Federalism
1NC
Gridlock in congress causes a shift towards federalism now – lobbying efforts are
focusing on localities because they know they can’t get anything done at the federal
level
Scott 13 – Dylan, graduated from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. “Could Gay Marriage, Guns and Marijuana Lead to
a Fragmented United States of America?” http://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-fragmented-united-states-of-america.html
Less than five months after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut enacted comprehensive gun control legislation. At the same
time, 1,300 miles south and an ideological world away, Mississippi lawmakers considered a bill that would explicitly prohibit state officials from
enforcing any new federal gun regulations. That last measure proved unnecessary. After months of controversy and extensive debate, Congress did not
muster the votes to pass any federal law at all. The same kind of split prevails on gay marriage. Last year, North Carolina joined more than 30 other
states that have explicitly outlawed same-sex marriage. In just the past three months, Rhode Island, Delaware and Minnesota have legalized it, joining
nine other states and the District of Columbia. The Supreme Court is currently deciding how far to wade into the gay marriage dispute -- or whether it
should wade in at all. A third case: Voters in Colorado
and Washington state chose to fully legalize marijuana in last
the same day, voters in Arkansas handily defeated a proposal to allow the drug even for
medicinal purposes. The use of marijuana remains illegal under federal law; the Obama administration hasn’t taken a
position on last fall’s actions but has made it clear that federal regulations will not be enforced. This is more than just party
polarization. It is part of a tectonic shift away from federal authority and toward power in the states.
November’s election. On
While the divided Congresses that have followed the 2010 Tea Party insurgency have been among the least productive in U.S. history, rife with partisan
bickering and a chronic inability to compromise, robust action is common at the state level. Connecticut’s quick and seamless movement from tragedy
to statute is one of countless examples. In turn, ideologues
and interest groups increasingly view states as
the most promising venues for policymaking. Why waste your time in Washington -where you might pass a watered-down, largely impotent bill if you’re lucky -- when you can head to Austin or
Sacramento and advance your agenda intact and with relative ease? And while states pass legislation with an almost industrial efficiency, America, as is
often noted these days, is becoming a more and more splintered nation. Red states are redder; blue states are bluer. Take a look at a U.S. map colored
by state party control. In the upper right-hand corner down to the Mid-Atlantic, it’s all blue. In the South and across the Great Plains, you see a blanket
of red. That crimson sea begins to break at the Rocky Mountains until you reach a stretch of blue along the West Coast. In a way, we are returning to
our roots as a loose confederation of culturally and geographically distinct governments. States led by Democrats are moving toward broader Medicaid
coverage, stricter gun laws and a liberalized drug policy. They’ve legalized gay marriage, abolished the death penalty and extended new rights to
undocumented immigrants. Republican strongholds are working quickly to remove government from the business sphere -- reducing taxes, pushing
anti-union right-to-work laws and rebelling against the Affordable Care Act (ACA). They’re also pressing forward on some of their most valued social
issues, promoting pro-life abortion policies and protecting the rights of gun owners. The
divisions generate fundamental
questions about the nature of federalism. The sweeping national interventions of the New Deal and the comprehensive federal
social legislation of the 1960s have been replaced by a more decentralized approach to governance. States are openly defying federal
law and resurrecting the concept of nullification. These are not merely legal or rhetorical exercises. They are fostering real
change and real consequences for average Americans. If one bill that’s currently pending in the Mississippi legislature is upheld by higher courts, the
state will have effectively outlawed abortion altogether. In New York, meanwhile, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has introduced legislation that would make
abortions easier for women in his state to obtain. Income taxes may go up this year in California and Massachusetts; several Republican governors say
they want to abolish income taxes completely. Illinois will insure nearly 1 million additional people next year by expanding its Medicaid program under
the federal health law, while Texas is expected to leave up to 2 million people without coverage because Gov. Rick Perry has steadfastly refused to do the
same. “Polarization
has resulted in this changing relationship between the states and
the federal government. There’s a clear connection,” says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory
University. “It’s leading to gridlock at the federal level, which in turn is leading to many issues being
decided at the state level because the federal government seems to be incapable of deciding
anything.” “That’s the hydraulics of political power. Power always seeks an outlet,” agrees Heather
Gerken, a law professor at Yale University. “When Congress is no longer doing anything, people are
going to go to the states and localities.” This rebalancing of the federalist system has
permeated almost every corner of public policy, taking center stage in the most controversial
debates of the last few years. Last summer, Chief Justice John Roberts made the unexpected decision to join with his liberal colleagues
and uphold the bulk of Obamacare and its individual mandate to purchase health insurance. But on the less publicized question of the law’s Medicaid
expansion, which was supposed to require states to extend eligibility for the program to those earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level,
Roberts took a startling turn. He ruled, for the first time in the court’s history, that the federal government had gone beyond its constitutional powers
when it threatened to withhold all of a state’s federal Medicaid funding if it refused to comply with the expansion. The immediate implication was a
dramatic reassertion of individual states’ sovereignty. In the year since the court’s decision, a Southern wall of conservative states, which fought against
the ACA in the first place and have been encouraged by national Republican leaders, have decided to take this new option that Roberts legitimized and
have refused to expand Medicaid. On other issues, states have rebuffed federal policy or preempted it . The Real ID Act of
2005, mandating state adoption of what is effectively a national identification card, has been foiled in the last decade by states refusing to comply with
its federal requirements. More than 40 states have agreed to adopt the Common Core State Standards for K-12 education, which involve new curricula
and assessments developed by state policymakers, in part because they didn’t want another federal education regime after the failure of No Child Left
Behind. The distribution of medical marijuana in 17 states, paired with outright legalization in Colorado and Washington, is a clear flouting of the
federal Controlled Substances Act. Want more politics news? Click here. Such
assertiveness or outright defiance by the
states is a dramatic shift from the assumptions of federal preeminence that have prevailed
during most of the years since the enactment of comprehensive social legislation during the 1960s, which
included the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare. Some would place the beginning of the erosion of the federal model in
the Reagan administration, which introduced the waiver concept to state-federal programs such as Medicaid. But it is also a reflection of changing
public opinion: The Pew Research Center found this April that people’s trust in state and local government had settled comfortably above 50 percent.
Trust in the federal government, meanwhile, sat at a dismal 28 percent in 2012. That’s a far cry from the early 1960s, when public confidence in
Washington approached 80 percent. “People had lost confidence that states were really up to the task of dealing with problems of modern society, so
the federal government filled that vacuum,” says Ernest Young, a constitutional law scholar at Duke University. “We’re living in a new era now where
the opposite is true. People have more trust in their state and local governments than the federal government.” Coinciding with this movement toward
more state-centric governance has been the ideological polarization of the two political parties. Conservative Southern Democrats and moderate
Northeast Republicans have slowly disappeared both from Congress and from state legislatures in the last generation. The Democratic Party is more
uniformly liberal, and the Republican Party more uniformly conservative, than either has ever been. They therefore command certain regions of the
country more consistently; the turnover of conservative Southerners to the Republican Party has turned the Deep South impenetrably red. Republicans
have become a weak minority in much of the Northeast and West Coast.
But, Marijuana reverses that precedent – spills over and kills state-based
immigration reform
Rauch 13, Jonathan, guest scholar in Governance Studies at Brookings. He is a contributing editor of National Journal and The
Atlantic, is the author of several books and many articles on public policy, culture, and economics, “Washington Versus Washington
(and Colorado): Why the States Should Lead on Marijuana Policy,” March,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/3/26%20marijuana%20legalization%20localism%20rauch/washi
ngton%20versus%20washington%20and%20colorado_rauch_v17.pdf
This paper argues that the public’s preference is well grounded. Specifically, it makes three points. First, the
clash over
marijuana, far from being anomalous, is the latest and greatest in an escalating series of state-federal
confrontations on hot-button issues. If not handled with care, it could lead to legal confusion, policy
incoherence, and political resentment. Law by itself cannot decide how to proceed; there is no avoiding
making political choices which determine whether and how the federal government and states will cooperate or collide.
Second, in making those choices, a good place to look for insight is to same-sex marriage. Though the two issues are substantively
and legally very different, from a political point of view their similarities are quite striking. With same-sex marriage, a state-led
approach has been a remarkable success, particularly at containing social conflict and adapting deliberately to social change. Most of
the reasons for that success also apply to marijuana legalization. Third, letting states lead on marijuana decision-making is legally
more difficult than letting them lead on marriage, and it is politically less natural. State leadership was the default option with
marriage; for marijuana it will take hard work and a willingness to stretch. That said, the work is worth doing. Trying to impose and
sustain a one-size-fits all, top-down resolution from Washington, D.C., is likely to be too unsustainable and inflexible to succeed. II.
What Happened? And what Next? Far from being an eternal fact of life, federal
control of marijuana policy is a
relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the country’s history, the legal status of marijuana
was left to the states, 29 of which had banned it by 1931.2 That changed in 1937, when Congress began the
first of a series of escalating restrictions, culminating in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act (CSA), which not
only prohibits cannabis but places it in the same category as heroin. By that point, the federal government became the dominant
actor, with states generally following the federal template. Still, some
states found ways to push back. Beginning with
Oregon in the early 1970s, 16 states have decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use. Then,
beginning with California in 1996, 18 states and the District of Columbia legalized medical
marijuana—a somewhat oblique but still pointed challenge to federal policy, which has been met,
by the Obama Administration most recently, with an ambivalent and inconsistent federal response.3 There is
nothing oblique or ambivalent, however, about the latest challenges from Colorado and
Washington. Last November’s legalization initiatives passed by decisive margins: 55-45 percent in Colorado, 56-44 percent in
Washington. No one could doubt that the public had spoken. The two initiatives differed, inasmuch as Washington set up a more
rigorous regulatory regime; but they are similar in making the possession and personal use of marijuana legal under state law, and in
making production and distribution legal under certain conditions regarding licensure, promotion, and taxation. Despite the spread
of medical marijuana liberalization, it is undisputed among legal authorities that federal drug law reigns supreme, and states cannot
defy or nullify it. For that reason, one school of thought holds that the answer to today’s marijuana conundrum is straightforward:
just enforce the CSA. On this view, the federal government has no legal alternative but to prevent the production, sale, and use of
marijuana to the very best of its ability, and to block any state policies to the contrary. End of story.4 While that answer is indeed
straightforward, simple it is not. Although
states cannot break or overrule federal law, state law and
policy can differ from federal law and policy—and very frequently does. Moreover, Washington, D.C.,
cannot conscript states to pass laws consonant with federal law and it cannot commandeer state
resources to enforce federal law. If states want to tell the federal government, “It’s your law, you
enforce it,” they can do so, provided they do not break federal law themselves. In the United States, the federal
government employs only a tiny fraction of the officers who enforce drug laws. Federal law enforcement
accounted for less than 1 percent of all marijuana arrests in 2007.5 The Drug Enforcement Administration employs only about 4,400
law enforcement agents, in a country where, in 2008, more than 40 percent of the population aged 12 and over had used marijuana,
and 6 percent were current users.6 Legally speaking, then, the federal government cannot prevent the states from removing their
troops from the battlefield; practically speaking, it cannot enforce the CSA by itself. The implication is that it might be impractical,
counterproductive, or both for the federal government to attempt to impose a “zero tolerance” model on Colorado and Washington,
which legalize but regulate marijuana, because they or other states might respond by simply legalizing marijuana without regulating
it—almost certainly a worse outcome from a federal point of view. Instead, the federal government might better serve the policy
goals of the CSA by working with Colorado and Washington to focus federal and state enforcement on high federal priorities, such as
preventing legalized marijuana from spilling across state borders, rather than on trying to shut down the states’ experiments. How
the courts might view such cooperative efforts, and where they might draw the line between states’ violating federal law and their
refusing to support it, and how much (if any) congressional action might be needed to sort it all out—all of those are complicated
questions on which legal opinions differ, and on which courts undoubtedly will differ as well. The statute books can shape the
outcome, but they cannot dictate it. Nor, for that matter, can drug policy preferences decide the matter, though they will certainly
bear upon it. Even
if the country were united in, say, a desire to liberalize drug policy, the question
would remain of who should lead the change, frame the policy, and set the tempo. In short, there is no
alternative to the exercise of political judgment. Mature people will have to make conscious choices about how to manage social
change and conflict with a minimum of unnecessary pain and disruption. The
stakes transcend drug policy proper:
marijuana legalization, far from standing alone, is an installment in a series. In the past several
years, state-federal conflict has become a running theme of the national debate, on multiple hotbutton issues and in multiple permutations: On immigration, the federal government demanded that the states follow
federal policy. Arizona claimed a right to independently enforce federal law, even if its enforcement priorities differed from those of
the federal government. It also asserted a right to supplement federal policies with its own more stringent ones. The federal
government objected, and the Supreme Court delivered a mixed ruling which mostly favored the federal government. On
Obamacare (the 2010 Affordable Care Act), states demanded the right not to follow federal policy. They challenged the law’s
expansion of Medicaid and its mandate to buy health insurance. The Supreme Court again delivered a mixed ruling, this time
leaning toward the states. On gay marriage, states demanded that the federal government follow state policy. In suing to
overturn the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act, they claimed that Washington, D.C., had to follow states’ definitions of marriage rather
than establish a separate definition of its own. The Supreme Court, at this writing, has yet to rule. Unlike the cases of
immigration and Obamacare and the Defense of Marriage Act, marijuana involves not merely friction
between state and federal policy but something closer to outright defiance. Even in a context of
growing agitation in federal-state relations, this was putting a cat among the pigeons. Avoiding
conflict or even chaos is not going to be easy, and the outcome will affect not only drug policy but the way in
which the country handles other federal-state conflicts sure to emerge.
Immigration reform is key to food security
ACIR ‘7 (December 4, 2007 THE AGRICULTURE COALITION FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM
Dear Member of Congress: The Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform (ACIR) is deeply concerned with pending immigration
enforcement legislation known as the ‘Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007' or ‘SAVE Act’ (H.R.4088
and S.2368). While these bills seek to address the worthy goal of stricter immigration law enforcement, they
fail to take a
comprehensive approach to solving the immigration problem. History shows that a one dimensional
approach to the nation’s immigration problem is doomed to fail. Enforcement alone, without
providing a viable means to obtain a legal workforce to sustain economic growth is a formula for
disaster. Agriculture best illustrates this point. Agricultural industries that need considerable
labor in order to function include the fruit and vegetable, dairy and livestock, nursery,
greenhouse, and Christmas tree sectors. Localized labor shortages have resulted in actual crop
loss in various parts of the country. More broadly, producers are making decisions to scale back
production, limit expansion, and leave many critical tasks unfulfilled. Continued labor shortages
could force more producers to shift production out of the U.S., thus stressing already taxed food
and import safety systems. Farm lenders are becoming increasingly concerned about the stability of affected industries.
This problem is aggravated by the nearly universal acknowledgement that the current H-2A agricultural guest worker program does
not work. Based on government statistics and other evidence, roughly 80 percent of the farm labor force in the United States is
foreign born, and a significant majority of that labor force is believed to be improperly authorized. The bills’ imposition of
mandatory electronic employment eligibility verification will screen out the farm labor force without providing access to legal
workers. Careful study of farm labor force demographics and trends indicates that there is not a replacement domestic workforce
available to fill these jobs. This feature alone will result in chaos unless combined with labor-stabilizing reforms. Continued
failure by Congress to act to address this situation in a comprehensive fashion is placing in
jeopardy U.S. food security and global competitiveness. Furthermore, congressional inaction
threatens the livelihoods of millions of Americans whose jobs exist because laborintensive
agricultural production is occurring in America. If production is forced to move, most of the upstream and
downstream jobs will disappear as well. The Coalition cannot defend of the broken status quo. We support well-managed borders
and a rational legal system. We have worked for years to develop popular bipartisan legislation that would stabilize the existing
experienced farm workforce and provide an orderly transition to wider reliance on a legal agricultural worker program that provides
a fair balance of employer and employee rights and protections. We respectfully urge you to oppose S.2368, H.R.4088, or any other
bills that would impose employment-based immigration enforcement in isolation from equally important reforms that would
provide for a stable and legal farm labor force.
World war 3
Calvin ’98 (William, Theoretical Neurophysiologist – U Washington, Atlantic Monthly,
January, Vol 281, No. 1, p. 47-64)
The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling.
Plummeting crop yields would cause some powerful
countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands -- if only because their armies,
unpaid and lacking food, would go marauding, both at home and across the borders. The betterorganized countries would attempt to use their armies, before they fell apart entirely, to take
over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or starving their inhabitants if not using modern
weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for the remaining food. This would be a worldwide
problem -- and could lead to a Third World War -- but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze. The
last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. Present-day Europe has more than
650 million people. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the
North Atlantic.
Bubble DA
1NC
Status quo marijuana legalization proceeding slowly on state by state basis
stopping the bubble from bursting – federal legalization bursts the Bubble on the
industry – collapses economy
Copeland 13 (“Is Marijuana Legalization the Next Bubble Industry?”, Policy.Mic, Tripp, http://mic.com/articles/22612/ismarijuana-legalization-the-next-bubble-industry, analyst for a Washington DC-based defense company, and I hold a J.D. from
University of Richmond School of Law and a B.A. in history from Hampden-Sydney College)
Trying to determine the next economic bubble is an unfortunate reality in America’s current economic environment. It has become a
consideration when deciding whether or not to enter an industry either in a career or as an investment opportunity. However, this
wasn’t always the reality. Although economic bubbles have always existed, in the last 25 years or so — from the savings and loan
crisis to the dotcom bust to the real estate bubble — they have become more commonplace. Now that this determination is part of
any due diligence, it is vital to understand the characteristics of a bubble in order to help identify the next one. I have some of my
own thoughts about the creation of bubbles, including limited barriers to market penetration, perverse federal policy and the speedy
entry of financial resources. But for this analysis let’s turn to an expert, Hyman Minsky, and his Theory of Financial Instability.
According to Minsky, there are five elements to any bubble scenario. First, in the displacement stage, a new entity piques investor
interest. Second, the boom stage ensues as prices and participants begin to rise. The third characteristic is euphoria where investors
create justifications for increasingly higher market prices. Forth, the participants see a profit taking opportunity and money begins
to leave the market. And last, the panic sets in when prices fall dramatically and investors sell out to protect against financial ruin. I
believe the emerging pot industry is protected against this phenomenon — for now. The
most important factor
protecting the marijuana industry from economic bubble status is a conflict of laws. Conflict between
federal prohibition and state legalization measures will allow the industry to grow at a reasonable
pace, as large scale financial and insurance institutions will hesitate to support investors in a
federally prohibited industry. Although the marijuana industry is not lacking financial resources due to private and
venture capital money, creating a economic bust similar to the dotcom or housing market will require a much
larger influx of financial resources and participants. Without legalization on a federal level, that
influx is unlikely. Legal conflicts impose a scaling problem on the industry, limiting its growth.
However, in the long run, those limitations may be exactly what create a lasting dynamic. Additionally, the
incremental implementation via a state-by-state federalism approach will allow the industry to
learn from mistakes and determine best practices. Moreover, state governments will be able to study different
implementation methods, as they already differ on how to regulate a nascent marijuana industry. Federalism also has the benefit of
federal government has not yet determined how to proceed, it seems
likely they will leave this issue to the states. And by limiting the invasion of federal policy through
true federalism, there is less of a chance for broad, top-down policies to facilitate a bubble
environment. Finally, the American marijuana industry is not new; it is just legal now. For decades an illegal market has
limiting federal policy intervention. Although the
existed, resulting in some of the highest rates of pot smoking in the world. While new rules and regulations will affect the existing
market, many of the early participants will have experience and knowledge to apply to the new, legal pot start-ups. Furthermore, we
already have industry models illustrating how to produce, market and sell vice products. Both the alcohol and cigarette industry are
longstanding and thriving examples to those entrepreneurs exploring the marijuana economic landscape. In fact, the cigarette
industry already has thoughts of applying their model to this newly legal substance — although they wont admit it.
Longstanding demand, cultural knowledge and existing business models will help the marijuana
industry develop sustainably over time. Even though I don’t see the emerging recreational
marijuana industry as the next great American bubble, that doesn’t mean the industry will not experience its
share of failures. That is part of American entrepreneurialism. Limited resources, other industry examples and Federalism can only
safeguard an emerging industry so much; investors and other participants will inevitably assume too much risk and make costly
mistakes. However, I
do see an increasingly strong industry as more states legalize marijuana. But
once this becomes a federal issue and large-scale investors get involved all bets are off.
Decline goes nuclear- stats
Royal ‘10 (Director of CTR Jedediah, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction – U.S.
Department of Defense, “Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of
Economic Crises”, Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, Ed.
Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 213-215)
Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict. Political science literature has
contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour of
interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable
contributions follow. First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (1996) work on leadership cycle
theory, finding that rhythms
in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent
power and the often bloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as
economic crises could usher in a redistribution of relative power (see also Gilpin. 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the
risk of miscalculation (Feaver, 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive
environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to challenge a declining power (Werner. 1999). Separately,
Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict
among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions
and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland's (1996, 2000) theory of trade expectations suggests
that 'future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security behaviour of states. He
argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade
relations. However, if the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, the
likelihood for conflict increases, as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be
the trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states.4
Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and
Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly
during periods of economic downturn. They write: The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are
strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the
presence of a recession tends to amplify the extent to which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg
& Hess, 2002. p. 89) Economic decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess, &
Weerapana, 2004), which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce
the popularity of a sitting government. "Diversionary theory" suggests that, when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline,
sitting governments have
increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a 'rally
around the flag' effect. Wang (1996), DeRouen (1995). and Blomberg, Hess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence
showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller
(1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states
than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack
of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United
States, and thus weak Presidential popularity, are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic
scholarship positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science
scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels.5 This implied connection between
integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured prominently in the economic-security debate and deserves more attention.
The K
1NC
Linear predictions fail and cause serial policy failure
Sa, 04 – Deug Whan, Dong-U College, South Korea, (“CHAOS, UNCERTA I N T Y, AND POLICY CHOICE: UTILIZING THE ADAPTIVE
MODEL,” International Review of Public Administration, vol. 8, no. 2, 2004, scholar)
In many cases, a
small choice might lead to overwhelming results that generate either a virtuous cycle or a vicious
cycle. If future results can be clearly predicted by stability and linearity, this will eliminate difficulties in making choice. Policy
choice has been an embarrassment in uncertain or chaotic situations that do not meet desirable
conditions. As a result, most major policies revert back to the uncertainty and chaos. Though the
presence of uncertainty in policy procedures is widely known, it has not been determined what influence it wields on policy choice
(Morgan and Henruion 1990: Lein 1997: 20). Generally, uncertainty refers to ‘difficulties in predicting the future.’ Naturally, the
uncertainty here includes not simply difficulties in predicting the results of various factors and interactions, but also difficulties in
predicting different configurations of interactions caused by the effect of such interactions (Saperstein 1997: 103-107). Uncertainty is
classified into 3 categories according to source and phase of policy procedures; i) uncertainty from contingency, ii) uncertainty from
inter-dependency of constituents, and iii) general uncertainty (Tompson 1967). The uncertainty from contingency arises
when it is impossible to predict how the policy environment will change. What results is uncertainty
from the interdependency of constituents makes it impossible to predict changes in the relationship
between policy matters and constituents. Finally, general uncertainty comes from lack of
knowledge about the cause and effect relationship in policy making. The Emergence of Chaos Theory and
Characteristics Chaos theory offers theoretical explanations about the world of uncertainty. Chaos theory refers to the study of
complex and dynamic systems with orders and patterns emerging from externally chaotic forms (Prigogine and Strengers 1984). The
reason chaos theory draws a lot of interest is the highlight of; disorder, instability, diversity, flexibility and disequilibrium. This
explains characteristics of rapid social changes in modern times referred to as the age of uncertainty. The focus of the chaos theory
as a study is on complex, indeterminate, non-linear and dynamic systems. The main study object chaotic systems are chaotic which
are complicated and dynamic. The characteristics of the chaos theory are as follows: The first is its self-organization principle.
Selforganization means that the organization is determined by internal factors without any outer interference. That is to say, selforganization is a network of production processes of constituents interrelated with each other, and a system that produces the same
network (Varela Maturana and Urife 1974; Jantsch 1980). The chaos theory assumes that order and organization can make an
autogenesis out of disorder and chaos through the process of ‘self-organization.’ This also means that setting up conditions for selforganization to naturally take place can result in a reduction of policy failures. The second characteristic is co-evolution, referring to
a process in which individual entities constituting a system continually adapt to each other and change. The essential concept of coevolution, is ‘mutual causality,’ which puts emphasis on mutual evolution where an individual entity evolves entire group and vice
versa, not the evolution of the survival of the fittest. It means interdependent species in continual inter-relationships evolve
together. For example, if a mutant frog appears with a longer tongue or a frog whose hunting speed is twice as fast, it will have a
competitive advantage to the environment and subsequent off-spring will flourish with the superior gene. On the other hand, flies
will decrease in number, until a mutant fly appears that has any combination of advantages such as; faster, bad smells frogs avoid, or
becomes poisonous, subsequent off-spring will survive and flourish. This is the way frogs and flies coevolve with each other.
Therefore, chaos theory regards a variety of paradoxes as an important principle instead of ignoring it or taking it as an exception.
Third, the characteristic is the existing Newtonian
determinism theory which presumes linear relations
that
predictions of the future are on the extended line of present knowledge and future knowledge is
not as unclear as the present one (Saperstein 1997: 103107), and that as similar inputs generate similar
outcomes, there will be no big differences despite small changes in initial conditions. However, chaos theory assumes
that the outcome is larger than the input and that prediction of the future is
fundamentally impossible.3 Hence, due to extreme sensitivity to initial fluctuations and nonlinear feedback loops, small differences in initial conditions are subject to amplifications and
eventual different outcomes, known as ‘chaos.’4 Chaos is sometimes divided into strong chaos and weak chaos (Eve,
where things proceed from the starting point toward the future on the thread of a single orbit. Thus, it also assumes
Horsfall and Lee 1997: 106); and goes through a series of orbit processes of close intersections and divisions. In particular, weak
chaos is found in the limits that account for the small proportion inside a system, while strong chaos features divisions at some
points inside a system, which lead to occupation of the entire system in little time. CHAOS, UNCERTAINTY AND POLICY CHOICE
1. Review of Existing Policy Models Social
scientists have tried to explain and predict policy matters, but never have
generated satisfactory outcomes in terms of accuracy of predictions. There could be a variety of reasons for
this inaccuracy in prediction, but one certain reason is that policies themselves are intrinsically governed by
uncertainty, complexity and chaos in policies that produce many different outcomes though they are faced with the
same initial internal states, the same environments, and governed by the same causal relationships.
It’s try or die—only complexity can solve inevitable extinction
Ahmed 12 – Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development (IPRD),
an independent think tank focused on the study of violent conflict, he has taught at the Department of International Relations,
University of Sussex. ("The international relations of crisis and the crisis of international relations: from the securitisation of scarcity
to the militarisation of society" Global Change, Peace %26 Security Volume 23, Issue 3, 2011 Taylor Francis)
Complicity This
analysis thus calls for a broader approach to environmental security based on
retrieving the manner in which political actors construct discourses of ‘scarcity’ in response to
ecological, energy and economic crises (critical security studies) in the context of the
historically-specific socio-political and geopolitical relations of domination by which their power
is constituted, and which are often implicated in the acceleration of these very crises (historical
sociology and historical materialism). Instead, both realist and liberal orthodox IR approaches focus on
different aspects of interstate behaviour, conflictual and cooperative respectively, but each lacks
the capacity to grasp that the unsustainable trajectory of state and inter-state
behaviour is only explicable in the context of a wider global system concurrently
over-exploiting the biophysical environment in which it is embedded. They are, in other
words, unable to address the relationship of the inter-state system itself to the biophysical environment as a key analytical category
for understanding the acceleration of global crises. They simultaneously therefore cannot
recognise the
embeddedness of the economy in society and the concomitant politically-constituted nature of
economics. 84 Hence, they neglect the profound irrationality of collective state behaviour,
which systematically erodes this relationship, globalising insecurity on a massive scale – in the very
process of seeking security. 85 In Cox’s words, because positivist IR theory ‘does not question the present order [it instead] has the
effect of legitimising and reifying it’. 86 Orthodox
IR sanitises globally-destructive collective inter-state
behaviour as a normal function of instrumental reason – thus rationalising what are clearly
deeply irrational collective human actions that threaten to permanently erode state power and
security by destroying the very conditions of human existence. Indeed, the prevalence of orthodox IR as a
body of disciplinary beliefs, norms and prescriptions organically conjoined with actual policy-making in the international system
highlights the extent to which both realism and liberalism are ideologically implicated in the acceleration of global systemic crises.
87 By the same token,
the incapacity to recognise and critically interrogate how prevailing social,
political and economic structures are driving global crisis acceleration has led to the
proliferation of symptom-led solutions focused on the expansion of state/regime military–
political power rather than any attempt to transform root structural causes. 88 It is in this context
that, as the prospects for meaningful reform through inter-state cooperation appear increasingly nullified under the pressure of
actors with a vested interest in sustaining prevailing geopolitical and economic structures, states have
resorted
progressively more to militarised responses designed to protect the concurrent structure of the
international system from dangerous new threats. In effect, the failure of orthodox approaches to accurately
diagnose global crises, directly accentuates a tendency to ‘securitise’ them – and this, ironically, fuels the proliferation of violent
conflict and militarisation responsible for magnified global insecurity. ‘Securitisation’ refers to a ‘speech act’ – an act of labelling –
whereby political authorities identify particular issues or incidents as an existential threat which, because of their extreme nature,
justify going beyond the normal security measures that are within the rule of law. It thus legitimises resort to special extra-legal
powers. By labelling issues a matter of ‘security’, therefore, states are able to move them outside the remit of democratic decisionmaking and into the realm of emergency powers, all in the name of survival itself. Far from representing a mere aberration from
democratic state practice, this discloses a deeper ‘dual’ structure of the state in its institutionalisation of the capacity to mobilise
extraordinary extra-legal military– police measures in purported response to an existential danger. 89 The problem in the context of
global ecological, economic and energy crises is that such levels of emergency
mobilisation and militarisation have
no positive impact on the very global crises generating ‘new security challenges’, and are thus
entirely disproportionate. 90 All that remains to examine is on the ‘surface’ of the international
system (geopolitical competition, the balance of power, international regimes, globalisation and so on), phenomena which
are dislocated from their structural causes by way of being unable to recognise the biophysicallyembedded and politically-constituted social relations of which they are comprised. The consequence
is that orthodox IR has no means of responding to global systemic crises other than to reduce
them to their symptoms. Indeed, orthodox IR theory has largely responded to global systemic
crises not with new theory, but with the expanded application of existing theory to ‘new security
challenges’ such as ‘low-intensity’ intra-state conflicts; inequality and poverty; environmental degradation;
international criminal activities including drugs and arms trafficking; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and
international terrorism. 91 Although the majority of such ‘new security challenges’ are non-military in origin – whether their
referents are states or individuals – the inadequacy
of systemic theoretical frameworks to diagnose them
means they are primarily examined through the lenses of military-political power. 92 In other words,
the escalation of global ecological, energy and economic crises is recognised not as evidence that the current organisation of the
global political economy is fundamentally unsustainable, requiring urgent transformation, but as vindicating the necessity for states
to radicalise the exertion of their military–political capacities to maintain existing power structures, to keep the lid on. 93 Global
crises are thus viewed as amplifying factors that could mobilise the popular will in ways that challenge existing political and
economic structures, which it is presumed (given that state power itself is constituted by these structures) deserve protection. This
justifies the state’s adoption of extra-legal measures outside the normal sphere of democratic politics. In the context of global crisis
impacts, this counter-democratic trend-line can result in a growing propensity to problematise potentially recalcitrant populations –
rationalising violence toward them as a control mechanism. 3.2 From theory to policy Consequently, for the most part, the policy
implications of orthodox IR approaches involve a redundant conceptualisation of global systemic crises purely as potential ‘threatmultipliers’ of traditional security issues such as ‘political instability around the world, the collapse of governments and the creation
of terrorist safe havens’. Climate change will serve to amplify the threat of international terrorism, particularly in regions with large
populations and scarce resources. 94 The US Army, for instance, depicts climate change as a ‘stress-multiplier’ that will ‘exacerbate
tensions’ and ‘complicate American foreign policy’; while the EU perceives it as a ‘threat-multiplier which exacerbates existing
trends, tensions and instability’. In practice, this generates an excessive preoccupation not with the causes of global crisis
acceleration and how to ameliorate them through structural transformation, but with their purportedly inevitable impacts, and how
to prepare for them by controlling problematic populations. Paradoxically, this
‘securitisation’ of global crises does
not render us safer. Instead, by necessitating more violence, while inhibiting preventive action, it guarantees greater
insecurity. Thus, a recent US Department of Defense report explores the future of international conflict up to 2050. It warns of
‘resource competition induced by growing populations and expanding economies’, particularly due to a projected ‘youth bulge’ in the
South, which ‘will consume ever increasing amounts of food, water and energy’. This will prompt a ‘return to traditional security
threats posed by emerging near-peers as we compete globally for depleting natural resources and overseas markets’. Finally, climate
change will ‘compound’ these stressors by generating humanitarian crises, population migrations and other complex emergencies.
96 A similar study by the US Joint Forces Command draws attention to the danger of global energy depletion through to 2030.
Warning of ‘the dangerous vulnerabilities the growing energy crisis presents’, the report concludes that ‘The implications for future
conflict are ominous.’ 97 Once again, the subject turns to demographics: ‘In total, the world will add approximately 60 million
people each year and reach a total of 8 billion by the 2030s’, 95 per cent accruing to developing countries, while populations in
developed countries slow or decline. ‘Regions such as the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, where the youth bulge will reach over
50% of the population, will possess fewer inhibitions about engaging in conflict.’ 98 The assumption is that regions which happen to
be both energy-rich and Muslim-majority will also be sites of violent conflict due to their rapidly growing populations. A British
Ministry of Defence report concurs with this assessment, highlighting an inevitable ‘youth bulge’ by 2035, with some 87 per cent of
all people under the age of 25 inhabiting developing countries. In particular, the Middle East population will increase by 132 per cent
and sub-Saharan Africa by 81 per cent. Growing resentment due to ‘endemic unemployment’ will be channelled through ‘political
militancy, including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and resistance to capitalism may
lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and global market forces’. More strangely, predicting an intensifying
global divide between a super-rich elite, the middle classes and an urban under-class, the report warns: ‘The world’s middle classes
might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.’ 99 3.3
Exclusionary logics of global crisis securitisation? Thus, the
securitisation of global crisis leads not only to the
problematisation of particular religious and ethnic groups in foreign regions of geopolitical
interest, but potentially extends this problematisation to any social group which might challenge
prevailing global political economic structures across racial, national and class lines. The previous
examples illustrate how securitisation paradoxically generates insecurity by reifying a process of militarisation against social groups
that are constructed as external to the prevailing geopolitical and economic order. In other words, the
internal
reductionism, fragmentation and compartmentalisation that plagues orthodox theory
and policy reproduces precisely these characteristics by externalising global crises from one
another, externalising states from one another, externalising the inter-state system from its
biophysical environment, and externalising new social groups as dangerous ‘outsiders’. Hence, a
simple discursive analysis of state militarisation and the construction of new ‘outsider’ identities is insufficient to understand the
causal dynamics driving the process of ‘Otherisation’. As Doug Stokes points out, the Western state preoccupation with the ongoing
military struggle against international terrorism reveals an underlying ‘discursive complex’, where representations about terrorism
and non-Western populations are premised on ‘the construction of stark boundaries’ that ‘operate to exclude and include’. Yet these
exclusionary discourses are ‘intimately bound up with political and economic processes’, such as strategic interests in proliferating
military bases in the Middle East, economic interests in control of oil, and the wider political goal of ‘maintaining American
hegemony’ by dominating a resource-rich region critical for global capitalism. 100 But even this does not go far enough, for arguably
the construction of certain hegemonic discourses is mutually constituted by these geopolitical,
strategic and economic interests – exclusionary discourses are politically constituted. New
conceptual developments in genocide studies throw further light on this in terms of the concrete socio-political dynamics of
securitisation processes. It is now widely recognised, for instance, that the distinguishing criterion of genocide is not the preexistence of primordial groups, one of which destroys the other on the basis of a preeminence in bureaucratic military–political
power. Rather, genocide is the intentional attempt to destroy a particular social group that has been socially constructed as different.
101 As Hinton observes, genocides precisely constitute a process of ‘othering’ in which an imagined community becomes reshaped so
that previously ‘included’ groups become ‘ideologically recast’ and dehumanised as threatening and dangerous outsiders, be it along
ethnic, religious, political or economic lines – eventually legitimising their annihilation. 102 In other words, genocidal violence is
inherently rooted in a prior and ongoing ideological process, whereby exclusionary group categories are innovated, constructed and
‘Otherised’ in accordance with a specific socio-political programme. The
very process of identifying and classifying
particular groups as outside the boundaries of an imagined community of ‘inclusion’, justifying
exculpatory violence toward them, is itself a political act without which genocide would be
impossible. 103 This recalls Lemkin’s recognition that the intention to destroy a group is integrally connected with a wider
socio-political project – or colonial project – designed to perpetuate the political, economic, cultural and ideological relations of the
perpetrators in the place of that of the victims, by interrupting or eradicating their means of social reproduction. Only by
interrogating the dynamic and origins of this programme to uncover the social relations from which that programme derives can the
emergence of genocidal intent become explicable. 104 Building on this insight, Semelin demonstrates that the
process of
exclusionary social group construction invariably derives from political processes emerging from
deep-seated sociopolitical crises that undermine the prevailing framework of civil order and
social norms; and which can, for one social group, be seemingly resolved by projecting anxieties
onto a new ‘outsider’ group deemed to be somehow responsible for crisis conditions . It is in this
context that various forms of mass violence, which may or may not eventually culminate in actual genocide, can become legitimised
as contributing to the resolution of crises. 105 This does not imply that the securitisation of global crises by Western defence
agencies is genocidal. Rather, the same essential dynamics of social polarisation and exclusionary group identity formation evident
in genocides are highly relevant in understanding the radicalisation processes behind mass violence. This
highlights the
fundamental connection between social crisis, the breakdown of prevailing norms, the
formation of new exclusionary group identities, and the projection of blame for crisis onto a
newly constructed ‘outsider’ group vindicating various forms of violence. Conclusions While
recommendations to shift our frame of orientation away from conventional state-centrism toward a ‘human security’ approach are
valid, this cannot be achieved without confronting the deeper theoretical assumptions underlying conventional approaches to ‘nontraditional’ security issues. 106 By occluding the structural origin and systemic dynamic of global ecological, energy and economic
crises, orthodox approaches are incapable of transforming them. Coupled with their excessive state-centrism, this means they
operate largely at the level of ‘surface’ impacts of global crises in terms of how they will affect quite traditional security issues relative
to sustaining state integrity, such as international terrorism, violent conflict and population movements. Global crises end up
fuelling the projection of risk onto social networks, groups and countries that cross the geopolitical fault-lines of these ‘surface’
impacts – which happen to intersect largely with Muslim communities. Hence, regions particularly vulnerable to climate change
impacts, containing large repositories of hydrocarbon energy resources, or subject to demographic transformations in the context of
rising population pressures, have become the focus of state security planning in the context of counter-terrorism operations abroad.
The intensifying problematisation and externalisation of Muslim-majority regions and populations by Western security agencies –
as a discourse – is therefore not only interwoven with growing state perceptions of global crisis acceleration, but driven ultimately by
an epistemological failure to interrogate the systemic causes of this acceleration in collective state policies (which themselves occur
in the context of particular social, political and economic structures). This expansion of militarisation is thus coeval with the
subliminal normative presumption that the social relations of the perpetrators, in this case Western states, must be protected and
perpetuated at any cost – precisely because the efficacy of the prevailing geopolitical and economic order is ideologically beyond
question. As much as this analysis highlights a direct link between global systemic crises, social polarisation and state militarisation,
it fundamentally undermines the idea of a symbiotic link between natural resources and conflict per se. Neither ‘resource shortages’
nor ‘resource abundance’ (in ecological, energy, food and monetary terms) necessitate conflict by themselves. There are two key
operative factors that determine whether either condition could lead to con- flict. The first is the extent to which either condition can
generate socio-political crises that challenge or undermine the prevailing order. The second is the way in which stakeholder actors
choose to actually respond to the latter crises. To
understand these factors accurately requires close attention
to the political, economic and ideological strictures of resource exploitation, consumption and
distribution between different social groups and classes. Overlooking the systematic causes of
social crisis leads to a heightened tendency to problematise its symptoms, in the forms of
challenges from particular social groups. This can lead to externalisation of those groups, and
the legitimisation of violence towards them. Ultimately, this systems approach to global crises
strongly suggests that conventional policy ‘reform’ is woefully inadequate. Global warming
and energy depletion are manifestations of a civilisation which is in overshoot. The current scale and organisation of human
activities is breaching the limits of the wider environmental and natural resource systems in which industrial civilisation is
embedded. This breach is now increasingly visible in the form of two interlinked crises in global food production and the global
financial system. In short, industrial civilisation in its current form is unsustainable. This calls for a process of wholesale
civilisational transition to adapt to the inevitable arrival of the post-carbon era through social, political and economic
transformation. Yet conventional theoretical and policy approaches fail to (1) fully engage with the gravity of research in the natural
sciences and (2) translate the social science implications of this research in terms of the embeddedness of human social systems in
natural systems. Hence, lacking
capacity for epistemological self-reflection and inhibiting the
transformative responses urgently required, they reify and normalise mass violence against
diverse ‘Others’, newly constructed as traditional security threats enormously amplified by
global crises – a process that guarantees the intensification and globalisation of insecurity on the
road to ecological, energy and economic catastrophe. Such an outcome, of course, is not inevitable, but
extensive new transdisciplinary research in IR and the wider social sciences – drawing on and
integrating human and critical security studies, political ecology, historical sociology and historical materialism, while engaging
directly with developments in the natural sciences – is
urgently required to develop coherent conceptual
frameworks which could inform more sober, effective, and joined-up policy-making on these
issues.
The alternative to engage in policy analysis of complexity- key to have preferable
political results in a chaotic world
Rosenau, 97 – professor emeritus of international affairs at George Washington (James,
“Many Damn Things Simultaneously: Complexity Theory and World Affairs”, Complexity,
Global Politics, and National Security,
http://www.dodccrp.org/html4/bibliography/comch04.html)
In short, there are strict limits within which theorizing based on the premises of complexity theory
must be confined. It cannot presently—and is unlikely ever to—provide a method for predicting
particular events and specifying the exact shape and nature of developments in the future. As one
observer notes, it is a theory "meant for thought experiments rather than for emulation of real systems."18 Consequently, it is when
our panacean impulses turn us toward complexity theory for guidance in the framing of exact predictions that the policy payoffs are
least likely to occur and our disillusionment is most likely to intensify. For the strides that complexity theorists have made with their
mathematical models and computer simulations are still a long way from amounting to a science that can be relied upon for
precision in charting the course of human affairs that lies ahead. Although their work has demonstrated the existence of an
underlying order, it has also called attention to a variety of ways in which the complexity of that order can collapse into pervasive
disorder. Put differently, while human affairs have both linear and nonlinear dimensions, and while there is a range of conditions in
which the latter dimensions are inoperative or "well behaved,"19 it is not known when or where the nonlinear dimensions will
appear and trigger inexplicable feedback mechanisms. Such
unknowns lead complexity theorists to be as
interested in patterns of disorder as those of order, an orientation that is quite contrary to the
concerns of policy makers. Theorizing Within the Limits To acknowledge the limits of complexity theory,
however, is not to assert that it is of no value for policy makers and academics charged with
comprehending world affairs. Far from it: if the search for panaceas is abandoned and replaced with a nuanced approach,
it quickly becomes clear that the underlying premises of complexity theory have a great deal to offer as a perspective or world view
with which to assess and anticipate the course of events. Perhaps most notably, they
challenge prevailing assumptions
in both the academic and policy-making communities that political, economic, and social
relationships adhere to patterns traced by linear regressions. Complexity theory asserts that it is not the case,
as all too many officials and analysts presume, that "we can get a value for the whole by adding up the values of its parts."20 In the
words of one analyst, Look out the nearest window. Is there any straight line out there that wasn’t man-made? I’ve been asking the
same question of student and professional groups for several years now, and the most common answer is a grin. Occasionally a
philosophical person will comment that even the lines that look like straight lines are not straight lines if we look at them through a
microscope. But even if we ignore that level of analysis, we are still stuck with the inevitable observation that
natural
structures are, at their core, nonlinear. If [this] is true, why do social scientists insist on describing
human events as if all the rules that make those events occur are based on straight lines?21 A
complexity perspective acknowledges the nonlinearity of both natural and human systems. It
posits human systems as constantly learning, reacting, adapting, and changing even as they
persist, as sustaining continuity and change simultaneously. It is a perspective that embraces non-
equilibrium existence. Stated more generally, it is a mental set, a cast of mind that does
not specify particular
outcomes or solutions but that offers guidelines and lever points that analysts and policy makers alike
can employ to more clearly assess the specific problems they seek to comprehend or resolve. Furthermore, the complexity
perspective does not neglect the role of history even though it rejects the notion that a single cause has a single effect. Rather,
focusing as it does on initial conditions and the paths that they chart for systems, complexity treats the historical context of
situations as crucial to comprehension. The first obstacle to adopting a complexity perspective is to recognize that inevitably we
operate with some kind of theory. It is sheer myth to believe that we need merely observe the circumstances of a situation in order to
understand them. Facts do not speak for themselves; observers give them voice by sorting out those that are relevant from those that
are irrelevant and, in so doing, they bring a theoretical perspective to bear. Whether it be realism, liberalism, or pragmatism,
analysts and policy makers alike must have some theoretical orientation if they are to know anything. Theory provides guidelines; it
sensitizes observers to alternative possibilities; it highlights where levers might be pulled and influence wielded; it links ends to
means and strategies to resources; and perhaps most of all,
it infuses context and pattern into a welter of
seemingly disarrayed and unrelated phenomena. It follows that the inability of complexity theory to
make specific predictions is not a serious drawback. Understanding and not prediction is the
task of theory. It provides a basis for grasping and anticipating the general patterns within which
specific events occur. The weather offers a good example. It cannot be precisely predicted at any moment in time, but there
are building blocks—fronts, highs and lows, jet streams, and so on—and our overall understanding of changes in weather has been
much advanced by theory based on these building blocks....We
understand the larger patterns and (many of) their
causes, though the detailed trajectory through the space of weather possibilities is perpetually novel. As a result, we can do far
better than the old standby: predict that "tomorrow’s weather will be like today’s" and you stand a 60 percent probability of being
correct. A relevant theory for [complex adaptive systems] should do at least as well.22 Given
the necessity of proceeding
from a theoretical standpoint, it ought not be difficult to adopt a complexity perspective. Indeed,
most of us have in subtle ways already done so. Even if political analysts are not—as I am not—
tooled up in computer science and mathematics, the premises of complexity theory and the
strides in comprehension they have facilitated are not difficult to grasp. Despite our conceptual
insufficiencies, we are not helpless in the face of mounting complexity. Indeed, as the consequences of turbulent
change have become more pervasive, so have observers of the global scene become increasingly wiser about the ways of the world
and, to a large degree, we
have become, each of us in our own way, complexity theorists. Not only are we
getting accustomed to a fragmegrative world view that accepts contradictions, anomalies, and
dialectic processes, but we have also learned that situations are multiply caused, that unintended
consequences can accompany those that are intended, that seemingly stable situations can
topple under the weight of cumulated grievances, that some situations are ripe for accidents
waiting to happen, that expectations can be self-fulfilling, that organizational decisions are
driven as much by informal as formal rules, that feedback loops can redirect the course of
events, and so on through an extensive list of understandings that appear so commonplace as to
obscure their origins in the social sciences only a few decades ago.23 Indeed, we now take for granted that learning
occurs in social systems, that systems in crisis are vulnerable to sharp turns of directions precipitated by seemingly trivial incidents,
that the difference between times one and two in any situation can often be ascribed to adaptive processes, that the surface
appearance of societal tranquillity can mask underlying problems, and that "other things being equal" can be a treacherous phrase if
it encourages us to ignore glaring exceptions. In short, we now
know that history is not one damn thing after
another so much as it is many damn things simultaneously. And if we ever slip in our
understanding of these subtle lessons, if we ever unknowingly revert to simplistic formulations,
complexity theory serves to remind us there are no panaceas. It tells us that there are limits to how much we
can comprehend of the complexity that pervades world affairs, that we have to learn to become comfortable living and acting under
conditions of uncertainty. The relevance of this accumulated wisdom—this implicit complexity perspective—can be readily
illustrated. It enables us to grasp how an accidental drowning in Hong Kong intensified demonstrations against China, how the
opening of a tunnel in Jerusalem could give rise to a major conflagration, how the death of four young girls can foster a "dark and
brooding" mood in Brussels, how an "October surprise" might impact strongly on an American presidential election, or how social
security funds will be exhausted early in the next century unless corrective policies are adopted—to cite three recent events and two
long-standing maxims.24 We know, too that while the social security example is different from the others—in that it is founded on a
linear projection of demographic change while the other examples involve nonlinear feedback loops—the world is comprised of
linear as well as nonlinear dynamics and that this distinction is central to the kind of analysis we undertake. In other words, while
it is understandable that we are vulnerable to the appeal of panaceas, this need not be the case.
Our analytic capacities and concepts are not so far removed from complexity theorists that we
need be in awe of their accomplishments or be ready to emulate their methods. Few of us have the
skills or resources to undertake sophisticated computer simulations—and that may even be an advantage, as greater technical skills
complexity theory is not
out of our reach. None of its premises and concepts are alien to our analytic habits. They sum to a perspective that
is consistent with our own and with the transformations that appear to be taking the world into
unfamiliar realms. Hence, through its explication, the complexity perspective can serve as a guide
both to comprehending a fragmegrated world and theorizing within its limits.
might lead us to dismiss complexity theory as inapplicable—but as a philosophical perspective
2NC
Theory is a prerequisite – we need to know how to approach the world before we
approach it
Saperstein, professor of physics and fellow – Center for Peace and Conflict Studies @ Wayne
State University, ‘97
(Alvin M, “Complexity, Chaos, and National Security Policy: Metaphors or Tools?” in
Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, eds. David S. Alberts and Thomas J.
Czerwinski, National Defense University)
The role of the policy maker, whether in a domestic or an international system, is to master the
system: to be able to take actions now which will lead to desirable events, or avoid undesirable
events, in the future. Thus he/she must be able to predict the outcome of current activities: if I
do A, A’ will result; if I do B, B’ will result, etc. Prediction is the transfer of knowledge of a
system from its present to its future. The ability to make such transfers is usually based upon an
understanding of the system—unless recourse is made to auguries or direct communications
from a transcendental power. Excluding the roles of divination or divinity, we must help the
rational policy maker to understand in order to master.
It is clear that the set of metaphors which underline our thoughts and discussions about the
political world determine our responses to matters of war and peace.3 Action often
follows theory. (But purely pragmatic responses—not the best, but adequate—are often
resorted to by some societies with some success. Non-theoretical societies do survive,
sometimes.) Moreover, we also recognize that our metaphors may also shape that political
world.4 The "field of endeavor," within which we are trying to find appropriate responses, is not
itself fixed apriori; its contours may be molded by our metaphors; the topographic maps relied
upon by the competing forces may be altered by the plans and actions of these forces. Hence
policy and response are easier and more effective, the more appropriate the available
metaphors.
It should also be clear that the new metaphors will be helpful in educating that majority of
citizens, soldiers, and statesmen which have not experienced chaos and complexity due to the
apparent simplicity of the bi-polar world view of the last half-century. It may be easier to have
university freshman and military cadets read modern works on complexity and chaos (e.g.,
Gleick 1987, Waldrop 1992) than have them study Thucydides or von Clausewitz. Metaphors
also determine the social acceptability of presenting ideas publicly, thus subjecting them to
criticism and possible action. For example, without the intellectual possibility of the dissolution
of nations, i.e., complexity, few conceived of (and thus planned for) the end of the Soviet Union
(and even fewer for that of its Cold War partner, the U.S.). The new intellectual paradigms
should focus attention on the underlying world political realities—chaos and complexities which
have always been there, sometimes obscured to many, but always recognized by some.
It is important to recognize that our metaphors, just as our goals, the "fields of competition and
endeavor," and the events themselves, are constantly changing as a result of our formulating
ideas, exploring our world, and attempting to control events and reach goals. We must be careful
not to imbed our ideas and "world-pictures" in stone since the stone of the world is often brittle
and ruptures catastrophically, or flows and deforms like lava. "He that will not apply new
remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator." (Philosopher-statesman
Francis Bacon, 17th century)
The more specific the education, the shorter its shelf-life –focus on framing
questions is key
ECHEVARR 2005 (Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II is the Director of Research and Director of National Security Affairs at the Strategic
Studies Institute, US ArmyWar College, Parameters, Summer)
Accordingly, history faces stiff competition for curriculum space from other disciplines—the political and behavioral sciences, for instance—all of which
claim (more or less dubiously) to be more relevant to the task of preparing military leaders to address contemporary challenges. The
issue of
relevance, for instance, while a favorite criterion of curriculum developers, is often overplayed. As a
general rule, the greater the relevance of any particular knowledge, the shorter its shelf-life.
Moreover, the problems that plague history and allow it to be abused are essentially epistemological
in nature, and thus afflict the political and behavioral sciences as well.2 Therefore, while this article focuses on
the troubles underlying history, it should not be construed as an argument for replacing history with another equally troubled discipline. On the
contrary, despite the faults that will be discussed here, history has much to offer. But not in the way traditionally thought.
Policy education from debate is unrealistic – therefore unpredictable and useless
CLAUDE 1988 (Inis, Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia, States and the Global System,
pages 18-20)
This view of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of sovereignty, which calls up the image of the monarch,
presiding over his kingdom. Sovereignty
emphasizes the singularity of the state, its monopoly of authority, its
France wills, Iran demands, China intends, New
Zealand promises and the Soviet Union insists. One all too easily conjures up the picture of a singleminded and purposeful state that decides exactly what it wants to achieve, adopts coherent
policies intelligently adapted to its objectives, knows what it is doing, does what it intends and always has its act
together. This view of the state is reinforced by political scientists’ emphasis upon the concept of
policy and upon the thesis that governments derive policy from calculations of national interest. We thus take it for
granted that states act internationally in accordance with rationally conceived and consciously
constructed schemes of action, and we implicitly refuse to consider the possibility that alternatives
to policy-directed behaviour may have importance–alternatives such as random, reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist
behaviour. Our rationalistic assumption that states do what they have planned to do tends to inhibit the
discovery that states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do, or what they have the
opportunity to do, or what they have usually done, or what other states are doing, or whatever
the line of least resistance would seem to suggest. Academic preoccupation with the making of
policy is accompanied by academic neglect of the execution of policy. We seem to assume that once
the state has calculated its interest and contrived a policy to further that interest, the carrying out of policy is the virtually
automatic result of the routine functioning of the bureaucratic mechanism of the state. I am inclined to call this the
Genesis theory of public administration, taking as my text the passage: ‘And God said, Let there be light:
and there was light’. I suspect that, in the realm of government, policy execution rarely follows so promptly
unity of command and its capacity to speak with one voice. Thus,
and inexorably from policy statement. Alternatively, one may dub it the Pooh-Bah/Ko-Ko theory, honouring those
denizens of William S. Gilbert’s Japan who took the position that when the Mikado ordered that something e done it was as good as
done and might as well be declared to have been done. In
the real world, that which a state decides to do is not
as good as done; it may, in fact, never be done. And what states do, they may never have decided
to do. Governments are not automatic machines, grinding out decisions and converting decisions into actions. They are
agglomerations of human beings, like the rest of us inclined to be fallible, lazy, forgetful,
indecisive, resistant to discipline and authority, and likely to fail to get the word or to heed it. As
in other large organizations, left and right governmental hands are frequently ignorant of each other’s activities, official spokesmen
contradict each other, ministries work at cross purposes, and the creaking machinery of government often gives the impression that
no one is really in charge. I hope that no one will attribute my jaundiced view of government merely to the fact that I am an
American–one, that is, whose personal experience is limited to a governmental system that is notoriously complex, disjointed,
erratic, cumbersome and unpredictable. The United States does not, I suspect, have the least effective government or the most
bumbling and incompetent bureaucracy in all the world. Here
and there, now and then, governments do, of course
perform prodigious feats of organization and administration: an extraordinary war effort, a flight to the moon, a
successful hostage-rescue operation. More often, states have to make do with governments that are not
notably clear about their purposes or coordinated and disciplined in their operations. This means
that, in international relations, states are sometimes less dangerous, and sometimes less reliable, than one might think. Neither their
threats nor their promises are to be taken with absolute seriousness. Above
all, it means that we students of
international politics must be cautious in attributing purposefulness and responsibility to
governments. To say the that the United States was informed about an event is not to establish
that the president acted in the light of that knowledge; he may never have heard about it. To say
that a Soviet pilot shot down an airliner is not to prove that the Kremlin has adopted the policy of destroying all intruders into Soviet
airspace; one wants to know how and by whom the decision to fire was made. To observe that the representative of Zimbabwe voted
in wfavour of a particular resolution in the United Nations General Assembly is not necessarily to discover the nature of Zimbabwe’s
policy on the affected matter; Zimbabwe may have no policy on that matter, and it may be that no one in the national capital has ever
heard of the issue. We can hardly dispense with the convenient notion that Pakistan claims, Cuba promises, and Italy insists, and we
it is essential that
we bear constantly in mind the reality that governments are never fully in charge and never
achieve the unity, purposefulness and discipline that theory attributes to them–and that they
sometimes claim.
cannot well abandon the formal position that governments speak for and act on behalf of their states, but
We’ll link turn the political relevance arguments – neo-rationalist ontologies filter
information through intersubjective frames without investigating the underlying
assumptions that inform action
Reus-Smit 12 – Professor of International Relations at the European University Institute,
Florence, Italy
(Christian, “International Relations, Irrelevant? Don’t Blame Theory”, Millennium - Journal of International Studies June 2012 vol.
40 no. 3 525-540,)
However widespread it might be, the
notion that IR’s lack of practical relevance stems from excessive
theorising rests more on vigorous assertion than weighty evidence. As noted above, we lack good data
on the field’s practical relevance, and the difficulties establishing appropriate measures are all too apparent in the
fraught attempts by several governments to quantify the impact of the humanities and social sciences more generally. Beyond this,
though, we
lack any credible evidence that any fluctuations in the field’s relevance are due to
more or less high theory. We hear that policymakers complain of not being able to understand or apply much that appears in our
leading journals, but it is unclear why we should be any more concerned about this than physicists or economists, who take theory,
even high theory, to be the bedrock of advancement in knowledge. Moreover, there
is now a wealth of research, inside
and outside IR, that shows that policy communities are not open epistemic or cognitive realms, simply
awaiting well-communicated, non-jargonistic knowledge – they
are bureaucracies, deeply susceptible to
groupthink, that filter information through their own intersubjective frames. 10 Beyond this, however, there
are good reasons to believe that precisely the reverse of the theory versus relevance thesis might be true;
that theoretical inquiry may be a necessary prerequisite for the generation of practically
relevant knowledge. I will focus here on the value of metatheory, as this attracts most contemporary criticism and would
appear the most difficult of theoretical forms to defend.¶ Metatheories take other theories as their subject. Indeed, their precepts
establish the conditions of possibility for second-order theories. In general, metatheories divide into three broad categories:
epistemology, ontology and meta-ethics. The first concerns the nature, validity and acquisition of knowledge; the second, the nature
of being (what can be said to exist, how things might be categorised and how they stand in relation to one another); and the third,
the nature of right and wrong, what constitutes moral argument, and how moral arguments might be sustained. Second-order
theories are constructed within, and on the basis of, assumptions formulated at the metatheoretical level. Epistemological
assumptions about what constitutes legitimate knowledge and how it is legitimately acquired delimit the questions we
ask and the kinds of information we can enlist in answering them. 11 Can social scientists ask
normative questions? Is literature a valid source of social-scientific knowledge? Ontological assumptions about the
nature and distinctiveness of the social universe affect not only what we ‘see’ but also how we order what we
see; how we relate the material to the ideational, agents to structures, interests to beliefs, and so on. If we
assume, for example, that individuals are rational actors, engaged in the efficient pursuit of
primarily material interests, then phenomena such as faith-motivated politics will remain at the far
periphery of our vision. 12 Lastly, meta-ethical assumptions about the nature of the good, and about what constitutes a valid
moral argument, frame how we reason about concrete ethical problems. Both deontology and consequentialism are meta-ethical
positions, operationalised, for example, in the differing arguments of Charles Beitz and Peter Singer on global distributive justice. 13
Most scholars would acknowledge the background, structuring role that metatheory plays, but argue that we can take
our metatheoretical assumptions off the shelf, get on with the serious business of research and leave
explicit metatheoretical reflection and debate to the philosophers. If practical relevance is one of our
concerns, however, there are several reasons why this is misguided.¶ Firstly, whether IR is practically relevant
depends, in large measure, on the kinds of questions that animate our research. I am not referring here to the
commonly held notion that we should be addressing questions that practitioners want answered. Indeed, our work will at
times be most relevant when we pursue questions that policymakers and others would prefer left
buried. My point is a different one, which I return to in greater detail below. It is sufficient to note here that being
practically relevant involves asking questions of practice; not just retrospective questions about
past practices – their nature, sources and consequences – but prospective questions about what human agents should do. As I
have argued elsewhere, being practically relevant means asking questions of how we, ourselves, or some other
actors (states, policymakers, citizens, NGOs, IOs, etc.) should act. 14 Yet our ability, nay willingness, to ask such
questions is determined by the metatheoretical assumptions that structure our research and
arguments. This is partly an issue of ontology – what we see affects how we understand the conditions of
action, rendering some practices possible or impossible, mandatory or beyond the pale. If, for example, we think that
political change is driven by material forces, then we are unlikely to see communicative
practices of argument and persuasion as potentially successful sources of change. More than this, though, it is
also an issue of epistemology. If we assume that the proper domain of IR as a social science is the
acquisition of empirically verifiable knowledge, then we will struggle to comprehend, let alone
answer, normative questions of how we should act. We will either reduce ‘ought’ questions to ‘is’ questions, or place
them off the agenda altogether. 15 Our metatheoretical assumptions thus determine the macroorientation of IR towards questions of practice, directly affecting the field’s practical relevance.¶
Secondly, metatheoretical revolutions license new second-order theoretical and analytical possibilities while
foreclosing others, directly affecting those forms of scholarship widely considered most
practically relevant. The rise of analytical eclecticism illustrates this. As noted above, Katzenstein and Sil’s call for a
¶
pragmatic approach to the study of world politics, one that addresses real-world problematics by combining insights from diverse
research traditions, resonates with the mood of much of the field, especially within the American mainstream. Epistemological
and ontological debates are widely considered irresolvable dead ends, grand theorising is
unfashionable, and gladiatorial contests between rival paradigms appear, increasingly, as unimaginative rituals. Boredom and
fatigue are partly responsible for this new mood, but something deeper is at work. Twenty-five years ago, Sil and Katzenstein’s call
would have fallen on deaf ears; the
neo-neo debate that preoccupied the American mainstream occurred
within a metatheoretical consensus, one that combined a neo-positivist epistemology with a rationalist ontology. This
singular metatheoretical framework defined the rules of the game; analytical eclecticism was unimaginable.
The Third Debate of the 1980s and early 1990s destabilised all of this; not because American IR scholars converted in their droves to
critical theory or poststructuralism (far from it), but because metatheoretical absolutism became less and less tenable. The antifoundationalist critique of the idea that there is any single measure of truth did not produce a wave of relativism, but it did generate
a widespread sense that battles on the terrain of epistemology were unwinnable. Similarly, the Third Debate emphasis on identity
politics and cultural particularity, which later found expression in constructivism, did not vanquish rationalism. It did, however,
establish a more pluralistic, if nevertheless heated, debate about ontology, a terrain on which many scholars felt more comfortable
than that of epistemology. One can plausibly argue, therefore, that the
metatheoretical struggles of the Third Debate
created a space for – even made possible – the rise of analytical eclecticism and its aversion to
metatheoretical absolutes, a principal benefit of which is said to be greater practical relevance.¶ Lastly, most of us
would agree that for our research to be practically relevant, it has to be good – it has to be the product of
sound inquiry, and our conclusions have to be plausible. The pluralists among us would also agree that different research questions
require different methods of inquiry and strategies of argument. Yet across
this diversity there are several practices
widely recognised as essential to good research. Among these are clarity of purpose, logical coherence, engagement
with alternative arguments and the provision of good reasons (empirical evidence, corroborating arguments textual interpretations,
etc.). Less often noted, however, is
the importance of metatheoretical reflexivity. If our
epistemological assumptions affect the questions we ask, then being conscious of these
assumptions is necessary to ensure that we are not fencing off questions of importance, and that
if we are, we can justify our choices. Likewise, if our ontological assumptions affect how we see the social
universe, determining what is in or outside our field of vision, then reflecting on these assumptions can prevent
us being blind to things that matter. A similar argument applies to our meta-ethical assumptions. Indeed, if deontology
and consequentialism are both meta-ethical positions, as I suggested earlier, then reflecting on our choice of one or
other position is part and parcel of weighing rival ethical arguments (on issues as diverse as global poverty
and human rights). Finally, our epistemological, ontological and meta-ethical assumptions are not
metatheoretical silos; assumptions we make in one have a tendency to shape those we make in
another. The oft-heard refrain that ‘if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter’ is an unfortunate example of epistemology
supervening on ontology, something that metatheoretical reflexivity can help guard against. In sum, like clarity, coherence,
consideration of alternative arguments and the provision of good reasons, metatheoretical
reflexivity is part of keeping us honest, making it practically relevant despite its abstraction.
Linearity creates vulnerabilities and makes effective conflict resolution impossible
Beyerchen, 97 – Alan D., associate professor of history at Ohio State University, and a fellow
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (“Chapter 7: Clausewitz,
Nonlinearity, and the Importance of Imagery,” Complexity, Global Politics, and National
Security, ed. David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski, National Defense University,
http://www.dodccrp.org/files/Alberts_Complexity_Global.pdf)RK
What is the utility of thinking about war—for our potential opponents and ourselves—in nonlinear terms, especially in the high-tech,
research-forefront metaphorical terms from the new sciences? For our opponents the usefulness may be the same as it was for
Clausewitz. The Germans were underdogs to the French, and Clausewitz wanted to understand and use against the French their
linearizing blindspots. He also needed to be the champion of disproportionate effects and unpredictability, for in a linear,
predictable world Prussian resistance to Napoleon after 1807 was futile. The opponents
of the United States will be
looking for our blindspots in an effort to seize opportunities to surprise and shock us. They may also be able to
compensate for their disadvantage in military confrontations such as the Gulf War by consciously
striving to affect the political context in order to change the conduct of warfare. An understanding of the
porousness of the boundaries between politics and war can be a real weapon against those who
envision those boundaries to be impermeable. We need for our own sake to understand the limitations
our imagination places upon us. Linearity is excellent for the systems we design to behave predictably, but offers a
narrow window on most natural and social systems. That narrowness sets blinders on our
perception of reality and offers a weakness for an opponent to exploit. But if we know our limits, we can
minimize the extent and duration of our surprise, reducing its value to someone else. And an expanded sense of the
complexity of reality can help us be more successfully adaptive amid changing circumstances. By thinking more
constructively about nonlinearity, we might be able to design more robust systems when we need them. A new
form of modeling that takes such concepts as self-organization to heart allows structures to bubble
up from below rather than be imposed from above. With such tools we might come to understand better the
biological and historical processes with which we must deal. And we may come to realize how conventional, analytical
predictive techniques can themselves stimulate a self-defeating, unfulfillable
desire to control more of the real world around us than is truly possible.
Midterms
TPA impact
GOP Senate is key to Trade Promotion Authority
Dickerson 14, John, Slate's chief political correspondent, “The Best Shot at Ending Gridlock in November,” May 22nd,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/republican_control_of_congress_why_that_would_be_better
_than_the_status.html
A more substantive
change would come from Republicans having to prove that they can govern.
For the moment, partisanship provides an excuse and impediment to action. House Republicans pass legislation,
but their views never have to be sharpened or reconciled with those of their Senate colleagues. Control of both houses
could force clarity in the GOP on issues like immigration, which leaders have ducked so far, claiming they didn’t have a
trusted partner in the president. That is a dodge to keep from starting a fight in the party over a contentious issue. When you
control both houses, this kind of inaction can’t be allowed if the goal is to be taken seriously as a governing party.
Republicans would also have to provide more concrete votes on issues like health care, tax reform, and
implementing portions of Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. Republican strategists know the GOP has to shake the “Party of No” label, which
means producing actual accomplishments—that is, unless you want the governors in the GOP 2016 field using you as a foil. (Of
course they’re already doing that anyway). Republicans
in the Senate face a terrible landscape in 2016 with
24 incumbents up for re-election. Many of them—such as Florida, Illinois, Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—will be in states where increased Democratic turnout in the presidential year will imperil their
chances for re-election to the Senate. Those
GOP senators can’t run on having done nothing, and there will
be pressure to pass legislation that will appeal to a broad swath of voters. There will also be pressure not to launch
extended show trials that might make voters think the party is so obsessed with partisan point scoring that they don’t have any
the pressure on Republicans in the Senate
will lead to legislation that the president, conscious of his legacy, can sign. The first easy score would be
Trade Promotion Authority, which would give President Obama the tools to complete and sign trade
agreements in Asia and Europe. That is a key domestic priority for the president because he believes it
would boost the economy and assist his foreign policy, too. Democrats have blocked it. Education legislation promoting
answers to the problems that confront people in their daily lives. Perhaps
charter schools would pass. (It might even pass before November). And you could also imagine a pathway to immigration reform of
some kind if those Republicans who think
passing something in 2015 is key to the party’s long-term
survival came together with a president thinking about his legacy.
TPP key to solve Asian war
Kahler, 11 – UC San Diego pacific international relations professor
[Miles, University of California, San Diego Rohr Professor of Pacific International Relations and
distinguished Professor of Political science, served as interim director and Founding director of
the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies at UCSD, former fellow at the
Center for Advanced Study in the behavioral sciences at Stanford University and a senior Fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations, "Weak Ties Don’t Bind: Asia Needs Stronger Structures to
Build Lasting Peace," Summer 2011, Global Asia Vol 6, No 2,
irps.ucsd.edu/assets/001/502399.pdf, accessed 1-27-13]
Organizations designed to increase regional economic integration can enhance regional security
and reduce the risk of military conflict in two ways. If regional economic organizations increase regional
economic exchange, they should contribute to peace. Although the effects of economic interdependence on military conflict
between states remains controversial, most scholars agree that cross-border trade and investment have the same
positive effect in reducing military conflict — even conflict short of war — as democracy. A second direct effect of international
organizations on conflict has inspired less consensus among researchers: membership in intergovernmental organizations has been shown to have
positive, negative and no overall effect on violent disputes and war among their members. But specific characteristics do seem to have conflict-reducing
benefits. Preferential trade agreements, since they stimulate greater economic ties among members than non-members, appear to enhance the effects
of economic interdependence in reducing conflict. International
organizations that incorporate forums or negotiations
for intensive information exchange are more likely
to reduce conflict risk by lowering the possibilities for
misreading an opponent’s resolve or capabilities. Some may also provide an arena for negotiation and
dispute resolution. Finally, international organizations may socialize their members into habits of cooperation and new norms of behavior. Even institutions with an economic purpose may have such spillover
effects into the domain of security. But evaluating these effects is tricky. Governments may join regional organizations when they already
intend to liberalize their economies or reorient their foreign policies. Whether Asia’s new regional economic institutions will lessen the likelihood of
military conflict requires answering two difficult questions: how much do peace-inducing levels of economic exchange depend on these organizations?
how likely would military conflict be if Asian governments did not belong to them? WEAK INSTITUTIONAL ENFORCEMENT Economic
interdependence in Asia has grown by most measures to levels that rival those in europe and north America. At the same time, foreign direct
investment and cross-border production networks have driven trade integration in key sectors (such as electronics and automobiles). China is central to
these networks; its trade with Asia now represents half the trade within the region. whatever the consequences of this burgeoning economic exchange
for regional security, regional institutions can claim little credit. until 2000, APeC and the ASeAn Free Trade Area (AFTA) were the sole regional
economic organizations with trade and investment liberalization agendas. Both were peripheral to the market-driven and China-centered pattern of
economic interdependence that took off in the 1990s. The universe of new preferential trade agreements (PTAs) that populate the region may be more
likely to contribute to deeper economic integration and positive security effects. Any interdependence effects will be shared outside the region,
however: most of the PTAs concluded, under negotiation, or proposed by Asian governments involve non-Asian partners. existing agreements are
many of these
agreements are relatively “light” in their provisions: they do not aim, at least initially, at deeper
integration through the elimination of politically sensitive “behind-the-border” barriers to trade and investment. Although PTAs have been
heavily biased toward ASeAn rather than northeast Asia, where the risks of international conflict are higher. Finally,
shown to reduce the use of military force between members, the new Asian PTAs are too recent and too restricted in geographical scope and policy
coverage to claim a role in deepening regional economic interdependence. The new regionalism could have direct effects on conflict through the
increasingly abundant organizations that span the region from the Tumen river to the Mekong. direct effects on regional security, however, are limited
by institutional design. A common format, inspired by ASeAn, characterizes most Asian regional institutions. governments have been reluctant to
delegate much authority to the permanent staff of these organizations — when a permanent staff even exists. Individuals and corporations play no
direct role in these organizations. There are no regional courts, for example, in which individuals can pe tition against violations of regional
agreements. decision-making is consensual. Membership is not used to enforce policy changes on governments that want to join the club, in sharp
contrast to the european union model. ASeAn itself has begun to move away from the model that it inspired, building — at least on paper — more
formal and binding structures. The ASeAn + 3 Chiang Mai Initiative, which grew out of the Asian financial crisis, has also taken the first steps toward
multilateralization of its network of bilateral swap agreements, laying the foundation for more robust financial co-operation. The
other key
regional economic and security institutions — ASEAN + 3, the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN regional Forum
— have not introduced significant changes in the dominant template for regional organizations. Regional
economic organizations of this design are likely to have, at best, weak effects on military conflict.
Although regional summits provide a venue for occasionally engaging other governments, thin institutional cores do not promote
continuous information exchange. Diverse memberships produce organizations that lack cohesion; membership rules are not based
on common cooperative ends but rather geographical proximity. Finally, Asian regional economic organizations rarely link economic agendas or
negotiations with political or security issues. The “Asian way” of regional institutions is not unique: countries in other developing regions have the same
suspicion of intrusion from regional overseers and work to protect their sovereignty. nevertheless, the absence of links between economics and security
is distinctive. In europe, economic and security issues are integrated across a network of regional organizations, with the european union and the north
Atlantic Treaty organization (nATo) at the center. In the Americas, peace-building and economic integration have reinforced one another. In Asia,
economics and security run on distinct and separate tracks, neither disrupting nor reinforcing one another. This two-track approach prevents political
conflict from interfering with the ex pansion of trade and investment. That benefit is more than outweighed, however, by a failure to encourage political
reconciliation or military confidence building as a precursor to regional economic initiatives. given their institutional design, Asian
regional
institutions contribute little to the deepening of economic integration (with its positive effects on regional security) and are poorly
equipped to dampen military conflicts. They may provide diplomatic forums that supply credible information to potential
adversaries, but their slender institutional structures and the line typically drawn between economic and security issues weigh against a central role in
reducing conflict among their members. The global economic crisis that began in 2008 has done little to jolt the region out of its institutional rut. The
largest emerging economies in the region weathered the crisis well; their attention has been focused on expanding their influence within global
governance. non-traditional security issues — such as terrorism, infectious diseases, natural disaster response and cross-border criminal networks —
show greater signs of co-operation from regional economic institutions, but for regional economic organizations to foster peace in Asia a
new
institutional model is required. That institutional model need not resemble the highly elaborate european design. Its
sources are more likely to lie in the requirements of future economic integration rather than any promised
gains for the current, relatively benign, security environment. Two types of institutional innovations are within
reach. First, governments that agree on an agenda of deeper economic integration — tackling behind-the-border barriers to trade and
investment — could break with the existing institutional mold in favor of more binding agreements and
organizations with more authority to monitor their members and to enforce those agreements. ASeAn + 3 and the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP) are likely sites for such a move. At the same time, a region-wide organization that bridges economic and security
agendas could permit programs of political reconciliation and possible military confidence building that have furthered economic co-operation in other
regions. The east Asian Summit incorporates all of the major powers required for such an institution, although its current shapeless agenda and
informal organization would need to change. will another, larger economic shock be required to move the institutional agenda forward? Politicians,
long suspicious of strong regional authority, will need to recognize a link between economic prosperity, their success and a new agenda of deeper
regional economic integration. If
new institutional structures are undertaken to seal those regional
commitments, economics and security in Asia may reinforce one another, lowering political and
military risks to the region’s intricate web of economic relations.
Nuclear war
Eland 12-10-13 [Ivan Eland,PhD in Public Policy from George Washington University, Senior
Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute, has been
Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for
Congress on national security issues, including Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional
Budget Office, has served as Evaluator-in-Charge for the U.S. General Accounting Office, “Stay
Out of Petty Island Disputes in East Asia,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/stayout-of-petty-island-_b_4414811.html]
One of the most dangerous international disputes that the United States could get dragged into has
little importance to U.S. security -- the disputes nations have over small islands (some really rocks rising out of the
sea) in East Asia. Although any war over these islands would rank right up there with the absurd Falkland Islands war of 1982
between Britain and Argentina over remote, windswept sheep pastures near Antarctica, any conflict in East Asia
always has the potential to escalate to nuclear war. And unlike the Falklands war, the United States
might be right in the atomic crosshairs.¶ Of the two antagonists in the Falklands War, only Britain had nuclear
weapons, thus limiting the possibility of nuclear escalation. And although it is true that of the more numerous East Asian
contenders, only China has such weapons, the
United States has formal alliance commitments to defend three
of the countries in competition with China over the islands -- the Philippines, Japan, and South
Korea -- and an informal alliance with Taiwan. Unbeknownst to most Americans, those outdated alliances left over
from the Cold War implicitly still commit the United States to sacrifice Seattle or Los Angeles to save Manila, Tokyo, Seoul, or
Taipei, should one of these countries get into a shooting war with China. Though a questionable tradeoff even during the Cold War,
it is even less so today. The "security" for America in
this implicit pledge has always rested on avoiding a faraway war in
the first place using a tenuous nuclear deterrent against China or any other potentially aggressive power. The deterrent is
tenuous, because friends and foes alike might wonder what rational set of U.S. leaders would make this ridiculously bad tradeoff if
all else failed. ¶ Of course these East
Asian nations are not quarreling because the islands or stone outcroppings
in waters that have
are intrinsically valuable, but because primarily they, depending on the particular dispute involved, are
natural riches -- fisheries or oil or gas resources. ¶ In one dispute, the Senkaku or Diaoyu dispute -- depending on whether the
Japanese or Chinese are describing it, respectively -- the United States just interjected itself, in response to the Chinese expansion of
its air defense zone over the islands, by flying B-52 bombers through this air space to support its ally Japan. The United States is
now taking the nonsensical position that it is neutral in the island kerfuffle, even though it took this bold action and pledged to
defend Japan if a war ensues. Predictably and understandably, China believes that the United States has chosen sides in the quarrel.¶
Then to match China, South Korea extended its own air defense zone -- so that it now overlaps that of both China and Japan. But
that said, as a legacy of World War II, South Korea seems to get along better with China, its largest trading partner, than it does with
Japan. Also, South Korea and Japan have a dispute over the Dokdo or Takeshima Islands, depending on who is describing them, in
the Sea of Japan. Because the United States has a formal defense alliance with each of those nations and stations forces in both,
which would it support if Japan and South Korea went to war over the dispute? It's anyone's guess.
FBI Adv
1NC
No cyber-war—flawed data and high resiliency
Lawson 2013 (Sean, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Utah, "Beyond CyberDoom: Assessing the limits of hypothetical scenarios in the framing of cyber-threats"
www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19331681.2012.759059)
Contemporary planning for disasters and future military conflicts, including those in/through cyberspace,
often relies on hypothetical scenarios that begin with the same assumptions about infrastructural and
societal fragility found in early airpower theory. Some have criticized what they see as over-reliance on
hypothetical scenarios instead of empirical data (Dynes, 2006; Glenn, 2005; Graham & Thrift, 2007, pp. 9–10; Ranum, 2009;
Stiennon, 2009). But there exists a body of historical and sociological data that casts serious doubt on the
assumptions underlying cyber-doom scenarios by demonstrating that both infrastructures and societies
are more resilient than often assumed.
Zero-probability of high-level attack in the next 2 years—experts
Segal 2013 (Adam, Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and National Security Studies at the Council on
Foreign Relations, "Is the threat of a cyber pearl harbor as potent as some have suggested?"
www.cfr.org/cybersecurity/threat-cyber-pearl-harbor-potent-some-have-suggested/p30863)
The phrase "cyber Pearl Harbor" received attention when it by former defense secretary Leon E. Panetta in a speech about
U.S. vulnerability to cyberwarfare threats. It is best understood as an effort to shape the domestic political debate
and as a description of a potential future scenario, rather than as an accurate description of the cybersecurity threat.
The most pressing cyber threat is not likely to be a single, sudden attack that cripples the United States.
Such attacks are probably limited to sophisticated state actors; they involve elaborate intelligence preparation, great
uncertainty for the attacker, and are subject to some deterrence. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.
testified that there was only a "remote chance" of "a major cyberattack against U.S. critical
infrastructure systems during the next two years that would result in long-term, wide-scale disruption of
services."
New military doctrine means no A2AD threat
Greenert 2012 (Jonathan, Chief of Naval Operations, 5/10/12, “Projecting Power, Assuring Access,”
http://cno.navylive.dodlive.mil/2012/05/10/projecting-power-assuring-access/)
There’s been attention recently about closing an international strait using, among other means, mines, fast
boats, cruise missiles and mini-subs. These weapons are all elements of what we call an “Anti-Access
/Area Denial (A2AD)” strategy. Keeping with my tenet of “Warfighting First,” I want to highlight for you how the Navy and Air
Force have been planning to deal with A2AD threats like this today and into the future.¶ A goal of an
A2AD strategy is to make others believe it can close off international airspace or waterways and that
U.S. military forces will not be able (or willing to pay the cost) to reopen those areas or come to the aid of our
allies and partners. In peacetime, this gives the country with the A2AD weapons leverage over their neighbors and reduces U.S.
influence. In wartime, A2AD capabilities can make U.S. power projection more difficult. The areas where A2AD threats
are most consequential are what I call “strategic maritime crossroads.” These include areas around the Straits of Hormuz and Gibraltar, Suez
Canal, Panama Canal or Malacca Strait – but strategic crossroads can also exist in the air, on land, and in cyberspace.¶ To
counter these
strategies and assure U.S. freedom of action, Navy and Air Force spearheaded a comprehensive study,
which included Army and Marine Corps participation, to bring forward a concept called Air Sea Battle (ASB). This concept
identifies how we will defeat A2AD capabilities such as cyber attack, mines, submarines, cruise and
ballistic missiles, and air defense systems and, where applicable, “natural access denial” such as weather, pollution, natural
disaster, etc. The concept also describes what we will need to do these operations, especially as the threats improve due to technological
advancements.¶ Air-Sea
Battle relies on tightly coordinated operations across domains (air, land, maritime, undersea,
space and cyberspace) to defeat A2AD capabilities, such as a submarine striking air defenses in support of Air
Force bombers, Air Force stealth fighters destroying a radar site to prevent cruise missile attacks on
Navy ships, or a Navy cryptologic technician (CT) confusing a radar system to allow an Air Force UAV to
attack an enemy command center. This level of real-time coordination requires new approaches to developing systems, planning
operations, and conducting command and control.¶ By working across domains, Air-Sea Battle takes advantage of unique U.S.
advantages in global reach (long-range tankers, nuclear-powered carriers), and stealth above (F-22 and
B-2) and below (SSN, SSGN) the sea. Putting Air Force and Navy capabilities together also creates new
combinations of systems, or “kill-chains”, for warfighting operations that can add redundancy or make us
more efficient. For example, a threat cruise missile could be detected by an Air Force E-3 AWACS or Navy E-2D Hawkeye, and if we invest
in the right data links, either of them could cue an Air Force F-22, Aegis ship or Navy F/A-18 to engage the missile. This provides more “paths”
we can follow to destroy the missile.¶ Using these integrated air and naval forces, the Air
Sea Battle concept executes three
main lines of effort:¶ Disrupt an adversary’s command, control, communications, computers and intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance (C4ISR) – this reduces the adversary’s ability to find or target us with large raids; they will have to
spread out their attacks to all our potential locations.¶ Destroy adversary weapons launch systems – To have sustained access
to international seas and skies, we will eventually need to destroy the launchers on land, sea and in the air.¶ Defeat adversary
weapons – until we destroy the launchers, our forces will kinetically or non-kinetically prevent the weapons launched at us from getting a
hit.¶ We are using the Air Sea Battle concept to guide decisions in procurement, doctrine, organization,
training, leadership, personnel and facilities. Our budgets for FY11, FY12 and now FY13 reflect hard choices that support AirSea Battle. In some cases we accepted reductions in capacity to ensure the needed capabilities were retained.
Defenses are sufficient
Rid 12 – a Reader in War Studies at King’s College London. He also is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations in the School
for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, DC. In 2009/2010, Rid was a visiting scholar at the Hebrew University
and the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2009 he worked at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the RAND Corporation in Washington, and at
the Institut français des relations internationales in Paris. Rid wrote his first book and thesis at the Berlin-based Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik,
Germany’s major government-funded foreign policy think tank. Rid holds a PhD from the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (Thomas, March/April,
“Think Again: Cyberwar” http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/cyberwar?page=0,6) Jacome
"Cyberattacks Are Becoming Easier."
Just the opposite. U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper warned last year that the volume of malicious software on American
networks had more than tripled since 2009 and that more than 60,000 pieces of malware are now discovered every day. The United States, he said, is
undergoing "a phenomenon known as 'convergence,' which amplifies the opportunity for disruptive cyberattacks, including against physical
infrastructures." ("Digital convergence" is a snazzy term for a simple thing: more and more devices able to talk to each other, and formerly separate
industries and activities able to work together.)
Just because there's more malware, however, doesn't mean that attacks are becoming easier. In fact, potentially
damaging or lifethreatening cyberattacks should be more difficult to pull off. Why? Sensitive systems generally
have built-in redundancy and safety systems, meaning an attacker's likely objective will not be to
shut down a system, since merely forcing the shutdown of one control system, say a power plant,
could trigger a backup and cause operators to start looking for the bug. To work as an effective
weapon, malware would have to influence an active process -- but not bring it to a screeching
halt. If the malicious activity extends over a lengthy period, it has to remain stealthy. That's a
more difficult trick than hitting the virtual off-button.
Take Stuxnet, the worm that sabotaged Iran's nuclear program in 2010. It didn't just crudely shut down the centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility;
rather, the worm subtly manipulated the system. Stuxnet stealthily infiltrated the plant's networks, then hopped onto the protected control systems,
intercepted input values from sensors, recorded these data, and then provided the legitimate controller code with pre-recorded fake input signals,
according to researchers who have studied the worm. Its objective was not just to fool operators in a control room, but also to circumvent digital safety
and monitoring systems so it could secretly manipulate the actual processes.
Building and deploying Stuxnet required extremely detailed intelligence about the systems
it was supposed to compromise, and the same will be true for other dangerous cyberweapons. Yes,
"convergence," standardization, and sloppy defense of control-systems software could increase the risk of generic
attacks, but the same trend has also caused defenses against the most coveted targets to improve
steadily and has made reprogramming highly specific installations on legacy systems more
complex, not less.
2NC
More ev – no motive or impact
Gartzke 13 – Erik Gartzke is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, and Professor of Government at
the University of Essex. (“The Myth of Cyberwar: Bringing War in Cyberspace Back Down to Earth”, International Security 38.2, Fall 2013, Project
Muse)
The terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, generated a sense of insecurity in the Western world: How can
The temptation
has been both to treat terrorism as an existential threat (because it is frightening) and to assume that the
best response is a vigorous defense. Yet, as I have argued, one of the most effective mechanisms of protection is not to remove
governments protect their citizens in an age where the enemy is concealed and where an attack may come at any time or place?
capabilities, but to puncture resolve, foremost by ensuring adversaries that their objectives will not be realized. A vault does less to deter bank robbers
than the presence of countermeasures (die packs, numbered bills) that deny criminals the fruit of their plunder, even when they successfully complete
the crime. Terrorism
is a marginal business, not because airports and diplomats are too well
protected or because guns or bombs are hard to come by, but because most people, even if very
unhappy, do not believe that bombings, hijackings, or assassinations will effect positive change.
Incapable of achieving their objectives directly, terrorists seek to mobilize fear and to cause overreaction,
mechanisms that mobilize the targets of terror to assist in accomplishing terrorist objectives.
The resort to cyberwar by terrorists does not imply that cyberterrorism is an
important threat to national security, any more than the appeal of the lottery to the poor or financially desperate implies
that the odds of winning are inversely tied to one’s income. Desperation leads to desperate measures, an indication in
fact that such measures probably will not succeed. In this sense, the rise of cyberterrorism may say more about rigidity and
impotence between agent and structure than about either in isolation. Cyberterrorism may be relatively ineffective, not unlike
terrorism generally. Nevertheless, terrorists may [End Page 68] adopt cyberwar even though internet attacks are unlikely to sway national policies or
public opinion. The
adoption of a particular method of attack by terrorists does not mean that their
actions represent a critical threat, any more than crime and corruption are considered issues of
national security. Most societies treat the latter activities as distinct from national security, not because they are not important or fail to harm
people, but because they do not directly threaten the state. Unless attackers have the ability to prosecute temporary advantages through physical force,
it is not clear whether cyberterrorism requires an elaborate or concerted national security response.
Terrorism is a form of compellence. Lacking the ability to impose their will on others, terrorists rely on the
prospect of harm to influence a target’s behavior. Indeed, because their ability to harm is limited, the terrorist
relies on psychology (fear and uncertainty) to multiply the impact of relatively finite capabilities
on opposing populations or states. Cyberwar is arguably especially poorly suited to the task of
fomenting terror. In particular, in addition to the problems in credibly threatening cyberattacks that have already been discussed, it is
difficult to see how internet attacks will be able to instill the quality of fear needed to magnify
the terrorist’s actions. How terrifying is a cyberattack? No one will be happy when the power
goes out or when one’s bank account is locked down, but attacks of this type evoke feelings of
anger, frustration, even resignation, not terror. Terrorism relies on generating a particularly
visceral emotion (the “terror” in terrorist), one not likely to be effected through the actions of
cyberwarriors, at least not directly. The old journalistic adage that “if it bleeds, it leads” implies the need
for graphic trauma and lurid imagery. The very attributes that make cyberwar appealing in the abstract—the sanitary
nature of interaction, the lack of exposure to direct harm, and strikes from remote locations—all
conspire to make cyberterrorism less than terrifying. White collar terrorists are probably not going to prove any more
effective, and perhaps may prove less, at shaping hearts and minds than the traditional model.
This is even more the case with long-duration, low-intensity conflicts that are a key component of both non-Western attempts at resistance and
Western efforts to protect the status quo international order. From
the perspective of the insurgent, asymmetric
warfare has never been about attacking to diminish an opponent’s strengths, but is instead
focused on maximizing one’s own strengths by targeting enemy weaknesses.65 Insurgency seeks out kinetic
close [End Page 69] physical combat where sophisticated technology is at its least effective (and decisive). Damaging the technology may draw an
enemy into direct contact, but it might also cause that enemy to withdraw and reschedule operations. Mobility dominates every battlefield for this very
reason. Internet
attacks in the midst of close contact make little sense, as it is here that the
comparative advantage of cyberwar (distance and asymmetry) is least potent. The ability of internet-dependent armies to
perform in superior ways on existing dimensions means that this is generally a process of leveling, not revolution.
Air gaps solve
Green 02 – Joshua is an Editor at the Washington Monthly. (“The Myth of Cyberterrorism”, November,
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0211.green.html)
When ordinary people imagine cyberterrorism, they tend to think along Hollywood plot lines,
doomsday scenarios in which terrorists hijack nuclear weapons, airliners, or military computers
from halfway around the world. Given the colorful history of federal boondoggles--billion-dollar weapons systems that misfire, $600
toilet seats--that's an understandable concern. But, with few exceptions, it's not one that applies to preparedness for a cyberattack . "The
government is miles ahead of the private sector when it comes to cybersecurity," says Michael Cheek, director of
intelligence for iDefense, a Virginia-based computer security company with government and private-sector clients. "Particularly the most
sensitive military systems." Serious effort and plain good fortune have combined to bring this
about. Take nuclear weapons. The biggest fallacy about their vulnerability, promoted in action
thrillers like WarGames, is that they're designed for remote operation. "[The movie] is premised on
the assumption that there's a modem bank hanging on the side of the computer that controls the
missiles," says Martin Libicki, a defense analyst at the RAND Corporation. "I assure you, there isn't." Rather, nuclear
weapons and other sensitive military systems enjoy the most basic form of Internet security: they're
"air-gapped," meaning that they're not physically connected to the Internet and are
therefore inaccessible to outside hackers. (Nuclear weapons also contain "permissive action links," mechanisms to prevent
weapons from being armed without inputting codes carried by the president.) A retired military official was somewhat indignant at the mere
suggestion: "As a general principle, we've been looking at this thing for 20 years. What cave have you been living in if you haven't considered this
[threat]?" When
it comes to cyberthreats, the Defense Department has been particularly vigilant
to protect key systems by isolating them from the Net and even from the Pentagon's internal
network. All new software must be submitted to the National Security Agency for security testing.
"Terrorists could not gain control of our spacecraft, nuclear weapons, or any other type of highconsequence asset," says Air Force Chief Information Officer John Gilligan. For more than a year, Pentagon CIO John Stenbit has enforced a
moratorium on new wireless networks, which are often easy to hack into, as well as common wireless devices such as PDAs, BlackBerrys, and even
wireless or infrared copiers and faxes.
There is a cyber-industrial complex
Brito and Watkins 11 – Jerry is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Tate is a Research
Associate at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. (“Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy”,
April 26, 2011, http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/publication/110421-cybersecurity.pdf)
B. Cyber-Industrial Complex An
industrial complex reminiscent of the Cold War’s may be emerging in
cybersecurity today. Some serious threats may exist, but we have also seen evidence of threat inflation. Alarm raised
over potential cyber threats has led to a cyber industry build-up and political competition over cyber pork. 1. Build-up In many cases, those
now inflating the scope and probability of cyber threats might well benefit from increased
regulation and more government spending on information security. Cybersecurity is a big and
booming industry.163 The U.S. government is expected to spend $10.5 billion per year on information security by 2015, and analysts have
estimated the worldwide market to be as much as $140 billion per year.164 The Department of Defense has also said it is seeking more than $3.2 billion
in cybersecurity funding for 2012.165 In recent years, in addition to traditional information security providers like MacAfee, Symantec, and Checkpoint,
defense contractors and consulting firms have recognized lucrative opportunities in
cybersecurity. 166 To weather probable cuts on traditional defense spending, and to take advantage of the growing market, these firms
have positioned themselves to compete with information security firms for government
contracts.167 Lockheed Martin, Boeing, L-3 Communications, SAIC, and BAE Systems have all
launched cybersecurity business divisions in recent years.168 Other traditional defense
contractors, like Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and ManTech International, have also invested
in information security products and services.169 Such investments appear to have positioned defense firms well. In 2009,
the top 10 information technology federal contractors included Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, SAIC, L-3
Communications, and Booz Allen Hamilton.170 Traditional
IT firms also see more opportunities to profit from
cybersecurity business in both the public and private sectors.171 Earlier this year, a software security company
executive noted “a very large rise in interest in spending on computer security by the government.”172 And as one IT market analyst put it: “It’s a
cyber war and we’re fighting it. In order to fight it, you need to spend more money, and some of
the core beneficiaries of that trend will be the security software companies.”173 Some companies from
diverse industries have also combined forces in the cybersecurity buildup. In 2009, a combination of defense, security, and tech companies, including
Lockheed, McAfee, Symantec, Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Juniper Networks, and Microsoft, formed a cybersecurity technology alliance to
study threats and innovate solutions.174 IT lobbyists, too, have looked forward to cybersecurity budget increases, to the dismay of at least one executive
at a small tech firm, who claimed, “Money
gets spent on the vendors who spend millions lobbying
Congress.”175 There are serious real online threats, and security firms, government agencies, the military, and private companies clearly must
invest to protect against such threats. But as with the Cold War bomber and missile gap frenzies, we must be wary of parties with
vested interests exaggerating threats, leading to unjustified and superfluous defense spending in
the name of national security. 2. Cyber Pork Private firms are not the only ones to have noticed increased cybersecurity spending.
Politicians and government officials have also taken notice and likely see it as an opportunity to
bring federal dollars to their states and districts. In spring of 2010, the Air Force officially established
Cyber Command, a new unit in charge of the military’s offensive and defensive cyber
capabilities.176 Cyber Command allows the military to protect its critical networks and
coordinate its cyber capabilities, an important function. 177 But the pork feeding frenzy that
Cyber Command precipitated offers a useful example of what could happen if legislators or
regulators call for similar buildup related to private networks. Beginning in early 2008, towns across the country
sought to lure the permanent headquarters of Cyber Command.178 In recent years, the Air Force had significantly trimmed its active duty force, and
the branch is still trying to reduce its numbers to reflect a Congressional mandate.179 Amid such cuts, and with calls to cut traditional defense
spending, the
military has looked to cyberspace as a new spending front.180 It was estimated that Cyber Command
headquarters would bring at least 10,000 direct and ancillary jobs, billions of dollars in contracts, and millions in local spending.181 Politicians
naturally saw the Command as an opportunity to boost local economies. Governors pitched their
respective states to the secretary of the Air Force, a dozen congressional delegations lobbied for
the Command, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal even lobbied President Bush during a
meeting on Hurricane Katrina recovery.182 Eventually communities in 18 states were vying for the Command,183 many offering
gifts of land, infrastructure, and tax breaks.184 The city of Bossier, Louisiana, proposed a $100 million “Cyber Innovation Center” office complex next
to Barksdale AFB in hopes of luring Cyber Command there.185 It began by building an $11 million bombresistant “cyber fortress” complete with a
moat.186 In Yuba City, California, community leaders gathered 53 signatures from the state’s congressional delegation and preached the merits of
nearby Silicon Valley in their effort to lure the Command.187 Colorado Springs touted the hardened location of Cheyenne Mountain, NORAD
headquarters.188 In Nebraska, the Omaha Development Foundation purchased 136 acres of land just south of Offutt Air Force Base and offered it as a
site for the Command.189 The president of a local chamber of commerce said, “It’s all political, where they decide to put it. We’re clearly the best
situated and equipped. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get it.”190 The Air Force ultimately established Cyber Command headquarters at Fort Meade,
Maryland, integrated with the NSA headquarters.191 Maryland politicians who had touted the cyber threat and sought the Command welcomed this.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski had previously proclaimed, “We
are at war, we are being attacked, and we are being
hacked.”192 Governor Martin O’Malley has noted, “We not only think that Maryland can be the national epicenter for cybersecurity; the fact of the
matter is, our state already isthe epicenter for our country.” 193 After the announcement that Cyber Command would be established at Fort Meade,
O’Malley praised the decision as one that would bolster national security and provide “endless economic opportunity and job creation.”194 His press
statement estimated the Command would bring more than 21,000 military and civilian jobs to the area.195 Local defense contractors and tech firms
also relished the announcement and the $15 to $30 billion in expected spending it would bring over the next five years.196 Other
recent
examples highlight what could be a trend toward more cyber pork. In January 2011, the NSA
and Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on a $1.2 billion dollar data center outside of Salt
Lake City for which Sen. Orrin Hatch lobbied.197 The same month, DHS announced that it would invest $16 million to test
security solutions at the University of Southern California.198 Proposed
cybersecurity legislation also presents
opportunities for congressional pork barrel spending. For example, the Cybersecurity Act of 2010 proposed by Senators
Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe called for the creation of regional cybersecurity centers across the country, a cyber scholarship-for-service
program, and myriad cybersecurity research and development grants.199 The
military-industrial complex was born out of
exaggerated Soviet threats, a defense industry closely allied with the military and Department of
Defense, and politicians striving to bring pork and jobs home to constituents. A similar cyberindustrial complex may be emerging today, and its players call for government involvement that
may be superfluous and definitely allows for rent seeking and pork barreling.
DTOs Adv
1NC
Legalization inevitable
Schlesinger 12, Brad, law student at St. Thomas University School of Law and holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Criminal
Justice from Florida International University, “Marijuana Prohibition Loses Ground to Modern Federalism,” July 24 th,
http://ivn.us/2012/07/24/marijuana-prohibition-loses-ground-modern-federalism/
While the powers of the federal government have been broadly interpreted and rapidly expanding over
the last eighty plus years, diluting the very notion of federalism on which the US system is designed, there is one area of
public policy where federalism is not only being exercised, but thriving– and that is marijuana policy.
The federal prohibition of marijuana was enacted when the Controlled Substances Act passed Congress in 1970. Since then, in
keeping with the concerns of the lives and liberties of its people, seventeen states and Washington DC legalized medical marijuana,
while fifteen states passed decriminalization measures. And despite the fact that the Supreme Court held in the 2005 case of
Gonzalez v. Raich that growing marijuana solely for personal and medicinal consumption in compliance with state law is subject to
regulation under the Controlled Substances Act, seven states passed medical marijuana laws since that decision, and Massachusetts
and Montana have medical cannabis initiatives on the ballot this fall. Undeterred
by the federal government’s
continuous ramping up of the war on medical marijuana, state efforts to push the envelope and even
further liberalize marijuana laws continue beyond medical cannabis. Colorado, Washington State, and Oregon are all thumbing
their noses at the federal government by placing marijuana legalization initiatives before voters this November. Even smaller efforts
like Ohio’s recently-passed legislation decriminalizing most marijuana paraphernalia shows that states
are continuing to
chart their own path on marijuana policy. By exercising their powers in accord with the
federalist principles on which our country was founded, many states have stood up for the long forgotten
idea that ours is a federal government of enumerated powers. More importantly though, those states
that chose to liberalize marijuana laws by passing medical and decriminalization measures and the like, laid the
foundation that will ultimately bring the federal prohibition of marijuana crashing
down.
Oil spikes don’t collapse the economy
Kahn 11 – independent journalist, the managing editor at The New Republic from 2004 to 2006, spent seven years as a writer at
Fortune magazine in New York, where he covered a range of domestic and international topics, was a Pew International Journalism
Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, twice named one of America's 30 top financial journalists under
the age of 30 by the trade publication TJFR, masters' degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a
bachelor's degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania. (Jeremy, Feburary 13, “Crude Reality”
http://articles.boston.com/2011-02-13/news/29336191_1_crude-oil-shocks-major-oil-producers) Jacome
Will a Middle Eastern oil disruption crush the economy? New research suggests the answer is no
-- and that a major tenet of American foreign policy may be fundamentally wrong.
For more than a month, the world
has been riveted by scenes of protest in the Middle East, with
in the West have also
been keeping a wary eye on something closer to home: the gyrating stock market and the rising price of gas.
Fear that the upheaval will start to affect major oil producers like Saudi Arabia has led speculators
to bid up oil prices — and led some economic analysts to predict that higher energy costs could
derail America’s nascent economic recovery.
demonstrators flooding streets from Tunisia to Egypt and beyond. As the unrest has spread, people
The idea that a
sudden spike in oil prices spells economic doom has influenced America’s foreign
policy since at least 1973, when Arab states, upset with Western support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, drastically
cut production and halted exports to the United States. The result was a sudden quadrupling in crude prices and a deep global
recession. Many Americans still have vivid memories of gas lines stretching for blocks, and of the unemployment, inflation, and
general sense of insecurity and panic that followed. Even harder hit were our allies in Europe and Japan, as well as many developing
nations.
Economists have a term for this disruption: an oil shock. The idea that such oil shocks will
inevitably wreak havoc on the US economy has become deeply rooted in the American psyche,
and in turn the United States has made ensuring the smooth flow of crude from the Middle East a central tenet of its foreign policy.
Oil security is one of the primary reasons America has a long-term military presence in the region. Even aside from the Iraq and
Afghan wars, we have equipment and forces positioned in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar; the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet is
permanently stationed in Bahrain.
But a growing body of economic research suggests that this conventional view of oil shocks is
wrong. The US economy is far less susceptible to interruptions in the oil supply than previously
assumed, according to these studies. Scholars examining the recent history of oil disruptions have found
the worldwide oil market to be remarkably adaptable and surprisingly quick at compensating for
shortfalls. Economists have found that much of the damage once attributed to oil shocks can more
persuasively be laid at the feet of bad government policies. The US economy, meanwhile, has become
less dependent on Persian Gulf oil and less sensitive to changes in crude prices overall than it was in
1973.
These findings have led a few bold political scientists and foreign policy experts to start asking an uncomfortable question: If the
United States could withstand a disruption in Persian Gulf oil supplies, why does it need a permanent military presence in the region
at all? There’s a lot riding on that question: America’s presence in the Middle East exacts a heavy toll in political capital, financial
resources, and lives. Washington’s support for Middle East autocrats makes America appear hypocritical on issues of human rights
and democracy. The United States spends billions of dollars every year to maintain troops in the Middle East, and the troops risk
their lives simply by being there, since they make tempting targets for the region’s Islamic extremists. And arguably, because the
presence of these forces inflames radicals and delegitimizes local rulers, they may actually be undermining the very stability they are
ostensibly there to ensure.
Among those asking this tough question are two young professors, Eugene Gholz, at the University of Texas, and Daryl Press, at
Dartmouth College. To find
out what actually happens when the world’s petroleum supply is
interrupted, the duo analyzed every major oil disruption since 1973. The results, published in a recent issue
of the journal Strategic Studies, showed that in almost all cases, the ensuing rise in prices, while sometimes
steep, was short-lived and had little lasting economic impact. When there have been prolonged
price rises, they found the cause to be panic on the part of oil purchasers rather than a supply
shortage. When oil runs short, in other words, the market is usually adept at filling the gap.
Mexican Drug Cartels don’t have ties to Hezbollah or other terrorist groups.
Boyle, Investigative Reporter, 12
(Matthew Boyle, November 20, 2012, The Daily Caller, “Mexico disputes House GOP report
alleging Iran, Hezbollah are using Mexican drug cartels,”
http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/20/mexico-disputes-house-gop-report-alleging-terrorists-tieswith-drug-cartels/, accessed June 20, 2013, EK)
A spokesman for Mexico’s
ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhán, told The Daily Caller his country’s
a recent House GOP report alleging that Iranian and Hezbollah terror
operatives are using Mexican drug cartels as a conduit to infiltrate the United States. Last week, the
government disputes
House Homeland Security Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Management released a report titled “A Line
in the Sand: Countering Crime, Violence and Terror at the Southwest Border.” The report found that the “Southwest border has now
become the greatest threat of terrorist infiltration into the United States.” It specifically cited a “growing influence” from Iranian and
Hezbollah terror forces in Latin America. The
Mexican government disagreed with that assessment. “The
Government of Mexico, as it has done in the past, reiterates that no such relationship or
presence exists,” Ricardo Alday, a spokesman for Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, wrote in a letter to The DC. Alday
pointed to the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism to support Mexico’s argument. “[I]n each and every one of its
the US Department of State has unmistakably established that there is no
such relationship.” Alday quoted the latest such State Department report, issued on July 31 of this year. “No known
international terrorist organization had an operational presence in Mexico and no terrorist
group targeted U.S. citizens in or from Mexican territory,” the State Department report reads. “There was
no evidence of ties between Mexican criminal organizations and terrorist groups, nor that the
criminal organizations had political or territorial control, aside from seeking to protect and
expand the impunity with which they conduct their criminal activity.” A spokesman for the House
Country Reports on Terrorism,
subcommittee, chaired by Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, did not immediately respond to a request for comment in
response to the ambassador’s letter.
2NC
Yes, the federal government has taken steps to stop State nullification, but it’s an
ongoing battle and the fed is losing
Boldin 14 - Michael Boldin is the founder of the Tenth Amendment Center, an organization that works to preserve and protect Tenth
Amendment freedoms through information and education. “State Nullification Works: Colorado Marijuana Stores Prove it”
http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2014/01/02/state-nullification-works-colorado-marijuana-stores-prove-it/ Jan. 2
Nullification works. James Madison wrote in Federalist 46 that refusing to cooperate with unconstitutional
federal acts would create “serious impediments” and “obstructions which the federal
government would hardly be willing to encounter.” Yesterday, the people of Colorado nullified
Washington DC and its unconstitutional federal laws banning marijuana – in a big, big way. Thousands of people
lined up at new recreational marijuana stores around the state on New Year’s Day, taking part in a business relationship that the
federal government has tried to stop more than ever. A friend in Denver wrote: “So one of the stores across the street from my house
(next to Chipotle) is legally selling marijuana. It opened at 8am. There are approximately 2000 people in line at 8:30. Happy New
Year.” This
isn’t happening because President Obama is friendly to the issue. He’s not. It’s happening because
state nullification efforts are overwhelming federal resources. Statistics prove that the Obama
administration has tried harder than any president – ever – to stop the states from nullifying federal
power on weed. The DOJ has engaged in more enforcement actions than ever. And they’ve spent more
money – in multiples – than any previous president. The fact, though, is that when 20+ states take steps to
nullify federal “laws” – the states win. The genie is out of the bottle and she won’t ever go back
in. The feds have lost and they know it. No matter how Holder and the DEA couch their words in an attempt to
maintain an illusion of control, state actions continue to effectively nullify these unconstitutional
marijuana “laws.” On top of it, they simply don’t have the resources to do anything about it . As
Mike Maharrey noted in a recent article, the feds don’t even have a chance to stop the nullification train that’s running them over.
Americans for Safe Access calculates that a direct raid on a medical marijuana dispensary costs around $300,000 and investigative
costs run about $12 million per raid. That means the DEA just spent roughly $3.6 million on the raids themselves – plus
investigative costs! Even if we play generous and assume that all 12 raids fell within the same investigative umbrella, that still means
the DEA just blew $15.6 million. I can’t emphasize this enough: 3 percent. In one city. In one state. The annual DEA budget runs
about $2.87 billion. It wouldn’t take too many investigations and raids to wipe that out. In fact, shutting
down all the
dispensaries in Denver alone would cost more than twice the total DEA budget. Make
no mistake, the entire war on drugs, including marijuana prohibition, rests on the same authority as all of the other undeclared wars
waged by the federal government in the last 75 years. None. Become a member and support the TAC! The
constitution
delegates no authority for the federal government to wage drug war. Drug policy should rightly
remain an object left to the states and the people. Doubt this? Then ask yourself why it took a constitutional
amendment to enact federal prohibition of alcohol. In his original draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, Thomas Jefferson
wrote, “Where
powers are assumed which have not been delegated, a nullification of the act is the
rightful remedy.” Washington and Colorado, along with all of the states now running medical
marijuana programs did just that. They exercised their will, ignored the federal mandates and
acted with the support of the people in their states. And it’s working. This should be seen as a
blueprint for victory. Time will tell if advocates for other causes will have the same kind of
courage.
No oil shocks -- Empirics prove –
a.) Iran Iraq War
Kahn 11 – independent journalist, the managing editor at The New Republic from 2004 to 2006, spent seven years as a writer at
Fortune magazine in New York, where he covered a range of domestic and international topics, was a Pew International Journalism
Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, twice named one of America's 30 top financial journalists under
the age of 30 by the trade publication TJFR, masters' degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a
bachelor's degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania. (Jeremy, Feburary 13, “Crude Reality”
http://articles.boston.com/2011-02-13/news/29336191_1_crude-oil-shocks-major-oil-producers) Jacome
One striking example was the height of the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. If anything was likely to produce an
oil shock, it was this: two major Persian Gulf producers directly targeting each other’s oil
facilities. And indeed, prices surged 25 percent in the first months of the conflict. But within 18 months of the
war’s start they had fallen back to their prewar levels, and they stayed there even though the
fighting continued to rage for six more years. Surprisingly, during the 1984 “Tanker War” phase of that
conflict — when Iraq tried to sink oil tankers carrying Iranian crude and Iran retaliated by targeting
ships carrying oil from Iraq and its Persian Gulf allies — the price of oil continued to drop
steadily. Gholz and Press found just one case after 1973 in which the market mechanisms failed: the 1979-1980 Iranian oil strike
which followed the overthrow of the Shah, during which Saudi Arabia, perhaps hoping to appease Islamists within the country, also
led OPEC to cut production, exacerbating the supply shortage.
Heg Bad
1NC
Heg unsustainable—Predictive trends—caving to “moral indignation” leads to
overstretch that makes heg self-defeating
Carpenter ’13 (Ted Carpenter, PhD in diplomatic history from the University of Texas, senior
fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, “Delusions of Indispensability,” http://nationalinterest.org/article/delusionsindispensability-8145?page=4, March 1st, 2013)
Selectivity is not merely an option when it comes to embarking on military interventions. It is
imperative for a major power that wishes to preserve its strategic solvency. Otherwise, overextension and
national exhaustion become increasing dangers. Over the past two decades, the
United States has not suffered from a tendency to intervene in too few cases. Quite
the contrary, it has shown a tendency to intervene in far too many conflicts. But many of the opinion leaders
who stress the need for constant U.S. global leadership advocate even more
frequent and far-ranging U.S. actions. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen takes President
Obama to task for not being more proactive against the Syrian government. Cohen argues further that a
“furious sense of moral indignation” must return to U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, it
should be “the centerpiece” of that policy.
His comments illustrate a worrisome absence of selectivity regarding military
interventions among members of the indispensable-nation faction. There is always
an abundance of brutal crackdowns, bloody insurrections and nasty civil wars
around the world. If a sense of moral indignation, instead of a calculating assessment
of the national interest, governs U.S. foreign policy, the United States will become
involved in even more murky conflicts in which few if any tangible American
interests are at stake. That is a blueprint for endless entanglements, a needless
expenditure of national blood and treasure, and bitter, debilitating divisions
among the American people. A country that has already sacrificed roughly 6,500
American lives and nearly $1.5 trillion in just the past decade pursuing nationbuilding chimeras in Iraq and Afghanistan should not be looking to launch similar
crusades elsewhere.
Great power war is a myth – nuclear deterrence and liberal democracies ensure
NO conflict is likely to erupt Ikenberry 11 (G. John, “A World of our Making” http://www.democracyjournal.org/21/aworld-of-our-making-1.php?page=all)
There are four reasons to think that some type of updated and reorganized liberal
international order will persist. First, the old and traditional mechanism for overturning
international order—great-power war—is no longer likely to occur. Already, the contemporary
world has experienced the longest period of great-power peace in the long history of the state
system. This absence of great-power war is no doubt due to several factors not present in
earlier eras, namely nuclear deterrence and the dominance of liberal democracies. Nuclear
weapons—and the deterrence they generate—give great powers some confidence that they will
not be dominated or invaded by other major states. They make war among major states less
rational and there-fore less likely. This removal of great-power war as a tool of overturning
international order tends to reinforce the status quo. The United States was lucky to have
emerged as a global power in the nuclear age, because rival great powers are put at a
disadvantage if they seek to overturn the American-led system. The cost-benefit
calculation of rival would-be hegemonic powers is altered in favor of working for change
within the system. But, again, the fact that great-power deterrence also sets limits on the
projection of American power presumably makes the existing international order more tolerable. It
removes a type of behavior in the system—war, invasion, and conquest between great powers—
that historically provided the motive for seeking to overturn order. If the violent over-turning of
international order is removed, a bias for continuity is introduced into the system.
Heg causes war and prolif-recalcitrant power balancing takes out the benefits of
heg
Monteiro 11 *Nuno P. Monteiro is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University
[http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ISEC_a_00064, “Unrest Assured: Why
Unipolarity is not Peaceful”]
A unipole carrying out a defensive-dominance strategy will seek to preserve all three aspects of the status quo:
maintaining the territorial boundaries and international political alignments of all other states, as well as freezing the global
distribution of power. 60 This strategy can lead
to conflict in two ways, both of which stem from uncertainty
about the unipole’s intentions. First, not knowing the extent of the unipole’s determination to
pursue a strategy of defensive dominance may spur some minor powers to develop their
capabilities. Second, uncertainty about the degree to which the unipole will oppose small changes
to the status quo may lead some minor powers to attempt them. In both cases, the opposition of the
unipole to these actions is likely to lead to war. In this section, I lay out these two pathways to conflict and then illustrate
them with historical examples. To be sure, states can never be certain of other states’ intentions. 61 There are a
couple of reasons, however, why this uncertainty increases in unipolarity, even when the unipole appears to be
determined to maintain the status quo. First, other states cannot be certain that the unipole will always
pursue nonrevisionist goals. This is particularly problematic because unipolarity minimizes the structural
constraints on the unipole’s grand strategy. As Waltz writes, “Even if a dominant power behaves with
moderation, restraint, and forbearance, weaker states will worry about its future behavior. . . . The absence of
se rious threats to American security gives the United States wide latitude in making foreign policy choices.” 62 Second,
unipolarity takes away the principal tool through which minor powers in bipolar and multipolar systems
deal with uncertainty about great power intentions—alliances with other great powers. Whereas in these other
systems minor powers can, in principle, attenuate the effects of uncertainty about great power
intentions through external balancing, in a unipolar world no great power sponsor is present by
definition. In effect, the systemic imbalance of power magnifies uncertainty about the unipole’s intentions. 63
Faced with this uncertainty, other states have two options. First, they can accommodate the unipole and
minimize the chances of conºict but at the price of their external autonomy. 64 Accommodation is less risky for major
powers because they can guarantee their own survival, and they stand to beneªt greatly from being part of the unipolar system. 65
Major powers are therefore unlikely to attempt to revise the status quo. Minor powers are also likely to accommodate the unipole, in
an attempt to avoid entering a confrontation with a preponderant power. Thus, most
states will accommodate the unipole
because, as Wohlforth points out, the power differential rests in its favor. 66 Accommodation, however, entails greater
risks for minor powers because their survival is not assured if the unipole should turn against
them. Thus some of them are likely to implement a second strategic option—resisting the
unipole. The structure of the international system does not entirely determine whether or not a minor power accommodates the
unipole. Still, structure conditions the likelihood of accommodation in two ways. To begin, a necessary part of a strategy of
dominance is the creation of alliances or informal security commitments with regional powers. Such regional powers, however,
are likely to have experienced conºict with, or a grievance toward, at least some of its neighboring minor
powers. The latter are more likely to adopt a recalcitrant posture. Additionally, by narrowing their
opportunities for regional integration and security maximization, the unipole’s interference with the regional
balance of power is likely to lower the value of the status quo for these minor powers. 67 As the
literature on the “value of peace” shows, countries that attribute a low value to the status quo are more risk acceptant. This
argument helps
explain, for example, Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 and Syria’s
and Egypt’s decision to attack Israel in 1973. 68 In both cases, aggressor states knew that their
capabilities were significantly weaker than those of their targets. They were nonetheless willing
to run the risk of launching attacks because they found the prewar status quo unacceptable. 69
Thus, for these states, the costs of balancing were lower relative to those of bandwagoning. In an international system
with more than one great power, recalcitrant minor powers would, in principle, be able to balance externally by finding a great
power sponsor. 70 In unipolarity, however, no such sponsors exist. 71 Only major powers are available, but because their survival is
already guaranteed, they are likely to accommodate the unipole. And even if some do not, they are unlikely to meet a recalcitrant
minor power’s security needs given that they possess only limited power-projection capabilities. 72 As such, recalcitrant minor
powers must defend themselves, which puts them in a position of extreme selfhelp. There are four
characteristics common to states in this position: (1) anarchy, (2) uncertainty about other states’ intentions, (3) insufªcient
capabilities to deter a great power, and (4) no potential great power sponsor with whom to form a balancing coalition.
The ªrst two characteristics are common to all states in all types of polarity. The third is part of the rough-and-tumble of minor
powers in any system. The fourth, however, is
unique to recalcitrant minor powers in unipolarity. This dire
powers at risk for as long as they lack the capability to defend themselves. They depend
on the goodwill of the unipole and must worry that the unipole will shift to a strategy of
offensive dominance or disengagement. Recalcitrant minor powers will therefore attempt to bolster
their capabilities through internal balancing. To deter an eventual attack by the unipole and bolster their chances of
survival in the event deterrence fails, recalcitrant minor powers will attempt to reinforce their conventional
defenses, develop the most effective asymmetric strategies possible, and, most likely in the
nuclear age, try to acquire the ultimate deterrent—survivable nuclear weapons.
situation places recalcitrant minor
73 In so doing, they
seek to become major powers. Defensive dominance, however, also gives the unipole
reason to oppose any such revisions to the status quo. First, such revisions decrease the benefits of
systemic leadership and limit the unipole’s ability to convert its relative power advantage into
favorable outcomes. In the case of nuclear weapons, this limitation is all but irreversible, virtually
guaranteeing the recalcitrant regime immunity against any attempt to coerce or overthrow it.
Second, proliferation has the potential to produce regional instability, raising the risk of arms races.
These would force the unipole to increase defense spending or accept a narrower overall relative power advantage. Third,
proliferation would lead to the emergence of a recalcitrant major power that could become the
harbinger of an unwanted large-scale balancing attempt. The unipole is therefore likely to demand that
recalcitrant minor powers not revise the status quo. The latter, however, will want to resist such demands because of the
threat they pose to those states’ security. 74 Whereas fighting over such demands would probably lead to defeat, conceding to them
peacefully would bring the undesired outcome with certainty. A
preventive war is therefore likely to ensue. In the
second causal path to war, recalcitrant minor powers test the limits of the status quo by making small
revisions—be they territorial conquests, altered international alignments, or an increase in
relative power—evocative of Thomas Schelling’s famous “salami tactics.” 75 The unipole may not, however, accept
these revisions, and instead demand their reversal. For a variety of reasons, including incomplete
information, commitment problems, and the need for the minor power to establish a reputation
for toughness, such demands may not be heeded. As a result, war between the unipole and
recalcitrant minor powers emerges as a distinct possibility. 76 Regardless of the causal path, a war between the
unipole and a recalcitrant minor power creates a precedent for other recalcitrant minor powers to boost their own capabilities.
Depending on the unipole’s overall capabilities—that is, whether it can launch a second simultaneous conºict—it may also induce
other recalcitrant minor powers to accelerate their balancing process. Thus, a war against a recalcitrant minor power presents
other such states with greater incentives for, and (under certain conditions) higher prospects of, assuring their
survival by acquiring the necessary capabilities, including nuclear weapons. At the same time, and depending on the
magnitude of the unipole’s power preponderance, a
war against a recalcitrant minor power creates an
opportunity for wars among major and minor powers—including major power wars. To the
extent that the unipole’s power preponderance is limited by its engagement in the ªrst war, its
ability to manage confrontations between other states elsewhere is curtailed, increasing the
chances that these will erupt into military conflicts. Therefore, even when the unipole is engaged, war remains a
possibility. Between the end of the Cold War and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States generally
implemented a strategy of defensive dominance. During this period, the dynamics described in this
section can be seen at work in the cases of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 1999 Kosovo War,
as well as in the Kargil War between India and Pakistan, and in North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear
programs. On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein ordered his forces to invade Kuwait, convinced the
United States would not oppose this revision of the status quo. During the months that followed, the United
States assembled an international coalition determined to restore Kuwaiti independence, and it obtained UN authorization to use
force if Iraq did not withdraw its occupation forces by January 15, 1991. Two days after this deadline, the
U.S.-led coalition
began military action against Iraqi forces, expelling them from Kuwait in six weeks. 77 Two points deserve mention.
First, the Gulf War was triggered by Iraq’s miscalculation regarding whether the United States would accept Iraqi
annexation of Kuwait. At the outset of the unipolar era, great uncertainty surrounded the limits of what actions
U.S. decisionmakers would find permissible. 78 Iraq miscalculated the degree of U.S. ºexibility, and war ensued.
Second, the war was made possible by unipolarity, which placed Iraq in a situation of extreme
selfhelp. Indeed, lack of a great power sponsor—at the time, the Soviet Union was in strategic
retrenchment—was duly noted in Baghdad. Immediately after the war, Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz,
lamented, “We don’t have a patron anymore. . . . If we still had the Soviets as our patron, none of this
would have happened.” 79 Similarly, in 1999, Serbian leaders miscalculated U.S. tolerance to ethnic
violence in Kosovo, a secessionist province of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In March 1999, reacting to increasing
brutality in the province, the international community convened a conference, which produced the Rambouillet accords. This
agreement called for the restoration of Kosovo’s autonomy and the deployment of NATO peacekeeping forces, both unacceptable to
Serbian authorities, who refused to submit to it. 80 In response, NATO launched a bombing campaign in Yugoslavia. In early June,
after nine weeks of bombing, NATO offered the Serbian leadership a compromise, which it accepted, ending the war. 81 Once the
war had started and it became clear that Serbia had overreached, Belgrade relied on the support
of its ancestral major power ally, Russia. Serbian strategy during the war thus aimed in part at
buying time for Russia to increase pressure on NATO to cease hostilities. Contrary to Belgrade’s expectations, however, Russian
support for Serbian aims eroded as the war continued. On May 6, Russia agreed with the Group of Seven nations on a plan that
included the deployment of UN peacekeepers and a guarantee of Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity. By mid-May, faced with Serbia’s
obduracy, Moscow began to press its ally to accept the offer. Thus, not only did Russian support fail to prevent a U.S.-led
intervention, but it was instrumental in convincing Serbia to accede to NATO’s demands. 82 The
only war between major
powers to have occurred thus far in a unipolar world—the Kargil War between India and
Pakistan—started, as my theory would have predicted, while the United States was involved in
Kosovo. 83 In May 1999, India detected Pakistani forces intruding into the Kargil sector in Indian-controlled Kashmir. This
action triggered the ªrst Indo-Pakistani war of the nuclear age, which ended on July 4—after the cessation of military operations in
Kosovo—when President Bill Clinton demanded Pakistan’s withdrawal, which occurred on July 26. 84 In
the absence of a
great power sponsor and uncertain of U.S. intentions, Iran and North Korea—both recalcitrant
minor powers—have made considerable efforts to bolster their relative power by developing a
nuclear capability. Unsurprisingly, the United States has consistently opposed their efforts, but has so far been
unable to persuade either to desist. The North Korean nuclear program dates to the 1960s, but most of the nuclear
development was conducted in a world with a status quo unipole. 85 Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, North Korea
sought to elude U.S. opposition without ever crossing the nuclear threshold. The North Korean regime seemed to have understood
that the United States would view an explicit move toward a nuclear breakout as an extreme provocation and raise the possibility of
a preventive war. When
the United States shifted to a strategy of offensive dominance in late 2001,
however, Pyongyang wasted little time in acquiring its nuclear deterrent. Iran, too, pursued a nuclear
program throughout the 1990s. 86 The Iranian nuclear program, started in the 1950s, gained new impetus with the end of the Cold
War as the result of a conºuence of factors: the 1989 replacement of an antinuclear supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
with a pronuclear Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; the discovery of Iraq’s covert nuclear program during the 1991 Gulf War; and, above all,
an increased U.S. presence in the region following that war. 87 A decade later, the expansion of Iran’s nuclear program prompted the
State Department to proclaim, “We believe Iran’s true intent is to develop the capability to produce ªssile material for nuclear
Iran’s nuclear program continued throughout the period in which the United States
shifted toward a strategy of offensive dominance, to which I turn next.
weapons.” 88
Extinction
Asal and Beardsley 09 (Victor, Department of Political Science, State University of New
York, Albany, and Kyle, Department of Political Science, Emory University, Winning with the
Bomb, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/uploads/BeardsleyAsal_Winning_with_the_Bomb.pdf)
Conclusion Why do states proliferate? Nuclear
weapons and the programs necessary to create them are expensive. They are
dangerous. Other countries may attack a state while it is trying to create a nuclear arsenal and
there is always the risk of a catastrophic accident. They may help generate existential threats by
encouraging first strike incentives amongst a state's opponents. This paper has explored the incentives that make
nuclear weapons attractive to a wide range of states despite their costly and dangerous nature. We have found that nuclear weapons
provide more than prestige, they provide leverage. They are useful in coercive diplomacy, and this must be central to any explanation
of why states acquire them. Since 9 August 1945 no state has used a nuclear weapon against another state, but we find evidence that
the possession of nuclear weapons helps states to succeed in their confrontations with other states even when they do not “use”
them. Conflict
with nuclear actors carries with it a potential danger that conflict with other states
simply does not have
. Even though the probability of full escalation is presumably low, the evidence confirms that the immense damage from the
possibility of such escalation is enough to make an opponent eager to offer concessions. Asymmetric crises allow nuclear states to
use their leverage to good effect. When crises involve a severe threat – and nuclear use is not completely ruled out – the advantage
that nuclear actors have is substantial. Nuclear weapons help states win concessions quickly in 25 salient conflicts. Consistent with
the other papers in this issue and the editors’ introduction (Gartzke and Kroenig this issue), we report that nuclear weapons confer
tangible benefits to the possessors. These benefits imply that there should be a general level of demand for nuclear weapons, which
means that explanations for why so few states have actually proliferated should focus more on the supply side, as applied by
Matthew Kroenig (this issue) and Matthew Fuhrmann (this issue). The
findings here importantly suggest an
additional reason why “proliferation begets proliferation,” in the words of George Shultz (Shultz 1984, 18). If
both parties to a crisis have nuclear weapons, the advantage is effectively cancelled out. When
states develop nuclear weapons, doing so may encourage their rivals to also proliferate for fear
of being exploited by the shifting bargaining positions. And once the rivals proliferate, the initial
proliferator no longer has much bargaining advantage. On the one hand, this dynamic adds some restraint to
initial proliferation within a rivalry relationship: states fear that their arsenal will encourage their rivals to pursue nuclear weapons,
which will leave them no better off (Davis 1993; Cirincione 2007). On the other hand, once
proliferation has occurred,
all other states that are likely to experience coercive bargaining with the new nuclear state will
also want nuclear weapons. The rate of proliferation has the potential to accelerate because the
desire to posses the “equalizer” will increase as the number of nuclear powers slowly rises. Our
theoretical framework and empirical findings are complementary to Gartzke and Jo (this issue), who posit and find that nuclear
states enjoy greater influence in the international realm. An interesting dynamic emerges when comparing the results to Rauchhaus
(this issue), who finds that nuclear weapons in asymmetric dyads tend to increase the propensity for escalation. We have argued that
nuclear weapons improve the bargaining leverage of the 26 possessors and tested that proposition directly. It is important to note
that the factors that shape conflict initiation and escalation are not necessarily the same factors that most shape the outcome of the
conflict. Even so, one explanation for why a stronger bargaining position does not necessarily produce less escalation is that
escalation is a function of decisions by both sides, and even though the opponent of a nuclear state is more willing to back down, the
nuclear state should be more willing to raise its demands and push for a harder bargain in order to maximize the benefits from the
nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons appear to need ever-greater shares of their bargains in order to be satisfied, which helps to
explain both their proclivity to win and their proclivity toward aggressive coercive diplomacy. An
important implication in
light of these findings is thus that even though nuclear weapon states tend to fare better at the
end of their crises, this does not necessarily mean that the weapons are a net benefit for peace
and stability.
1NR
Only American withdrawal can prevent war with China.
Layne 7 (Christopher, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public
Service at Texas A&M University) 2007 “American Empire: A Debate” p 73-4
To be sure, the United States should not ignore the potential strategic rami-fications of China's
arrival on the world stage as a great power. After all, the lesson of history is that the emergence
of new great powers in the international system leads to conflict, not peace. On this score, the
notion—propagated byBeijing—that China's will be a"peaceful rise"is just as fanciful as claims
byAmerican policy-makers that China has no need to build up its military capa-bilities because
it is unthreatened by any other state. Still, this does not mean that the United States and China
inevitably are on a collision course that will culminate in the next decade or two in a war.
Whether Washington and Beijing actually come to blows, however, depends largely on what
strategy theUnited States chooses to adopt toward China, because the United States has the "last
clear chance"to adopt a grand strategy that will serve its interests in balancing Chinese power
without running the risk of an armed clash with Beijing. If the United States continues to aim at
upholding its current primacy, however, Sino-American conflict is virtually certain.
Specifically, it causes Chinese asymmetric balancing which leads to cyber war –
turns the other advantage – oops
Bandow ’09 - senior fellow at the Cato Institute; former special assistant to President Ronald
Reagan, author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire [Doug Bandow, “China’s
Military Rise means end of U.S. hegemony?” Korea Times 5/5/09,
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10175]
One suspects it means accepting American military hegemony in East Asia — something with
which Beijing isn't likely to agree.The Chinese military buildup so far has been significant but
measured. "The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is pursuing comprehensive transformation
from a mass army designed for protracted wars of attrition on its periphery against high-tech
adversaries," explains the Pentagon. Moreover, China's "armed forces continue to develop and
field disruptive military technologies, including those for anti-access/area-denial, as well as for
nuclear, space, and cyber warfare, that are changing regional military balances and that have
implications beyond the Asia-Pacific region."
Proliferation is a conflict escalator
Taylor 1 (Theodore, Chairman of NOVA, Former Nuclear Weapons Designer, 2001,
http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/chapters/taylor.html)
Nuclear proliferation - be it among nations or terrorists - greatly increases the chance of nuclear violence on a
scale that would be intolerable. Proliferation increases the chance that nuclear weapons will fall
into the hands of irrational people, either suicidal or with no concern for the fate of the world. Irrational or outright
psychotic leaders of military factions or terrorist groups might decide to use a few nuclear weapons under their control to stimulate a
global nuclear war, as an act of vengeance against humanity as a whole. Countless scenarios of this type can be constructed.
Limited
nuclear wars between countries with small numbers of nuclear weapons could escalate into major
nuclear wars between superpowers. For example, a nation in an advanced stage of "latent proliferation," finding itself
losing a nonnuclear war, might complete the transition to deliverable nuclear weapons and, in desperation, use them. If that should
happen in a region, such as the Middle East, where major superpower interests are at stake, the
small nuclear war could
easily escalate into a global nuclear war.
It’s fast which increases the likelihood of accidents
Killop 10 (Andrew, founding member of the Asian chapter of the International Association of Energy
Economics, May 4,
http://www.raisethehammer.org/article/1069/nuclear_weapons_and_proliferation__are_you_kidding) LL
Obama rightly called nuclear weapons a dangerous relic of the period from 1945 to 1989, from the Second World War's end to the Cold
War's end. Today's focus for ending nuclear weapons proliferation is terrorism, completely ignoring the
Chernobyl catastrophe of 1986, which had a "zero terror" component, and was 100% accidental, whether human error only or combined
technology failure-and-human error. Obama's call also ignores the entire "back end" of nuclear power, whether civil or not: wastes have
to be stored, separated by re-treatment or destroyed, and reactors have to be decommissioned. Ensuring 100% security against
technology failure and human error is a pipe dream, assiduously preached by the World Nuclear Association and all other interested
Due to accumulated stocks, aging reactors and storage facilities, aging fuel re-treatment capacities (only in France and
other weak links across the spectrum from "front end" uranium and thorium mining, to planned but not built "final
repositories" the potential for accident can only increase. This is intensified by factors as wide ranging as the quest for
parties.
UK), and
national energy security, the role of high oil prices, calls for "low carbon" energy in the fight against climate change, the perception that
nuclear electricity is cheap, non-electricity uses of nuclear power, and others. Today there are great plans for expanding nuclear power's
role in world energy, to be sure well distanced from facts on the ground, but growing all the same. The pro-nuclear World Nuclear
Association claims 50 civil reactors were under construction in 13 countries as of February 2010, while other sources give as few as 45
under construction in early 2010, the difference again including research reactors and their definition, for example reactors under
construction for both research-and-power production, as in several countries. When we move up to the category of "planned or
proposed" civil reactors, numbers can extend to over 100 for the period 2010-2020. Further complicating the outlook, but not in the
immediate and short-term (2010-2015) we have increasing likelihood of reactor-equivalent nuclear heat source applications being
proposed, and extended from their present few major industrial applications. These include heat sources already used in Russia's metals
refining industry, and its nuclear powered icebreaker fleet. Outside Russia, these reactor-equivalent installations could for example be
used as cheap heat supply for tarsand oil production, seawater desalination, large-scale horticulture operations (as operated in Russia), in
synthetic hydrocarbon liqfuels processing, the cement industry and other heat-intensive industries. Reactors for industrial heat supply
are already commercial in Russia (for example VK 300 type), but proposed versions include fast or high neutron intensity reactors using
(or burning down) MOX-type uranium-plutonium fuels, or thorium-plutonium fuel mixes. This nuclear
"proliferation" is
increasingly possible or probable as energy prices rise and nuclear waste stockpiles increase, creating
rising pressures to "recycle" or destroy it. This further raises the risks of major nuclear accidents. Error not terror
is already, and will likely remain the biggest nuclear risk we face.
Unipolarity destroys coordination necessary to stop the next epidemic-abandoning
heg solves
Weber et al. 7 *Steven Weber is a Professor of Political Science at UC-Berkeley and Director of
the Institute of International Studies, Naazneen Barma, Matthew Kroenig, Ely Ratner, [“How
Globalization Went Bad”, January-February 2007, Foreign Policy]
The same is true for global public health. Globalization is turning the world into an enormous
petri dish for the incubation of infectious disease. Humans cannot outsmart disease, because it
just evolves too quickly. Bacteria can reproduce a new generation in less than 30 minutes, while
it takes us decades to come up with a new generation of antibiotics. Solutions are only
possible when and where we get the upper hand. Poor countries where humans live in
close proximity to farm animals are the best place to breed extremely dangerous zoonotic
disease. These are often the same countries, perhaps not entirely coincidentally,
that feel threatened by American power. Establishing an early warning system for these
diseases—exactly what we lacked in the case of SARS a few years ago and exactly what we lack
for avian flu today—will require a significant level of intervention into the very places that don’t
want it. That will be true as long as international intervention means American interference. The
most likely sources of the next ebola or HIV-like pandemic are the countries that simply won’t
let U.S. or other Western agencies in, including the World Health Organization. Yet the threat is
too arcane and not immediate enough for the West to force the issue. What’s needed is another
great power to take over a piece of the work, a power that has more immediate interests in the
countries where diseases incubate and one that is seen as less of a threat. As long as the
United States remains the world’s lone superpower, we’re not likely to get any
help. Even after HIV, SARS, and several years of mounting hysteria about avian flu, the world is
still not ready for a viral pandemic in Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. America can’t
change that alone.
Disease – It leads to extinction
GREGER 08 – M.D., is Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at The Humane
Society of the United States (Michael Greger, , Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching,
http://birdflubook.com/a.php?id=111)
Senate Majority Leader Frist describes the recent slew of emerging diseases in almost biblical
terms: “All of these [new diseases] were advance patrols of a great army that is preparing way
out of sight.”3146 Scientists like Joshua Lederberg don’t think this is mere rhetoric. He should
know. Lederberg won the Nobel Prize in medicine at age 33 for his discoveries in bacterial
evolution. Lederberg went on to become president of Rockefeller University. “Some people think
I am being hysterical,” he said, referring to pandemic influenza, “but there are catastrophes
ahead. We live in evolutionary competition with microbes—bacteria and viruses. There is no
guarantee that we will be the survivors.”3147 There is a concept in host-parasite evolutionary
dynamics called the Red Queen hypothesis, which attempts to describe the unremitting struggle
between immune systems and the pathogens against which they fight, each constantly evolving
to try to outsmart the other.3148 The name is taken from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking
Glass in which the Red Queen instructs Alice, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you
can do to keep in the same place.”3149 Because the pathogens keep evolving, our immune
systems have to keep adapting as well just to keep up. According to the theory, animals who
“stop running” go extinct. So far our immune systems have largely retained the upper hand, but
the fear is that given the current rate of disease emergence, the human race is losing the
race.3150 In a Scientific American article titled, “Will We Survive?,” one of the world’s leading
immunologists writes: Has the immune system, then, reached its apogee after the few hundred
million years it had taken to develop? Can it respond in time to the new evolutionary challenges?
These perfectly proper questions lack sure answers because we are in an utterly unprecedented
situation [given the number of newly emerging infections].3151 The research team who wrote
Beasts of the Earth conclude, “Considering that bacteria, viruses, and protozoa had a more than
two-billion-year head start in this war, a victory by recently arrived Homo sapiens would be
remarkable.”3152 Lederberg ardently believes that emerging viruses may imperil human society
itself. Says NIH medical epidemiologist David Morens, When you look at the relationship
between bugs and humans, the more important thing to look at is the bug. When an enterovirus
like polio goes through the human gastrointestinal tract in three days, its genome mutates about
two percent. That level of mutation—two percent of the genome—has taken the human species
eight million years to accomplish. So who’s going to adapt to whom? Pitted against that kind of
competition, Lederberg concludes that the human evolutionary capacity to keep up “may be
dismissed as almost totally inconsequential.”3153 To help prevent the evolution of viruses as
threatening as H5N1, the least we can do is take away a few billion feathered test tubes in which
viruses can experiment, a few billion fewer spins at pandemic roulette. The human species has
existed in something like our present form for approximately 200,000 years. “Such a long run
should itself give us confidence that our species will continue to survive, at least insofar as the
microbial world is concerned. Yet such optimism,” wrote the Ehrlich prize-winning former chair
of zoology at the University College of London, “might easily transmute into a tune whistled
whilst passing a graveyard.”3154
Heg unsustainable—China rise—mutual restraint means the transition will be
peaceful
Kishore ‘13 (Mahbubani Kishore, Professor in Public Policy at the National University of Singapore,
former fellow at the Center of International Affairs at Harvard “While America Slept,”
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/02/27/the_calm_before_the_storm_china_rise, February
27th, 2013)
Today, the situation is different. The No. 1 power is the United States, the standardbearer of the West. The No. 2 power rapidly catching up is China, an Asian power. If China passes
America in the next decade or two, it will be the first time in two centuries that a non-Western power has emerged
as No. 1. (According to economic historian Angus Maddison's calculations, China was the world's No. 1 economy
until 1890.)
The logic of history tells us that such power transitions do not happen peacefully .
Indeed, we should expect to see a rising level of tension as America worries more and more about losing its
primacy. Yet it has done little to act on these fears thus far. It would have been quite natural for America to carry
out various moves to thwart China's rise. That's what great powers have done throughout history. That's how
America faced the Soviet Union. So
why isn't this happening? Why are we seeing an unnatural degree
of geopolitical calm between the world's greatest power and the world's greatest
emerging power?
It would be virtually impossible to get Beijing and Washington to agree on the answers to these natural questions,
as there are two distinct and sometimes competing narratives in the two capitals.
The view in Beijing is that the calm in Sino-American relations is a result of the
extraordinary patience and forbearance shown by China. Chinese leaders believe they have
followed the wise advice of Deng Xiaoping, the late reformist leader, and decided not to challenge American
leadership in any way or in any area. And when China has felt that it was directly provoked, it
has also followed Deng's advice and swallowed its humiliation. Few Americans remember
any such instances of provocation. Chinese leaders remember many. In May 1999, during the NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia, a U.S. plane bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. America apologized, but no Chinese leader
believed it was a mistake. Similarly, a Chinese fighter jet was downed when it crashed into a U.S. spy plane near
Hainan Island, China, in April 2001. Here, too, China felt humiliated. Few Americans will recall the humiliation
Premier Zhu Rongji suffered in April 1999 when he went to Washington to negotiate China's entry into the World
Trade Organization (WTO); Chinese elites haven't forgotten. In their minds, China has been
responsible for the low levels of tension in U.S.-China relations because China has
swallowed such bitter pills time and again.
The view in Washington is almost exactly the opposite. Few Americans believe that China has been able to
rise peacefully because of China's geopolitical acumen or America's geopolitical mistakes. Instead, the
prevailing view is that America has been remarkably generous to China and
allowed it to emerge peacefully because the United States is an inherently virtuous
and generous country. There can be no denying that the United States has been generous to China in
many real ways: allowing China's accession to the WTO (under stiff conditions, it must be
emphasized, but stiff conditions that ironically benefited China); allowing China to enjoy massive
trade surpluses; allowing China to join multilateral bodies like the Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation forum; and perhaps most importantly of all, allowing hundreds of
thousands of Chinese students to study in American universities. These are
generous acts. But it is also true that the United States allowed China to rise
because it was so supremely self-confident that it would always remain on top.
China's benign rise was a result of American neglect, not a result of any long-term strategy. China
acted strategically; America did not. After the 9/11 attacks, for instance, the United States
focused on the Middle East instead of the rise of China, leading Hong Kong
journalist Frank Ching to write, "The fact is, it's not going too far to say that China
owes a huge debt of gratitude to Osama bin Laden."
Domestic opinion is calling for a pull back of US commitments
Layne 10/12/11 (Christopher, Prof @ Texas A&M University, “Are Voters Looking
for an Isolationist?”)
First, Iraq and Afghanistan have been for the U.S. what the Boer War was for Britain: costly
defeats causing “imperial overstretch” and accelerating national decline. Second, the warnings
of the 1980s “declinists” (so dubbed by their establishment critics) have been vindicated.
Persistent budget, trade and balance of payments deficits -- and the hollowing-out of the U.S.
manufacturing base -- have caused a termite-like weakening of U.S. economic power.
Finally, leading forecasters agree that sometime this decade China’s gross domestic product will
surpass the United States’. Global power is shifting from West to East, and the U.S.-dominated
“unipolar” world is giving way to one of several more or less equal great powers.
US superpower status is no longer affordable
Layne 11 (Christopher, Prof and Chair of the Robert M. Gates National Security @
Texas A&M” Bye bye, Miss American Pie”)
U.S. decline reflects its own economic troubles. Optimists contend that current worries about
decline will fade once the U.S. recovers from the recession. After all, they say, the U.S. faced a larger
debt/GDPratio after World War II, and yet embarked on a sustained era of growth. But the post-war era was a golden age
of U.S. industrial and financial dominance, trade surpluses, and sustained high growth rates. Those
days are gone forever. The United States of 2011 are different from 1945. Even in the best case, the United States will
emerge from the current crisis facing a grave fiscal crisis. The looming fiscal results from the $1 trillion plus
budget deficits that the U.S. will incur for at least a decade. When these are bundled with the entitlements overhang
(the unfunded future liabilities of Medicare and Social Security) and the cost of the ongoing wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, there is reason to worry about United States’ long-term fiscal stability – and the role of the
dollar. The dollar’s vulnerability is the United States’ real geopolitical Achilles’ heel because the dollar’s role as the international
economy’s reserve currency role underpins U.S. primacy. If
the dollar loses that status America’s hegemony
literally will be unaffordable. In coming years the U.S. will be pressured to defend the dollar by preventing runaway inflation.
This will require fiscal self-discipline through a combination of tax increases and big spending cuts. Meaningful cuts in federal spending
mean deep reductions in defense expenditures because discretionary non-defense – domestic – spending accounts for only about 20% of
annual federal outlays. Faced with these hard choices,
Americans may contract hegemony fatigue. If so, the U.S.
will be compelled to retrench strategically and the Pax Americana will end.
And domestic issues outweigh pure conceptions of power
Cohen 2012(Michael, ow at the Century Foundation, February 21, "Rotting from the Inside
Out",
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/21/rotting_from_the_inside_out?page=full)jn
The fact is, discussions
of U.S. power that only take into account America's global standing in relation to
has a bigger and better military than
practically every other nation combined. Sure, it has a better global image than Russia or China or any other potential global
rival. Sure, America's economy is bigger than any other nation's (though this is a debatable point). But if its students aren't
being well educated, if huge disparities exist in technological adoption, if social mobility remains
stagnant if the country's health care system is poorly functioning, and if its government is
hopelessly gridlocked, what good is all the global power that transfixes Kagan and others? The even more urgent
question is how the United States can hope to maintain that power if it's built on a shaky foundation at
home.
other countries are not only misleading -- they're largely irrelevant. Sure, America
No risk of great power war – all countries are on the defensive and there aren’t
cultural or political differences large enough to start a conflict
Buzan 2011 (Barry, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics,
"The Inaugural Kenneth N. Waltz Annual Lecture A World Order Without Superpowers
Decentred Globalism," International Relations, 4-1, vol. 25 no. 1 3-25)
There are many reasons to think that a regionalized international order would work quite well. The
generic worry about such an order stems from the experience of most of the 20th century, when imperial powers competed with each
other either over their spheres of influence or over whether one of them could dominate the whole world, and the 1930s’ experience is
often cited as a warning against going down this route. 45 For several reasons the
danger of a struggle for global
hegemony seems no longer very salient. First, the West is in relative decline, and other regions are
mainly defensive in outlook, trying to maintain their political and cultural characteristics, and find their own route to
modernization, against Western pressure. Nobody else obviously wants the job of global leader. Second any
potential global hegemon will be constrained both by the breadth and depth of anti-hegemonism,
and by the difficulty of acquiring the necessary material preponderance and social standing. Third, there are no deep
ideological or racist differences to fuel conflict like those that dominated the 20th century. Fourth, all the great
powers fear both war and economic breakdown, and have a commitment to maintaining world trade. Nobody wants
to go back to the autarchic, empire-building days of the 1930s. In addition, a good case can be made that sufficient shared values
exist to underpin a reasonable degree of global-level coexistence and cooperation even in a more regionalized
international order. Logics additional to Waltz’s unit veto ideas about the proliferation of nuclear weapons 46 are in play: cultural,
political and economic factors can also work to produce a stable international order. The world will
certainly divide on whether the move towards such an order is a good thing or not. Liberals, both in the West and elsewhere, will
lament the weakening of their universalist project, and fear the rise of various parochialisms, some possibly quite nasty. Whatever its
merits, a more regionalized world order would mark a retreat from universalist liberal agendas of both a political and an economic sort.
The loss of hegemonic leadership would probably mean a reduction in the overall management capacity of the system, though even that
is not a given. One should not underestimate the possibilities for innovation on this front once the now in-built habit of dependence on
US leadership is broken. On the economic side, regions would still provide a halfway house for economies of scale, and there would
still be a lot of global trade and cooperation on many functional matters from big science to environmental management. It is not
without significance that even during the depths of the Cold War, the Americans and the Soviets were able to negotiate on common
survival issues such as nuclear testing, non-proliferation and arms control. However, there would no longer be an attempt to run a
financially integrated global economy
Multipolarity solves war- lack of great power aggressiveness makes war
unthinkable, empirical examples fail this system will be different
Schweller 10 *Randall Schweller is a Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University
[“Entropy and the trajectory of world politics: why polarity has become less meaningful,”
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Volume 23, Number 1, March 2010]
Though rarely mentioned, system equilibrium can emerge without balancing or power-seeking
behaviour. This should not come as a surprise; for we know that a Concert system existed during
a multipolar phase, roughly between 1815 and 1853. That system, however, arose from the ashes
of war, the purpose of which was to defeat an aspiring hegemon before it rolled up the system.
The current system, however, has already been ‘rolled up’ for all intents and purposes. So how
could a balance of power be restored without deliberate balancing against the US? The answer is
that uneven rates of growth among states seeking merely to get rich (wealth, not military power,
security, or political influence over others) can produce a rough equivalence in capabilities
among several states, none of which feel particularly threatened by each other or seek relative
gains at the expense of one another. In other words, the major actors in the system are strictly
egoistic, and they interact cooperatively, not competitively or strategically in a military sense,
with each other. It is essentially an orthodox liberal world, in which international politics
becomes a positive-sum game and the concept of equilibrium is, by definition, a Pareto optimal
condition that no actor has an interest in changing (see Callinicos 2007, 546). Here, global
equilibrium means maximum entropy. What has changed? Simply put, there is no longer an
expectation of violent expansion among the great powers. Balance of power is built on the assumption not only
that war is a legitimate instrument of statecraft (Jervis 1986, 60) but that states will settle their differences by fighting. This
expectation exercises a profound influence on the types of behaviours exhibited by states and the system as awhole (Lasswell 1965
It was not just the prospect of war that triggered the basic dynamics of past
multipolar and bipolar systems. It was the anticipation that powerful states sought to and
would, if given the right odds, carry out territorial conquests at each others’ expense that shaped
and shoved actors in ways consistent with the predictions of Waltzian balance of power
theory.Without the very real fear of Soviet expansion, why would bipolarity have compelled the US to adopt a grand strategy of
containment and deterrence? Without the traditional expectations of great power war and conquest,
why would the added complexity and uncertainty of multipolar systems make them unstable?
[1935], chapter 3).
Why would states form alliances in the first place, much less worry about who aligns with whom? When war is unthinkable among
the great powers, it is hard to see how polarity exerts the constraints predicted by structural balance of power theory. To the extent
that this driving force of history is no longer in play, the system will experience increasing entropy. The current system’s ideational
or social structures also seem to be pushing in the direction of greater entropy, suggesting that the world may be reaching an
endpoint of sorts. This view of history is consistent with Kant’s (2005 [1795]) ‘perpetual peace’, Richard Rosecrance’s (1987) ‘rise of
the trading state’, Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) ‘end of history’ and, for slightly different reasons, John Ikenberry’s (2001) vision of a
‘constitutional order’ rooted in liberalism. Regarding
the latter, a ‘multipolar’ constitutional order would not
be all that different from the current world because: (1) constitutional orders place limits on the
returns to power, so presumably a switch from unipolarity to multipolarity would not be terribly
significant; (2) the system, though multipolar, would retain the basic foundations of the
American liberal order, its underlying social values would remain intact, and (3) there would be,
just as today, no balancing behaviour among the major powers against each other, and major
power war would be virtually unthinkable. That noted, Ikenberry’s view of order is more centralized, structured and
deliberate than the one I have in mind. An entropy version of Ikenberry’s order would be a watered-down, more decentralized and
spontaneously generated liberal order—but one that still devalues power. Liberals are not the only ones making such claims. Several
prominent realists have also acknowledged that the world has fundamentally changed to the point that, if and when unipolarity
ends, we will not likely see a return to traditional great power politics among the core states. Robert Jervis (2005), for instance,
stresses the unprecedented development of a Security Community among all the leading powers as the defining feature of today’s
world politics. The existence of this security community means not only that major power war has become unthinkable but also that
bandwagoning and balancing ‘will not map on the classical form of the balance of power’ (Jervis 2005, 31). Similarly, Jonathan
Kirshner (2008, 335) sees fewer prospects for great power war as a consequence of globalization. Along these lines, Fareed Zakaria
(2008, 243) predicts a postAmerican world governed by a messy ad hoc order composed of a` la carte multilateralism and
networked interactions among state and nonstate actors. The provision of international order in this future world will no longer be a
matter decided solely by the political and military power held by a single hegemon or even a group of leading states. The
bottomline is that, if war no longer lurks in the background of great power relations and if
strong states must share power with institutions and nonstate actors, then to say that the world
is becoming multipolar is, if not meaningless, grossly misleading. The dynamics of this new
multipolar world will be significantly different from those of past multipolar systems. When
great powers built arms in traditional multipolar settings, they did so under the belief that it was
not only possible but probable that their weapons would be targeted and used against each
other. Likewise, when they formed alliances, they targeted them at one another. A Community composed of the most developed
states in the international system was not on the menu of traditional alliance politics under multipolarity. Of course, international
politics can change rapidly and the mere prediction that the Community will survive into the foreseeable future, no matter how
compelling it appears to us today, does not mean that the Community will not dissolve sooner than later. Even so, it is difficult to see
how major power war becomes thinkable again given the intolerably high costs of war and the obvious destructiveness of nuclear
weapons, the benefits of peace grounded in the perceived decoupling of territorial conquest from national prosperity, and the shared
values and beliefs about how the world works among the leading states (Jervis 2005).
Retrenchment now and solves war – new hotness
Parent and Macdonald ’14 (Parent Macdonald, Assistant Professor of Political Science at
Wellesley College and Joseph Parent, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of
Miami, “The Banality of Retrenchment”, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141019/paulk-macdonald-and-joseph-m-parent/the-banality-of-retrenchment, March 9th, 2014)
It is hard to know what to make of this year’s proposed U.S. defense budget. Secretary of Defense
Chuck Hagel bills it as a novelty: “the first budget to fully reflect the transition DoD is making after 13
years of war.” The New York Times portrays it as an antiquity: “Pentagon Plans to Shrink Army to PreWorld War II Level,” reads its headline. Senator Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) paints it as a travesty: “illconceived, ill-designed, bad defense policy, detached from reality.” In truth, it is none of
those things. Rather, the proposed budget represents a continuation of nearly three
years of defense retrenchment, which is modest in scope and prudent in purpose.
For starters, there is far more continuity than novelty in contemporary retrenchment. Since
early 2011, the Obama administration has consistently limited the defense
burden by slowing military spending, reducing forces overseas, and
privileging diplomatic statecraft. In January of that year, Robert Gates, who was secretary of
defense at the time, announced an initial plan to trim defense spending by $78 billion over the
next five years. The Budget Control Act, passed in August 2011, placed new caps on securityrelated spending, which resulted in an additional $24 billion being stripped from that year’s base
defense budget. Matters came to a dramatic head, of course, in March 2013, when the failure to pass a
deficit-reduction bill triggered sequestration, which threatened to cut some $600 billion from defense
over the next nine years. As a result of all of these changes, the Pentagon’s spending has shrunk:
Whereas it had planned an average base budget of $582 billion a year between 2011 and 2015, it is now on
pace to spend an average of $509 billion a year over the same period. Retrenchment is nothing
new: It is the new normal.
Nor is the extent of retrenchment unrealistic. Even with these dramatic reductions, the
proposed 2015 base budget still exceeds its 2006 counterpart by almost $10 billion in constant dollar
terms. And the base budget is only part of the picture. The administration will also request additional warrelated funds, which have remained in excess of $80 billion over the past two years, despite the
withdrawal of upwards of 30,000 troops from Afghanistan over the same time frame. It has also
announced its intention to seek an additional $26 billion as part of an Opportunity, Growth, and Security
Initiative, with an eye toward preserving readiness. In relative terms, reduced U.S. expenditures would
still dwarf the estimated $132 billion that China plans to spend on its military this year -- and China is the
second-biggest military spender in the world by a wide margin.
It would also be wrong to view this year’s budget as archaic. Although the army is
slated to shrink, it will not reach 450,000 soldiers until 2019, and the 2019 force will be only six
percent smaller than the one that secured an initial success in Afghanistan back in 2001. Further,
although the number of personnel is falling, moreover, this is not your grandparents’
military. Old workhorses such as the U-2 spy plane are scheduled to be replaced by the Global
Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle. The budget represents an attempt to invest in
quality over quantity. That is, instead of preserving large forces designed to
support ambitious nation-building efforts, the budget seeks to create what
Hagel describes as a “smaller and more capable force.” To this end, the budget calls
for the expansion of special operations and cyberwarfare capabilities. Far
from regressing, the Defense Department is evolving.
Back when Gates inaugurated the latest era of retrenchment, critics warned that paring back military
spending would ruin the defense industrial base without making a dent in the deficit. The Brookings
fellow Robert Kagan claimed that defense cuts would “increase the risk of strategic failure in an
already risky world, despite the near irrelevance of the defense budget to American fiscal health.”
Neither of these predictions came true. Between 2010 and 2013, the top three U.S.
defense contractors -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman -- averaged a four percent
annual increase in net income and 16 percent annual increase in stock price. The Aerospace
Industry Association likewise estimated that net profits in the aerospace and defense industry
increased by almost $8 billion over the same period, driven in part by a 26 percent increase in
military exports. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the deficit will fall to $514
billion this year, down from $1.4 trillion just five years earlier, in large part due to cuts in discretionary
spending, including defense.
But what is retrenchment good for? Potentially nothing if it turns into isolationism, inertia, or
appeasement. But none of those outcomes looks likely. For better or worse, the
United States remains deeply engaged in the world, although it brandishes
fewer threats while doing so. Notwithstanding fears that defense cuts might unnerve allies,
the United States has retained --and in some cases strengthened -- crucial
partnerships. Witness the recent state visit of French President François Hollande and intensified
military exercises with Japan.
Similar warnings that adversaries would exploit U.S. weakness proved
overblown. The recent crisis in Crimea has raised fresh concerns about sagging American prestige,
but Russia has shown a consistent willingness to use force opportunistically in its near abroad. Critics are
wrong to argue that retrenchment has fueled the ambitions of Russian
President Vladimir Putin. After all, Russia engaged in similar aggression in
Georgia in 2008, when U.S. defense spending was at its apex. In any event, this
is not a situation amenable to military solutions, and Secretary of State John
Kerry’s recent pledge of financial assistance to the new regime in Kiev
appears the most promising approach to what is a difficult situation.
Furthermore, in Syria, it was the threat of force combined with multilateral pressure that resulted
in an unprecedented deal in which Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad agreed to surrender his
stockpile of chemical weapons. Firm diplomacy has likewise led to an interim deal
on Iran’s nuclear program, which, while not solving the problem, affords critical
breathing room to reach a more comprehensive deal.
It’s true of all rising nations – BRIC countries have a stake in the international
system.
Ikenberry 11 (G. John, “A World of our Making”
http://www.democracyjournal.org/21/a-world-of-our-making-1.php?page=all)
Third, the states that are rising today do not constitute a potential united opposition bloc to the
existing order. There are so-called rising states in various regions of the world. China, India,
Brazil, and South Africa are perhaps most prominent. Russia is also sometimes included in this
grouping of rising states. These states are all capitalist and most are democratic. They all gain from
trade and integration within the world capitalist system. They all either are members of the WTO or
seek membership in it. But they also have very diverse geopolitical and regional interests and
agendas. They do not constitute either an economic bloc or a geopolitical one. Their
ideologies and histories are distinct. They share an interest in gaining access to the leading
institutions that govern the international system. Sometimes this creates competition
among them for influence and access. But it also orients their struggles toward the reform and
reorganization of governing institutions, not to a united effort to overturn the underlying order.