population. Was this the victory of an idea or the victory of arms? Was it the product of an inevitable human
evolution or, as Samuel P. Huntington later observed, of “historically discrete events”?[3] We would prefer to believe the
former, but evidence suggests the latter, for it turned out that even the great wave of democracy following
World War II was not irreversible. Another “reverse wave” hit from the late 1950s through the early 1970s.
Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, South Korea, the Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece
all fell back under authoritarian rule. In Africa, Nigeria was the most prominent of the newly decolonized nations where
democracy failed. By 1975, more than three-dozen governments around the world had been installed by military coups.[4]
Few spoke of democracy’s inevitability in the 1970s or even in the early 1980s. As late as 1984, Huntington himself
believed that “the limits of democratic development in the world” had been reached, noting the “unreceptivity to
democracy of several major cultural traditions,” as well as “the substantial power of antidemocratic governments
(particularly the Soviet Union).”[5]
Surveillance Hurts the Democratic Model
Domestic NSA surveillance destroys the perception of the viability of
democracy and American soft power—hypocrisy only helps Putin
Shevtsova 13 Lilia Shevtsova, Kremlinology expert and currently serves as a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, “Tinker, tailor, Snowden, spy?” 2013-07-29,
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2013/07/197_140121.html
The real espionage, however, lies not in Snowden's
decision to release NSA secrets, but in the surveillance
the West's long-ignored failure to strike
an informed balance between security and liberty. Current political and economic
uncertainty has exacerbated the situation, driving policymakers to settle on simplistic
solutions that, as Snowden made starkly apparent, can undermine the values that the
West espouses. This is not true only in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, which happen to be entangled in the
programs that he exposed. The leaked information highlighted
Snowden scandal. The reluctant responses by Germany and France to evidence that the NSA has been conducting
unprecedented surveillance of their officials indicate that Europe's governments may also be involved. Indeed, it now
appears that America has shared its intelligence trove with Germany's spy services when needed. So far, Obama's
handling of the Snowden affair shows that he places more stock in the logic of security
than in adherence to principle. Coming from a president who won global sympathy - and a Nobel Peace Prize for his moral stance, the claim that the NSA's activities are justified because 'that's how intelligence services operate' is
particularly disappointing. A state that emphasizes security over civil rights and liberties is
easily hijacked by security agencies. While America's 'war on terror' demands a stronger emphasis on
security, the NSA's activities expose an alarming willingness to violate the privacy of
millions of individuals - including in allied countries, whose constitutions and sovereignty have also been
breached. Western leaders must now ask themselves whether the ends justify the means. With the all-powerful U.S.
training its sights on a young former analyst, the answer appears to be no. The current scandal's impact on
Obama's image increasingly resembles the impact of the Watergate scandal on
President Richard Nixon's standing in the 1970s - only now the events are playing
themselves out on a global stage. But Obama is not really the problem; at the heart of the
issue is a model of liberal democracy that fails to respond to challenges that
contradict the values it is supposed to uphold . In fact, Snowden's warning that 'any
NSA analyst, at any time, can target anyone, from a federal judge to the president'
suggests that NSA head Keith Alexander - dubbed 'Emperor Alexander' - could already
be more powerful than Obama. Monitoring individuals' private lives is not limited to the state and its security
services. Major global telecommunication companies - such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Skype - have assembled
secret stockpiles of personal information about their users, which they share with the NSA. Beyond the obvious
violation of individuals' privacy implied by such activities lies the danger that
these firms will later make a deal with authoritarian regimes in Russia or
China, where little, if any, effort is made to preserve even the illusion of privacy. Google
already has some experience in turning over information to China's security services.
Against this background, it is impossible to know whether these companies are already spying on Western leaders,
together with the NSA. Snowden's presence in Russia, even in the airport's international transit zone, has given the U.S. a
pretext to declare that he is not a whistleblower, but a traitor. The fact that Snowden has now applied for temporary
asylum in Russia has reinforced that interpretation. Ironically, by turning the affair into a spy thriller, Putin has helped
the U.S. to salvage its reputation - or at least to deflect some of the attention from the NSA's surveillance programs. The
discussion about security, privacy, and freedom that the Snowden drama has sparked is long overdue. But the scandal has
begotten many losers. Snowden has effectively given up his future. The U.S. and Obama have lost their
claim to the moral high ground. And liberal democracies' apparent inability to protect
their citizens from infringement of their individual rights has undermined their standing
at home and abroad. Russian society will also pay a price, with the NSA's surveillance programs giving the Kremlin
ammunition to defend the expansion of state control over the Internet and other aspects of citizens' personal lives.
Similarly, the scandal will likely inspire China to strengthen its Great Firewall further. The ordeal's only victor
is
Putin, who now has grounds to dismiss U.S. criticism of his authoritarian rule. Indeed, at the
slightest provocation, Putin will be able to point to America's hypocrisy for spying on, say, European
Union facilities as part of expanded surveillance programs supposedly within the scope of the war on terror, and for
hunting Snowden after accusing Russia of unfairly prosecuting the whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Snowden did not
create the security-privacy dilemma, but he did illuminate a deeply rooted problem that Western leaders have long tried to
obscure. One can only hope that his actions, and the resulting scandal, will compel Western
leaders to reassess their approach to national security - and not simply lead them to try to conceal it
better.
The US cannot lead by example now because of domestic surveillance
Wong 15 - Cynthia Wong is senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.
(“Reclaiming Privacy in the Golden Age of Surveillance,” http://fpif.org/reclaiming-privacy-golden-age-surveillance/ 1/12/2015) STRYKER
As a global community, we
have not even begun to grapple with the costs of mass surveillance to
privacy and other rights. A joint Human Rights Watch and American Civil Liberties
Union report in July documented the insidious effects of large-scale surveillance on
journalism and law in the United States. Interviews with dozens of leading journalists showed that increased
surveillance is stifling reporting, especially when government tightens controls to prevent sources from leaking
government information or even talking to journalists about unclassified topics. This damages the role of the fourth estate, particularly on
matters of public concern related to national security. Perhaps
one of the biggest casualties of the Snowden
revelations has been the U.S. and UK’s moral authority to criticize the surveillance
abuses of other governments and lead by example . A March Human Rights
Watch report documented how the Ethiopian government uses surveillance to monitor
opposition groups and journalists and silence dissenters. With unfettered access to mobile networks,
security agencies intercept calls and access phone records, using them to intimidate detainees during abusive interrogations. Ethiopia
is not the United States or the UK, but the actions of those governments set a troubling
precedent that undermine their credibility on rights and that many other
governments will cite .
Massive government surveillance is the antithesis of democracy
Rowley 15 - Coleen Rowley is a former FBI Special Agent (“ Real Democracy Promotion : Lord Acton and
Tom Clancy vs John Yoo,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/real-democracy-promotion_b_7473824.html 5/29/2015)
STRYKER
power corrupts but he also figured out that "everything secret degenerates, even
the administration of justice." The creators of democratic forms of government throughout the ages, including America's
Founding Fathers knew these things too so they tried to ensure governmental
transparency, in part through constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press .
Sadly however, we've allowed our excessively secret government to take away almost all
the privacy of ordinary citizens. As I wrote here a couple months ago, "when a powerful government
like 'Top Secret America' enjoys maximum 'privacy' while private individuals are
subjected to full transparency, it might be time to turn that boat around!" It will be telling if
Lord Acton is famous for his insights on how
Congress can start the turn-around by allowing Section 215 of the Patriot Act to sunset, especially after a 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals
unanimously told them that the Bush and Obama Administrations' secret interpretation of this provision was and is completely illegal.
Until it gets righted, the topsy turvy situation that now exists is the antithesis of
democracy . As Tom Clancy put it: "The control of information is something the elite always
does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is
power. If you can control information, you can control people." Here just one example: it's supposed to
be illegal to classify information evidencing illegality yet ironically, whistleblowers who disclose government illegality are the ones who are
threatened with imprisonment and they don't even get a chance to explain any of this or their righteous motivation to a jury. Maybe poor
Richard Nixon, with his theory of being above the law, just missed his time?! This currently anti-democratic system can likely be traced to a
couple of weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when a top secret memo was written by Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Attorney John
Yoo, (who would also write the "torture memo" a year later). The OLC memo stated, among other things: "First Amendment speech and
press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully. 'When a nation is at war, many things that might be
said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could
regard them as protected by any constitutional right.'" This OLC opinion--see full article by retired Army Major Todd Pierce--claimed
authority of the President as the Commander in Chief to use the military both inside and outside of the U.S., and was probably the authority
for the National Security Agency's (NSA's) military operation within the U.S., spying on Americans. In the years that followed, we
learned, due to the courage of whistleblowers, culminating with the numerous documentary disclosures of
Edward Snowden, that the NSA and other US intelligence agencies secretly implemented
various massive data collection projects, vacuuming up trillions of pieces of info on
people all over the world, in a counter-productive effort to achieve a kind of "Total
Information Awareness." With its omnipresent surveillance, the US Government
also began aggressively targeting and prosecuting whistleblowers and other sources,
putting renowned journalists and publishers worldwide, even mainstream media like Associated Press,
directly or incidentally in their surveillance crosshairs.
Surveillance undermines the US democratic model
Goh 15 - Benjamin Goh wrote this as his thesis for an International Relations PhD at New York University. (“Prosperity and Security:
A Political Economy Model of Internet Surveillance,” http://www.politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/5628/Goh.pdf 4/3/2015) STRYKER
Edward Snowden’s
leak of classified NSA documents revealed to a large extent the
invasiveness of the NSA in surveilling U.S. citizens. This revelation fuelled an
outcry within the United States, when citizens found out that the NSA was forcing Internet Service Providers to provide information
about its users, infringing upon the right to privacy (Greenwald and MacAskill 2013). While the secret legislative process
that was employed to surveil Americans sparked uproar about the democratic
process , the debate on surveillance was largely centered on the diminishing sovereign power of the citizens that has been ceded to
the authorities (Cassidy 2013). However, while Big Brother seems more intrusive than ever before, the public is still ambivalent about
Edward Snowden’s revelations. Some celebrate him as a hero who gave up his life to fight for privacy, while others believe that this battle for
privacy comes at the expense of increasing their vulnerability to aggressors (Scarborough 2014; Drury 2014). Are privacy and security two
sides of the same coin? Proponents of this tradeoff argue that monitoring the Internet indeed plays an important role in breaking down
belligerent organizations, such as terrorist groups—Osama bin Laden, for example, had to have his communications delivered manually
through flash drives rather than through emails (Schneier 2011). On the other hand, privacy activists, while cognizant of the possibility of
threats to national security, argue that society incurs a similarly large social cost when empowering the government to have the—to borrow
a Foucauldian term—“panoptic gaze” into the lives of the individual. This is because surveillance, even if it is “just metadata”, imposes a
categorical suspicion on everyone plugged into the net, assessing guilt by Google keyword searches (van Dijck 2014; Webb 2007; Marx
1988). However, the “right to privacy”, although explicitly expressed in the UDHR and the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights, is barely a commonly agreed upon principle across nations. While it can be commonly agreed upon that terrorism is costly, in doing
cross-national studies on surveillance it is worth reminding that the rhetoric of privacy is a concept too narrow, overly grounded on the
assumption of human rights (Bennett 2011). There is also no universally accepted definition of privacy (Viseu et al. 2004); privacy, in turn,
has to be understood in terms of culture, a construction based partly on history, but for the most part a function of political institutions. In
recognizing the importance of ideological differences, this paper thus proposes a model that explicitly acknowledges the divergence in
cultural attitudes towards internet surveillance in understanding the extent to which countries surveil its people. Within a country, the
driving forces behind the desire to surveil stems not only from the possible backlash by citizens but also from a combination of factors such
as the level of terror paranoia, prevalence of terror attacks, and the overall perceived ability of the leader. I posit that these variables are the
key factors in attempting to explain what determines the equilibrium level of surveillance. I also go further to explore the comparative
statics across countries and determine the conditions under which some governments may choose to increase or decrease level of
surveillance employed. The motivating question is this: what
causes the United States and the United Kingdom, long
seen as beacons of democracy, to employ surveillance levels similar or worse than
Venezuela, Malaysia and Kazakhstan (The Web Index 2014)? Is democratic dragnet
surveillance the norm, or are these countries an anomaly? This model will be, to my knowledge, the
first paper to systematically study surveillance policies across countries, and aims to broaden the discussion on how to influence public
decision making on employing surveillance.
Uniqueness—Internet Freedom
Internet freedom is slipping globally
PMS 15 - Plus Media Solutions. (“Internet Insecurity,” Lexis Nexis, 4/29/2015) STRYKER
From fingerprints to foreign policy, CAS researchers are addressing internet security on a national scale by challenging data
collection policies—an issue that has dominated the news since former National Security Agency (NSA)
contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on US surveillance methods. The classified
documents Snowden leaked to journalists prove that the NSA reached deeper into our lives than we realized,
amassing a staggering cache of information about our phone calls and internet
communications. These revelations have challenged our definition of privacy and fueled a
national debate over the balance between security and civil rights. “As a society, we have established
fairly sharply defined boundaries for other kinds of communication, like the telephone and the US Postal Service,” Crovella says. “What’s
changed with respect to the internet is that with the ease and scope with which monitoring can be performed, we’ve slipped out of those
traditional boundaries. We’re out of whack.” In a paper that made national news in summer 2014, Goldberg exposed a policy loophole that
illustrates just how far we’ve slipped. She discovered that although
US citizens are protected from domestic
surveillance under federal law, a little-known executive order (EO), issued in 1981 by
President Ronald Reagan to allow the collection of foreign intelligence, authorizes the
government to access our digital communications if gathered overseas. The order, EO 12333,
translates poorly to the digital realm because the internet does not abide by physical borders . US
internet communications are globally routed and stored on servers in data centers throughout the world. “Consequently,” says Goldberg,
“this protection of foreign soil versus American soil is no protection at all in terms of privacy.” Crovella says lawmakers seem to be as
confused by the internet’s complexities as the rest of us, making it difficult for them to evaluate the technical impact of their policies on the
digital domain. Equally problematic, much of this legislation passes under the radar of the average American. Goldberg points to Section
309 of the Intelligence Authorization Act, which passed in Congress on December 10, 2014, “with no reports in the media whatsoever.
Anywhere.” Section 309 sanctions Reagan’s order by enforcing a five-year limit on the length of time US citizens’ phone and internet
communications can be held. “It
is good that Congress is trying to regulate 12333 activities,” said former
the language in this
bill just endorses a terrible system that allows the NSA to take virtually everything
Americans do online and use it however it wants according to the rules it writes.” This
State Department internet policy official John Napier Tye in a US News & World Report article. “ But
provision not only passed without notice in the media, it nearly eluded detection by Congress, as it was snuck into the 47-page act the
morning it was headed to vote. Congressman Justin Amash (R-Mich.) noticed the addition and petitioned his colleagues to vote against it,
but Congress passed the bill 325 to 100—apparently without reading it. “ Problematic
new laws are emerging
in democratic and authoritarian countries alike,” according to the summary of Freedom on the Net 2014, a
report released in 2014 by the independent watchdog organization Freedom House. While every government has a
legitimate need to protect its country’s infrastructure, trade secrets, and public safety,
“the problem here is to balance our concerns over protecting our computer networks—
especially in the way they interact with critical infrastructure—with personal liberty and
privacy,” said Timothy H. Edgar, a CAS computer science visiting lecturer, in a talk at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at
Harvard University. “A growing list of countries have adopted a variety of more or less restrictive
internet filtering practices, and not just the usual suspects,” said Edgar, who served under President Barack Obama as the
first director of privacy and civil liberties for the White House National Security Staff. Democratic countries are
debating internet filtering, joining authoritarian states like China, Russia, and Iran,
where citizens’ online freedom has long been restricted. In 2014, according to the
Freedom House report, internet freedom declined globally for the fourth year
in a row: 41 countries proposed or passed legislation that gives the government more
control over internet content, more surveillance power, and more authority to punish users for their actions
online. And 38 countries—particularly in North Africa and the Middle East—arrested users for posting content
relating to politics and social issues. In response to this tension between security and civil liberty, Edgar suggests that in
trying to secure our online world, we may undo the openness that has allowed it to thrive. He asks: “ Will we destroy the
internet to try to save it? ”
Internet freedom is low now—US is doing a bad job promoting it—plan is key
Peralta, ’14, (Adriana, PanAm Post reporter, “Censors Close In on Global Internet
Freedom Four Years Running,” PanAm, DECEMBER 8, 2014,
http://panampost.com/adriana-peralta/2014/12/08/censors-close-in-on-globalinternet-freedom-four-years-running/)//erg
Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fourth consecutive year, warns the
latest report from Freedom House. More and more governments have increased their censorship
and monitoring of the web, using increasingly sophisticated and aggressive methods.+ On
the American continent, Venezuela (56), the United States (19), and Mexico (39) were the three countries that registered
the greatest slip in their rating out of 100 points, with a loss of three, two, and three points, respectively.+ The Freedom on
the Net 2013 report, published December 3, examined 65 countries between May 2013 and May 2014, analyzing laws
affecting the internet and the accessibility of web pages, and interviewed those who used the web as both a method of
communication and for online activism.+ With zero being the best rating and 100 the worst, Iran (89), Syria (88) and
China (87) were the worst-scored countries in the study. China was found to have intimidated — and in some cases
arrested — users who had posted criticisms of the government online.+ In Syria, pro-government hackers
infected more than 10,000 computers with a virus that hid warnings of ongoing cyber
attacks. The report classifies the war-torn state as the most dangerous place in the world for journalists: 24 reporters
were killed between 2013 and 2014.+ Russia (60), Turkey (55), and Ukraine (33) were the countries that increased
their control over web content the most, such as blocking access to information during
political crises, above all during the Russian annexation of Crimea. In the past year, Turkey has
increased blocks on social networks, and expanded its program of cyber attacks against Twitter, YouTube, and news and
opposition websites.+ Conversely, internet freedom has increased in only 12 countries. The majority of the
improvements were due to the further reduction of technical controls on internet use,
rather than a broader, genuine approach by governments to lessen their control over the
internet.+ India was the most successful in decreasing restrictions on web access, largely due to the removal of blocks
to web content, imposed in 2013 with the stated aim of preventing civil disturbances in the northeast of the country.
Surveillance Hurts Internet Freedom Credibility
Domestic surveillance harms US credibility of Internet governance
Weinstein 14 - Dave Weinstein is a cybersecurity consultant and affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Program on
Digital and Cyberspace Policy. For 3 years he was a Strategic Operations Planner at U.S. Cyber Command. (“Snowden and U.S. Cyber
Power,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Google Books, 2014) STRYKER
In addition, Snowden's
actions prompted a domestic and international debate on surveillance
that, regard- less of merit, disadvantages the Unit- ed States relative to its otherwise less capable
adversaries. The biggest win- ners (incidentally also the two coun- tries to which Snowden fled following the initial
leaks) are China and Russia, states that have historically received sig- nificant
international criticism for sur- veillance practices but also maintain a highly competitive
relationship with the United States on matters of technical espionage. The Snowden
leaks, how- ever, have subjected the United States to levels of international scrutiny that were
previously reserved for its steepest competitors in the digital domain. Diminished Credibility. If intelli- gence
plays a role in enabling cyber power, then credibility aids in main- taining it. Prior to Snowden's leaks, the United States
derived signifi- cant credibility on cyber issues from its legitimacy on a range of policies
and practices. Moreover, it possessed a highly regarded reputation for lead- ership
on Internet governance topics and, mainly due to the general illegiti- mate standing
of other cyber powers, the United States enjoyed widespread support to pursue its policy objec- tives in international forums.
But in the wake of Snowden's revelations, the United States’ international credibility on
these issues plummeted. Whether or not this rapid downward trajectory was warranted is another debate altogether (and
beyond the scope of this text). Nevertheless, fueled by intense media obsession, the United States’ credibility on
cyberspace policy transformed from a position of strength to one of weak- ness
almost overnight. Friendly states, facing domestic political opposition, distanced
themselves from the U.S. on cyberspace policy and, at times even participated in the public condem- nation.
Adversarial states , meanwhile, swiftly joined the chorus of criticism seeking to harm
America's credibility and, in turn, enhance their cyber pow- er vis-a-vis the United States. In
the court of public opinion, the Snowden leaks left American credibility severely tattered
at precisely the same time that America’s adversaries were in jeopardy of commanding
almost no interna- tional credibility on cyberspace policy whatsoever. In this respect, the timely leaks
provided a welcomed distraction for states typically faced with domestic surveillance
criticisms. Conclusion and Recommendations. If Snowden's leaks revealed any- thing, they revealed the extent of Amer- ican cyber
power to the world. In doing so, though, the leaks threatened the very elements from which the United
States derives this power. In particular, Snowden's actions succeeded in lower- ing cyberspace’s already low barriers to entry,
decreasing America's anonym- ity in cyberspace, and mitigating its inherent offensive advantage relative to other cyber actors. In
addition to damaging the United States' longstand- ing credibility on cyberspace policy,
Snowden's revelations compromised the very sources and methods that play a key role in
enabling American cyber power. It is important that policymakers, therefore, view the consequences of Snowden's actions
beyond the context of just intelligence and diplomatic set- backs. The damage to the United States'
intelligence posture and its diplomatic standing on Internet governance and
surveillance issues is not insignificant: but given the growing importance of cyberspace as
a venue for military and geopolitical interaction, perhaps the even more damaging
development relates to Snowden's long-term threat to U.S. cyber power. In an environ- ment as competitive as cyberspace, the
United States must take three swifts steps to mitigate this threat. First, policymakers must take steps to
preserve America's operational ano- nymity in cyberspace while maintaining transparency on matters of
cyberspace policy. The former will help Amer- ica recover its cyber power relative to other actors that enjoy high levels of obfuscation in
will help the United States rebuild its credibility among
domestic and inter- national audiences. American cyber operations deserve anonymity but, in the post-Snowden era,
cyberspace and the latter
the policies that govern them warrant more public scrutiny.
Western reliance on surveillance undermines Internet and political
freedom
Morozov 11 - Evgeny Morozov is a writer and researcher who studies political and social implications of technology. (“Political
repression 2.0,” Lexis Nexis, 9/3/2011) STRYKER
Unfortunately, the American government, the world's most vociferous defender of
''Internet freedom,'' has little to say about such complicity. Though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
often speaks publicly on the subject, she has yet to address how companies from her country undermine her stated goal. To add insult to
injury, in December the State Department gave Cisco - which supplied parts for China's so-called Great Firewall - an award in recognition of
its ''good corporate citizenship.'' Such
reticence may not be entirely accidental, since many of these
tools were first developed for Western law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Western policy makers are therefore in a delicate spot: On the one hand, it is hard to rein
in the very companies they have nurtured; it is also hard to resist the argument from repressive regimes that they
need such technologies to monitor extremists. On the other hand, it's getting harder to ignore the fact that
extremists aren't the only ones under surveillance. The obvious response is to ban the
export of such technologies to repressive governments. But as long as Western states
continue using monitoring technologies themselves, sanctions won't
completely eliminate the problem - the supply will always find a way to meet the demand. Moreover, dictators
who are keen on fighting extremism are still welcome in Washington. We in the West need to recognize that our
reliance on surveillance technology domestically - even if it is checked by the legal system - is
inadvertently undermining freedom in places where the legal system provides little if
any protection. That recognition should, in turn, fuel tighter restrictions on domestic
surveillance-technology sectors. As countries like Belarus, Iran and Myanmar digest the
lessons of the Arab Spring, their demand for monitoring technology will grow. Left uncontrolled, Western
surveillance tools could undermine the ''Internet freedom'' agenda in the
same way arms exports undermine Western-led peace initiatives. How many activists, finding
themselves confronted with information collected using Western technology, would trust the pronouncements of Western governments
again?
Domestic surveillance prevents global Internet freedom/solvency advocate
BBC 13 - BBC Worldwide Monitoring. (“Leading tech firms urge transparency in US surveillance debate,” Lexis Nexis, 7/1/2013)
STRYKER
GNI is particularly concerned by surveillance programmes that restrict the right to
privacy in the context of inadequate legal safeguards. This is a global problem. Recent statements by US
authorities make clear the need for informed public debate on whether legislative and judicial oversight of surveillance that occurs entirely
The lack of transparency in
the United States around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) interpretations of the FISA
Amendments Act and Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, as well as the inability of
companies to report on the requests they are receiving, make it difficult for companies
operating in the United States to be transparent regarding their efforts to protect free
expression and privacy. In light of this we call for three specific actions:1) Create a
declassification process for significant legal opinions to inform public debate and
enable oversight of government actions. GNI supports recently proposed legislation to facilitate declassification of
in secret is consistent with international human rights standards and the rule of law.
significant legal decisions by the FISC and the FISC Court of Review. We recognize that unclassified summaries of FISC opinions may be
necessary in some cases but believe that greater
declassification will enable informed public debate as
well as improve public oversight of the nature and the scope of the government's use of
FISA authorities. 2) Revise the provisions that restrict discussion of national
security demands. While understanding the need for confidentiality in matters of national security, GNI is deeply
concerned by the nondisclosure obligations imposed on companies who receive FISA
orders and National Security Letters (NSLs). These letters effectively and perpetually prohibit companies from
reporting even in general terms, after the fact, on the national security demands they receive. Policymakers should seriously consider
reforms that would require government authorities to make a factual showing to the court to demonstrate that harm would result from
disclosure, before issuance or renewal of gag orders, or placing a specific time limit on those orders. 3) Governments
(especially those already committed to protecting human rights online) should lead by
example and report on their own surveillance requests . GNI commends the 21 governments of
the Freedom Online Coalition for their commitment to protecting free expression and privacy online and urges other governments to follow
their lead. However, the
credibility of their efforts ultimately rests on the example they set
through their own domestic laws and policies. Contradictions between
countries' domestic surveillance policies and practices and their foreign policy positions
on Internet freedom and openness fundamentally undermine their ability to
advocate for other governments to support Internet freedom . GNI urges the
governments in the Freedom Online Coalition to report on the requests they make for electronic communications surveillance. We also urge
them to make it legally possible for companies to report regularly to the public on the government requests that they receive from law
enforcement as well as national security authorities. Annual reports, such as the US Wiretap Report and the U.K. Government report of the
Interception of Communications Commissioner offer a starting point for more comprehensive disclosure of information about the number
of national security surveillance orders made and the number of persons affected. Next steps GNI will advocate strongly with all
governments, including the US, on behalf of these reforms, which are a prerequisite for informed global public debate on the balance
between national security and privacy and freedom of expression rights. We
view such transparency reforms
as necessary first steps in examining whether domestic law adequately protects the
rights to privacy and freedom of expression. All governments have a responsibility to work together with the
private sector and civil society to determine the narrowly defined circumstances (based on internationally recognized human rights laws
and standards) under which surveillance can take place. We will continue to push for this dialogue and press governments to meet their
obligation to protect the rights of freedom of expression and privacy for people all over the world.Source: Global Network Initiative,
Washington DC, in English 28 Jun 13
Uniqueness—Soft Power
American influence is on the brink—the changing world order necessitates
changes like the affirmative
Nye 15 - Joseph Nye is university distinguished service professor and former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He
has served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, chair of the National Intelligence Council, and deputy under
secretary of state for security assistance, science, and technology. (Is the American Century Over? pp. 186-188 e-book, 2015) STRYKER
In conclusion, the
American century is not over, if by that we mean the extraordinary period
of American pre-eminence in military, economic, and soft power resources that have
made the United States central to the workings of the global balance of power, and to the
provision of global public goods. Contrary to those who proclaim this the Chinese century, we have not entered a postAmerican world. But the continuation of the American century will not look like it
did in the twentieth century. The American share of the world economy will
be less than it was in the middle of the last century, and the complexity represented
by the rise of other countries as well as the increased role of non-state actors will make it
more difficult for anyone to wield influence and organize action . Analysts should stop
using clichés about unipolarity and multipolarity. They will have to live with both in different issues at the same time. And they should stop
talking and worrying about poorly specified concepts of decline that mix many different types of behavior and lead to mistaken policy
conclusions. Leadership
is not the same as domination. America will have to listen in
order to get others to enlist in what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called a multipartner
world . It is important to remember that there have always been degrees of leadership and degrees of
influence during the American century. The United States never had complete control. As
we saw in Chapter 1, even when the United States had preponderant resources, it often failed to get what it wanted. And those who argue
that the complexity and turmoil of today’s entropic world is much worse than the past should remember a year like 1956 when the United
States was unable to prevent Soviet repression of a revolt in Hungary, French loss of Vietnam, or the Suez invasion by our allies Britain,
France, and Israel. One
should be wary of viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses. To borrow a
with slightly less preponderance
and a much more complex world, the United States will need to make smart
strategic choices both at home and abroad if it wishes to maintain its position .
comedian’s line, “hegemony ain’t what it used to be, but then it never was.” Now,
The American century is likely to continue for a number of decades at the very least, but it will look very different from how it did when
Henry Luce first articulated it.
US soft power is declining—China is more attractive
Kurlantzick 06 (Joshua, visiting scholar for the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, “China’s Charm: Implications of Chinese Soft Power,” Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, June 2006,
http://carnegieendowment.org/files/PB_47_FINAL.pdf)//kjz
Declining American Soft Power America’s popularity is plummeting around the world.
Washington has made it harder for foreigners to obtain visas, undermining the idea of the United
States as a land of opportunity. The United States’ unrivalled global power has fostered
resentment in some nations toward the United States. The George W. Bush administration’s disavowal of multilateral
institutions has damaged the U.S. moral legitimacy abroad. The failures of neoliberal economics, linked to
Washington, in regions like Latin America have rebounded against the United States. The results are stark.
In a poll of twenty-one nations done by the British Broadcasting Corporation, only one-third of
people wanted American values to spread in their nation, and, in another study, more than
twice as many nations believed China has a mostly positive influence on the world as
believed the United States does. Respect for U.S. values, culture, and companies is deteriorating,
too: in a study last year of numerous nations, respondents ranked the United States only eleventh
worldwide in cultural, political, and business attractiveness.
Chinese soft power attractive due to recent investment back success
Sing 4/29 (Michael, managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy. From 2005 to 2008, he worked on Middle East issues at the National Security
Council, “China-Led Bank a Sign of U.S. Struggle to Transform Power Into Policy
Success,” Washington Wire, 4/29/15,
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/04/29/china-led-bank-a-sign-of-u-s-struggle-totransform-power-into-policy-success/?KEYWORDS=%22soft+power%22)//kjz
The failure of the U.S. campaign to dissuade allies from joining China’s Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank was greeted in some quarters as a sign of American
decline. But this episode was not a crisis of American power, which remains unequaled. And while the threat that the
bank poses to that power and to the international order it undergirds has been much touted, it is in fact overstated. In fact,
the main portent of the episode is not Beijing’s overturning of the international economic order or the arrival of
China as a U.S. peer but the
United States’ continued struggle to transform its power into policy
success. Democracy favors freedom and debate over efficiency in policy making. Contrast
the long-running clashes between the White House and Congress over Iran policy with
China’s swift execution of its infrastructure investment bank, which President Xi Jinping
proposed in 2013. The checks and balances in the U.S. system are a diplomatic strength
and ensure that our foreign policy serves the public interest and can be sustained over
political cycles. But the level of inefficiency this debate imposes on policy making can vary widely. The difference
between deliberation and dysfunction is, in part, a matter of presidential and political leadership. It is no
coincidence that the Chinese bank has progressed as two initiatives in Washington
foundered: International Monetary Fund quota reform, which would increase the IMF’s capitalization
while increasing the voting rights of emerging economies; and fast-track trade promotion authority to
conclude the Trans-Pacific Partnership. U.S.-led reform of the international economic order that preserves
our role while appealing to emerging economies would likely win more adherents than any Chinese-led order. But
Washington’s lack of progress toward IMF and trade reform means that the U.S. has
been fighting something with nothing. The experience with China’s investment bank is
less a demonstration that Chinese soft power is compelling than that America’s has been
allowed to atrophy. It’s tempting to chalk up U.S. policy paralysis to political polarization, but that wouldn’t be
accurate. IMF reform is opposed primarily on the right; trade-promotion authority on the left. As campaigning has
increasingly trumped governing, bipartisan consensus has become more elusive even on issues where it once reigned such
as Iran and Israel policy. A similar erosion of statecraft is evident in U.S. foreign relations. The
United States has faced difficulty in recent years in challenging adversaries–failing, for
example, to transform economic leverage into negotiating gains in the Iran nuclear talks
or to deter serial Russian aggression in its near abroad. At the same time, we have neglected alliances
that would conserve and amplify U.S. power. It would be challenging to identify a single U.S. alliance that is stronger today
than it was in 2009. How to think about all this? The world is changing, but our diplomacy has not kept up. During the
Cold War, it was relatively straightforward to make the case that states should not only pursue their own interests but also
uphold the Western-led international order in the face of the Communist threat. Today, we are victims of our own success:
No such unifying threat exists, and power and prosperity are more diffuse. Our diplomacy must therefore be more
nimble–setting priorities, forming coalitions around shared values and interests, and working assiduously to maintain the
broad appeal of the international order. This means working harder not only to understand how our allies perceive their
interests–in this case, allies clearly determined that their interests were better served by joining with Beijing–but also
demonstrating U.S. dedication to those interests amid diminishing national security budgets and commitments.
Surveillance Hurts Soft Power
Surveillance revelations cause decline in American influence
Quinn, ’13, (Adam, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at University of
Birmingham, “Obama’s soft power a hard sell after NSA revelations,” The Conversation,
October 28, 2013, http://theconversation.com/obamas-soft-power-a-hard-sell-afternsa-revelations-19572)//erg
For presidents, like sports team managers, the tough weeks tend to outnumber the jubilant. But even by the standards of
an unforgiving job, Barack Obama could be forgiven for feeling unusually buffeted of late. Many of the blows have come on
the domestic front, with the all-consuming stand off of the government shutdown segueing into frantic efforts to defend
and repair the roll-out of Obamacare amid charges of fatal technological incompetence. But if he were tempted to seek
solace in the autonomy of foreign policy – as modern presidents have been wont to do – there has been little consolatory
triumph to be found. In August and September, he was caught in a mighty tangle over Syria, threatening military strikes
over its chemical weapons use before being hamstrung first by Britain’s refusal to join the charge and then by the
reluctance of his own Congress. The legacy of that mess continues to work itself out in unpredictable ways, such as
increasingly public tensions between the US and Saudi Arabia, hitherto one of its more solid allies. Though the eventual
Russian-orchestrated deal to remove Syria’s chemical weapons was a respectable one given the circumstances, the episode
as a whole spoke of an America straining to translate its power into influence, or to maintain a united front among its
friends. Now the rolling scandal over National Security Agency surveillance, triggered by
the mass leak of secrets by Edward Snowden, has entered another phase of intensity, this
time centred on Europe. Revelations that the US tapped the phone of German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, operated numerous “listening posts” on European soil, and sucked up vast quantities of
communications data from millions of citizens across Europe have broken in the press.
Public expressions of displeasure have been forthcoming , including a European Union
statement. Taken together, these vignettes of public dissention will be enough to make many ask the question: is the
US losing its influence even over its allies? Is this just a tricky moment for a particular president, or
harbinger of a broader trend? Global shift First, the necessary caveats: enduring alliance relationships resemble long
marriages, in that the mere presence of moments of strain, or even audible arguments, cannot be taken as evidence of
imminent separation. Looking back over the longer-term history of America’s relations with its allies, episodes such as the
Vietnam War, the “Euromissile” crisis of the 1980s, and the controversial interventions in the former Yugoslavia in the
1990s, demonstrate that sharp differences of opinion and conflicting priorities are no radical new state of affairs. And
however unhappy they may be with their recent treatment, it is not obvious that countries such as Germany, France or
Saudi Arabia have anywhere to go if they did decide the time had come to tout for alternative alliance partners. It is not
entirely clear how European annoyance might manifest in ways that have practical importance. It is true they have it in
their power to threaten progress on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership process, but it is not clear that
such an action would harm the US more than Europe itself. In short, even if they are disgruntled, necessity may ultimately
prove a sufficient force to help them get over it. The reason present friction between the US and its
allies carries greater weight, however, is that it arises in the context of a global shift in
power away from the US and its established allies and towards new powers. The prospect
of “American decline” in terms of relative international power is the focus of a great deal
of debate over both substance and semantics. But the central fact is that even the part of the US’s own
intelligence apparatus charged with long-term foresight regards it as established that within 20 years the world
will have transitioned from the “unipolar” American dominance of the first post-Cold
War decades to a world in which multiple centres of power must coexist. The centre of
economic gravity has already shifted markedly towards Asia during the last decade.
Current domestic surveillance practices significantly damage US ability to
leverage soft power
Quinn, ’13, (Adam, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at University of
Birmingham, “Obama’s soft power a hard sell after NSA revelations,” The Conversation,
October 28, 2013, http://theconversation.com/obamas-soft-power-a-hard-sell-afternsa-revelations-19572)//erg
This certainly does not mean any single new power is about to rise to replace the US as a
hegemonic force. Nor does it mean the US will be going anywhere: the scale of its existing
advantages across a range of fronts – military, economic, institutional – is sufficiently great that it is assured a prominent
place at the table of whatever order may come. What it does mean is that Americans must presently be
engaged in thinking carefully about how best to leverage their advantages to retain the
maximum possible influence into the future. If they cannot continue to be first among equals in managing
the world order, they will wish at least to ensure that order is one that runs in line with their own established preferences.
Soft power Many of those who are optimistic about the ability of the US to pull off this
project of declining power without declining influence place emphasis on two things: the
extent to which the US has soft power due to widespread admiration for its political and
cultural values, and the extent to which it has locked in influence through the extent of its
existing networks of friends and allies. Even if these advantages cannot arrest America’s decline on harder
metrics, if played properly they can mitigate its consequences and secure an acceptable future. Shoring up support from
like-minded countries such as those of Europe ought to be the low-hanging fruit of such an effort. So the current
problems do harm on both fronts. It will be difficult to maintain the allure of soft power
if global opinion settles on the view that American political discord has rendered its
democracy dysfunctional at home, or that its surveillance practices have given rein to the
mores of a police state. And it will be harder to preserve American status through the force
of its alliances if its politicians' economic irresponsibility (for example, publicly contemplating a
default on American national debt) or scandals over surveillance or drone strikes alienate their
public or cause their leaders to question the extent to which they really are on the same
side as the US. Obama’s day-to-day foreign policy struggles should not be simplistically taken as signs of collapsing
American influence. But if the long-term plan is to carefully manage relative decline so as to preserves maximum
influence, episodes such as those his country has faced since August do nothing to boost the prospects of success.
US hypocrisy prevents spill over
Migranyan 13 (Andranik, professor at the Moscow State Institute of International
Relations and as a director of the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, “Scandals
Harm U.S. Soft Power,” The National Interest, 7/5/13,
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/scandals-harm-us-soft-power-8695)//kjz
On a practical geopolitical level, the spying scandals have seriously tarnished the reputation of the U nited States.
They have circumscribed its ability to exert soft power; the same influence that made the U.S. model very attractive to the rest of
the world. This former lustre is now diminished. The blatant everyday intrusions into the private lives of
Americans, and violations of individual rights and liberties by runaway, unaccountable
U.S. government agencies, have deprived the United States of its authority to dictate how
others must live and what others must do. Washington can no longer lecture others when its very
foundational institutions and values are being discredited—or at a minimum, when all is not well “in the state of Denmark.” Perhaps precisely because not all is well, many American politicians
seem unable to adequately address the current situation. Instead of asking what isn’t working in the government and how to ensure accountability and transparency in their institutions, they try, in
their annoyance, to blame the messenger—as they are doing in Snowden’s case. Some Senators hurried to blame Russia and Ecuador for anti-American behavior, and threatened to punish them
should they offer asylum to Snowden. Ads by Adblade Trending Offers and Articles Here's the ugly truth about diabetic amputation your doctor will never tell you. 30 News Anchors With Jaw
Dropping Beauty These Hollywood actresses weren't shy when it came to showing their figures These threats could only cause confusion in sober minds, as every sovereign country retains the right
to issue or deny asylum to whomever it pleases. In addition, the United States itself has a tradition of always offering political asylum to deserters of the secret services of other countries, especially
in the case of the former Soviet Union and other ex-socialist countries. In those situations, the United States never gave any consideration to how those other countries might react—it considered
the deserters sources of valuable information. As long as deserters have not had a criminal and murderous past, they can receive political asylum in any country that considers itself sovereign and
can stand up to any pressure and blackmail. Meanwhile, the hysteria of some politicians, if the State Department or other institutions of the executive branch join it, can only accelerate the process
of Snowden’s asylum. For any country he might ask will only be more willing to demonstrate its own sovereignty and dignity by standing up to a bully that tries to dictate conditions to it. In our
particular case, political pressure on Russia and President Putin could turn out to be utterly counterproductive. I believe that Washington has enough levelheaded people to understand that fact,
and correctly advise the White House. The administration will need sound advice, as many people in Congress fail to understand the consequences of their calls for punishment of sovereign
countries or foreign political leaders that don’t dance to Washington’s tune. Judging by the latest exchange between Moscow and Washington, it appears that the executive branches of both
countries will find adequate solutions to the Snowden situation without attacks on each other’s dignity and self-esteem. Russia and the United States are both Security Council members, and much
the recent series of scandals has caused
damage to the image and soft power of the United States. I do not know how soon this damage can be repaired. But
gone are the days when Orwell was seen as a relic of the Cold War, as the all-powerful Leviathan of the security services has run away from all accountability to state and society. Today
the world is looking at America—and its model for governance—with a more critical eye.
hinges on their decisions, including a slew of common problems that make cooperation necessary. Yet
irreparable
Surveillance undermines democracy and soft power
Legal Monitor Worldwide 13 (a subscription based publication covering legal news
and developments from worldwide jurisdictions, “Disintegration of democratic values
threatens future of US,” Legal Monitor Worldwide, 6/21/13, Lexis)//kjz
The case of Edward Snowden raises a number of difficult issues for the US. The case impacts on Washington's foreign
policy and on its domestic politics. The decline of US democracy is now sharply in focus. Snowden's
dramatic flight to Hong Kong raises the issue of US-China relations. The complexities of Hong Kong law could lead to
Snowden residing there for an extended time while matters move through the courts. It is ironic that just before the recent
summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama, the White House undiplomatically
pointed an accusing finger in public at China for alleged cyber warfare. Such clumsy, abrasive, and unnecessary tactics
blew up in Washington's face with the Snowden affair. While spy cases often spark lurid headlines and a stir when made
public, state-to-state relations are not destabilized. As governments well know, espionage is part and parcel of the game of
nations. High-profile cases involving political dissenters, while prickly, do not destabilize fundamental state-to-state
relations. Snowden positioned himself as a political dissenter who knowingly took an extreme step in violation of the law
to make his political point. The US and China have an appropriate official mechanism for consultation on cyber war issues
within the important US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue process. The Snowden affair seems to be an appropriate
agenda item for the upcoming July meeting, an opportunity for Washington to provide a full explanation. Americans
naturally want military and other capabilities to defend their country, but we do not want such capabilities turned on
ourselves in violation of the US constitution. Since the 9/11 attacks, however, the Bush administration and the Obama
administration engaged in internal surveillance activities which are controversial if not unconstitutional. The Snowden
case has had more impact on US domestic politics than on the state-to-state relations between the US and China. China
has maintained a diplomatic low-profile stance. Russia and Iceland have indicated they would consider an asylum request
by Snowden. It would be understandable if China would do the same at some point. The impact on US domestic politics is
squarely on issues of constitutional law. Already the watchdog American Civil Liberties Union has filed a
court case against the government as a result of Snowden's revelations. Irate politicians from both
the Republican and Democratic parties denounce what they see as improper and unconstitutional
behavior. The constitutional issue in the US is complicated by the fact that the US
Congress itself passed legislation, opposed by critics, which included vague language and
loopholes that the White House took advantage of for domestic surveillance activities.
Critics were outraged by what they saw as White House lying about possibly illegal domestic surveillance activities. There
was further outrage over the recent congressional testimony of the head of the NSA and the head of the US Intelligence
Community. Critics said these two men committed perjury by lying to the US Congress, which is a high crime. In the US
system governed by its unique constitution, the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers is a core value.
Constitutions and political systems naturally vary around the world, but the separation of powers doctrine is fundamental
to the US constitution. It is based on ancient principles found in Greco-Roman tradition as well as in European
parliamentary tradition. As a result of the Snowden affair, one aspect of the internal crisis of US
democracy is before the world. The construction of the "imperial presidency" and
distortion of the separation of powers started during the Cold War. Critics today say US
constitutional democracy is in deep decline reflecting not only the disintegration of the
rule of law, but also reflecting the disintegration of US civic culture. While some US politicians
and officials hypocritically attempt to manipulate the cyber war issue to undermine US-China relations, the real issue is
the constitutional crisis and disintegration of democracy in the US. The Snowden affair shows the US must clean up its
own house rather than point an accusing finger at others.
Hypocrisy hurts soft power and human rights protection
Gardels 05 (Nathan, editor of New Perspectives Quarterly since it began publishing in
1985. Since January 2014 he has been editor-in-chief of THEWORLDPOST, “The Rise
and Fall of America’s Soft Power,” New Perspectives Quarterly, winter 2005,
https://onlinelibrarystatic.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.15405842.2005.00718.x/asset/j.15405842.2005.00718.x.pdf?v=1&t=ib9nb68d&s=a861662ec00cfe0815f1f12ce5848ee8cb9ca
038)//kjz
IRAQ WAR AND ABU GHRAIB IMAGES | The other element that has brought down American prestige, and not just in
the Arab and Muslim world, is the Iraq war and the torture at Abu Ghraib. For a superpower to act
unilaterally—if it is perceived to act ONLY in its own interest as if it were a NORMAL power—is, by definition, to
undermine the basis of the consensual hegemony granted to it by others, who expect it to
look after their interests as well. Without dwelling on facts familiar to all during the buildup to war, acting in
the name of the world but without the world’s consent forfeited too much political capital—that is, soft
power. Another superpower did emerge to oppose US policy in the past year: global public opinion. It was led,
figuratively, by Nelson Mandela, the ultimate soft power icon of moral leadership, who said early on, “America
is a threat to world peace.” Its opposition to US policy meant that the political objectives for which our
unparalleled military might paved the way could not in the end be met. Soft power checkmated hard power. Here it might
be apt to paraphrase Stalin on the Pope. Some skeptics might ask “how many divisions does global public opinion have?”
Answer: It has the divisions so direly needed now but not deployed in Iraq—no divisions from Turkey, from the French,
from Spain, from NATO. Walter Lippmann wrote about phantom public opinion. But in this case we’ve seen a phantom
coalition, where public opinion from Japan to Italy to Britain doesn’t stand behind their leaders, constraining the actual
capacity of the coalition to shape postwar Iraq. Spain bowed out after the fact of war; the fledgling democracy in Turkey,
though championed by the US for membership in Europe, bowed out before, making the US invasion jump through
tactical hoops to get into Iraq. It turned out to be only an assumed ally. In this context, and by contrast, across much of
Asia, China has become seen as the stabilizer seeking a “peaceful rise” while the US upsets the apple cart, not only through
the war in Iraq but with its anti-terror crusade that is a low priority for most Asians. The lack of consent for going into
Iraq, and the daily demonstration of powerlessness since, have made even those Asians suspicious of China’s new power
concerned about whether they can rely on the US. Tokyo’s nationalist governor, Shintaro Ishihara, told me as much in a
long conversation last year: Japan, he said, can no longer depend on the US to take care of anyone’s interest but its own,
so Japan must reopen its nuclear option and be prepared to remilitarize. Just as DeGaulle was sure the US would not
sacrifice New York for Paris, so too the new breed of Japanese politician doesn’t trust the US not to sacrifice Tokyo in
pursuit of other interests. Paradoxically, by willfully ignoring the interests of others as expressed in their public opinion,
the US unilateralist approach to Iraq and other issues has pushed the multipolar world order out of its post-Cold War
womb. This is the most profound strategic consequence of the loss of US soft power. America has been demoted from a
hegemon to a preponderant power—by the public opinion of its own allies! Condi Rice once argued to me that the French
call for a multipolar world was the rhetoric of an adversary, not an ally, especially when proclaimed at summits in Beijing
and Moscow. The rhetoric is now on its way to realization. In this respect, the Iraq war has had a demonstration effect, but
not the one Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney envisioned. Rather than demonstrate American power it has demonstrated
the limits to American power. Qian Qichen, China’s former foreign minister, has summed up the lesson as most of the
world sees it: “Th
means it is incapable of realizing the goal.” As Joe Nye writes in his book Soft Power, “Politics in an information age may
ultimately be about whose story wins.” Much of America’s winning story which accounted for it being a soft superpower—
human rights, the rule of law, an historic liberator instead of occupier—was further undercut by the images of humiliation,
torture and sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. Certain images so iconify a moment in history they are impossible to erase.
Germans knocking down the Berlin Wall piece by piece with sledge hammers is one. The lone individual standing down a
Chinese tank near Tiananmen Square is another. On the ignoble side, now there are the images of Abu Ghraib. The further
the truth of the image is from a false claim, the deeper and more enduring the damage. Whereas American softpower
d its own soft power. As
Brezezinski argued recently: “In our entire history as a nation, world opinion has never been as hostile toward the US as it
is today.” The hearts and minds once won are now being lost. And there are real costs. Just two examples to
illustrate the case. After the Abu Ghraib images emerged, I asked Boutros Boutros-Ghali about the impact in the Arab
world and beyond. First, of course, he said these photos were a gift to Al Qaeda recruiters. Second, he said, “they
damage the role of organizations all around the world that deal with the protection of
human rights and law in the time of war. I am the president of the Egyptian Commission on Human Rights,
“ he told me. “It will be difficult for me now to say, ‘Look, the international community is demanding that we clean up the
human rights situation in the Arab world.’ Their response now is: ‘The superpower is not respecting human rights in Iraq
or Guantanamo. So the pressure is off . . . governments all over the world will say that security is
more important than the protection of human rights.’”
NSA revelations tanked credibility
Gross 13 (Grant, covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for the
IDG News Service, “The NSA scandal has damaged U.S. credibility online,”
ComputerWorld, 12/5/13,
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2486546/internet/the-nsa-scandal-hasdamaged-u-s--credibility-online.html)//kjz
The U.S. government has a huge image problem worldwide as it promotes Internet freedom on one hand and conducts
mass surveillance on the other, potentially creating major problems for U.S. technology companies, a former official with
President Barack Obama's administration said Thursday. Many U.S. policy makers don't recognize the
level of distrust created by recent revelations about U.S. National Security Agency surveillance,
and that lack of trust will drive other countries away from U.S. technology firms, said Andrew McLaughlin, former White
House deputy CTO. "We, as an advocate for freedom of speech and privacy worldwide, are much, much, much more
screwed than we generally think in Washington, and ... American industry and our Internet sector is more much, much,
much more screwed than we think internationally," McLaughlin said during a speech at a Human Rights First summit in
Washington, D.C. Many overseas critics of the U.S. see the Obama administration's push for
Internet freedom as "profoundly hypocritical" in the face of the NSA surveillance
revelations and a continued push by U.S. trade officials to have U.S. trading partners
filter the Internet to protect against copyright violations, said McLaughlin, now president of Digg, the
online news aggregation service. The NSA surveillance has led to an intense "level of anger and
the degree of betrayal" in many countries that U.S. policy makers don't seem to fully
appreciate, he said. And many countries have begun to explore other options beyond U.S. technology companies
because of the surveillance revelations, he added. There's now a perception outside the U.S. that the
country's technology companies "are willing instruments of violation of civil rights and
civil liberties," McLaughlin said. "We have essentially nationalized what were previously seen as stateless Internet
entities."
NSA revelations hurt US influence
Neier 13 (Aryeh, an American human rights campaigner. He was the president of the
Open Society Institute from 1993-2012 and a founder of Human Rights Watch. His most
recent book is Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights, “After the NSA
revelations, who will listen to America on human rights?,” The Guardian, 11/11/13,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/11/nsa-revelations-americahuman-rights)//kjz
One of the unfortunate consequences of the spying by the NSA that has now been revealed is
that it makes it more difficult for the United States to be effective in promoting human
rights internationally. America's ability to exercise a positive influence on the practices of
other governments had been severely damaged under the Bush administration. That was
because American abuses against detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib deprived Washington of the moral authority
to criticise others when they engaged in such practices as prolonged detentions without charges or trials, or trials before
irregular courts, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, or torture. President Obama's inability to fulfil his promise to
close Guantánamo because of congressional opposition, and his unwillingness to hold Bush-era officials to account for
their abuses, has hampered his administration in recovering lost moral authority. That may help to explain why the
Obama administration has been relatively reluctant to speak out forcefully about abuses of rights by governments such as
those of China and Russia. Of course, dependence on those governments economically and eagerness for their
collaboration in the ongoing global struggle against terrorism were also probably factors in muting American criticism.
What the world has learned about the NSA's systematic intrusions on the privacy of
others has dashed hopes that the US would gradually recover its voice in speaking out for
rights. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a government that is seen by many worldwide
as a great violator of rights to be credible in promoting those same rights. Of course, the
damage to American foreign policy by the practices of the NSA goes far beyond American capacity to promote human
rights. Perhaps the damage in Europe has been the greatest. Europe has much stronger protections for privacy than the
US, reflecting a high level of public concern. Nowhere is the commitment to privacy stronger than in Germany, where
article one of the country's constitution, the Basic Law, begins with the assertion: "Human dignity is inviolable. To respect
it and protect it is the duty of all state power." Dignity, which also has a central place in the European charter of
fundamental rights, but is not mentioned in the US constitution, is understood in Germany and elsewhere in Europe to
encompass a commitment to privacy. In the absence of a clear repudiation by the Obama administration of practices of the
NSA that go far beyond the requirements of national security, including a pledge to discontinue spying on European
leaders, and to end indiscriminate surveillance of many millions of European citizens, it seems likely that co-operation
with the United States on a host of issues will decline drastically. The US once enjoyed a reputation as a
country that respected human rights. This enhanced its political standing with other
countries and gave Washington the capacity to promote these rights worldwide. Its stand on
rights had been an asset; now it is turning into a liability. The main reason to respect rights, of course, is because of their
intrinsic worth and significance. A secondary reason that is not negligible, however, is that America's practices on
rights also have a significant impact on the country's other interests in its relations with
the rest of the world.
Link
Lead By Example—Democracy
Curtailing surveillance allows the US to lead by example
Condon 14 - Stephanie Condon is a political reporter for CBSNews.com. (“Obama: U.S. must lead the world by example,”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-u-s-by-lead-the-world-by-example/ 5/28/2014) STRYKER
"America must always lead on the world stage . If we don't, no one else will," President Obama told the
graduating class at the United States Military Academy at West Point on Wednesday. Responding to critics that have cast his foreign policy
as feckless and weak, Mr. Obama used the commencement address to make the case that his leadership has positioned the U.S. to be a
nation that leads by example and that the United States has never been stronger than it is now. "Those who argue otherwise - who suggest
that America is in decline, or has seen its global leadership slip away - are either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics," Mr.
Obama said. The president reassured the cadets that the military is the backbone of U.S. leadership but that it must be used with restraint.
"Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail," he said,
defining his leadership style in contrast to the overzealous interventions of the Bush era. "It is a particularly useful time for America to
reflect on those who have sacrificed so much for our freedom," Mr. Obama said, "for you are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may
not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan." Mr.
Obama summarized how his foreign policy, based on
a strong reliance on multilateral diplomacy, applies to hot spots across the globe. He said the U.S. will "step up our
efforts to support Syria's neighbors" as its civil war drags on. He urged Congress to ramp up support for Syria, as well as to
"lead by example" by on issues like limiting domestic surveillance , acknowledging
international treaties and closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Consistency key—domestic surveillance is hypocritical
Diamond 8 - Larry Diamond is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and founding co-editor of the Journal
of Democracy. At Stanford University, he is professor by courtesy of political science and sociology, and he coordinates the democracy
program of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International
Studies (FSI). (“Doing Democracy Promotion Right,” http://www.newsweek.com/doing-democracy-promotion-right-82937 12/20/2008)
STRYKER
Finally, the
new president should keep in mind the power of example. Washington
can't promote democracy abroad if it erodes it at home . The contradictions between the rhetoric of
Bush's "freedom agenda" and the realities of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, torture, warrantless surveillance and
boundless executive privilege have led even many of the United States' natural allies to dismiss U.S.
efforts as hypocritical . Thus the new president must immediately shut down Guantánamo and unequivocally renounce the
use of torture; few gestures would restore American credibility more quickly. The United States should also reduce the power of lobbyists,
enhance executive and legislative transparency and reform campaign-finance rules—both for its own good and for the message it would
send. Make no mistake: thanks to the global economic crisis and antidemocratic trends, things may get worse before they get better. But
supporting democracy abroad advances U.S. national interests and engages universal human aspirations. A
more consistent,
realistic and multilateral approach will help to secure at-risk democracies and plant the
seeds of freedom in oppressed countries. Patience, persistence and savvy diplomacy will serve the next president far
better than moralistic rhetoric that divides the world into good and evil. We've seen where that got us.
The US needs to set a good example
The Century Foundation 9 - Citing Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who served on
the State Department’s policy planning staff in the last years of the Clinton administration after living and working on the ground for the
National Democratic Institute in Egypt and the Palestinian territories. (“Democracy Promotion in the Middle East and the Obama
Administration,” http://www.tcf.org/work/foreign_policy/detail/democracy-promotion-in-the-middle-east-and-the-obamaadministration2/16/2009) STRYKER
“Making
this shift in strategy will require significant changes in how the United
States implements its national security policies ,” Katulis concludes. “But the most
important step that the United States and the full range of U.S. institutions and
organizations can do to advance human rights and democracy in the Middle East is to
practice what it preaches—lead by example and ensure that its actions match the
democratic values and ideals it seeks to advance in the Middle East.”
Thorough democracy is crucial to successful modeling
Kemming and Humborg 10 - Jan Dirk Kemming is Creative Director for Weber Shandwick Continental Europe and a
visiting lecturer at Cologne University of Applied Science. His PhD from Giessen University deals with nation branding and public
diplomacy for Turkey’s EU accession. Christian Humborg is the Managing Director for an NGO in Berlin and a visiting lecturer at the
University of Potsdam. He holds a PhD from the same university. His recent academic work focuses on the linkage of democracy and
lobbyism. (“Democracy and nation brand(ing): Friends or foes?” Ebsco, 8/1/2010) STRYKER
CONCLUSION AND PROSPECTUS Our
research indicates a significant relationship between the
success of a nation’s brand and perceptions of its performance as a
democracy. These findings not only show how relevant and essential democracy is for
successful nations 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, but also reveal a remarkable perspective on
earlier identified tensions between consensus-orientated democratic procedures versus
the presumed necessity of hierarchical brand management. Apparently, thoroughly
democratic nations display consistently high scores in terms of their esteem
from other world citizens . This result indicates that successful brand management does not require non-democratic
procedures.
Bad US practices spillover
Gates 12 - Kelly Gates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and the Science Studies Program at University
of California, San Diego. Gates specializes in the study of surveillance, digital media, and visual culture, from an analytical perspective that
bridges science and technology studies and cultural and media studies. (“d. The globalization of homeland security,” Routledge Handbook
of Surveillance Studies, Google Books, 2012) STRYKER
How have the priorities of "homeland security " in the post—9/11 era been mobilized to
bolster an expanding global industry, and what are the consequences of this industry
expansion on surveillance practices transnationally ? It is the aim of this chapter to consider the
globalization of homeland security. It examines the extent to which the US model of homeland security
has been exported to other countries, and what the results have been for the spread of
new surveillance practices across national borders. “Homeland security" is typically understood as a policy
program instituted in the United States as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I argue that it is more adequately understood as a broader
govern- mental rationality that reconfigures the US Cold War “national security" regime in ways more amenable to the post-Cold War
context, and to the priorities of an emerging global security industry. In
order to be promoted as a form of
national identity, the US model of “homeland security" has been and must con- tinue to
be defined as uniquely "American ." However, it is also being globalized in particular
ways in order to serve as a powerful political and economic strategy in the "war on terror" (see also
Hayes, this volume). One focus of this strategy has been the USA-led effort to create a global
surveillance apparatus , a dis- persed system of monitoring and identification that aims to enact a USA-centric politics of
inclusion and exclusion on a global scale. Not only the USA, but much of the world, is engaged in what Giorgio Agamben (2005) has called a
permanent “state of exception." Here constitutional laws and human rights are suspended indefinitely, and individuals are continuously
called upon to demonstrate their legitimate identity and right to exist. As the USA and its allies carry out the seemingly endless "war on
terror," a heavily financed “security-industrial complex" has taken shape. Along with it has come a seemingly endless and increasingly
integrated stream of new surveillance systems and practices.
Consistency is important to democracy promotion
O'Connell 12 - Jamie O'Connell is a Senior Fellow of the Honorable G. William and Ariadna Miller Institute for Global Challenges
and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, as well as a Lecturer in Residence. He teaches and writes on political
and legal development, and has particular expertise in law and development, transitional justice, democratization, post-conflict
reconstruction, and business and human rights. (“Common Interests, Closer Allies: How Democracy in Arab States Can Benefit the West,”
Stanford Journal of International Law, Lexis Nexis, Summer, 2012) STRYKER
The unpredictable, gradual, and context-specific nature of democratization means that the benefits to Western countries of that
transformation may appear quickly in some Arab states, but only slowly in others. Western
countries cannot simply
vary their posture toward democratic change from country to country, however. Polling data on
the Arab Spring suggests that many Arab citizens feel a sense of solidarity that
transcends national borders. n31 Western countries' policies in all Arab countries therefore are
likely to affect how they are perceived by citizens of each Arab country. n32 Egyptians, for
example, will doubt the sincerity of the United States' commitment to Egyptian
democracy and professions of friendship with the Egyptian people if they see that country supporting
repression in Bahrain. To be sure, each Western country's policies toward democratization must vary somewhat among Arab
countries, based on its specific interests in each place, level of influence there, and other factors. In crafting those policies, however,
Western policymakers should appreciate that the more consistently they can support
democratization across all Arab countries, the more likely they will be to benefit from its
success in any of them.
Consistency key
Babayan 15 - Nelli Babayan has a PhD from the University of Trento and is a Senior Researcher at the Freie Universitat Berlin,
where she has also taught on democratization and the role of information technologies in democracy. (Democratic Transformation and
Obstruction: EU, US, and Russia in the South Caucasus, p. 2, Google Books, 2015) STRYKER
Given that “never in human history had international forces—political, eco- nomic, and cultural—been
so supportive of democratic ideas and institutions” (Dahl 1998), the limited progress of
democracy has been even more surprising. Since the early 1990s, states and organizations have
targeted virtually every corner of the world with democracy-promotion activities.
However, after the “third wave of democratization" (Huntington 1993), liberal democracy has
made little progress or has even broken down (Diamond 2008), arguably pointing to a third reversewave of democratization. However, policies of democracy promo- tion have also lacked
consistency and well-defined strategies, leaving practition- ers and academics wondering how
democracy promotion would proceed (Cox et al. 2000; Smith 2008; Youngs 2002). To shed light on these
issues, the book investigates democracy promotion by the European Union (EU) and the United States of America (US) in Armenia,
Azerbaijan, and Georgia against the back- drop of Russia's regional interests.
Lead By Example—Internet Freedom
The US cannot challenge autocracies with bad domestic policies
Mahoney 13 - Robert Mahoney is CPJ’s deputy director. He writes and speaks on press freedom, and has led CPJ missions to
global hot spots from Iraq to Sri Lanka. He worked as a reporter, bureau chief and editor for Reuters around the world. (“In NSA
surveillance debate, tech firms urge transparency,” https://cpj.org/blog/2013/06/in-nsa-surveillance-debate-tech-firms-urge-transpa.php
6/28/2013) STRYKER
The Global Network Initiative, or GNI, is a coalition of leading technology companies--including
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo--and human rights groups, Internet freedom advocates, and
ethical investors that promotes user privacy and freedom of expression online. The GNI
acknowledged that governments must weigh national security concerns along with individual freedoms but expressed concern about
"inadequate legal safeguards" for privacy under the secret spy programs. It said the lack of transparency involving the U.S. Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court and U.S. surveillance laws prevented companies from reporting on the government requests they receive for
client information. The group called for more of the court's legal opinions to be declassified to enable greater public debate on
oversight of government actions. It also called for an easing of the gag orders placed on companies regarding the national security orders
they receive. Finally it urged
governments--especially those in the 21-member Freedom Online
Coalition, which includes the United States--to lead by example and report on their
own surveillance requests. The GNI noted an argument often made by CPJ: Western governments lose
the authority to challenge authoritarian regimes around the world on press
freedom violations when their own domestic policies fall short of international
standards . " Contradictions between countries' domestic surveillance policies
and practices and their foreign policy positions on Internet freedom and openness
fundamentally undermine their ability to advocate for other governments to support
Internet freedom," the GNI said.
America must lead Internet freedom by example
Risen 12 - Tom Risen is a technology and business reporter for U.S. News & World Report. (“America Leads the Internet By
Example,” https://netizenproject.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/americas-internet-leads-by-example/ 6/4/2012) STRYKER
As birthplace of the Internet the United States remains a worldwide standard for how to
use it, yet America sends conflicting examples when it advocates digital liberty
while practicing domestic surveillance . This influence is evident in Tunisia, which is drafting a new
constitution a year after social media-connected Arab Spring protesters ousted Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali from his 23 year-long presidency.
During Google’s recent Internet at Liberty conference, Noomane Fehri of the Tunisian National Constitutional Assembly said open Internet
made the Arab Spring possible, but the plans he described for his country’s new laws reflect the duality between individual rights and
government security Americans face. Tunisia’s new leaders want to uphold First Amendment principles, he said, and will have a
constitutional commission for transparency. While Fehri said monitoring the Internet and tracking an individual should “absolutely not be
allowed,” he added “except in very few cases,” such as when someone is “known to be unlawful.” “I have no problem [with] collecting data.
My problem is who accesses it and in which conditions they access it. That’s where we need to be extremely careful,” Fehri said. Accessing
data, Fehri said, could be valuable not just for security but for research, statistics, advancing public health and economic growth to develop
Tunisia. “You need to put the right level of anonymity on it,” Fehri said. “But for government issue, again, we need to be extremely,
extremely strict. There should be a constitutional commission outside the government who observe and monitor the behavior of any
[governmental access] to that data. That’s what we are aiming to do.” The
strength of the Internet for individual
freedom will undermine any post-20th century “quasi-authoritarian states,” said Stewart
Baker, a former general counsel for the National Security Agency, who reflected the dual perception that the state should not always lose
when it seeks to regulate the Internet. The hardest part of a revolution, Baker said, is to transfer power back into the hands of a government.
“In a properly organized society the state is representing us. Because who else will do it?” said Baker, formerly assistant secretary for policy
at the Department of Homeland Security. “We should be looking for ways to distinguish between the kinds of regulation that are offensive
to democratic values and those that support democratic values.” Criticism
of the United States’ Internet values
stems from the recent House of Representatives passage of the Cyber Intelligence
Sharing and Protection Act [CISPA] to expand Internet governance on cybercrime, trials
reviewing the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, and the construction of data collecting
fusion centers, such as the Utah Data Center. Baker supported CISPA and said allowing Internet service providers to share
information about their customers without a subpoena would make it more efficient to detect hackers sending malware and viruses. “It
turns out many of the people who are sending us malware are customers” Baker said. “If you can’t share that information because of a dumb
law from the ’80s, you ought to get rid of the dumb law from the ‘80s.” Dismissing a recent article on the Utah Data Center in Wired as
“filled with innuendo,” Baker said the complex is not being used to collect information on citizens with no criminal record, but “data
collection is where we are headed.” “Being able to sift through large amounts of data to find patterns of behavior that alert us to terrorist
activity is part of what we’re going to end up having to do,” Baker said. When
democratic Western governments
reach for security above all else in cyberspace it sets a bad example for tech policy
worldwide, said John Kampfner, author of “Freedom For Sale: Why The World Is Trading Democracy For Security.” “ It gives a
wonderful get out clause for authoritarian leaders to harbor on,” said Kampfner, former chief executive
of Index on Censorship. “It may be entirely illegitimate, but they use the perception of moral
equivalence to pursue their own agendas.” Criticizing “preemptive censorship” of online behavior by governments
through the use of terrorism accusations, Global Voices columnist Renata Avila said even the simpler communications tech of the ‘80s
allowed military dictator Ríos Montt to repress citizens in her native Guatemala. “We
are heading toward a society of
total control, that is very similar to a totalitarian regime, controlled by some powerful
governments and some powerful corporations that are totally ignoring human rights
standards and are using the argument, ‘we want to protect our citizens,’” Avila said. Some of the
world’s largest tech companies are based in the United States, some of which sell technology to repressive nations such as Syria that could
be used it to build surveillance and censorship networks. In April the government issued sanctions against certain equipment to Syria. One
recent example of controversial technology sales to Syria is Blue Coat Systems. These technologies give the private sector unprecedented
ability to influence law enforcement and human rights, and thus greater responsibility to consider the global impact of their actions, said
Cynthia Wong, director of the Project on Global Internet Freedom at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. “Companies need
to think about how to avoid complicity in human rights violations,” Wong said. African Development Bank Consultant Mohamed El
Dahshan said other risks to human rights worldwide include companies giving into government requests for user information or setting
privacy polices that do not protect anonymity. Citing Google’s Transparency Report indicates as an example, El Dahshan said the Google
does not respond to requests for user data or content removal from developing nations such as Pakistan as often as they do from the United
States or European countries. “If you are a foreign activist, and all your data is stored on the server of a U.S. company, is it possible that my
country which is an autocratic country, would send a friendly request to disclose information about me as a user?” said El Dahshan, coauthor of “Diaries of the Revolution,” which recounts the Egyptian uprising of 2011. The dilemma with government oversight of the Internet
is that technology advances too fast for law to keep up with it, said Sunil Abraham, executive director of India’s Centre for the Internet and
Society. One solution could be co-regulation of the tech industry between companies and governments, Abraham said. “Once a practice is
developed, or a standard in the private sector the penalties or remedies when that practice is violated can be administered by a government
official,” Abraham said. “A privacy commission for example, could fine a company because it is in violation of a self-regulatory call.”
Attendees of Google’s Internet at Liberty conference admired the host company for its commitment to two days of reviewing global Internet
freedom, but ironically also feared the search engine represented surrender of privacy and anonymity in exchange for convenience. The
United States preaches freedom but also the free market. Kampfner said the republic
must be an example of an open Internet so other countries will uphold the
freedom to participate in the online public realm as much as the private online
freedoms the Internet offers users.
Domestic surveillance undermines promotion of Internet freedom
GNI 13 - Global Network Initiative. (“Transparency, National Security, and Protecting Rights Online,”
https://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/news/transparency-national-security-and-protecting-rights-online 6/28/2013) STRYKER
3) Governments—especially those already committed to protecting human rights online— should
lead by
example and report on their own surveillance requests. GNI commends the 21 governments of the
Freedom Online Coalition for their commitment to protecting free expression and privacy online and urges other governments to follow
their lead. However, the
credibility of their efforts ultimately rests on the example they set
through their own domestic laws and policies. Contradictions between countries’
domestic surveillance policies and practices and their foreign policy
positions on Internet freedom and openness fundamentally undermine their
ability to advocate for other governments to support Internet freedom.
Lead By Example—Soft Power
Hypocrisy of surveillance hurts soft power
Farrell and Finnemore 13 (Henry, Associate Professor of Political Science and
International Affairs at George Washington University, and Martha, University Professor
of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, “The End
of Hypocrisy: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks,” Foreign Affairs,
November/December 13, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/201310-15/end-hypocrisy)//kjz
A HYPOCRITICAL HEGEMON Hypocrisy is central to Washington’s soft power -- its ability to get
other countries to accept the legitimacy of its actions -- yet few Americans appreciate its
role. Liberals tend to believe that other countries cooperate with the United States
because American ideals are attractive and the U.S.-led international system is fair.
Realists may be more cynical, yet if they think about Washington’s hypocrisy at all, they consider it irrelevant. For them, it
is Washington’s cold, hard power, not its ideals, that encourages other countries to partner with the United States. Of
course, the United States is far from the only hypocrite in international politics. But the United States’ hypocrisy
matters more than that of other countries. That’s because most of the world today lives
within an order that the United States built, one that is both underwritten by U.S. power
and legitimated by liberal ideas. American commitments to the rule of law, democracy, and
free trade are embedded in the multilateral institutions that the country helped establish
after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and later the
World Trade Organization. Despite recent challenges to U.S. preeminence, from the Iraq war to the financial crisis, the
international order remains an American one. This system needs the lubricating oil of hypocrisy to keep its gears turning.
To ensure that the world order continues to be seen as legitimate, U.S. officials must regularly promote and claim fealty to
its core liberal principles; the United States cannot impose its hegemony through force alone.
But as the recent leaks have shown, Washington is also unable to consistently abide by
the values that it trumpets. This disconnect creates the risk that other states might
decide that the U.S.-led order is fundamentally illegitimate. Of course, the United States has gotten
away with hypocrisy for some time now. It has long preached the virtues of nuclear nonproliferation, for example, and has
coerced some states into abandoning their atomic ambitions. At the same time, it tacitly accepted Israel’s nuclearization
and, in 2004, signed a formal deal affirming India’s right to civilian nuclear energy despite its having flouted the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty by acquiring nuclear weapons. In a similar vein, Washington talks a good game on democracy, yet
it stood by as the Egyptian military overthrew an elected government in July, refusing to call a coup a coup. Then there’s
the “war on terror”: Washington pushes foreign governments hard on human rights but claims sweeping exceptions for its
own behavior when it feels its safety is threatened. The reason the United States has until now suffered few consequences
for such hypocrisy is that other states have a strong interest in turning a blind eye. Given how much they benefit from the
global public goods Washington provides, they have little interest in calling the hegemon on its bad behavior. Public
criticism risks pushing the U.S. government toward self-interested positions that would undermine the larger world order.
Moreover, the United States can punish those who point out the inconsistency in its actions by downgrading trade
relations or through other forms of direct retaliation. Allies thus usually air their concerns in private. Adversaries may
point fingers, but few can convincingly occupy the moral high ground. Complaints by China and Russia hardly inspire
admiration for their purer policies. The ease with which the United States has been able to act inconsistently has bred
complacency among its leaders. Since few countries ever point out the nakedness of U.S. hypocrisy, and since those that
do can usually be ignored, American politicians have become desensitized to their country’s double standards. But
thanks to Manning and Snowden, such double standards are getting harder and harder
to ignore. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST To see how this dynamic will play out, consider the implications
of Snowden’s revelations for U.S. cybersecurity policy. Until very recently, U.S. officials did not talk about their country’s
offensive capabilities in cyberspace, instead emphasizing their strategies to defend against foreign attacks. At the same
time, they have made increasingly direct warnings about Chinese hacking, detailing the threat to U.S. computer networks
and the potential damage to U.S.-Chinese relations. But the United States has been surreptitiously waging its own major
offensive against China’s computers -- and those of other adversaries -- for some time now. The U.S. government has
quietly poured billions of dollars into developing offensive, as well as defensive, capacities in cyberspace. (Indeed, the two
are often interchangeable -- programmers who are good at crafting defenses for their own systems know how to penetrate
other people’s computers, too.) And Snowden confirmed that the U.S. military has hacked not only the Chinese military’s
computers but also those belonging to Chinese cell-phone companies and the country’s most prestigious university.
Although prior to Snowden’s disclosures, many experts were aware -- or at least reasonably certain -- that the U.S.
government was involved in hacking against China, Washington was able to maintain official deniability. Protected from
major criticism, U.S. officials were planning a major public relations campaign to pressure China into tamping down its
illicit activities in cyberspace, starting with threats and perhaps culminating in legal indictments of Chinese hackers.
Chinese officials, although well aware that the Americans were acting hypocritically, avoided calling them out directly in
order to prevent further damage to the relationship. But Beijing’s logic changed after Snowden’s leaks. China suddenly had
every reason to push back publicly against U.S. hypocrisy. After all, Washington could hardly take umbrage with Beijing
for calling out U.S. behavior confirmed by official U.S. documents. Indeed, the disclosures left China with little choice but
to respond publicly. If it did not point out U.S. hypocrisy, its reticence would be interpreted as weakness. At a news
conference after the revelations, a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of National Defense insisted that the scandal
“reveal[ed] the true face and hypocritical conduct regarding Internet security” of the United States. The United States has
found itself flatfooted. It may attempt, as the former head of U.S. counterintelligence Joel Brenner has urged, to draw
distinctions between China’s allegedly unacceptable hacking, aimed at stealing commercial secrets, and its own perfectly
legitimate hacking of military or other security-related targets. But those distinctions will likely fall on deaf ears.
Washington has been forced to abandon its naming-and-shaming campaign against Chinese hacking. Manning’s and
Snowden’s leaks mark the beginning of a new era in which the U.S. government can no longer count on keeping its secret
behavior secret. Hundreds of thousands of Americans today have access to classified documents that would embarrass the
country if they were publicly circulated. As the recent revelations show, in the age of the cell-phone camera and the flash
drive, even the most draconian laws and reprisals will not prevent this information from leaking out. As a result,
Washington faces what can be described as an accelerating hypocrisy collapse -- a dramatic narrowing of the country’s
room to maneuver between its stated aspirations and its sometimes sordid pursuit of self-interest. The U.S. government,
its friends, and its foes can no longer plausibly deny the dark side of U.S. foreign policy and will have to address it headon. SUIT THE ACTION TO THE WORD, THE WORD TO THE ACTION The collapse of hypocrisy presents the United
States with uncomfortable choices. One way or another, its policy and its rhetoric will have to move closer to each other.
The easiest course for the U.S. government to take would be to forgo hypocritical rhetoric altogether and acknowledge the
narrowly self-interested goals of many of its actions. Leaks would be much less embarrassing -- and less damaging -- if
they only confirmed what Washington had already stated its policies to be. Indeed, the United States could take a page out
of China’s and Russia’s playbooks: instead of framing their behavior in terms of the common good, those countries decry
anything that they see as infringing on their national sovereignty and assert their prerogative to pursue their interests at
will. Washington could do the same, while continuing to punish leakers with harsh prison sentences and threatening
countries that might give them refuge. We have a brand new look! We've made some changes to our website to give you a
better experience. LEARN MORE HERE The problem with this course, however, is that U.S. national interests are
inextricably bound up with a global system of multilateral ties and relative openness. Washington has already undermined
its commitment to liberalism by suggesting that it will retaliate economically against countries that offer safe haven to
leakers. If the United States abandoned the rhetoric of mutual good, it would signal to the world that it was no longer
committed to the order it leads. As other countries followed its example and retreated to the defense of naked self-interest,
the bonds of trade and cooperation that Washington has spent decades building could unravel. The United States would
not prosper in a world where everyone thought about international cooperation in the way that Putin does. A better
alternative would be for Washington to pivot in the opposite direction, acting in ways more compatible with its rhetoric.
This approach would also be costly and imperfect, for in international politics, ideals and interests will often clash. But
the U.S. government can certainly afford to roll back some of its hypocritical behavior
without compromising national security. A double standard on torture, a near indifference to casualties
among non-American civilians, the gross expansion of the surveillance state -- none of these is
crucial to the country’s well-being, and in some cases, they undermine it. Although the current
administration has curtailed some of the abuses of its predecessors, it still has a long way to go. Secrecy can be defended as
a policy in a democracy. Blatant hypocrisy is a tougher sell. Voters accept that they cannot know everything that their
government does, but they do not like being lied to. If the United States is to reduce its dangerous dependence on
doublespeak, it will have to submit to real oversight and an open democratic debate about its policies. The era of easy
hypocrisy is over.
US soft power can influence—getting rid of hypocrisy key
Layne 09 (Christopher, Professor, and Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and
National Security, at Texas A&M University's George H.W. Bush School of Government
and Public Service, “The Waning of U.S. Hegemony—Myth or Reality? A Review Essay,”
International Security, Vol. 34, No. 1 summer 2009,
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/isec.2009.34.1.147#.VYmUaNNVjZE
)//kjz
When Zakaria looks at U.S. “decline,” he sees a glass still nearly full rather than one half-empty and leaking. The
world, he says, is moving America’s way with respect to modernization, globalization,
human rights, and democracy (p. 218). The United States has the opportunity to “remain
the pivotal player in a richer, more dynamic, more exciting world” (p. 219). All it must do is to
renounce the unilateralism and blunderbuss diplomacy that characterized the George W. Bush administration, and revert
to its tradition of working through multilateral institutions and relying on diplomacy and persuasion. Zakaria argues that
the United States can remain at the center of the international system for a long time to
come because there is “still a strong market for American power, for both geopolitical
and economic reasons. But even more centrally, there remains a strong ideological demand for
it” (p. 234). The United States can remain the pivot of international politics by assuaging the
need of rising powers for validation of their status; avoiding the imposition of its preferences on the
rest of the world; and engaging in “consultation, cooperation, and even compromise” (p. 233).25 For the
United States, Zakaria argues, the way to retain preeminence in the emerging
international system is through soft power, not hard power
US Key—Internet Freedom
US leadership key for Internet freedom
The Nation 13 - (“John Negroponte,” Lexis Nexis, 8/22/2013) STRYKER
The Internet as we know it is open, secure and resilient. This is no mistake. It was designed and evolved this
way. Due to its open nature, the Internet has gained traction at a fantastic pace and
transformed the world by fostering communication and innovation while generating
economic growth. Roughly 2.5 billion people currently use the Internet, and another 2.5 billion are expected to go online by the
end of this decade. But the open Internet that governments, corporations and individuals rely
on is under threat . Only concerted moves by stakeholders can protect its valued openness. The Internet, as it transforms, has
become a victim of its own success. The various groups that rely on Internet services – governments, corporations and individuals –
have different needs. Sometimes these needs overlap, sometimes they are at odds. However,
sovereign governments
are increasingly seeking control of their own domestic spheres as well as the flow of data
and information between countries and, in doing so, are attacking the openness that
represents one of the foundations of the Internet. Nation-states are increasingly attempting to regulate social,
political and economic activity and content in cyberspace and, in many cases, suppress expression they view as threatening. Justifying
their actions by claiming to protect children or national security, more than 40 governments have
erected restrictions of information, data and knowledge flow on the Internet. Censoring the Internet takes many forms, including
censorship of opinions (Vietnam, Saudi Arabia); of specific websites or ISPs (Australia, Pakistan, Russia); of specific information (China,
Germany); demanding information be taken down (France, Singapore); demanding users' IP addresses (more than 50 countries); and
erecting regulatory barriers to cross-border information flow (Brunei and Vietnam). More drastically, others including Iran, China, Saudi
Arabia and Russia have considered building national computer networks that would tightly control or even sever connections to the global
Internet. The
ongoing controversy surrounding former US National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden makes for headline news, but obscures these broader global
challenges confronting the world's Internet infrastructure. The Internet facilitates
communication, commerce and trade, and is an integral part of modern life. The global
repercussions of censorship are severe. Regulations that constrict the flow of information not only create disparities
among people's access to knowledge, but also have a negative effect on the shape, architecture, safety and resilience of the Internet. In 2012,
for example, two proposals in the US Congress to allow filtering of the Domain Name System, or DNS, which would enable the government
to require US companies to block access to certain websites, were deemed a significant risk to cyber-security. Moreover, restrictive
and discriminatory operating rules complicate trade and slow economic growth. The
Internet economy accounted for 4.7 per cent of US gross domestic product in 2010, or
$68.2 billion, and is projected to rise to 5.4 per cent of GDP in 2016. The US captures more than 30
per cent of global Internet revenues and more than 40 per cent of net income. Filtering, blocking and other limitations on data flow make it
more difficult for companies of all sizes to reach customers, provide services or share critical information globally. There are many possible
approaches the US could pursue to address this issue, but one of the most promising is mandating that all future trade agreements should
include the goal of fostering the free flow of information and data across national borders while protecting intellectual property and
developing an inter-operable global regulatory framework for respecting the privacy rights of individuals. Trade agreements in the past have
addressed the free flow of goods, piracy and human rights. The trade agreements of the future should be no different, and some already
address this issue. For example, the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement calls on the two countries to "refrain from imposing or maintaining
unnecessary barriers to electronic information flows across borders". The US has trade agreements with most countries in the world, and
these agreements provide an opportunity to promote our values. To further promote digital trade: The Trans-Pacific Partnership, the USEuropean trade negotiations and future bilateral agreements should guarantee the free flow of information across borders. The US, along
with its trading partners, should create a digital due process for requests on content removal and user data that is consistent across nations.
This could prevent countries like Singapore, which has announced that news websites that report on the country must be licensed and could
be fined if they do not remove any story deemed objectionable by the government, from independently enacting due process for content
removal requests. The US and others should make transfer of data between governments more transparent and efficient by improving the
Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, or MLAT system. The US already has more than 60 MLAT agreements in place. With its Japanese and
European counterparts, the US trade representative should coordinate pressure on India and Brazil to lift procurement regulations, location
requirements and other non-tariff barriers to trade. The US should protect intellectual property, while preserving the rights of users to
access lawful content. The US Congress debated this issue during negotiations over the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual
Property Act (respectively, SOPA and PIPA). The bills, stalled for now, will be reintroduced in some shape, way or form. The US should help
create an environment in which the Internet economy flourishes. This is beneficial for the US and the entire world. US
companies
and universities remain at the technological cutting edge, and the US continues to be an
important role model. The US can exert a great deal of influence as a positive
model , and US technology companies have already taken the lead. Google, Twitter, LinkedIn Microsoft and other companies now
issue transparency reports that detail the number of requests they receive from government law enforcement for data on users around the
world. Previous
success in areas such as democracy promotion and human rights
depended heavily on leadership by example. The US does not own the Internet, nor
is it responsible for fixing or updating it. Indeed, no one nation can fix the Internet, now used by every nation. However, the US
can set high standards in hopes that the rest of the world will follow. The open, global
Internet is unlikely to continue to flourish without deliberate action to
promote and defend it . Political, economic and technological forces are seeking to splinter the Internet into something
that looks more like national networks, with each government controlling its own domestic sphere as well as the flow of data and
information among countries. A
global Internet increasingly fragmented into national systems is
not in the interest of the world.
Domestic Key
Domestic surveillance is the cause of decline US democracy
LMW 13 - Legal Monitor Worldwide. (“Disintegration of democratic values threatens future of US,” Lexis Nexis, 6/21/2013)
STRYKER
The case of Edward Snowden
raises a number of difficult issues for the US. The case impacts on
decline of US democracy is now sharply
Washington's foreign policy and on its domestic politics. The
in focus . Snowden's dramatic flight to Hong Kong raises the issue of US-China relations. The complexities of Hong Kong law could
lead to Snowden residing there for an extended time while matters move through the courts. It is ironic that just before the recent summit
between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama, the White House undiplomatically pointed an accusing finger in
public at China for alleged cyber warfare. Such clumsy, abrasive, and unnecessary tactics blew up in Washington's face with the Snowden
affair. While spy cases often spark lurid headlines and a stir when made public, state-to-state relations are not destabilized. As governments
well know, espionage is part and parcel of the game of nations. High-profile cases involving political dissenters, while prickly, do not
destabilize fundamental state-to-state relations. Snowden positioned himself as a political dissenter who knowingly took an extreme step in
violation of the law to make his political point. The US and China have an appropriate official mechanism for consultation on cyber war
issues within the important US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue process. The Snowden affair seems to be an appropriate agenda
item for the upcoming July meeting, an opportunity for Washington to provide a full explanation. Americans
naturally want
military and other capabilities to defend their country, but we do not want such
capabilities turned on ourselves in violation of the US constitution. Since the 9/11 attacks, however,
the Bush administration and the Obama administration engaged in internal surveillance activities which are controversial if not
unconstitutional. The
Snowden case has had more impact on US domestic politics than
on the state-to-state relations between the US and China. China has maintained a diplomatic low-profile stance.
Russia and Iceland have indicated they would consider an asylum request by Snowden. It would be understandable if China would do the
same at some point. The
impact on US domestic politics is squarely on issues of
constitutional law. Already the watchdog American Civil Liberties Union has filed a court case against the government as a result
of Snowden's revelations. Irate politicians from both the Republican and Democratic parties denounce what they see as improper and
unconstitutional behavior. The constitutional issue in the US is complicated by the fact that the US Congress itself passed legislation,
opposed by critics, which included vague language and loopholes that the White House took advantage of for domestic surveillance
activities. Critics
were outraged by what they saw as White House lying about possibly
illegal domestic surveillance activities . There was further outrage over the recent congressional testimony
of the head of the NSA and the head of the US Intelligence Community. Critics said these two men committed perjury by lying to the US
Congress, which is a high crime. In
the US system governed by its unique constitution, the
separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers is a core value. Constitutions and
political systems naturally vary around the world, but the separation of powers doctrine
is fundamental to the US constitution. It is based on ancient principles found in Greco-Roman tradition as well as in
European parliamentary tradition. As a result of the Snowden affair, one aspect of the internal
crisis of US democracy is before the world . The construction of the "imperial presidency" and distortion
of the separation of powers started during the Cold War. Critics today say US constitutional democracy is in
deep decline reflecting not only the disintegration of the rule of law, but also reflecting
the disintegration of US civic culture. While some US politicians and officials hypocritically attempt to manipulate the
cyber war issue to undermine US-China relations, the real issue is the constitutional crisis and
disintegration of democracy in the US.
Domestic surveillance undermines democracy promotion
Cambanis 13 - Thanassis Cambanis is a fellow at The Century Foundation and the author of “A Privilege to Die: Inside
Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel.” (“Meet the international revolutionary geek squad,”
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/06/22/meet-international-revolutionary-geek-squad/HP4iljWroxdBods6d9kD5I/story.html
6/23/2013) STRYKER
But there are new wrinkles. Some
of the safest channels for dissidents have been Skype and
Gmail—two services to which the US government has apparently unfettered access. It’s
virtually impossible for a government like Iran’s to break the powerful encryption used by these companies. Alex, the trainer who worked
with Syrians, says that a doctor in Aleppo doesn’t need to worry about the NSA listening to Skype calls, but an activist doing battle with a US
corporation might. Officially,
American policy promotes a surveillance-free Internet around the
world, although Washington’s actual practices have undercut the credibility of the
US government on this issue. How will Washington continue to insist, for example, that
Iranian activists should be able to plan protests and have political discussions online
without government surveillance, when Americans cannot be sure that they are
free to do the same? For activists grappling with real-time emergencies in places like Syria or long-term repression in
China, Russia, and elsewhere, the latest news doesn’t change their basic strategy—but it may make the outlook for Internet freedom darker.
“These
revelations set a terrible precedent that could be used to justify pervasive
surveillance elsewhere,” Maher said. “Americans can go to the courts or their legislators to try
and challenge these programs, but individuals in authoritarian states won’t have these
options.”
Specifically domestic surveillance undermines the US reputation of civil
liberties
Pew 14 - The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan American think tank based in Washington, D.C., that provides information on
social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the world. (“Global Opposition to U.S. Surveillance and
Drones, but Limited Harm to America’s Image,” http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/14/global-opposition-to-u-s-surveillance-and-dronesbut-limited-harm-to-americas-image/ 7/14/2014) STRYKER
The Snowden Effect Disclosures
by former National Security Administration (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden about
NSA spying revealed the U.S. government’s vast capacity to intercept communications
around the world. The Snowden revelations appear to have damaged one major
element of America’s global image: its reputation for protecting individual
liberties. In 22 of 36 countries surveyed in both 2013 and 2014, people are significantly
less likely to believe the U.S. government respects the personal freedoms of
its citizens. In six nations, the decline was 20 percentage points or more.
Domestic surveillance undermines its reputation of respect for personal
freedom
Pew 14 - The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan American think tank based in Washington, D.C., that provides information on
social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the world. (“Global Opposition to U.S. Surveillance and
Drones, but Limited Harm to America’s Image,” http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/14/global-opposition-to-u-s-surveillance-and-dronesbut-limited-harm-to-americas-image/ 7/14/2014) STRYKER
The Snowden Effect The
image of the United States has been tarnished by Snowden’s revelations
about National Security Agency monitoring of communications around the world,
especially in Europe and Latin America. Admiration for America’s respect for the
personal freedoms of its own people has gone down significantly in 22 of 36
nations where there is comparable data for 2013 and 2014. NSA actions have particularly hurt the U.S.
reputation in Brazil, where belief that Uncle Sam respects Americans’ freedoms is
down 25 percentage points, and in Germany, where it is down 23 points. Washington listened in
on the phone conversations of both the Brazilian and German leaders. Drops of 20 points or more are also found in El Salvador, Pakistan,
Argentina, Spain and Russia. And
Americans themselves have lost some faith in their own
government’s safeguards for civil liberties. The share of the U.S. public that says Washington respects personal
freedoms has declined from 69% in 2013 to 63% in 2014.
Domestic surveillance undermines the appeal of the Western democratic
model
Whitehead 10 - Laurence Whitehead is an Official Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford University, and Senior Fellow of
the College. (“State sovereignty and democracy: and awkward coupling,” New Challenges to Democratization, p. 33, Google Books, 2010)
STRYKER
Recent US-led efforts
to export democracy by coercive means have not served to enhance the quality
of democracy at home. To the contrary, it has seemed to many outside observers that previous
standards of human rights observance and rule of law guarantees may have been
compromised by the tensions associated with external belligerence and counterterrorism. The western leaders most vocal about the need to export regime change to other countries have not been the most
conscientious about displaying their accountability to their home electorates. Media pluralism and the tolerance of
dissent have been shown in a poor light. Practices of domestic surveillance and
heightened powers for security forces may have been necessary, but they have not
added to the international appeal of the western democratic model . Respect for
international law. the sovereignty of other nations. and pluralism of political alternatives could all be regarded as integral components of
what makes western democracy so widely attractive. If so. strategies of democracy promotion that jeopardize these assets are clearly
counter-productive.
AT//Alt Causes (General)
The Snowden revelations uniquely eroded the US international image—this
proves surveillance is the cause of the credibility gap, so the plan overcomes
alt causes
Ganguly 15 - Sumit Ganguly is a Professor of Political Science at Indiana University and the currently holds that university's
Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations. He and was a founding editor of the journals India Review and Asian
Security. (“Foreward,” The Snowden Reader, Google Books, 2015) STRYKER
David P. Fidler addresses “U.S. Foreign Policy and the Snowden Leaks." He lays
out U.S. foreign policy approaches to
before Snowden, especially U.S. support for "Internet freedom,”
and analyses how these leaks have adversely affected them . The damage arises from revelations
cyberspace and cyber security
about the NSA's surveillance activities within the United States, the NSA's electronic surveil-lance targeting foreign nationals outside the
United States, U.S. cyber espionage against other government, U.S. offensive cyber operations, and NSA activities perceived to threaten
global cyber security. Fidler argues the
Snowden disclosures have diminished U.S. credibility in cyberspace
affairs, an outcome that coincides, worryingly, with an erosion of U.S. influence in
geopolitical matters in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
International opinion of US still high despite alt causes—surveillance is key
Perry 6/24 (Douglas, a news and entertainment writer at The Oregonian, “U.S.
outpaces China in global popularity; European view of American ideals declines,” Oregon
Live, 6/24/15,
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/06/us_outpaces_china_in_global_
po.html)//kjz
Opinions about the U.S. suffered in the wake of revelations a decade ago about the
American government's use of harsh interrogation methods in its battle against
terrorism. But America's image has since rebounded, reports the Pew Research Center.
From March through May of this year, Pew conducted a survey of more than 45,000 people in 40 countries. The Pew
website breaks out views by each country. Vladimir Putin may believe that Russia remains the U.S.'s greatest rival. But
Pew has positioned China as America's chief competitor for global goodwill. A global median of 69 percent of
those polled viewed the U.S. positively. China draws a favorable opinion from 55 percent of respondents.
Global opinion about the U.S.'s protection of individual rights is a key reason America wins the popularity contest. A
median of 63 percent of survey respondents heralds America's personal freedoms, while only 34 percent say China
respects its citizens' individual rights. The gap between the two countries would have been even larger in the U.S.'s favor,
except the American score on this issue was degraded in the 2015 Pew survey thanks to an unlikely source: Western
Europeans. "Across the Western European nations polled, ratings for the U.S. on (individual
rights) declined
between 2013 and 2014, at least partly in response to Edward Snowden's
revelations about the NSA's electronic surveillance programs," Pew writes. "This year's
survey highlights further declines, perhaps in response to highly publicized stories over
the last year, such as those concerning harsh interrogation techniques in the post-9/11
era, as well as the controversy in the U.S. regarding police treatment of AfricanAmericans and other minorities." Time appears to be on America's side, however. In
most countries, the young are more likely to view the U.S. positively -- and to be stronger
in their positive feelings. Chinese respondents, meanwhile, believe they are very much in competition with the
U.S. -- and that Americans are worried about their gains. Fifty-four percent of Chinese believe the U.S. is "trying to
prevent China from becoming equally as powerful." Across the world, China receives higher approval ratings than the U.S.
only in the Middle East. The U.S. is widely viewed as the dominant economic force in the world,
though "majorities in 27 countries believe that China will eventually replace the U.S. as the world's top superpower." And
despite views about the American government's use of torture in the past, 62 percent of respondents back U.S.-led efforts
against Islamic State, though in Middle East countries the support falls below 50 percent.
Plan key to restore credibility lost by NSA revelations—overcomes alt causes
Nicholson 14 (Parke T., senior research associate with the American Institute for
Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, “NSA scandals caused
rift with U.S. allies,” The Baltimore Sun, 11/21/14,
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-nsa-europe-20141123story.html)//kjz
No single issue has caused greater damage to the trust between the United States and its
allies than the sweeping revelations of the National Security Agency's global surveillance
programs. This story continues to fuel the perception that we no longer care to uphold
our values at home or abroad. Our credibility has suffered by failing to sufficiently justify
our actions even to ourselves. It is finally time to undo the damage. Recent presidential and
congressional measures concerning espionage and data privacy have the potential to
bolster our credibility, counter these misperceptions and restore trust with our allies.
Congress failed to vote on the USA Freedom Act last week, but the bill itself demonstrates our resolve to
protect the privacy of all U.S. citizens and end bulk data collection. The NSA is also taking
unprecedented steps to protect the rights of those at home and abroad. It is imperative that we explain and advance these
evolving norms, particularly with our allies across the Atlantic. Since the revelations last year by Edward Snowden, a
debate has raged in Europe about why the United States had collected information about leaders and citizens abroad. The
firestorm of ill-informed opinion about U.S. intentions and capabilities has led to the perception that our allies must
protect themselves from the United States. The consequences of this are evident in the slow pace of negotiations over the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, implementation of countermeasures against U.S. intelligence activities
and even discussion of lawsuits against the United States before the International Criminal Court. The U.S. government
has struggled to respond to the outrage in Europe. President Barack Obama outlined the new parameters for foreign
intelligence collection (Presidential Policy Directive 28) in a speech last January that was met with skepticism. This slowly
led to a "statement of principles" delivered quietly by his chief of staff to his German counterpart this past July. Congress
has been too distracted and too divided to lend much support to these attempts at public diplomacy. The time is ripe for a
renewed exchange to diffuse tensions caused by the NSA revelations. Senior congressional leaders such as Senate
Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin
Republican, should describe the privacy protections outlined in the USA Freedom Act to their counterparts in the
European Parliament and German Bundestag. The bill ends the bulk collection of Americans' private metadata and
enhances democratic control over the NSA's activities. While a final vote was delayed until 2015, the bill is a powerful
declaration that the United States can align the tools we use to secure our country with
our basic rights and freedoms. The NSA's guidelines on foreign intelligence collection released this October are
also a unique expression of democratic constraint. They outline how the agency will ensure that privacy is an "integral
consideration" in collection operations and that all people are treated "with dignity and respect regardless of their
nationality or place of residence." Outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder and former NSA Director Mike McConnell are
credible, high-level actors to communicate this message of restraint to European audiences in Brussels and Berlin.
America benefits when its allies spend their time and resources on emerging threats elsewhere in the world — and stop
worrying about the United States. U.S. business leaders should also join this effort. Many are threatened by the possibility
of being locked out of European government contracts and are being targeted by strict privacy laws that may prove
significant obstacles in the negotiations on TTIP. They have an important opportunity to show how their products actually
enhance privacy and why it is important to preserve the benefits of the open Internet. It is has become the norm in
Washington to cynically dismiss Europe's uproar over the NSA: Europe should "get over it" because all European
countries engage in espionage. The U.S. government shouldn't have to explain how it protects both Americans and
Europeans from terrorism and other transnational threats. U.S. tech firms provide goods that all Europeans enjoy and
should not have to put up with strict privacy laws and regulations. So why care? The United States and Europe share core,
democratic values that undergird our vision of the international order. By strengthening our commitment to
shared values — liberty, democracy, human dignity and economic freedom — we reap
benefits far beyond our ability to project power in the world. There is no zero-sum tradeoff between
privacy and security. We will enhance both when the United States and Europe restore confidence and trust.
AT//Drones Alt Cause
Drones aren’t an alt cause—no effect on US image
Pew 14 - The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan American think tank based in Washington, D.C., that provides information on
social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the world. (“Global Opposition to U.S. Surveillance and
Drones, but Limited Harm to America’s Image,” http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/14/global-opposition-to-u-s-surveillance-and-dronesbut-limited-harm-to-americas-image/ 7/14/2014) STRYKER
Another high-profile aspect of America’s recent national security strategy is also widely
unpopular: drones. In 39 of 44 countries surveyed, majorities or pluralities oppose U.S. drone strikes
targeting extremists in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Moreover, opposition to
drone attacks has increased in many nations since last year. Israel, Kenya and the U.S. are the only nations polled where at least half of the
Despite these misgivings about signature American policies,
across 43 nations, a median of 65% express a positive opinion about the U.S. And
these overall ratings for the U.S. are little changed from 2013 .
public supports drone strikes.
AT//International Surveillance Alt Cause
Global surveillance is inevitable and GENERALLY accepted
Gewirtz 13 - David Gewirtz is a CBSi distinguished lecturer, and hosts the ZDNet Government and ZDNet DIY-IT blogs. He is an
author, U.S. policy advisor and computer scientist. (“Why do allies spy on each other?” http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-do-allies-spyon-each-other/ 10/28/2013) STRYKER
Allies spy on each other . Back in 2004, the FBI investigated an Israeli worker in the
Pentagon, who was reportedly an analyst in an undersecretary's office and who may have
been attempting to influence U.S. policy towards Iran and Iraq. The Israeli spy had developed ties to
then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who, according to an article in Harpers was the primary author of the Bush Doctrine and a
staunch advocate of war with Iraq. Allies
spy on each other. Germany's Merkel herself hasn't been
immune to the urge to spy on allies. As recently as 2008, German international
broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported that Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst (better known as the BND,
Germany's CIA) had been "monitoring email correspondence between Afghan Trade and
Industry Minister Amin Farhang and a German journalist." Yeah. That sounds familiar. Allies spy
on each other. Just to round out the mix, let's not hesitate to remember that outraged former Mexican President Calderon himself
was present when his diplomatic "functionary" Rafael Quintero Curiel stole White House BlackBerry's from a table right outside the room
where Calderon and our President Bush were meeting. I wrote about that last week, in NSA and Mexico: missing facts, reporters are
puppets on Snowden's string . So, yes, everyone
is outraged that the NSA might be conducting signals
intelligence operations against allies. Our so-called allies are using this as an
opportunity to swat the U.S. upside the head , and potentially as leverage to talk the U.S. into some sort
of concession in the future. On the other hand, the mainstream American press, the suddenly holier-than-thou
international press, and the always hyperbolic blogigentsia are screaming "foul" at the tops of
their oh-so-righteous lungs. As we've seen in just one set of examples, the French broke into our
diplomats' hotel rooms and sifted through luggage, Israel has tried to infiltrate spies into the Pentagon,
Mexico stole White House BlackBerry devices , and Germany broke into the email communications of
both diplomats and journalists. The thing is, allies spy on each other. They always have and they
always will . So all this outrage is either meant to drum up traffic in our attention economy (I'm looking right at you, Guardian!), or
out of a complete lack of historical and geopolitical perspective on the part of reporters and bloggers. Either way, spying among
allies will continue, probably forever. Why? Well here's a simple reason: to make sure they're
still allies . Of course, the need for information and leverage goes deeper than that, but that will do for today. Allies spy on
each other because they don't always tell the truth when meeting face-to-face.
International surveillance isn’t that big of a deal
Cohen and Pearson 13 - Tom Cohen and Michael Pearson are staff writers for CNN. (“All nations collect intelligence,
Obama says,” http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/01/world/europe/eu-nsa/ 7/2/2013) STRYKER
"The
United States government will respond appropriately to the European Union
through our diplomatic channels, and through the EU/U.S. experts' dialogue on
intelligence that the U.S. proposed several weeks ago," the DNI office said in a statement. "We will also
discuss these issues bilaterally with EU member states. While we are not going to comment publicly on
specific alleged intelligence activities, as a matter of policy, we have made clear that the United States
gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations ." Ventrell referred to the
DNI statement Monday, repeatedly telling reporters that the United States would deal directly with European
allies on the matter instead of making public statements.
Foreign surveillance has no impact
Hudgins 13 (Sarabrynn, Internet Freedom and Human Rights Program Associate at the
New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, “US Surveillance Unsettles
Civilians More Than States,” The World Post, 7/17/13,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarabrynn-hudgins/us-surveillanceunsettles_b_3610941.html)//kjz
French President Hollande insisted that NSA surveillance programs "stop immediately"
and demanded a US explanation, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated her intention to
question Obama on the "possible impairment of German citizens." Media speculates that
European ire may inspire the European Parliament (EP) to veto the passage of the wide-ranging Trans-Atlantic
Trade Deal. The Parliament did, after all, term the surveillance programs a "serious violation" and
call for an investigation whose findings could threaten transatlantic cooperation. These
fears are overblown. Any recommendations to come from the EP will require passage not only by Parliamentarians,
but also EU member states, before becoming law, in a labyrinthine process that is unlikely to occur. Also far-fetched is the
notion that EU states will make a principled stand against the trade deal to their own financial detriment, or that they
would suspend collaboration on security measures like the Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme. Brazil, whose
President called US surveillance of the Brazilian military an affront to Brazilian sovereignty and human rights, may
pose the most serious state challenge to US surveillance. Yet, considering that the NSA's
PRISM program had 117,675 active foreign surveillance targets by April 2013, these
reactions are rather tame. State indignation (especially in Europe) may be muted, as some allege,
because most web-savvy countries, including France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands,
conduct their own sweeping surveillance programs. These black pots are loathe to
disparage the US kettle, no matter how dark. The German government's outcry, the
loudest in Europe, has been derided as largely "a flurry of activity apparently designed to
reassure German electors." Le Monde ascribes France's "weak signs of protest" to "two
excellent reasons: Paris already knew. And it does the same thing." The song and dance of
recrimination will continue mainly because governments want to appease "public pressure to respond assertively." US
officials understand that they need not worry about real intergovernmental hostilities, at
least for now.
AT//Exchange Programs Key
No evidence to support that exchange programs spread democratic ideals—
their author
Atkinson 10 (Carol, Vanderbilt University, Department of Political Science, Assistant Professor, “Does Soft Power Matter? A
Comparative Analysis of Student Exchange Programs from 1980–2006,” Foreign Policy Analysis, 2010, http://iisdb.stanford.edu/pubs/22948/Atkinson_Does_Soft_Power_Matter.pdf)//kjz
While educational exchange programs are claimed to promote liberalization in
nondemocratic countries, to date there has been little systematic empirical examination of
their long-term effects across the international system. Noted democratization scholar Adam
Przeworski has pointed specifically to this deficiency: We can match on observables. But should
we not worry about unobservables? Suppose that leaders of some countries go to study in Cambridge, where
they absorb the ideals of democracy and learn how to promote growth. Leaders of other countries, however, go to the
School for [sic] the Americas, where they learn how to repress and nothing about economics. Dictatorships will then
generate lower growth because of the quality of the leadership (…) Since this is a variable we could not observe
systematically, we cannot match on it. And it may matter. Conditional mean independence—the
assumption that unobserved factors do not matter—is very strong, and likely to be often
false in cross-national research. (Przeworski 2007:161) Likewise, in their study of US Fulbright scholars,
Sunal and Sunal (1991:98) noted that although a lot of information was available about US
sponsored exchanges it ‘‘did not provide much help, however, in generalizing about the
possible effects of the overseas experience on the individuals involved or in determining
relationships between important variables in the Fulbright experience.’’
AT//National Debt Alt Cause
National debt has no impact on credibility—we can NEVER default
Harvey 12 - John T. Harvey is a Professor of Economics at Texas Christian University, where he has worked since 1987. His areas of
specialty are international economics (particularly exchange rates), macroeconomics, history of economics, and contemporary schools of
thought. He has served as department chair, Executive Director of the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in
Economics, a member of the board of directors of the Association for Evolutionary Economics, and a member of the editorial boards of the
American Review of Political Economy, the Critique of Political Economy, the Encyclopedia of Political Economy, the Journal of Economics
Issues, and the Social Science Journal. (“It Is Impossible For The US To Default,”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2012/09/10/impossible-to-default/ 9/10/2012) STRYKER
With so many economic, political, and social problems facing us today, there is little point in focusing
attention on something that is not one. The false fear of which I speak is the chance of
US debt default. There is no need to speculate on what that likelihood is, I can give you the exact number: there is 0%
chance that the US will be forced to default on the debt . We could choose to do so, just as a
person trapped in a warehouse full of food could choose to starve, but we could never be forced to. This is not a theory or
conjecture, it is cold, hard fact. The reason the US could never be forced to default is that
every single bit of the debt is owed in the currency that we and only we can issue: dollars.
Unlike Greece, we don’t have to try to earn foreign exchange via exports or beg for better terms. There is simply no level of
debt we could not repay with a keystroke. Don’t take my word for it. Here are just a few folks from across the
political spectrum and in different walks of life saying the same thing: “The United States can pay any debt it has
because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”
Alan Greenspan “In the case of United States, default is absolutely impossible . All U.S.
government debt is denominated in U.S. dollar assets.” Peter Zeihan, Vice President of Analysis for
STRATFOR “In the case of governments boasting monetary sovereignty and debt denominated in its own currency, like the United
States (but also Japan and the UK), it is technically impossible to fall into debt default.” Erwan
Mahe, European asset allocation and options strategies adviser “There is never a risk of
default for a sovereign nation that issues its own free-floating currency and where its debts are
denominated in that currency.” Mike Norman, Chief Economist for John Thomas Financial “There is
no inherent limit on federal expenses and therefore on federal spending…When the U.S.
government decides to spend fiat money, it adds to its banking reserve system and when it taxes or borrows (issues Treasury securities) it
Monty
Agarwal , managing partner and chief investment officer of MA Managed Futures Fund
“As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can
never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to
remain operational.” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
drains reserves from its banking system. These reserve operations are done solely to maintain the target Federal Funds rate.”
Impact
Democracy Promotion Good—Democratic Peace
Global democratic consolidation checks inevitable extinction
Diamond ‘95 (Larry, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s, December,
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/fr.htm)
This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist
aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful
international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of
tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The
very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of
these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or
absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in
a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against
their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not
ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic
insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not
build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more
reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are
more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the
destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and
because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they
respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the
only reliable foundation on
which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.
Exts. Democratic Peace
Regardless of the reason, democratic peace theory is empirical law
Tomz and Weeks 13 - Michaeal Tomz is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, a Senior
Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Stanford Center for International Development, and affiliated with
the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Institute for
Research in the Social Sciences, and the Woods Institute for the Environment. Jessica Weeks is a professor of political science at the
University of Wisconsin Madison, whose research and teaching interests focus on the domestic politics of foreign policy, the domestic and
international politics of authoritarian regimes, and public opinion about foreign policy. Her research has appeared in or is forthcoming in
the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and International Organization (“Public Opinion and the
Democratic Peace,” The American Political Science Review, ProQuest, November, 2013) STRYKER
Few findings in political science have received as much attention as the "democratic
peace," the discovery that democracies almost never fight other democracies (Doyle 1986;
Russett 1993). To some, the absence of military conflict among democracies is so consistent
that it approaches the status of an "empirical law " (Levy 1988). Some authors have
attempted to explain the democratic peace by highlighting the role of public opinion. They
observe that democratic leaders are beholden to voters and claim that voters oppose war
because of its human and financial costs. This argument, which dates to Immanuel Kant, predicts that
democracies will behave peacefully in general--avoiding war not only against democracies but also against
autocracies. History shows, however, that democracies frequently fight autocracies. A different possibility is that
democratic publics are primarily averse to war against other democracies. If leaders are
responsive to voters and voters are more reluctant to fight democracies than otherwise
equivalent autocracies, then public opinion could play an important role in the dyadic democratic
peace. To date, however, surprisingly few studies have investigated whether democratic publics are more reluctant to attack democracies
than autocracies. 1Moreover, the small body of existing work has not accounted for variables that could confound the relationship between
shared democracy and public support for war, nor has it investigated the mechanisms by which the regime type of the adversary affects the
public mood. Despite decades of research on the democratic peace, we still lack convincing evidence about whether and how public opinion
contributes to the absence of war among democracies. We
used experiments to shed new light on these
important questions.2Our experiments, embedded in public opinion polls that were administered to nationally representative
samples of British and American citizens, involved a situation in which a country was developing nuclear weapons. When describing the
situation, we randomly and independently varied four potential sources of peace: the political regime, alliance status, economic ties, and
military power of the adversary. We then asked individuals whether they would support or oppose a preventive military strike against the
country's nuclear facilities. Participants
in our experiments were substantially less supportive
of military strikes against democracies than against otherwise identical
autocracies. Moreover, because we randomly and independently manipulated the regime
type of the adversary, the observed preference for peace with other
democracies was almost certainly causal, rather than spurious. Our findings
therefore provide empirical microfoundations for the hypothesis that the preferences of
ordinary voters contribute to peace among democracies. In addition to estimating the overall effect of
democracy, we investigated the mechanisms through which shared democracy reduces public enthusiasm for
war. Democratic publics may feel reluctant to attack other democracies for a variety of
reasons: They may view democracies as less threatening (Risse-Kappen 1995; Russett 1993), regard
democracies as more formidable opponents (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999; Lake 1992; Reiter and Stam 2002),
or have moral qualms about using force to overturn policies that were freely chosen by
citizens in another democracy. Despite volumes of research about the democratic peace, however, little is known about
whether these factors influence the willingness of voters to attack other democracies. Using a unique experimental design and new
techniques for causal mediation analysis (Imai et al. 2011; Imai, Keele, and Yamamoto 2010), we find that shared
democracy
pacifies the public primarily by changing perceptions of threat and morality, not by raising
expectations of costs or failure. Individuals who faced democratic rather than autocratic countries were less fearful of the country's nuclear
program and harbored greater moral reservations about attacking. Those
perceptions, in turn, made citizens
more peaceful toward democracies . By comparison, respondents did not think that attacking a democracy
would result in substantially higher costs or a lower likelihood of success than attacking an autocracy. Thus, our data help arbitrate between
competing mechanisms, while also identifying morality as an important but understudied source of peace among democracies.
Democracies don’t go to war
Gautreaux, ’12, (Sergio, M.A. in International Relations from Webster University in
Leiden, the Netherlands, and a B.A. in History, international consultant based in East
Asia, “Examining the Democratic Peace Hypothesis: A Neorealist Critique,”
International Policy Digest, 04.26.12,
http://www.internationalpolicydigest.org/2012/04/26/examining-the-democraticpeace-hypothesis-a-neorealist-critique/)//erg
Referred to as the “closest thing we have to law in international relations,” the democratic peace theory – the
idea that democratic states do not go to war against each other – has been used as a
champion ideology during the latter half of the post-World War II era and into the new millennium. For the
theory’s mostly Western advocates, it is believed that as democracy is spread to all corners of the
globe, so shall peace. The seemingly unanimous explanation among liberal international relations theorists for
such a Kantian principle has been that democratic states avoid conflict with each other because of
the similar natures of the democratic processes and the shared values within liberal
societies that constrain the states’ leaders from conflict escalation. Since the time of Cleisthenes
and the ancient Athenians, the very method of democratization has been dynamic. That is to say, the
process is always one of transformation – moving from a so-called undemocratic society to a free one; from an
irresponsible government to one in which the leaders are responsible for the well-being of the citizenry; from weak and
absent civil societies to active and vibrant civic organizations. Proponents of the theory posit that it is this transformation
in which cultural values are established over time and, ultimately, institutions are created, that prevents dyadic conflict
between democratic states. In his seminal work on the democratic peace, Bruce Russett develops two models of
explanation. First, the “cultural/normative model” asserts that the norms of peaceful
conflict resolution – such as rule of law – inherent in democratic states lead these
societies to avoid dyadic conflict with their counterparts. It is through this concept of shared
culture, norms, and ideals that war is made unthinkable. Second, the
“structural/institutional model” suggests that checks and balances, a dispersion of
power, and a need for public debate and majority support makes it more difficult for
democratic states to escalate disagreements to a point in which peaceful resolution is
impossible. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s seemed to indicate to liberal intellectuals, such as
Russett and others within American academia, that the superiority of the Western system had prevented the Cold War
from escalating to the point of no return. In a twist of Karl Marx’s historical determinism, Francis Fukuyama preemptively dubbed this era “the end of history,” arguing that the world had moved to a stage in which liberal democracy
was seen as the only legitimate form of government. “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or
the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s
ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This
Wilsonian pronouncement has been used as a foreign policy doctrine for successive post-Cold War American leaders, such
as Bill Clinton, who stated in his 1994 State of the Union address that, “Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure
our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy
elsewhere. Democracies don’t attack each other.”
Democracy Promotion Good—Middle East
Arab democracy promotion creates stability and US perception is key
O'Connell 12 - Jamie O'Connell is a Senior Fellow of the Honorable G. William and Ariadna Miller Institute for Global Challenges
and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, as well as a Lecturer in Residence. He teaches and writes on political
and legal development, and has particular expertise in law and development, transitional justice, democratization, post-conflict
reconstruction, and business and human rights. (“Common Interests, Closer Allies: How Democracy in Arab States Can Benefit the West,”
Stanford Journal of International Law, Lexis Nexis, Summer, 2012) STRYKER
The foreign policies of Western countries, and others, reflect policymakers' and citizens' conceptions of their national interests more than
their ideals. This Part explains how democratic change in the Arab world would advance important Western interests in that region, based
on qualitative and quantitative social science research and policy analysis. Democratization
is a very good foreign
policy bet for Western countries, even though it is not an "international cure-all"
that will solve every problem or advance every interest. n61 Subpart A argues that Arab countries would
likely be more internally stable - a central concern of Western foreign policy - if they were governed democratically. Democracy
facilitates peaceful negotiation of the competing interests found in any society. The
results of empirical studies of the links between democracy and internal stability
strongly support the conclusion that democratization will enhance the
stability of Arab countries in the long run, and for many of them in the short run as
well. Subpart B elaborates on Immanuel Kant's "democratic peace" thesis - that democracies do
not fight wars against each other - which has acquired extensive scholarly support
in recent years. As Arab countries democratize, the risk of military conflict involving
them and other democracies, including in the West, is likely to decline. Subpart C argues that
democratization in Arab countries would reduce the threat of terrorism against the
West, for reasons set out by the United States' official counterterrorism policy and supported by academic research
on terrorism. Subpart D addresses the concern that, given a choice, Arab citizens will choose leaders less friendly to Western
countries than current or recently deposed dictators. It argues that Arab countries' interests in relation to the West have not changed, so
dramatic shifts in their foreign policies are unlikely in the near future. More importantly, democratization
creates an
opportunity for Western countries to solidify cooperation with Arab countries,
because their fundamental interests dovetail with those of the bulk of the population
across the region. Ultimately, Arab citizens who are convinced of Western countries'
benign intentions will be more reliable allies than dictators concerned only with their
own survival and enrichment. The Subpart also argues that concern for Israel's security should not dilute Western
enthusiasm for Arab democratization. These four likely benefits - greater internal stability, less
interstate conflict, less transnational terrorism, and stronger and more reliable longterm alliances - together constitute a strong case that democratization in Arab countries
will serve Western countries' interests as well as their values.
Middle East war goes nuclear
Stirling 11 (The Earl of Stirling 11, hereditary Governor & Lord Lieutenant of Canada, Lord High Admiral of Nova Scotia, & B.Sc. in
Pol. Sc. & History; M.A. in European Studies, “General Middle East War Nears - Syrian events more dangerous than even nuclear nightmare
in Japan”, http://europebusines.blogspot.com/2011/03/general-middle-east-war-nears-syrian.html)
Any Third Lebanon War/General Middle East War is apt to involve WMD on both side quickly
as both sides know the stakes and that the Israelis are determined to end, once and for all,
any Iranian opposition to a 'Greater Israel' domination of the entire Middle East. It will
be a case of 'use your WMD or lose them' to enemy strikes. Any massive WMD usage
against Israel will result in the usage of Israeli thermonuclear warheads against Arab and
Persian populations centers in large parts of the Middle East, with the resulting spread of
radioactive fallout over large parts of the Northern Hemisphere. However, the first use of nukes is
apt to be lower yield warheads directed against Iranian underground facilities including both nuclear sites and
governmental command and control and leadership bunkers, with some limited strikes also likely early-on in Syrian
territory.¶ The Iranians are well prepared to launch a global Advanced Biological Warfare
terrorism based strike against not only Israel and American and allied forces in the
Middle East but also against the American, Canadian, British, French, German, Italian,
etc., homelands. This will utilize DNA recombination based genetically engineered 'super killer
viruses' that are designed to spread themselves throughout the world using humans as
vectors. There are very few defenses against such warfare, other than total quarantine of the
population until all of the different man-made viruses (and there could be dozens or even over a hundred different viruses
released at the same time) have 'burned themselves out'. This could kill a third of the world's total
population. ¶ Such a result from an Israeli triggered war would almost certainly cause a
Russian-Chinese response that would eventually finish off what is left of Israel and begin
a truly global war/WWIII with multiple war theaters around the world. It is highly
unlikely that a Third World War, fought with 21st Century weaponry will be anything but
the Biblical Armageddon.
Exts. Democracy Creates Stability
Democracy promotes stability
O'Connell 12 - Jamie O'Connell is a Senior Fellow of the Honorable G. William and Ariadna Miller Institute for Global Challenges
and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, as well as a Lecturer in Residence. He teaches and writes on political
and legal development, and has particular expertise in law and development, transitional justice, democratization, post-conflict
reconstruction, and business and human rights. (“Common Interests, Closer Allies: How Democracy in Arab States Can Benefit the West,”
Stanford Journal of International Law, Lexis Nexis, Summer, 2012) STRYKER
Democratization is very likely to substantially enhance the internal stability of Arab
countries. We can be most confident about the long run, but the benefits of democratization may appear
quickly in countries with less autocratic governments, such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Jordan. In more authoritarian states,
democratization could increase the chances of instability in the short term. Yet many of
these countries are well positioned by such factors as level of economic development,
population size, and history to avoid the most serious violence, civil war. Finally, the
strategic importance of the region is likely to motivate powerful foreign actors to invest
considerable diplomatic, human, financial, and, under extreme circumstances, military resources to
maintain essential levels of internal stability in Arab countries during transitional periods. Analysis of
Arab countries, in particular, supports the conclusion that democratization is likely to
enhance, not reduce, their stability. A 2008 Rand Corporation study assessed whether liberalizing political reforms in Algeria,
Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia from 1991 to 2006 alleviated or exacerbated terrorism and political extremism. n107
After analyzing each country in depth, it concluded that while there were "dangers and risks inherent in reform processes" in the countries
studied, "there
are also dangers in trying to stymie such processes." n108 On balance, "pressing
ahead with genuine democratization, not just limited reforms, may stem extremism over time," and
"serious attention to liberalization measures in this region ... can serve U.S. interests over the long
term ." n109 The West's own agency provides an additional reason for optimism that Arab states can remain stable if they democratize:
Western countries can take action to help maintain basic stability during these
transitions. Unlike many democratizing countries whose experiences affect the results of the statistical studies
discussed above, those in the Arab world are considered strategically vital by the most powerful
states in the world. In the event of serious unrest in a democratizing Arab country, it would clearly be
worthwhile for the United States and other Western countries - perhaps assisted by China and other non-Western powers
- to ensure that the country was not destabilized.
Democracy creates peace—specifically true in the Arab world
O'Connell 12 - Jamie O'Connell is a Senior Fellow of the Honorable G. William and Ariadna Miller Institute for Global Challenges
and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, as well as a Lecturer in Residence. He teaches and writes on political
and legal development, and has particular expertise in law and development, transitional justice, democratization, post-conflict
reconstruction, and business and human rights. (“Common Interests, Closer Allies: How Democracy in Arab States Can Benefit the West,”
Stanford Journal of International Law, Lexis Nexis, Summer, 2012) STRYKER
B. Promoting International Peace Immanuel Kant's
"democratic peace" theory n110 has acquired extensive
scholarly support in recent years, and U.S. policymakers have used it to justify
promoting democracy abroad. This Subpart summarizes political science research on the relationship between democracy
and international peace and analyzes its implications for Arab democratization. Democratization in the Arab world is likely
to reduce the risk of conflict among Arab countries , between them and their democratic
neighbors, and between Arab and Western countries. This pacifying effect may appear in the short run between new Arab democracies and existing Western and other democracies - and should grow stronger as more
Arab states become democracies. The magnitude of the benefit will depend largely on the
scope of democratization: The more Arab countries - and neighbors - that become democratic, the more peaceful the region is
likely to be. This is because the democratic peace is a dyadic rather than monadic phenomenon;
extensive social science research shows that democracies seldom go to war, skirmish, or
make violent threats against each other, but democracies are not especially pacific in
their relations with nondemocratic states. n111 Subpart 1 explains the basic relationship between democracy and
interstate peace that scholars have documented. Subpart 2 describes policymakers' enthusiasm for this research. Subpart 3 presents new
empirical findings on the incidence of interstate conflict involving Arab countries. Subpart 4 surveys the different explanations political
scientists have proffered for the democratic peace finding, linking particular elements of democracy to peace, and identifies the implications
for policymakers of scholars' lack of consensus. 1. The Democratic Peace Finding That
democracies very seldom
engage in military conflict with each other is widely considered to be "one of the
most important and empirically robust findings in international relations"
scholarship . n112 It is not merely that democracies seldom fight each other, but that even after controlling for other factors that
might affect the likelihood of conflict, two democracies are less likely to fight each other than are
other combinations of regimes (e.g., two autocracies). This central descriptive finding has
endured despite "two decades of sophisticated attempts [by [*367] scholars] to demolish it." n113 It
applies to both full-scale wars and less dramatic resorts to military force, sometimes termed
"militarized interstate disputes" (or MIDs) by political scientists; n114 both are less common between democracies
than between other combinations of regimes. MIDs are instances of conflict between states "in which the threat,
display or use of military force short of war by one member state [of the international state system] is explicitly directed towards the
government, official representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state." n115 The
finding of peace among
democracies rests on a series of increasingly sophisticated statistical studies by
political scientists. The vast majority of these studies examine pairs of states (dyads) for various
historical periods extending back to the early nineteenth century. The researchers examine which pairs
engaged in wars or MIDs. n116 They then consider the type of regime governing each member of
each pair (i.e., democracy vs. autocracy), and various other variables that might make militarized
conflict more or less likely. n117 Study after study has found, after controlling for various alternative
explanations, that wars or MIDs are less likely between two democracies than between an
autocracy and a democracy or between two autocracies. n118 Furthermore, when MIDs do arise
between two democracies, they are far more likely to be resolved peacefully than
when they arise between two autocracies or between an autocracy and a democracy. n119
This finding has been so thoroughly supported that academics have largely shifted from
verifying it to [*368] testing explanations for it. n120 Most scholars believe that democracies behave more peacefully
only in relation to other democracies, and that war is just as likely to break out between a democracy and a nondemocracy as between two
nondemocracies. n121 A few, however, have conducted statistical
analysis that suggests that democracies could
be more pacific than autocracies in their relations with all other countries, regardless of
the interlocutor's form of government. n122 Political scientists term the former finding a "dyadic" democratic peace
and the latter, less common, finding a "monadic" democratic peace. n123 If the democratic peace were monadic, then
democratization in the Arab world would reduce the risk of interstate conflict in the
region more quickly, because each newly democratic Arab state would be likely to behave
more peacefully than it had before. Statistical evidence and theory suggest that the democratic peace is only dyadic,
however, so the pacifying effect of democratization in the region is likely to appear only between pairs of democracies. n124
Democracy Promotion Good—Terrorism
Democracy is vital to counterterrorism
O'Connell 12 - Jamie O'Connell is a Senior Fellow of the Honorable G. William and Ariadna Miller Institute for Global Challenges
and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, as well as a Lecturer in Residence. He teaches and writes on political
and legal development, and has particular expertise in law and development, transitional justice, democratization, post-conflict
reconstruction, and business and human rights. (“Common Interests, Closer Allies: How Democracy in Arab States Can Benefit the West,”
Stanford Journal of International Law, Lexis Nexis, Summer, 2012) STRYKER
C. Preventing Transnational Terrorism Many
of the bloodiest terrorist attacks against Western
countries in the last fifteen years have had some connection to Arab countries, rather than
being entirely homegrown. n150 (It would be grossly unjust to associate Arabs generally with
terrorism; those involved in terrorism represent a tiny fringe, and Westerners also
perpetrate terrorist acts. n151) Social scientists understand the impact of democracy on transnational terrorism less
well than its impact on domestic instability or interstate conflict. n152 Their findings indicate, however, that
democratization of Arab countries is likely to serve Western countries' interests by
reducing the threat of terrorist attacks against them . The U.S. government, under both
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, has made democratization a central component of the
country's official counterterrorism strategy. Large-sample statistical research
supports this conclusion . n153 The large majority of studies find that freer, more democratic
countries have been less likely to generate transnational terrorist attacks than more
repressive, less democratic [*376] countries. n154 Consequently, Western countries are likely to benefit from
liberalization of countries from which terrorism might originate. Alan Krueger and David Laitin examined countries
with high civil liberties and found that attacks on them were most likely to originate
in countries with restricted civil liberties and least likely to originate in ones with
expansive ones. n155 Findings such as these lead some scholars to urge policymakers to "encourage more liberal institutions to
facilitate political and economic freedom" within states, so as to reduce terrorism originating in those states. n156 Some
transnational terrorists attack foreign targets in order to influence their own
governments. n157 Lacking effective channels for influencing their government
directly, such as voting, citizens of autocracies try to pressure them indirectly, by
attacking their Western democratic allies. n158 (One of Osama bin Laden's oldest
grievances was the presence of U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia, with Saudi
government approval, because this placed them too close to Mecca. n159) Such attacks can lead the public in the target state to
press their own (democratic) leaders to try to influence the policies of the terrorists' (autocratic) home [*377] government or more generally
to scale back their support for it. n160 Democratization
of Arab countries would reduce the number of
their citizens who found foreign terrorism appealing for these reasons by giving them a
peaceful, legal, and less dangerous means for shaping their governments' policies. n161 As
Jennifer Windsor wrote in 2003: The source of much of the current wave of terrorist activity - the Middle East - is not coincidentally also
overwhelmingly undemocratic, and most regimes in the region lack the legitimacy and capacity to respond to the social and economic
challenges that face them... . Democratic
institutions and procedures, by enabling the peaceful
reconciliation of grievances and providing channels for participation in policymaking,
can help to address those underlying conditions that have fueled the recent rise of Islamist extremism. n162 The
United States' National Strategy for Counterterrorism adopts this logic. "Promoting democracy" was the sole "long-term" component of the
strategy President George W. Bush officially promulgated in 2006. n163 "Transnational terrorists are recruited from populations with no
voice in their own government and see no legitimate way to promote change in their own country. Without a stake in the existing order, they
are vulnerable to manipulation by those who advocate a perverse political vision based on violence and destruction." n164 President Obama
has maintained democratization as a central component of his official counterterrorism strategy: Promoting
representative,
responsive governance is a core tenet of U.S. foreign policy and directly
contributes to our [ counterterrorism ] goals. Governments that place the will of their people first and encourage
peaceful change directly contradict the al-Qa'ida ideology. Governments that are responsive to the needs of their citizens diminish the
discontent of their people and the associated drivers and grievances that al-Qa'ida actively attempts to exploit. Effective governance reduces
the traction and [*378] space for al-Qa'ida, reducing its resonance and contributing to what it fears most - irrelevance. n165
[Insert terrorism impact]
Democracy Promotion Good—Africa
African democracy is slipping—the US needs to alter DOMESTIC practices to
beat out authoritarianism
Joseph 14 - Richard Joseph is John Evans Professor of International History and Politics at Northwestern University. He is the
author of Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria (1987; reissued 2014). He is writing books on post-1975 Nigerian politics and
society; and on governance, development, and the state in Africa. (“Growth, Security, and Democracy in Africa,” Journal of Democracy,
Volume 25, Number 4, pp. 60-72, Project Muse, October 2014) STRYKER
Today, as is often observed, democracy in many places must battle unfriendly circumstances
while experiencing a global slippage. In line with this trend, democracy in Africa has
been on the retreat. As Freedom House has charted in its annual Freedom in the World reports, swings in civilliberties and political-rights scores have been more pronounced in sub-Saharan
Africa than in any other world region. Two years ago, I noted that media accounts presented Africa’s story as a
hopeful tale accompanied by impressive economic-growth statistics. There has also been a disaster narrative of corruption, bogus elections,
rights abuses, epidemics, and violent conflicts. Readers have been left to resolve the antinomies.1 I suggested a third account called
“prismatic” because, just as a [End Page 61] prism separates the various colors that comprise a beam of light, this account explores the
complex interplay of local, regional, and global factors that affect Africa.2 Security is now high on the African agenda, and so are accelerated
growth and development as well as democracy. Discoveries of major oil, natural gas, and coal deposits are making the continent more
significant in meeting global energy needs. Abundant and underused land will steadily contribute to global food supplies. And expanding
economies will continue to provide increased opportunities for investors. It is the physical-security side of the African ledger, however, that
poses the greatest challenge, as dramatized recently by violent insurgencies and disease outbreaks in West Africa. How this challenge is
tackled will greatly affect progress in other spheres. The
“complex interplay” of forces in contemporary
Africa is one that prevailing paradigms are unable to explain. The present reflections, like the ones I
offered in these pages almost a quarter-century ago regarding the original democratic abertura, are provisional.3 Now as then, events are
moving swiftly and on a broad front. The stalling of democratization globally is taking place amid other major developments, especially
terrorism, warfare, and the rise of a phenomenon referred to as authoritarian modernization. Authoritarian modernization is curious
because, scarcely two decades ago, the very term would have seemed an oxymoron. Commenting on the revolutions of 1989, Marc Plattner
recently wrote that a “key reason for the resurgence of democracy undoubtedly lay in the increasingly manifest failings of its autocratic
rivals.”4 Today, that assessment is often reversed. The
Western model of liberal-democratic development is
losing ground to an authoritarian alternative. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge capture this
trend and suggest that the liberal democracies need a “fourth revolution” in governance and
affairs of state (to follow the revolutions of state sovereignty, individual rights, and moderate welfarism) if they are to
avoid falling permanently behind their autocratic rivals. “ A global race is on ,” write these
two British journalists, “to devise the best kind of state and the best system of government.” The
dysfunctions of liberal democracy can be contrasted, they contend, with “the impressive
track records” of “modernizing authoritarianism pursued by Asian countries such as
Singapore and China.” The key concern is performance—namely, “which innovations in governing yield the best results.”5
Michael Ignatieff agrees that “the liberal state is in crisis .” Authoritarian modernization now forms “an alternate
route to modern development: growth without democracy and progress without freedom.”6 Ignatieff’s conclusion is widely shared:
It
is “difficult to defend liberal democracy with much
enthusiasm abroad if it works so poorly at home .”7 Plattner is hopeful that
the “apparent vigor” today of modernizing autocracy as compared to liberal democracy will “prove to be temporary.”8 David Brooks is
not sure. He sees
“an ideological war” being [End Page 62] waged “between centralized
authoritarian capitalism and decentralized liberal democratic capitalism.” This “battle of
regimes is playing out with special force in Africa.” While democracy is experiencing “a crisis of morale,”
autocracies “are feeling confident and on the rise.”9
The US is key
Gyimah-Boadi 15 - E. Gyimah-Boadi is executive director of both the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and the
Afrobarometer, and professor of political science at the University of Ghana, Legon. (“Africa’s Waning Democratic Commitment,” Journal
of Democracy, Volume 26, Number 1, p. 100-111, Project Muse, January 2015) STRYKER
Finally, the
illiberal acts of the United States and other Western democratic nations in the post-9/11
global “war on terror” have given Africa’s elected autocrats easy justification for their
own retreat from the principles and practices of democratic accountability. African
political elites opportunistically cite U.S. actions such as the rendition or waterboarding of suspected terrorists
as examples to
justify their own privileging of national-security interests over
citizens’ rights . Similarly, Africa’s elected autocrats are finding great comfort in the
resurgence of authoritarian and illiberal role models provided by China, Iran, Russia,
Venezuela, and others.
African democracy is crucial to stability
Ohlson and Söderberg 2 - Thomas Ohlson is an Associate Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict at Uppsala
University. Mimmi Söderberg is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict at Uppsala University. (“From Intra-State
War To Democratic Peace in Weak States,” http://www.pcr.uu.se/digitalAssets/18/18593_UPRP_No_5.pdf 2002) STRYKER
***2002 was the date of an earlier version of this article
To understand politics in the weak state context, Chabal and Daloz argue, one must consider the ways in which individuals, groups and
communities seek to instrumentals the resources that they command within the context of political and economic disorder. Disorder
in many African states, for example, should not be viewed merely as a state of failure or
neglect, but should also be seen as a condition that offers opportunities for those who
know how to play the system. The failure of the state to be emancipated from society may
have limited the scope for good government and sustainable economic
growth , but the weakness and inefficiency of the state has nevertheless been profitable to
political elites and probably even more so to European and North American economic actors. The clientelist networks within
the formal political apparatus have allowed the elite to raise the resources necessary for providing their constituencies with protection and
services in exchange for the recognition of their political and social status. The
instrumentalisation of the prevailing
political disorder may thus function as a disincentive to the establishment of a more
properly institutionalised state on the Weberian model as well as to the implementation
of a democratic political system. “Why should the African political elites dismantle a political system which serves them so
well?” (Chabal and Daloz 1999, p. 14). In our view, the important merit of the above arguments is that they point to the highly negative
potential of patrimonial structures. Undeniably, these
structures pose problems for durable peace,
legitimacy and for addressing the so-called national question, that is, for the processes of
state formation and nation-building . However, we caution against seeing this as a zero-sum game: either the
holders of state power pursue a genuine national interest in the Weberian sense or they completely succumb to the structures of private,
sectarian interests. Such is not the case. Rather, we argue that every state, weak or strong, has both Weberian and patrimonial structures.
This, too, is a continuum and the balance between the two types of structure 13 should be understood as a variable, not a constant. Neither
enlightened leadership nor popular pressure from below should be underestimated. Many weak states have made considerable moves
towards greater legitimacy. In addition, when
legitimacy is really low, even minor improvements
in degrees of rule of law and good governance may generate major improvements in
terms of closing the legitimacy gap.
African war goes nuclear
DEUTSCH 2002
(Jeffrey, Political Risk Consultant and Ph.D in Economics, The Rabid Tiger Newsletter, Vol 2, No 9, Nov 18,
http://list.webengr.com/pipermail/picoipo/2002-November/000208.html)
The Rabid Tiger Project believes that a nuclear war is most likely to start in Africa. Civil wars in the Congo (the
country formerly known as Zaire), Rwanda, Somalia and Sierra Leone, and domestic instability in Zimbabwe, Sudan and other countries, as
well as occasional brushfire and other wars (thanks in part to "national" borders that cut across tribal ones) turn into a really nasty stew.
We've got all too many rabid tigers and potential rabid tigers, who are willing to push the button rather than risk being seen as wishy-washy
in the face of a mortal threat and overthrown. Geopolitically speaking, Africa is open range. Very
few countries in Africa
are beholden to any particular power. South Africa is a major exception in this respect - not to mention in that she also
probably already has the Bomb. Thus, outside powers can more easily find client states there than, say,
in Europe where the political lines have long since been drawn, or Asia where many of the countries (China, India, Japan) are
powers unto themselves and don't need any "help," thank you. Thus, an African war can attract outside
involvement very quickly. Of course, a proxy war alone may not induce the Great Powers to fight each other. But an
African nuclear strike can ignite a much broader conflagration, if the other powers are
interested in a fight. Certainly, such a strike would in the first place have been facilitated by outside help - financial, scientific,
engineering, etc. Africa is an ocean of troubled waters, and some people love to go fishing.
Exts. African Democracy Slipping
African democratization is on the brink
Gyimah-Boadi 15 - E. Gyimah-Boadi is executive director of both the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and the
Afrobarometer, and professor of political science at the University of Ghana, Legon. (“Africa’s Waning Democratic Commitment,” Journal
of Democracy, Volume 26, Number 1, p. 100-111, Project Muse, January 2015) STRYKER
In the early 1990s, a wave of democratization (and, in some cases, redemocratization) began to unfold
in sub-Saharan Africa. In the years since, a majority of the continent’s citizens have come
to view democracy as the ideal political regime, and many African countries made considerable strides up
through the mid-2000s in liberalizing their political systems and establishing democratic institutions. But for nearly a decade
now, that progress has slowed and in some places reversed . Foremost among the
obstacles to democracy on the continent is the waning commitment to the
democratic project on the part of political elites. Moreover, the supply of democratic
goods—in particular, government responsiveness and accountability—has become
increasingly scarce. Even in Ghana, a country held up as one of Africa’s star
democratizers, there has been a recent spate of corruption scandals and, despite strong
whistleblower protections, subsequent government reprisals against those who expose
wrongdoing. While popular aspirations for democratic governance have gone largely unmet, citizens’ desire for democracy is
deepening. What is causing democratic progress to falter on the continent, and what are the prospects for democratic development in the
future? Over the past several decades, most African countries have seen the development of four major democratic trends: the embrace of
elections; the acceptance of constitutional norms; the emergence of free media and an active civil society; and the establishment of regional
prodemocratic conventions and protocols. To begin with, the ballot box has replaced the military coup as the chief instrument for changing
governments and electing political leaders. The holding of regularly scheduled and increasingly competitive elections has become the norm
in most of Africa. [End Page 101] The number of multiparty elections for the executive has risen significantly over the past two decades,
from an average of slightly less than one a year (1960–89) to around seven per year (1990–2012), and just over a fifth of these contests have
led to a change in leadership.1 Indeed, the number of “electoral democracies” in sub-Saharan Africa has risen from just a handful in the
early 1990s to 19 of the region’s 49 countries, according to the Freedom House rankings for 2013.2 Most
African countries
are now governed by constitutions that are—at least on paper—more or less democratic.
Many of these charters mandate some degree of separation of powers and include a bill of rights that anchors independent judiciaries,
ombudsmen, human-rights and anticorruption commissions, and election-management bodies. The imposition of presidential term limits
in a number of countries (ranging from two four-year terms, as in Ghana, to two seven-year terms, as in Senegal) may be the most
important indicator of how entrenched constitutionalism has become in the new era on a continent notorious for its de jure and de facto
“presidents-for-life.” Moreover, parliaments have been flourishing, making at least some legislative oversight of the executive increasingly
common in sub-Saharan Africa today (at least in the minimalist terms of approving the annual budget and public accounts, presidential
nominations to ministerial positions, and legislation initiated by the executive). Since
the mid-1990s, an everexpanding network of private FM radio, free-to-air and cable television, newspapers,
and magazines has reduced states’ monopoly over print and electronic media. Most
African governments have relaxed official censorship, making possible the practice of
real investigative journalism and the occasional discovery and exposure of
government malfeasance by local media. Associational freedoms have been expanding as well. As a result, civil
society organizations have multiplied and are now undertaking (often with financial, technical, and moral support from the international
community) a vast array of activities—including the promotion of social, economic, and political inclusion as well as human rights, equity,
clean elections, and governmental transparency and accountability—to countervail state power. Yet another measure of the embrace of
democratic norms in the region, even if largely symbolic, may be found in the raft of prodemocracy agreements adopted by the African
Union (AU) and the various subregional organizations.3 In the early postindependence period, military despots were common figures at
African summit meetings. The AU, by contrast, denies official recognition to governments and leaders who ascend to power through
“unconstitutional” means.4 In accordance with prodemocracy conventions and protocols, both the AU and the Economic Community of
West African States (ECOWAS) denied official recognition and suspended the memberships of Togo in 2005, Mauritania in 2005–2007 and
2008–2009, Guinea in 2008–2009, Niger [End Page 102] in 2009–2011, Côte d’Ivoire in 2010–2011, and Mali in 2012. Beyond these
symbolic gestures, the AU now routinely deploys teams to monitor elections in member states and, through the African Peer Review
Mechanism (APRM), assesses members’ progress and performance on democratic governance. Shortcomings and Deficiencies The
progress of democracy chronicled above describes the general trend during the first
decade and a half of the democratization process in the region.5 Hardcore authoritarian
rule gave way to electoral democracy in many countries, and African citizens began to enjoy much greater
voice than at any time in the postindependence era. While there have been instances of democratic
backsliding, there has not yet been a case of permanent reversal to the status
quo ante of robust authoritarianism. With the benefit of hindsight, however, these achievements can be seen to
represent the harvest of African democratization’s “low-hanging fruit.” The march of democratic progress in Africa
that received such fanfare seems to have been succeeded by a long phase of
stagnation. Democracy has substantively improved in only a minority of sub-Saharan
countries so that barely one in five qualified as Free in Freedom House’s 2014 rankings.6
Internet Freedom Good—Economy
The mass surveillance model hurts global Internet freedom, a key part of the
global economy and security
Kehl et al ’14, (Danielle Kehl, Senior Policy Analyst, Open Technology Institute, Kevin
Bankston, Director, Open Technology Institute, Robert Morgus, Program Associate,
International Security Program, and Robyn Greene, Policy Counsel, Open Technology
Institute, “SURVEILLANCE COSTS: THE NSA'S IMPACT ON THE ECONOMY,
INTERNET FREEDOM & CYBERSECURITY,” Open Technology Institute, JULY 29,
2014, https://www.newamerica.org/oti/surveillance-costs-the-nsas-impact-on-theeconomy-internet-freedom-cybersecurity/)//erg
It has been over a year since The Guardian reported the first story on the National Security
Agency’s surveillance programs based on the leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, yet the national
conversation remains largely mired in a simplistic debate over the tradeoffs between national security and individual
privacy. It is time to start weighing the overall costs and benefits more broadly. While
intelligence officials have vigorously defended the merits of the NSA programs, they have offered little hard evidence to
prove their value—and some of the initial analysis actually suggests that the benefits of these programs are dubious. Three
different studies—from the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, the Privacy and
Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and the New America Foundation’s International Security Program—question the value of
bulk collection programs in stopping terrorist plots and enhancing national security. Meanwhile, there has been
little sustained discussion of the costs of the NSA programs beyond their impact on
privacy and liberty, and in particular, how they affect the U.S. economy, American foreign
policy, and the security of the Internet as a whole. This paper attempts to quantify and categorize the costs
of the NSA surveillance programs since the initial leaks were reported in June 2013. Our findings indicate
that the NSA’s actions have already begun to, and will continue to, cause
significant damage to the interests of the United States and the global
Internet community . Specifically, we have observed the costs of NSA surveillance in the following four areas:
Direct Economic Costs to U.S. Businesses: American companies have reported declining sales
overseas and lost business opportunities, especially as foreign companies turn claims of
products that can protect users from NSA spying into a competitive advantage. The cloud
computing industry is particularly vulnerable and could lose billions of dollars in the next three to five years as a result of
NSA surveillance. Potential Costs to U.S. Businesses and to the Openness of the Internet from the Rise of Data
Localization and Data Protection Proposals: New proposals from foreign governments looking to implement data
localization requirements or much stronger data protection laws could compound economic losses in the long term. These
proposals could also force changes to the architecture of the global network itself, threatening free expression and privacy
if they are implemented. Costs to U.S. Foreign Policy: Loss of credibility for the U.S. Internet Freedom
agenda, as well as damage to broader bilateral and multilateral relations, threaten U.S.
foreign policy interests. Revelations about the extent of NSA surveillance have already
colored a number of critical interactions with nations such as Germany and Brazil in the
past year. Costs to Cybersecurity: The NSA has done serious damage to Internet security
through its weakening of key encryption standards, insertion of surveillance backdoors
into widely-used hardware and software products, stockpiling rather than responsibly
disclosing information about software security vulnerabilities, and a variety of offensive
hacking operations undermining the overall security of the global Internet. The U.S.
government has already taken some limited steps to mitigate this damage and begin the slow, difficult process of
rebuilding trust in the United States as a responsible steward of the Internet. But the
reform efforts to date have been relatively narrow, focusing primarily on the surveillance programs’
impact on the rights of U.S. citizens. Based on our findings, we recommend that the U.S. government take the following
steps to address the broader concern that the NSA’s programs are impacting our economy, our foreign relations, and our
cybersecurity: Strengthen privacy protections for both Americans and non-Americans, within the United States and
extraterritorially. Provide for increased transparency around government surveillance, both from the government and
companies. Recommit to the Internet Freedom agenda in a way that directly addresses
issues raised by NSA surveillance, including moving toward international human-rights
based standards on surveillance. Begin the process of restoring trust in cryptography standards through the
National Institute of Standards and Technology. Ensure that the U.S. government does not undermine cybersecurity by
inserting surveillance backdoors into hardware or software products. Help to eliminate security vulnerabilities in software,
rather than stockpile them. Develop clear policies about whether, when, and under what legal standards it is permissible
for the government to secretly install malware on a computer or in a network. Separate the offensive and defensive
functions of the NSA in order to minimize conflicts of interest.
The Internet is a key area for economic progress and social change
Peralta, ’14, (Adriana, PanAm Post reporter, “Censors Close In on Global Internet
Freedom Four Years Running,” PanAm, DECEMBER 8, 2014,
http://panampost.com/adriana-peralta/2014/12/08/censors-close-in-on-globalinternet-freedom-four-years-running/)//erg
During the presentation of the report, its findings were analyzed by six representatives from various think tanks in favor of
internet freedom. Among them were the director of the study, Sanja Kelly, and the founder of Yahoo’s human-rights
The experts concluded that the internet is currently at a
key moment for the future of humanity. They emphasized how information about the
huge political and social changes of recent years has been rapidly disseminated around
the world via the internet.+ All the panelists agreed that, in order for the web to continue being
free, civil society must be vigilant about legislative proposals to control the creation,
spread, and free access of online media.+ None were optimistic about the immediate
future of web freedom, but they underlined the importance of continuing to fight in favor of liberty
online, arguing that a free internet is synonymous with human well-being, freer
markets, and economic progress.
program, Michael Samway.
Multitude of reasons why global Internet freedom is the key factor in
economic success—innovation, business credibility, e-commerce, promotion
of institutions
Sugarman, ’14, (Eli, Cyber Initiative Program Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation, Adviser to Stanford University's Rule of Law Program and a Truman
National Security Fellow, “Russia's War on Internet Freedom Is Bad for Business and the
Russian Economy,” Forbes, 3/27/2014,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/elisugarman/2014/03/27/russias-war-on-internetfreedom-is-bad-for-business-and-the-russian-economy/)//erg
In December 2013, Russian lawmakers added content that promotes rioting, racial hatred, or
extremism, including “public events held in violation of the public order,” (e.g. public protests,
etc.) to the list of materials that can be blocked without a court order. President Putin’s own Committee on Human Rights denounced it as
likely infringing upon the Russian constitution. And at least one technology industry group in Russia fears the law will be used by
provocateurs to post objectionable comments on websites to trigger their blocking by prosecutors. Putin recently pushed through several
new laws to enhance his government’s Internet surveillance powers, too. One law requires website
owners and operators – ranging from Facebook to local Russian blogs – to archive all data from all users of their
websites for six months, provide it to the government, and inform Russian security services every time a new
user starts using their site or “exchange[s] information.” Taken literally, this law would place crippling compliance burdens on websites
located in Russia and abroad (the law specifically states the foreign websites with Russian users are covered) while threatening
hefty monetary penalties for violations. A second law limits online money transfers in Russia, which are the lifeblood
of many businesses in addition to civic movements and campaigns. Russia also directs pro-Kremlin groups to engage in Distributed Denial
of Service (DDoS) attacks against websites, pays commentators to post propagandistic content, and hijack blog ratings. It uses other forms
of pressure, such as commitment to psychiatric facilities, to silence online critics and drive them out of Russia. And
authorities
routinely abuse surveillance platforms to access users’ email and data for political
purposes (the state has direct access to phone-company and ISP servers through local control centers). These attacks on an
open Internet not only undermine Russian democracy but also the country’s economy. A
newly-released Dalberg study highlights five ways that a free and open Internet – one in which users can freely choose
which platforms and services to use and what content to create, share, and access — stimulates economic growth.
First, it is easier for users to access the Internet if it is open, which promotes Internet
businesses. Second, a free Internet correlates with larger volumes of e-commerce, especially online
banking, which often represents new economic activity instead of mere replacement of in-person transactions. Third,
multinational companies are more likely to invest in countries with
unencumbered Internet access . Fourth, a free Internet encourages innovation,
which in turn, drives economic growth . Fifth and last, an open Internet promotes
better quality education, institutions, and social capital, important
hallmarks of a dynamic economy.
Restrictions on Internet Freedom devastate destroy the economy
Sugarman, ’14, (Eli, Cyber Initiative Program Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation, Adviser to Stanford University's Rule of Law Program and a Truman
National Security Fellow, “Russia's War on Internet Freedom Is Bad for Business and the
Russian Economy,” Forbes, 3/27/2014,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/elisugarman/2014/03/27/russias-war-on-internetfreedom-is-bad-for-business-and-the-russian-economy/)//erg
Conversely, Internet restrictions, such as those implemented by Russia, inhibit economic growth in
several ways. First, they reduce investor confidence by creating uncertainty and risk, which
in turn reduces investment. Second, they hamper Internet business by requiring
expenditures for compliance (e.g. purchasing hardware, installing software, retaining lawyers to fight frivolous
charges, etc.) instead of value-added pursuits, such as hiring more employees, investing in research and
development, etc. Third , they limit the availability of information that would
otherwise catalyze innovation or stimulate economic growth . Fourth, these
restrictive measures impede collaboration within and across borders, thereby making it
more difficult for individuals and organizations to generate new ideas for products
and/or services. Last, limitations create fear and mistrust among Internet users,
which depresses online commerce and constrains the market place of ideas.
The economic costs of Russia’s war on Internet freedom will be particularly acute because it is alienating younger
Russians. Russians between the ages of 18 and 29 strongly believe in a free and open Internet while Russians above the
age of 50 do not. In fact, Russia has the largest generation gap worldwide in terms of societal views on
Internet freedom. Moscow should take note of this trend because Russia’s economy will increasingly rely
on its youth to generate growth as the country’s population ages. As emerging markets
grapple with important decisions about how and whether to regulate the Internet, Russia
can ill afford to deprive itself of this vital engine of economic growth. Many countries are wisely
embracing the transformative nature of the open Internet without which global e-commerce and cloud computing are not
possible. Russia risks being left behind if it continues its attacks on Internet freedom, which pose an even greater long
term risk to the Russian economy than Moscow’s ill-advised military foray in Ukraine.
Now is a key time to re-focus to global Internet freedom—it’s the key factor
in economic growth
GENACHOWSKI and GOLDSTEIN, ’14, (Julius, Chairman, Federal
Communications Commission and Gordon M. “'Global' Internet Governance Invites
Censorship,” Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2014,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579471670854356630)//e
rg
The Commerce Department announced last month that the U.S. government intends to transition its authority overseeing
the Internet's Domain Name System, which is run through a nonprofit organization called Icann (the Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers), under a contract that expires in late 2015. This announcement comes at a time when
global Internet freedom has never been more important or under greater
threat . Governments around the world are considering measures to squelch free speech
or free enterprise on the Internet, including efforts to suppress Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, and
restrictions on cloud computing and other Internet data services. Multilateral organizations have already taken disturbing
steps. At the 2013 International Telecommunication Union treaty conference in Dubai, a majority of countries joined
Russia, Iran and China in supporting a measure calling on the ITU, a United Nations agency, to play an enlarged role in
"international Internet governance." The ITU has historically had authority over certain international telephone rates and
global spectrum allocations. At its next conference in South Korea in October, the ITU's 193 member states will likely
consider extending the agency's authority to the Internet. The U.S. can influence this and other
multilateral gatherings, working to convince countries on the fence that a free and open
Internet promotes economic growth globally and within countries that
embrace it. Toward this end, changes in the U.S. relationship with Icann should be designed to preserve the
unrestricted flow of information and data over the Internet. This means, first of all, that any entity that might replace the
U.S. oversight role cannot be a government entity. Instead, it must be a multistakeholder body rooted in the private sector
and civil society, preserving the decentralized, nongovernmental approach that has "governed" the Internet from its
inception. Otherwise, no deal. The Commerce Department made such conditions implicit when it announced its intention
to eventually transfer its current oversight role with Icann. We believe these conditions should become explicit and
nonnegotiable. First, the U.S. should not yield any authority to another government, group of governments or
intergovernmental body, including the United Nations or a U.N. agency such as the ITU. Second, any transfer must be to
an entity that is protected from governmental interference and includes both private sector and civil society organizations
that depend upon the Internet remaining free of international actions that could impede
innovation. Third, any transfer must guarantee the reliability, stability and resilience of the
Internet, complying with official U.S. policy since the Bush administration. Finally, any transfer of authority over Icann
must be subjected to "stress tests," hypothetical scenarios designed to expose potential vulnerabilities of any new oversight
mechanism. America's relationship with Icann has been used as an argument to grant governing authority to a United
Nations agency like the ITU or to otherwise Balkanize the Internet through increased restrictions by individual countries.
Not coincidently, the argument has spread since the Arab Spring demonstrated that widely available Internet connectivity
threatens nondemocratic governments. More recently, and without irony, some governments have cited the Snowden
matter to advance international governmental involvement, despite the fact that American oversight of Icann is wholly
The Internet is the
infrastructure of the modern global economy, and the free flow of data is
essential to any country seeking economic growth. Global Internet consumption
and expenditure now exceeds that of the agriculture and energy sectors. The Internet spurred
unrelated to NSA matters. Bowing to these arguments would be a mistake.
21% of GDP growth during the past five years in the world's 13 leading developed nations, according to a 2011 study by the
McKinsey Global Institute.
Global Internet freedom provides opportunities for small businesses and
better international innovation
GENACHOWSKI and GOLDSTEIN, ’14, (Julius, Chairman, Federal
Communications Commission and Gordon M. “'Global' Internet Governance Invites
Censorship,” Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2014,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579471670854356630)//e
rg
Moreover, the Internet is a boon to small businesses and job creation. The Web helps new
businesses start and young businesses expand, enabling them to sell more products and services
across all industries. The lower infrastructure costs of the mobile Internet has brought innovation to
countries that had given up on building a well-functioning communications system. And
while it's caused disruption in some sectors, McKinsey also found that for every job eliminated, the Internet created more
than 2.5 new jobs. The Internet is also driving innovation in health care and education world-
wide, saving lives and creating economic opportunity for millions. Innovators in Africa have led
the way on mobile health initiatives, such as texting services that send health reminders and tips to pregnant women and
young mothers. Innovators in Asia are using the Internet and technology to expand literacy
and basic skills. South Korea, for example, has pledged to replace all paper textbooks with digital learning by 2015.
A censored Internet will choke these opportunities. A flourishing and free Internet, on the other hand,
will expand them. A January Boston Consulting Group study of 65 countries found that reducing limitations on online
activity, through enhanced broadband connectivity and access, can increase a country's GDP by as much as 2.5%. A
fragmented global network encumbered by international regulatory restrictions will only
limit this potential for growth.
Internet Freedom Good—Repression
The Internet is manipulated as a tool to exert control over vulnerable
populations and deprive them of their rights—Free Internet is key
Figliola, ’13, (Patricia Moloney, Specialist in Internet and Telecommunications Policy,
“Promoting Global Internet Freedom: Policy and Technology,” Congressional Research
Service, October 22, 2013, https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41837.pdf)//erg
Governments everywhere need the Internet for economic growth and
technological development . Some also seek to restrict the Internet in order to
maintain social, political, or economic control. Such regimes often require the assistance of foreign Internet
companies operating in their countries. These global technology companies find themselves in a dilemma. They must either follow the laws
and requests of the host country, or refuse to do so and risk
the loss of business licenses or the ability to sell
services in that country. However, the global technology industry also risks raising the
concern of U.S. lawmakers by appearing to be complicit with a repressive regime if they
cooperate. For example, the Global Online Freedom Act of 2011 (GOFA) (H.R. 3605), introduced by Representative Christopher
Smith, would prohibit or require reporting of the sale of Internet technologies and provision of Internet services to “Internet-restricting
countries” (as determined by the State Department). That legislation mirrors opinions of some who believe that the U.S. technology
industry should be doing more to ensure that its products are not used for repressive purposes. Others believe that technology can offer a
complementary (and, in some cases, better) solution to prevent government censorship than mandates imposed on companies. Hardware,
software, and Internet services, in and of themselves, are neutral elements of the Internet; it is how they are implemented by various
countries that makes them “repressive.” For example, software is needed by Internet service providers (ISPs) to provide that service.
However, software features intended for day-to-day Internet traffic management, such as filtering programs that catch spam or viruses, can
be misused. Repressive
governments use such programs to censor and monitor Internet
traffic—sometimes using them to identify specific individuals for persecution. Further, U.S.
technology representatives note that it is not currently feasible to completely remove these programs, even when sold to countries that use
those features to repress political speech, without risking significant network disruptions.1
Internet freedom protects individuals’ by combatting repressive regimes
Sugarman, ’14, (Eli, Cyber Initiative Program Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation, Adviser to Stanford University's Rule of Law Program and a Truman
National Security Fellow, “Russia's War on Internet Freedom Is Bad for Business and the
Russian Economy,” Forbes, 3/27/2014,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/elisugarman/2014/03/27/russias-war-on-internetfreedom-is-bad-for-business-and-the-russian-economy/)//erg
Russia’s invasion of the Crimea could push the country into a sharp recession. Yet Moscow’s war on Internet
freedom should spook investors even more. It risks long term damage to Russia’s
economy, according to a recent report by Dalberg. President Putin should change course and support a free and
open Internet before it’s too late. Russia ranks poorly in global indexes of Internet
freedom due to widespread censorship of online content and repeated violation of users’
rights, including criminal prosecution for blog posts critical of the government. Earlier this month, the Russian
government took some of its boldest steps yet and blocked the independent news site of chess-champion and opposition
figure Garry Kasparov as well as the very popular blog of well-known anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny. Internet
restrictions accelerated following Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency nearly two years ago. Moscow passed its
“Internet blacklist law” in July 2012 that empowered Russian prosecutors to block websites that contain
extremist materials and/or content harmful to children without a court order. That law
has since been abused to block local news websites, religious websites, blogs
on LiveJournal, and other publications that run afoul of the Kremlin.
Soft Power Good—Terrorism
Soft power key to solve terrorism
Nye 06 (Joseph S. Jr., University distinguished service professor at Harvard University
and author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, “Think Again: Soft
Power,” Foreign Policy, 2/23/06, http://foreignpolicy.com/2006/02/23/think-againsoft-power/)//kjz
Soft Power Is Irrelevant to the Current Terrorist Threat False. There is a small likelihood that the West will ever
attract such people as Mohammed Atta or Osama bin Laden. We need hard power to deal with people like them. But the current terrorist
threat is not Samuel Huntingtons clash of civilizations. It is a civil war within Islam between a majority of moderates and a small minority who
want to coerce others into an extremist and oversimplified version of their religion. The United States cannot win unless the
moderates win. We cannot win unless the number of people the extremists are recruiting is lower than the number we are killing and deterring.
Rumsfeld himself asked in a 2003 memo: Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading
more terrorists every day than the madrasas and the radical clerics are recruiting,
training, and deploying against us? That equation will be very hard to balance without a
strategy to win hearts and minds. Soft power is more relevant than ever .
[Insert terrorism impact]
Exts. Soft Power Solves Terrorism
Soft power key to effective hard power and fighting terrorism
Nye 04 (Joseph S.,University distinguished service professor at Harvard University ,
“Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics—Edited Transcript,”4/13/04,
https://www.academia.edu/2517747/Soft_power_The_means_to_success_in_world_p
olitics)//kjz
New threats are arising from the bottom board of transnational relations. While military
power can be of some use occasionally on the bottom board, more often you will need
other forms of power, particularly soft power. The trouble is that a group of people within the
Administration, who came into power and looked at American military preeminence, devised the view that Charles
Krauthammer has called “the new unilateralism:” that the United States is so powerful that we can do as we wish and
others have no choice but to follow. They have used that view as a way of applying American military power to all sorts of
problems. The problem is that this is a one-dimensional view in a three-dimensional world. If you play one-dimensional
chess on one board only and it’s a three-dimensional game, in the long run you will lose. That is my great fear about the
way in which we have implemented the strategy. What about soft power? The basic concept of power is the ability to
influence others to get them to do what you want. There are three major ways to do that: one is to threaten them with
sticks; the second is to pay them with carrots; the third is to attract them or co-opt them, so that they want what you want.
If you can get others to be attracted, to want what you want, it costs you much less in carrots and sticks. The Bush
Administration has neglected using our American soft power. In this new world of transnational threats and the
information age, it is not just whose army wins, it’s whose story wins. They have not been very attentive to the question of
whose story wins. If you look at the results of their strategy, the polls are quite chilling. Not only do you find situations like
Europe, where the United States has lost on average thirty points of attractiveness in all European capitals, including
countries that supported us in the Iraq war, but if you go beyond that to the Islamic world, the decline of American
attraction is quite appalling. In 2000, in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country, three-quarters of the people said they were
attracted to the United States. By May 2003, that had dropped to 15 percent. And yet these are the people that we will
need for cooperation against organizations like al-Gama’a at-al-Islamiyya and other offshoots of al Qaeda in the region. If
you look at trends in polls in countries like Jordan or Pakistan, which are allegedly somewhat more friendly towards the
United States, we see that larger majorities are attracted to Osama bin Laden than to George Bush or Tony Blair. Again,
this is a bit chastening when those are the people whose cooperation we will need to deal with this new type of threat. The
new unilateralists’ reaction is: “Not to worry. You should never base foreign policy on polls. Popularity is ephemeral. We
have been unpopular in the past -- look how unpopular the Americans were during the Vietnam War, and yet we
recovered. We should keep on track and decide what we think is right, pursue it, and then let the chips fall as they may.”
This skepticism about the role of soft power, quite frequent among neo-conservatives, is a very powerful view. The great
danger is that it sells short the importance of being able to attract others. And it ignores the fact that a country’s soft
power can affect its hard power. If you take the example of Turkey a year ago, the Americans wanted
to persuade the Turkish government to send the Fourth Infantry Division across Turkey
to enter Iraq from the north. The Turkish government might have been willing to concede, but the Turkish
parliament said, “No,” because the United States had become so unpopular, its policies
perceived as so illegitimate, that they were not willing to allow this transfer of troops
across the country. The net effect was that the Fourth Infantry Division had to go down through the Canal, up
through the Gulf, and arrived late to the war, which made a difference in the number of troops on the ground in areas like
the Sunni Triangle. Neglect of soft power had a definite negative effect on hard power. The
question is sometimes further rebutted by the skeptics who say: “Yes, that may all be well and good, and it may also be
true that the Americans and the West used soft power to prevail in the Cold War, but it has nothing to do with the current
situation of terrorism. Terrorists are a new type of threat and are not attractable. The idea that we will defeat bin Laden or
al Qaeda by attracting them is sticking your head in the sand.” To some extent that is true. If you ask, “Are we going to
attract bin Laden or people like Mohamed Atta, who flew into the World Trade Towers?” No. You do need hard power to
defeat these people who are irreconcilable. But the important role for soft power is to be found in the larger context. If you
think of the war on terrorism as a clash between Islam and the West -- Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” -- you
are mischaracterizing the situation. It’s a
clash within Islamic civilization, between a group of people at the
majority who
want things that are similar to what we want: a better life, education, health care, opportunities, and a
extreme who are trying to use force to impose their view of a pure version of their religion on others, a
sense of dignity. The key question is: how do you prevent those extremists from prevailing as they try to radicalize the
majority, the moderates? Soft power is essential to be able to attract the majorities to the values that
I just described -- not necessarily to being Americans, but in a diverse and pluralistic world to
better
opportunities, education, health care, and a sense of dignity. We can appeal to these values and try
to inoculate them against the appeal of the extremists. We will not prevail in this struggle against
terrorism unless the majority wins, unless the moderates win. And we will not prevail
against extremists unless we are able to attract that majority, those moderates. That is
the role of soft power. In addition, even when you need to use hard power against the hardcore terrorist, you will need cooperation from other governments in a civilian matter. You
will not solve this by bombs alone. You will need close civilian cooperation -- intelligence sharing, policy
work across borders, tracing financial flows. To some extent other governments will share information to deal with
terrorists out of their self-interest, but the degree of sharing you get depends upon the degree to which you are attractive
to other countries. For example, if being pro-American or sympathetic to the Americans or being seen to cooperate with
the Americans is the kiss of death in domestic politics, you will get less cooperation from those governments -- witness the
Turkish example I just gave. So for both reasons, both to attract the moderate majority and to reach a context or setting in
which governments can cooperate more fully with us to deal with the hard core, soft power is key to being able to wage this
struggle against terrorism. How are we doing? Not well. We are not doing well for several reasons. One is the style and
substance of our policies. Soft power grows out of a country’s culture; it grows out of our values -- democracy and human
rights, when we live up to them; it grows out of our policies. When our policies are formulated in ways
which are consultative, which involve the views and interests of others, we are far more
likely to be seen as legitimate and to attract others. And certainly the style of the new unilateralists in
the Bush Administration has decreased the legitimacy of American policy. So to restore our soft power, we need to change
both the substance and style of our foreign policy. We also need to find better ways to present this policy. This country, the
leader in the information age, supposedly the greatest communicating country in the world, is being out-communicated by
people in caves. This is a bizarre situation. With the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, we wanted a peace dividend not
only in military expenditures but also in our public diplomacy, and so we cut back dramatically. The U.S. Information
Agency had half the number of people that it had at the height of the Cold War when it was folded into the State
Department, itself a big mistake. International exchange programs were cut by a third. Look at how poorly we do in
broadcasting -- for example if you take Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan, the Voice of America broadcasts two hours a
day in Urdu, and yet Pakistan is allegedly a frontline country in this struggle against terrorism. Ambassador Djerejian,
who chaired a bipartisan panel on Public Diplomacy in the Islamic World, argued that the United States spent $150
million on public diplomacy for the whole Islamic world last year, and that is about the equal of two hours of the defense
budget, an extraordinary imbalance. The United States spends 400 times more on its hard power than on its soft power, if
you take all the exchange programs and broadcasting programs and lump them together as a measure of soft power. If we
were to spend just 1 percent of the military budget on soft power, it would mean quadrupling our public diplomacy
programs. There is something wrong with our approach. In short, the challenge that we face in dealing with this new
threat of terrorism, particularly the danger of their obtaining weapons of mass destruction, is a challenge which is very
new and real in American foreign policy. But beyond the United States, it is a challenge for all of modern urban
civilization. If this spreads, and we find that people will no longer live in cities because of fear, we will live in a very
different and less favorable world. At the same time, our approach to the problem has relied much too heavily on one
dimension of a three-dimensional world, one instrument between hard and soft power. The answer is not to pretend that
hard power doesn’t matter -- it does and we will need to continue to use it -- but realise that to use hard power without
combining it with soft power, which has all too often been the practice in the last few years, is a serious mistake. The good
news is that in the past the United States has, as in the Cold War, combined hard and soft power. The bad news is that we
are not doing it yet. But since we have done it once, presumably we can do it again. When we learn how to better combine
hard and soft power, then we will be what I call a smart power.
Soft power fosters more positive opinions of the US—helps deter suicide
bombings
Chiozza 14 (Giacomo, associate professor of political science at Vanderbilt University,
“Does U.S. Soft Power Have Consequences for U.S. Security? Evidence from Popular
Support for Suicide Bombing,” The Korean Journal of International Studies, 9/3/14,
http://www.kjis.org/journal/view.html?uid=154&&vmd=Full)//kjz
In Figure 4, I present four CART models, a pooled model for all the three coun- tries, and three disaggregate models for
each country. The major finding at the aggregate level, in the upper left panel of Figure 4, is that, positive
attitudes towards the United States was the most discriminating factor accounting for
opposition to suicide bombing. The probability that someone who had a good opinion of
the United States would support suicide attacks was between 4.3% and 9.1%, a large drop
over the unconditional probability of support which ranged from 41.5% to 46.2%. As a first
result, therefore, the analysis in Figure 4 indicates 11
Theprobabilitythatagivenindividualwouldsupportsuicidebombing(π)canbemodeledasa binomial distribution where n is
the number of subjects in the sample and x is the number of subjects who hold such a belief. I use a non-informative
reference prior distribution to derive the posterior dis- tribution and, from that, the probability that the parameter of
interest πlies in an interval with 95% probability. I use Jeffrey’s reference prior distribution, which has the property of
being invariant to scale transformations. In the case of binomial likelihood functions, Jeffrey’s prior takes the form of a
Beta distribution, π~ Beta(1/2,1/2). 12 I report the logistic regression models in the on-line Appendix. 77). I use a
validation set approach, by split-  The Korean Journal of International Studies 13-1  222 that U.S. soft power
provided a “disabling environment,” as Nye (2011)’s soft power theory predicts. LEGEND: AMERICANS
PRO.AL.QAEDA PRO.FRANCE PRO.US RELIGION.VERY.IMPORTANT SAFER.SADDAM.CONE THREATS.TO.ISLAM
Dslk=Respondent dislikes the American people; Like=Repondent likes the American people Does respondent have any
confidence, or no confidence at all, in Usama bin Laden? Does respondent have a favorable opinion of France? Does
respondent have a favorable opinion of the United States? Is religion very important in respondent’s life? Does respondent
believe that the world is safer anfter the removal of Saddam Hussein from power? Does respondent believe that there are
serious threats to Islam? Figure 4. Attitudinal Profile of the Support for Suicide Bombing against Americans and
Westerners Note: Data analysis is based on the 2005 wave of the Pew Global Attitudes Survey. The labels below the final
branches indicate the most common response: “No” indicates that the most common response was disap- proval of suicide
bombing; “Yes” indicates that the most common response was approval suicide bombing. The numbers underneath
measure the 95% Bayesian confidence intervals around the conditional probability of approval of suicide bombing. “CI”
stands for Confidence Interval. After that, the model splits the sample separating Turkey, on the one hand, and Jordan
and Lebanon, on the other. This split indicates that the patterns in Turkey Does U.S. Soft Power Have Consequences for
U.S. Security? 223 differed from those found in Jordan and Lebanon not just quantitatively, as illus- trated in Figures 2
and 3, but also qualitatively. The second substantive factor accounting for patterns of opinion towards suicide attacks was
another soft power indicator, i.e. attitudes towards the American people. For the Jordanians and the
Lebanese who disliked the United States, a negative view of the American people
increased the probability of approval of suicide attacks against Americans and
Westerners to a range between 74.5% and 81%. For the Jordanians and Lebanese who
disliked the United States and liked the Americans, the probability of support for suicide
attacks dropped substantially, but not enough to clear the baseline confidence interval. The country-by-country
analysis further validates the aggregate findings. In both the Jordanian and the Lebanese cases, U.S.
soft power emerges as the strongest predictor of support for suicide bombing against
Americans and Westerners. Overwhelmingly, the Jordanians who had a positive opinion of
Americans did not find suicide bombing against them legitimate; the probability interval for the
support of suicide attacks ranges from 5.4% to 12.6%. Among the Lebanese, no one among those who liked the United
States was also willing to jus- tify suicide attacks against them, which yields a probability of support between 0% and 2%.
With such a discriminating power, U.S. soft power emerged as a key factor in structuring opinion
towards suicide bombing. Importantly for the theory of soft power, however, its policy component  i.e., the
endorsement that foreign publics might give to specific U.S. policies, such as the U.S.-led war on terror  does not emerge
as a relevant explanatory parameter. For the people of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, it was the (lack of) normative and
personal standing of the United States and its people that would mostly shape their views on anti-American vio- lence.
Soft Power Good—Democracy
Soft power is influenced by policies and uniquely promotes democracy
Nye 09 (Joseph S., University distinguished service professor at Harvard University,
“Obama’s Soft Power,” New Perspectives Quarterly, 2009,
https://onlinelibrarystatic.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.15405842.2009.01057.x/asset/j.15405842.2009.01057.x.pdf?v=1&t=ib5e5swr&s=278fd5621bdb8284abc7f132a1d586979bf91
17b)//kjz
cambridge, mass—In her confirmation hearings to become secretary of state, Hillary Clinton said: “America cannot solve
the most pressing problems on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America. . . . We must use what has
been called ‘smart power,’ the full range of tools at our disposal.” Smart power is the combination of hard and soft power.
Soft power is the ability to obtain preferred outcomes through attraction rather than
coercion or payments. Public opinion polls show a serious decline in American
attractiveness in Europe, Latin America and, most dramatically, across the entire
Muslim world. The resources that produce soft power for a country include its culture (where it is attractive to
others), its values (where they are attractive and not undercut by inconsistent practices) and policies (where they are seen
as inclusive and legitimate in the eyes of others). When poll respondents are asked why they report a
decline in American soft power, they cite American policies more than American culture
or values. Since it is easier for a country to change its policies than its culture, this implies that President
Barack Obama will be able to choose policies that could help to recover some of America’s
soft power. Of course, soft power is not the solution to all problems. Even though North Korean dictator Kim Jong
Il likes to watch Hollywood movies, that is unlikely to affect his nuclear weapons program. And soft power got nowhere in
attracting the Taliban government away from its support for al-Qaida in the 1990s. It took hard military power in 2001 to
end that. But other goals—such as the promotion of democracy and human rights—are better
achieved by soft power.
Soft power is a successful tool in democracy promotion
Kroenig, McAdam, and Weber 10 (Matthew, Associate Professor and International
Relations Field Chair in the Department of Government and School of Foreign Service at
Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on
International Security at The Atlantic Council; Melissa, Visiting Scholar at George
Washington University’s Elliott School, in the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies;
Steven, Professor at the Information School , University of California, Berkeley, “Taking
Soft Power Seriously,” Comparative Strategy, 12/13/10,
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ucst20)//kjz
The United States has also attempted to use soft power to promote the spread of
democracy around the globe. Unlike in the other two issue areas, the U.S. democracy promotion
campaigns met with some success as evidenced by a spate of electoral revolutions in the postcommunist region.
We argue that the successful influence of these U.S. democracy promotion efforts is due to the presence of the necessary
conditions for an effective soft power campaign. In the countries that experienced electoral revolutions, there was a
functioning marketplace of ideas, the United States identified and supported credible messengers
to transmit ideas about democratization, and ideas about the best practices for bringing
down authoritarian regimes could significantly impact the outcome. In recent years, the United
States has devoted a disproportionate amount of its democracy promotion attention to the postcommunist region. The
proportion of countries receiving USAID democracy assistance, and the duration of time over which the countries receive
assistance, are higher in the postcommunist region than in other world regions. A survey of USAID funding from 1990–
2003 “reveals that the postcommunist region stands out as a clear priority for USAID with respect to democracy
assistance.”73 Other U.S. government-funded democracy promotion organizations such as the National Endowment for
Democracy have similarly concentrated their resources on the postcommunist region. The U.S.’s soft power
strategies aimed at promoting democracy in the postcommunist world since the end of
the Cold War have met with notable success. The rate of electoral revolutions in this region has been
staggering. According to a recent study, “pivotal elections that have either enhanced or introduced
democracy have taken place in eight countries, or 40 percent of the twenty
postcommunist countries that remained eligible for such revolutions.”74 The well-publicized
“color revolutions” swept through Georgia (The Rose Revolution, 2003), Ukraine (The Orange
Revolution, 2004), and Kyrgyzstan (The Tulip Revolution, 2005). Downloaded by [Georgetown University] at 11:08
23 June 2015 Taking Soft Power Seriously 423
Soft Power Good—Peace/Proliferation
American soft power is crucial to a stable international order—slows
proliferation and bolsters trade
Nye 15 - Joseph Nye is university distinguished service professor and former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He
has served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, chair of the National Intelligence Council, and deputy under
secretary of state for security assistance, science, and technology. (Is the American Century Over? pp. 153-158 e-book, 2015) STRYKER
The problem of leadership in such a world is how to get everyone into the act and
still get action. And the American role in galvanizing institutions and organizing
informal networks remains crucial to answering that puzzle. As we saw earlier, there has often been
self-serving exaggeration about the American provision of public goods in the past, but a case can be made for Goliath. As Michael
Mandelbaum describes the American role, other countries will criticize it, but “they will
miss it when it is gone .”11 More important, it is not yet gone. Even in issues where its pre-eminence in
resources has diminished, American leadership often remains critical to global
collective action. Take trade and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons as two
examples of important economic and security issues where American dominance is not
what it once was. In trade, the United States was by far the largest trading nation when
the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) was created in 1947, and the United States deliberately
accepted trade discrimination by Europe and Japan as part of its Cold War strategy. After those countries recovered, they
joined the United States in a club of like-minded nations within the GATT.12 In the 1990s, as other states’ shares of global trade increased,
the United States supported the expansion of GATT into the World Trade Organization
and the club model became
obsolete. The United States supported Chinese accession to the World Trade
Organization and China passed the United States as the world’s largest trading nation.
While global rounds of trade negotiations became more difficult to accomplish and
various free trade agreements proliferated, the rules of the World Trade Organization continued to provide a
general structure wherein the norm of most favored nation status and reciprocity created a framework in which particular club deals could
be generalized to a larger number of countries. Moreover, new entrants like China found it in their interests to observe even adverse
judgments of the World Trade Organization dispute settlement process. Similarly
with the non-proliferation
regime: in the 1940s, when the United States had a nuclear monopoly, it proposed the Baruch
plan for UN control, which the Soviet Union rejected in order to pursue its own nuclear weapons program. In the 1950s,
the United States used the Atoms for Peace program, coupled with inspections by a new
International Atomic Energy Agency, to try to separate the peaceful from the weapons purposes of nuclear technology
as it spread. In the 1960s, the five states with nuclear weapons negotiated the nonproliferation treaty, which promised peaceful assistance to states that accepted a legal status of non-weapons states. In the
1970s, after India’s explosion of a nuclear device and the further spread of technology for
enrichment and reprocessing of fissile materials, the United States and like-minded
states created a Nuclear Suppliers Group, which agreed “to exercise restraint” in the export of sensitive technologies,
as well as an International National Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation, which called into question the
optimistic projections about the use of plutonium fuels. While none of these institutional adaptations was
perfect, and problems persist with North Korea and Iran today, the net effect
of the normative structure and American leadership was to slow the growth
in the number of nuclear weapons states from the 25 expected in the 1960s to the 9 that exist today.13 In
2003, the US launched the Proliferation Security Initiative, a loosely structured grouping of countries that shares information and
Similar questions arise today
about the governance of the internet and cyber activities. In its early days, the
internet was largely American, but today China has twice as many users as the United
States. Where once only Roman alphabet characters were used on the internet, now there are top-level domain names in Chinese,
coordinates efforts to stop trafficking in nuclear proliferation related materials.
Arabic, and Cyrillic scripts, with more alphabets expected. And in 2014, the United States announced that it would relax the Commerce
Department’s supervision of the internet’s “address book,” the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Some
observers worried that this would open the way for authoritarian states to try to exert control and censor the addresses of opponents. Such
fears seem exaggerated both on technical grounds and in their underlying premises. Not only would such censorship be difficult, but there
are self-interested grounds for states to avoid such fragmentation of the internet. In addition, the descriptions in the decline in American
power in the cyber issue are overstated. Not only does the United States remain the second largest user of the internet, but it is the home of
eight of the ten largest global information companies.14 Moreover, when one looks at the composition of important non-state voluntary
communities (like the Internet Engineering Task Force), one sees a disproportionate number of Americans participating because of their
expertise. The loosening of US government influence over ICANN could be seen as a strategy for strengthening the institution and
reinforcing the American multistakeholder philosophy rather than as a sign of defeat.15 Some
cyber stability now exists,
but the fact that cyber insecurity creates inherent risks for both the United States and its
opponents provides a basis for possible agreements.16 In short, projections based on theories
of hegemonic decline can be misleading about the realities of American leadership in
international institutions and networks. Even with diminishing power resources,
American leadership remains essential in creating public goods .
Proliferation causes extinction
Kroenig 12 – Matthew Kroenig is the Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University and a Stanton Nuclear Security
Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. ("The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have A Future? Prepared for the
Nonproliferation Policy Education Center,” May 26, 2012, http://www.npolicy.org/article.php?aid=1182&tid=30)
Nuclear War. The
greatest threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons is nuclear war. The
more states in possession of nuclear weapons, the greater the probability that somewhere, someday, there is a catastrophic nuclear war. A
nuclear exchange between the two superpowers during the Cold War could have
arguably resulted in human extinction and a nuclear exchange between states with smaller nuclear arsenals,
such as India and Pakistan, could still result in millions of deaths and casualties, billions of dollars of economic devastation, environmental
degradation, and a parade of other horrors. To date, nuclear weapons have only been used in warfare once. In 1945, the United States used
one nuclear weapon each on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a close. Many analysts point to sixty-five-plus-year
tradition of nuclear non-use as evidence that nuclear weapons are unusable, but it would be naïve to think that nuclear weapons will never
be used again. After all, analysts in the 1990s argued that worldwide economic downturns like the Great Depression were a thing of the past,
only to be surprised by the dot-com bubble bursting in the later 1990s and the Great Recession of the late Naughts.[53] This author, for one,
would be surprised if nuclear weapons are not used in my lifetime. Before
reaching a state of MAD, new nuclear
states go through a transition period in which they lack a secure second-strike capability.
In this context, one or both states might believe that it has an incentive to use nuclear
weapons first. For example, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons neither Iran, nor its nuclear-armed rival, Israel, will have a secure,
second-strike capability. Even though it is believed to have a large arsenal, given its small size and lack of strategic depth, Israel might not
be confident that it could absorb a nuclear strike and respond with a devastating counterstrike. Similarly, Iran might eventually be able to
build a large and survivable nuclear arsenal, but, when it first crosses the nuclear threshold, Tehran will have a small and vulnerable nuclear
force. In these pre-MAD situations, there are at least three ways that nuclear war could occur. First, the
state with the nuclear
advantage might believe it has a splendid first strike capability. In a crisis, Israel might, therefore,
decide to launch a preemptive nuclear strike to disarm Iran’s nuclear capabilities and eliminate the threat of nuclear war against Israel.
Indeed, this incentive might be further increased by Israel’s aggressive strategic culture that emphasizes preemptive action. Second, the
state with a small and vulnerable nuclear arsenal, in this case Iran, might feel use ‘em
or loose ‘em pressures . That is, if Tehran believes that Israel might launch a preemptive strike, Iran might decide to
strike first rather than risk having its entire nuclear arsenal destroyed. Third, as Thomas Schelling has argued, nuclear war could
result due to the reciprocal fear of surprise attack. If there are advantages to striking
first, one state might start a nuclear war in the belief that war is inevitable and that it
would be better to go first than to go second. In a future Israeli-Iranian crisis, for example, Israel and Iran might
both prefer to avoid a nuclear war, but decide to strike first rather than suffer a devastating first attack from an opponent. Even in a
world of MAD, there is a risk of nuclear war. Rational deterrence theory assumes
nuclear-armed states are governed by rational leaders that would not intentionally
launch a suicidal nuclear war. This assumption appears to have applied to past and current nuclear
powers, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to hold in the future. For example, Iran’s
theocratic government, despite its inflammatory rhetoric, has followed a fairly pragmatic foreign policy since 1979, but it contains leaders
who genuinely hold millenarian religious worldviews who could one day ascend to power and have their finger on the nuclear trigger. We
cannot rule out the possibility that, as nuclear weapons continue to spread, one
leader will choose to launch a
nuclear war, knowing full well that it could result in self-destruction. One does not need
to resort to irrationality, however, to imagine a nuclear war under MAD. Nuclear weapons may
deter leaders from intentionally launching full-scale wars, but they do not mean the end of international politics. As was discussed above,
nuclear-armed states still have conflicts of interest and leaders still seek to coerce
nuclear-armed adversaries. This leads to the credibility problem that is at the heart of modern
deterrence theory: how can you threaten to launch a suicidal nuclear war? Deterrence theorists
have devised at least two answers to this question. First, as stated above, leaders can choose to launch
a limited nuclear war. This strategy might be especially attractive to states in a position of conventional military inferiority that
might have an incentive to escalate a crisis quickly. During the Cold War, the United States was willing to use nuclear weapons first to stop a
Soviet invasion of Western Europe given NATO’s conventional inferiority in continental Europe. As Russia’s conventional military power
has deteriorated since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has come to rely more heavily on nuclear use in its strategic doctrine. Indeed,
Russian strategy calls for the use of nuclear weapons early in a conflict (something that most Western strategists would consider to be
escalatory) as a way to de-escalate a crisis. Similarly, Pakistan’s military plans for nuclear use in the event of an invasion from
conventionally stronger India. And finally, Chinese generals openly talk about the possibility of nuclear use against a U.S. superpower in a
possible East Asia contingency. Second, as was also discussed above, leaders
can make a “threat that leaves
something to chance.” They can initiate a nuclear crisis. By playing these risky games of
nuclear brinkmanship, states can increase the risk of nuclear war in an attempt to
force a less resolved adversary to back down. Historical crises have not resulted in nuclear war, but many of them,
including the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, have come close. And scholars have documented historical incidents when accidents could have led
to war.[57] When we think about future nuclear crisis dyads, such as India and Pakistan and Iran and Israel, there are fewer sources of
stability that existed during the Cold War, meaning that there is a very real risk that a future Middle East crisis could result in a devastating
nuclear exchange.
Exts. Peace
Soft power resolves a laundry list of impacts—reestablishing values is
specifically key to projection
Lagon 11 Mark P. Lagon is the International Relations and Security Chair at
Georgetown University's Master of Science in Foreign Service Program and adjunct
senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the former US Ambassador-atLarge to Combat Trafficking in Persons at the US Department of State. “The Value of
Values: Soft Power Under Obama,” SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011,
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/value-values-soft-power-under-obama
What he hasn’t accomplished to any great degree is what most observers assumed would be the hallmark of his approach to foreign affairs—
a full assertion of the soft power that makes hard power more effective. His 2008 campaign centered
on a critique of President Bush’s overreliance on hard power. Obama suggested he would rehabilitate the damaged image of America
created by these excesses and show that the United States was not a cowboy nation. Upon taking office, he made fresh-start statements,
such as his June 2009 remarks in Cairo, and embraced political means like dialogue, respectful multilateralism, and the use of new media,
suggesting that he felt the soft power to change minds, build legitimacy, and advance interests was the key element missing from the recent
US approach to the world—and that he would quickly remedy that defect. Yet President Obama’s
conception of soft
power has curiously lacked the very quality that has made it most efficacious in the
past—the values dimension . This may seem odd for a leader who is seen worldwide as an icon of morality, known for the
motto “the audacity of hope” and his deployment of soaring rhetoric. Yet his governance has virtually ignored the values dimension of soft
power, which goes beyond the tradecraft of diplomacy and multilateral consultation to aggressively assert the ideals of freedom in practical
initiatives. The excision of this values dimension renders soft power a hollow concept . Related
Essay Boxed In? The Women of Libya’s Revolution Ann Marlowe | ESSAY Libya’s leading women are eager to join in forming a new, postQaddafi government, but thus far they have been given seats on the sidelines. The Obama presidency has regularly avoided asserting
meaningful soft power, particularly in its relations with three countries—Iran, Russia, and Egypt—where it might have made a difference
not only for those countries but for American interests as well. His reaction to the challenges these countries have posed to the US suggest
that it is not soft power itself that Obama doubts, but America’s moral standing to project it. Perhaps the most striking example of a lost
opportunity to use moral soft power was in Iran. In March 2009, President Obama made an appeal in a video to Iran for a “new beginning”
of diplomatic engagement. In April 2009, he said in an address in Prague that in trying to stem Iran’s nuclear arms efforts, his
administration would “seek engagement with Iran based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” Two months later questions arose about
President Ahmadinejad claiming victory over Mir Hussein Moussavi in the presidential election on June 12th. Within three days, there were
large demonstrations in Tehran, Rasht, Orumiyeh, Zahedan, and Tabriz. As Iranians took to the streets, Obama had to choose whether to
associate the US with the protestors or preserve what he appeared to believe was a possible channel of dialogue with Ahmadinejad on Iran’s
nuclear program. For several days, the American president deliberately refused to embrace the Green Movement swelling in Iran’s streets to
protest a stolen election—reaching up to three million in Tehran alone. Temporizing, he said, “It is up to Iranians to make decisions about
who Iran’s leaders will be. We respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran.” But it was
inevitable that the US would be scapegoated by Iranian leaders for meddling, even if it chose moral inaction. As Council on Foreign
Relations President Richard Haass wrote in Newsweek seven months later: “I am a card-carrying realist on the grounds that ousting
regimes and replacing them with something better is easier said than done. . . . Critics will say promoting regime change will encourage
Iranian authorities to tar the opposition as pawns of the West. But the regime is already doing so. Outsiders should act to strengthen the
opposition and to deepen rifts among the rulers. This process is underway . . . . Even a realist should recognize that it’s an opportunity not
to be missed.” Eventually, probably as a result of the influence of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose opposition to Iran’s leadership
she established as a senator, administration policy became more forthright. A year after the protests began, the president signed into law
targeted sanctions on the Revolutionary Guard. Yet failing to clearly side with Ahmadinejad’s opponents in 2009 represented a serious loss
of US credibility. It also failed to encourage the moral “change” that Obama had appeared to invoke during his campaign. Soft power and its
ability to strengthen the protest movement was squandered. Early and active US backing for a more unified opposition might have buoyed
and strengthened the Green opposition and helped it to better take advantage of subsequent divisions in the regime: parliamentarians
petitioning to investigate payoffs to millions of people to vote for Ahmadinejad, friction between Ahmadinejad and supreme leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and efforts by the Revolutionary Guard to assert prevalence over politics. By supporting the opposition in Iran
through soft power, the administration would not only have associated the US with the aspirations of the people in the streets of Tehran but
also advanced the objective of dislodging a potentially nuclear rogue state. I t is particularly ironic that Obama policy toward Russia should
have eschewed the projection of soft power given that the NSC’s senior director for Russia and Eurasia, Michael McFaul, is the
administration official most closely identified in his career with the cause of democracy promotion. In Advancing Democracy Abroad ,
published just last year, he writes, “The
American president must continue to speak out in support of
democracy and human rights. Shying away from the ‘d’ word . . . would send a terrible signal to the activists around the
world fighting for human rights and democratic change. . . . American diplomats must not check their values at the door.” In the book,
McFaul offers an ambitious vision linking values to stability for Russia and Eurasia: “In Eurasia, a democratic Russia could become a force
for regional stability . . . not unlike the role that Russia played in the beginning of the 1990s. A democratic Russia seeking once again to
integrate into Western institutions also would cooperate more closely with the United States and Europe on international security issues.”
But in its haste to “hit the reset button” on bilateral relations, the Obama White House ignored McFaul’s counsel. Instead of approaching
the Russians with a set of firm moral expectations, the administration has courted President Medvedev as a counterweight to Putinism
(missing the fact that rather than a countervailing force, Medvedev was, as noted in a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, Robin to
Putin’s Batman). As events would show, Medvedev offered no real obstacle to Putin’s resumption of the presidency after a hiatus as prime
minister to satisfy term limit laws. Nor, for that matter, is there any significant difference in policy between the Medvedev era and that
which preceded it in terms of issues such as the occupation of Georgian territory, internal corruption, or silencing remaining independent
media or business figures. Instead of establishing a foundation of clear principles in his reset of relations with the Putin regime, President
Obama has seen relations with Russia in terms of a larger picture of strategic arms control. He believes proliferators like Iran and North
Korea can be restrained if the major nuclear powers reduce their stockpiles, in fealty to the premises of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty. Hence, the New START Treaty was his singular focus with Russia and the grounds for his appeasement of Putinism. He seems never
to have considered asserting a soft power that would have signaled to Russian opposition figures like Boris Nemtsov—badly beaten in
December 2010 after flying home from speaking in the US—that the US places little trust in bargains with leaders shredding the rule of law
in their daily governance. The Russian security state has chosen to cooperate with the US in a few areas it has concluded are in its own
interest. It allowed passage of a watered-down UN Security Council resolution 1929, imposing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program,
and cancelled plans to sell the S-300 air defense system to the Ahmadinejad regime. It has also cooperated on counterterrorism and US
military access to Afghanistan. Yet would the United States have been unable to secure this discrete cooperation without “checking our
values at the door,” in Michael McFaul’s phrase? The United States has achieved no cooperation from Russian leaders on issues such as the
rule of law and an end to systematic intimidation and the arrests of opposition, press, and business figures, and indeed threats to American
businesses’ private property rights and safety. Leaders of the Solidarity opposition movement continue to be detained, environmental
nonprofits continue to be raided for trumped-up tax and software piracy irregularities, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in detention, and
journalist Oleg Kashin was, like Boris Nemtsov, beaten. There is no evidence of concerted bilateral pressure by the Obama administration to
protest Russian unwillingness to protect freedoms for its citizens. The lack of linkage between “realist” hard-power issues (such as
nonproliferation) and domestic values (such as the rule of law) has limited rather than increased US influence with Russia. The Carnegie
Endowment’s Matthew Rojansky and James Collins rightly conclude: “If the United States erects an impenetrable wall between bilateral
cooperation and Russia’s domestic politics, the Kremlin will simply conclude Washington is willing to give ground on transparency,
democracy, and rule of law in order to gain Russian cooperation on nonproliferation, Afghanistan, and other challenges.” Indeed, in June
2011, the undeterred Russian regime barred Nemtsov’s People’s Freedom Party from running in the December 2011 parliamentary
elections. President Obama has selected Michael McFaul to be his ambassador to Russia. Sadly, dispatching the first non-diplomat in that
role in three decades, not to mention a man whose vision of a just Russian policy for the US is at odds with the administration’s own
practice, is unlikely to dislodge this values-free approach. The underwriting of Hosni Mubarak long predates the Obama administration.
The unconditional gift of massive annual aid for the 1979 Camp David Accords lasted thirty-one years, spanning the administrations of six
US presidents. It left Mubarak to squash democracy initiatives at home and force a binary choice on American policymakers between the
Egyptian ruler and Muslim Brotherhood Islamists. Yet both before and after Egyptians took to the streets early this year to call for
Mubarak’s ouster, President Obama lost chances to exercise soft power in a way that might have conditioned the eventual outcome in Egypt.
The United States would have been much better poised to shape a transition and assist non-Islamist democrats in 2011 if the Obama
administration had not cut democracy and governance aid in Egypt from $50 million in 2008 to $20 million in 2009 (to which Congress
later restored $5 million). The outgoing Bush administration had cut economic aid for Egypt in the 2009 budget, but sustained democracy
and governance programs. Urged by US ambassador to Egypt Margaret Scobey, the Obama administration cut those programs too. Cuts for
civil society and NGOs were sharpest, from $32 million to $7 million in 2009. These steps made a mockery of Obama’s June 2009 Cairo
speech offering to “turn a page” in US-Muslim engagement. When the Egyptian people took to the streets to reject their leader as Tunisians
just had, President Obama picked former ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner as special crisis envoy. Reflecting what was actually the
president’s position at the outset, Wisner said to an annual conference in Munich, “We need to get a national consensus around the preconditions for the next step forward. The president [Mubarak] must stay in office to steer those changes.” He also opined, “I believe
President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical—it’s his chance to write his own legacy.” This legacy was not a pretty thing as the
Mubarak regime tried to resist the will of the Egyptian public with lethal force. Echoing his response nineteen months earlier in Iran,
President Obama asserted only that the United States was determined not to be central to the Egyptian story, however it evolved. When he
saw which way the truth was blowing on the streets of Cairo, the president recalibrated. Watching these developments, which had far more
to do with image than policy, Financial Times correspondent Daniel Dombey surmised: “So when the demonstrations began, the White
House struggled to catch up, changing its message day by day until it eventually sided with the protesters against the government of Hosni
Mubarak . . . Now, US officials suggest, the president has finally embraced his ‘inner Obama’ . . . The White House has also indulged in a
little spinning, depicting the president as a decisive leader who broke with the status quo view of state department Arabists.” In the March
2011 referendum on amendments to the Egyptian Constitution, forty-one percent of the Egyptian public turned out and backed the
amendments by a seventy-seven percent tally. The leaders of the anti-Mubarak protests and leading presidential candidates Mohamed
ElBaradei and Amr Moussa had urged Egyptians to turn out and reject the amendments, drafted by lawyers and judges picked by Egypt’s
military rulers, in favor of a whole new constitution limiting expansive presidential powers. The Muslim Brotherhood backed the
amendments, perhaps hoping to benefit from winning strong executive power. The “inner Obama” failed to place America squarely behind
the relatively weak non-Islamist forces in Egyptian civil society when it would have counted. Despite
large economic
challenges, two protracted military expeditions, and the rise of China, India, Brazil, and
other new players on the international scene, the United States still has an unrivaled
ability to confront terrorism, nuclear proliferation, financial instability,
pandemic disease, mass atrocity, or tyranny . Although far from omnipotent, the United
States is still, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called it, “the indispensible nation.” Soft
power is crucial to sustaining and best leveraging this role as catalyst. That
President Obama should have excluded it from his vision of America’s foreign policy
assets—particularly in the key cases of Iran, Russia, and Egypt—suggests that he feels the
country has so declined, not only in real power but in the power of example, that it lacks
the moral authority to project soft power. In the 1970s, many also considered the US in decline as it grappled with
counterinsurgency in faraway lands, a crisis due to economic stagnation, and reliance on foreign oil. Like Obama, Henry Kissinger tried to
manage decline in what he saw as a multipolar world, dressing up prescriptions for policy as descriptions of immutable reality. In
the
1980s, however, soft power played a crucial part in a turnaround for US foreign policy. Applying
it, President Reagan sought to transcend a nuclear balance of terror with defensive technologies, pushed allies in the Cold War (e.g., El
Salvador, Chile, Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines) to liberalize for their own good, backed labor movements opposed to
Communists in Poland and Central America, and called for the Berlin Wall to be torn down—over Foggy Bottom objections. This symbolism
not only boosted the perception and the reality of US influence, but also hastened the demise of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. For Barack
Obama, this was the path not taken. Even the Arab Spring has not cured his acute allergy to soft power. His May 20, 2011, speech on the
Middle East and Northern Africa came four months after the Jasmine Revolution emerged. His emphasis on 1967 borders as the basis for
Israeli-Palestinian peace managed to eclipse even his broad words (vice deeds) on democracy in the Middle East. Further, those words
failed to explain his deeds in continuing to support some Arab autocracies (e.g., Bahrain’s, backed by Saudi forces) even as he gives tardy
rhetorical support for popular forces casting aside other ones. To use soft power without hard power is to be Sweden. To use hard power
without soft power is to be China. Even
France, with its long commitment to realpolitik, has
overtaken the United States as proponent and implementer of humanitarian
intervention in Libya and Ivory Coast. When the American president has no problem
with France combining hard and soft power better than the United States, something is
seriously amiss .
US soft power maintains peace and stability
Williams 14 (Trevor, editor of Global Atlanta, “U.S. Soft Power key to Global Stability,”
Global Atlanta, 9/29/14, http://www.globalatlanta.com/article/27191/isakson-us-softpower-key-to-global-security/)//kjz
America still has an unrivaled level of influence in the world, but the key to achieving long-term peace is marrying military
strength with moves to boost education, health and economic development in conflict areas, U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, RGa., said Monday. While he sees “peace through strength” as a valid doctrine, American “soft power”
portrayed through trade and humanitarian outreach globally will help solidify stability
won through power. “Strength will get you the peace originally but it’s good soft power that keeps the peace,”
Mr. Isakson said at the Grand Hyatt in Buckhead during a speech on foreign aid hosted by the U.S. Global Leadership
Coalition. Focusing heavily on Africa, Mr. Isakson sought to debunk the idea that American influence in the world is
waning, using travel tales to support the idea that the American reputation is alive and well thanks to
the work of the U.S. government as well as corporations and nonprofits around the globe.
“It’s about telling America’s story to the American people themselves. I know sometimes we forget,” the senator said. U.S.
Visa Glitch Leaves Travelers in LimboMetro Atlanta Chamber Supports 'Open Innovation' as Key to Regional GrowthCan
Technology Fix the Air Travel Experience? Popeyes Plans More International GrowthAfter Dispute, Atlanta Loses Nobel
Summit From Coca-Cola’s clean water work in Ghana to MANA’s nutritional paste made from Georgia peanuts saving
lives in Somalia to the decision to hand out U.S.-backed micro loans to Iraqi merchants after the invasion, America is
still invested in using its strength for the good of the world, he said, mentioning multiple times the
PEPFAR program, which provides antiretroviral drugs to help stem mother-to-child transmission of HIV in Africa.
Formerly the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s sub-committee on Africa, he contrasted the
U.S. approach in Africa to that of China, framing one of the U.S.’s largest trade partners as a “competitor" on the continent
that exploits African resources and builds infrastructure but not capacity. He was also unequivocal in labeling the air
strikes aimed at debilitating and destroying ISIS in Iraq constituted a “dangerous war, the ultimate war between good and
evil.” When the U.S.-led coalition has won, it will have to provide those affected by the war the same type of
redevelopment assistance it gave Germany, Korea and Japan after emerging victorious in conflicts with those nations.
“America doesn’t bomb and leave; America stays and builds, and that’s the difference in
us and any other nation on the face of this earth,” he said.
AT//Counterterrorism is Immoral
Democracy promotion eliminates the impetus for conservatives to torture
adversaries
O'Connell 12 - Jamie O'Connell is a Senior Fellow of the Honorable G. William and Ariadna Miller Institute for Global Challenges
and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, as well as a Lecturer in Residence. He teaches and writes on political
and legal development, and has particular expertise in law and development, transitional justice, democratization, post-conflict
reconstruction, and business and human rights. (“Common Interests, Closer Allies: How Democracy in Arab States Can Benefit the West,”
Stanford Journal of International Law, Lexis Nexis, Summer, 2012) STRYKER
Western policymakers should not be concerned that democratization
in the Arab world will reduce their
ability to fight terrorism through repression by proxies . The analysis above shows why
working with repressive regimes is likely to be counterproductive in the long run,
but even in the short run its benefits may be illusory and the methods it involves are
both illegal and immoral . During the "War on Terror," the United States used "extraordinary rendition" to, effectively,
outsource torture by handing over suspected terrorists for interrogation by the brutal [*379] security forces of countries such as Egypt and
Syria. n171 If those countries become democratic and reform their security forces, this will be impossible to repeat. In practice, however,
this should not damage counterterrorism efforts. The
intelligence produced by torture and other abusive
interrogation methods has dubious value. n172 Neuroscientists have found that torture
distorts victims' memories and therefore can corrupt the very knowledge interrogators
seek. n173 Many professional interrogators believe that developing a rapport with suspects produces far better information than abusive
methods, n174 and there are innumerable examples of suspects saying whatever they think their torturers want to hear. n175
Fundamental moral principles dovetail with this practical argument. The most basic
principles of humanity forbid torture: It can cause permanent, even fundamental,
damage to its victims. n176 Torture violates bedrock international human rights law and the
domestic laws of most or all Western countries, and should never be used under any circumstances. These reasons may
explain why the National Strategy for Counterterrorism concludes that in fighting
terrorism the United States "partners best with nations that share our common values [and] have
similar democratic institutions ." n177
AT//Other Factors Create Peace
The consensus is that democracy is the vital variable—their authors are the
minority
O'Connell 12 - Jamie O'Connell is a Senior Fellow of the Honorable G. William and Ariadna Miller Institute for Global Challenges
and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, as well as a Lecturer in Residence. He teaches and writes on political
and legal development, and has particular expertise in law and development, transitional justice, democratization, post-conflict
reconstruction, and business and human rights. (“Common Interests, Closer Allies: How Democracy in Arab States Can Benefit the West,”
Stanford Journal of International Law, Lexis Nexis, Summer, 2012) STRYKER
A small minority of scholars argue that the democratic peace is not, in fact, caused by
democracy. While accepting the descriptive finding that the countries that have been democracies have seldom fought each other,
they argue that this peace was caused by factors that had nothing to do with those
countries' systems of government. They argue and present statistical evidence that other factors such as economic development, integration of capital markets, unspecified shared
interests, or U.S. hegemony during the Cold War - fully explain the lack of conflict. n146 Other
scholars dispute the evidence supporting each alternative explanation , however.
n147 [*374] The dominant view remains that one or more aspects of democratic political
structures, values, or processes contribute substantially to peace.
AT//Gartzke and Weisiger
Gatzke and Weisiger are wrong—they assume democratic states are more
diverse than autocracies
Ray 13 - James Lee Ray is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. He previously taught at Florida State University,
where he directed the International Affairs and the Peace Studies. (“War on Democratic Peace,” International Studies Quarterly, Volume
57, Issue 1, p. 198–200, Wiley Online Library, March 2013) STRYKER
In intelligent and vigorous challenges, Erik Gartzke
and Alex Weisiger, as well as Michael Mousseau, deny
that democracy has an important pacifying impact on interstate relationships. Gartzke
and Weisiger suggest that democratic states will become more prone to conflict with
each other as they become more numerous, while Mousseau asserts that contractintensive economic systems produce both democracy and peace, thus rendering the relationship
between them spurious. Both arguments , however, are insufficiently convincing to
undermine confidence in democratic peace . Gartzke and Weisiger point out that
as democratic states become more predominant, their need to cooperate with each other
against less-powerful and so less-threatening autocratic states will diminish. Also, the more
democracies there are, the more wide ranging and different their preferences will be, thus further augmenting the probability of conflict
among them. Predominating democracies in the system might also lead to more collaboration among the more outnumbered and so more
vulnerable autocratic states in the system, which will be reinforced because they have similar regimes. Thus, the distinctiveness of
relationships among democratic states would be diluted not only by more conflict among democratic states, but also by more peaceful,
cooperative relationships among autocracies. Gartzke and Weisiger devise a simple dynamic computerized model in one of their attempts to
evaluate these ideas. “A central assumption of this model is that democracies and autocracies are identical to each other except for the label
that they apply to themselves” (p. 13). That assumption implies that shared democracy and autocracy are roughly equal in their pacifying
potential. But there
is some tension between the arguments by Gartzke and Weisiger that
regime similarity is an important pacifying force and that joint democracy and joint
autocracy are roughly equal in their pacifying potential. Democratic states are
considerably more homogenous than autocratic states. In other words, the differences
among democracies are subtle compared to the stark contrasts between communist,
fascist, monarchical, military dictatorial, Islamic fundamentalist, and “personalist”
regimes (as Russett and Oneal 2001 point out). And substantial empirical evidence suggests that this diversity among
autocratic states does reduce the pacifying impact of shared autocracy , especially
relative to that of shared democracy (Russett and Oneal 2001; Bueno de Mesquita and Ray 2004; Oneal 2006). The main attempt by
Gartzke and Weisiger to evaluate their theoretical contribution is based on a multivariate model. They include
alliances and major power status as control variables. (So does Mousseau.) Their discussion
suggests that joint democracy may make alliances and major party status more likely,1
which would mean that both variables intervene in the process leading from regime type
to interstate conflict. They cite Ray (2005) in their rationale for this multivariate model. But Ray (2005) agrees with
King, Keohane, and Verba (1994:173) that including controls for intervening variables produces
misleading results .2 (That is, such control variables can wipe out the relationship between the treatment and outcome
variables, creating the impression that the treatment variable has no impact.)
Both Gartzke and Weisiger’s AND Mousseau’s arguments are incomplete
Ray 13 - James Lee Ray is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. He previously taught at Florida State University,
where he directed the International Affairs and the Peace Studies. (“War on Democratic Peace,” International Studies Quarterly, Volume
57, Issue 1, p. 198–200, Wiley Online Library, March 2013) STRYKER
So, in conclusion, I
would suggest that Gartzke and Weisiger in future research should first
acknowledge that democracy’s pacifying force may not be as fragile as their paper
suggests. Their argument implies that democratic states avoid war primarily because
they like one another (to oversimplify somewhat). But some strands of democratic peace thought
emphasize the extent to which democratic states are able to avoid war with each other
because of their superior ability to make credible commitments, or because they
are leery about military conflict against democratic states with impressive war-fighting capabilities. They
might also investigate another possible impact of an increase in the predominance of
democratic states in the global system, having to do with the possible tendency of
democratic states to behave more assertively against autocratic states. (Military initiatives by the
United States since the demise of the Soviet Union, on occasion assisted by democratic allies, to depose autocratic regimes in Panama,
Haiti, Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya might be examples of this tendency.)5 To
Mousseau, I would suggest
either that he acknowledge the extent to which his theoretical argument is similar to
liberal ideas about the beneficial impact of economic interdependence or that he address
the endogeneity issue regarding contract intensity and democracy more persuasively (if
that is possible), and develop a more distinctive theoretical theme, to go along with his clearly innovative indicator. I am not
convinced , however (to comment on one possible alternative theme), that life insurance in force has face
validity as an indicator of respect for orthodox international law or traditional notions of
sovereignty that he attributes to contract-intensive states. In the contemporary era, both China and Russia,
for example, seem to be more enthusiastic supporters of both than most contract-intensive states (especially the United States).
AT//Mousseau
Mousseau’s argument is incomplete and actually supports democratic peace
Ray 13 - James Lee Ray is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. He previously taught at Florida State University,
where he directed the International Affairs and the Peace Studies. (“War on Democratic Peace,” International Studies Quarterly, Volume
57, Issue 1, p. 198–200, Wiley Online Library, March 2013) STRYKER
Mousseau’s argument that contract intensity confounds the relationship between
democracy and peace can be valid only to the extent that contract intensity
precedes and brings about democracy (as well as peace). Evaluating the validity of such a
theoretical argument is more difficult because data for years before 1960 on contract intensity,
as indicated by life insurance in force, are not readily available. However, The World Almanac and Encyclopedia 1916 (The
Press Publishing Company 1915:339) provides data on life insurance in force for selected states in that era. It seems fair to assume that the
selected states were those with the largest totals. If one calculates the natural log of US dollars per capita index used by Mousseau to gauge
contract intensity, the available data suggest that the five most contract-intensive states in 1915 were the United States, Great Britain,
Germany, France, and Austria-Hungary. Russia and Japan were among the top ten states on this list. Perhaps at this stage, no state had
enough life insurance in force to qualify as “contract-intensive?” (If so, where is that threshold, and what theoretical guidelines would
support that choice?) In any case, these
data might suggest that all of the major participants in World
War I, save Italy, were contract-intensive states.3 They were at least among the world leaders in life insurance contracts
in force. What these data might imply about whether democracy or contract intensity comes first is not clear. But they clearly indicate that
in the early decades of the twentieth century, the
most contract-intensive states in the world fought
against each other. Mousseau (2012:200) provides a list of existing contract-intensive
economies since 1960. There are 30 of them. Eleven of those 30 were contract-intensive by 1960, so it is not
possible to establish for them without additional data on contract intensity before 1960 the timing of their respective transitions to
democracy and contract intensity. Of the remaining 19 states, 13 were, according to data provided by Mousseau and Polity IV, democratic
Those cases , then, tend to undermine Mousseau’s
argument that contract intensity typically precedes and produces democracy. (Admittedly,
that leaves 6 states on Mousseau’s list that became contract-intensive before they became democratic.) Violence and Social
Orders (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009) is apparently canonical for the “economic norms theory”
advocated by Mousseau. Since Mousseau cites that book approvingly , one might expect it to
before they became contract-intensive.
support his view that it is economic factors (such as contract intensity) that determine or shape political structures or processes. However,
in fact, what
North et al. (2009:3) say is “whether there is a causal link between democracy and
economic development, and if so, which way the link runs, has remained an open
question .”4 So, perhaps the fairest verdict is that democracy and contract intensity are
reciprocally related. To the extent that democracy tends to lead to contract intensity
(rather than vice versa), Mousseau’s claim that contract intensity confounds the relationship
between democracy and peace loses some credibility.
Solvency
Freedom Act Affirmative
New Freedom Act fails to restore US’s global credibility on Internet
freedom. The original version solves by closing SST loopholes.
Brinkerhoff ‘14
(Internally quoting Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining
Human Rights Watch, Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on
Global Internet Freedom. She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular focus on
international free expression and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global Network Initiative
(GNI), a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the technology sector. Prior to joining
CDT, Wong was the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to
the organization’s work in the areas of business and human rights and freedom of expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New
York University School of Law. Human Rights Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant
movement to uphold human dignity and advance the cause of human rights for all. Noel Brinkerhoff is a Political reporter and writer
covering state and national politics for 15 years. “With Support of Obama Administration, House NSA Surveillance Reform Bill Includes
Gaping Loopholes” – AllGov – May 26th - http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/with-support-of-obama-administration-house-nsasurveillance-reform-bill-includes-gaping-loopholes-140526?news=853242)
Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives claim they have addressed the problems of the National
Security Agency’s (NSA) notorious bulk collection of data, made so famous last year by whistleblower
Edward Snowden. But the legislation adopted to end this controversial practice
contains huge loopholes that could allow the NSA to keep vacuuming up large
amounts of Americans’ communications records, all with the blessing of the Obama administration. Dubbed
the USA Freedom Act, the bill overwhelmingly approved by the House (303 to 121) was criticized
for not going far enough to keep data out of the hands of government. “This socalled reform bill won’t restore the trust of Internet users in the U.S. and around the world,” Cynthia Wong, senior
Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said. “Until Congress passes
real reform, U.S. credibility and leadership on Internet freedom will continue to
fade.” Julian Sanchez, a researcher at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, warned that the changes could mean the continuation
of bulk collection of phone records by another name. “The core problem is that this only ends ‘bulk’
collection in the sense the intelligence community uses that term,” Sanchez told Wired. “As long
as there’s some kind of target , they don’t call that bulk collection, even if you’re still
collecting millions of records…If they say ‘give us the record of everyone who visited these
thousand websites,’ that’s not bulk collection, because they have a list of targets.” HRW
says the bill, which now goes to the Senate for consideration, contains ambiguous definitions about what can and
cannot be collected by the agency. For instance, an earlier version more clearly defined the scope of
what the NSA could grab under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which has formed the legal basis for gathering the metadata of
phone calls. “Under an earlier version of the USA Freedom Act, the government would
have been required to base any demand for phone metadata or other records on a
“specific selection term” that “uniquely describe[s] a person, entity, or account.” Under the
House version, this definition was broadened to mean “a discrete term, such as a term specifically
identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device, used by the government to limit the scope” of information sought,” according to
Human Rights Watch. “This
definition is too open-ended and ambiguous to prevent the sort of creative
interpretation by intelligence agencies that has been used to justify overbroad collection practices in the past,” the
group claims. The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute is similarly disappointed in the final House bill. “Taken together,”
the Institute wrote, “the
changes to this definition may still allow for massive collection of millions
of Americans’ private information based on very broad selection terms such as a zip
code, an area code , the physical address of a particular email provider or financial
institution , or the IP address of a web hosting service that hosts thousands of
web sites.”
The US can alter global practices that threaten internet freedom – but only
when US image is seen as less hypocritical.
Wong ‘13
Cynthia M. Wong is the senior researcher on the Internet and human rights for Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human Rights Watch,
Wong worked as an attorney at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and as director of their Project on Global Internet Freedom.
She conducted much of the organization’s work promoting global Internet freedom, with a particular focus on international free expression
and privacy. She also served as co-chair of the Policy & Learning Committee of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder
organization that advances corporate responsibility and human rights in the technology sector. Prior to joining CDT, Wong was the Robert
L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights in China (HRIC). There, she contributed to the organization’s work in the
areas of business and human rights and freedom of expression online. Wong earned her law degree from New York University School of
Law – “ Surveillance and the Corrosion of Internet Freedom” - July 30, 2013 - Published in: The Huffington Post and also available at the
HRW website at this address: http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/30/surveillance-and-corrosion-internet-freedom
Defenders of US and UK surveillance programs argue that collecting metadata is not as
problematic as “listening to the content of people’s phone calls” or reading emails. This is misleading. Technologists have
long recognized that metadata can reveal incredibly sensitive information, especially if it is collected at large scale over long periods of time,
since digitized data can be easily combined and analyzed. The
revelations have also exposed glaring contradictions
about the US Internet freedom agenda. This has emboldened the Chinese state media, for example, to
cynically denounce US hypocrisy, even as the Chinese government continues to censor the Internet, infringe on privacy rights, and curb
anonymity online. Though there is hypocrisy on both sides, the
widening rift between US values and actions
has real, unintended human rights consequences. For the human rights movement, the Internet’s impact on rights
crystalized in 2005 after we learned that Yahoo! uncritically turned user account information
over to the Chinese government, leading to a 10-year prison sentence for the journalist Shi Tao. The US
government forcefully objected to the Chinese government’s actions and urged the tech industry to
act responsibly. In the end, that incident catalyzed a set of new human rights standards that
pushed some companies to improve safeguards for user privacy in the face of government
demands for data. US support was critical back then , but it is hard to imagine the
government having the same influence or credibility now. The mass surveillance scandal has damaged
the US government’s ability to press for better corporate practices as technology companies
expand globally. It will also be more difficult for companies to resist overbroad surveillance
mandates if they are seen as complicit in mass US infringements on privacy. Other
governments will feel more entitled to ask for the same cooperation that the US receives. We
can also expect governments around the world to pressure companies to store user data locally or maintain a local presence so that
governments can more easily access it, as Brazil and Russia are now debating. While comparisons to the Chinese government are
overstated, there
is reason to worry about the broader precedent the US has set. Just months before the NSA
began rolling out a centralized system to monitor all phone and Internet
communications in the country, without much clarity on safeguards to protect rights. This
scandal broke, India
development is chilling, considering the government’s problematic use of sedition and Internet laws in recent arrests. Over the last few
weeks, Turkish
officials have condemned social media as a key tool for Gezi Park protesters. Twitter has drawn
the government is preparing new regulations that would make it easier to
get data from Internet companies and identify individual users online. The Obama administration and US companies
could have been in a strong position to push back in India and Turkey. Instead, the US
has provided these governments with a roadmap for conducting secret, mass surveillance and
conscripting the help of the private sector.
particular ire. Now
An undiluted Freedom Act is crucial to democratic accountability
HRW 14 - Human Rights Watch (“US: Surveillance Reform Advances in the Senate,” https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/29/ussurveillance-reform-advances-senate 7/29/2014) STRYKER
(Washington, DC) – The
US Senate should move swiftly to approve a surveillance reform bill
introduced on July 29, 2014, by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, Human Rights Watch said today. The
bill, known as the USA Freedom Act, is a significant improvement over a companion bill
that the US House of Representatives passed on May 22 and, if approved, has the
potential to end bulk collection of phone records in the US. “The NSA’s large scale
collection of phone metadata has deeply undermined the public’s trust in government
and is doing serious harm to basic freedoms and democratic accountability in
the US ,” said Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Senate’s bill is a muchneeded first step, and Congress should act quickly to approve it without letting it
be diluted .” Human Rights Watch had previously criticized the ambiguous
language in the House version of the bill. That version would leave broad loopholes that could ultimately fail to
end mass phone data collection, despite the fact that its sponsors say that is the central objective of the draft law. The House-passed bill also
would weaken transparency and oversight provisions in an earlier draft of the USA Freedom Act that could have improved supervision of
surveillance practices.
PRISM Affirmative
PRISM unpopular and undermines support from allies
Arkedis 13 (Jim, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and the co-author of
Political Mercenaries, “PRISM Is Bad for American Soft Power,” The Atlantic, 6/19/13,
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/prism-is-bad-foramerican-soft-power/277015/)//kjz
Which brings us to PRISM, the NSA program that collects meta-data from Americans'
telephone and online communications. I am a former Department of Defense intelligence analyst. I have
never used PRISM, and do not know if it existed during my tenure. However, I have used NSA databases, and became
aware of two ironclad truths about the agency: First, its data is a critical intelligence tool; and second, that access to
databases by non-NSA intelligence analysts is highly controlled. It's like buying drugs (so I'm told): you need "a guy" on
the inside who passes you the goods in the shadows, then disavows any connection to you. In addition to being useful and
tightly controlled, PRISM is, of course, legal by the letter of the law. Its existence is primarily justified by the
"business records" clause in the PATRIOT Act, and President Obama has argued that the legislation has been authorized
by "bipartisan majorities repeatedly," and that "it's important to understand your duly elected representatives have been
consistently informed on exactly what we're doing." Salvation from excessive government snooping would seem to lie at
the ballot box. Fair enough. But in the immediate wake of September 11, Americans questioned
little of what their government would do to keep them safe. Just four months after the attacks in
January 2002, Gallup reported that fully half of Americans would support anti-terrorism measures even if they violated
civil liberties. Times have changed. As soon as August 2003, Gallup found just 29 percent of Americans were
willing to sacrifice civil liberties for security. By
2009, a CBS poll concluded only 41 percent of Americans
had even heard or read about the PATRIOT Act, and 45 percent of those believed the law
endangered their civil liberties. A Washington Post poll from April 2013--after the Boston marathon attacks
but before PRISM's disclosure-- found 48 percent of Americans feared the government would go too far in compromising
constitutional rights to investigate terrorism. And following the Edward Snowden leaks, 58 percent
were against the government collecting phone records. Not a total reversal, but certainly trending in
one direction. This shift has existed in a vacuum of public debate. Prior to the PRISM leaks, the last time domestic
government surveillance made headlines was in very late 2005 and early 2006, following revelations that the Bush
administration was wiretapping Americans without a warrant. Despite the scandal, the PATRIOT Act was quickly
reauthorized by March 2006. The Bush administration did announce the end of warrantless wiretapping in 2007, and he
moved the program under jurisdiction of the FISA court , a panel of Supreme Court-appointed judges who approve
domestic surveillance requests. To call the FISA court a rubber stamp is an understatement. This year, it has rejected a
grand total of 11 warrant requests out of--wait for it--33,996 applications since the Carter administration. The PATRIOT
Act's reauthorization wouldn't come up again until 2009. By then, public uproar over warrantless wiretapping had long
since receded, and the year's debate played out as a relatively quite inside-baseball scuffle between civil liberties groups
and the Hill. When the law came up for its next presidential signature in 2011, it was done quietly by autopen--a device
that imitates Obama's John Hancock--from France. Shifting attitudes and quiet reauthorization flies in the face of the
standard the president has set for himself. In a 2009 speech at the National Archives, Obama emphasized the importance
of the consent of the governed in security affairs, "I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we cannot
keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values... My administration will make all
information available to the American people so that they can make informed judgments and hold us accountable." The
president's inability to live up to this ideal is particularly jarring as he defends PRISM. Following the leaks, he's said he is
pushing the intelligence community to release what it can, and rightly insists that the NSA is not listening in on
Americans' phone calls. Those are helpful steps, but should have been raised during the National Archives speech just
months into his administration, not six months into his second term. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
continues to argue that disclosure of collection methods will give America's enemies a "'playbook' to avoid detection."
That's thin gruel. First, America's enemies are already aware of the NSA's extensive electronic surveillance capabilities.
That's why Osama Bin Laden and deceased al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi used a complex network of
couriers rather than electronic communications. It's typical operational security of truly dangerous operatives. Second,
Obama stated as recently as late May that the threat from al Qaeda's core operatives has decreased significantly, shifting to
less deadly cells scattered throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The lack of public debate, shifting
attitudes towards civil liberties, insufficient disclosure, and a decreasing terrorist threat
demands that collecting Americans' phone and Internet records must meet the absolute
highest bar of public consent. It's a test the Obama administration is failing. This brings us back to Harry
Truman and Jim Crow. Even though PRISM is technically legal, the lack of recent public debate and
support for aggressive domestic collection is hurting America's soft power. The evidence is
rolling in. The China Daily, an English-language mouthpiece for the Communist Party, is having a field day,
pointing out America's hypocrisy as the Soviet Union did with Jim Crow. Chinese dissident
artist Ai
Wei Wei made the link explicitly, saying "In the Soviet Union before, in China today, and even in the U.S.,
lesson that people should learn from history is
the need to limit state power." Even America's allies are uneasy, at best. German Chancellor
Angela Merkel grew up in the East German police state and expressed diplomatic "surprise" at the
NSA's activities. She vowed to raise the issue with Obama at this week's G8 meetings. The Italian data
protection commissioner said the program would "not be legal" in his country. British
Foreign Minister William Hague came under fire in Parliament for his government's
participation. If Americans supported these programs, our adversaries and allies would have no argument. As it is,
officials always think what they do is necessary... but the
the next time the United States asks others for help in tracking terrorists, it's more likely than not that they will question
Washington's motives. It's not too late. The PATRIOT Act is up for reauthorization in 2015. In the context of a diminished
threat, the White House still has time to push the public debate on still-hidden, controversial intelligence strategies (while
safeguarding specific sources and methods). Further, the administration should seek to empower the FISA court. Rather
that defer to the Supreme Court to appoint its panel of judges, it would be better to have Senate-confirmable justices
serving limited terms. President Obama has said Americans can't have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy. But
you can have an honest public debate about that allows Americans to legitimately decide where to strike that balance. It's
both the right thing to do and American foreign policy demands it.
Other
Plan Solves TTIP
Transatlantic relations are shot—NSA transparency is crucial to TTIP
success and broader relations
Knigge 13 - Michael Knigge is a reporter in DW's English department. (“NSA surveillance eroded transatlantic trust,”
http://www.dw.de/nsa-surveillance-eroded-transatlantic-trust/a-17311216 12/27/2013) STRYKER
When the Guardian started reporting on the largest disclosure of secret NSA files in the
history of the agency in June, it was only a question of time before the information spill
reached America's allies overseas. That's because the NSA's prime duty is to monitor and collect global signals
intelligence. The agency is by law prohibited from conducting electronic surveillance on Americans except under special circumstances. In
the Guardian's first story on how the NSA was collecting the metadata of phone calls from Verizon, a major US carrier, it was clear that data
of European citizens would be involved, since the NSA's secret court order included all calls made from and to the US. But it was the second
scoop on the NSA's PRISM program that really blew the story wide open. It revealed that the agency was siphoning off personal data like
email, chats and photos from the world's biggest Internet companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo. Everyone affected
This revelation did not simply show that everyone using these services was affected by
NSA surveillance. It also made it impossible to ignore politically on both sides of the
Atlantic. But official reactions in the US were characterized by a strong focus on the leaker
Edward Snowden and the alleged damage by his revelations to US national security.
European officials meanwhile tried to downplay the relevance of the Snowden disclosures culminating in Chancellor Merkel's chief of staff
stating in August that the so-called NSA scandal was now over. Two
months and a slew of major disclosures
later, news broke that the chancellor's personal mobile phone had been monitored by the
NSA. "I think that alone would not have caused that much damage ," says Jeremi Suri, a
transatlantic relations expert at the University of Texas. "But that revelation in the context of all the
other revelations from the documents that Edward Snowden released symbolized for
many that the United States saw almost no limits on what it could do. If we would tap into the cell
phone of the German leader, one of our closest allies, many people are asking, is there anything we wouldn't
do. Are we willing do anything to support our interest?" Turning point The surveillance of Merkel's phone was a
game changer in Europe as well as the US. It forced both the White House and Congress
to acknowledge that the practices of US intelligence needed closer inspection. It also drove
Chancellor Merkel, Europe's most important leader, to publicly take a tougher stance vis-à-vis
Washington. Most importantly, it undermined one of the central pillars of the transatlantic
relations: trust . "I think the damage is actually quite significant," notes Suri. "One of the most significant
accomplishments of the United States after World War II was to build with its European partners a set of relationships were there was
presumed trust and a believe that the US was acting in their interest." Snowden's revelations, argues Suri, have eroded the "basis of that
relationship and a younger generation of Europeans that are coming of age not necessarily believing that the US is really their partner, but
perceiving the United States as a big bully with technology using its
technology to do whatever it wants. And that's a perception, once held, that's very difficult to
eradicate." Revamped relationship Overcoming the transatlantic rift will require to rebuild trust
and confidence between both partners again. A success in the current US-EU trade negotiations (TTIP)
would be the best symbol of restored trust, argues Klaus Larres, a transatlantic relations scholar at the University of
North Carolina: "If the EU and the US can really get their act together and perhaps include
some privacy laws into these trade negotiations than that would really demonstrate that transatlantic relations haven't been
damaged for good." His colleague Suri is not convinced that this will suffice. The US intelligence
services need to become more transparent , he says, so Americans and people around the
world know what they are doing. "This is supposed to be an open society and we have
in the last 15 years moved away from openness on many of these issues. We need to
build credibility and trust by being open not just by apologizing and by saying
we won't do this again." Whether that will happen is all but certain. Since taking office Obama has
instead
made a U-turn from his very critical stance on US intelligence activities.
Politics Link Turn
Plan is popular—bipartisan support
GENACHOWSKI and GOLDSTEIN, ’14, (Julius, Chairman, Federal
Communications Commission and Gordon M. “'Global' Internet Governance Invites
Censorship,” Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2014,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579471670854356630)//e
rg
The Internet is also driving innovation in health care and education world-wide, saving
lives and creating economic opportunity for millions. Innovators in Africa have led the way on mobile
health initiatives, such as texting services that send health reminders and tips to pregnant women and young mothers.
Innovators in Asia are using the Internet and technology to expand literacy and basic
skills. South Korea, for example, has pledged to replace all paper textbooks with digital learning by 2015. A
censored Internet will choke these opportunities. A flourishing and free Internet, on the other hand, will
expand them. A January Boston Consulting Group study of 65 countries found that reducing limitations on online activity,
through enhanced broadband connectivity and access, can increase a country's GDP by as much as 2.5%. A
fragmented global network encumbered by international regulatory restrictions will only
limit this potential for growth. The good news is there's broad, bipartisan support for
resisting measures to restrict Internet freedom . In 2012, both houses of Congress
unanimously passed resolutions affirming that the policy of the U.S. is "to promote a
global Internet free from governmental control." The Icann oversight transition presents a major
opportunity to build on that consensus—to preserve and further Internet freedom world-wide.