280 SS Hegemony US Grand Strategy

Heg
Dartmouth Debate Institute – Serrano/Strange

Sudarshan/Koneru
US Grand Strategy
Uniqueness:
US Grand Strategy.......................................................................................................................................................................................1
Uniqueness:..................................................................................................................................................................................................1
Heg – Brink Now.........................................................................................................................................................................................3
Readiness – Brink Now...............................................................................................................................................................................4
Heg Unsustainable – Multipolarity Now.....................................................................................................................................................5
Heg Unsustainable – Generic.......................................................................................................................................................................6
Heg Unsustainable – Generic ......................................................................................................................................................................7
Heg Unsustainable – Generic ......................................................................................................................................................................8
Heg Unsustainable – Balancing ..................................................................................................................................................................9
Heg Unsustainable – Economic Overstretch.............................................................................................................................................10
Heg Unsustainable – Dollar.......................................................................................................................................................................11
Heg Unsustainable – Dollar.......................................................................................................................................................................12
A2: Conflate Trends & Status Quo [1/2]...................................................................................................................................................13
A2: Conflate Trends & Status Quo [2/2]...................................................................................................................................................14
Heg Sustainable – Generic.........................................................................................................................................................................15
Heg Sustainable – Generic.........................................................................................................................................................................16
Heg Sustainable – Competitiveness...........................................................................................................................................................17
Heg Sustainable – Economy......................................................................................................................................................................18
Heg Sustainable – Economy......................................................................................................................................................................19
Heg Sustainable – Military........................................................................................................................................................................20
Heg Sustainable – Military........................................................................................................................................................................21
Heg Sustainable – Air Power.....................................................................................................................................................................22
Heg Sustainable – Naval Power.................................................................................................................................................................23
Heg Sustainable – Multilateralism.............................................................................................................................................................24
Internals – Economy .................................................................................................................................................................................25
A2: Balancing – Generic............................................................................................................................................................................26
A2: Balancing – China...............................................................................................................................................................................30
A2: Balancing – EU...................................................................................................................................................................................33
A2: Balancing – EU...................................................................................................................................................................................34
A2: Balancing – Russia..............................................................................................................................................................................35
A2: Balancing – Russia-China Alliance....................................................................................................................................................36
A2: Balancing – Russia-China-India Alliance...........................................................................................................................................37
A2: Imperial Overstretch...........................................................................................................................................................................38
A2: Oil Dollar Switch................................................................................................................................................................................39
A2: Globalization.......................................................................................................................................................................................40
A2: Offshore Balancing.............................................................................................................................................................................41
Heg Good – Kagan [1/2]............................................................................................................................................................................42
Heg Good – Kagan [2/2]............................................................................................................................................................................43
Heg Good – Ferguson................................................................................................................................................................................44
Heg Good – Thayer [1/2]...........................................................................................................................................................................45
Heg Good – Thayer [2/2]...........................................................................................................................................................................46
Heg Good – Economy Shell......................................................................................................................................................................47
Heg Good – Terrorism Shell......................................................................................................................................................................48
Heg Good – Proliferation Shell..................................................................................................................................................................49
Heg Good – Proliferation Ext....................................................................................................................................................................50
Heg Good – China Shell............................................................................................................................................................................51
Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 1

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Asian Proliferation Shell.......................................................................................................................................................52
Heg Good – Democracy Shell...................................................................................................................................................................53
A2: Heg Good – War.................................................................................................................................................................................54
A2: Heg Good – Economy.........................................................................................................................................................................55
A2: Heg Good – Middle East.....................................................................................................................................................................56
A2: Benevolent Hegemony........................................................................................................................................................................57
Heg Bad – War...........................................................................................................................................................................................58
Heg Bad – War...........................................................................................................................................................................................59
Heg Bad – Nuclear War.............................................................................................................................................................................60
Heg Bad – Terrorism Shell.........................................................................................................................................................................61
Heg Bad – Terrorism Ext...........................................................................................................................................................................62
Heg Bad – Terrorism Ext...........................................................................................................................................................................63
Heg Bad – China Shell [1/2]......................................................................................................................................................................64
Heg Bad – China Shell [2/2]......................................................................................................................................................................65
Heg Bad – Proliferation.............................................................................................................................................................................66
Heg Bad – Russia-China Alliance Shell....................................................................................................................................................67
Heg Bad – Korea Shell..............................................................................................................................................................................68
Offshore Balancing Good – Conflict.........................................................................................................................................................69
Offshore Balancing Good – Asia...............................................................................................................................................................70
Offshore Balancing Good – China.............................................................................................................................................................71
A2: Re-Intervention...................................................................................................................................................................................72
A2: Transition Wars...................................................................................................................................................................................73
A2: Layne...................................................................................................................................................................................................74
A2: Kagan..................................................................................................................................................................................................75

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg – Brink Now

Hegemony is on the brink of collapse – unilateralism and ecological issues
Pakistan Daily 7-16-08
(Foreign scholars say US hegemony to give way soon, http://www.daily.pk/world/worldnews/84-worldnews/5722-
foreign-scholars-say-us-hegemony-to-give-way-soon-.html)
The four scholars were unanimous that the USA was on a destructive course after it had adopted the policy of an American
century, in 1997, and strategy of controlling politics and economics of other countries. However, each of the four speakers came to
the same conclusion: that the USA was bound to give way, soon. Dr Justin Podur, referring to the double standard in American
dealings, said it had militarily encircled the world with more than 700 air bases and had politicised international law in a selective
way. Arguing that technology would not solve the problems, the Canadian scholar also contended that the US was bad samaritan,
and its multinational corporations had politicised nature. These companies were engaged in a system of plunder, and destroying the
ecology of the world, the scholar said, and resources were getting depleted. He also mentioned that the world was facing a deficit
of agriculture, through the degradation of soil capacity, as well as food, water, and oil. American scholar Robert Jensen's view
about the USA was a more iconoclastic one. Referring to the generally held opinion that the USA had changed after the horrendous
9/11 tragedy, he said in fact nothing had changed. "The USA was always a unilateral country, it attacked Vietnam in violation of
international law, and constitutional rights of citizen had been curbed after 9/11 and there was a spurt of repression. One could not
be republican in character and rule an empire at the same time, " he added. Jenson agreed that the USA was an affluent country, but
the affluence has made American citizens "stupid". Holding the American media responsible for a moral decay in the pursuit of
public policies, the media has given the American government unparalleled control over the thinking of the people, through subtle
methods such as advertising, marketing and public relations. Referring to the keyword of labour and consumerism, the present
hallmark of the American society, he remarked "you work to consume more; that has become the reason for your living." This
could not go on for long, Jensen believed, and the solution is to return to spirituality in the conduct of men, adding that "the nature
always bats last." However, the Institute's director general, Dr Tanvir Ahmad Khan, believed in the infinite goodness of American
citizens. He spoke of insurgencies already afoot against the current America policies. "We can see this in the rank anti-
Americanism prevalent through out the world although the country exercised influence over each one of them." No country could
think of concluding a long-term relationship with it. "The countries were never sure when it would leave them in the lurch." Dr
Tanvir Ahmad was confident that a sentiment of multi-polar world is emerging, and, that "ultimately the USA would see the
wisdom of ecology issues and also adopt the Tokyo treaty on climate change."

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Readiness – Brink Now

Military readiness is on the verge of collapse – resources are key
P.W. Singer 08 Senior Fellow & Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative @ the Brookings Institution
(Military Readiness: Bent but Not Broken,
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2007/~/media/Files/Projects/Opportunity08/Factsheet_MilitaryReadiness.pdf)
Our military has been stretched to nearly the breaking point. Recruitment and retention are down. And our troops often lack
adequate supplies and equipment. If we are to maintain a military unmatched in its power and capability, our next Commander-in-
Chief must ensure that the ranks of our military continue to grow and that our troops have the resources they need to remain ready
and capable.
Readiness is on the brink – overstretch & tech

P.W. Singer 08 Senior Fellow & Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative @ the Brookings Institution
(Military Readiness: Bent but Not Broken,
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2007/~/media/Files/Projects/Opportunity08/Factsheet_MilitaryReadiness.pdf)
Although the next U.S. President will become Commander-in-Chief of a military unmatched in its power and capability, this
excellence is under siege. The U.S. military has been stretched thin and worn down by the combination of extensive deployments
over the last six years and a deferral of the hard questions of how a nation supports a military at war. Downward trends in
recruiting and retention show a force under great stress. More than a simple matter of raw numbers, this has a long-term effect on
the quality of our military forces. And, while defense budgeting remains focused on acquiring major new weapons systems that
will not be available until many years hence, a looming equipment gap harms our security in the here and now. The war in Iraq has
created many of these challenges, but they will continue years after operations there end.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Unsustainable – Multipolarity Now

The unipolar era is ending – the world is becoming multipolar
Christopher Layne 06 Research Fellow @ the Independent Institute, Visiting Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies @ the Cato Institute
(The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present, p. 149-150)
Although balance-of-power theorists were off with respect to the timing, now, even if somewhat belatedly, new great powers indeed
are emerging, and the unipolar era’s days are numbered. In its survey of likely international developments up until 2020, the National
Intelligence Council’s report, Mapping the Global Future, notes: The likely emergency of China and India as new major global players
– similar to the rise of Germany in the 19th century and the United States in the early 20th century – will transform the geopolitical
landscape, with impacts potentially as dramatic as those of previous two centuries. In the same way that commentators refer to the
1900s as the American Century, the early 21st century may be seen as the time when some in the developing world led by China and
India came into their own. In a similar vein, a study by the Strategic Assessment Group concludes that already both China (which,
according to Mapping the Global Future, by around 2020, will be “by any measure a first rate military power”) and the European
Union (each with a 14 percent share) are approaching the United States (20 percent) in their respective shares of world power.
Although the same study predicts the EU’s shares of world power will decrease somewhat between now and 2020, China and India are
projected to post significant gains. In other words, the international system today already is on the cusp of multipolarity and is likely to
become fully multipolar between now and 2020. It is unsurprising that, as balance-of-power theory predicts, new great powers are
rising. The potential for successful counterhegemonic balancing always exists in a unipolar system, because hegemony is not the
equivalent of what used to be called “universal empire.” A unipolar system still is made up of sovereign states, and even if none of
them have the short-term capacity to counterbalance the hegemon, invariably some of these states – which I term “eligible states –
have the potential to do so. Differential economic growth rates determine which actors in the international system are eligible states.
The distribution of power in the international system is never static, because some states are gaining relative power while others are
losing it. A hegemon’s grip on preponderance begins to loosen when the relative power gap between itself and some of the other starts
narrowing appreciably. When that gap closes enough, an inflection point is reached where the hegemon’s hard-power capabilities no
longer are an effective entry barrier to others’ emergence as peer competitors. As Gilpin puts it, “The critical significance of the
differential growth of power among states is that it alters the cost of changing the international system and therefore the incentives for
changing the international system.” The redistribution of power in the international system caused by differential growth rates
invariably has important geopolitical consequences: time and again relative “economic shifts heralded the rise of new Great Powers
which one day would have a decisive impact on the military/territorial order.” In a unipolar world, eligible states have real incentives
to transform their latent capabilities into actual hard power. Given the anarchic nature of the international political system, eligible
states can gain security only by building themselves into counterweights to the hegemon’s power. In this sense, unipolar systems
contain the seeds of their own demise, because the hegemon’s unchecked power, in itself, stimulates eligible states, in self-defense, to
emerge as great powers. The emergence of new great powers erodes the hegemon’s relative power, ultimately ending its dominance.
Thus, from the standpoint of balance-of-power theory, “unipolarity appears as the least stable of international organizations.” The two
prior unipolar moments in international history – France under Louis XIV and mid-Victorian Britain- suggest that hegemony prompts
the near-simultaneous emergence of several new great powers and the consequent transformation of the international system from
unipolarity to multipolarity.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Unsustainable – Generic

Unipolarity is ending – globalization is causing power shifts and harmful US policy insures overstretch
Richard Haass 08 President of the Council on Foreign Relations
(Bottom of Form The Age of Nonpolarity What Will Follow U.S. Dominance, Foreign Affairs, May/June)
But even if great-power rivals have not emerged, unipolarity has ended. Three explanations for its demise stand out. The first is
historical. States develop; they get better at generating and piecing together the human, financial, and technological resources that lead
to productivity and prosperity. The same holds for corporations and other organizations. The rise of these new powers cannot be
stopped. The result is an ever larger number of actors able to exert influence regionally or globally. A second cause is U.S. policy. To
paraphrase Walt Kelly's Pogo, the post-World War II comic hero, we have met the explanation and it is us. By both what it has done
and what it has failed to do, the United States has accelerated the emergence of alternative power centers in the world and has
weakened its own position relative to them. U.S. energy policy (or the lack thereof) is a driving force behind the end of unipolarity.
Since the first oil shocks of the 1970s, U.S. consumption of oil has grown by approximately 20 percent, and, more important, U.S.
imports of petroleum products have more than doubled in volume and nearly doubled as a percentage of consumption. This growth in
demand for foreign oil has helped drive up the world price of oil from just over $20 a barrel to over $100 a barrel in less than a
decade. The result is an enormous transfer of wealth and leverage to those states with energy reserves. In short, U.S. energy policy has
helped bring about the emergence of oil and gas producers as major power centers. U.S. economic policy has played a role as well.
President Lyndon Johnson was widely criticized for simultaneously fighting a war in Vietnam and increasing domestic spending.
President Bush has fought costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, allowed discretionary spending to increase by an annual rate of eight
percent, and cut taxes. As a result, the United States' fiscal position declined from a surplus of over $100 billion in 2001 to an
estimated deficit of approximately $250 billion in 2007. Perhaps more relevant is the ballooning current account deficit, which is now
more than six percent of GDP. This places downward pressure on the dollar, stimulates inflation, and contributes to the accumulation
of wealth and power elsewhere in the world. Poor regulation of the U.S. mortgage market and the credit crisis it has spawned have
exacerbated these problems. The war in Iraq has also contributed to the dilution of the United States' position in the world. The war in
Iraq has proved to be an expensive war of choice -- militarily, economically, and diplomatically as well as in human terms. Years ago,
the historian Paul Kennedy outlined his thesis about "imperial overstretch," which posited that the United States would eventually
decline by overreaching, just as other great powers had in the past. Kennedy's theory turned out to apply most immediately to the
Soviet Union, but the United States -- for all its corrective mechanisms and dynamism -- has not proved to be immune. It is not simply
that the U.S. military will take a generation to recover from Iraq; it is also that the United States lacks sufficient military assets to
continue doing what it is doing in Iraq, much less assume new burdens of any scale elsewhere. Finally, today's nonpolar world is not
simply a result of the rise of other states and organizations or of the failures and follies of U.S. policy. It is also an inevitable
consequence of globalization. Globalization has increased the volume, velocity, and importance of cross-border flows of just about
everything, from drugs, e-mails, greenhouse gases, manufactured goods, and people to television and radio signals, viruses (virtual
and real), and weapons. Globalization reinforces nonpolarity in two fundamental ways. First, many cross-border flows take place
outside the control of governments and without their knowledge. As a result, globalization dilutes the influence of the major powers.
Second, these same flows often strengthen the capacities of nonstate actors, such as energy exporters (who are experiencing a dramatic
increase in wealth owing to transfers from importers), terrorists (who use the Internet to recruit and train, the international banking
system to move resources, and the global transport system to move people), rogue states (who can exploit black and gray markets),
and Fortune 500 firms (who quickly move personnel and investments). It is increasingly apparent that being the strongest state no
longer means having a near monopoly on power. It is easier than ever before for individuals and groups to accumulate and project
substantial power. NONPOLAR DISORDER The increasingly nonpolar world will have mostly negative consequences for the United
States -- and for much of the rest of the world as well. It will make it more difficult for Washington to lead on those occasions when it
seeks to promote collective responses to regional and global challenges. One reason has to do with simple arithmetic. With so many
more actors possessing meaningful power and trying to assert influence, it will be more difficult to build collective responses and
make institutions work. Herding dozens is harder than herding a few. The inability to reach agreement in the Doha Round of global
trade talks is a telling example. Nonpolarity will also increase the number of threats and vulnerabilities facing a country such as the
United States. These threats can take the form of rogue states, terrorist groups, energy producers that choose to reduce their output, or
central banks whose action or inaction can create conditions that affect the role and strength of the U.S. dollar. The Federal Reserve
might want to think twice before continuing to lower interest rates, lest it precipitate a further move away from the dollar. There can be
worse things than a recession. Iran is a case in point. Its effort to become a nuclear power is a result of nonpolarity. Thanks more than
anything to the surge in oil prices, it has become another meaningful concentration of power, one able to exert influence in Iraq,
Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and beyond, as well as within OPEC. It has many sources of technology and finance and
numerous markets for its energy exports. And due to nonpolarity, the United States cannot manage Iran alone. Rather, Washington is
dependent on others to support political and economic sanctions or block Tehran's access to nuclear technology and materials.
Nonpolarity begets nonpolarity.
Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru

American decline is inevitable – diffusion of power is occurring now
Richard Haass 08 President of the Council on Foreign Relations
(Bottom of Form The Age of Nonpolarity What Will Follow U.S. Dominance, Foreign Affairs, May/June)
The principal characteristic of twenty-first-century international relations is turning out to be nonpolarity: a world dominated not by
one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power. This represents a
tectonic shift from the past. The twentieth century started out distinctly multipolar. But after almost 50 years, two world wars, and
many smaller conflicts, a bipolar system emerged. Then, with the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, bipolarity
gave way to unipolarity -- an international system dominated by one power, in this case the United States. But today power is diffuse,
and the onset of nonpolarity raises a number of important questions. How does nonpolarity differ from other forms of international
order? How and why did it materialize? What are its likely consequences? And how should the United States respond? NEWER
WORLD ORDER In contrast to multipolarity -- which involves several distinct poles or concentrations of power -- a nonpolar
international system is characterized by numerous centers with meaningful power. In a multipolar system, no power dominates, or the
system will become unipolar. Nor do concentrations of power revolve around two positions, or the system will become bipolar.
Multipolar systems can be cooperative, even assuming the form of a concert of powers, in which a few major powers work together on
setting the rules of the game and disciplining those who violate them. They can also be more competitive, revolving around a balance
of power, or conflictual, when the balance breaks down. At first glance, the world today may appear to be multipolar. The major
powers -- China, the European Union (EU), India, Japan, Russia, and the United States -- contain just over half the world's people and
account for 75 percent of global GDP and 80 percent of global defense spending. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Today's
world differs in a fundamental way from one of classic multipolarity: there are many more power centers, and quite a few of these
poles are not nation-states. Indeed, one of the cardinal features of the contemporary international system is that nation-states have lost
their monopoly on power and in some domains their preeminence as well. States are being challenged from above, by regional and
global organizations; from below, by militias; and from the side, by a variety of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and
corporations. Power is now found in many hands and in many places. In addition to the six major world powers, there are numerous
regional powers: Brazil and, arguably, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela in Latin America; Nigeria and South Africa in Africa;
Egypt, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East; Pakistan in South Asia; Australia, Indonesia, and South Korea in East Asia
and Oceania. A good many organizations would be on the list of power centers, including those that are global (the International
Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the World Bank), those that are regional (the African Union, the Arab League, the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations, the EU, the Organization of American States, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation), and
those that are functional (the International Energy Agency, OPEC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the World Health
Organization). So, too, would states within nation-states, such as California and India's Uttar Pradesh, and cities, such as New York,
São Paulo, and Shanghai. Then there are the large global companies, including those that dominate the worlds of energy, finance, and
manufacturing. Other entities deserving inclusion would be global media outlets (al Jazeera, the BBC, CNN), militias (Hamas,
Hezbollah, the Mahdi Army, the Taliban), political parties, religious institutions and movements, terrorist organizations (al Qaeda),
drug cartels, and NGOs of a more benign sort (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, Greenpeace).
Today's world is increasingly one of distributed, rather than concentrated, power. In this world, the United States is and will long
remain the largest single aggregation of power. It spends more than $500 billion annually on its military -- and more than $700 billion
if the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are included -- and boasts land, air, and naval forces that are the world's most capable. Its
economy, with a GDP of some $14 trillion, is the world's largest. The United States is also a major source of culture (through films
and television), information, and innovation. But the reality of American strength should not mask the relative decline of the United
States' position in the world -- and with this relative decline in power an absolute decline in influence and independence. The U.S.
share of global imports is already down to 15 percent. Although U.S. GDP accounts for over 25 percent of the world's total, this
percentage is sure to decline over time given the actual and projected differential between the United States' growth rate and those of
the Asian giants and many other countries, a large number of which are growing at more than two or three times the rate of the United
States. GDP growth is hardly the only indication of a move away from U.S. economic dominance. The rise of sovereign wealth funds
-- in countries such as China, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates -- is another. These government-controlled
pools of wealth, mostly the result of oil and gas exports, now total some $3 trillion. They are growing at a projected rate of $1 trillion
a year and are an increasingly important source of liquidity for U.S. firms. High energy prices, fueled mostly by the surge in Chinese
and Indian demand, are here to stay for some time, meaning that the size and significance of these funds will continue to grow.
Alternative stock exchanges are springing up and drawing away companies from the U.S. exchanges and even launching initial public
offerings (IPOs). London, in particular, is competing with New York as the world's financial center and has already surpassed it in
Haass Continues

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru

Continued Card
terms of the number of IPOs it hosts. The dollar has weakened against the euro and the British pound, and it is likely to decline in
value relative to Asian currencies as well. A majority of the world's foreign exchange holdings are now in currencies other than the
dollar, and a move to denominate oil in euros or a basket of currencies is possible, a step that would only leave the U.S. economy more
vulnerable to inflation as well as currency crises. U.S. primacy is also being challenged in other realms, such as military effectiveness
and diplomacy. Measures of military spending are not the same as measures of military capacity. September 11 showed how a small
investment by terrorists could cause extraordinary levels of human and physical damage. Many of the most costly pieces of modern
weaponry are not particularly useful in modern conflicts in which traditional battlefields are replaced by urban combat zones. In such
environments, large numbers of lightly armed soldiers can prove to be more than a match for smaller numbers of highly trained and
better-armed U.S. troops. Power and influence are less and less linked in an era of nonpolarity. U.S. calls for others to reform will tend
to fall on deaf ears, U.S. assistance programs will buy less, and U.S.-led sanctions will accomplish less. After all, China proved to be
the country best able to influence North Korea's nuclear program. Washington's ability to pressure Tehran has been strengthened by
the participation of several western European countries -- and weakened by the reluctance of China and Russia to sanction Iran. Both
Beijing and Moscow have diluted international efforts to pressure the government in Sudan to end its war in Darfur. Pakistan,
meanwhile, has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to resist U.S. entreaties, as have Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. The
trend also extends to the worlds of culture and information. Bollywood produces more films every year than Hollywood. Alternatives
to U.S.-produced and disseminated television are multiplying. Web sites and blogs from other countries provide further competition
for U.S.-produced news and commentary. The proliferation of information is as much a cause of nonpolarity as is the proliferation of
weaponry.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Unsustainable – Balancing

Heg will inevitably collapse – other great powers are rising
(American Empire: A Debate, p. 93-4)
Primacy is a strategy that causes insecurity because it will lead to a geopolitical backlash against the United States. In time, this will
take the form of traditional great power counterbalancing against American primacy. The emergence of new great powers during the
next decade or two is all but certain. Indeed, China already is on the cusp of establishing itself as a peer competitor to the United
States. The U.S. grand strategy of maintaining its global primacy has put the United States on the road to confrontation with a rising
China, and with Iran. In the short term, primacy has triggered asymmetric responses—notably terrorism—in regions like the Middle
East where America’s geopolitical presence is resented.
Heg will end – balancing and overstretch

In retrospect, it is not surprising that the second-tier major powers chose to avoid confronting the United States head on while it was at
the zenith of its power, but this doesn’t mean that great power politics has been banished permanently from the international system.
Even the most robust unipolar optimists admit that eventually peer competitors will emerge and that their counterbalancing strategies
will succeed in offsetting U.S. hegemony. Similarly, it is not surprising that, in the short term, the second-tier major powers have
chosen to pursue mixed strategies of cooperation with and competition against the United States. This does not imply that they are
reconciled to continuing U.S. hegemony, however. Rather, they have chosen to lie low and reap the benefits of free-riding on
America’s military and economic coattails while simultaneously engaging in other (nonhard and semi-hard) forms of balancing until
the time is ripe to challenge U.S. hegemony more directly. Viewed properly, the real debate about the future of American hegemony
has been miscast. The issue is not whether other states can, or will, balance against U.S. hegemony. They are, and have been since the
cold war’s end. Similarly, the issue is not whether American hegemony will end. Even unipolar optimists and agnostics admit that
someday it will end. The key question is when it will end. On this point, the unipolar pessimism of the balance-of-power theorists is
not misplaced. There are good reasons to believe that the unipolar era will end within the next decade or two. Indeed, the foundation
of U.S. hegemony already are eroding due to the interaction of external and internal factors. First, unipolar optimism notwithstanding,
the distribution of power in the international system will shift as new great powers (or “peer competitors”) emerge to challenge the
United States. Second, by succumbing to the “hegemon’s temptation,” the United States will become increasingly overextended
abroad. Third, fiscal and economic constraints increasingly will impinge on Washington’s ability to maintain edge declines, other
major states will be emboldened to engage in hard balancing against the United States

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Unsustainable – Economic Overstretch

Primacy is unsustainable – commitments insure fiscal overstretch
The economic vulnerabilities that Kennedy pinpointed did not disappear, however. Once again, the United States is running endless
federal budget deficits and the trade deficit has grown worse and worse. In contrast to the late 1980s (when Japan was the problem),
today America’s biggest bilateral trade deficit is with China ($162 billion in 2004 according to U.S. government figures – more than
twice as much as the second biggest bilateral trade deficit, $75 billion with Japan). Moreover, China also has emerged as a major U.S.
creditor. According to the Treasury Department, it now is the number-two investor in U.S. Treasury bills ($242 billion, compared with
Japan’s $683 billion). The United States still depends on capital inflows from abroad – to finance its deficit spending, to finance
private consumption, and to maintain the dollar’s position as the international economic system’s reserve currency. Because of the
twin deficits, the underlying fundamentals of the U.S. economy are out of alignment. The United States cannot live beyond its means
indefinitely. Sooner or later, the bill will come due in the form of higher taxes and higher interest rates. And, as the United States
borrows more and more to finance its budget and trade deficits, private investment is likely to be crowded out of the marketplace, with
predictable effects on the economy’s long-term health. In a word (or two), the United States is suffering from “fiscal overstretch”).
Economically, the United States is looking at the same problems in the early twenty-first century that it faced in the 1980s (and which
had been building since the early 1960s). Except this time the long-term prognosis is bleaker, because there are two big differences
between now and then. First, during the cold war, Japan (and, during the 1970s, West Germany) subsidized U.S. budget and trade
deficits as a quid pro quo for U.S. security guarantees. It will be interesting to see whether an emerging geopolitical rival like China –
or, for that matter, the European Union – will be as willing to underwrite U.S. hegemony in the coming decades. Second, big changes
on the economic side of the ledger make America’s long-term economic prospects problematic. The willingness of other states to
cover America’s debts no longer can be taken for granted. Already, key central banks are signaling their lack of confidence in the
dollar by diversifying their currency holdings. There are rumblings, too, that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC) may start pricing oil in euros, and that the dollar could be supplanted by the euro as the international economy’s reserve
currency. Should this happen, the ability of the United States to sustain its hegemony would be jeopardized. The domestic economic
picture is not so promising, either. The annual federal budget deficits are just the tip of the iceberg. The deeper problem is the federal
government;s huge unfunded liabilities for entitlement programs that will begin to come due about a decade hence. Increasingly,
defense spending and entitlement expenditures are squeezing out discretionary spending on domestic programs. Just down the road,
the United States is facing stark “warfare” or “welfare” choices between maintaining the overwhelming military capabilities on which
its hegemony rests or funding discretionary spending on domestic needs and funding Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. During
the past fifteen years or so since the Soviet Union’s collapse, the United States was able to postpone the need to grapple with the
painful issues Paul Kennedy raised in 1987. However, the chickens are coming home to roost, and those questions soon will have to
be faced. Gilpin’s 1987 description of America’s grand strategic and economic dilemmas is, if anything even more timely today: With
a decreased rate of economic growth and a low rate of national savings, the United States was living and defending commitments far
beyond its means. In order to bring is commitments and power back into balance once again, the United States would one day have to
cut back further on its overseas commitments, reduce the American standard of living, or decrease domestic productive investment
even more than it already had. In the meantime, American hegemony was threatened by a potentially devastating fiscal crisis. At some
point, the relative decline of U.S. economic power hat is in the offing will bring American hegemony to an end. In the shorter term,
however, the United States can prolong its hegemony if Americans are willing to pay the price in terms of higher taxes, reduced
consumption, and the curtailing of domestic programs. But there is a treadmill-like aspect to preserving U.S. hegemony, because
perpetuating American dominance will hasten the weakening of the economic base on which it rests.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Unsustainable – Dollar

The dollar has already declined – Euro is taking over
Shalendra Sharma 08 Professor of Politics @ the University of San Francisco
(The Rising Euro and Sinking Dollar: Explanations and Implications, Mediterranean Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring)
On the other hand, the euro’s growing appeal comes from several factors. First, the euro zone is comparable to the US economy in
terms of GDP (the euro zone covers some 300 million Europeans and, at inception, the euro accounted for 19.4 percent of the world’s
GDP, compared with 19.6 percent for the United States). Second, the ECB has kept inflation in check and fiscal policy stable due to its
strong commitment to budgetary discipline. Third, the EU is not burdened with anything like America’s current account deficit and
external debt. Fourth, the euro has brought tangible economic and business benefits. The currency has cut costs for businesses and
promoted trade. Crossborder transactions are now easier and cheaper since there are no longer the costly currency exchanges and
bureaucracy within the euro zone. Fifth, the euro has encouraged foreign investment by removing both currency costs and exchange-
rate uncertainty. For businesses and for consumers, the euro makes it easier to compare the prices of goods and services. What are the
implications of this shift? First, the most obvious: this change is not lost on both sovereign and private investors. More and more
countries are moving away from managing their exchange rates with the dollar and adopting euro-based anchors or baskets, and more
and more investors are choosing to denominate their assets in euros when investing in world markets. Many international business
houses have already switched from payments in the US dollar to other currencies, in particular the euro, and increasing numbers of
investors are now investing in nondollar currencies, not only for better returns but to seek less currency turmoil. Similarly, a number of
sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), like those from China, Russia, and Kuwait, have stated that their strategies include a deemphasis of
US-based dollar assets — the SWFs currently hold around $2.5 trillion. Not far behind, central banks in emerging market economies
such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China are already engaged in reserve diversification and now give larger weight to the euro in their
foreign reserve assets, as have a number of oil-producing Middle Eastern countries, most notably the United Arab Emirates, which has
dramatically diversified its assets away from the dollar. To put it bluntly, countries that have large holdings of US dollars are showing
a new boldness in dumping the dollar in favor of the euro. The Chinese, who have over the years purchased a huge volume of US
Treasury bonds (thereby enabling the US government to finance its deficit spending), and have accumulated an unprecedented $1
trillion worth of reserves, have served notice that they will be pursuing alternative investments with their surpluses — from purchasing
companies and assets to diversifying their holdings by trading their dollars into a basket of currencies. Indeed, a recent International
Monetary Fund report notes that “in official use, roughly one-third of countries that peg their currency in one form or another use the
euro as their anchor currency. . . . In private use, the euro has now surpassed the dollar as the most important currency of issue for
international bonds and notes (defined as foreign-currency issues and domestic-currency issues targeted at nonresidents) . . . in
international banking, 39 percent of all loans and 28 percent of all deposits were denominated in euros at end-June 2006, compared
with 41 percent and 48 percent, respectively, denominated in dollars.” 2 The implications of this shift are profound: it will not only
reduce America’s influence over international commerce, it will make other countries less willing to follow America’s lead on trade
and security matters.
Decline is inevitable – dollar is worthless

Parag Khanna 1-27-08 Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation
(The New York Times, “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony,” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-
t.html?ref=magazine)
Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury —
carrying a big wallet. The E.U.’s market is the world’s largest, European technologies more and more set the global standard and
European countries give the most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the world’s money will be safely invested
in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the
collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer price its oil in “worthless” dollars. President Hugo
Chávez of Venezuela went on to suggest euros. It doesn’t help that Congress revealed its true protectionist colors by essentially
blocking the Dubai ports deal in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the world’s financial capital for stock listing, it’s no
surprise that China’s new state investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead of New York. Meanwhile,
America’s share of global exchange reserves has dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bündchen demands to be paid in euros, while Jay-Z
drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Unsustainable – Dollar

Heg is unsustainable – dollar fall proves
Chandra Muzaffar 7-3-08 President of the International Movement for a Just World, Professor of Global Studies @ Universiti Sains
Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia
(Tehran Times, “Dollar’s reign coming to an end?” http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=172257)
One of the most significant trends in the global economy in recent years has been the decline of the U.S. dollar. It is a trend that has
far-reaching consequences for all the inhabitants of this planet. It is partly because the U.S. dollar has declined so much in value since
2003 that the price of oil -- a lot of the oil trade is denominated in the dollar -- has shot up. According to an analyst, “Against a basket
of currencies, the dollar has fallen by 25 percent since 2003, and considerably more since its peak in 2001.” What this means is that
the dollar value of a barrel of oil today is much more than it was 5 years ago. Of course, there are other reasons why the price of oil is
escalating. Since oil is the lifeblood of contemporary civilization, the steep price hike has impacted upon all areas of life. With the
higher cost of living, not only the poor but even those who are at the lower echelons of the middle class are struggling to make ends
meet. The increase in food prices on a global scale, for instance, is linked to oil. The rising costs of both food and oil -- it has to be
reiterated -- are directly connected to the decline of the dollar. The adverse consequences of the declining dollar go beyond oil and
food. Since the U.S. runs huge trade deficits with countries like China and Japan, the declining dollar will not be in the interest of the
latter. Neither will it be in the interest of countries which hold most of their foreign exchange reserves in the dollar. A number of them
are already feeling the effects of the diminishing value of their reserves. It is not surprising, therefore, that countries are converting
part or all of their reserves into other currencies, notably the euro. Some oil-producing countries are also switching to other currencies.
As expected, these moves have further weakened the dollar. The U.S. is not happy about this, though a weaker dollar may boost its
exports and reduce its trade deficit marginally. The U.S. knows that it is the dominant position of the dollar that enables it to exercise
global financial and economic hegemony. It is because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency that the U.S. has so much political
clout in the international arena. This is why the dollar has been described as one of the two principal pillars of U.S. global hegemony,
the other being its military power. It explains why the U.S. leadership was so incensed when former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein
abandoned the dollar and switched to the euro in 2000. He also converted Iraq’s 10 billion reserve fund at the UN to euros.
Commentators have argued that it was partly because of these decisions that the U.S. and British governments pushed hard for the
invasion of Iraq, which at the time of the currency switch was already under tough UN sanctions. Since 2002, Iran, currently the
world’s second largest oil exporter, has converted all its foreign exchange reserves to a basket of currencies, excluding the dollar. In
the second quarter of 2008, it went further and decided to denominate its entire oil trade in currencies other than the dollar. Is it any
wonder that Israel, the United States’ closest ally, has become more bellicose in its threats against Iran in recent weeks? Of course,
there are also other motives behind the attempts by the U.S., Israel and their other Western allies to undermine Iran. For the U.S., any
move by a major oil exporter to wean itself away from the dollar is a direct challenge to its hegemonic power. Look at its continuous
maneuvers to undermine Venezuela’s democratically elected president after Hugo Chavez placed a portion of his country’s oil trade
out of the dollar’s orbit. It is not difficult to fathom why the U.S. is so obsessed with perpetuating the oil-dollar nexus . It is partly
because most of the oil trade -- more than any other trade -- is denominated in the dollar that the U.S. currency is able to dominate the
world economy. In fact, it was the United States’ agreement with Saudi Arabia in 1974 that the oil trade would be denominated in the
dollar which gave a huge lift to the dollar’s reign. The U.S. will fight tooth and nail to ensure that that reign continues.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Conflate Trends & Status Quo [1/2]

Even if multipolarity isn’t here yet, the US can no longer affect global events
Efstathios Fakiolas & Tassos Fakiolas 07 PhD from the Department of War Studies, King's College London, and is currently working
as a strategy and southeastern European affairs analyst at ATEbank and PhD from IMEMO, Moscow, Russian Academy of Sciences
and is a special adviser on Russian and east European affairs for a Greek business firm
(Pax Americana or Multilateralism? Reflecting on the United States' Grand Strategic Vision of Hegemony in the Wake of the
11 September Attacks, Mediterranean Quarterly 18.4 (2007) 53-86)
Four years after the invasion of Iraq, it is forecast that "the military presence may last a decade or more," which inevitably will entail
considerable costs and casualties.84 Failure of the Bush administration to persuade or intimidate friendly countries and obtain even a
"moral majority" for the war from the UN Security Council highlights the limits of its aspirations for Pax Americana.85 India, the
second most populous country in the world after China, refused to contribute armed forces to the campaign against Iraq owing to the
lack of UN authorization.86 Countries participating in the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq represented only about 20 percent of the
world's population.87 In 2004 Spain and four other countries quit the coalition. In view of opposition by European and Arab
governments, primarily Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, Washington was forced to give up its so-called Greater Middle East Initiative
to stimulate political, economic, and social reforms from Mauritania to Pakistan.88 The United States is trapped in a deadlock that
vividly demonstrates the limits of its human and material resources. Despite its military superiority, it is unable to command and
simultaneously democratize Iraq.89 Senior US military headquarters officers reject any idea of further large-scale wars to tame rogue
states.90 The American economy spends more than it can really [ afford, suffering from "huge increases in government outlays . . .
and rising dependence on foreign funding."91 As half of the Arab population is less than twenty-five years old, and in general the
majority of the young people in the Islamic world are very prone to radical ideologies, the supply of potential terrorists is unlikely to
dry up soon.92 Under these adverse circumstances, in late January 2004 Bush asked, in his State of the Union Address, for Congress to
renew the Patriot Act, set to lapse in 2005. He justified his request on America's obligation to bring to a successful end the historic
work that it had undertaken in Afghanistan and Iraq, in order that they "can light the way for others and help transform a troubled part
of the world." But the problem is that Washington is no longer capable of marshalling the necessary human and material resources for
the task at hand, "as long as it relies principally upon the limited coalition with which it fought the war."93 To build a much broader
coalition and engage great powers other than Britain and Japan presupposes that US ambitions and designs for hegemony in the form
of a Pax Americana should be given up, a step that the Bush administration categorically renounces. It is obvious that time and the
force of circumstances is not working in favor of the United States. Such close allies and neighbors as Canada and Mexico have
refused to pledge their support to American actions in Iraq. To the enduring tension with Cuba must also be added the failure of
Washington to materialize its long coveted plan of forming a free trade area of the Americas, which would incorporate thirty-four
nations into a united commercial zone valued at $13 trillion. The member states of the Mercosur customs union, namely Brazil,
Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, which account for more than two-thirds of South America's economy, have repeatedly rejected the
American proposal. So has Venezuela, notwithstanding US pressure.94 Equally important, non-Americans no longer believe that the
September terrorist attacks must forever determine the world's security agenda and politics. Threats to global security also include
disease and poverty in the developing countries, the dwindling supply of such natural resources as fresh water, and the environment.95
"The US concentration on terrorism undermines the process of developing better relations," according to some.96 The paradox is that
despite unmatched military power the United States finds enormous difficulties in imposing its will on allies or potential challengers,
mainly EU, Russia, and China, whose ability to unite together in order to balance against it cannot be overlooked any more.97 The EU,
as a group of twenty-seven state actors, has proven able to emerge as the largest economic and commercial power in the world, having
in market exchange rates about 33 percent of world GDP and 20 percent of world trade. Having a common currency on a par with the
American dollar and enjoying a high level of productivity, it plays an increasingly important role in international monetary affairs.98
Having adopted a single patent system, Europe constructs an exceptionally competitive civilian plane, the Airbus, which in 2003 and
2004 sold more than Boeing; an effective military aircraft, the Euro-fighter; and the Arian space rocket. In the near future, it is to put
into service the world's biggest space positioning system, the Galileo, and the largest civilian plane, the 555 passenger European
Jumbo Airbus 380. The EU has established relations of close cooperation with numerous countries of Africa, the Pacific, and the
Caribbean. Since the end of the Cold War, it has created, by incorporating twelve new states as full members, a zone of peace and
stability in Central and Eastern Europe. It has initiated an array of energy, environment, and nuclear safety policies for the wider Black
Sea, especially for the Caucasian-3—Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia—including TRACECA for transport and INOGATE for oil
and gas. During the course of the current decade, it has set about developing good-neighbor relations with Russia, Ukraine,
Fakiolas & Fakiolas Continue

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Conflate Trends & Status Quo [2/2]

Continued Card
Belarussia, Moldavia, and the southern Mediterranean countries.99 The EU provides around 70 percent of the world's humanitarian
aid and civilian development assistance, four times the level of the United States, and contributes ten times as many peace-keeping
troops as the United States.100 Evidence, therefore, indicates that although American military and technological superiority is still
unprecedented, the EU potentially has all the possibilities to exert influence and write the rules of the power game in world politics on
equal footing with Washington. As high representative of the EU Javier Solana aptly points out, the EU can no longer "continue to
publicly espouse values and principles while calling on others to defend them."101 Indeed, as the EU European Security and Defense
Policy gains momentum, Europe is seemingly all the more willing to evolve into a military power, which will be able to play a leading
role in "a burden-sharing without sharing leadership."102 In reality, the Europeanization of security governance has brought into effect
a well-organized and credible military force; while not bearing a resemblance to the nature and structure of a state's national fighting
services or equating to a single, unified European army, it is "a power to be reckoned with."103 On the other hand, at a moment when
the United States is urgently in need of allies, relations with significant great powers are worse than at any time since the end of World
War II. France and Germany, for instance, are no longer regarded as trusty friends or partners by the Bush administration. Traditional
and cordial US-German postwar cordial bonds have become embittered since Chancellor Schroeder resorted to anti-American, anti-
war-in-Iraq rhetoric in his 2002 electoral campaign, while US-France relations have reached an all-time low after Paris tried to
forestall US plans to overthrow Saddam's regime.104 Also, Russia is suspicious of Washington's strong willingness to use force
abroad.105 The Russians have felt alienated from Washington as a result of its missile defense program and North Atlantic Treaty
Organization enlargement to the East. They have been warned "not to take unilateral steps that might threaten the unity of the entire
anti-terrorist coalition."106 Former secretary of state Colin Powell cautioned that several developments in Russian politics "have
given [the Americans] pause."107 But Moscow's security concerns and strategic preferences should not be ignored. Although
investment in military research and development dwindled in the 1990s, Russia still has a noteworthy high-technology military-
industrial complex with considerable research and development potential awaiting the opportunity to be exploited again, "as it was
during the Cold War."108 Relations between the United States and China are undermined by the long-standing, open question of
Taiwan. Having sharply improved its relations with India, the Chinese leadership appears ready to establish closer ties with the EU.
China has hailed European integration as creating a new political and economic pole of constructive influence destined to contribute to
world stability and development. It has signed an agreement with the Europeans in order to join their Galileo satellite navigation
system. Former French president Jacques Chirac offered a lavish welcome in Paris to Chinese President Jintao and threw his weight
against Taiwan and called on the EU to lift its arms embargo on China, an act that infuriated Washington.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Sustainable – Generic

Primacy is sustainable – US is dominant in all sectors
Stephen G. Brooks & William C. Wohlforth 08 Associate Professors in the Department of Government @ Dartmouth College
(World Out of Balance, p. 27-31)
“Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing,” historian Paul Kennedy observes: “I have returned to all of the
comparative defense spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years that I compiled in The Rise and Fall of the
Great Powers, and no other nation comes close.” Though assessments of U.S. power have changed since those words were written in
2002, they remain true. Even when capabilities are understood broadly to include economic, technological, and other wellsprings of
national power, they are concentrated in the United States to a degree never before experienced in the history of the modern system of
states and thus never contemplated by balance-of-power theorists. The United spends more on defense that all the other major military
powers combined, and most of those powers are its allies. Its massive investments in the human, institutional, and technological
requisites of military power, cumulated over many decades, make any effort to match U.S. capabilities even more daunting that the
gross spending numbers imply. Military research and development (R&D) may best capture the scale of the long-term investment that
give the United States a dramatic qualitative edge in military capabilities. As table 2.1 shows, in 2004 U.S. military R&D expenditures
were more than six times greater than those of Germany, Japan, France, and Britain combined. By some estimates over half the
military R&D expenditures in the world are American. And this disparity has been sustained for decades: over the past 30 years, for
example, the United States has invested over three times more than the entire European Union on military R&D. These vast
commitments have created a preeminence in military capabilities vis-à-vis all the other major powers that is unique after the
seventeenth century. While other powers could contest U.S. forces near their homelands, especially over issues on which nuclear
deterrence is credible, the United States is and will long remain the only state capable of projecting major military power globally.
This capacity arises from “command of the commons” – that is, unassailable military dominance over the sea, air, and space. As Barry
Posen puts it, Command of the commons is the key military enabler of the U.S global power position. It allows the United States to
exploit more fully other sources of power, including its own economic and military might as well as the economic and military might
of its allies. Command of the commons also helps the United States to weaken its adversaries, by restricting their access to economic,
military, and political assistance….Command of the commons provides the United States with more useful military potential for a
hegemonic foreign policy than any other offshore power has ever had. Posen’s study of American military primacy ratifies Kennedy’s
emphasis on the historical importance of the economic foundations of national power. It is the combination of military and economic
potential that sets the United States apart from its predecessors at the top of the international system. Previous leading states were
either great commercial and naval powers or great military powers on land, never both. The British Empire in its heyday and the
United States during the Cold War, for example, shared the world with other powers that matched or exceeded them in some areas.
Even at the height of the Pax Britannica, the United Kingdom was outspent, outmanned, and outgunned by both France and Russia.
Similarly, at the dawn of the Cold War the United States was dominant economically as well as in air and naval capabilities. But the
Soviet Union retained overall military parity, and thanks to geography and investment in land power it had a superior ability to seize
territory in Eurasia. The United States’ share of world GDP in 2006, 27.5 percent, surpassed that of any leading state in modern
history, with the sole exception of its own position after 1945 (when World War II had temporarily depressed every other major
economy). The size of the U.S economy means that its massive military capabilities required roughly 4 percent of its GDP in 2005, far
less than the nearly 10 percent it averaged over the peak years of the Cold War, 1950-70, and the burden borne by most of the major
powers of the past. As Kennedy sums up, “Being Number One at great cost is one thing; being the world’s single superpower on the
cheap is astonishing.”

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Sustainable – Generic

Heg is sustainable – the US is the greatest power in history
(American Primacy in Perspective, July/August, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, Issue 4, p. 20)
To understand just how dominant the United States is today, one needs to look at each of the standard components of national power in
succession. In the military arena, the United States is poised to spend more on defense in 2003 than the next 15-20 biggest spenders
combined. The United States has overwhelming nuclear superiority, the world's dominant air force, the only truly blue-water navy, and
a unique capability to project power around the globe. And its military advantage is even more apparent in quality than in quantity.
The United States leads the world in exploiting the military applications of advanced communications and information technology and
it has demonstrated an unrivaled ability to coordinate and process information about the battlefield and destroy targets from afar with
extraordinary precision. Washington is not making it easy for others to catch up, moreover, given the massive gap in spending on
military research and development (R&D), on which the United States spends three times more than the next six powers combined.
Looked at another way, the United States currently spends more on military R&D than Germany or the United Kingdom spends on
defense in total. No state in the modern history of international politics has come close to the military predominance these numbers
suggest. And the United States purchases this preeminence with only 3.5 percent of its GDP. As historian Paul Kennedy notes, "being
Number One at great cost is one thing; being the world's single superpower on the cheap is astonishing." America's economic
dominance, meanwhile -- relative to either the next several richest powers or the rest of the world combined -- surpasses that of any
great power in modern history, with the sole exception of its own position after 1945 (when World War II had temporarily laid waste
every other major economy). The U.S. economy is currently twice as large as its closest rival, Japan. California's economy alone has
risen to become the fifth largest in the world (using market exchange-rate estimates), ahead of France and just behind the United
Kingdom. It is true that the long expansion of the 1990s has ebbed, but it would take an experience like Japan's in that decade -- that
is, an extraordinarily deep and prolonged domestic recession juxtaposed with robust growth elsewhere -- for the United States just to
fall back to the economic position it occupied in 1991. The odds against such relative decline are long, however, in part because the
United States is the country in the best position to take advantage of globalization. Its status as the preferred destination for
scientifically trained foreign workers solidified during the 1990s, and it is the most popular destination for foreign firms. In 1999 it
attracted more than one-third of world inflows of foreign direct investment. U.S. military and economic dominance, finally, is rooted
in the country's position as the world's leading technological power. Although measuring national R&D spending is increasingly
difficult in an era in which so many economic activities cross borders, efforts to do so indicate America's continuing lead. Figures
from the late 1990s showed that U.S. expenditures on R&D nearly equaled those of the next seven richest countries combined.
Measuring the degree of American dominance in each category begins to place things in perspective. But what truly distinguishes the
current international system is American dominance in all of them simultaneously. Previous leading states in the modern era were
either great commercial and naval powers or great military powers on land, never both. The British Empire in its heyday and the
United States during the Cold War, for example, each shared the world with other powers that matched or exceeded them in some
areas. Following the Napoleonic Wars, the United Kingdom was clearly the world's leading commercial and naval power. But even at
the height of the Pax Britannica, the United Kingdom was outspent, outmanned, and outgunned by both France and Russia. And its 24
percent share of GDP among the six leading powers in the early 1870s was matched by the United States, with Russia and Germany
following close behind. Similarly, at the dawn of the Cold War the United States was clearly dominant economically as well as in air
and naval capabilities. But the Soviet Union retained overall military parity, and thanks to geography and investment in land power it
had a superior ability to seize territory in Eurasia. Today, in contrast, the United States has no rival in any critical dimension of power.
There has never been a system of sovereign states that contained one state with this degree of dominance. The recent tendency to
equate unipolarity with the ability to achieve desired outcomes single-handedly on all issues only reinforces this point; in no previous
international system would it ever have occurred to anyone to apply such a yardstick.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Sustainable – Competitiveness

Heg is sustainable – US competitiveness is untouchable
American primacy is also rooted in the country’s position as the world’s leading technological power. The United States remains
dominant globally in overall R&D investments, high-technology production, commercial innovation, and higher education (table 2.3).
Despite the weight of this evidence, elite perceptions of U.S power had shifted toward pessimism by the middle of the first decade of
this century. As we noted in chapter 1, this was partly the result of an Iraq-induced doubt about the utility of material predominance, a
doubt redolent of the post-Vietnam mood. In retrospect, many assessments of U.S economic and technological prowess from the
1990s were overly optimistic; by the next decade important potential vulnerabilities were evident. In particular, chronically
imbalanced domestic finances and accelerating public debt convinced some analysts that the United States once again confronted a
competitiveness crisis. If concerns continue to mount, this will count as the fourth such crisis since 1945; the first three occurred
during the 1950s (Sputnik), the 1970s (Vietnam and stagflation), and the 1980s (the Soviet threat and Japan’s challenge). None of
these crises, however, shifted the international system’s structure: multipolarity did not return in the 1960s, 1970s or early 1990s, and
each scare over competitiveness ended with the American position of primacy retained or strengthened. Our review of the evidence of
U.S. predominance is not meant to suggest that the United States lacks vulnerabilities or causes for concern. In fact, it confronts a
number of significant vulnerabilities; of course, this is also true of the other major powers. The point is that adverse trends for the
United States will not cause a polarity shift in the near future. If we take a long view of U.S. competitiveness and the prospects for
relative declines in economic and technological dominance, one takeaway stands out: relative power shifts slowly. The United States
has accounted for a quarter to a third of global output for over a century. No other economy will match its combination of wealth, size,
technological capacity, and productivity in the foreseeable future (table 2.2 and 2.3) The depth, scale, and projected longevity of the
U.S. lead in each critical dimension of power are noteworthy. But what truly distinguishes the current distribution of capabilities is
American dominance in all of them simultaneously. The chief lesson of Kennedy’s 500-year survey of leading powers is that nothing
remotely similar ever occurred in the historical experience that informs modern international relations theory. The implication is both
simple and underappreciated: the counterbalancing constraint is inoperative and will remain so until the distribution of capabilities
changes fundamentally. The next section explains why.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Sustainable – Economy

Heg is sustainable for a long time – imperial overstretch theory is bankrupt
Bradley A. Thayer 07 Associate Professor of Political Science @ Missouri State University
Given the historical economic growth rates of these countries, it is unlikely that any of them (or the EU) will be able to reach the
levels of economic growth required to match current U.S. defense spending and, thus, supplant the United States. China comes closest
with 6.6 percent annual economic growth estimated by the World Bank through 2020, or the 7 percent annual economic growth
estimated by the World Economic Forum through 2020.3' It is not even clear if China can sustain its growth rates and, other than
China, no other country is even in the ballpark. Table 1.5 shows the sustained economic growth rates necessary to match the present
military spending by the United States. Thus, the economy is well placed to be the engine of the American Empire. Even the leading
proponent of the "imperial overstretch" argument, Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, has acknowledged this. Imperial
overstretch occurs when an empire's military power and alliance commitments are too burdensome for its economy. In the 1980s,
there was much concern among academics that the United States was in danger of this as its economy strained to fund its military
operations and alliance commitments abroad. However, Kennedy now acknowledges that he was wrong when he made that argument
in his famous book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, because of the robustness of American economic and military power.
Indeed, if there is any imperial overstretch, it is more likely to be by China, France, Britain, India, Russia, or the EU-not the United
States. Reflecting on the history of world politics, Kennedy submits that the United States not only has overwhelming dominance but
possesses such power so as to be a historically unique condition: "Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. I have
returned to all of the comparative defense spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years that I compiled in The
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and no other nation comes close," not even an empire as great as the British, because "even the
Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies. Right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American
maritime supremacy.' Moreover, Kennedy recognizes that the steady economic growth of the American economy, and the curbing of
inflation, means that "America's enormous defense expenditures could be pursued at a far lower relative cost to the country than the
military spending of Ronald Reagan's years," and that fact is "an incomparable source of the U.S. strength."" When Kennedy, who was
perhaps the strongest skeptic of the economic foundation of America's power, comes to acknowledge, first, that no previous empire
has been as powerful as America is now; and, second, that its strength will last because of the fundamental soundness of its economy,
then, as Jeff Foxworthy would say, "You might be an empire...." And it is one that will last a considerable amount of time. As with its
military might, the economic foundation of the American empire is sound for the projected future.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Sustainable – Economy

Economic dominance will sustain heg despite deficits and debt
American economic power is critical to the maintenance of the American Empire because economic power is the wellspring of
military power. A good rule of thumb in international politics is that a country's gross domestic product equals the strength of military
power, or GDP = Military Power. So, a healthy American economy helps to ensure adequate military strength to preserve America's
position in the world. Fortunately for the United States, it has the world's largest economy and its relative economic strength, like its
relative military power, is astonishing. In order to demonstrate this argument, we have to examine the aggregate economic strength of
the United States versus the economic power of other countries. Table 1.4 captures the relative economic might of the United States. It
provides a comparison of the world's top twenty economies as estimated by the Central Intelligence Agency, the International Institute
for Strategic Studies, and the World Bank. For the United States, the data are consistent using any of the major tools economists
employ to estimate economic might (the CIA's GDP-PPP, GDP for the IISS, and GNI for the World Bank). The data show that the
United States is clearly the world's most powerful economy in both absolute and relative terms. Indeed, if we consider economies,
only the twenty-five-member-nation European Union (EU) possibly surpasses American economic might, and if it does, it is not by
much. In 2004, the EU's economy was $11.05 trillion, in contrast to the $10.99 trillion U.S. economy in 2003, according to the CIA.26
If we recognize that the CIA estimates the EU had 1 percent real growth in 2004, and the United States had 3.1 percent real growth in
2003, it is the case that the economies are really the same size. Additionally, as I will describe below, the U.S. economy is much more
efficient and better primed for continued economic growth than is the EU's sclerotic and moribund economy. The United States is the
world's largest and most efficient economy. Its currency is the world's reserve currency, it fosters and protects international trade and
helps to serve as the "lender of last resort" for the world economy. Additionally, the United States is enjoying historically low levels of
inflation, unemployment, and interest rates. However, despite this unrivaled economic dominance, no economy is perfect. The U.S.
economy certainly has problems, such as a large federal budget deficit and a considerable current account deficit (the difference
between what Americans earn from and pay to foreigners). Continuing deficits have made the United States the world's leading debtor.
But neither deficits nor debt are a major problem for the United States.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Sustainable – Military

US military is untouchable – tech and skills are superior
These and other factors place a significant limit on the strategy of purchasing weapons systems to reduce the gap with U.S. military
forces." Not surprisingly, analysts and policymakers typically stress a different reason why rising economic interdependence can erode
the U.S, advantage in weaponry: "globalization has made the technology and resources necessary to develop sophisticated weapons
more widely available. Economic globalization certainly does increase the access that countries throughout the world have to the
technologies and resources needed for defense production; there is, however, no basis for concluding that this will undercut the current
American edge in military technology. Just having access to components and technology will not be enough for other states to produce
and field weaponry capable of rivaling the United States. To produce capable weapons systems, components and technology must be
married with sufficient production experience, design skills, and general knowledge of systems integration-areas where other countries
fall far short of the United States." The United States has more of these intangible production resources in part because the immense
scope of its economy gives it a greater ability to develop them." U.S. economic size is also significant because it leads to a larger pool
of military R&D and production knowledge to draw upon, which makes it much easier to achieve economies of scale in weapons
production. Significantly, the economic size of the United States gives it a dramatic advantage in the production of weaponry not just
on its own but also in conjunction with economic globalization." The gains to be accrued from pursuing globalization in defense
production are a function of how high a state aims in military technology: the more advanced the weapons, the greater the need for a
wide range of parts, components, and technologies. In turn, how high a state aims in military technology is largely a reflection of
economic size. Finally, even if it were possible for other states to take advantage of globalization to produce weapons systems that
could rival those of the United States, a large gap would still exist in terms of their real battlefield effectiveness. And this is largely
because the United States is so far ahead in obtaining and processing battlefield information.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Sustainable – Military

US military is dominant – sea, air, and space prove
Barry Posen 03 Professor of Political Science @ MIT, Member of its Security Studies Program
(Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony, International Security, Summer)
The U.S. military currently possesses command of the global commons. Command of the commons is analogous to command of the
sea, or in Paul Kennedy's words, it is analogous to "naval mastery." 10 The "commons," in the case of the sea and space, are areas that
belong to no one state and that provide access to much of the globe. 11 Airspace does technically belong to the countries below it, but
there are few countries that can deny their airspace above 15,000 feet to U.S. warplanes. Command does not mean that other states
cannot use the commons in peacetime. Nor does it mean that others cannot acquire military assets that can move through or even
exploit them when unhindered by the United States. Command means that the United States gets vastly more military use out of the
sea, space, and air than do others; that it can credibly threaten to deny their use to others; and that others would lose a military contest
for the commons if they attempted to deny them to the United States. Having lost such a contest, they could not mount another effort
for a very long time, and the United States would preserve, restore, and consolidate its hold after such a fight. 12 Command of the
commons is the key military enabler of the U.S. global power position. It allows the United States to exploit more fully other sources
[End Page 8] of power, including its own economic and military might as well as the economic and military might of its allies.
Command of the commons also helps the United States to weaken its adversaries, by restricting their access to economic, military, and
political assistance. Command of the commons has permitted the United States to wage war on short notice even where it has had little
permanent military presence. This was true of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the 1993 intervention in Somalia, and the 2001 action in
Afghanistan. Command of the commons provides the United States with more useful military potential for a hegemonic foreign
policy than any other offshore power has ever had. When nineteenth-century Britain had command of the sea, its timely power
projection capability ended at the maximum range of the Royal Navy's shipboard guns. The Royal Navy could deliver an army many
places around the globe, but the army's journey inland was usually difficult and slow; without such a journey, Britain's ability to
influence events was limited. As the nineteenth century unfolded, the industrialization of the continental powers, improvements in land
transportation, and the development of coastal warfare technologies such as the torpedo and mine reduced the strategic leverage
provided by command of the sea. 13 The United States enjoys the same command of the sea that Britain once did, and it can also
move large and heavy forces around the globe. But command of space allows the United States to see across the surface of the world's
landmasses and to gather vast amounts of information. At least on the matter of medium-to-large-scale military developments, the
United States can locate and identify military targets with considerable fidelity and communicate this information to offensive forces
in a timely fashion. Air power, ashore and afloat, can reach targets deep inland; and with modern precision-guided weaponry, it can
often hit and destroy those targets. U.S. forces can even more easily do great damage to a state's transportation and communications
networks as well as economic infrastructure. When U.S. ground forces do venture inland, they do so against a weakened adversary;
they also have decent intelligence, good maps, and remarkable knowledge of their own position from moment to moment. Moreover,
they can call on a great reserve of responsive, accurate, air- delivered firepower, which permits the ground forces considerable
freedom of action. Political, economic, and technological changes since the 1980s have thus partially reversed the rise of land power
relative to sea power that [End Page 9] occurred in the late nineteenth century and helped to erode Britain's formal and informal
empire.
American military is vastly superior – it’s the key measure of power

Thomas Weiss 04 Presidential Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies
(The Sunset of Humanitarian Intervention? The Responsibility to Protect in a Unipolar Era, June, Security Dialogue, Vol. 35,
No. 2)
Though the ICISS met with Hubert Védrine, they failed to appreciate adequately the implications of what the French foreign minister
dubbed the hyper-puissance. Bipolarity had given way to what was supposed to be US primacy, but the military prowess in
Afghanistan and Iraq makes ‘primacy’ a vast understatement. Scholars speculate about the nuances of economic and cultural leverage
resulting from US soft power (see Nye, 2002), but the hard currency of international politics undoubtedly remains military might.
Before the war on Iraq, Washington was already spending more on its military than the next 15–25 countries (depending on who was
counting); with an additional appropriation of almost $90 billion for the war on Iraq, the United States now spends more than the rest
of the world’s militaries combined (Center for Defense Information, 2004)

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Sustainable – Air Power

US air power is unrivaled
An electronic flying circus of specialized attack, jamming, and electronic intelligence aircraft allows the U.S military to achieve the
"suppression of enemy air defenses" (SEAD); limit the effectiveness of enemy radars, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and fighters; and
achieve the relatively safe exploitation of enemy skies above 15,000 feet. 37 Cheap and simple air defense weapons, such as
antiaircraft guns and shoulder-fired lightweight SAMs, are largely ineffective at these altitudes. Yet at these altitudes aircraft can
deliver precision-guided munitions with great accuracy and lethality, if targets have been properly located and identified. The ability
of the U.S. military to satisfy these latter two conditions varies with the nature of the targets, the operational circumstances, and the
available reconnaissance and command and control assets (as discussed below), so precision-guided munitions are not a solution to
every problem. The United States has devoted increasing effort to modern aerial reconnaissance capabilities, including both aircraft
and drones, which have improved the military's ability in particular to employ air power against ground forces, but these assets still do
not provide perfect, instantaneous information. 38 Confidence in the quality of their intelligence, and the lethality and responsiveness
of their air power, permitted U.S. commanders to dispatch relatively small numbers of ground forces deep into Iraq in the early days of
the 2003 war, without much concern for counterattacks by large Iraqi army units. 39 The U.S. military maintains a vast stockpile of
precision-guided munitions and is adding to it. As of 1995, the Pentagon had purchased nearly 120,000 air-launched precision-guided
weapons for land and naval attack at a cost of $18 billion. 40 Some 20,000 of these weapons were high-speed antiradiation missiles
[End Page 15] (HARMs), designed to home in on the radar emissions of ground-based SAM systems, a key weapon for the SEAD
campaign. Thousands of these bombs and missiles were launched in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but tens of thousands more have
been ordered. 41 The capability for precision attack at great range gives the United States an ability to do significant damage to the
infrastructure and the forces of an adversary, while that adversary can do little to harm U.S. forces. 42 Air power alone may not be
able to determine the outcome of all wars, but it is a very significant asset. Moreover, U.S. air power has proven particularly
devastating to mechanized ground forces operating offensively, as was discovered in the only Iraqi mechanized offensive in Desert
Storm, the battle of al-Khafji, in which coalition air forces pummeled three advancing Iraqi divisions. 43 The United States can
provide unparalleled assistance to any state that fears a conventional invasion, making it a very valuable ally.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Sustainable – Naval Power

US Navy is the world’s elite
U.S. nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) are perhaps the key assets of U.S. open- ocean antisubmarine warfare (ASW) capability, which
in turn is the key to maintaining command of the sea. 17 During the Cold War, the Soviet Union challenged U.S. command of the sea
with its large force of SSNs. The U.S. Navy quietly won the "third battle of the Atlantic," though the Soviet successes in quieting their
nuclear submarines in the 1980s would have necessitated another expensive and difficult round of technological competition had the
Cold War not ended. 18 At more than $1 billion each (more than $2 billion each for the new U.S. SSN), modern nuclear submarines
are prohibitively expensive for most states. Aside from the United States, Britain, China, France, and Russia are the only other
countries that can build them, and China is scarcely able. 19 Several partially built nuclear attack submarines remained in Russian
yards in the late 1990s, but no new ones have been laid down. 20 Perhaps 20-30 Russian nuclear attack submarines remain in service.
21 Currently, the U.S. Navy has 54 SSNs in service and 4 under construction. It plans to build roughly 2 new boats every three years.
It also has a program to convert 4Ohio-class Trident ballistic missile submarines into nonnuclear cruise missile-carrying submarines
for land attack. The U.S. Navy also dominates the surface of the oceans, with 12 aircraft carriers (9 nuclear powered) capable of
launching high-performance aircraft. 22 The Soviet Union was just building its first true aircraft carrier when its political system
collapsed. Aside from France, [End Page 11] which has 1, no other country has any nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. At $5billion
apiece for a single U.S. Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, this is no surprise. 23 Moreover, the U.S. Navy operates for the
Marine Corps a fleet of a dozen large helicopter/VSTOL carriers, each almost twice the size of the Royal Navy's comparable (3 ship)
Invincible class. To protect its aircraft carriers and amphibious assets, the U.S. Navy has commissioned 37 Arleigh Burke-class
destroyers since 1991—billion-dollar multimission platforms capable of antiair, antisubmarine, and land-attack missions in high-threat
environments. 24 This vessel is surely the most capable surface combatant in the world.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Sustainable – Multilateralism

Multilateral coalitions are key to heg
Efstathios Fakiolas & Tassos Fakiolas 07 PhD from the Department of War Studies, King's College London, and is currently working
as a strategy and southeastern European affairs analyst at ATEbank and PhD from IMEMO, Moscow, Russian Academy of Sciences
and is a special adviser on Russian and east European affairs for a Greek business firm
(Pax Americana or Multilateralism? Reflecting on the United States' Grand Strategic Vision of Hegemony in the Wake of the
11 September Attacks, Mediterranean Quarterly 18.4 (2007) 53-86)
Second, the circumstances of the times dictate that Washington should build a world order around strong security ties among the great
powers. Neither the EU nor China and Russia should be left isolated. Instead, they should be brought together into a hegemonic
coalition tied to a multipolar, American-led international system. In fact, US leadership is bound to retain its superpower status and
become an unrivalled hegemon only if it proves able to render to all the other great powers a role conceived of as a sort of equal
alliance partnership within global hegemonic American leadership. This US-centered great powers coalition and security order may
serve both to convert US global primacy into US hegemony and reassure all the great powers of their ability to play their part as
strategic partners in managing world politics. In sum, the pursuit of Pax Americana is doomed to failure. Unless this grand strategic
objective, along with the corresponding grand strategy of preventive [End Page 85] war and assertive engagement, is given up, it will
soon be doubtful whether the United States will be able to pursue hegemony even in the form of multilateralism to shape a multipolar,
American-led world order. Why the Bush administration is unwilling to tailor its strategic decisions and steps to match this reality, in
order to continue to hold the upper hand as a preeminent great power, is another story.
Multilateralism makes the US seem benign – prevents balancing

(International Relations Theory and the Case against Unilateralism, Perspectives on Politics, September, Vol. 3, No. 3)
The most pervasive argument against unilateralism is that it will spark or hasten counterbalancing by other major powers. The
argument is derived from balance-of-power theory, long a staple of realist thinking and practice. Realism’s focus on relative power
does explain why the United States has the opportunity to act unilaterally, and, moreover, some realists discount the importance of
international institutions. Nevertheless, influential contemporary formulations of the theory yield the argument that by strongly
demonstrating its multilateral credentials, the United States can signal benign intent and thus forestall counterbalancing. In making
this argument, contemporary realists are in distinguished historical company, for anticipated counterbalancing has long been the
strongest realist argument for restraint.9 More than any other intellectual factor, this accounts for the similarity between many realists’
preferences regarding unilateralism and those of their institutionalist and constructivist counterparts. Balance-of-power theory posits
that because states have an interest in maximizing their long-term odds on survival, they will coordinate to check dangerous
concentrations of power.10 If the security threat to others inheres in power potential alone, as Kenneth Waltz maintains, then there is
nothing Washington can do to affect the probability and rate of counterbalancing. 11 If, however, other states assess America’s
intentions as well as its capabilities when deciding whether to balance, as Stephen Walt and many other realists argue, then U.S. policy
makers can use support for international institutions to demonstrate their satisfaction with the status quo and dampen other states’
security fears, thus forestalling the emergence of a counterbalancing coalition.12 Many self-described realists accept the proposition
that the United States can and should reduce the probability of counterbalancing by maintaining a general disposition toward
multilateralism. Walt argues that “the United Nations and other international institutions help the United States exercise its power in a
way that is less threatening (and therefore more acceptable) to others.”13 Michael Mastanduno explicitly derives from Walt’s balance
of threat theory the proposition that “the dominant state in a unipolar setting will rely on multilateralism in its international
undertakings.”14 Randall Schweller and David Priess agree, noting that “if the hegemon adopts a benevolent strategy and creates a
negotiated order based on legitimate influence and management, lesser states will bandwagon with rather than balance against it.”15

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Internals – Economy
Economic strength is key to hegemony
Zalmay Khalilzad 95 US Ambassador to Iraq, Director of Strategy & Doctrine Program @ the RAND Corporation
(From Containment to Global Leadership? America and the World After the Cold War,
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR525/index2.html)
U.S. economic strength is essential for U.S. global leadership. To remain the preeminent world power, the United States must
enhance its economic strength by improving productivity, thus increasing real per-capita income, strengthening education and
training; and generating and using superior science and technology. In the long run, the nation’s economic future will be affected
by two other factors. One is the imbalance between government revenues and government expenditure. Second, and even more
important to long-term economic well-being, may be the overall rate of investment. Although government cannot imbue
Americans with a Japanese-style propensity to invest, it can use tax policy to encourage such behavior. The nation’s global
standing will also be affected by its social conditions – which are currently unsatisfactory because of the high rate of violence in
the cities, the poor state of race relations, and the breakdown in families. Though the United States faces no global ideological
rival, and though movements such as Islamic fundamentalism and East-Asian traditionalism are limited in their appeal, the
country’s social problems are limiting its appeal as a model. If the social crisis worsens, it is likely that over the long term, a new
organizing principle with greater universal appeal might emerge and be adopted by states with the power and the desire to
challenge the United States.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Balancing – Generic

Balancing efforts fail – alliances are hard to build and the US is too strong
The main systemic obstacles to external balancing are coordination – a ubiquitous difficulty in international relations – and the
collective action problem, which is even more formidable. Collective goods theory predicts that counterbalancing alliances will be
hard to form and make effective. A balancing constraint against a prospective hegemon can be enjoyed by states that do not contribute
to it; one state’s security benefit does not prevent others from benefiting as well. The result is a powerful incentive to free ride. States
are tempted to stand aside and pass the balancing buck to others. Hence it is little wonder that John Mearsheimer’s review of two
centuries’ experience leads him to conclude that “great powers seem clearly to prefer buck-passing to balancing.” The collective action
problem feeds into the coordination challenges that beset any cooperative endeavor among states. Each prospective balancer is a self-
interested actor seeking to minimize costs and risks and maximize the degree to which the alliance’s strategy complements the actor’s
other preferences. Even when they agree on the need to balance, states tend to disagree on how burdens should be shared and what
strategy should be followed. Allies tend to splinter over who gets to lead and set strategy. Except for those few alliances lucky enough
to be able to balance a hegemon without a great deal of strategic coordination, effective alliances demand that members’ decisions on
national security be shaped by their collective purpose. Leadership in an alliance of sovereign states with roughly equal capabilities is
usually so contentious an issue that it is never really settled, which leads to strategic incoherence. The sheer size and
comprehensiveness of the power gap favoring the United States, moreover, raises still higher the coordination and collective action
barriers to external balancing. The greater and more comprehensive the hegemon’s lead, the larger and more strategically coherent the
coalition needed to check it. As figure 2.1 illustrates, the power gaps that balancing efforts had to overcome in the past were much
narrower, and yet the barriers loomed large. They are far more formidable now given the long road prospective balancers would have
to travel to produce a credible check on American power. A comparison to history’s most successful power-aggregating alliance,
NATO, is instructive. NATO’s ability to overcome the perennial obstacles to balancing in the Cold War hinged on two conditions: it
confronted a one-dimensional superpower that was competitive mainly in conventional land power; and U.S. leadership within the
coalition allowed Washington to overcome coordination problems and absorb the costs and risks of free riding by others. Those
advantages do not apply to the would-be members of a counter-coalition against U.S. power today. There is no obvious leader of a
hypothetical coalition, nor would that coalition posses the latent power advantage NATO enjoyed. Today’s unipolar system, in short,
multiplies the problems that complicated the balancing efforts of the past. Organizing collective action to check a rising power is hard
enough; fashioning a durable, coherent coalition against a well-established hegemon is a tougher order of business. All of the
difficulties of overthrowing a ramified status quo now work for, rather than against, the hegemon. Several of the major powers are
longtime allies of United States and derive substantial benefits from their position. Attempting to balance would put those benefits at
risk, and Washington has ample opportunities to exploit the free-rider problem by playing divide and rule.
Balancing theory is inapplicable – assumes a rising hegemon

(World Out of Balance, p. 48)
Attempts to check the leading state’s power, in sum, are theoretically possible in any international system. But behavior that is
possible may be patiently self-defeating and hence highly improbable. Even if we examine only causal factors that are featured in
balance-of-power theory itself, it is clear that counterbalancing is highly improbable today. The plain fact is that balance-of-power
theorists never contemplated a unipolar system. Applying the theory to such a system essentially reverses its implications for
constraints on the leading state. The balancing constraint may well work on the leading state up to a threshold of hegemony or
unipolarity. Once a state passes this threshold however, the causal arrows reverse: the stronger a leading state is and the more
entrenched its dominance, the more improbable and thus less constraining counterbalancing dynamics are.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru

States won’t balance – geography and neighboring powers restrict them
A final impediment to balancing is the opportunity cost of using resources and bending strategy toward countering the system’s
strongest state. Some fortunate balancers may find that their efforts to counter the hegemon complement their other foreign policy
objectives. But most are not so lucky; the resources they use for balancing often cannot be used for other purposes. Many are less
fortunate still, and find that balancing undermines other core interests. Here, we will discuss only opportunity costs for pursuing
security interests, but this analysis can easily be extended to other core interests as well. A state’s willingness to pay for balancing is
conditioned by the proportion of its security problems that would be addressed by checking systemic hegemony. The smaller this
proportion is, the higher the opportunity cost – and thus the lower the probability – of balancing. More specifically, the more important
are local securities issues compared to the benefit of checking the systemic hegemon. First is geography. The costs and challenges of
moving military forces over long distances mean that countries generally pose greater threats to their neighbors than to states farther
away. Neighbors are also more likely to have more potential clashes of interest with each other than with distant states. The Atlantic
and Pacific oceans separate the United States from the Eurasian landmass, where all the prospective balancers reside. When the
putative hegemon and most of the potential balancers are close neighbors – as they were in the classic balancing episodes in modern
European history – systemic and local imperatives more readily reinforce each other, meaning that balancing the hegemon is less
likely to come at the expense of addressing local security challenges. In contrast, when the hegemon lies far offshore and the
prospective balancers are close neighbors, as in the current system, local imperatives loom larger, and the counterbalancing strategy
loses appeal. Second is the number of lesser states relative to great powers. The previous section showed that the current international
system is characterized by an unprecedented hegemony with the great-power subsystem. Also important is the extraordinary
proliferation of medium and minor powers. The dramatic increase in the number of states over the last half-century means that there
are many more with at least some offensive military capability and occasionally significant defensive capability. Each great power has
to think about more (and, in some cases, more capable) states than did their predecessors in most previous international systems. The
result is again to increase the significance of local security issues and decrease the salience of systemic balance. A high relative
salience of local security issues in today’s unipolar system raises the opportunity costs of systemic balancing. In many cases, the
capabilities needed to check U.S. power are ill suited for local security challenges. As we shall discuss in more detail in chapter 3,
when states face trade-offs between purchasing capabilities that might constrain the United States as opposed to those more useful for
dealing with more immediate local problems, most opt for the latter most of the time. Even more important are the direct local security
costs of systemic balancing. With great powers other than the United States clustered in and around Eurasia, efforts to produce
systemic balance are likely to stoke local security dilemmas and generate compensating efforts by neighbors long before they
materially reduce U.S preponderance. Moreover, such efforts may have the perverse effect of pushing neighboring powers closer to
the United States.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru

Balancing is unlikely – international system design proves
(International Relations Theory and the Case against Unilateralism, Perspectives on Politics, September, Vol. 3, No. 3, p. 511-
12)
The importance of the balancing proposition cannot be overstated, for it also figures crucially in the arguments of nonrealist scholars. When
institutionalists and constructivists assess the costs of unilateralism, expected counterbalancing by other states often figures prominently. 16
Moreover, the balance-of-power metaphor is a staple of punditry, both in the United States and abroad, in which each new effort at
coordination among major powers that excludes Washington is routinely hailed as an epoch-making “axis.” Indeed, the leaders of other
major powers—notably the presidents of France, Russia, and China—periodically seem to invoke the balancing proposition themselves, arguing that
their policies are intended to foster a multipolar world. This confluence of theoretical expectations, journalistic commentary, and political rhetoric
lends initial plausibility to the balancing proposition and partly explains its popularity as an argument against unilateralism. The argument hinges
on the proposition that the more the United States backs away from multilateralism, the greater the probability of counterbalancing.
The problem is that there is no counterbalancing against the United States, nor is there likely to be any time soon. Indeed, the
remarkable thing about the current international system is that three key causal factors highlighted by realist balance-of-power theory itself
are configured so as to make the reemergence of traditional balancing dynamics among the major powers highly improbable.17 First is
geography. The counterbalancing coalitions of the past all emerged against centrally located land powers that constituted existential
threats to nearby major states. The United States, by contrast, lies far from the shores of Eurasia, where the other major powers are all
clustered. Distance mutes the potential security threat U.S. power poses to others, while proximity magnifies the potential threat their
power poses to one another and thus increases the salience of local as opposed to global counterbalancing. The geographical uniqueness
of the current international system and its implications for balancing are now widely appreciated.18 This is partly true of the second key factor: the
distribution of material capabilities. It is now commonplace to observe that the gap in overall power between the United States and all
other states is larger now than any analogous gap in the history of the modern states system.19 Analysts are also sensitive to
decisive U.S. advantages in the individual components of national power: military, technological, economic, and even demographic.20
Historically minded observers are aware that all preceding leading states were dominant militarily or economically, but never both
simultaneously. Less widely appreciated is the gap in latent power.21 States make choices about balancing depending on their
expectations of the capabilities prospective balancers could produce in extremis. The United States is in a better position than past
leading states to enhance its capabilities vis-à-vis putative rivals for two reasons: it obtains its currently dominant military capabilities
by devoting a historically small proportion of its economy to national defense (less than 4 percent of GDP in 2004 as compared to 5–14
percent during the cold war); and its historically large technological lead is a potential resource that could be further exploited. And these
underlying advantages interact with the perennial problem would-be balancers face: they must coordinate policies in complex ways to
increase capabilities against a hegemon whose response is coordinated by a single government. The third key factor is that American
primacy is an accomplished fact rather than a revisionist aspiration. Many observers now recognize that other key powers derive
benefits from the status quo and so may be reluctant to pay costs to overthrow it.22 Less recognized is that for three centuries no balance-of-
power theorist ever developed propositions about a system in which hegemony is the status quo. All the historical experience of balancing from
the seventeenth century until 1991 concerns efforts to check a rising power from attaining hegemony. While both history and balance-of-power
theory clearly suggest that a rising potential hegemon needs to be concerned about the counterbalancing constraint, neither yields this implication for
a hegemon that is already firmly established. On the contrary, both theory and historical experience suggest that when hegemony is the status
quo, all the familiar obstacles to balancing will be dramatically magnified. Chief among these are the much higher coordination
challenges putative counterbalancers would face today, in comparison with their predecessors. Classical balancing coalitions were always vulnerable
to the collective action problem, as members would seek to ride free on the efforts of others. Those challenges would be multiplied in any
attempt to counterbalance the United States today. These factors characterize an international system that is already primed against
traditional power balancing due to nuclear weapons and the declining economic and military value of territory. All the major powers
have or can quickly produce nuclear weapons. With a secure secondstrike capability, their territorial integrity is better secured than that of any
past great power, and the security threat inherent in concentrated power is diminished.23 Moreover, the economic and military benefits of
owning specific bits of land have declined dramatically, reducing the incentives for conquest and diminishing the core security threat
posed by concentrated power.24 Taken individually, each of these factors militates against counterbalancing. Together they make it
exceedingly unlikely, for there is considerable positive interaction among them. American preponderance in the material scales of world power
feeds the collective action and coordination problems, as do geography and the status quo barrier. Other schools of IR research yield additional
reasons to doubt the salience of counterbalancing today.25 But the key is that all of the factors highlighted here lie within the realist system of
explanation that highlights anarchy and its attendant security problems. Even discounting the importance of factors such as shared democratic
norms and institutions, there is no reason to expect the reemergence of traditional balancing dynamics in the current international
system. It follows that whatever the costs of unilateralism are, counterbalancing is not among them.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru

Balancing fails – regional balancing checks
Many who acknowledge the extent of American power, however, regard it as necessarily self-negating. Other states traditionally
band together to restrain potential hegemons, they say, and this time will be no different. As German political commentator Josef Joe
has put it, “the history books say that Mr. Big always invites his own demise. Nos. 2, 3, 4 will gang up on him, form countervailing
alliances and plot his downfall. That happened to Napoleon, as it happened to Louis xiv and the mighty Hapsburgs, to Hitler and to
Stalin. Power begets superior counterpower; it’s the oldest rule of world politics.” What such arguments fail to recognize are the
features of America’s post–Cold War position that make it likely to buck the historical trend. Bounded by oceans to the east and west
and weak, friendly powers to the north and south, the United States is both less vulnerable than previous aspiring hegemons and also
less threatening to others. The main potential challengers to its unipolarity, meanwhile— China, Russia, Japan, and Germany—are in
the opposite position. They cannot augment their military capabilities so as to balance the United States without simultaneously
becoming an immediate threat to their neighbors. Politics, even international politics, is local. Although American power attracts a lot
of attention globally, states are usually more concerned with their own neighborhoods than with the global equilibrium. Were any of
the potential challengers to make a serious run at the United States, regional balancing efforts would almost certainly help contain
them, as would the massive latent power capabilities of the United States, which could be mobilized as necessary to head off an
emerging threat.
Balancing theory is bunk – US power position is unique

(American Primacy in Perspective, July/August, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, Issue 4, p. 24-5)
When analysts refer to a historical pattern of balancing against potentially preponderant powers, they rarely note that the cases
in question—the Hapsburg ascendancy, Napoleonic France, the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and so forth—featured would-be
hegemons that were vulnerable, threatening, centrally located, and dominant in only one or two components of power. Moreover, the
would-be hegemons all specialized in precisely the form of power—the ability to seize territory—most likely to scare other states into
an antihegemonic coalition. American capabilities, by contrast, are relatively greater and more comprehensive than those of past
hegemonic aspirants, they are located safely onshore, and the prospective balancers are close regional neighbors of one another. U.S.
power is also at the command of one government, whereas the putative balancers would face major challenges in acting collectively to
assemble and coordinate their military capabilities. Previous historical experiences of balancing, moreover, involved groups of status
quo powers seeking to contain a rising revisionist one. The balancers had much to fear if the aspiring hegemon got its way. Today,
however, U.S. dominance is the status quo. Several of the major powers in the system have been closely allied with the United States
for decades and derive substantial benefits from their position. Not only would they have to forego those benefits if they tried
to balance, but they would have to find some way of putting together a durable, coherent alliance while America was watching. This is
a profoundly important point, because although there may be several precedents for a coalition of balancers preventing a hegemon
from emerging, there is none for a group of subordinate powers joining to topple a hegemon once it has already emerged, which is
what would have to happen today. The comprehensive nature of U.S. power, finally, also skews the odds against any major attempt at
balancing, let alone a successful one. The United States is both big and rich, whereas the potential challengers are all either one or the
other. It will take at least a generation for today’s other big countries (such as China and India) to become rich, and given declining
birth rates the other rich powers are not about to get big, at least in relative terms. During the 1990s, the U.S. population increased by
32.7 million—a figure equal to more than half the current population of France or the United Kingdom.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Balancing – China

Chinese balancing fails – military and economic reform won’t affect the power gap
In sum, while rapid economic growth makes China an increasingly important actor in world politics, it still has a long way to go
before it can contest American dominance in all key measures of power. This conclusion is confirmed by China’s behavior and the
assessments of its leadership. None of China’s external alignments can be considered counterbalancing. The only other major power
with which China has concluded formal partnerships is Russia. As we discuss in detail in chapter 3, the Sino-Russian strategic
partnership is propelled primarily by economics and regional security interests and is not well explained as a counterbalancing
alignment. Neither Chinese nor Russian officials, nor experts on the two countries’ foreign policies, describe the partnership in such
terms. Some scholars do describe China’s growing military expenditures as counterbalancing. But it is only possible to reach this
conclusion if balancing is defined so expansively as to include any effort by any state to enhance its military capacity. There is no
doubt that China is improving its military, and little doubt that it will continue to do so, at least until competing demands on the state
budget determine otherwise. After all, the People’s Liberation Army starts from a primitive technological and organizational base. Any
military leadership would want to upgrade that force. China’s military expenditures are a small fraction of the American commitment,
and this ratio is not sensitive to the means of estimating it (see fig. 2.2). With a rapidly growing economy, China can afford to spend
more on defense. The result of such expenditures over time may be new challenges for U.S. military operations in what Barry Posen
calls the “contested zones” in or near China. The extent of these challenges depends on what the United States, Japan, Taiwan, and
others do in response to China’s efforts. But the main point is that China’s current level of effort is nowhere near adequate to constitute
counterbalancing – that is, to affect the United States’ overall military primacy and its command of the commons. With a smaller and
much less advanced economy and a comparatively antiquated and inefficient military force, China cannot affect the overall military
gap vis-à-vis the United States unless it is able to devote a substantially greater proportion of its comparatively smaller vote a
substantially greater proportion of its comparatively smaller economic resources to defense than does the United States. Compared to
China, the United States has and will long have a dramatic relative advantage in its ability to convert wealth to military power because
of its massive investment over decades in the accumulation of the skills and infrastructure necessary to produce and use advanced
weaponry. Yet China consistently devotes a smaller proportion of its GDP to defense than the United States does. Again, this
conclusion is not sensitive to the measure used (see table 2.1). Given that China is not even working as hard as the United States at
generating military power, we cannot describe its behavior as counterbalancing.
Chinese balancing fails – multiple factors

Most analysts looking for a future peer competitor to the United States, therefore, focus on China, since it is the only power with the
potential to match the size of the U.S. economy over the next several decades. Yet even if China were eventually to catch up to the
United States in terms of aggregate GDP, the gaps in the two states’ other power capabilities—technological, military, and geographic
—would remain. Since the mid-1990s, Chinese strategists themselves have become markedly less bullish about their country’s ability
to close the gap in what they call “comprehensive national power” any time soon. The latest estimates by China’s intelligence agency
project that in 2020 the country will possess between slightly more than a third and slightly more than half of U.S. capabilities. Fifty
percent of China’s labor force is employed in agriculture, and relatively little of its economy is geared toward high technology. In the
1990s, U.S. spending on technological development was more than 20 times China’s. Most of China’s weapons are decades old. And
nothing China can do will allow it to escape its geography, which leaves it surrounded by countries that have the motivation and
ability to engage in balancing of their own should China start to build up an expansive military force.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru

Chinese economic growth can’t challenge us – they don’t benefit as much from globalization
(World Out of Balance, p.131-3)
While China's economic growth is indeed assisted by its access to the global economy, the situation radically departs from the one
Gilpin described. For one thing, the specific FDI mechanism he highlighted does not apply today. When Gilpin's book was written in
1975, U.S. “outward investment was four-and-a-half times greater than its inward investment." In recent years, in comparison, the
U.S. FDI ratio has hovered right around "a perfect balance in terms of outward and inward" Of course, China is also aided by inward
FDI, likely to a much greater extent than the United States. Yet, the same is true in reverse when we look at other aspects of economic
globalization: the United States greatly benefits from globalization in a number of important ways that China either does not or only to
a very limited extent. Significantly, many of these specific advantages the United States draws from economic globalization are to a
large degree a function of its position in the system, both in terms of the size of its economy and also its status as the "incumbent"
leader of the financial system. In particular, the United States profits to a great extent from having the dollar as the world's reserve
currency and from its preferred status as a destination for international portfolio investment. With such a wide scope of available
opportunities, the U.S. economy has also long attracted far more scientifically trained workers than any other state. By contrast, the
renminbi is in no position to become a global reserve currency; just making it convertible will be a major challenge and is unlikely
anytime soon." China is also not soon going to rival the United States in any way as a preferred destination for international portfolio
investment or for newly mobile scientific and technological talent. Finally, it is also significant that U.S. MNCs have been at the
forefront of establishing cooperative partnerships with foreign firms to enhance innovation and they also lead in the geographic
dispersal of their production throughout the globe to reap various locational advantages. In contrast, in the years ahead China can at
best benefit only slightly from home-based MNCs adopting novel globalization strategies given its current dearth of firms that are
large and experienced enough to pursue this course." Globalization's contribution to China's rise in recent decades should also not be
overstated. In contrast to the industrialized great-power challengers Gilpin discussed, China is a developing country whose extremely
rapid growth in recent years owes much to factors having nothing to do with economic globalization. In particular, the speed of
China's economic ascent since the late 1970s can also be traced to the fact that Chinese leaders put in place the key institutions-land
reform, basic property rights-that most economists see as central to economic growth and that it started from an extremely low initial
position thanks to decades of Mao-inspired policies that had long blocked the country's economic potential. In sum, China has been
able to exploit "the advantages of backwardness" both through basic domestic reforms and through globalization. Finally, even if
China benefits more from enhanced global economic interdependence than the United States, a power transition is simply not in the
cards for many decades precisely because the United States now occupies such a dominant power position in the system. The
challengers that Gilpin discussed were great powers with advanced economies at a comparable level of development to the hegemon.
In those circumstances, aggregate GDP is a far better index of power than in a case where the rising state has a very large but
comparatively poor population. As chapter 2 established, the power gap between the United States and China is currently immense,
especially in military capabilities: no single factor, including globalization, can wipe it away anytime soon.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru

China can’t balance now – major barriers to their rise
The Threat from China: Significant, but Reduced by the Dragon's Demographics China is a major country undergoing a dramatic
modernization process. It is where the United States was a hundred years ago or where most major European countries were one
hundred and fifty years ago. Periods of modernization result in great economic growth as economies move from agrarian to an
industrial or postindustrial information economy. Its economic growth rates are very impressive—an 8 percent real increase in GDP in
2000, 7.3 percent in 2001, 8 percent in 2002, and 9.1 percent in 2003.42 So the trend of economic growth is clear and certainly will
continue for the next few years, before falling off as economic efficiencies and returns on trade decline. Eventually, China will have
economic growth rates of 1 percent, 2 percent, or 3 percent per year, which is typical for developed countries. Nevertheless, as a result
of its rapid growth, China will be in a position to threaten the dominant role of the United States in world politics. According to the
National Intelligence Council, China is projected to have about a $4.3 trillion GDP in 2016.43 That is equivalent to the 2003 GDP of
Japan. About 2042, China is expected to have the GDP (about $10.9 trillion) that the United States possessed in 2003. Although its
continued economic growth is impressive, China faces major problems that will hinder its ability to replace the United States as the
world's hegemon. The first of these is a rapidly aging population beginning in 2020. Nearly 400 million Chinese will be over sixty-
five years old by 2020. This could be a source of unrest and economic stagnation. Younger generations will be pressed to care for the
older population. There will be a great discrepancy between the numbers of young people and the elderly, and China lacks the pension
and health care infrastructure characteristic of Western societies. Many Chinese will have to work far into old age and will not be able
to care for themselves should they fall sick or be too old to earn a wage. As we see with Japan, economic productivity will peak. This
situation is the direct result of the "one child" policy adopted in 1979 to halt explosive population growth. When China took its first
countrywide census in 1953, its population was 600 million. By 1970, it was approximately 800 million. As a result of the "one child"
policy, the Chinese birthrate has fallen from 5.8 children per woman in 1970 to fewer than 2 per woman in 2000. The "one child"
policy is believed to have resulted in 300 million fewer Chinese. A second big problem stemming from the "one child" policy is the
imbalance between the sexes. For social and economic reasons, if only one child is permitted, most Chinese parents will choose a son.
This has led to widespread abortion, female infanticide, and female adoption out of China. Simply put, there are too few females in
China. The normal worldwide divergence between the number of boys to girls is about 103 males to 107 females. In China, about 119
boys are born for every 100 girls. In rural areas, where the preference for sons is the strongest, the imbalance is even greater, about
133 to 100." There are an estimated 40 million more men than women in China's population. The declining birth rates that flow from
this will hinder economic growth in the long run. China eventually will face other major economic and social problems as well,
including those related to the economic fragility of its financial system and state-owned enterprises, economic malaise brought on by
widespread corruption, ubiquitous environmental pollution, HIV/AIDS and other epidemic diseases like SARS, and the high energy
costs, which stifle economic growth. In addition, unlike the United States, China is not a model for other countries. Chinese political
values are inferior to those of the United States because China is repressive. The Chinese do not respect human rights, including
religious and political freedom. There is also the wildcard of potential conflict over Taiwan. A war with Taiwan would retard China's
economic progress and scare neighboring states. The fact that China has so many territorial and other disputes with its major
neighbors, Japan, India, Russia, and Vietnam, means that many countries see it as a threat and will want to ally with the United States
against Chinese power. The rise of China is ripe for potential conflict with its neighbors, and this constitutes a big danger in
international politics.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Balancing – EU
EU won’t balance – no military and heavily divided
The only other economy big and rich enough to generate military capabilities on the American scale is that of the European Union,
whose 27 member states have a combined GDP larger than that of the United States. To realize that potential, however, Brussels would
have to wield Europe’s aggregate economic output with the same strategic purpose as the United States, a unitary state. A
superpower’s military force could be purchased only at the price of a frontal assault on European nations’ core sovereignty. Balance-
of-power theory assumes that states seek to preserve their security and autonomy, and, as Jolyon Howorth and Anand Menon point
out, “Fundamental to an understanding of the EU is an appreciation of the fact that such considerations are as present within it as they
are in its dealings with the outside world.” Neither the authority nor the ability to act decisively in Europe’s name exists even in
monetary matters, to say nothing of foreign and defense policy. Ultimate authority rests with the member states, all 27 of which must
agree to any decision on defense and security policy. This requirement of unanimity “place profound limits on the potential for
decisive EU security policies.”
EU can’t balance – lacks military bite and unity

(American Primacy in Perspective, July/August, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, Issue 4, p. 25-6)
Some might argue that the European Union is an exception to the big-or-rich rule. It is true that if Brussels were to develop impressive
military capabilities and wield its latent collective power like a state, the EU would clearly constitute another pole. But the creation of
an autonomous and unified defense and defense-industrial capacity that could compete with that of the United States would be a
gargantuan task. The EU is struggling to put together a 60,000-strong rapid reaction force that is designed for smaller operations such
as humanitarian relief, peacekeeping, and crisis management, but it still lacks military essentials such as capabilities in intelligence
gathering, airlift, air-defense suppression, air-to-air refueling, sea transport, medical care, and combat search and rescue—and even
when it has those capacities, perhaps by the end of this decade, it will still rely on NATO command and control and other
assets. Whatever capability the EU eventually assembles, moreover, will matter only to the extent that it is under the control of a state-
like decision-making body with the authority to act quickly and decisively in Europe’s name. Such authority, which does not yet exist
even for international financial matters, could be purchased only at the price of a direct frontal assault on European nations’ core
sovereignty. And all of this would have to occur as the EU expands to add ten or more new member states, a process that will
complicate further deepening. Given these obstacles, Europe is unlikely to emerge as a dominant actor in the military realm for a very
long time, if ever.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Balancing – EU
EU can’t balance – political and socioeconomic barriers
Yet unlike China, the EU simply does not pose a great danger to the American Empire for two major reasons—political and
socioeconomic. The political similarities between the EU and the United States are enormous . In essence, the political values of EU are
largely those of the United States. This is not a surprise, in many respects; the United States is the daughter of Europe, and that may be excellent news for future
warm relations between them. In addition, if the "clash of civilizations" argument made famous by Samuel Huntington is correct (that is, that future major conflicts will
be between civilizations), then as other civilizations become more powerful—such as the Chinese or Islamic—Europe and the United States
will be united again by the threat from those civilizations .46 They were united during the Cold War by the threat from the Soviet Union, and history
teaches that an external threat can produce comity where once there was rivalry. In addition to the political reasons, there are three major
socioeconomic reasons why the EU will not be able to challenge the United States. These are (1) the costs of expansion; (2) the
different approach to work and the related costs of generous social welfare programs in the EU; and (3) the aging EU workforce and
the risks of Muslim immigration to the EU's identity. The first factor retarding economic growth is the costs involved in the further
expansion of the European Union. Expansion is hindered by the fact that Brussels has only a fraction of the structural funds (aid to regions or
countries where GDP per capita is below 75 percent EU average, such as Portugal, Greece, Spain, and the former East Germany) needed to bring new members
up to the standard of living found in the rest of the EU. Additionally, new members will receive no cohesion funds, which are given to
build a country's infrastructure. The simple fact is that there is too little money for too many new members (already about 35 percent of the EU
budget goes to the structural and cohesion funds). This situation stands in stark contrast to the 1970s and early 1980s when Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Greece joined.
At that time, the number of rich members and the small number of new members meant that the funds were well focused. That is not true today. As a result, the EU
will be tiered: wealthier old members will continue to receive generous structural and cohesion funds, while new members occupy a
second, poorer tier. The Common Agricultural Policy also hinders economic growth in the European Union. Almost half (about 45 percent) of the EU's budget is
spent on agriculture—mostly payments to farmers. The EU provides about $120 billion in agricultural subsidies. In contrast, the U.S. government provides about $40
billion annually in agricultural subsidies. Each cow in the United States gets about $120 a year in federal subsidies. Each European cow gets $600 per year from the
EU.47 These subsidies are an enormous drain on the EU economy but are perpetuated because EU members do not want to lose them. The second economic
reason is that EU is based on a different socioeconomic model than the United States. The American economy is as close as it gets to
raw capitalism. You have to work to feed, house, and clothe yourself in America. The social safety net does have large gaps in
comparison to Europe, and there is great disparity in wealth—a smaller number of people have control over more of the wealth of the
country than in Europe. America is a great place to be rich. It is in Europe as well, but less so due to high taxes and greater income equality. The ratio
between what the top tier of American CEOs earn and what the average manufacturing employee earns is 475:1. In Europe, the ratio is 24:1 in Britain, 15:1 in France,
and 13:1 in Sweden. On the other hand, the American economy is fluid, so the guy who invents the better mousetrap is able to market it and make a million. There is
relatively little government intervention in the economy, and capitalism is warmly embraced. America is the epitome of free market capitalism. The
European economy does not work that way. In contrast to America, there is much more government intervention in the economy—laws
that govern business practices and protect workers and the environment—and there is great ambivalence toward capitalism. Europeans
prefer a closer distribution of wealth so that there is not an enormous gap between the richest and the poorest. In the United States, about 20 percent of adults are living
in poverty, while the numbers are about 7.5 percent for France, 7.6 percent for Germany, 6.5 percent for Italy, and 14.6 percent for Britain. Europeans strongly prefer a
social safety net. A system of cradle-to-grave welfare programs exists to help Europeans receive an education and to shelter people from the storms of life, even if they
are tempests that affect health, housing, or employment. European unemployment rates are consistently higher than those in the United States because the costs of being
unemployed are much lower due to the social safety net than in the United States, where modest unemployment benefits soon are exhausted. Americans also work
much harder than Europeans. In 2003, Americans worked an average of 1,976 hours. German and French workers averaged about 400
fewer hours per year. One American in three works more than 50 hours a week. It is the rare European who matches those hours. Vacations are generous for
Europeans, about 5 weeks, as are holidays. Employees have 23 paid holidays in Britain, 25 in France, and Sweden has 30. In the United States, depending in which state
you reside, you get 4 to 10 holidays." In sum, Americans work much harder than Europeans. But social welfare is expensive. It requires high taxes to support generous
government spending. This, in turn, hinders economic growth. So, too, does maintaining tight income equality. If you tell someone that he will be able to earn only a
certain amount, and no more than that, he does not have an incentive to work hard (although he does have an incentive to move to America, where he can become rich).
Slow economic growth and high unemployment is known as "Eurosclerosis," and the disease shows no signs of being cured anytime soon. The lack of economic growth
results in a lack of funds for research and development in comparison to the United States. And so, the problem feeds upon itself. The third reason for the EU's
inability to challenge the United States is that the EU states suffer from an aging and changing workforce, and both elements have the
potential to hobble its already slow economic growth. The major European economies of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy will need
several million new workers over the next fifteen years to fill positions vacated by retiring ones . Presently, those workers do not exist because
fewer European women are having children, and this "baby bust" ultimately will make it impossible to sustain the generous welfare benefits provided by European
governments.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Balancing – Russia

Russia can’t balance – military and weapons are incompetent
The real core of Russia’s relationship with China, however, is no the diplomatic partnerships but extensive military coproduction
arrangements and major arms sales. Yet Russia’s fundamental interest in these exports is not checking U.S. power but rather a
desperate need to slow the decline of its military industrial complex. Between 1992 and 1998, Russia experienced what was probably
the steepest peacetime decline in military power by any major state in history. Weapons procurement and spending declined
dramatically after 1991, and by 2000 only 20 percent of Russia’s operational weapons stocks were modern, compared with 60-80
percent in NATO countries. Given the collapse of domestic orders (in 2001, only 10 percent of Russian defense firms received state
orders), Russia’s defense sector possesses massive excess capacity. Against a backdrop of massive competing demands for new
resources (dismal maintenance and training, dire personnel problems and overall inefficiency), increased defense outlays after 2001
did little to alter the fact that even a downsized Soviet-scale defense sector are too big for Russia. Arms sales are a lifeline for a
military industry producing less than one-third of its 1992 output, and rapidly losing technological competitiveness. Even more
immediately, exports aid a defense sector that supplies income and welfare services to hundreds to thousands of workers and their
families, provides the economic lifeblood of dozens of cities, and enriches numerous managers and public officials. Military industry
represents one of the few high-technology sectors in which Russians remain competitive, and they perceive strong overall commercial
interest in promoting exports. The evidence concerning Russia’s major arms relationships overwhelmingly indicates that Moscow’s
eagerness to sell weaponry to Beijing is only indirectly and marginally connected to the issue of U.S. hegemony.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Balancing – Russia-China Alliance

Russia-China alliance won’t lead to balancing
In the end, however, checking U.S. power plays, at best, a marginal role in the Sino-Russian partnership. Although officials in Beijing and Moscow
may see a we a welcome bonus in complications for U.S security policy that emerge from their partnership, analysts should not confuse side effects with important
causes. Let us consider each of the three elements of the partnership, in ascending order of importance: the diplomatic relationship, the SCO, and the arms sales.
Although Russian and Chinese leaders periodically describe their diplomatic partnership as an expression of their preference for a
multipolar world, there is little evidence that checking the United States is the driving force behind it. Rhetoric notwithstanding, the policies
are crafted to avoid trading off the parties’ partnership against their key bilateral relationships with the United States. The Russia-China Treaty on Good-
Neighborliness, Friendship, and Cooperation, signed in 2001, capped more than a decade of improving bilateral ties, but it lacks anything resembling a mutual
defense clause. While the treaty obligates the signatories in a general sense to maintain the global equilibrium and to consult each other in the event of threats to
security, neither it nor any other public Sino-Russian agreement entails any observable commitment to counter U.S. power. No mutual
undertaking in accordance with the partnership has involved significant costs in the countries’ relationships with the United States.
Russian and Chinese leaders have frequently used SCO gatherings to express their preference for a multipolar world, and both they and their authoritarian partners in
Central Asia sometimes portray the organization as a bulwark against U.S. and European pressure on democratization and human rights. Given the rhetoric, it is
hardly surprising that some observers see the SCO as a coordinating mechanism for balancing U.S. power in the region. Yet an
examination of the organization’s real activities undermines this interpretation . Balance-of-threat theory does not encompass the causes that actually
go the SCO up and running. The organization’s main initial goal was confidence building among the new states in the region , especially by
resolving old Soviet-Chinese border disputes. China further sought to stabilize and secure its borders from Islamic extremism, a factor that
threatened not only post-Soviet Central Asia but also the restive Xinjiang region of western China. China feared that the Uighur separatists were receiving funding and
arms from the Uighurs in its neighboring states, as well as from Afghanistan. Russia shared the common threat of an increasingly Islamicized
Chechen separatist movement. Uzbekistan joined the SCO in 2001 as it sought a common forum for responding to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)
– a transnational guerilla threat. The SCO signed a declaration on June 15, 2001, expanding its mission in the region and focused increasingly on terrorist threats,
religious extremism, and to a lesser extent, arms and narcotics trafficking. The organization announced the creation of a counterterrorism center in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan,
known as the Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure (RATS), but the project stalled and few assets were invested or resources committed. Thus, the main issue that
China, Russia, and the Central Asian states agreed upon that warranted an upgrading of the organization was counterterrorism. Having
coordinated the SCO around this issue, however, the members unable to assemble the capabilities required to address it. This shortcoming was made brutally evident
after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when U.S-led Operation Enduring Freedom quickly toppled the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan and weakened the IMU –
the very threats whose rise had just begun to provide the SCO’s raison d’etre. The U.S. deployment to Afghanistan created a contradiction between
the SCO’s rhetorical role as a balancing mechanism and its operational role as a regional security organization. At least initially, China
and Russia resolve the contradiction by strongly supporting the United States in the war on terror. In ensuing years, member states again sought to
position the SCO as central to the region’s security. This effort was buttressed by the downturn in Uzbekistan’s security ties with the United States and NATO in
response to Western criticisms of Tashkent’s violent suppression of a domestic demonstration. The SCO officially called upon the United States to announce a deadline
for ending its military presence in the region. The anti-U.S. political message had to remain subtle, however, given Russian and especially Chinese leaders’ interest in
avoiding a confrontation with the United States, continued differences between the two great powers and between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and developing ties
between Kazakhstan and the United States. On the ground, meanwhile, the real activity centered on counterterrorism. The RATS slowly took on substance, sponsoring
joint counterterror exercises involving units from Russia, China, and other member states, and creating an intelligence database on terrorist activities in the region. As
Celeste Wallander sums up, “[T]he SCO is a successful regional organization, but other than the rhetoric against U.S. unilateralism and
against liberalization, its successes do not threatened U.S. interests.” Pragmatic regional security cooperation remained the SCO’s real operational
focus, with the organization’s political utility a welcome bonus. The real core of Russia’s relationship with China, however, is no the diplomatic
partnerships but extensive military coproduction arrangements and major arms sales. Yet Russia’s fundamental interest in these exports is
not checking U.S. power but rather a desperate need to slow the decline of its military industrial complex. Between 1992 and 1998, Russia
experienced what was probably the steepest peacetime decline in military power by any major state in history. Weapons procurement and spending declined
dramatically after 1991, and by 2000 only 20 percent of Russia’s operational weapons stocks were modern, compared with 60-80 percent in NATO countries. Given the
collapse of domestic orders (in 2001, only 10 percent of Russian defense firms received state orders), Russia’s defense sector possesses massive excess capacity.
Against a backdrop of massive competing demands for new resources (dismal maintenance and training, dire personnel problems and overall inefficiency), increased
defense outlays after 2001 did little to alter the fact that even a downsized Soviet-scale defense sector are too big for Russia. Arms sales are a lifeline for a
military industry producing less than one-third of its 1992 output, and rapidly losing technological competitiveness. Even more
immediately, exports aid a defense sector that supplies income and welfare services to hundreds to thousands of workers and their
families, provides the economic lifeblood of dozens of cities, and enriches numerous managers and public officials. Military industry
represents one of the few high-technology sectors in which Russians remain competitive, and the perceive a strong overall commercial interest in promoting exports.
The evidence concerning Russia’s major arms relationships overwhelmingly indicates that Moscow’s eagerness to sell weaponry to
Beijing is only indirectly and marginally connected to the issue of U.S. hegemony.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Balancing – Russia-China-India Alliance

Alliance will fail – enmity and mistrust prove
Bringing in India – which for a brief period near the turn of the century was sometimes touted as the third member of an anti-Western
“Asian triangle” – further weakens the balance-of-threat argument. Many Russian analysts regard their country’s partnership with
India as a hedge against rising Chinese power in Asia. Russia has tended to sell India more advanced weapons systems than it exports
to China, and the agreements on the joint design and production of weapons that Russia has signed with India also tend to be deeper
and more comprehensive than the arrangements that Moscow has made with Beijing. Russian officials are quick to cite these facts
when questioned by domestic critics who accuse them of mortaging Russia’s security through the arms transfers to China. Needless to
say, Moscow’s interest in marketing military hardware (and nuclear technology) to New Delhi was undiminished after Indian moved
to develop an entirely new cooperative security relationship with the United States in the second half of the George W. Bush
presidency.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Imperial Overstretch

Overstretch is unlikely – US can draw on latent power
Analysts who argue that the United States now suffers, or soon will suffer, from imperial overstretch invariably fail to distinguish
between latent power (the level of resources that could be mobilized from society) and actual power (the level of resources a
government actually chooses to mobilize)." In his original formulation of imperial overstretch, Kennedy had in mind a situation in
which a state's actual and latent capabilities cannot cope with its existing foreign policy commitments. To date, there is virtually no
research on whether the United States faces this prospect. Part of the problem is that because the Bush administration made no attempt
to ask the public for greater sacrifice, there is no observable evidence of whether it would be possible to extract more resources for
advancing Ll.S. foreign policy interests. The Cold War experience indicates that the U.S. public is capable of supporting, over long
periods, significantly higher spending on foreign policy than current levels. Yet this does not necessarily mean that the U.S. public
would be willing to support a dramatic increase in foreign policy spending now if policymakers called for it. The larger issue is that
though IR scholars use the term, they have not theorized or researched imperial overstretch as a constraint independent of
counterbalancing. In the historical cases highlighted by Kennedy and others, leading states suffered from imperial overstretch in
significant part because they faced counterbalancing that demanded more resources than they were able to extract domestically. As
chapters 2 and 3 showed, the United States does not face a counterbalancing constraint. This raises a key question of whether there are
limits to the U'S. polity's capacity to generate power in the absence of the threat posed by a geopolitical peer rival. Lacking a focused
research effort, scholars can now only answer with speculation.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Oil Dollar Switch

Oil won’t be switched to euros – even if, the dollar would remain the reserve currency in other ways
There is also a second potential financial dependence mechanism with a link to U.S. security policy that some IR scholars regard as a
realistic threat. Robert Pape maintains that "Europe could challenge the position of the dollar as the world's reserve currency by, most
notably, using euros to purchase its oil. ... This would substantially reduce demand for dollars, reduce the dollar share of all world
reserves to the U.S. share of world GNP, and so largely eliminate seignorage benefits to the United States. This would be painful.'"
Pape's argument might appear pertinent and dire in light of the fact that some leaders-notably Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad-have publicly advocated a general switch in the structure of the global oil market to euro
pricing.58 In fact, Pape's scenario is highly improbable. For one thing, there is little reason to think that a switch to euro oil pricing
could occur in the policy-relevant future. In this regard, OPEC's overall stance is most crucial." Over the years, "OPEC has many
times said that it would continue pricing oil sales in dollars only."60 The general aversion of OPEC to switch away from pricing oil
only in dollars is grounded in concrete economic factors." The various economic advantages of the dollar for OPEC would be less
consequential if there were not downsides associated with pricing oil in multiple currencies. Yet from a transactions cost standpoint,
continuing to price oil exclusively in dollars has a number of advantages." For these and other reasons, it thus appears that "OPEC is
unlikely to bring about or even try to shift markets to euro-priced oil."63 The more important point is that even if a switch to euro oil
pricing eventually did occur, the practice of pricing oil in dollars is a very minor contributor to the status of the dollar as the
international reserve currency. Global trade flows-of which oil is obviously just one element- are a tiny portion of global financial
flows: the average daily turnover in foreign exchange markets is now $3.2 trillion per day, while the value of world exports is just
under $12 trillion per year.64 Significantly, many of the core contributing factors to the dollar's status as the reserve currency have the
weight of path dependency behind them. The dollar's role as the reserve currency is intimately related to the United States' long-
standing position as the largest military and economic power in the system. The dollar's status as the reserve currency is also a product
of the deep, well-developed nature of U.S. capital and money markets: Countries, or more precisely cities within countries, become
financial centers when their markets in financial assets are deep, liquid, and stable. Status as a financial center, once acquired, thus
tends to sustain itself. When a country succeeds in attracting a critical mass of transactions in the relevant securities, other investors
bring their business there to take advantage of the liquidity and depth of the market. Incumbency is an advantage, and the United
States is the leading incumbent financial center." Furthermore, "network externalities" make use of the dollar very attractive: the dollar
has long been widely held (around two-thirds of foreign exchange reserves are now held in dollars) and widely used and "the more
often a currency is used in international transactions, the lower the costs associated with using that currency and hence the more
attractive is the currency for conducting international exchanges. In short, history matters: "the intrinsic characteristics of a currency
are of less importance than the path-dependent historical equilibrium. There is a strong inertial bias in favor of using whatever
currency has been the international currency of the past. The significance of path dependency explains why the last reserve currency
transition (from the British pound to the U'.S. dollar) took decades to eventuate and only occurred after a set of massive political and
economic disruptions: By 1919 the USA had surpassed the UK in terms of overall productive capacity, aggregate trade flows and as a
net international creditor. In addition to the growing relative strength of the US economy, economic historians have argued that the
creation of a Federal Reserve System in December 1913 and the subsequent development of New York as the world's financial centre
provided another strong impetus for the rise of the US dollar's role as a major international currency. However, it was only after the
shock of the two world wars and the resulting devastation of other European economies, as well as the gross mismanagement of the
British economy that the USA took over the role of the world's reserve currency, thus breaking the de facto 'sterling standard. In the
end, as Menzie Chinn and Jeffrey Frankel underscore, "under any plausible scenario, the dollar will remain far ahead of the euro and
other potential challengers for many years."

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Globalization
Globalization won’t constrain US action – the US is too key to their survival
The final question that needs to be considered is whether rising levels of economic interdependence could lead to shifts in the nature
of the actors that limit U.S. security policy. States and nonstate actors are both potentially relevant in this regard. Although economic
globalization could theoretically increase the motivation of states to pose security challenges to the United States, this is not an
argument that gained any currency among scholars. Instead, there is every indication that the relationship actually goes in the other
direction: scholars have identified numerous cases in which economic globalization has lowered the motivation of states to challenge
the United States (China and Libya are two such cases that were already noted in the previous discussion)." The basic takeaway is that
states now generally seek international economic openness," and confronting Washington is likely to be counterproductive for
achieving this objective. More puzzling is whether rising economic interdependence could lead to constraints on U'.S. security policy
by nonstate actors. Two key nonstate actors need to be discussed in this regard: private firms or investors, and terrorists. Let us first
examine the former, analyzing each of the three elements of economic globalization-trade, finance, and production-and their potential
links to U.S. security policies. With respect to trade, any firm that is subject to market pressures simply cannot opt to refrain from
exporting to the U.S. market, whether to advance a political objective or for some other reason. This is because the U.S. market is so
large, constituting by far the largest source of spending-both consumer and business-in the world. The story regarding FDI in the
United States is very similar. As noted previously, having a presence in the United States is now especially valuable for foreign firms
from a competitiveness standpoint. None of the various attractions of the United States as an investment site for foreign firms-
including its market size and its high level of R&D spending and rate of innovation-will meaningfully change in response to U.S,
security policy. Only the behavior of financial investors represents an even remotely plausible potential link to U.S. security policy. In
a widely discussed account, Thomas Friedman maintains that aggressive states will be punished by international investors: "The only
place a country can go to get big checks is the Electronic Herd.... Not only will the herd not fund a country's regional war ...the herd
will actually punish a country for fighting a war with its neighbors, by withdrawing the only significant source of growth capital in the
world today. As such, countries have no choice but to behave in a way that is attractive to the herd or ignore the herd and pay the price
of living without it."95 A number of prominent scholars have also emphasized this basic line of argument. As Jonathan Kirshner
underscores: Financial globalization will affect the likelihood of war generally in the international system, by creating a new
disincentive for states to risk both militarized crises and war. This is because all states are now more beholden to the preferences of the
"international financial community" which is simply another phrase for the power of "financial globalization"- the consequences of the
collective behavior of thousands of individual agents making their best informed guesses about the future value and attractiveness of
various paper assets." Although Kirshner maintains that financial globalization raises "both the costs and opportunity costs" of
initiating international conflict for all states, his analysis implicitly makes the point that the United States is far and away least affected
by this mechanism precisely because of the position it occupies within the system. Specifically, he emphasizes that the United States
has a large pull on global capital flows for a number of structural reasons, including the magnitude of the American economy and the
size of its financial markets." In the end, he concludes that"despite the fact that even the enormous U.s. economy is now more
beholden to the whims of international financial markets, given its deep capital markets, powerful financial institutions, and enormous
influence within the International Monetary Fund (IMF), globalized finance enhances the relative power of the U.S. compared to
virtually every other state in the world."

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Offshore Balancing

Offshore balancing increases threats – we have to confront them head-on
Bradley A. Thayer 06 Professor of Political Science @ Missouri State University
(In Defense of Primacy, The National Interest, November, p. 32-7)
In contrast, a strategy based on retrenchment will not be able to achieve these fundamental objectives of the United States. Indeed,
retrenchment will make the United States less secure than the present grand strategy of primacy. This is because threats will exist
no matter what role America chooses to play in international politics. Washington cannot call a "time out", and it cannot hide from
threats. Whether they are terrorists, rogue states or rising powers, history shows that threats must be confronted. Simply by
declaring that the United States is "going home", thus abandoning its commitments or making unconvincing half-pledges to defend
its interests and allies, does not mean that others will respect American wishes to retreat. To make such a declaration implies
weakness and emboldens aggression. In the anarchic world of the animal kingdom, predators prefer to eat the weak rather than
confront the strong. The same is true of the anarchic world of international politics. If there is no diplomatic solution to the threats
that confront the United States, then the conventional and strategic military power of the United States is what protects the country
from such threats. And when enemies must be confronted, a strategy based on primacy focuses on engaging enemies overseas,
away from American soil. Indeed, a key tenet of the Bush Doctrine is to attack terrorists far from America's shores and not to wait
while they use bases in other countries to plan and train for attacks against the United States itself. This requires a physical, on-the-
ground presence that cannot be achieved by offshore balancing.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Kagan [1/2]

Sustainable US primacy prevents global nuclear wars – all alternatives fail
Robert Kagan 07 Senior Associate @ the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
(End of Dreams, Return of History, Policy Review, Hoover Institution,
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/8552512.html)
Finally, there is the United States itself. As a matter of national policy stretching back across numerous administrations, Democratic
and Republican, liberal and conservative, Americans have insisted on preserving regional predominance in East Asia; the Middle East;
the Western Hemisphere; until recently, Europe; and now, increasingly, Central Asia. This was its goal after the Second World War,
and since the end of the Cold War, beginning with the first Bush administration and continuing through the Clinton years, the United
States did not retract but expanded its influence eastward across Europe and into the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.
Even as it maintains its position as the predominant global power, it is also engaged in hegemonic competitions in these regions with
China in East and Central Asia, with Iran in the Middle East and Central Asia, and with Russia in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and
the Caucasus. The United States, too, is more of a traditional than a postmodern power, and though Americans are loath to
acknowledge it, they generally prefer their global place as “No. 1” and are equally loath to relinquish it. Once having entered a region,
whether for practical or idealistic reasons, they are remarkably slow to withdraw from it until they believe they have substantially
transformed it in their own image. They profess indifference to the world and claim they just want to be left alone even as they seek
daily to shape the behavior of billions of people around the globe. The jostling for status and influence among these ambitious nations
and would-be nations is a second defining feature of the new post-Cold War international system. Nationalism in all its forms is back,
if it ever went away, and so is international competition for power, influence, honor, and status. American predominance prevents
these rivalries from intensifying — its regional as well as its global predominance. Were the United States to diminish its influence in
the regions where it is currently the strongest power, the other nations would settle disputes as great and lesser powers have done in
the past: sometimes through diplomacy and accommodation but often through confrontation and wars of varying scope, intensity, and
destructiveness. One novel aspect of such a multipolar world is that most of these powers would possess nuclear weapons. That could
make wars between them less likely, or it could simply make them more catastrophic. It is easy but also dangerous to underestimate
the role the United States plays in providing a measure of stability in the world even as it also disrupts stability. For instance, the
United States is the dominant naval power everywhere, such that other nations cannot compete with it even in their home waters. They
either happily or grudgingly allow the United States Navy to be the guarantor of international waterways and trade routes, of
international access to markets and raw materials such as oil. Even when the United States engages in a war, it is able to play its role
as guardian of the waterways. In a more genuinely multipolar world, however, it would not. Nations would compete for naval
dominance at least in their own regions and possibly beyond. Conflict between nations would involve struggles on the oceans as well
as on land. Armed embargos, of the kind used in World War i and other major conflicts, would disrupt trade flows in a way that is now
impossible. Such order as exists in the world rests not merely on the goodwill of peoples but on a foundation provided by American
power. Even the European Union, that great geopolitical miracle, owes its founding to American power, for without it the European
nations after World War ii would never have felt secure enough to reintegrate Germany. Most Europeans recoil at the thought, but
even today Europe’s stability depends on the guarantee, however distant and one hopes unnecessary, that the United States could step
in to check any dangerous development on the continent. In a genuinely multipolar world, that would not be possible without
renewing the danger of world war. People who believe greater equality among nations would be preferable to the present American
predominance often succumb to a basic logical fallacy. They believe the order the world enjoys today exists independently of
American power. They imagine that in a world where American power was diminished, the aspects of international order that they like
would remain in place. But that’s not the way it works. International order does not rest on ideas and institutions. It is shaped by
configurations of power. The international order we know today reflects the distribution of power in the world since World War ii, and
especially since the end of the Cold War. A different configuration of power, a multipolar world in which the poles were Russia,
China, the United States, India, and Europe, would produce its own kind of order, with different rules and norms reflecting the
interests of the powerful states that would have a hand in shaping it. Would that international order be an improvement? Perhaps for
Sir Kagan Continues

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Kagan [2/2]

Sir Kagan Continued
Beijing and Moscow it would. But it is doubtful that it would suit the tastes of enlightenment liberals in the United States and Europe.
The current order, of course, is not only far from perfect but also offers no guarantee against major conflict among the world’s great
powers. Even under the umbrella of unipolarity, regional conflicts involving the large powers may erupt. War could erupt between
China and Taiwan and draw in both the United States and Japan. War could erupt between Russia and Georgia, forcing the United
States and its European allies to decide whether to intervene or suffer the consequences of a Russian victory. Conflict between India
and Pakistan remains possible, as does conflict between Iran and Israel or other Middle Eastern states. These, too, could draw in other
great powers, including the United States. Such conflicts may be unavoidable no matter what policies the United States pursues. But
they are more likely to erupt if the United States weakens or withdraws from its positions of regional dominance. This is especially
true in East Asia, where most nations agree that a reliable American power has a stabilizing and pacific effect on the region. That is
certainly the view of most of China’s neighbors. But even China, which seeks gradually to supplant the United States as the dominant
power in the region, faces the dilemma that an American withdrawal could unleash an ambitious, independent, nationalist Japan. In
Europe, too, the departure of the United States from the scene — even if it remained the world’s most powerful nation — could be
destabilizing. It could tempt Russia to an even more overbearing and potentially forceful approach to unruly nations on its periphery.
Although some realist theorists seem to imagine that the disappearance of the Soviet Union put an end to the possibility of
confrontation between Russia and the West, and therefore to the need for a permanent American role in Europe, history suggests that
conflicts in Europe involving Russia are possible even without Soviet communism. If the United States withdrew from Europe — if it
adopted what some call a strategy of “offshore balancing” — this could in time increase the likelihood of conflict involving Russia
and its near neighbors, which could in turn draw the United States back in under unfavorable circumstances. It is also optimistic to
imagine that a retrenchment of the American position in the Middle East and the assumption of a more passive, “offshore” role would
lead to greater stability there. The vital interest the United States has in access to oil and the role it plays in keeping access open to
other nations in Europe and Asia make it unlikely that American leaders could or would stand back and hope for the best while the
powers in the region battle it out. Nor would a more “even-handed” policy toward Israel, which some see as the magic key to
unlocking peace, stability, and comity in the Middle East, obviate the need to come to Israel’s aid if its security became threatened.
That commitment, paired with the American commitment to protect strategic oil supplies for most of the world, practically ensures a
heavy American military presence in the region, both on the seas and on the ground. The subtraction of American power from any
region would not end conflict but would simply change the equation. In the Middle East, competition for influence among powers
both inside and outside the region has raged for at least two centuries. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism doesn’t change this. It only
adds a new and more threatening dimension to the competition, which neither a sudden end to the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians nor an immediate American withdrawal from Iraq would change. The alternative to American predominance in the region
is not balance and peace. It is further competition. The region and the states within it remain relatively weak. A diminution of
American influence would not be followed by a diminution of other external influences. One could expect deeper involvement by both
China and Russia, if only to secure their interests. 18 And one could also expect the more powerful states of the region, particularly
Iran, to expand and fill the vacuum. It is doubtful that any American administration would voluntarily take actions that could shift the
balance of power in the Middle East further toward Russia, China, or Iran. The world hasn’t changed that much. An American
withdrawal from Iraq will not return things to “normal” or to a new kind of stability in the region. It will produce a new instability, one
likely to draw the United States back in again. The alternative to American regional predominance in the Middle East and elsewhere
is not a new regional stability. In an era of burgeoning nationalism, the future is likely to be one of intensified competition among
nations and nationalist movements. Difficult as it may be to extend American predominance into the future, no one should imagine
that a reduction of American power or a retraction of American influence and global involvement will provide an easier path.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Ferguson

Hegemony is key to maintain stability and prevent nuclear war – the alternative is apolarity
Niall Ferguson 04 Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History @ Harvard University, Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution
(When Empires Wane, http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005244)
Yet universal claims were an integral part of the rhetoric of that era. All the empires claimed to rule the world; some, unaware of the
existence of other civilizations, maybe even believed that they did. The reality, however, was political fragmentation. And that remains
true today. The defining characteristic of our age is not a shift of power upward to supranational institutions, but downward. If free
flows of information and factors of production have empowered multinational corporations and NGOs (to say nothing of evangelistic
cults of all denominations), the free flow of destructive technology has empowered criminal organizations and terrorist cells, the
Viking raiders of our time. These can operate wherever they choose, from Hamburg to Gaza. By contrast, the writ of the international
community is not global. It is, in fact, increasingly confined to a few strategic cities such as Kabul and Sarajevo. Waning empires.
Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities. These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a
hyperpower might find itself reliving. The trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than
the one of the ninth century. For the world is roughly 25 times more populous, so that friction between the world's "tribes" is bound to
be greater. Technology has transformed production; now societies depend not merely on freshwater and the harvest but also on
supplies of mineral oil that are known to be finite. Technology has changed destruction, too: Now it is possible not just to sack a city,
but to obliterate it. For more than two decades, globalization has been raising living standards, except where countries have shut
themselves off from the process through tyranny or civil war. Deglobalization--which is what a new Dark Age would amount to--
would lead to economic depression. As the U.S. sought to protect itself after a second 9/11 devastated Houston, say, it would
inevitably become a less open society. And as Europe's Muslim enclaves g`1row, infiltration of the EU by Islamist extremists could
become irreversible, increasing trans-Atlantic tensions over the Middle East to breaking point. Meanwhile, an economic crisis in
China could plunge the Communist system into crisis, unleashing the centrifugal forces that have undermined previous Chinese
empires. Western investors would lose out, and conclude that lower returns at home are preferable to the risks of default abroad. The
worst effects of the Dark Age would be felt on the margins of the waning great powers. With ease, the terrorists could disrupt the
freedom of the seas, targeting oil tankers and cruise liners while we concentrate our efforts on making airports secure. Meanwhile,
limited nuclear wars could devastate numerous regions, beginning in Korea and Kashmir; perhaps ending catastrophically in the
Middle East. The prospect of an apolar world should frighten us a great deal more than it frightened the heirs of Charlemagne. If the
U.S. is to retreat from the role of global hegemon--its fragile self-belief dented by minor reversals--its critics must not pretend that
they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony. The alternative to unpolarity may not be multipolarity at all. It may be a global
vacuum of power. Be careful what you wish for.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Thayer [1/2]

Hegemony promotes economic and democratic norms – solving global stability
Stability Peace, like good health, is not often noticed, but certainly is missed when absent. Throughout history, peace and stability
have been a major benefit of empires. In fact, pax Romana in Latin means the Roman peace, or the stability brought about by the
Roman Empire. Rome's power was so overwhelming that no one could challenge it successfully for hundreds of years. The result was
stability within the Roman Empire. Where Rome conquered, peace, law, order, education, a common language, and much else
followed. That was true of the British Empire (pax Britannica) too. So it is with the United States today. Peace and stability are major
benefits of the American Empire. The fact that America is so powerful actually reduces the likelihood of major war. Scholars of
international politics have found that the presence of a dominant state in international politics actually reduces the likelihood of war
because weaker states, including even great powers, know that it is unlikely that they could challenge the dominant state and win.
They may resort to other mechanisms or tactics to challenge the dominant country, but are unlikely to do so directly. This means that
there will be no wars between great powers. At least, not until a challenger (certainly China) thinks it can overthrow the dominant state
(the United States). But there will be intense security competition—both China and the United States will watch each other closely,
with their intelligence communities increasingly focused on each other, their diplomats striving to ensure that countries around the
world do not align with the other, and their militaries seeing the other as their principal threat. This is not unusual in international
politics but, in fact, is its "normal" condition. Americans may not pay much attention to it until a crisis occurs. But right now states are
competing with one another. This is because international politics does not sleep; it never takes a rest. Spreading Our Form of
Government The American Empire gives the United States the ability to spread its form of government, democracy, and other
elements of its ideology of liberalism. Using American power to spread democracy can be a source of much good for the countries
concerned as well as for the United States. This is because democracies are more likely to align themselves with the United States and
be sympathetic to its worldview. In addition, there is a chance—small as it may be—that once states are governed democratically, the
likelihood of conflict will be reduced further. Natan Sharansky makes the argument that once Arabs are governed democratically, they
will not wish to continue the conflict against Israel." This idea has had a big effect on President George W. Bush. He has said that
Sharansky's worldview "is part of my presidential DNA."" Whether democracy in the Middle East would have this impact is
debatable. Perhaps democratic Arab states would be more opposed to Israel, but nonetheless, their people would be better off. The
United States has brought democracy to Afghanistan, where 8.5 million Afghans, 40 percent of them women, voted in October 2004,
even though remnant Taliban forces threatened them. Elections were held in Iraq in January 2005, the first free elections in that
country's history. The military power of the United States put Iraq on the path to democracy. Democracy has spread to Latin America,
Europe, Asia, the Caucasus, and now even the Middle East is becoming increasingly democratic. They may not yet look like Western-
style democracies, but democratic progress has been made in Morocco, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, the Palestinian Authority, and Egypt.
The march of democracy has been impressive. Although democracies have their flaws, simply put, democracy is the best form of
government. Winston Churchill recognized this over half a century ago: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those
other forms that have been tried from time to time." The United States should do what it can to foster the spread of democracy
throughout the world. Economic Prosperity Economic prosperity is also a product of the American Empire. It has created a Liberal
International Economic Order (LIED)—a network of worldwide free trade and commerce, respect for intellectual property rights,
mobility of capital and labor markets—to promote economic growth. The stability and prosperity that stems from this economic order
is a global public good from which all states benefit, particularly states in the Third World. The American Empire has created this
network not out of altruism but because it benefits the economic well-being of the United States. In 1998, the Secretary of Defense
William Cohen put this well when he acknowledged that "economists and soldiers share the same interest in stability"; soldiers create
the conditions in which the American economy may thrive, and "we are able to shape the environment [of international politics] in
ways that are advantageous to us and that are stabilizing to the areas where we are forward deployed, thereby helping to promote
investment and prosperity...business follows the flag."6° Perhaps the greatest testament to the benefits of the American Empire comes
from Deepak Lal, a former Indian foreign service diplomat, researcher at the World Bank, prolific author, and now a professor who
started his career confident in the socialist ideology of post-independence India that strongly condemned empire. He has abandoned
the position of his youth and is now one of the strongest proponents of the American Empire. Lal has traveled the world and, in the
course of his journeys, has witnessed great poverty and misery due to a lack of economic development. He realized that free markets
were necessary for the development of poor countries, and this led him to recognize that his faith in socialism was wrong. Just as a
conservative famously is said to be a liberal who has been mugged by reality, the hard "evidence and experience" that stemmed from
"working and traveling in most parts of the Third World during my professional career" caused this profound change.' Lal submits that
Thayer Continues

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Thayer [2/2]

Continued Card
the only way to bring relief to the desperately poor countries of the Third World is through the American Empire. Empires provide
order, and this order "has been essential for the working of the benign processes of globalization, which promote prosperity."62
Globalization is the process of creating a common economic space, which leads to a growing integration of the world economy
through the increasingly free movement of goods, capital, and labor. It is the responsibility of the United States, Lal argues, to use the
LIEU to promote the well-being of all economies, but particularly those in the Third World, so that they too may enjoy economic
prosperity. Humanitarian Missions If someone were to ask "How many humanitarian missions has the United States undertaken since
the end of the Cold War?", most Americans probably have to think for a moment and then answer "three or four." In fact, the number
is much larger. The U.S. military has participated in over fifty operations since the end of the Cold War, and while wars like the
invasion of Panama or Iraq received considerable attention from the world's media, most of the fifty actions were humanitarian in
nature and received almost no media attention in the United States. The U.S. military is the earth's "911 force"—it serves as the
world's police; it is the global paramedic, and the planet's fire department. Whenever there is a natural disaster, earthquake, flood,
typhoon, or tsunami, the United States assists the countries in need. In 1991, when flooding caused by cyclone Marian killed almost
140,000 people and left 5 million homeless in Bangladesh, the United States launched Operation Sea Angel to save stranded and
starving people by supplying food, potable water, and medical assistance. U.S. forces are credited with saving over 200,000 lives in
that operation. In 1999, torrential rains and flash flooding in Venezuela killed 30,000 people and left 140,000 homeless. The United
States responded with Operation Fundamental Response, which brought water purification and hygiene equipment saving thousands.
Also in 1999, Operation Strong Support aided Central Americans affected by Hurricane Mitch. That hurricane was the fourth-strongest
ever recorded in the Atlantic and the worst natural disaster to strike Central America in the twentieth century. The magnitude of the
devastation was tremendous, with about 10,000 people killed, 13,000 missing, and 2 million left homeless. It is estimated that 60
percent of the infrastructure in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala was destroyed. Again, the U.S. military came to the aid of the
people affected. It is believed to have rescued about 700 people who otherwise would have died, while saving more from disease due
to the timely arrival of medical supplies, food, water, blankets, and mobile shelters. In the next phase of Strong Support, military
engineers rebuilt much of the infrastructure of those countries, including bridges, hospitals, roads, and schools. On the day after
Christmas in 2004, a tremendous earthquake and tsunami occurred in the Indian Ocean near Sumatra and killed 300,000 people. The
United States was the first to respond with aid. More importantly, Washington not only contributed a large amount of aid, $350
million, plus another $350 million provided by American citizens and corporations, but also—only days after the tsunami struck—
used its military to help those in need. About 20,000 U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines responded by providing water, food,
medical aid, disease treatment and prevention, as well as forensic assistance to help identify the bodies of those killed. Only the U.S.
military could have accomplished this Herculean effort, and it is important to keep in mind that its costs were separate from the $350
million provided by the U.S. government and other money given by American citizens and corporations to relief organizations like the
International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent. The generosity of the United States has done more to help the country fight
the war on terror than almost any other measure. Before the tsunami, 80 percent of Indonesian opinion was opposed to the United
States; after it, 80 percent had a favorable opinion of the United States. In October 2005, an enormous earthquake struck Kashmir,
killing about 74,000 people and leaving 3 million homeless. The U.S. military responded immediately, diverting helicopters fighting
the war on terror in nearby Afghanistan to bring relief as soon as possible. To help those in need, the United States provided about
$156 million in aid to Pakistan; and, as one might expect from those witnessing the generosity of the United States, it left a lasting
impression about the United States. Whether in Indonesia or Kashmir, the money was well spent because it helped people in the wake
of disasters, but it also had a real impact on the war on terror. There is no other state or international organization that can provide
these benefits. The United Nations certainly cannot because it lacks the military and economic power of the United States. It is riven
with conflicts and major cleavages that divide the international body time and again on small matters as well as great ones. Thus, it
lacks the ability to speak with one voice on important issues and to act as a unified force once a decision has been reached. Moreover,
it does not possess the communications capabilities or global logistical reach of the U.S. military. In fact, UN peacekeeping operations
depend on the United States to supply UN forces. Simply put, there is no alternative to the leadership of the United States.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Economy Shell

Heg is key to the economy
Michael Mandelbaum 05 Director & Professor of American Foreign Policy Program @ Johns Hopkins University
(The Case for Goliath)
It is satisfying because if the strings that manipulate events the world over lead back to Washington and New York, then the world may
be seen as intelligible, coherent, and rational, if not benign. It is plausible because, as by far the most powerful member of the system
of sovereign states, the United States surely does exercise considerable influence. Globalization—the spread around the world of
cross-border economic transactions—is not an American invention, nor does the United States control the trade and investment that
enriches some, harms others, and alters the daily routines of tens of millions; but American-based firms certainly do conduct a large
part of the world's trade and investment, American economic policies do affect conditions in the rest of the world and the system of
global market relations within which these often disruptive transactions take places does rest on the military might and the economic
strength of the international system's most powerful member.
And, economic collapse causes global nuclear war

Walter Russell Mead 92 Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy @ the Council on Foreign Relations
(Depending on the kindness of strangers, New Perspectives Quarterly, Summer, p. 28, Academic Search Elite)
If so, this new failure--the failure to develop an international system to hedge against the possibility of worldwide depression--will
open their eyes to their folly. Hundreds of millions-- billions--of people around the world have pinned their hopes on the international
market economy. They and their leaders have embraced market principles—and drawn closer to the West--because they believe that
our system can work for them. But what if it can't? What if the global economy stagnates--or even shrinks? In that case, we will face a
new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor. Russia, China, India--these countries with their billions of
people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much greater danger to world order than Germany and Japan did in the '30s.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Terrorism Shell

Heg deters terrorist use of WMDs
Gary Schmitt 06 Resident Scholar & Director of the Program on Advanced Strategic Studies @ the American Enterprise Institute
(Is there any alternative to U.S. primacy, The Weekly Standard, Books & Arts, Vol. 11, No. 22, February, lexis)
The core argument itself is not new: The United States and the West face a new threat--weapons of mass destruction in the hands
of terrorists--and, whether we like it or not, no power other than the United States has the capacity, or can provide the decisive
leadership, required to handle this and other critical global security issues. Certainly not the United Nations or, anytime soon, the
European Union. In the absence of American primacy, the international order would quickly return to disorder. Indeed, whatever
legitimate concerns people may have about the fact of America's primacy, the downsides of not asserting that primacy are,
according to The American Era, potentially far more serious. The critics "tend to dwell disproportionately on problems in the
exercise of [American] power rather than on the dire consequences of retreat from an activist foreign policy," Lieber writes. They
forget "what can happen in the absence of such power."
And, terrorism results in extinction

Jerome Corsi 05 Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University
(Atomic Iran, p. 176-8)
The United States retaliates: 'End of the world' scenarios The combination of horror and outrage that will surge upon the nation will demand that the president
retaliate for the incomprehensible damage done by the attack. The problem will be that the president will not immediately know how to respond or against whom.The perpetrators
will have been incinerated by the explosion that destroyed New York City. Unlike 9-11, there will have been no interval during the attack when those hijacked could make phone calls to loved
ones telling them before they died that the hijackers were radical Islamic extremists.There will be no such phone calls when the attack will not have been anticipated until the instant the
terrorists detonate their improvised nuclear device inside the truck parked on a curb at the Empire State Building. Nor will there be any possibility of finding any clues, which either were
vaporized instantly or are now lying physically inaccessible under tons of radioactive rubble.Still, the
president, members of Congress, the military, and the public at large
will suspect another attack by our known enemy – Islamic terrorists. The first impulse will be to launch a nuclear strike on Mecca, to destroy the whole
religion of Islam. Medina could possibly be added to the target list just to make the point with crystal clarity. Yet what would we gain? The moment Mecca and
Medina were wiped off the map, the Islamic world – more than 1 billion human beings in countless different nations – would feel attacked. Nothing would emerge intact after a
war between the United States and Islam. The apocalypse would be upon us.Then, too, we would face an immediate threat from our long-term enemy, the
former Soviet Union. Many in the Kremlin would see this as an opportunity to grasp the victory that had been snatched from them by Ronald Reagan when
the Berlin Wall came down. A missile strike by the Russians on a score of American cities could possibly be pre-emptive. Would the U.S. strategic
defense system be so in shock that immediate retaliation would not be possible? Hardliners in Moscow might argue that there was never a better opportunity to
destroy America. In China, our newer Communist enemies might not care if we could retaliate. With a population already over 1.3 billion people and with their population not
concentrated in a few major cities, the Chinese might calculate to initiate a nuclear blow on the United States. What if the United States retaliated with a nuclear
counterattack upon China? The Chinese might be able to absorb the blow and recover. The North Koreans might calculate even more recklessly. Why not launch upon America the few missiles
they have that could reach our soil? More confusion and chaos might only advance their position. If Russia, China, and the United States could be drawn into attacking one another, North
Korea might emerge stronger just because it was overlooked while the great nations focus on attacking one another. So, too, our supposed allies in Europe might relish the immediate reduction
in power suddenly inflicted upon America. Many of the great egos in Europe have never fully recovered from the disgrace of World War II, when in the last century the Americans a second
time in just over two decades had been forced to come to their rescue. If the
French did not start launching nuclear weapons themselves, they might be happy to fan the
the president might decide simply to launch a limited nuclear strike on Tehran
diplomatic fire beginning to burn under the Russians and the Chinese. Or
itself. This might be the most rational option in the attempt to retaliate but still communicate restraint. The problem is that a strike on Tehran would add more
nuclear devastation to the world calculation. Muslims around the world would still see the retaliation as an attack on Islam, especially when the United States had no positive proof that the
for the president not to retaliate might be unacceptable to
destruction of New York City had been triggered by radical Islamic extremists with assistance from Iran. But
the American people. So weakened by the loss of New York, Americans would feel vulnerable in every city in the nation. "Who is going to be next?" would be the question on
everyone's mind. For this there would be no effective answer. That the president might think politically at this instant seems almost petty, yet every
president is by nature a politician. The political party in power at the time of the attack would be destroyed unless the president
retaliated with a nuclear strike against somebody. The American people would feel a price had to be paid while the country was still capable of exacting
revenge.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Proliferation Shell

Heg deters proliferation
The greatest threat to their security that the members of the international system did face in the new century, one that the United States
had devoted considerable resources and political capital to containing and that a serious reduction in the American global rule would
certainly aggravate, was the spread of nuclear weapons. Nuclear proliferation poses three related dangers. The first is that, in the
absence of an American nuclear guarantee, major countries in Europe and Asia will feel the need to acquire their own nuclear
armaments. If the United States withdrew from Europe and East Asia, Germany might come to consider it imprudent to deal with a
nuclear-armed Russia, and Japan with a nuclear-armed China, without nuclear arms of their own. They would seek these weapons in
order to avoid an imbalance in power that might work to their disadvantage. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by such affluent,
democratic, peaceful countries would not, by itself, trigger a war. It could, however, trigger arms races similar to the one between the
United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It would surely make Europe and East Asia less comfortable places, and
relations among the countries of these regions more suspicious, than was the case at the outset of the twenty-first century. The spread
of nuclear weapons poses a second danger, which the United States exerted itself to thwart to the extent of threatening a war in North
Korea and actually waging one in Iraq and that the recession of American power would increase: the possession of nuclear armaments
by "rogue" states, countries governed by regimes at odds with their neighbors and hostile to prevailing international norms. A nuclear-
armed Iraq, an unlikely development after the over-throw of Saddam Hussein's regime, or a nuclear-armed Iran, a far more plausible
prospect, would make the international relations of the Persian Gulf far more dangerous. That in turn would threaten virtually every
country in the world because so much of the oil on which they all depend comes from that region.' A nuclear-armed North Korea
would similarly change the international relations of East Asia for the worse. Especially if the United States withdrew from the region,
South Korea and Japan, and perhaps ultimately Tai-wan, might well decide to equip themselves with nuclear weapons of their own. A
North Korean nuclear arsenal would pose yet a third threat: nuclear weapons in the hands of a terrorist group such as al Qaeda.
Lacking the infrastructure of a sovereign state, a terrorist organization probably could not construct a nuclear weapon itself. But it
could purchase either a full-fledged nuclear explosive or nuclear material that could form the basis for a device that, while not actually
exploding, could spew poisonous radiation over populated areas, killing or infecting many thousands of people.' Nuclear materials are
potentially available for purchase not only in North Korea but elsewhere as well.
And, proliferation causes extinction

Victor A. Utgoff 02 Deputy Director of Strategy, Forces, & Resources Division of Institute for Defense Analysis
(Survival, Summer, ProQuest)
In sum, widespread proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shoot-outs will have a
substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is
stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations
wearing nuclear ‘six-shooters’ on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we
will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations. This kind of world is in no nation’s interest.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Proliferation Ext.

Heg deters proliferation in Europe and Asia
American forces remained in Europe and East Asia because the countries located in these two regions wanted them there, even if they
did not always say so clearly or even explicitly. They wanted them there because the American presence offered the assurance that
these regions would remain free of war and, in the case of Europe, free of the costly preparations for war that had marked the
twentieth century. The American military presence was in both cases a confidence-building measure, and if that presence were with-
drawn, the countries in both regions would feel less confident that no threat to their security would appear. They would, in all
likelihood, take steps to compensate for the absence of these forces. Those steps would surely not include war, at least not in the first
instance. Instead, since the American forces serve as a hedge against uncertainty, some of the countries of East Asia and Europe might
well seek to replace them with another source of hedging. A leading candidate for that role would be nuclear weapons of their own.9
The possession of nuclear weapons equips their owner with a certain leverage, a geopolitical weight that, unless somehow
counterbalanced, can confer a political advantage in dealing with countries lacking them. Like the relationship between employer and
employee, the one between a nuclear-weapon state and a non-nuclear-weapon state has inequality built into it, no matter how friendly
that relationship may be. During the Cold War, the American military presence, and the guarantee of protection by the mighty nuclear
arsenal of the United States that came with it, neutralized the nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of
China accumulated. Russia and China retain nuclear stock-piles in the wake of the Cold War, and with the end of the American
military presence in their regions, several of their non-nuclear neighbors—Germany, Poland, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, for
example—might feel the need to off-set those stockpiles with nuclear forces of their own. Perhaps the process of replacing American
nuclear armaments with those of other countries, if this should take place, would occur smoothly, with Europe and East Asia
remaining peaceful throughout the transition. But this is not what most of the world believes. To the contrary, the spread of nuclear
weapons to countries that do not already have them is widely considered to be the single greatest threat to international tranquillity in
the twenty-first century. The United States has made the prevention of nuclear proliferation one of its most important foreign policies,
and its efforts to this end constitute, like reassurance, a service to the other members of the international system.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – China Shell

Primacy is key to contain Chinese expansion
(In Defense of Primacy, The National Interest, November)
China is clearly the most important of these states because it is a rising great power. But even Beijing is intimidated by the United
States and refrains from openly challenging U.S. power. China proclaims that it will, if necessary, resort to other mechanisms of
challenging the United States, including asymmetric strategies such as targeting communication and intelligence satellites upon which
the United States depends. But China may not be confident those strategies would work, and so it is likely to refrain from testing the
United States directly for the foreseeable future because China's power benefits, as we shall see, from the international order U.S.
primacy creates.
And, confrontation with China causes extinction

Straits Times, 00
(6/25, “Regional Fallout: No one gains in war over Taiwan,” lexis)
THE high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-scale war between the US and China. If Washington were to conclude that
splitting China would better serve its national interests, then a full-scale war becomes unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would embroil other countries far
and near and -- horror of horrors -- raise the possibility of a nuclear war. Beijing has already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any
country providing bases and logistics support to any US forces attacking China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In the region,
this means South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east Asia will be set on fire. And the conflagration
may not end there as opportunistic powers elsewhere may try to overturn the existing world order. With the US distracted, Russia may
seek to redefine Europe's political landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly upset by the likes of Iraq. In
south Asia, hostilities between India and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase .
Will a full-scale Sino-US war lead to a nuclear war? According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army which fought against the Chinese in
the Korean War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to save the US from military defeat. In his book The Korean War, a personal
account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and its implications on future US foreign policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two
choices in Korea -- truce or a broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to resort to nuclear weaponry to defeat China long
before the latter acquired a similar capability, there is little hope of winning a war against China 50 years later, short of using nuclear weapons. The
US estimates that China possesses about 20 nuclear warheads that can destroy major American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for
the nuclear option. A Chinese military officer disclosed recently that Beijing was considering a review of its "non first use" principle regarding nuclear weapons.
Major-General Pan Zhangqiang, president of the military-funded Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for
Scholars in Washington that although the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures from the military to drop it. He said military leaders
considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked dismemberment as a result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that
should that come to pass, we would see the destruction of civilisation . There would be no victors in such a war. While the prospect of a nuclear
Armageddon over Taiwan might seem inconceivable, it cannot be ruled out entirely, for China puts sovereignty above everything else.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Asian Proliferation Shell

Heg is key to solve East Asian proliferation
Robert Lieber 05 Professor of Government & International Affairs @ Georgetown University
(The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century)
Taken together, these Asian involvements are not without risk, especially vis-a-vis North Korea, China-Taiwan, and the uncertain
future of a nuclear-armed Pakistan. Nonetheless, the American engagement provides both reassurance and deterrence and thus eases
the security dilemmas of the key states there, including countries that are America's allies but remain suspicious of each other. Given
the history of the region, an American withdrawal would be likely to trigger arms races and the accelerated proliferation of nuclear
weapons. It is thus no exaggeration to describe the American presence as providing the "oxygen" crucial for the region's stability and
economic prosperity.37
And, East Asian proliferation results in extinction

Joseph Cirincione 00 Director of Non-Proliferation Project @ the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
(The Asian Nuclear Reaction Chain, Spring)
The blocks would fall quickest and hardest in Asia, where proliferation pressures are already building more quickly than anywhere
else in the world. If a nuclear breakout takes place in Asia, then the international arms control agreements that have been painstakingly
negotiated over the past 40 years will crumble. Moreover, the United States could find itself embroiled in its fourth war on the Asian
continent in six decades--a costly rebuke to those who seek the safety of Fortress America by hiding behind national missile defenses.
Consider what is already happening: North Korea continues to play guessing games with its nuclear and missile programs; South
Korea wants its own missiles to match Pyongyang's; India and Pakistan shoot across borders while running a slow-motion nuclear
arms race; China modernizes its nuclear arsenal amid tensions with Taiwan and the United States; Japan's vice defense minister is
forced to resign after extolling the benefits of nuclear weapons; and Russia-whose Far East nuclear deployments alone make it the
largest Asian nuclear power-struggles to maintain territorial coherence. Five of these states have nuclear weapons; the others are
capable of constructing them. Like neutrons firing from a split atom, one nation's actions can trigger reactions throughout the region,
which in turn, stimulate additional actions. These nations form an interlocking Asian nuclear reaction chain that vibrates dangerously
with each new development. If the frequency and intensity of this reaction cycle increase, critical decisions taken by any one of these
governments could cascade into the second great wave of nuclear-weapon proliferation, bringing regional and global economic and
political instability and, perhaps, the first combat use of a nuclear weapon since 1945.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Good – Democracy Shell

Heg is key to spread democracy
(In Defense of Primacy, The National Interest, November)
Everything we think of when we consider the current international order--free trade, a robust monetary regime, increasing respect for
human rights, growing democratization is directly linked to U.S. power. Retrenchment proponents seem to think that the current
system can be maintained without the current amount of U.S. power behind it. In that they are dead wrong and need to be reminded of
one of history's most significant lessons: Appalling things happen when international orders collapse. The Dark Ages followed Rome's
collapse. Hitler succeeded the order established at Versailles. Without U.S. power, the liberal order created by the United States will
end just as assuredly. As country and western great Ral Donner sang: "You don't know what you've got (until you lose it)."
And, democracy prevents extinction

Larry Diamond 95 Senior Fellow @ the Hoover Institution
(Promoting Democracy in the 1990s, wwics.si.edu/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/1.htm)
This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia
nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly
powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the
institutions of tenuous, democratic ones, Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on
Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated
with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and
openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that
govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to
aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they
are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons
of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading
partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible
because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to
honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach
agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule
of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Heg Good – War

Heg can’t solve conflicts – their authors exaggerate US influence
A second contention advanced by proponents of American hegemony is that the United States cannot withdraw from Eurasia because
a great power war there could shape the postconflict international system in ways harmful to U.S. interests. Hence, the United States
“could suffer few economic losses during a war, or even benefit somewhat, and still find the postwar environment costly to its own
trade and investment.” This really is not an economic argument but rather an argument about the consequences of Eurasia’s political
and ideological, as well as economic, closure. Proponents of hegemony fear that if great power wars in Eurasia occur, they could bring
to power militaristic or totalitarian regimes. Here, several points need to be made. First, proponents of American hegemony
overestimate the amount of influence that the United States has on the international system. There are numerous possible geopolitical
rivalries in Eurasia. Most of these will not culminate in war, but it’s a good bet that some will. But regardless of whether Eurasian
great powers remain at peace, the outcomes are going to be caused more by those states’ calculations of their interests than by the
presence of U.S. forces in Eurasia. The United States has only limited power to affect the amount of war and peace in the international
system, and whatever influence it does have is being eroded by the creeping multipolarization under way in Eurasia. Second, the
possible benefits of “environment shaping” have to be weighed against the possible costs of U.S. involvement in a big Eurasian war.
Finally, distilled to its essence, this argument is a restatement of the fear that U.S. security and interests inevitably will be jeopardized
by a Eurasian hegemon. This threat is easily exaggerated, and manipulated, to disguise ulterior motives for U.S. military intervention
in Eurasia.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Heg Good – Economy

Economic well-being is inevitable – markets will adapt under offshore balancing
Advocates of hegemony (and selective engagement) also seem to have a peculiar understanding of international economics and
convey the impression that international trade and investment will come to a grinding halt if the Untied States abandons its current
grand strategy – or if a Eurasian great power war occurs. This is not true, however. If the United States abandons its current grand
strategic role as the protector of international economic openness, international economic intercourse will not stop, even in time of
great power war. If the United States were to adopt an offshore balancing grand strategy, its own and global markets would adapt to
the new political and strategic environment. Firms and investors would reassess the risks of overseas trade and investment, and over
time investment and trade flows would shift in response to these calculations. Instead of being diminished, international trade and
investment would be diverted to more geopolitically secure regions, and these “safe havens” – especially the United States – would be
the beneficiaries. Finally, the assumption that a Eurasia dominated by a hegemon would be closed economically to the United States is
dubious. A Eurasian hegemon would have a stake in its own economic well-being (both for strategic and domestic political reasons),
and it would be most unlikely to hive itself off completely from international trade.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Heg Good – Middle East

Withdrawal from the Mideast won’t destabilize the region – other powers won’t intervene
There are two main threats to U.S. oil interests. First, there is the danger of a single power in the Gulf region consolidating its control
over the majority of the world's oil reserves. The fear that Iraq would control both Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian oil reserves, as well as
its own, was the nightmare scenario invoked by U.S. policymakers as one of the rationales for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. An "oil
hegemon" in the Gulf would be in a position to raise oil prices and use oil as an instrument of political coercion. Yet, although the
United States does have an interest in preventing the emergence of a Persian Gulf oil hegemon, the risk of such a development is low,
because the three largest states in the Gulf-Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran-lack the military capabilities to conquer each other. This was
true even before the Gulf War, or the Iraq War. Thus, when Iraq went to war with Iran in September 1980, the conflict ended in a
prolonged, bloody stalemate. Similarly, from the end of the Gulf War in 1991 until the U.S. invasion in March 2003, Iraq posed no
military threat to Saudi Arabia (or Iran). On the other side of the coin, because of its overwhelming military capabilities compared to
the "big three" Gulf powers, the United States easily could deter any of them from launching a war of conquest. In 1990, for example,
the United States was able to dissuade Saddam Hussein from using Kuwait as a platform for conquering Saudi Arabia by inserting
airpower and a limited number of ground forces (as a trip wire) into Saudi Arabia, and by imposing an economic embargo on Iraq.
This policy of containment and deterrence worked in 1990-and still was working in March 2003.62 To make sure no Gulf oil hegemon
emerges in the future, Washington should make it clear that it would respond militarily to prevent a single power from gaining control
over a majority of the region's oil capacity. However, a deterrence strategy does not require a substantial U.S. military presence in the
region, because the United States today (in contrast to 1990) can back up its deterrent threat with long-range airpower and sea-based
cruise missiles.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Benevolent Hegemony

Benevolent hegemony is impossible
The claim that others regard American primacy as benevolent because of U.S. soft power and shared values is similarly dubious. And
again, Iraq played an important role in exploding this myth. Beginning with the run-up to the invasion of Iraq to the present, one
public opinion survey after another has revealed that a vast "values gap" exists between the United States and the rest of the world.
Tellingly, this gap exists not just between the United States and East Asia and the Middle East, but between the United States and
Europe. One would think that if there is any part of the world where shared values really do cause others to view American primacy as
benevolent, Europe would be the place. Yet, a September 2004 poll of eight thousand respondents on both sides of the Atlantic found
that 83 percent of Americans, and 79 percent of Europeans, agreed that Europe and the United States have different social and cultural
values." On a host of issues—including the death penalty, the role of religion in everyday life, and attitudes toward the role of
international law and institutions—Europeans and Americans hold divergent views, not common ones. The Iraq war has exposed the
huge gulf in values that gradually is causing the United States and Europe to drift apart—in large measure because Europe regards the
United States as being a geopolitical rogue elephant, rather than as a "benevolent hegemon." The problem with rogue elephants, of
course, is that when they are on the loose anyone nearby is at risk of being trampled. This is why other states are uneasy about
American primacy. For sure, many states do benefit both economically and in terms of security from American primacy. And it also is
true that not all other states will feel threatened by U.S. hard power. Eventually, however, some of the other states in the international
political system are going to believe that they are menaced by American primacy. For example, far from being "off-shore" as the
primacists claim, U.S. power is very much on shore—or lurking just beyond the coastline—and very much in the faces of China,
Russia, and the Islamic world. And, in this sense, international politics is not a lot different than basketball: players who push others
around and get in their faces are likely to be the targets of a self-defensive punch in the nose. Doubtless, American primacy has its
dimension of benevolence, but a state as powerful as the United States can never be benevolent enough to offset the fear that other
states have of its unchecked power. In international politics, benevolent hegemons are like unicorns—there is no such animal.
Hegemons love themselves, but others mistrust and fear them—and for good reason. In today's world, others dread both the
overconcentration of geopolitical weight in America's favor and the purposes for which it may be used. After all, "No great power has
a monopoly on virtue and, although some may have a great deal more virtue than others, virtue imposed on others is not seen as such
by them. All great powers are capable of exercising a measure of self-restraint, but they are tempted not to and the choice to practice
restraint is made easier by the existence of countervailing power and the possibility of it being exercised."49 While Washington's self-
proclaimed benevolence is inherently ephemeral, the hard fist of American power is tangible. Others must worry constantly that if
U.S. intentions change, bad things may happen to them. In a one-superpower world, the overconcentration of power in America's
hands is an omnipresent challenge to other states' security, and Washington's ability to reassure others of its benevolence is limited by
the very enormity of its power.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Bad – War

US engagement increases likelihood of great power war
Eugene Gholz, Darryl G. Press, & Harvey M. Sapolsky 97 Doctoral Candidates in the Dept. of Political Science @ MIT, Professor of
Public Policy and Organization in the Dept. of Political Science @ MIT
(Come Home, America, The Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation, International Security, Vol. 21, No. 4, Spring, p.
30-1)
Several prominent analysts favor a policy of selective engagement. These analysts fear that American military retrenchment would
increase the risk of great power war. A great power war today would be a calamity, even for those countries that manage to stay out of
the fighting. The best way to prevent great power war, according to these analysts, is to remain engaged in Europe and East Asia.
Twice in this century the United States has pulled out of Europe, and both times great power war followed. Then America chose to
stay engaged, and the longest period of European great power peace ensued. In sum, selective engagers point to the costs of others’
great power wars and the relative ease of preventing them. The selective engagers’ strategy is wrong for two reasons. First, selective
engagers overstate the effect of U.S. military presence as a positive force for great power peace. In today’s world, disengagement will
not cause great power war and continued engagement will not reliably prevent it. In some circumstances, engagement may actually
increase the likelihood of conflict. Second, selective engagers overstate the costs of distant wars and seriously understate the costs and
risks of their strategies. Overseas deployments require a large force structure. Even worse, selective engagement will ensure that when
a future great power war erupts, the United States will be in the thick of things. Although distant great power wars are bad for
America, the only sure path to ruin is to step in the middle of a faraway fight. Selective engagers overstate America’s effect on the
likelihood of future great power wars. There is little reason to believe that withdrawal from Europe or Asia would lead to deterrence
failures. With or without a forward U.S. presence, America’s major allies have sufficient military strength to deter any potential
aggressors. Conflict is far more likely to erupt from a sequence described in the spiral model.
Primacy entangles the US in faraway great power wars

33-4)
The larger long-term cost of selective engagement is the risk of involvement in faraway great power wars. Great power conflicts will
continue to be a rare occurrence, but when they happen, the United States is much better off staying as far away from the combatants
as possible. World War II resulted in the deaths of 400,000 Americans, many times that number wounded, and nearly 40 percent of
GDP devoted to defense (compared to 4 percent today). A new great power conflict, with the possibility of nuclear use, might exact
even higher costs from the participants. World War II was fought to prevent the consolidation of Europe and Asia by hostile, fanatical
adversaries, but a new great power war would not raise that specter. The biggest cost of selective engagement is the risk of being
drawn into someone else’s faraway great power war. The global economy may be disrupted by war, depending on who is involved, but
even in the worst case, the costs would be manageable. Trade accounts for roughly 20 percent of the American economy, and sudden,
forced autarky would be devastating for American prosperity. But no great power war could come close to forcing American autarky:
essentially all goods have substitute sources of supply at varying marginal increases in cost. Furthermore, wars never isolate the
fighting countries completely from external trade. Some dislocation is a real possibility, but these short-term costs would not justify
the risks of fighting a great power war. The risk of nuclear escalation is a reason to worry about great power war, but it is a highly
suspect reason to favor a military policy that puts U.S. forces between feuding powers. Nuclear weapons may not be used in a future
great power war; the fear of retaliation should breed great caution on the part of the belligerents. But the larger point is that the
possibility of a faraway nuclear exchange is precisely the reason that America should keep its military forces out of other country’s
disputes. An Indo-Pakistani nuclear war would be a terrible thing, but it makes no sense to get in the middle. Distant wars would be
costly, but not nearly as costly as the solution that selective engagers propose.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Bad – War

Primacy increases prospects for bipolar war
36)
Second, the general prescriptions of primacy are likely to cause the problems they are supposed to avoid. Primacy is designed to
prevent the costs of a future bipolar confrontation, but primacy’s prescription is to pay those costs today. America spends more today
on defense than it did during most peacetime years of the Cold War, yet many advocates of primacy want to increase defense spending
toward its Cold War peak. Primacy advocates remember the military casualties of the Cold War’s confrontations, but their strategy
would immediately involve the United States in disputes in the South China Sea, Eastern Ukraine, and Chechnya. It makes no sense to
pay the costs of a new Cold War today – and into the indefinite future – to avoid the possibility of incurring these costs later.
Furthermore, primacy increases the chances of a full-fledged confrontation with a new rival. As things stand now, all of America’s
potential competitors have other countries to worry about; they all live near one another and far away from the United States. Number
two, no matter who it is, has plenty of problems without American engagement. But by adopting a policy of confrontation, attempting
to limit the economic and military power of Russia, China, Japan, and perhaps a united Europe, the United States would make itself
these countries’ biggest problem – more powerful and threatening than their natural, geographic adversaries. Primacy is the surest
recipe for starting bipolar military confrontation.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Bad – Nuclear War

Hegemony causes nuclear conflict – there’s no impact to US withdrawal
Rather than being instruments of regional pacification, today America’s alliances are transmission belts for war that ensure that the
U.S. would be embroiled in Eurasian wars. In deciding whether to go to war in Eurasia, the United States should not allow its hands to
be tied in advance. For example, a non-great power war on the Korean peninsula – even if nuclear weapons were not involved – would
be very costly. The dangers of being entangled in a great power war in Eurasia, of course, are even greater, and could expose the
American homeland to nuclear attack. An offshore balancing grand strategy would extricate the United States from the danger of
being entrapped in Eurasian conflicts by its alliance commitments. Offshore balancing is a strategy of burden shifting, not burden
sharing. As such, it would devolve to other states the costs and risks of their defense. From the late 1940s to the present U.S. alliance
commitments have turned geostrategic logic on its head, because these commitments have imposed the greatest burdens – both
economically and in terms of danger – on the alliance partner (the United States) whose security is least at risk. In World War II’s
immediate aftermath, it made sense for the United States to allow Western Europe and Japan to shelter temporarily under its strategic
umbrella while they got back on their feet. Today, however, there is no inherent reason why the United States should be compelled to
bear the costs or run the risks of shielding other states from direct attack or protecting their overseas interests from regional turmoil.
Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea, for example, have the economic and technological wherewithal to provide fully for their
own security. However, by promising its allies that it will defend them, America’s current hegemonic grand strategy gives them strong
incentives to free ride on the back of U.S. security guarantees. An offshore balancing strategy would shift strategic responsibilities to
where they properly belong: from the United States to those allies whose interests and security are most immediately implicated.
By devolving full responsibility for their defense to U.S. allies, offshore balancing would take advantage of the unique geostrategic
advantages that allow the United States to benefit from multipolarity, exercise a free hand strategically, and avoid being automatically
engulfed in Eurasian conflicts because of its alliance commitments. As an offshore balancer, the United States would reap security
advantages from a reversion to multipolarity. The United States is far removed from powerful rivals and shielded from them both by
geography and its own hard power. Consequently, as an insular great power, the United States is far less vulnerable to the effects of
“instability” than are the majors powers of Eurasia, and it could – and should – insulate itself from possible future Eurasian great
power wars. For the United States, the risk of conflict and the possible exposure of the American homeland to attack, rather than
arising from any direct threat to the United States itself, derive directly from the overseas commitments mandated by hegemony’s all-
encompassing definition of U.S. interests. Of course, proponents of current U.S. grand strategy will object that, by retracting its
security umbrella, the United States will create Eurasian security vacuums that will cause re-nationalization and a reversion to
destabilizing multipolarity. Ironically, however, America’s hegemonic grand strategy is failing in this respect already, because re-
nationalization is occurring gradually, even though the United States is acting as a regional stabilizer. On its present grand strategic
course the United States will end up with the worst of both worlds: notwithstanding the U.S. military presence, Eurasia is becoming
more multipolar and more volatile. This means that instead of increasing the chances of peace, its alliances expose the United States to
the rising probability of becoming entrapped in a future Eurasian war. Just as their West European counterparts did during the cold
war, America’s major Eurasian allies understand the dilemmas of extended deterrence in a nuclear world. In 1961, French president de
Gaulle told President Kennedy that Europe could never believe that the United States really would risk the destruction of New York in
order to save Paris. Today, U.S. allies have similar – well-founded – doubts about whether the United States would risk Seattle or Los
Angeles to defend Tokyo or Taipei. America’s Eurasian allies are starting to re-nationalize because they understand that the credibility
of U.S. security guarantees is eroding. Instead of foregoing military autonomy (re-nationalizing) they have every reason to make sure
they can defend themselves if they are abandoned by the United States. The result is that security competitions of increasing intensity
– like that between China and Japan – are taking place even though the U.S. military presence in East Asia is supposed to prevent
them from happening.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Bad – Terrorism Shell

Primacy causes terrorism
The events of 9/11 are another example of how hegemony makes the United States less secure than it would be if it followed an offshore balancing
strategy. Terrorism, the RAND Corporation terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman says, is "about power: the pursuit of power, the acquisition of power, and use of power to achieve political
change."86 If we step back for a moment from our horror and revulsion at the events of September 11, we can see that the attack was in keeping with the Clausewitzian paradigm of war: force
was used against the United States by its adversaries to advance their political objectives. As Clausewitz observed, "War is not an act of senseless passion but is controlled by its political
September 11 represented a violent counterreaction to America's geopolitical-and cultural-hegemony. As the strategy expert Richard K. Betts
object."88
It is 'hardly likely that Middle Eastern radicals would be hatching schemes like the destruction
presciently observed in a 1998 Foreign Affairs article:
of the World Trade Center if the United States had not been identified so long as the mainstay of Israel, the shah of Iran, and
conservative Arab regimes and the source of a cultural assault on Islam .89 U.S. hegemony fuels terrorist groups like al Qaeda and fans
Islamic fundamentalism, which is a form of "blowback" against America's preponderance and its world role.90 As long as the United States
maintains its global hegemony-and its concomitant preeminence in regions like the Persian Gulf-it will be the target of politically motivated terrorist
groups like al Qaeda. After 9/11, many foreign policy analysts and pundits asked the question, "Why do they hate us?" This question missed the key point . No doubt, there are
Islamic fundamentalists who do "hate" the United States for cultural, religious, and ideological reasons . And even leaving aside American
neoconservatives' obvious relish for making it so, to some extent the war on terror inescapably has overtones of a "clash of civilizations:' Still, this isn't-and should not be allowed to become-a
Fundamentally 9/11 was about geopolitics, specifically about U.S. hegemony. The United States may be greatly reviled in some quarters of the
replay of the Crusades.
were the United States not so intimately involved in the affairs of the Middle East, it's hardly likely that this detestation
Islamic world, but
would have manifested itself in something like 9/11. As Michael Scheurer, who headed the CIA analytical team monitoring Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, puts it, "One
of the greatest dangers for Americans in deciding how to confront the Islamist threat lies in continuing to believe-at the urging of senior U.S. leaders-that Muslims hate and attack us for what
we are and think, rather than for what we do."91 It is American policies-to be precise, American hegernony-that make the United States a lightning rod for
Muslim anger.
And, terrorism results in extinction

Jerome Corsi 05 Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University
(Atomic Iran, p. 176-8)
The United States retaliates: 'End of the world' scenarios The combination of horror and outrage that will surge upon the nation will demand that the president
retaliate for the incomprehensible damage done by the attack. The problem will be that the president will not immediately know how to respond or against whom.The perpetrators
will have been incinerated by the explosion that destroyed New York City. Unlike 9-11, there will have been no interval during the attack when those hijacked could make phone calls to loved
ones telling them before they died that the hijackers were radical Islamic extremists.There will be no such phone calls when the attack will not have been anticipated until the instant the
terrorists detonate their improvised nuclear device inside the truck parked on a curb at the Empire State Building. Nor will there be any possibility of finding any clues, which either were
vaporized instantly or are now lying physically inaccessible under tons of radioactive rubble.Still, the
president, members of Congress, the military, and the public at large
will suspect another attack by our known enemy – Islamic terrorists. The first impulse will be to launch a nuclear strike on Mecca, to destroy the whole
religion of Islam. Medina could possibly be added to the target list just to make the point with crystal clarity. Yet what would we gain? The moment Mecca and
Medina were wiped off the map, the Islamic world – more than 1 billion human beings in countless different nations – would feel attacked. Nothing would emerge intact after a
war between the United States and Islam. The apocalypse would be upon us.Then, too, we would face an immediate threat from our long-term enemy, the
former Soviet Union. Many in the Kremlin would see this as an opportunity to grasp the victory that had been snatched from them by Ronald Reagan when
the Berlin Wall came down. A missile strike by the Russians on a score of American cities could possibly be pre-emptive. Would the U.S. strategic
defense system be so in shock that immediate retaliation would not be possible? Hardliners in Moscow might argue that there was never a better opportunity to
destroy America. In China, our newer Communist enemies might not care if we could retaliate. With a population already over 1.3 billion people and with their population not
concentrated in a few major cities, the Chinese might calculate to initiate a nuclear blow on the United States. What if the United States retaliated with a nuclear
counterattack upon China? The Chinese might be able to absorb the blow and recover. The North Koreans might calculate even more recklessly. Why not launch upon America the few missiles
they have that could reach our soil? More confusion and chaos might only advance their position. If Russia, China, and the United States could be drawn into attacking one another, North
Korea might emerge stronger just because it was overlooked while the great nations focus on attacking one another. So, too, our supposed allies in Europe might relish the immediate reduction
in power suddenly inflicted upon America. Many of the great egos in Europe have never fully recovered from the disgrace of World War II, when in the last century the Americans a second
time in just over two decades had been forced to come to their rescue. If the
French did not start launching nuclear weapons themselves, they might be happy to fan the
the president might decide simply to launch a limited nuclear strike on Tehran
diplomatic fire beginning to burn under the Russians and the Chinese. Or
itself. This might be the most rational option in the attempt to retaliate but still communicate restraint. The problem is that a strike on Tehran would add more
nuclear devastation to the world calculation. Muslims around the world would still see the retaliation as an attack on Islam, especially when the United States had no positive proof that the
for the president not to retaliate might be unacceptable to
destruction of New York City had been triggered by radical Islamic extremists with assistance from Iran. But
the American people. So weakened by the loss of New York, Americans would feel vulnerable in every city in the nation. "Who is going to be next?" would be the question on
everyone's mind. For this there would be no effective answer. That the president might think politically at this instant seems almost petty, yet every
president is by nature a politician. The political party in power at the time of the attack would be destroyed unless the president
retaliated with a nuclear strike against somebody. The American people would feel a price had to be paid while the country was still capable of exacting
revenge.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Bad – Terrorism Ext.
Decrease in hegemony would reduce the likelihood of terrorism

Ivan Eland 98 Director of Defense Policy Studies @ the Cato Institute
(DOES U.S. INTERVENTION OVERSEAS BREED TERRORISM? The Historical Record, Cato Briefing, No. 50)
All of the examples of terrorist attacks on the United States can be explained as retaliation for U.S. intervention abroad. Empirically
validating the connection between an interventionist foreign policy and such attacks is more critical than ever now that terrorists can
more readily obtain weapons of mass destruction and seem to be more willing to use them. The extensive number of incidents of
terrorism linked to U.S. foreign policy implies that the United States could substantially reduce the chance of catastrophic terrorist
attacks if it lowered its military profile overseas. 16 The United States needs to adopt a new policy that would use military force only
as a last resort in the defense of truly vital national interests. The Cold War has ended, yet the United States continues to use its
worldwide military dominance to intervene anywhere and everywhere in an effort to maintain its defense perimeter far forward. In a
changed strategic environment in which ostensibly weak terrorist groups might acquire weapons of mass destruction, such an extended
defense perimeter may actually increase the catastrophic threat to the American homeland. Even the U.S. Department of Defense
admits the problem: Indeed, a paradox of the new strategic environment is that American military superiority actually increases the
threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical attack against us by creating incentives for adversaries to challenge us asymmetrically.
These weapons may be used as tools of terrorism against the American people.
Presence and policy in the Middle East exacerbates terrorist resentment

(American Empire: A Debate, p. 94)
The Bush administration and the neoconservative imperialists believe that by democratizing the Middle East, the United States will
solve the problem of terrorism and bring stability to the region. There are three things wrong with this vision of American Empire in
the Middle East. First, democratization is not the magic bullet cure for terrorism. A policy of regime change—using U.S. overt
military power or covert capabilities to oust governments in the Middle East and install new regimes that will clamp down on radical
Islam—is misdirected and will not make the United States safer. Radical Islam is fueled by resentment against American primacy;
specifically, the U.S. military presence in the region. The expansion of that presence for the purpose of overthrowing regimes does not
make America more secure from terrorist attacks. On the contrary, it simply adds fuel to terrorist groups like al Queda. As Robert Pape
observes: Spreading democracy at the barrel of a gun in the Persian Gulf is not likely to lead to a lasting solution against suicide
terrorism. Just as al-Qaeda's suicide terrorism campaign began against American troops on the Arabian Peninsula and then escalated to
the United States, we should recognize that the longer that American forces remain in Iraq, the greater the threat of the next September
11 from groups who have not targeted us before. Even if our intentions are good, the United States cannot depend on democratic
governments in the region to dampen the risk of suicide terrorism so long as American forces are stationed there.'"

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Bad – Terrorism Ext.

Heg fuels terrorist anger – sparking attacks
9/11 was not a random act of violence visited upon the United States. The United States was the target of al Qaeda's terrorist strikes
because that group harbored specific political grievances against the United States. If we step back for a moment from our horror and revulsion at
the events of September 11, we can see that the attack was in keeping with the Clausewitzian paradigm of war: force was used against the United States by
its adversaries to advance their political objectives. As Michael Scheurer, who headed the CIA analytical team monitoring Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda,
put it, "In the context of ideas bin Laden shares with his brethren, the military actions of al Qaeda and its allies are acts of war, not
terrorism...meant to advance bin Laden's clear, focused, limited, and widely popular foreign policy goals...."50 Terrorism, Bruce Hoffman says, is "about power: the
pursuit of power, the acquisition of power, and use of power to achieve political change."" As Clausewitz himself observed, "war is not an act of senseless passion but is
controlled by its political object."" Terrorism really is a form of asymmetric warfare waged against the United States by groups that lack the
military wherewithal to slug it out with the United States toe-to-toe. 9/11 was a violent counterreaction to America's geopolitical—and
cultural—primacy. As Richard K. Betts presciently observed in a 1998 Foreign Affairs article, "It is hardly likely that Middle Eastern radicals would
be hatching schemes like the destruction of the World Trade Center if the United States had not been identified so long as the mainstay
of Israel, the shah of Iran, and conservative Arab regimes and the source of a cultural assault on Islam.'"53 U.S. primacy fuels terrorist
groups like al Qaeda and fans Islamic fundamentalism, which is a form of "blowback" against America's preponderance and its world
role." As long as the United States uses its global primacy to impose its imperial sway on regions like the Persian Gulf, it will be the target
of politically motivated terrorist groups like al Qaeda. After 9/11, many foreign policy analysts and pundits asked the question, "Why
do they hate us?" This question missed the key point, however. No doubt, there are Islamic fundamentalists who do "hate" the United
States for cultural, religious, and ideological reasons. And, for sure, notwithstanding American neoconservatives' obvious relish for
making it so, to some extent the War on Terrorism inescapably has overtones of a "clash of civilizations ." Still, this isn't—and should not be
allowed to become—a replay of the Crusades. As Scheuer says, " one of the greatest dangers for Americans in deciding how to confront the Islamist
threat lies in continuing to believe—at the urging of senior U.S. leaders—that Muslims hate and attack us for what we are and think, rather
than for what we do."" The United States may be greatly reviled in some quarters of the Islamic world, but were the United States not so intimately
involved in the affairs of the Middle East, it's hardly likely that this detestation would have manifested itself as violently as it did on
9/11. Experts on terrorism understand the political motives that drive the actions of groups like al Qaeda. In his important recent study of suicide terrorists, Robert A.
Pape found that what "nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern
democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland."56 Pape found that "even al Qaeda
fits this pattern: although Saudi Arabia is not under American military occupation per se, a principal objective of Osama bin Laden is the expulsion of American troops
from the Persian Gulf and the reduction of Washington's power in the region."57 This finding is seconded by Scheuer, who describes bin Laden's objectives as: "the end
of U.S. aid to Israel and the ultimate elimination of that state; the removal of U.S. and Western forces from the Arabian Peninsula; the removal of U.S. and Western
military forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Muslim lands; the end of U.S. support for oppression of Muslims by Russia, China, and India; the end of U.S.
protection for repressive, apostate Muslim regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, et cetera; and the conservation of the Muslim world's energy resources and
their sale at higher prices."58 Simply put, it is American primacy, and the policies that flow from it, that have made the United States a lightning
rod for Islamic anger.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Bad – China Shell [1/2]

Current US grand strategy makes Sino-American war inevitable
The Bush II administration has not entirely abandoned engagement with Beijing, but—more openly than the Bush I and Clinton
administrations—it has embraced containment of China as an alternative to engagement. Given the influence of neoconservative
foreign policy intellectuals on the administration’s grand strategy, this is unsurprising. After all, during the 1990s, leading
neoconservatives were part of the so-called Blue Team of anti-China hardliners in the foreign policy community.' Containment is a
strategy that emphasizes using the traditional hard power tools of statecraft to prevent China’s great power emergence and maintain
American primacy!' The heart of containment, however, lies in military power and alliance diplomacy. What, specifically, do
primacists mean when they call for China's containment? First, they want the United States to pledge explicitly to defend Taiwan from
Chinese attack and also to help Taiwan build up its own military capabilities. Primacists believe that the United States should not back
away from confronting China over Taiwan and, indeed, they would like the United States to provoke such a showdown. They also
want the United States to emulate its anti-Soviet Cold War strategy by assembling a powerful alliance of states that share a common
interest in curbing rising Chinese power. As part of such a strategy, the United States should tighten its security relationship with
Japan and invest it with an overtly anti-Chinese mission. Needless to say, primacists are determined that the United States maintain its
conventional and nuclear military superiority over China. Indeed, with respect to nuclear weapons, as Keir Lieber and Daryl Press
have pointed out in an important Foreign Affairs article, the United States currently has an overwhelming nuclear first-strike capability
against China, which will be augmented by the national ballistic missile defense system that the United States currently is deploying.
Even if Beijing switches its military modernization priorities from its current conventional defense buildup to the enhancement of its
strategic nuclear deterrent, it will take some time before China could offset the first-strike capability that the United States
possesses. Advocates of containment hope that the various measures encompassed by this strategy will halt China's rise and preserve
American primacy.73 However, as one leading proponent of containment argues, if these steps fail to stop China's great power
emergence, "the United States should consider harsher measures."" That is, before its current military advantage over China is
narrowed, the United States should launch a preventive war to forestall China's emergence as a peer competitor. Of course, in the
abstract, preventive war always has been an option in great powers' strategic playbooks—typically as a strategy that declining great
powers employ against rising challengers. However, it also is a strategy that also can appeal to a dominant power that still is on top of
its game and is determined to squelch potential challengers before they become actual threats. In fact, preventive war (along with
preemptive military strikes) is the grand strategic approach of the Bush II administration, as set out in its 2002 National Security
Strategy (and reaffirmed by the administration in its 2006 National Security Strategy), and in policy statements by senior
administration officials (including President George W. Bush himself). There is nothing in the logic of the administration's grand
strategy doctrines of preventive war and preemptive action that suggests that it is applicable only to terrorist groups like al Qaeda and
so-called rouge states (like Iran and North Korea). If anything, preventive strategies should be most appealing with respect to potential
rivals like China—those who could become peer competitors of the United States. Here, the pramacists' fixation on defending Taiwan
suggests that an American commitment to that island's defense is valued most because it could afford Washington a possible pretext to
take on China in a preventive war. To be sure, the United States should not ignore the potential strategic ramifications 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 by Beijing—that China's will be a "peaceful
rise" is just as fanciful as claims by American policy-makers that China has no need to build up its military capabilities 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 the United 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.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Bad – China Shell [2/2]

And, war with China causes extinction
Straits Times, 00
(6/25, “Regional Fallout: No one gains in war over Taiwan,” lexis)
THE high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-scale war between the US and China. If Washington were to conclude that
splitting China would better serve its national interests, then a full-scale war becomes unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would embroil other countries far
and near and -- horror of horrors -- raise the possibility of a nuclear war. Beijing has already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any
country providing bases and logistics support to any US forces attacking China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In the region,
this means South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east Asia will be set on fire. And the conflagration
may not end there as opportunistic powers elsewhere may try to overturn the existing world order. With the US distracted, Russia may
seek to redefine Europe's political landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly upset by the likes of Iraq. In
south Asia, hostilities between India and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase .
Will a full-scale Sino-US war lead to a nuclear war? According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army which fought against the Chinese in
the Korean War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to save the US from military defeat. In his book The Korean War, a personal
account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and its implications on future US foreign policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two
choices in Korea -- truce or a broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to resort to nuclear weaponry to defeat China long
before the latter acquired a similar capability, there is little hope of winning a war against China 50 years later, short of using nuclear weapons. The
US estimates that China possesses about 20 nuclear warheads that can destroy major American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for
the nuclear option. A Chinese military officer disclosed recently that Beijing was considering a review of its "non first use" principle regarding nuclear weapons.
Major-General Pan Zhangqiang, president of the military-funded Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for
Scholars in Washington that although the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures from the military to drop it. He said military leaders
considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked dismemberment as a result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that
should that come to pass, we would see the destruction of civilisation . There would be no victors in such a war. While the prospect of a nuclear
Armageddon over Taiwan might seem inconceivable, it cannot be ruled out entirely, for China puts sovereignty above everything else.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Bad – Proliferation

Primacy causes proliferation due to fears of US power
(American Empire: A Debate, p. 133)
Long before Saddam Hussein came down the pike, “regime change” has been a favored tool of American foreign policy. Here,
however, U.S. grand strategy tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it causes states that might not otherwise have done so
to become threats. That is, Wilsonianism causes the United States to be more, not less, insecure than it would be if its external
ambitions were modest. When, by asserting the universal applicability of its own ideology, the United States challenges the legitimacy
of other regimes – by labeling them as outposts of tyranny or members of an axis of evil – the effect is to increase those states’ sense
of isolation and vulnerability. With good reason, such states fear that their survival could be at risk. Iran is a good example. Given that
states – and regimes – are highly motivated to survive, it’s no surprise that others respond to American policy by adopting strategies
that give them a chance to do so – like acquiring WMD capabilities and supporting terrorism. One thing is for sure: because of its
Wilsonian foundations, the American Empire is a recipe for confrontation and antagonism with “others.”
And, proliferation causes extinction

Victor A. Utgoff 02 Deputy Director of Strategy, Forces, & Resources Division of Institute for Defense Analysis
(Survival, Summer, ProQuest)
In sum, widespread proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shoot-outs will have a
substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is
stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations
wearing nuclear ‘six-shooters’ on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we
will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations. This kind of world is in no nation’s interest.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Bad – Russia-China Alliance Shell

Predominance spurs a Russia-China military alliance that ends in nuclear extinction
Paul Craig Roberts 07 Senior Research Fellow @ the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, William E. Simon Chair in Political
Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies
(“US Hegemony Spawns Russian-Chinese Military Alliance,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts218.html)
This week the Russian and Chinese militaries are conducting a joint military exercise involving large numbers of troops and combat
vehicles. The former Soviet Republics of Tajikistan, Kyrgkyzstan, and Kazakstan are participating. Other countries appear ready to
join the military alliance. This new potent military alliance is a real world response to neoconservative delusions about US hegemony.
Neocons believe that the US is supreme in the world and can dictate its course. The neoconservative idiots have actually written
papers, read by Russians and Chinese, about why the US must use its military superiority to assert hegemony over Russia and
China. Cynics believe that the neocons are just shills, like Bush and Cheney, for the military-security complex and are paid to restart
the cold war for the sake of the profits of the armaments industry. But the fact is that the neocons actually believe their delusions about
American hegemony. Russia and China have now witnessed enough of the Bush administration’s unprovoked aggression in the world
to take neocon intentions seriously. As the US has proven that it cannot occupy the Iraqi city of Baghdad despite 5 years of efforts, it
most certainly cannot occupy Russia or China. That means the conflict toward which the neocons are driving will be a nuclear
conflict. In an attempt to gain the advantage in a nuclear conflict, the neocons are positioning US anti-ballistic missiles on Soviet
borders in Poland and the Czech Republic. This is an idiotic provocation as the Russians can eliminate anti-ballistic missiles with
cruise missiles. Neocons are people who desire war, but know nothing about it. Thus, the US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reagan
and Gorbachev ended the cold war. However, US administrations after Reagan’s have broken the agreements and understandings. The
US gratuitously brought NATO and anti-ballistic missiles to Russia’s borders. The Bush regime has initiated a propaganda war against
the Russian government of V. Putin. These are gratuitous acts of aggression. Both the Russian and Chinese governments are trying to
devote resources to their economic development, not to their militaries. Yet, both are being forced by America’s aggressive posture to
revamp their militaries. Americans need to understand what the neocon Bush regime cannot: a nuclear exchange between the US,
Russia, and China would establish the hegemony of the cockroach. In a mere 6.5 years the Bush regime has destroyed the world’s
good will toward the US. Today, America’s influence in the world is limited to its payments of tens of millions of dollars to bribed
heads of foreign governments, such as Egypt’s and Pakistan’s. The Bush regime even thinks that as it has bought and paid for
Musharraf, he will stand aside and permit Bush to make air strikes inside Pakistan. Is Bush blind to the danger that he will cause an
Islamic revolution within Pakistan that will depose the US puppet and present the Middle East with an Islamic state armed with
nuclear weapons? Considering the instabilities and dangers that abound, the aggressive posture of the Bush regime goes far beyond
recklessness. The Bush regime is the most irresponsibly aggressive regime the world has seen since Hitler’s.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Heg Bad – Korea Shell

Hegemony spurs Korean misunderstanding and war
America’s hegemonic strategy holds that in East Asia (and in Europe) the United States must (1) protect U.S. allies from “rogue
states” armed with nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction; (2) remain in Eurasia to prevent great power rivalries from
erupting into war by providing regional deterrence and reassurance; and (3) underscore the credibility of its commitments by fighting
in defense of its allies if deterrence fails. This is potentially a high-risk strategy. Its viability hinges on a key question: How credible
are American security guarantees in East Asia? America’s East Asian strategy is most immediately challenged by North Korea.
Although Pyongyang claims it has nuclear weapons, it is uncertain whether it actually does. If it does not presently have them,
however, it certainly is close to having some weapons in hand, and – unless something happens either diplomatically or militarily to
interrupt its weapons development program – its arsenal could grow considerably during the next few years. Moreover, Pyongyang
currently has ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads against targets in South Korea and Japan, and it could have
some intercontinental missile capability in a decade or so. The North Korean regime’s unpredictability, its nuclear ambitions, and the
military standoff along the 38th parallel between North Korean forces and U.S. and South Korean troops make the peninsula a volatile
place. Conflict is not inevitable, but neither is it unimaginable. If diplomacy fails to bring about a North Korean agreement to
dismantle its nuclear weapons, the United States may decide to strike preemptively in an attempt to destroy Pyongyang’s nuclear
facilities. It is impossible to know whether this would spark an all-out war on the peninsula. On the other hand, fearing it might be the
target of such strikes or a U.S. campaign to bring about regime change, North Korea might lash out irrationally in ways that confound
the predictions of deterrence theory. Given that the American homeland currently is not vulnerable to North Korean retaliation, the
U.S. deterrent umbrella should dissuade Pyongyang from using nuclear weapons to attack civilian or military targets in South Korea
or Japan. Whether North Korea actually would be deterred, though, is a huge unknown. Three things are known, however. First, if
North Korea has nuclear weapons, U.S. troops in South Korea, and possibly in Japan, are hostages. Second, even a nonnuclear conflict
on the peninsula would be costly to the United States (notwithstanding the fact that the United States ultimately would prevail on the
battlefield). Third, U.S. troops in South Korea act as a trip wire, which ensures that, if war does occur, the United States automatically
will be involved.
And, Korean conflict causes extinction

Pat Fungamwango 99
(Africa News, Third world war: Watch the Koreas, 10/25, lexis)
If there is one place today where the much-dreaded Third World War could easily erupt and probably reduce earth to a huge
smouldering cinder it is the Korean Peninsula in Far East Asia. Ever since the end of the savage three-year Korean war in the early 1950s, military tension
between the hardline communist north and the American backed South Korea has remained dangerously high. In fact the Koreas are technically
still at war. A foreign visitor to either Pyongyong in the North or Seoul in South Korea will quickly notice that the divided country is always on maximum alert for any eventuality. North Korea
or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has never forgiven the US for coming to the aid of South Korea during the Korean war. She still regards the US as an occupation force in
South Korea and wholly to blame for the non-reunification of the country. North Korean media constantly churns out a tirade of attacks on "imperialist" America and its "running dog" South
Korea. The DPRK is one of the most secretive countries in the world where a visitor is given the impression that the people's hatred for the US is absolute while the love for their government is
total. Whether this is really so, it is extremely difficult to conclude. In the DPRK, a visitor is never given a chance to speak to ordinary Koreans about the politics of their country. No visitor
moves around alone without government escort. The American government argues that its presence in South Korea was because of the constant danger of an invasion from the north. America
has vast economic interests in South Korea. She points out that the north has dug numerous tunnels along the demilitarised zone as part of the invasion plans. She also accuses the north of
violating South Korean territorial waters. Early this year, a small North Korean submarine was caught in South Korean waters after getting entangled in fishing nets. Both the Americans and
South Koreans claim the submarine was on a military spying mission. However, the intension of the alleged intrusion will probably never be known because the craft's crew were all found with
fatal gunshot wounds to their heads in what has been described as suicide pact to hide the truth of the mission. The US mistrust of the north's intentions is so deep that it is no secret that today
Washington has the largest concentration of soldiers and weaponry of all descriptions in south Korea than anywhere else in the World, apart from America itself. Some of the armada that was
deployed in the recent bombing of Iraq and in Operation Desert Storm against the same country following its invasion of Kuwait was from the fleet permanently stationed on the Korean
Peninsula. It is true too that at the moment the North/South Korean border is the most fortified in the world. The border line is littered with anti-tank and anti-personnel landmines, surface-to-
surface and surfaceto- air missiles and is constantly patrolled by warplanes from both sides. It is common knowledge that America also keeps an eye on any military movement or build-up in
The DPRK is said to have an estimated one million soldiers and a huge arsenal of various weapons. Although
the north through spy satellites.
the DPRK regards herself as a developing country, she can however be classified as a super-power in terms of military might. The
DPRK is capable of producing medium and long-range missiles. Last year, for example, she test-fired a medium range missile over Japan, an action that greatly
shook and alarmed the US, Japan and South Korea. The DPRK says the projectile was a satellite. There have also been fears that she was planning to test another
ballistic missile capable of reaching North America. Naturally, the world is anxious that military tension on the Korean Peninsula must
be defused to avoid an apocalypse on earth. It is therefore significant that the American government announced a few days ago that it was moving towards normalising
relations with North Korea.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Offshore Balancing Good – Conflict

Offshore balancing prevents conflict
An offshore balancing grand strategy would have four key objectives: (1) insulating the United States from possible future great
power wars in Eurasia; (2) avoiding the need for the United States to fight “wars of credibility” or unnecessary wars on behalf of
client states; (3) reducing the vulnerability of the American homeland to terrorism; (4) maximizing both America’s relative power
position in the international system and its freedom of action strategically. Unlike America’s current hegemonic grand strategy,
offshore balancing is a multipolar – not a unipolar – strategy, and therefore it would accommodate the rise of new great powers while
simultaneously shifting, or devolving, to Eurasia’s major powers the primary responsibility for their own defense. In this respect, not
only is offshore balancing a strategy of devolution but it also is a strategy of deflection. By drawing back from Eurasia, and refraining
from pushing others around, the United States gives them a lot less reason to push back. Rather than focusing their grand strategic
attention on the United States, they would pay more attention to their neighborhood rivals. As an offshore balancer, the United States
could maximize its relative power effortlessly by standing on the sidelines while other great powers enervate themselves in security
competitions with one another.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Offshore Balancing Good – Asia

Offshore balancing spurs Asian security buildup – preventing conflict
19-20)
American foreign policy in Asia, too, has been captured by Cold War alliances, although in this region the formal institutions are less
developed than the European NATO structure. The United States has already pulled out of its largest overseas bases, the facilities at
Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines, but has reinvigorated the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty and
reaffirmed the “tripwire” deployment in Korea. Indeed, one of the principal architects of the Clinton administration’s Asia strategy,
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., has suggested that the United States remain engaged in the Pacific Rim with the specific intent of slowly
developing formal institutions of regional integration. We argue, however, that this forward presence in Asia has lost its Cold War
security rationale, exposes American soldiers to risk, costs Americans money, and artificially reduces the defense burden on America’s
leading economic competitors, helping them compete against U.S. companies. As in Europe, the United States currently has about
100,000 military personnel stationed in Asia, all of whom should be brought home and demobilized. The United States should end its
commitments to Japan and South Korea, cease military cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),
withdraw from the Australia, New Zealand, United States Pact (ANZUS), and terminate the implicit guarantee to Taiwan, giving those
nations new incentives to take care of themselves. No Asian ally of the United States faces an overwhelming conventional threat. It
requires astounding assumptions about the relative fighting strength of North and South Korean soldiers to develop a military balance
requirement for U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula. South Korea may want to improve its defenses further to replace capabilities that
the United States is expected to supply – e.g., build a larger air force – but it is difficult to understand how a country with twice the
population and twenty times the economic power of its primary competitor, not to mention a substantial technological lead, cannot
find the resources to defend itself. Current U.S. strategy implicitly assumes that America must remain engaged because of the Asian
countries’ failure to balance against Chinese strength. But Japan and Taiwan, the two plausible targets for Chinese aggression, are
more than capable of defending themselves from conventional attack. Both enjoy the geographic advantage of being islands. The
surrounding oceans ensure a defense dominance that could only be overcome with enormous material or technological advantages.
East Asia has inherent deterrence effects – prevents wars

31-2)
The danger of spirals leading to war in East Asia is remote. Spirals happen when states, seeking security, frighten their neighbors. The
risk of spirals is great when offense is easier than defense, because any country’s attempt to achieve security will give it an offensive
capability against its neighbors. The neighbors’ attempts to eliminate the vulnerability give them fleeting offensive capabilities and
tempt them to launch preventive war. But Asia, as discussed earlier, is blessed with inherent defensive advantages. Japan and Taiwan
are islands, which makes them very difficult to invade. China has a long land border with Russia, but enjoys the protection of the East
China Sea, which stands between it and Japan. The expanse of Siberia gives Russia, its ever-trusted ally, strategic depth. South Korea
benefits from mountainous terrain which would channel an attacking force from the north. Offense is difficult in East Asia, so spirals
should not be acute. In fact, no other region in which great powers interact offers more defensive advantage than East Asia.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
Offshore Balancing Good – China

Offshore balancing solves China war
So what should the United States do about China? If the United States persists with its strategy of primacy, the odds of a Sino-
American conflict are high. Current American strategy commits the United States to maintaining the geopolitical status quo in East
Asia, a status quo that reflects American primacy. The United States' desire to preserve the status quo, however, clashes with the
ambitions of a rising China. As a rising great power, China has its own ideas about how East Asia's political and security order should
be organized. Unless U.S. and Chinese interests can be accommodated, the potential for future tension—or worse—exists. Moreover,
as I already have demonstrated, the very fact of American primacy is bound to produce a geopolitical backlash—with China in the
vanguard—in the form of counter-hegemonic balancing. Nevertheless, the United States cannot be completely indifferent to China's
rise. The key component of a new geopolitical approach by the United States would be the adoption of an offshore balancing strategy.
Under this approach, a regional East Asian power balance would become America's first line of defense against a rising China and
would prevent Beijing from dominating East Asia. The other major powers in Asia—Japan, Russia, India—have a much more
immediate interest in stopping a rising China in their midst than does the United States, and it is money in the bank that they will step
up to the plate and balance against a powerful, expansionist state in their own neighborhood. It is hardly surprising (indeed, it parallels
in many ways America's own emergence as a great power) that China—the largest and potentially most powerful state in Asia—is
seeking a more assertive political, military, and economic role in the region, and even challenging America's present dominance in
East Asia. This poses no direct threat to U.S. security, however. Doubtless, Japan, India, and Russia (and, perhaps, Korea) may be
worried about the implications of China's rapid ascendance, because a powerful China potentially would be a direct threat to their
security. This is precisely the point of offshore balancing: because China threatens its neighbors far more than it threatens the United
States, these neighbors—not the United States—should bear the responsibility of balancing against Chinese power.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Re-Intervention
Re-intervention is based on current grand strategy – offshore balancing solves
(The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present, p. 163)
The historical record does not support the claim that European and Asian wars invariably compel the United States to intervene. The
United States does not get “sucked into” Eurasian wars. Wars are not forces of nature that magnetically draw states into conflict
against their will. Policymakers have volition. They decide whether to go to war. The United States could have followed an offshore
balancing strategy and probably remained out of both world wars (and certainly out of World War I). However, although America’s
interests would have allowed it to remain safely on the sidelines, America’s ambitions – and its ideology – caused it to become
involved in these conflicts. In this sense, far from enhancing America’s security, the grand strategic internationalism to which those
ambitions have given rise has contributed to American insecurity.
Re-intervention theory isn’t true – there are compelling reasons to stay out of wars
45)
The last major criticism of American military restraint denies that restraint is possible. According to this argument, big wars suck in
powerful nations. Twice in this century the United States tried to stay out of great power war in Europe, and both times it was pulled
in. Trying to tie policymakers’ hands by weakening U.S. military capabilities will only put America’s eventual involvement on less
favorable military terms. The United States fielded small, unprepared armed forces in 1916, 1940, and 1950, but its weakness did not
prevent its entrance into two world wars and the Korean conflict. History suggests that withdrawing from alliances and cutting forces
will not keep the United States out of war; it will make these wars more likely and keep America ill prepared to fight. This argument,
however, relies on a selective view of history. Great power wars do not always suck in powerful countries. Neither the British nor the
French were dragged into the Russo-Japanese War. The British stayed out of the Franco-Prussian War, and both the British and the
French stayed out of the Austro-Prussian war. The United States is not doomed by the laws of nature to go overseas and fight. In fact,
the United States probably has more choice about the wars it fights than any other nation, because it does not share borders with other
great powers. Furthermore, it will be much easier to stay out of distant great power wars than it was in the past. First, the fact that no
country can possibly unite the industrial resources of Eurasia eliminates America’s traditional concern about the outcome of foreign
wars. Second, the potential costs of American intervention in an ongoing great power war have never been higher. Great power war
has always been extremely costly, but nuclear weapons raise the potential costs of intervention immeasurably. A new war between
Russia and Germany would be a tragedy, but the possibility of nuclear escalation would cool the enthusiasm of even the most
committed American interventionists. Critics say that the United States is unable to stay out of big wars, but a thought experiment may
shed a different light on this assertion. Would President Wilson have brought America into World War I if Germany had possessed a
large nuclear arsenal? Recall how hard it was to get America involved in World War II. The American people have a sense of the risks.
In sum, the United States is not inevitably drawn into foreign wars. If a future great power war erupts, there will be many powerful
reasons to stay out. Rather than accept today’s internationalist worldview as an unchangeable fact of life, Americans should reeducate
themselves to the new strategic reality. In the late 1940s, America’s leaders struggled to turn the American people away from their
isolationist predispositions and contain Soviet expansionism. Today the challenge is to demonstrate that the world is safe for restraint.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Transition Wars

Withdrawal causes formation of power balancing that check transition wars
Offshore balancing is a strategy of burden shifting, not burden sharing. As such, it would devolve to other states the costs and risks of
their defense. From the late 1940s to the present U.S. alliance commitments have turned geostrategic logic on its head, because these
commitments have imposed the greatest burdens-both economically and in terms of danger-on the alliance partner (the United States)
whose security is least at risk. In World War II's immediate aftermath, it made sense for the United States to allow Western Europe and
Japan to shelter temporarily under its strategic umbrella while they got back on their feet. Today, however, there is no inherent reason
why the United States should be compelled to bear the costs or run the risks of shielding other states from direct attack or protecting
their overseas interests from regional turmoil. Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea, for example, have the economic and
technological wherewithal to provide fully for their own security. However, by promising its allies that it will defend them, America's
current hegemonic grand strategy gives them strong incentives free ride on the back of U.S. security guarantees. An offshore
balancing strategy would shift strategic responsibilities to where they properly belong: from the United States to those allies whose
interests and security are most immediately implicated. By devolving full responsibility for their defense to U.S. allies, offshore
balancing would take advantage of the unique geostrategic advantages that allow the United States to benefit from multi polarity,
exercise a free hand strategically, and avoid being automatically engulfed in Eurasian conflicts because of its alliance commitments.
As an offshore balancer, the United States would reap security advantages from a reversion to multipolarity. The United States is far
removed from powerful rivals and shielded from them both by geography and its own hard power. Consequently, as an insular great
power, the United States is far less vulnerable to the effects of "instability" than are the major powers of Eurasia, and it could-and
should-insulate itself from possible future Eurasian great power wars. For the United States, the risk of conflict and the possible
exposure of the American homeland to attack, rather than arising from any direct threat to the United States itself, derive directly from
the overseas commitments mandated by hegemony's all-encompassing definition of U.S. interests. Of course, proponents of current
U.S. grand strategy will object that, by retracting its security umbrella, the United States will create Eurasian security vacuums that
will cause re-nationalization and a reversion to destabilizing multipolarity. Ironically, however, America's hegemonic grand strategy is
failing in this respect already, because re-nationalization is occurring gradually, even though the United States is acting as a regional
stabilizer. On its present grand strategic course the United States will end up with the worst of both worlds: notwithstanding the U.S.
military presence, Eurasia is becoming more multipolar and more volatile. This means that instead of increasing the chances of peace,
its alliances expose the United States to the rising probability of becoming entrapped in a future Eurasian war. Just as their West
European counterparts did during the cold war, America's major Eurasian allies understand the dilemmas of extended deterrence in a
nuclear world. In 1961, French president de Gaulle told President Kennedy that Europe could never believe that the United States
really would risk the destruction of New York in order to save Paris.35 Today, U.S. allies have similar-well-founded-doubts about
whether the United States would risk Seattle or Los Angeles to defend Tokyo or Taipei. America's Eurasian allies are starting to re-
nationalize because they understand that the credibility of U.S. security guarantees is eroding. Instead of foregoing military autonomy
(re-nationalizing) they have every reason to make sure they can defend themselves if they are abandoned by the United States. The
result is that security competitions of increasing intensity-like that between China and Japan-are taking place even though the U.S.
military presence in East Asia is supposed to prevent them from happening.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Layne
Layne is wrong – his analysis is based off flawed historical basis
Jack Snyder 06 Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and
Peace Studies
(The Crusade of Illusions, Foreign Affairs, July/August)
His account, however, is far too one-sided to convince, and Layne is wrong on many key issues. In his historical overview, he ignores
the fact that the U.S. decision to withdraw from active participation in balancing power in Eurasia in the 1930s was a disaster, and that
the U.S. victory in the Cold War came cheap compared to other historic contests for hegemony. Moreover, Stalin would never have
accepted a deal to set up a truly independent Germany, because he rightly feared a rerun of World War II. And NATO was created
because the Europeans pushed for it; if anyone was ambivalent about it, it was the U.S. Congress, which was reluctant to fund ongoing
troop deployments abroad. More generally, Layne is right to worry that U.S. dominance may provoke resistance. But he overlooks the
critical fact that during the Cold War, most states balanced against the weaker but more threatening Soviet Union, rather than against
the stronger but more attractive United States. The result of such skewed historical judgments is that Layne unfairly dismisses the
possibility that a consensual international order based on prudent, liberal American leadership could emerge.

Heg
Sudarshan/Koneru
A2: Kagan
Kagan exaggerates the importance of the US and overlooks other factors
Andrew Bacevich 08 Professor of History and International Relations @ Boston University
(Present at the Re-Creation: A Neoconservative Moves On, Foreign Affairs, July/August)
Despite his newfound realism, Kagan balks at considering the possibility that the United States and Americans ought to change. He
makes no effort to assess whether the Bush administration's recent revival of an expansionist conception of statecraft serves U.S.
interests today. Has the doctrine of preventive war enhanced the well-being of the American people? Has the pursuit of President
Bush's "freedom agenda" improved the United States' standing in the world? Or have the policies devised in the wake of 9/11
squandered the United States' power and multiplied its problems? Although there is abundant empirical evidence bearing directly on
these questions, Kagan evinces almost no interest in such data. He has little time for contemplating the costs of Bush's aggressive
policies in the Middle East, even though, according to some estimates, the price of the Iraq war alone may reach into the trillions of
dollars. Key indicators of basic economic health -- such as the size of the national debt, the strength of the dollar, the extent of the
trade deficit, and the country's ever-increasing dependence on imported oil -- do not figure in his analysis, even though they all have
worsened under President Bush. For Kagan, the United States remains indispensable. It "is still the keystone to the arch," he writes.
"Remove it, and the arch collapses." Here, Kagan the recent convert to realism gives way to Kagan the unrepentant neoconservative,
who refuses to acknowledge that the United States' traditional foreign policy of expansionism has long been counterproductive. From
the end of the Revolutionary War through the 1950s, expansionism did enhance U.S. power and wealth, and it did make freedom
possible for ever larger numbers of Americans. But that correlation came undone in the 1960s. Recent efforts at expansion -- such as
President Bush's ill-fated attempt to pacify the Muslim world -- have served only to dissipate U.S. power while weakening the U.S.
economy and creating pretexts for the government to curtail individual freedoms at home. Expansionism no longer offers a way out --
and this fact, as much as and perhaps more so than the rise of China or the resurgence of Russia, defines the world that must be
reckoned with today. But Kagan, eager to move on, bury the Iraq war, and whitewash the entire post-9/11 era, which he and other
neoconservatives have so profoundly misunderstood, cannot or will not acknowledge this new reality.
Kagan oversimplifies IR theory and ignores real-world challenges

Andrew Bacevich 08 Professor of History and International Relations @ Boston University
(Present at the Re-Creation: A Neoconservative Moves On, Foreign Affairs, July/August)
Cribbing from the realist tradition, Kagan outlines the contours of the great-power competition he expects will define the twenty-first
century, with China, Europe, India, Japan, Russia, and, of course, the United States as key players. In the process, he engages in
considerable oversimplification and more than a little hype. To justify Japan's making the cut, for example, Kagan claims that Tokyo
today "displays great power ambitions" and even plays a "global military role." Yet Japan's military spending has actually declined in
recent years; the country's top national security priority is not power projection but ballistic missile defense. As a participant in global
military affairs, Japan lags well behind Canada. Kagan views a rising China and a resurgent Russia as potential problems: both are
authoritarian states whose ambitions could threaten international stability. In response, he calls for the formation of a "league of
democracies," led by the United States and including European states, that would hold "regular meetings and consultations among
democratic nations on the issues of the day." (Headline: "Mars and Venus Announce Plans to Marry!") That he now advocates creating
a talking society shows how far Kagan has traveled since the days when he was touting the benefits of the United States' global
hegemony. It is hard to see what this league would accomplish apart from providing sinecures for large numbers of second-tier
government officials and civil servants. In all likelihood, it would be a new NATO without the clout or the cohesion of the old. How
does violent Islamic radicalism figure in this vision of the twenty-first century? For Kagan, the threat turns out not to be so great after
all. Refreshingly devoid of inflammatory references to "Islamofascism" or World War IV, The Return of History does not foresee a new caliphate seizing control of the
Muslim world and attempting to impose sharia on the West. Kagan sees the Islamist cause as doomed to fail. He describes political Islam as a "hopeless dream," believing (correctly, in my
terrorism no longer ranks as a
view) that "in the struggle between traditionalism and modernity, tradition cannot win." Thus, for Kagan, mounting an all-out global assault against
top priority. Neither does the war in Iraq. In the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003, Kagan, writing in The Washington Post,
described Iraq as "a historical pivot" and events there as destined to "shape the course of Middle Eastern politics, and therefore world
politics, both now and for the remainder of this century." After five years of fighting, more than 4,000 U.S. deaths, several hundred
billion dollars frittered away, and some 140,000 U.S. troops still on the ground, he no longer seems to think so. The Return of History
barely mentions Iraq. For Kagan, at least, the longer the war drags on, the less important it becomes. In this, he is like a 1960s hawk
writing a book in 1968 who consigns the Vietnam War to a couple of sentences.

280 SS Hegemony US Grand Strategy

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

280 SS Hegemony US Grand Strategy

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Heg

Dartmouth Debate Institute – Serrano/Strange

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 1

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 2

Heg – Brink Now

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 3

Readiness – Brink Now

Readiness is on the brink – overstretch & tech

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 4

Heg Unsustainable – Multipolarity Now

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 5

Heg Unsustainable – Generic

Heg Unsustainable – Generic

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 7

Heg Unsustainable – Generic

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 8

Heg Unsustainable – Balancing

Heg will end – balancing and overstretch

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 9

Heg Unsustainable – Economic Overstretch

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 10

Heg Unsustainable – Dollar

Decline is inevitable – dollar is worthless

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 11

Heg Unsustainable – Dollar

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 12

A2: Conflate Trends & Status Quo [1/2]

Fakiolas & Fakiolas Continue

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 13

A2: Conflate Trends & Status Quo [2/2]

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 14

Heg Sustainable – Generic

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 15

Heg Sustainable – Generic

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 16

Heg Sustainable – Competitiveness

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 17

Heg Sustainable – Economy

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 18

Heg Sustainable – Economy

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 19

Heg Sustainable – Military

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 20

Heg Sustainable – Military

American military is vastly superior – it’s the key measure of power

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 21

Heg Sustainable – Air Power

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 22

Heg Sustainable – Naval Power

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 23

Heg Sustainable – Multilateralism

Multilateralism makes the US seem benign – prevents balancing

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 24

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 25

A2: Balancing – Generic

Balancing theory is inapplicable – assumes a rising hegemon

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 26

A2: Balancing – Generic

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 27

A2: Balancing – Generic

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 28

A2: Balancing – Generic

Balancing theory is bunk – US power position is unique

Trample the weak, hurdle the dead 29