1ac

Taiwan War
War is inevitable in Asia because of Taiwan arms sales – the aff is neither an
affirmation of Chinese sovereignty claims nor a denial of Taiwanese independence but
rather is a rejection of containment in the Strait
Paul Heer 19, National Intelligence Officer for East Asia in the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence from 2007 to 2015. He has since served as Robert E. Wilhelm Research Fellow at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies and as Adjunct Professor at
George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs., 1-8-2019, "Rethinking U.S.
Primacy in East Asia," National Interest, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/rethinking-us-
primacy-east-asia-40972?page=0%2C1
American policy in the Western Pacific has long been framed in terms of preventing the emergence of an exclusive, hostile hegemon that could threaten vital U.S. interests and deny American access there. The Trump
administration’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy respectively assert that “China seeks to displace the United States” in East Asia and thus achieve “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony.” Avoiding this possibility
has required Washington, also as a matter of policy, to maintain its own hegemony in the region (although we prefer to call it “primacy” or “preeminence”) as the best and only guarantee against such a danger. This mantra was

this policy mantra has two

central to the Obama administration’s “rebalance” in East Asia, and remains central to the Trump administration’s advocacy of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific.” But

fundamental problems: it mischaracterizes China’s strategic intentions in the region, and it is based on a
U.S. strategic objective that is probably no longer achievable. First, China is pursuing hegemony in East Asia,
but not an exclusive hostile hegemony . It is not trying to extrude the United States from the region or
deny American access there. The Chinese have long recognized the utility—and the benefits to China
itself—of U.S. engagement with the region, and they have indicated receptivity to peaceful coexistence
and overlapping spheres of influence with the United States there. Moreover, China is not trying to
impose its political or economic system on its neighbors, and it does not seek to obstruct commercial
freedom of navigation in the region (because no country is more dependent on freedom of the seas than China itself). In short, Beijing wants to extend its power
and influence within East Asia, but not as part of a “winner-take-all” contest. China does have unsettled and vexing sovereignty claims
over Taiwan, most of the islands and other features in the East and South China Seas, and their adjacent waters. Although Beijing has demonstrated a willingness to use force in defense or pursuit of these claims, it is not looking for
excuses to do so. Whether these disputes can be managed or resolved in a way that is mutually acceptable to the relevant parties and consistent with U.S. interests in the region is an open, long-term question. But that possibility
should not be ruled out on the basis of—or made more difficult by—false assumptions of irreconcilable interests. On the contrary, it should be pursued on the basis of a recognition that all the parties want to avoid conflict—and
that the sovereignty disputes in the region ultimately are not military problems requiring military solutions. And since Washington has never been opposed in principle to reunification between China and Taiwan as long as it is

Of course,
peaceful, and similarly takes no position on the ultimate sovereignty of the other disputed features, their long-term disposition need not be the litmus test of either U.S. or Chinese hegemony in the region.

China would prefer not to have forward-deployed U.S. military forces in the Western Pacific that could
be used against it, but Beijing has long tolerated and arguably could indefinitely tolerate an American
military presence in the region—unless that presence is clearly and exclusively aimed at coercing or
containing China. It is also true that Beijing disagrees with American principles of military freedom of navigation in the region; and this constitutes a significant challenge in waters where China claims
territorial jurisdiction in violation of the UN Commission on the Law of the Sea. But this should not be conflated with a Chinese desire or intention to exclusively “control” all the waters within the first island chain in the Western

Pacific.The Chinese almost certainly recognize that exclusive control or “domination” of the neighborhood is
not achievable at any reasonable cost, and that pursuing it would be counterproductive by inviting
pushback and challenges that would negate the objective. So what would Chinese “hegemony” in East
Asia mean or look like? Beijing probably thinks in terms of something much like American primacy in the
Western Hemisphere: a model in which China is generally recognized and acknowledged as the de facto central or
primary power in the region, but has little need or incentive for militarily adventurism because the
mutual benefits of economic interdependence prevail and the neighbors have no reason —and inherent disincentives—
to challenge China’s vital interests or security. And as a parallel to China’s economic and diplomatic engagement in Latin America, Beijing would neither exclude nor be hostile
to continued U.S. engagement in East Asia. A standard counterargument to this relatively benign scenario is that Beijing would

not be content with it for long because China’s strategic ambitions will expand as its capabilities grow.
This is a valid hypothesis, but it usually overlooks the greater possibility that China’s external ambitions
will expand not because its inherent capabilities have grown, but because Beijing sees the need to be
more assertive in response to external challenges to Chinese interests or security. Indeed, much of China’s
“assertiveness” within East Asia over the past decade—when Beijing probably would prefer to focus on domestic priorities— has been a
reaction to such perceived challenges. Accordingly, Beijing’s willingness to settle for a narrowly-
defined, peaceable version of regional preeminence will depend heavily on whether it perceives other
countries—especially the United States— as trying to deny China this option and instead obstruct Chinese
interests or security in the region. This leads to the second inherent problem with the mantra that the United States must maintain its primacy in the Western Pacific to prevent a hostile
rival hegemon: U.S. primacy in the region itself is not sustainable, and trying to sustain it will probably be

counterproductive. For all intents and purposes, American primacy in East Asia—depending on how it is defined—is
arguably already a thing of the past. Since about a decade ago, China has a larger share of East Asian regional trade
than the United States, and is now the biggest trading partner of most of its neighbors. If defined in
military terms, most net assessments suggest that the American advantage in power projection forces
within the region is eroding relative to Chinese capabilities; and it is not at all clear in the wake of
sequestration and competing budgetary priorities that the United States could or will devote the
resources necessary to arrest this trend. American primacy in East Asia has often been characterized in terms of the United States serving as the guarantor of regional security,
protecting the “global commons” and providing “public goods” there. The U.S. alliance network in the region certainly extends an umbrella of protection to those countries with which Washington has defense pacts; and its military

even U.S. allies do not perceive that China is being

freedom of navigation operations signal an intention to resist excessive Chinese maritime claims. But

deterred in the South and East China Seas. More broadly, it is not clear what other public goods the
United States is actually providing in the East Asian commons. For example, commercial shippers in the
Western Pacific do not presume or rely on the protection of the U.S. Navy—which doesn’t have the fleet to provide it. And
Washington’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership has undermined the idea of U.S. leadership
in the region on behalf of shared economic interests. Indeed, most East Asian countries—including U.S.
allies—appear increasingly uncertain about Washington’s attention to their interests and their security.
Questions and even doubts about the substance and sustainability of the American commitment to the
region have grown over the past decade, and most of the countries in the region—again, including U.S. allies—have
already been adjusting their foreign and security policies to hedge against the potential unreliability of
the United States. Indeed, such hedging and independent-mindedness by U.S. allies is itself contributing
to the erosion of U.S. influence in the region. On balance, it is hard to make the case that the United
States retains effective primacy in the Western Pacific when much of the region has doubts about
Washington’s ability and willingness to exercise it. So what can and should Washington do to address these new historical circumstances? It may be
possible to regain the confidence of U.S. allies and partners in East Asia, but restoring and retaining
American primacy there over the long term is probably no longer achievable, given the shifts in the regional balance of power and the
constraints on U.S. resources. It’s not 1945 anymore, or even 1991. The United States sought and maintained a preponderance of power during the Cold War, but this almost certainly is not permanently sustainable, either globally

Moreover,
or within East Asia. American primacy in the Western Pacific was a historical anomaly, and sooner or later the United States will have to get used to a regional role that is something less than that.

policies and strategies aimed at upholding U.S. primacy in East Asia are likely to be counterproductive
because such an approach, probably more than anything else, would reinforce Beijing’s belief that the
United States seeks to contain China by keeping it subordinate within its own region. This would
increase the chances of Beijing feeling compelled to adopt a more confrontational and aggressive
posture . Chinese pursuit of a more exclusive hostile hegemony could thus become a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Instead, the United States needs to recognize and acknowledge the emerging limits on its
power, influence and position in East Asia; and accordingly reassess both its definition of its interests in the region and the strategies by which it will pursue and defend those
interests. If U.S. primacy in the region is not materially sustainable, it becomes untenable to define it as a vital

interest that must be upheld. Indeed, over the long term Washington will have to confront the question of whether there is a version of Chinese primacy in East Asia which—being neither
exclusive nor hostile, and akin to U.S. primacy in the Western Hemisphere—would be compatible with American interests and thus acceptable to the United States. None of this means that Washington should withdraw its military
forces or commitments in East Asia, downgrade its diplomatic and economic engagement with the region, and surrender the Western Pacific to a Chinese sphere of influence. Quite the contrary. The United States needs to
redouble its commitments, and expand and accelerate its engagement, in order to reassure its friends and allies in East Asia and reaffirm its determination to sustain a sphere of influence and a decisive role there. The U.S. alliance
 But
network can and should remain central to this effort. It will still be key to balancing, leveraging, guarding and pushing back against China when Beijing overplays its hand in its own pursuit of regional power and influence.

Washington should not approach this competition on the basis of outdated assumptions—including the
belief that U.S. primacy in East Asia can and should be perpetually sustained (an obsolete world view), a
misunderstanding or mischaracterization of China’s regional ambitions, or a miscalculation of the United
States’ own power and leverage. Washington should accept that strategic competition is unavoidable
and absolute security is not possible. It should also recognize that even U.S. allies and partners in the
region are already operating within overlapping American and Chinese spheres of influence—and they
prefer this to being forced to choose between Washington and Beijing. The United States can and
should continue to exercise leadership in East Asia, but will need to share it with China . Washington
should seek to deescalate the current trend in the regional competition with Beijing—which is now
heading toward a destabilizing and futile game of “king of the hill”—and instead pursue opportunities to
engage Beijing toward establishing a long-term, stable balance of power in the region . This is a tall order that will challenge
the diplomatic and security management skills and finesse of both sides, and will almost certainly remain a work in progress for many years. But it will always be preferable to an arms race or a cold war in East Asia.

Absent accommodation, spirals escalate into military conflict.

Michael D. Swaine 19, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of
the most prominent American analysts in Chinese security studies., 2-21-2019, "The Deepening U.S.-
China Crisis: Origins and Solutions," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/02/21/deepening-u.s.-china-crisis-origins-and-solutions-pub-
78429

The ugly dynamic of growing suspicion and worst-case assumptions is increasing the likelihood of future
U.S.-China political or military crises in Asia, crises that could in turn eventually propel the two sides into a Cold War or worse. The
deepening suspicion and hostility in the relationship is occurring during, and (in part) as a result of, a
shifting balance of power in Asia within the First Island Chain. This negative turn also reflects a general failure to resolve
several contentious issues in the region, including the Korean Peninsula; Taiwan; maritime disputes; and military-related
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities. I believe that China’s continued growth in military and economic

power and influence in Asia, and the resulting relative decline in U.S. maritime predominance, will eventually
create an unstable rough parity between China and U.S./allied states within the First Island Chain along China’s maritime periphery (within
approximately 1,500 kilometers of the country’s coast). This could cause China to overestimate its leverage and ability to advance its

interests on contentious and provocative issues such as Taiwan and maritime sovereignty disputes. At the same time, it could also cause

the United States and Japan to overreact to such behavior, partly to disabuse China and others of the notion that
the United States is losing its dominant position. Without adequate communication and a clear sense of
each other’s red lines, and without reassuring understandings on limits and intentions, such
miscalculations could easily escalate into tests of relative resolve , with neither side willing to make accommodations to
reach a middle ground. Although Beijing and Washington could perhaps avoid letting such a crisis devolve into

actual military conflict, even a major nonviolent confrontation could severely, and perhaps irreparably,
damage U.S.-China relations well beyond anything seen thus far, producing untold shocks to the
global economy and both regional and global security . Under present conditions, the issue of Taiwan is particularly concerning.
Given the current and worsening U.S. trend toward a zero-sum strategic competition with Beijing in virtually all areas, it is quite possible that anti-China zealots in or
around the U.S. government could successfully argue that Washington should start regarding Taiwan as a strategic asset that it should deny China. These sentiments
are already found among defense analysts in the United States and Japan. Needless
to say, if such views became policy, the U.S.
One China policy would collapse, along with the original basis for normalized relations with Beijing. The
result could be a military conflict . I am certainly not predicting such an outcome. But I am less confident today than I was a few years ago that it
can be avoided. HOW TO SALVAGE CONSTRUCTIVE U.S.-CHINA TIES What should policymakers do about this troubling state of affairs? First, serious, influential
individuals in both countries (and not just experts on U.S.-China relations) need to speak out more forcefully. They need to call for an end to reckless rhetoric,
soothing propagandistic utterances about win-win outcomes, and mild, half measures for dealing with the serious sources of discontent and suspicion in the
relationship. For its part, in the near term, China needs to focus like a laser on dealing with the sources of Western businesses’ discontent and cyber espionage,
while indicating a clear willingness, through actions and not just words, to involve Western capitals and business interests in Chinese economic enterprises such as
the Belt and Road Initiative. Such actions, along with the efforts of U.S. state and local officials to strengthen close economic ties with China, could contribute
greatly to reestablishing the U.S. business community as a major pillar of the U.S.-China relationship. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress should hold hearings on the
future strategic balance in Asia and its implications for U.S. policy. This exercise should involve a full assessment of how medium- and long-term changes in the
military, economic, political/diplomatic, and soft-power resources that the United States, China, and other Asian states possess will likely affect regional stability,
especially in terms of changing levels of risk tolerance and regional threat perceptions. The point of this assessment would be to confirm and define more clearly the
power shift occurring in Asia and to determine the most feasible and effective policy options. In my view, this
should lead the two countries to
accept the need for a stable (and real) balance in Asia and a defusing of the most likely sources of
conflict through mutual accommodation , alongside genuine efforts to integrate the region economically. Such a mentality
should take the place of what currently appear to be U.S. efforts to deepen strategic competition
through a largely futile attempt to stay well ahead of China in the region while isolating Beijing
economically.

Ending arms sales is key---other options fail because China cares about Taiwan way
more than the US does.
Eric Gomez 15, an independent analyst and recent Master’s graduate of the Bush School of
Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He is working to develop expertise in regional
security issues and U.S. military strategy in East Asia, with a focus on China, 8-6-2015, "Deep
Accommodation: The Best Option for Preventing War in the Taiwan Strait," Center for International
Maritime Security, http://cimsec.org/deep-accommodation-best-option-preventing-war-taiwan-
strait/18128 *brackets for clarity*

History has shown that emerging great powers and established or declining great powers are likely to
fight major wars in order to determine the balance of power in the international system. There is considerable fear that the U.S.
and China are heading towards great power conflict. As Christopher Layne argues, there are “several important — and unsettling —

parallels between the Anglo-Germany relationship during the run-up to 1914 and the unfolding Sino-
American relationship.” The headline-grabbing dispute in the South China Sea offers an excellent example of one of the several flashpoints that could
spark a larger conflict between the U.S. and China. But the probability of great power conflict between the U.S. and China

can be reduced if the two states can find ways to better manage interactions in flashpoint areas. The
oldest flashpoint, and the area most important for Chinese domestic politics, is the Taiwan Strait. In 1972,
the Shanghai Communique stated that the so-called Taiwan question was the most important issue blocking the normalization of relations between the U.S. and
China. This question has yet to be solved, mostly because Taiwan has been able to deter attack through a strong indigenous defense capability backed up by
American commitment. The
status quo in the Taiwan Strait will be unsustainable as China continues to improve
its military capabilities and adopt more aggressive military strategies. If the U.S. wants to avert a war
with China in the Taiwan Strait, it must start looking for an alternative to the status quo. Taiwan’s strategy of
economic accommodation with China under the Ma Ying-jeou administration has brought about benefits. The U.S. should encourage Taiwan to deepen its military
and political accommodation with China. This would be a difficult pill for Taiwan to swallow, but it could offer the most sustainable deterrent to armed conflict in
the Taiwan Strait. For years, Taiwan’s de facto independence from China has relied on a qualitatively superior, defense-focused military that could prevent the
landing of a large Chinese force on the island. The
growing power of the Chinese military, especially its naval and missile
forces, has begun eroding this qualitative advantage. Indeed, some observers have already concluded
that “the days when [Taiwan] forces had a quantitative and qualitative advantage over [China] are over.”
Taiwan still possesses a formidable military and could inflict high costs on an attacking Chinese force, but ultimately American intervention would likely be necessary
to save Taiwan from a determined Chinese attack. Military intervention by the U.S. on the behalf of Taiwan would be met
with formidable Chinese resistance. China’s anti-access/area denial [A2/AD] strategy complicates the
U.S.’s ability to project power in the Taiwan Strait. China’s latest maritime strategy document, released in May of this year, states that
China’s navy will start shifting its focus further offshore to include open seas protection missions. Such a shift implies an aspirational capability to keep intervening
American forces away from Taiwan. American political leaders have not given up on Taiwan, and the 2015 U.S. National Military Strategy places a premium on
reassuring allies of America’s commitments. However, the fact that China’s improving military capabilities will make an American military intervention on behalf of
The best option for preventing a war in the Taiwan Strait is deepening
Taiwan more and more costly must not be ignored.

the strategy of accommodation that Beijing and Taipei have already started. According to Baohui Zhang,
accommodation “relies on expanding common interests, institutionalizing dialogues, promoting security
confidence-building and offering assurances to establish mutual trust.” The Ma Ying-jeou administration in Taiwan has tried
to use accommodation as a way to lock in the status quo and avoid conflict, but their efforts have been met with more and more popular backlash in Taiwan.
China’s military strategy document does acknowledge that “cross-Taiwan Straits relations have sustained a sound momentum of peaceful development, but the
root cause of instability has not yet been removed.” If Taiwan is serious about accommodation as a means of deterring
military conflict, then it should cease purchasing military equipment from the U.S. Stopping the arms purchases would
send a clear message to Beijing that Taiwan is interested in deeper accommodation. A halt in arms sales would also benefit U.S.-

Chinese relations by removing a “ major stumbling block for developing bilateral military-to-military
ties .” This is certainly a very controversial proposal, and would likely be very difficult to sell to the Taiwanese people, but as I’ve already explained the status quo
is becoming more and more untenable. There are two important things to keep in mind about this proposal which mitigate fears that this is some kind of
appeasement to China. First, halting
U.S. arms sales does not mean that Taiwan’s self-defense forces would cease
to exist. China may be gaining ground on Taiwan militarily, but the pain that Taiwan could inflict on an
attacking force is still high. China may be able to defeat Taiwan in a conflict, but the losses its military
would take to seize the island would significantly hamper its ability to use its military while it recovers
from attacking Taiwan. Second, there is an easily identifiable off-ramp that can be used by Taiwan if the policy is

not successful. Stopping arms purchases is meant to be a way of testing the water. If the Chinese
respond positively to the decision by offering greater military cooperation with Taiwan or some form of political
concessions then Beijing signals its commitment to the accommodation process. On the other hand, if the
Chinese refuse to follow through and meet Taiwan halfway then Beijing signals that it is not actually
committed to accommodation. Taiwan would then resume purchasing American weapons with the knowledge that it must find some other way to
prevent conflict. Accommodation by giving up American arms sales is a tough pill for Taiwan to swallow, but it

simply does not have many other viable alternatives to preventing conflict . Taiwan could pursue acquiring nuclear
weapons, but this would be met by American opposition and would likely trigger a pre-emptive attack by China if the weapons program were discovered.
Taiwan could try to avert conflict by increasing military spending to forestall, but this would be difficult
to sustain so long as China’s economy and military spending is also growing. Analysts at CSBA have argued for deterrence
through protraction, which advocates employing asymmetric guerrilla-style tactics to prevent China from achieving air and sea dominance. This has the highest
likelihood of success of the three alternatives mentioned in this paragraph, but it still relies on intervention by outside powers to ultimately save the day.
Taiwan’s military deterrent will not be able to prevent a Chinese attempt to change the status quo by
force for much longer. Any conflict in the Taiwan Strait would likely involve a commitment of U.S. forces
and could lead to a major war between the U.S. and China . Accommodation could be the best worst
option that Taiwan, and the U.S., has for preventing a war with China. Announcing an end to American
weapons purchases could bring Taiwan progress on negotiations with China if successful while still
providing off-ramps that Taiwan could take if unsuccessful. I admit, the idea of accommodation does have its flaws, and more work
needs to be done to flesh out this idea. I hope that this idea of deep accommodation will add to the discussion about the management of the Taiwan Strait issue.
The status quo won’t last forever, and a vigorous debate will be needed to arrive at the best possible solution.
Recent arms sales are a red line – they inflame Chinese nationalism while cementing
containment
John Lee 19, Hudson Institute senior fellow, 4-3-2019, “Why a US Sale of Fighter Jets to Taiwan
Matters,” Diplomat, https://thediplomat.com/2019/04/why-a-us-sale-of-fighter-jets-to-taiwan-matters/

In late March, Bloomberg reported that U.S. President Donald Trump’s advisers had encouraged Taiwan
to submit a formal request to buy up to 60 advanced F-16V fighter planes. Any sale must still be approved by Congress and would
be the first major aircraft purchase from the United States by Taiwan since 1992. During her visit to Hawaii last week, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen confirmed that Taiwan had requested a
purchase of new fighter jets from the United States. Days later, two Chinese fighter planes crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait that divides China and Taiwan – the first time this has

Even if the F-16V sale goes ahead, Taiwan’s new planes will not alter the military balance
occurred for 20 years.

between China and Taiwan, nor dissuade the mainland from further provocations such as the median line flyover. That is not Beijing’s primary concern, however. The
most important calculation China must make is not the relative capabilities of the Taiwanese armed forces but how the United States will respond in the event of a crisis or conflict in the
Taiwan Strait. Every clue with respect to uncovering U.S. intention is vital because U.S. intervention could tip the military balance against China in any such conflict. In any event, it guarantees
the end of any “acceptable cost” outcome in the event of conflict for China. Under the United States’ 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, any attempt to forcibly determine Taiwan’s future is
considered “a threat to peace and security of the Western Pacific and of grave concern to the United States.” To prevent that, Washington is obligated to sell “arms of a defensive character” to

Since the Bill Clinton era, administrations have

Taipei to allow the latter to defend itself and dissuade China from launching any military action.

denied Taiwan’s request to purchase new fighter planes on the basis that the grey line from “defense”
to “offense” might be crossed. Speaking from Hawaii, Tsai let the cat out of the bag when she said the purchase of advanced fourth generation fighters would “greatly
enhance our land and air capabilities, strengthen military moral and show to the world the U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s defense.” It is the last line which sends shivers down the spine of
mainland leaders. Since the Taiwan Relations Act came into force, the United States has deliberately embarked on a policy of “strategic ambiguity” with respect to its military commitments to

Under the Barack Obama

Taiwan in the event the latter is attacked. Whether the United States intervenes is a matter of political judgment and strategic assessment.

administration, the decision to only offer Taipei upgrades to its aging F-16 A/B planes suggested to
Beijing that de-escalating tensions arising from differences over Taiwan was the predominant mindset.
In contrast, the Trump administration has shown unprecedented willingness to escalate tensions with China

over political, strategic, and economic differences. The speech by Vice President Mike Pence last October at the Hudson Institute and the 2017
National Security Strategy pulled no punches in identifying China as a comprehensive rival to the United States. If the sale of F-16V planes goes through,

then, it is evidence that the mindset in Washington with respect to Taiwan has also changed and is less
accepting of mainland sensibilities and demands. Such a sale would be an indication that preserving de
facto Taiwanese independence is once more considered critical to U.S. and allied strategy when it
comes to keeping the PLA confined to inside the so-called First Island Chain. That would be a
significant blow to Chinese PresidentXi Jinping’s plans . In a wide-ranging speech on Taiwan in January to mark the 40th anniversary of the “Message to
Compatriots in Taiwan” delivered to the 1978 National People’s Congress, Xi implied that “reunification” with Taiwan was a “historic task”

he wanted to achieve during his tenure. A U.S. sale of F-16Vs to Taiwan — and all it implies — makes
fulfillment of that task less likely . Finally, the strength of American support for Taiwan will influence how other nations respond to persistent Chinese attempts to
reduce international space within which Taiwan can act as a de facto sovereign entity. The most important regional relationship for Taiwan is with Japan, which has emerged under Shinzo Abe
as the political, strategic, and economic leader among democratic Asian nations. On issues such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Tokyo has shown initiative when Washington has been found
wanting. The Japanese leader has emerged as one of the few regional countries to have established a strong personal relationship with Taiwan’s Tsai and is widely seen as the most pro-Taiwan
leaders amongst U.S. allies in the region. Even then, Abe’s room to move is dependent on the extent to which the United States is willing to defend Taipei’s desire to behave as a de facto
sovereign entity. If it is confirmed that Washington is moving to a more robust approach with respect to cross-strait relations, Japan, Australia and others will follow. Xi is already under internal
pressure from the global pushback against his flagship policies such as the Belt and Road Initiative and “Made in China 2025.” China has lost goodwill with neighboring states over its actions in
the East and South China Seas and along the disputed border with India. It is in the middle of an economic war with the United States while the European Union and Japan are openly criticizing

China for violations of economic rules and norms, including the systematic theft of intellectual property by Chinese state-owned firms and “national champions.” Xi took a great
risk in abandoning the rhetoric and diplomacy of China’s “peaceful rise,” which was promulgated by his predecessor Hu Jintao.
Previously admired for his iron determination to achieve China’s great “rejuvenation,” Xi is now being criticized domestically for overreach and

miscalculation. It is speculated that the legitimacy of the Communist Party would not survive the “loss”
of Taiwan. If the United States goes ahead with the sale of F-16Vs to Taiwan, then the pressure on a
president who has embarked on an unprecedented “anti-corruption campaign” to silence political enemies and doubters will be immense.
Crisis over Taiwan draws in the US
Charles Glaser 11, GWU political science professor, “Will China's Rise Lead to War?” Foreign Affairs,
March/April, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2011-03-01/will-chinas-rise-lead-war)

THE PROSPECTS for avoiding intense military competition and war may be good, but growth in China's power may nevertheless
require some changes in U.S. foreign policy that Washington will find disagreeable--particularly regarding Taiwan.
Although it lost control of Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War more than six decades ago, China still considers Taiwan to be part
of its homeland, and unification remains a key political goal for Beijing. China has made clear that it will
use force if Taiwan declares independence , and much of China's conventional military buildup has been dedicated to
increasing its ability to coerce Taiwan and reducing the United States' ability to intervene. Because China places such high value
on Taiwan and because the United States and China--whatever they might formally agree to--have such
different attitudes regarding the legitimacy of the status quo, the issue poses special dangers and
challenges for the U.S.-Chinese relationship, placing it in a different category than Japan or South
Korea. A crisis over Taiwan could fairly easily escalate to nuclear war, because each step along the way
might well seem rational to the actors involved. Current U.S. policy is designed to reduce the probability that Taiwan will
declare independence and to make clear that the United States will not come to Taiwan's aid if it does. Nevertheless, the United States
would find itself under pressure to protect Taiwan against any sort of attack, no matter how it
originated . Given the different interests and perceptions of the various parties and the limited control
Washington has over Taipei's behavior, a crisis could unfold in which the United States found itself
following events rather than leading them. Such dangers have been around for decades, but ongoing improvements
in China's military capabilities may make Beijing more willing to escalate a Taiwan crisis. In addition to
its improved conventional capabilities, China is modernizing its nuclear forces to increase their ability to
survive and retaliate following a large-scale U.S. attack. Standard deterrence theory holds that
Washington's current ability to destroy most or all of China's nuclear force enhances its bargaining
position. China's nuclear modernization might remove that check on Chinese action, leading Beijing to
behave more boldly in future crises than it has in past ones. A U.S. attempt to preserve its ability to
defend Taiwan, meanwhile, could fuel a conventional and nuclear arms race . Enhancements to U.S. offensive targeting
capabilities and strategic ballistic missile defenses might be interpreted by China as a signal of malign U.S. motives, leading to further Chinese
military efforts and a general poisoning of U.S.-Chinese relations.

That war goes nuclear because Chinese nuclear and conventional forces are
intermingled
Talmadge 18 [Caitlin, Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of
Foreign Service at Georgetown University, “Beijing’s Nuclear Option: Why a U.S.-China War Could Spiral
Out of Control,” accessible online at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-10-
15/beijings-nuclear-option, published Nov/Dec 2018]

As China’s power has grown in recent years, so, too, has the risk of war with the United States. Under President Xi Jinping, China
has increased its political and economic pressure on Taiwan and built military installations on coral reefs in the South China Sea, fueling Washington’s
fears that Chinese expansionism will threaten U.S. allies and influence in the region. U.S. destroyers have
transited the Taiwan Strait, to loud protests from Beijing. American policymakers have wondered aloud whether they should send an aircraft carrier through the
 Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump has brought long-simmering
strait as well. Chinese fighter jets have intercepted U.S. aircraft in the skies above the South China Sea.

economic disputes to a rolling boil . A war between the two countries remains unlikely, but the prospect of a military confrontation—
resulting, for example, from a Chinese campaign against Taiwan —no longer seems as implausible as it once did. And the odds
of such a confrontation going nuclear are higher than most policymakers and analysts think. Members of China’s strategic community tend to dismiss such
concerns. Likewise, U.S. studies of a potential war with China often exclude nuclear weapons from the analysis entirely, treating them as basically irrelevant to the course of a conflict. Asked about the issue in 2015, Dennis Blair, the

If deployed against
former commander of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, estimated the likelihood of a U.S.-Chinese nuclear crisis as “somewhere between nil and zero.” This assurance is misguided.

China, the Pentagon’s preferred style of conventional warfare would be a potential recipe for nuclear escalation . Since the end of the Cold War, the
United States’ signature approach to war has been simple: punch deep into enemy territory in order to rapidly knock out the opponent’s key military assets at minimal cost. But the Pentagon developed this formula in wars against

China, by contrast, not only has nuclear weapons; it has also intermingled them with its
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia, none of which was a nuclear power.

conventional military forces, making it difficult to attack one without attacking the other. This means that a major
U.S. military campaign targeting China’s conventional forces would likely also threaten its nuclear arsenal. Faced

with such a threat, Chinese leaders could decide to use their nuclear weapons while they were still able to. As U.S. and Chinese leaders
navigate a relationship fraught with mutual suspicion , they must come to grips with the fact that a conventional war could skid
into a nuclear confrontation . Although this risk is not high in absolute terms, its consequences for the region and the world would be devastating. As
long as the United States and China continue to pursue their current grand strategies, the risk is likely to endure. This
means that leaders on both sides should dispense with the illusion that they can easily fight a limited war. They should focus instead on managing or resolving the political, economic, and military tensions that might lead to a
conflict in the first place. A NEW KIND OF THREAT There are some reasons for optimism. For one, China has long stood out for its nonaggressive nuclear doctrine. After its first nuclear test, in 1964, China largely avoided the Cold
War arms race, building a much smaller and simpler nuclear arsenal than its resources would have allowed. Chinese leaders have consistently characterized nuclear weapons as useful only for deterring nuclear aggression and
coercion. Historically, this narrow purpose required only a handful of nuclear weapons that could ensure Chinese retaliation in the event of an attack. To this day, China maintains a “no first use” pledge, promising that it will never
be the first to use nuclear weapons. The prospect of a nuclear conflict can also seem like a relic of the Cold War. Back then, the United States and its allies lived in fear of a Warsaw Pact offensive rapidly overrunning Europe. NATO
stood ready to use nuclear weapons first to stalemate such an attack. Both Washington and Moscow also consistently worried that their nuclear forces could be taken out in a bolt-from-the-blue nuclear strike by the other side.
This mutual fear increased the risk that one superpower might rush to launch in the erroneous belief that it was already under attack. Initially, the danger of unauthorized strikes also loomed large. In the 1950s, lax safety
procedures for U.S. nuclear weapons stationed on NATO soil, as well as minimal civilian oversight of U.S. military commanders, raised a serious risk that nuclear escalation could have occurred without explicit orders from the U.S.
president. The good news is that these Cold War worries have little bearing on U.S.-Chinese relations today. Neither country could rapidly overrun the other’s territory in a conventional war. Neither seems worried about a nuclear
bolt from the blue. And civilian political control of nuclear weapons is relatively strong in both countries. What remains, in theory, is the comforting logic of mutual deterrence: in a war between two nuclear powers, neither side

will launch a nuclear strike for fear that its enemy will respond in kind. The bad news is that one other trigger remains: a conventional war that threatens
China’s nuclear arsenal. Conventional forces can threaten nuclear forces in ways that generate
pressures to escalate—especially when ever more capable U.S. conventional forces face adversaries with relatively small and fragile
nuclear arsenals, such as China. If U.S. operations endangered or damaged China’s nuclear forces, Chinese leaders

might come to think that Washington had aims beyond winning the conventional war—that it might be
seeking to disable or destroy China’s nuclear arsenal outright, perhaps as a prelude to regime change. In the fog of war, Beijing might reluctantly
conclude that limited nuclear escalation —an initial strike small enough that it could avoid full-scale U.S. retaliation—was a viable option to defend itself. STRAIT
SHOOTERS The most worrisome flash point for a U.S.-Chinese war is Taiwan . Beijing’s long-term objective of reunifying the island
with mainland China is clearly in conflict with Washington’s longstanding desire to maintain the status quo in the
strait. It is not difficult to imagine how this might lead to war . For example, China could decide that the political or military window for
regaining control over the island was closing and launch an attack , using air and naval forces to blockade Taiwanese
harbors or bombard the island. Although U.S. law does not require Washington to intervene in such a scenario, the Taiwan Relations Act states that the United States will “consider any effort to
determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” Were

Washington to intervene on Taipei’s behalf, the world’s sole superpower and its rising competitor would
find themselves in the first great-power war of the twenty-first century. In the course of such a war, U.S. conventional
military operations would likely threaten , disable, or outright eliminate some Chinese nuclear capabilities—whether doing so was Washington’s
stated objective or not. In fact, if the United States engaged in the style of warfare it has practiced over the last 30 years, this outcome would be all but guaranteed . Consider

submarine warfare. China could use its conventionally armed attack submarines to blockade Taiwanese harbors or bomb the island, or to

attack U.S. and allied forces in the region. If that happened, the U.S. Navy would almost certainly undertake an
antisubmarine campaign , which would likely threaten China’s “boomers,” the four nuclear-armed ballistic missile
submarines that form its naval nuclear deterrent. China’s conventionally armed and nuclear-armed submarines share the same shore-based
communications system; a U.S. attack on these transmitters would thus not only disrupt the activities of China’s attack submarine force but also cut off its
boomers from contact with Beijing, leaving Chinese leaders unsure of the fate of their naval nuclear force. In addition,
nuclear ballistic missile submarines depend on attack submarines for protection, just as lumbering bomber aircraft rely on nimble fighter jets. If the United States started sinking Chinese attack submarines, it would be sinking the
very force that protects China’s ballistic missile submarines, leaving the latter dramatically more vulnerable. Even more dangerous, U.S. forces hunting Chinese attack submarines could
inadvertently sink a Chinese boomer instead. After all, at least some Chinese attack submarines might be escorting ballistic missile submarines, especially in wartime, when China might
flush its boomers from their ports and try to send them within range of the continental United States. Since correctly identifying targets remains one of the trickiest challenges of undersea warfare, a U.S. submarine crew might
come within shooting range of a Chinese submarine without being sure of its type, especially in a crowded, noisy environment like the Taiwan Strait. Platitudes about caution are easy in peacetime. In wartime, when Chinese attack

submarines might already have launched deadly strikes, the U.S. crew might decide to shoot first and ask questions later. Adding to China’s sense of vulnerability , the
small size of its nuclear-armed submarine force means that just two such incidents would eliminate half of
its sea-based deterrent. Meanwhile, any Chinese boomers that escaped this fate would likely be cut off from
communication with onshore commanders, left without an escort force, and unable to return to destroyed ports. If that happened, China would essentially have no
naval nuclear deterrent. The situation is similar onshore, where any U.S. military campaign would have to contend with China’s growing land-based conventional ballistic missile force. Much of this force
is within range of Taiwan, ready to launch ballistic missiles against the island or at any allies coming to its aid. Once again, U.S. victory would hinge on the ability to degrade this conventional ballistic missile force. And once

again, it would be virtually impossible to do so while leaving China’s nuclear ballistic missile force unscathed.

Chinese conventional and nuclear ballistic missiles are often attached to the same base headquarters, meaning that
they likely share transportation and supply networks, patrol routes, and other supporting infrastructure . It is also
possible that they share some command-and-control networks, or that the United States would be unable to distinguish between the conventional and nuclear networks even if they were physically separate. To add to the
challenge, some of China’s ballistic missiles can carry either a conventional or a nuclear warhead, and the two versions are virtually indistinguishable to U.S. aerial surveillance. In a war, targeting the conventional variants would

sending manned aircraft to attack Chinese missile launch sites and bases
likely mean destroying some nuclear ones in the process. Furthermore,

would require at least partial control of the airspace over China, which in turn would require weakening Chinese
air defenses. But degrading China’s coastal air defense network in order to fight a conventional war would also leave much of its
nuclear force without protection. Once China was under attack, its leaders might come to fear that even intercontinental ballistic missiles located deep in the country’s interior were
vulnerable. For years, observers have pointed to the U.S. military’s failed attempts to locate and destroy Iraqi Scud missiles during the 1990–91 Gulf War as evidence that mobile missiles are virtually impervious to attack.

Chinese intercontinental
Therefore, the thinking goes, China could retain a nuclear deterrent no matter what harm U.S. forces inflicted on its coastal areas. Yet recent research suggests otherwise.

ballistic missiles are larger and less mobile than the Iraqi Scuds were, and they are harder to move without detection. The United States is also likely
to have been tracking them much more closely in peacetime. As a result, China is unlikely to view a failed Scud hunt in Iraq nearly 30 years ago as reassurance that its residual nuclear force is safe
today, especially during an ongoing, high-intensity conventional war. China’s vehement criticism of a U.S. regional missile defense system designed to guard against a potential North Korean attack already reflects these latent fears.
Beijing’s worry is that this system could help Washington block the handful of missiles China might launch in the aftermath of a U.S. attack on its arsenal. That sort of campaign might seem much more plausible in Beijing’s eyes if a
conventional war had already begun to seriously undermine other parts of China’s nuclear deterrent. It does not help that China’s real-time awareness of the state of its forces would probably be limited, since blinding the

the favored U.S. strategy to ensure a conventional victory would likely

adversary is a standard part of the U.S. military playbook. Put simply,

endanger much of China’s nuclear arsenal in the process, at sea and on land. Whether the United States actually intended to
target all of China’s nuclear weapons would be incidental . All that would matter is that Chinese leaders would
consider them threatened . LESSONS FROM THE PAST At that point, the question becomes, How will China react? Will it practice restraint and uphold the “no first use” pledge once its nuclear forces
appear to be under attack? Or will it use those weapons while it still can, gambling that limited escalation will either halt the U.S. campaign or intimidate Washington into backing down? Chinese writings and statements remain
deliberately ambiguous on this point. It is unclear which exact set of capabilities China considers part of its core nuclear deterrent and which it considers less crucial. For example, if China already recognizes that its sea-based

wartime
nuclear deterrent is relatively small and weak, then losing some of its ballistic missile submarines in a war might not prompt any radical discontinuity in its calculus. The danger lies in

developments that could shift China’s assumptions about U.S. intentions. If Beijing interprets the erosion of its
sea- and land-based nuclear forces as a deliberate effort to destroy its nuclear deterrent, or perhaps even as a prelude to a nuclear attack, it might see limited

nuclear escalation as a way to force an end to the conflict. For example, China could use nuclear weapons to
instantaneously destroy the U.S. air bases that posed the biggest threat to its arsenal. It could also launch a

nuclear strike with no direct military purpose—on an unpopulated area or at sea—as a way to signal that the United States had
crossed a redline. If such escalation appears far-fetched, China’s history suggests otherwise. In 1969,
similar dynamics brought China to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In early March of that year, Chinese troops
ambushed Soviet guards amid rising tensions over a disputed border area. Less than two weeks later, the two countries were fighting an undeclared border war with heavy artillery and aircraft. The conflict

quickly escalated beyond what Chinese leaders had expected, and before the end of March, Moscow was
making thinly veiled nuclear threats to pressure China to back down. Chinese leaders initially dismissed these warnings, only to radically upgrade their threat assessment once they
learned that the Soviets had privately discussed nuclear attack plans with other countries. Moscow never intended to follow through on its nuclear threat, archives would later reveal, but Chinese leaders believed otherwise. On
three separate occasions, they were convinced that a Soviet nuclear attack was imminent. Once, when Moscow sent representatives to talks in Beijing, China suspected that the plane transporting the delegation was in fact carrying

nuclear weapons. Increasingly fearful, China test-fired a thermonuclear weapon in the Lop Nur desert and put its rudimentary
nuclear forces on alert—a dangerous step in itself, as it increased the risk of an unauthorized or accidental launch. Only after numerous preparations for Soviet nuclear attacks that never came did Beijing
finally agree to negotiations. China is a different country today than it was in the time of Mao Zedong, but the 1969 conflict offers important lessons. China started

a war in which it believed nuclear weapons would be irrelevant , even though the Soviet arsenal was several orders of magnitude larger than China’s, just
 Once the conventional war did not go as planned, the Chinese reversed their
as the U.S. arsenal dwarfs China’s today.

assessment of the possibility of a nuclear attack to a degree bordering on paranoia . Most worrying, China
signaled that it was actually considering using its nuclear weapons, even though it had to expect devastating
retaliation . Ambiguous wartime information and worst-case thinking led it to take nuclear risks it would have considered unthinkable only months earlier. This pattern could unfold again today.

Reducing arms sales signals US threat reduction and reverses perceptions of

containment.
Bruce Gilley 10, PhD from Princeton, "Not So Dire Straits," Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2010-01-01/not-so-dire-straits

SIDELINING UNCLE SAM THE UNITED STATES has played a crucial role in maintaining cross-strait peace and encouraging democracy in

Taiwan since 1949. Today, the U.S. role in this process is nearing its end. U.S. policy toward a Finlandized Taiwan will have to be
adjusted both strategically and diplomatically. Expanded official contacts with Taiwan will require consultations with Beijing; the United
States and its allies will have to refashion battle plans to exclude Taiwan; Washington will have to support the new approach to cross-strait
peace through its public diplomacy; and U.S. intelligence agencies will have to be more careful about scrutinizing technology transfers to the
island because the prc's intelligence gathering on Taiwan will inevitably expand. Most important , Washington will have to
significantly scale back its arms sales to Taipei. In 1982, the United States pledged to China that it would
reduce its arms sales to Taiwan - a promise that it has conspicuously broken ever since. Today, as then, there is a
golden opportunity to demilitarize the conflict . The U.S. Congress is not particularly interested in pressing President Barack
Obama on the issue, and Taiwan's economic decline has moderated Taipei's appetite for major arms purchases anyway. In the past, sales
of fighter jets, destroyers, tanks, and missiles to Taiwan were premised as much on the political message they sent to
Beijing as on their tactical value. In the new climate, Washington can reinforce the détente by holding back
planned sales of items such as Black Hawk helicopters, Patriot missiles, and additional fighter jets. The
Pentagon must view the shift not as simply a minor adjustment due to reduced cross-strait tensions but as a
wholesale rejection of the vision of Taiwan as a militarized base within the U.S. strategic orbit. By
signaling that Washington is finally respecting China's territorial integrity, these reductions could, in
turn, lead to verifiable force reductions by China, as well as to an end to its Taiwan-focused military

attack drills . Removing Taiwan as a major player in the United States' Asian security strategy would have ripple effects on U.S. strategy in
the region as a whole. Indeed, it is likely that Asian-only
security organizations, such as the asean Regional Forum, would
increasingly take the lead in defining Asia's future security architecture. The arguments in favor of Finlandization are
stronger today than ever before: a Finlandized Taiwan would play a much more transformative role in China
itself, thus improving the chances of a peacefully rising China . As was the case for Finland in its relations with the Soviet
Union, Taiwan could create a model for the peaceful resolution of China's many resource, boundary, and
military conflicts throughout Asia. More broadly, the Taiwan-China détente is a test of liberal approaches to
international relations - specifically, the notion that a broad integration of domestic interests will pacify
relations between states far more than a militarized balance of power. Taiwan has always been a
frontline state in the rivalry between Washington and Beijing. In the past, that meant the United States' fending off
China's plans to invade Taiwan and defying Beijing's opposition to the island's democratic development. Today, with Taiwan's territory secure
and democracy consolidated, Taiwan's role on the frontlines is changing again. It is now Washington's turn to confront and
adapt to this historic shift.
Recent deals threaten to push the conflict over the brink – the aff is both sufficient
and necessary
Thrall and Cohen 9/17 - A. Trevor Thrall is an associate professor in the Schar School of Policy and
Government at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Jordan Cohen is a
Ph.D. student in political science at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.
(A. Trevor and Jordan, “Selling F-16s to Taiwan Is Bad Business,” Defense One, September 17, 2019,
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/09/selling-f-16s-taiwan-bad-business/159915/)
Even if the trade war were not an issue, however, the strategic benefits of selling F-16s to Taiwan are dubious at best. It is true that the F-16s
will help Taiwan respond to potential Chinese violations of its airspace or sovereign waters. But the truth is that the
most important
thing Taiwan is buying isn’t tanks, missiles, or fighters. The most important thing Taiwan is buying is the confidence that
the United States remains committed to intervening on Taiwan’s behalf if China ever does
invade. As one Taiwanese defense official recently told a group of American scholars, “…when you sell us the latest
fighters, it lets China know America would intervene on our behalf in a conflict.” The reality is
that a few more F-16s won’t change the balance of power between Taiwan and China. So instead
of providing for Taiwan’s defense from China, what the F-16 deal will do is give Taiwan the confidence to act in
ways that aggravate China and encourage China to act more aggressively in turn. Worse, by
raising tensions between the two nations, the F-16 deal also increases the possibility of a
conflict breaking out, one that could drag the United States into a costly and dangerous war on
the other side of the world with a nuclear-armed superpower.

The plan functionally severs the TRA which means even with fill in or circumvention,
we still solve
Van Jackson 15, senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington, 4-8-
2015, "Forget F-16s for Taiwan: It's All About A2/AD ," Diplomat,
https://thediplomat.com/2015/04/forget-f-16s-for-taiwan-its-all-about-a2ad/

decisions relating to F-16 sales have become a leading indicator of U.S. intentions vis-à-
Against this backdrop,

vis Beijing and Taipei. If the U nited S tates sells new F-16s to Taiwan, Beijing may perceive it as a threat to
the Sino-U.S. strategic relationship and the PRC’s position in the region. If the U nited S tates refuses to arm Taiwan at
all, it would not only be found in violation of the T aiwan R elations A ct, but Taiwan would then be forced to
make the grand strategic assumption that it no longer has U.S. support . The Obama administration has continued the
delicate dance of its predecessors, offering an interim solution of not shipping F-16s to Taiwan but instead offering to help modernize Taiwan’s existing fleet.

Such a Goldilocks solution has helped keep the peace, but it cannot continue indefinitely . F-16s are
already outmoded by current generation fighters, and there are realistic limits to how much you can simply maintain and upgrade an
existing fleet as it ages; eventually new kit will be necessary. Yet by the time the United States is “forced” to again sell F-16s to Taiwan , it will

will predictably stir the ire of Beijing, far

inevitably be in the context of having refrained from selling Taiwan F-16s for decades — this

more so than if U.S. administrations had simply sold new F-16s to Taipei regularly . But there’s an even
bigger problem with the kabuki theater surrounding F-16 sales and upgrades — it’s a feckless
capability that in fact does not provide Taiwan with “sufficient self-defense capabilities, ” as law requires.
The reality of the military balance between the PRC and Taiwan is that the former overwhelms the latter
in the air. Taiwan has no chance of air superiority on its own. So arming Taiwan with inferior fighters in fewer numbers than
their most likely adversary doesn’t restore a military balance in the air domain; it quixotically wastes
Taiwan’s limited defense budget .

The United States federal government should implement a substantial reduction of

Direct Commercial Sales and Foreign Military Sales of arms from the United States to
Taiwan.

We should use debate to hash out what alternative foreign policies look like. It is
more productive than pure resistance AND there is a unique opening for ideas to take
hold---our method provides necessary preparation.
Loren Dejonge Schulman 18, Deputy Director of Studies and Leon E. Panetta Senior Fellow at the
Center for a New American Security., 12-4-2018, "Policy Roundtable: The Future of Progressive Foreign
Policy – Texas National Security Review," Texas National Security Review,
https://tnsr.org/roundtable/policy-roundtable-the-future-of-progressive-foreign-policy/#_ftn75
In his essay on what a progressive national security agenda should look like, Van Jackson proposes to stretch the common progressive position of anti-militarism to
a more realist platform of military “sufficiency.” In
doing so, he brings attention to a serious gap in current defense
politics. The stilted and superficial dialogue that passes for national security debate in American politics
includes an active constituency for a “military first” (or military friendly) foreign policy, reflexively applying
military tools to problems abroad and inflating defense spending. There is also a weaker constituency, most present
outside government, for a “military last” or “anti-militarist” policy, which would cut defense spending
and end wars with similar reflexivity. Outside the apolitical “blob” of Washington, there is little interest
in publicly debating the prudence or effectiveness of these agendas. The left, regardless of its broader
“theory of security,” could fill some of this vacuum — and it is better situated to do so than
conventional wisdom might suggest.70 Democrats Drowning at the Water’s Edge For the last two
decades, there has been little political opportunity to question America’s role in the world. With some
exception, relevant defense and security policies have been open to even less scrutiny. Questions about
the ethical or effective application of force, the size of the defense budget, the success of a given
military strategy, the utility of specific weapons platforms, and the return on investment from security
cooperation are, at best, diversions. Anyone who attempts to challenge the status quo risks being greeted with political attacks about lacking
patriotism or not supporting American troops.71 But at a time of frequent missteps abroad on the part of the Trump

administration, the space to question America’s foreign policy traditions may be widening. The
inability to pose legitimate questions about security policy is a particular flavor of political correctness, and
because of it, the Democratic Party has all but disappeared in defense policy and politics.72 The last two years
have seen more than a dozen pieces on the left’s lack of branded national security ideas.73 Michael Walzer has attributed this gap to an intentional abstention:

The default position of the left is that “the best foreign policy is a good domestic policy.”74 Jackson highlights
modest resourcing and under-representation as justifications for the left’s notable lack of a “theory of security” and the general subsuming of the debate under a
big-tent “third way” liberalism. Traditional Democrats in the national security community (including me) have bristled at these criticisms, but would be hard-pressed
to offer a distinctive and coherent political viewpoint. Some
see the Democratic Party’s lack of a defined national security policy
as something to celebrate. Declaring that politics “stops at the water’s edge” of national security is a
winning Bingo option at any think tank event. But this dictum stifles debate about the national interest and the proper
application of national resources. Consequently, there are moral and political questions on defense and interventions

abroad that have no meaningful forum. This gap is particularly felt on Capitol Hill, where in the past security-minded Democrats have
found political safe-harbor in a Republican-lite national security agenda — essentially blank-check support for Republicans on defense with, at most, a raised
eyebrow from time to time. These policy positions require little analytical effort or political capital, and let Democrats occasionally posture as morally superior by
emphasizing “non-military tools” of foreign policy. The
opposite alternative of a more rigid pacifism and anti-militarism,
though common in the grassroots progressive community, has no consistently organized political
presence on the Hill and thus also escapes thorough interrogation .75 For those outside the Beltway, opposition to
all things military offers the refuge of principle without critical justification or analysis. For many Democrats,
the Obama model was a strangely tolerable middle ground: a bipartisan budget mess made while a “responsible” president ramped up security interventions in
enough secrecy to avoid nagging scrutiny or self-examination. Re-Politicizing Defense Despite the valiant efforts of some individuals, there is no political home for
responsible defense debate, oversight, and accountability.76 Yet,
with determination, the left might find a real foothold in
defense policy — without compromising progressive values. To be clear: There is substantial work to be
done on figuring out what cohesive view of America’s role in the world the left can tolerate and advance.
There is even greater work to be done on determining how to renew, reuse, and reform international
institutions.77 But any such agendas would be well served by embracing a set of principles that make clear-eyed debate and evaluation of defense policy and
execution an asset, not an unforgiveable sin. Critical analysis of defense affairs is too often left to the technocratic and

comparatively powerless “blob,” which can write a mean op-ed or tweet, but has limited ability to
engage the American people on its will and interests. And although Congress has willfully declawed
itself so that it cannot maintain meaningful oversight of national security,78 its ability to stage and
amplify policy debate for the American people is without parallel, and it has tremendous latent potential
to restore greater balance in civil-military relations. Congress’s absence and the associated de-
politicization of national security affairs is costly. For instance, the American public is deeply ambivalent about the 17-year conflict in
Afghanistan and generally ignorant of the widespread activities of the war on terror.79 This is unsurprising: Congress, too, is disaffected, often ignorant of where
the U.S. military is even engaged,80 and has made little headway into questioning or shaping this intervention. The most substantive and serious debate about
executive war authorities and the effectiveness of U.S. counterterrorism strategy has resulted in little more than a reauthorization proposal that still failed to move
forward.81 Too many examples of political leaders’ stand-off or superficial approach to defense policy and execution abound. Military superiority is generally
viewed as sacrosanct, placed on “so high a pedestal as to render real debate meaningless.”82 That reverence infantilizes defense budget debates. Thanking troops
for their service is a politicized ritual that divorces politicians and their constituents from the intent and costs of that service. With decisions on the needs of the U.S.
military and sustaining legacy systems openly linked to the economies of congressional districts, it’s understandable that skeptics of utilizing military tools have
been unwilling to evaluate their merits. These must all change. While, at its worst, the political right treats the use of force abroad as a metric of patriotism and the
size of the force as the measure of one’s love of America, the political left ought to draw from its skepticism toward intervention and its faith in institutions to

advance a more rational and accountable approach to national security. For years, Robert Farley has highlighted that “ progressives
consistently
underestimate the importance of discussions about military doctrine and technology,”83 taking what
Michael Walzer calls “shortcuts”84 in their critiques of defense policy that relieve them from
contributing to key debates. Instead of excusing themselves, the left should instead propose legitimate
questions about major shifts in force employment and development: Will it work? What are its goals?
What is the U.S. national security apparatus learning? Why didn’t it work? Were U.S. objectives wrong?
What did America change when it didn’t work? Will America do it again? What could be improved?
What should America do now? Joining the Conversation Jackson’s notion of what a progressive “wager” on
national security might look like in practice is useful, filling the gap between the “Republican-lite”
default and the stubbornness of anti-militarism. But the left’s diversity of thought can accommodate a wider playing field of potential
alternative approaches to security than even he proposes. A true pacifist movement on the Hill and on the campaign trail, dedicated to the advancement of non-
military approaches but premised on analysis and logical arguments, would be a serious advancement in national security and should be welcomed by the most
ardent military advocates. Likewise, a
more prudent middle ground approach — one that is skeptical of, but open to,
military might and intervention and demands a better return on investment of national security tools —
should play a more prominent political role. The full range of the left’s national security spectrum should
forcefully engage in oversight of the rationale for and quality of American forces and interventions
abroad. The left should therefore consider adopting a series of principles on defense matters —
including criteria for the use of force — that apply to the military-friendly and anti-militarist left alike. In
practice, this means acknowledging that there are valid political positions on matters of defense that
lie somewhere in between “yes, and” and “no never” and that trivializing them is harmful to America’s
national security. There are alternatives to today’s counterterror strategy and it would not be an insult to the military to debate them. It’s entirely
legitimate to study whether the military is equipped to face today’s threats without being accused of retreating from the world or starting with an artificial budget
cut. It’s sensible to consider whether the planned growth of ground forces, a 350-ship Navy, or a 386-squadron Air Force are the right investments or political
benchmarks.85 These
questions involve choices and values and should not be avoided under the umbrella of a
supposed technocratic bipartisan agreement. Just as important, it’s essential that the left avoid
becoming a caricature of itself that promotes simplistic and superficial positions that set rigid,
unserious standards. The left may not agree on the size or purpose of the military, but it can agree
America should strive for informed oversight and accountability. The bumper sticker of such principles is simple: Ask informed
questions,86 illuminate and demand accountability for failures, encourage fresh thinking, and bring the American people into the discussion without fear. That this
is so simple is an embarrassment to the present state of the “debate.” In detail, these principles should include: Building
the right force driven by
security interests, not an inherently smaller force driven by an allergy to size. Arguing that the U.S.
military is too large without clarifying what it should be expected to do and how is, at best, a lazy and an
ill-informed reaction to sticker shock. There are valid questions — and a range of plausible answers — about the appropriate mission and scope
of America’s forces, and a worthwhile dialogue to be had on where risks in force structure should reside. Exploring fully how threat

assessments impact military roles, missions, and investments. A rigid antipathy to conflict and
intervention, or to the military itself, leaves the left out of conversations that determine how and
where America spends its blood and treasure, and precludes the defense establishment from tackling
questions important to the left (e.g., what does a world of accelerating climate change require of the U.S. military?). The left’s absence
from attempts to set the analytic agenda for defense policy is dangerous. Engaging in more practical
conversations about how military capabilities might be used, where, and why. Military platforms carry within them
assumptions about the nature of U.S. strategy and interests that are poorly articulated in today’s defense authorizing environment. Most detailed political debate
today emphasizes the cost of military platforms, or their associated acquisition processes, or, for legacy systems, the industrial base. As
Robert Farley
noted in 2011, “Analysts, institutions, and politicians tend to respond to the arguments they see, rather
than those that they don’t.”87 Recruiting, retaining, and promoting the military and civilian skill sets and imagination necessary for today’s and
tomorrow’s security challenges. The mish-mash of human capital and talent management processes of today’s Department of Defense, paired with a legacy focus
on capacity, the booming costs of military personnel, a growing civil-military divide, and a growing gap in the military’s high-technical skills, spell a looming disaster
for future military manpower. The left must treat this as a strategic priority rather than a mere bureaucratic matter. Increasing transparency to the public on the
manner, costs, risks, intent, and success or failure of military interventions. As I wrote with Alice Friend, the current approach of military secrecy and unwillingness
to pursue an “airing of grievances” about past strategic and operational failure “assumes that domestic support for U.S. military engagements can be sustained in an
information vacuum. It draws on a reservoir of public faith in the military while also limiting the public’s ability to make an informed decision. This is a losing
gamble.”88 The left should reset this dynamic. Deliberately connecting debates on America’s capabilities and political investments in preventing and resolving
conflicts to the more mature debates on how to prepare to fight the nation’s wars. Diplomacy, development, economics, and intelligence demand modernization
just as military forces do, and they need to be far better at measuring and communicating their value. The left should push the political dialogue on these matters
beyond mere talking-points. Ensuring
that any military action America does engage in has clear goals, is limited in
scope, is sustainable for the duration, and is assessed in terms of fully-burdened costs to the military,
the broader national security community (intelligence analysts, diplomats, aid workers, contractors, and more), U.S. allies, and
local populations. Exploring these matters is not pedantic or risky in the face of threats. It is the only
responsible option, and the left should force these discussions. Sustaining engaged and thoughtful interest, oversight, and civil
skepticism of all military and non-military intervention activities abroad. The beginning of an intervention should not be the high point of political energy. It is
shameful that the progress of the war in Afghanistan, the viability of the U.S. counterterrorism strategy, the occasional airstrikes in Syria, and much more escape
serious oversight. Advancing civil-military relations with respectful skepticism of military employment; unconditional support for service members, families, and

veterans; and resolve to right wrongs of past failures. The left — in all its forms — should embrace the necessity of active
participation and serious debate beyond the water’s edge. That’s how to make national security more
democratic, transparent, and therefore accountable. What could be more progressive than that?

Making impactful contributions demands causal policy relevance AND methodological

pluralism---that is the only way to draw accurate contextual conclusions and prevent
violent, imprecise reification.
Michael C. Desch 19. Packey J. Dee Professor of International Relations at Notre Dame and founding
director of the Notre Dame International Security Center, former Professor and Director of the
Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky, #gocats.
2019. “Conclusions, Responses to Objections, and Scholarly Recommendations.” Cult of the Irrelevant:
The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security, Princeton University Press.

I want to reiterate that I

am not arguing that scholarship that is formal or quantitative is by definition
irrelevant . Indeed, one can point to examples of both that are. When applied to economic issues, the discipline of
economics has managed to be both highly “scientific” and, at times, quite relevant, though for both
good and ill. Likewise, there are examples of highly quantitative political science that policymakers have
found useful.1 Finally, there is much nonquantitative scholarship, particularly but not exclusively in the humanities that, is jargon laden
and otherwise inaccessible to a wider audience, including government policymakers.2 This is by no means an anti-social science methods
screed, just a reminder of the tensions between rigor and relevance that need to managed rather than assumed away. Nor is this in any
way a brief against theory . Former State Department official Roger Hilsman reminded us that everyone , including policymakers,
uses theory. Paraphrasing John Maynard Keynes, he concluded that “it seems obvious that all thinking involves notions
of how and why things happen. Even the ‘practical’ man who despises theory has a number of assumptions and expectations which
lead him to believe that when certain things are done, certain results follow.. . .It is this ‘theory’ that helps a problem solver select from the
mass of facts surrounding him those which he hopes are relevant.”3 Given that, I fully associate myself with Hans Morgenthau’s balanced view
that “theory without verification is metaphysics, but empiricism without theory is aimless.”4 Since policymakers implicitly use theory in
analyzing situations and assessing their alternatives, such theories should be stated explicitly and analyzed systematically, which is a
comparative advantage of the scholars. Instead , what I offer is simply a critique of the increasing tendency of many social
scientists to embrace methods and models for their own sake rather than because they can help us answer
substantively important questions . This inclination is in part the result of the otherwise normal and productive workings of science,

but is also reinforced by less positive factors such as organizational self-interest and intellectual culture. As a result of the

latter, many political

scientists have committed themselves to particular social science methods not so much
because they believe they will illuminate real-world policy problems but because they serve a vested interest
in disciplinary autonomy and dovetail with a particular image (mathematized and model-based) of what a “science” of politics
should look like. In other words, the professionalization of social science is the root of the enduring relevance question. This tendency to
equate rigor with technique imposes costs on the rest of society as well as the discipline, especially when it excludes a more
balanced approach to rigor and relevance of the sort that characterized the subfield of security studies
in the past . On the former, as diplomat George Kennan rightly observed, policymakers need academic expertise because
they have to make decisions about issues and areas of the world “about which they cannot be expert
and learned.”5 They depend on the academy for the raw data—whether quantitative or historical—
that they use in decision making. They also rely on the social sciences for the theories they use to
analyze and make sense of this data. The problem with relying exclusively on in-house government
research to make up for the lack of policy-relevant academic research is that it is often of low quality.
The role of the “independent policy analyst” is essential for three reasons: 6 He or she can challenge basic
policy assumptions . As RAND’s Hans Spier put it, they can undertake “research which does not necessarily take
the mission of the military for granted and admits the possibility U.S. may be wrong” 7 And academic
social scientists are particularly well suited to this role by virtue of the fact that they both conduct
research and also teach future policymakers. Academics have some other advantages over policymakers. They have
the time to develop greater depth of knowledge on issues and regions than most policymakers can. The institution of
tenure also gives them, at least in theory, the freedom to explore controversial issues and take unpopular
stands . And while peer review can homogenize and narrow scholarship, it also plays an indisputably
positive role in advancing it. Finally, university-based scholars have less of a vested interest in certain
policies and programs than do policymakers, though of course that is not to deny that they have their own institutional interests and
biases.9 I am not suggesting, of course, that scholars would make better policy than bureaucrats and
elected officials. They lack inside knowledge, have little actual power, and are often politically out of
step with the rest of American society.10 They also come to policy issues with a markedly different intellectual orientation than
policymakers.11 Rather, my point is simply that our democratic political system depends on the successful functioning of
the marketplace of ideas and checks and balances in which individuals and groups with various strengths and weaknesses and
offsetting biases participate in the larger policy debate, thereby compensating for each other’s limitations .12 We run into
trouble when we lack one of these perspectives in policy debates. Indeed, there are instances—the war in
Vietnam and the recent Iraq War—in which had the majority consensus of scholars in academia influenced
policy , the country’s national interest would have been better served . As the flawed Iraq War debate
bankrupt , particularly in national security affairs .13 Of course, our
demonstrates, our nation’s marketplace of ideas is
political problems run much deeper than just the Beltway/Ivory Tower gap, but closing it would
represent an important step in the country’s intellectual recapitalization . This nation’s universities need to reclaim
their place as one of society’s main sources of independent ideas about the problems that it faces.14 Less widely recognized, and perhaps more
controversial given the prevailing sentiments in the Academy for a sharp distinction between “science” and “policy,” is my contention that the
growing gap is ultimately bad for the generation of new knowledge. There are at least two reasons why greater attention to policy relevance
produces better scholarship. First, it leads to more realistic theorizing. As John Kenneth Galbraith warned his economics colleagues nearly forty
years ago, “No arrangement for the perpetuation of thought is secure if that thought does not make
contact with the problems that it is presumed to solve .”15 Second, a focus on manipulatable variables makes it more
likely that they are testable because the analyst can ensure variation on them. Also, the hyperspecialization of knowledge

today makes it difficult for even scholars in related disciplines to understand each other, much less the
general public . Such intellectual fragmentation makes the application of scholarly knowledge to
policymaking extremely difficult . Therefore, a deeper and more regular engagement between the
Ivory Tower and the Beltway will be mutually beneficial for both sides.16 Ultimately, even the most
sophisticated social science will be judged by what it tells us about things that affect the lives of large
numbers of people and which policymakers therefore seek to influence and control.17 The recurrent
congressional debates about National Science Foundation funding for political science highlight the
direct costs to the discipline of not being able to justify itself in terms of broader impact on the rest of
society. Harkening back to the debate about the Mansfield Amendment, an article in Science cautioned that “to the extent that the research
community disdains work on major national missions or behaves self-servingly in mission-oriented work, anti-intellectualism will increase its
influence on the fate of American science.”18 Also, public and philanthropic community support for investment in academia generally reflects
the belief that it will produce work that will speak to problems of broader importance. When
the academy fails on that score, it can
undermine that support .19 Political science’s subfield of international security studies can plausibly claim
to save large amounts of money and even lives and so its increasing marginalization is a self-inflicted
wound on the discipline. Response to Objections There are at least eight reasonable, though ultimately unpersuasive, objections to
my argument that we should consider. First, some point to the influence of the Democratic Peace Theory (DPT) on the Clinton, George W. Bush,
and Obama administrations as evidence that one of the most scientific of social science theories in international relations was both useful and
influential among policymakers.20 The argument that democracies are unlikely to go to war with each other gained currency among social
scientists based on statistical analysis of every major interstate war since 1815. In the words of Rutgers political scientist Jack Levy, the
Democratic Peace Theory is “as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.”21 Two scholars argued that the theory
became relevant outside of the academy precisely “because of the law-like status of a particular empirical finding.”22 Others hold it up as a
model of how basic research in political science can contribute to policymakers.23 It is not clear, though, that the influence of the DPT on
recent U.S. foreign policy was due to its unassailable social scientific standing. While former Defense Department official and Ohio State
political scientist Joseph Kruzel conceded that DPT “had substantial impact on public policy,” he attributed its attractiveness to policymakers to
its simplicity rather than its social scientific rigor.24 It clearly identifies America’s enemies (nondemocratic states) and prescribed a simple
response to them (make them democratic). It is also likely that the much less methodologically sophisticated articulation of the theory in the
work of Michael Doyle was far more influential.25 And the process by which DPT entered the Clinton White House did not involve sophisticated
social science. Rather, the key administration proponent of the democratic peace was National Security Advisor (and former college professor)
Anthony Lake.26 It is clear, however, that to the extent that Lake was drawing support for the democratic peace from academic sources, it was
not from statistically based research, but rather from the qualitative work of scholars like Harvard’s Samuel Huntington.27 The results of a
survey of senior national security policymakers found that more than half of those familiar with the methodologically sophisticated democratic
peace theory reported not being influenced by it in their government work.28 Finally, one could argue that U.S. policymakers have embraced
the democratic peace because of its compatibility with our political culture rather than its scientific standing.29 A second, and in some ways,
flip side of the first critique, is that the relevance problem with contemporary security studies is the result of the subfield’s domination by
realism, and particularly its most abstruse and theoretical manifestation, neorealism.30 Critics point particularly to neorealist arguments that
tout the virtues of nuclear proliferation as examples of theoretically elegant but politically unacceptable social science.31 Despite its
respectability among scholars, neorealist proliferation optimism has reportedly had little influence on actual policy.32 While that particular
policy issue may not have been influenced by realist thinking, as this book has shown realists have remained committed to policy relevance at
times when the rest of the discipline has eschewed it. And they have more often been on the right side of policy debates as well.33 A third
potential challenge to my argument is that many social scientists believe that they should avoid offering policy recommendations in favoring of
focusing on basic research tasks such as identifying empirical regularities and offering generalizations to explain them.34 As Dartmouth political
scientist Kalman Silvert warned, “It is not the legitimate role of the social scientist as scholar to advocate specific courses of governmental
action or to act as implementer of government decisions.”35 Another rationale is that doing so is unnecessary given that the applied
implications of basic research tend to trickle down by themselves.36 Policy engagement—particularly offering explicit policy
recommendations—is both unwise and unnecessary in the view of many social scientists. Neither of these views, however, are shared by
policymakers. Most believe that in addition to providing basic research findings, “scientists must explicitly define the linkage, whether
immediate or remote, of the knowledge acquired or being acquired, to specific operational problems and continually assess the import of such
knowledge to solution of the problems.”37 Nor are current and former policymakers sanguine about the trickle-down (or bubble-up in which
senior policymakers get the results of scholarly work through their methodologically savvy staffs) process. As John K. Plank of the Brookings
Institution, a former DoD official, recollected, “There is presumably a process whereby the research product is filtered up to [senior
policymakers], but in point of fact very little of operational usefulness is transmitted.”38 Fourth, some political scientists believe that there are
now so many new outlets for scholars to engage in the policy debate, it is both easier for them to do so and also unnecessary for them to
concern themselves with doing so in their scholarship.39 Academics can now publish basic research in scholarly venues and then disseminate
its applied implications through the new media. George Washington political scientist and blogger Marc Lynch effused that with the rise of the
new media “this is in most ways a golden age for policy-relevant public spheres.”40 Indeed, many see the proliferation of new media outlets as
the answer to political science’s perennial problem: its diminished public profile.41 The assumption here is that political scientists are simply
not communicating their results effectively. There are three problems with these arguments: Until recently, we had no idea whether blogs and
other new media reached policymakers. As one optimist conceded, we have “no solid statistics” on our impact.42 But we do now and it
suggests that blogs and other new media are in fact not an important source of information for policymakers and therefore are unlikely to
effectively convey the implications of basic research to policymakers, the media, or the general public.43 Moreover, even if a few blogs get
some attention, many others do not, simply making more noise in an already cacophonous marketplace of ideas.44 And suggesting that the
failure of communication argument misses the mark, Social Science Research Council president Craig Calhoun noted that scholarly
“engagement with public constituencies must move beyond a dissemination model” that assumes that “pure research” will naturally triclde
down, even with better communication.45 In other words, it is not the medium that matters as much as the message. And the message must
be made more intelligible and useful to policymakers and the general public. Finally, there is systematic evidence that academic bloggers and
scholars who utilize other new media venues receive little professional credit for them in the critical areas of promotion and tenure.46 In short,
despite the explosive growth of new media outlets, professional incentives still do not encourage scholars to use them. A fifth conceivable
objection is that advanced social science techniques and basic research will eventually become more useful to policymakers as they (or at least
their staffs) become more sophisticated in their understanding of them. One optimist, for example, noted that most graduate public policy
schools now include one or two required courses in economics and social science methods in their curricula. As these increasingly
methodologically savvy young bureaucrats become senior policymakers, so this argument goes, they will be more adept at using them and
more appreciative of their policy relevance.47 However, this argument assumes that training in advanced research techniques is a recent
development. Policy schools, however, have long had methods courses as part of their required curriculum. Even prior to this, many national
security policymakers came out of academic Ph.D. programs in which they were exposed to the latest innovations in social science
methodology. It also ignores that the security studies subfield played a leading role in developing many of these sophisticated social science
techniques, particularly at RAND in the 1950s.48 An example of the reverse flow of ideas from the policy world to the Academy was the
“unquestionably” leading role that RAND mathematicians and other social scientists played in the development of game theory, a mathematical
framework for strategizing under uncertainty.49 Despite early enthusiasm, many at RAND concluded that game theory had an Achilles Heel in
its application to national security policy: how to assign the numerical values that were to be plugged into its formulas. That was not a trivial
limitation, which led Hitch to confess that “for our purposes, Game Theory has been quite disappointing.”50 It also assumes that today’s
aspiring policymakers come away from these methods courses with an unqualified appreciation of their usefulness. My experience after ten
years in teaching in such schools, and familiarity with the evaluations students give these courses, leaves me skeptical. They often do not see
the usefulness of such courses and suspect they are being forced to take them for academic, not professional, reasons.51 Other colleagues at
professional schools share this impression.52 Finally, an earlier survey of current and former national security policymakers reveals that the
more highly educated the policymaker, the greater the skepticism about their utility.53 This is consistent with the argument that familiarity
with advanced techniques instills greater appreciation not only for their promise but also their limits. Even proponents of modern social science
methods in international relations concede that “the emerging science of international relations has a long way to go before it can be of direct
use to policy makers.”54 It is hard to find much evidence that the most sophisticated approaches to international relations are of much direct
use to policymakers, and there are ample reasons for caution about how much of the discipline’s “basic” research is really trickling down to
indirectly influence policymakers. Sixth, some point to the post-9 /11 resurgence of interest among younger social scientists as a harbinger of
another renaissance of interest in policy relevance. Others suggest that changes in the nature of the “new paradigm of knowledge production,”
which is “socially distributed, application-oriented, trans-disciplinary, and subject to multiple accountabilities” constitute grounds for optimism
about a broader return to relevance among the social sciences.55 To be sure, there are reasons for optimism on this score but also for
continuing caution. As we have seen, previous periods of optimism about answering the relevance question have given way to disappointment.
Moreover, many scholars have claimed to be policy relevant even though policymakers did not find them so.56 As one CIA analyst warned,
“Social scientists commonly define policy-relevant research far more broadly than the foreign policy community does.”57 A seventh potential
criticism of my argument is there are other forms of “relevance” beyond just influencing government
policymakers by offering policy recommendations to which scholars should aspire.58 Especially in a democratic
political system, a scholar’s vocation for politics can also involve educating students and informing the wider public

about pressing issues of policy. Moreover, an engaged scholar could serve with n on g overnmental and private
o rganization s rather than just through government service. While there is no doubt that policy influence is
broader than just affecting government policy, that is ultimately the goal of the enterprise, either
directly through policymakers or indirectly through the media or the public. Moreover, it is the clearest
and most demanding standard of relevance available. So if we want to understand when and how
social science matters to policymakers that is the most important, if not the only, aspect of it to
consider.59 Finally, many political scientists share Daniel Drezner’s view that economics has solved the relevance question in being both
rigorous and relevant. 60 The logical implication of such a belief is that the rest of social sciences should follow that discipline’s lead in terms of
its approach and methodology. This economics envy is based on a misapprehension that academic trends in economics have not also created a
relevance problem. For example, a recent review of research at the World Bank by leading academic economists raised questions about how
much of the scholarship of bank analysts that was written for publication in academic journals was of any use to the bank.61 Their answer was
not much. They blamed intellectual trends in the discipline because it encouraged research that was “too academic, too focused toward the
previously existing academic agenda, and too directed towards technical rather than pressing policy issues.”62 Behind this economics envy lies
an even deeper inferiority complex visa- vis the natural sciences. Many social scientists believe that the physical sciences have two advantages
over the “softer” social sciences: more reliable data and a consensus on how to analyze it. Quantifiable data, in this view, is more persuasive,
because it is clearer and less subject to dispute.63 This view of the superiority of the physical over the social sciences is widespread, with many
of the former reveling in their preeminence and some of the latter manifesting two classic symptoms of an inferiority complex: resentment or
reflexive emulation. Neither of these responses is healthy. It is simply not true that expressing propositions mathematically ensures that they
are clearer and more transparent than conveying them in English. Economist Paul Romer admitted that “with enough math, an author can be
confident that most readers will never figure out where FWUTV [facts with unknown truth values] is buried. A discussant or referee cannot say
that an identification assumption is not credible if they cannot figure out what it is and are too embarrassed to ask.”64 On the latter, one would
think that the 2008 Great Recession, in which the misguided belief that quantitative models of the economy could be used to guide investment
decisions on the grounds they could reveal “the truth” about what drives the market, would temper confidence that such scientific approaches
could ensure effective policy.65 In a much discussed essay in the New York Times Magazine, Princeton economist Paul Krugman concluded that
“the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.. . .
The central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a
chance to show off their mathematical prowess.”66 It is not even clear that natural scientists have been most influential when they have
employed their most rigorous and mathematically sophisticated approaches, at least in the national security realm. Indeed, there is more
evidence that they have been most influential when they have offered practical solutions to real-world problems. These solutions have often
come from scientifically uncertain and incomplete data.67 These are the hallmarks of much of the best of qualitative social science. Social
scientists also ought to take heart that they not only can make an important contribution using their own distinct approaches, but also that in
some instances they might even be superior to those of the physical scientists. For example, many of the nuclear scientists involved in the
Manhattan Project soon came to regret their role in the escalating nuclear arms race of the Cold War. Reflecting a collective sense of guilt,
chemist and peace activist Linus Pauling got almost nine thousand scientists to sign a January 1958 petition to end nuclear testing as first step
toward universal disarmament.68 Talcing an equally impractical tack, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard wrote to Franldin Delano Roosevelt’s
science adviser Vannevar Bush in January 1944, “This weapon is so powerful that there can be no peace if it is simultaneously in the possession
of any two powers unless these two powers are bound by an indissoluble political union.”69 While not all of the atomic scientists harbored
doubts—recall the famous debates between Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller—the majority became advocates of international control
of nuclear weapons, a policy that in retrospect was politically unrealistic. In comparing the assessments and policy recommendations of the
physical scientists in the Golden Age, with those of social scientists like Jacob Viner, Bernard Brodie, and William T. R Fox, it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that the latter’s views of the nuclear problem (that the genie of nuclear weapons could not be stuffed back in the bottle), and their
recommendations for dealing with that situation (nuclear deterrence), were far more “realistic” than those of the nuclear “one world” physical
scientists. What Is to Be Done? There
are, of course, some nuts-and-bolts issues that scholars should be mindful of if
they want to participate in the broader policy debate. Since policymakers have short attention spans given the number and
breadth of issues they have to deal with, scholarly efforts to engage them need to be brief in conveying their ideas.70 This explains why Op/Eds
are particularly influential and why so many are optimistic that blogs could play a similar role. Moreover, policymakers find much
current scholarly work—from across the methodological spectrum— inaccessible . The common sentiment animating their views is
that scholars should cut the jargon . Policymakers don’t want scholars to write in Greek or French, but rather just plain English.71

There are also some much bigger issues undergirding the relevance question.72 To begin with, political
science needs to rethink
how it balances scholarly rigor with practical application. There is a middle ground between policy
analysis and journalism, on one side, and scholastic irrelevance on the other.73 The best approach to balancing
scholarly rigor with continuing policy relevance is
methodological pluralism, which includes a commitment to using
not any particular method (or all of them ) but rather just the approach most appropriate for the
question at hand . But methodological pluralism, by itself, is not sufficient. The latest trend in political science requiring the simultaneous
use of multiple methods could, ironically, prove to be even more limiting of policy relevance. Indeed, given the need to employ all of these
methods simultaneously, it is potentially even more constraining in terms of the problems it can address because it has to be limited to those
reinforcing methodological pluralism
which can be quantified, modeled, and studied in depth at the same time.74 Therefore,

must also be a commitment to problem-, rather than method-, driven research agendas. It is only the
combination of these two principles that will ensure that policy-relevant security studies can not only
survive , but thrive, in political science.75 Scholars also need to think carefully about the role of theory in policyrelevant security studies
scholarship. While there is no doubt that theory is important to policymakers, scholars need to be aware
that as with many other things, too much of it can be a bad thing. In particular, the effort to cram the rich
complexity of the social world into universal models can do intellectual violence to the phenomenon
under study as well as produce suboptimal policy . Paul Nitze, then the director of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning
Staff, readily conceded policymakers’ need for theory but also noted that “there is the opposing consideration .. . that [theoretical]
oversimplification presents great dangers .”76 Albert Wohlstetter advocated a balanced approach to theory, noting that the key
to his success throughout his career “was the practical experience I had in working with engineers. I worked with them from two sides, so to
speak, as someone who had been concerned with very abstract theory more basic than that familiar to design engineers, but on the other
hand, I was also concerned with production, and therefore generally trying to get them to do things more practical than they wanted to do.”77
Theory is a powerful tool of statecraft, but when scholars embrace universal models they also risk
irrelevance or worse . Likewise, the transmission belts conveying scholarly findings to the policy world must be repaired. Kennan
envisioned the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in the late 1940s serving this function, and in some respects it continues to do so to this
day.78 However, there are limits to how effectively a part of the bureaucracy can serve as an honest research broker. A plethora of think tanks
in Washington are also supposed to translate knowledge into action, though the trend in recent years has been toward the establishment of
overtly political and advocacy organizations, rather than nonpartisan, translational research centers.79 Reinventing the role of think tanks as
bridges between the Ivory Tower and the beltway is long overdue. While
nonacademic transmission belts can mediate
between the Ivory Tower and the Beltway, they are no substitute for the scholars who produce
knowledge to themselves serve as their own translators of it into policy. To be sure, scholars should
not stop writing scholarly books and monographs utilizing the most sophisticated techniques of their discipline, if
appropriate. In
addition to doing these things, scholars should address pressing real world problems, not
just chase after disciplinary fads. No one is in a better position to highlight the policy implications of a
given piece of research than the individual who conducted it . Academic social scientists, if they want to be heard by
senior policymakers, and heard correctly, need to be their own policy “transmission belts.”80 The role of the Democratic Peace Theory in the
recent Iraq war demonstrates the problems with scholars not specifying the concrete policy implications of their research.81 Drawing
on
DPT , some officials in the George W. Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq as part of a larger strategy to
bring peace to the region by spreading democracy.82 Democratic Peace proponent Bruce Russett
objected to this conclusion after
the fact though his voice had been largely mute in the run up to the war.83 Had he and other democracy scholars
participated more actively in the prewar debate , this rationale may have been less credible . Academics
also need to develop a more nuanced appreciation of the various influences on policy. Many, even in
democratic political systems, tend to have an unrealistically “technocratic” attitude toward policymaking. 84
They often underestimate the role of politics in government decision making. Scholars must therefore understand

that the policymaking process is inherently political and that without such an appreciation of the
political considerations associated with any policy choice, even a good one may not be implemented.85

Understanding the intricacies of politics, the state, and the military is a prerequisite to
addressing oppression – means our academic theorizing is methodologically valuable
Bryant 12 – (9/15, Levi, professor of Philosophy at Collin College and Chair of the Critical Philosophy
program at the New Centre for Research and Practice, “War Machines and Military Logistics: Some
Cards on the Table,” https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/war-machines-and-military-
logistics-some-cards-on-the-table/)

We need answers to these questions to intervene effectively. We can call them questions of “military logistics”. We are,
after all, constructing war machines to combat these intolerable conditions. Military logistics asks two questions: first, it asks what
things the opposing force, the opposing war machine captured by the state apparatus, relies on in order to
deploy its war machine: supply lines, communications networks, people willing to fight, propaganda or ideology,
people believing in the cause, etc. Military logistics maps all of these things. Second, military logistics asks how to best
deploy its own resources in fighting that state war machine. In what way should we deploy our war machine to defeat
war machines like racism, sexism, capitalism, neoliberalism , etc? What are the things upon which these state based war
machines are based, what are the privileged nodes within these state based war machines that allows them to
function? These nodes are the things upon which we want our nomadic war machines to intervene. If we are to be effective in producing
change we better know what the supply lines are so that we might make them our target. What I’ve heard in these discussions is a
complete indifference to military logistics . It’s as if people like to wave their hands and say “this is
horrible and unjust!” and believe that hand waving is a politically efficacious act . Yeah, you’re right, it is
horrible but saying so doesn’t go very far and changing it. It’s also as if people are horrified when anyone discusses
anything besides how horribly unjust everything is. Confronted with an analysis why the social functions in the
horrible way, the next response is to say “you’re justifying that system and saying it’s a-okay!” This
misses the point that the entire point is to map the “supply lines” of the opposing war machine so you
can strategically intervene in them to destroy them and create alternative forms of life. You see, we
already took for granted your analysis of how horrible things are. You’re preaching to the choir . We wanted
to get to work determining how to change that and believed for that we needed good maps of the opposing state based war machine so we can
your sole strategy seems to be ideological
decide how to intervene. We then look at your actual practices and see that

critique or debunking . Your idea seems to be that if you just prove that other people’s beliefs are
incoherent, they’ll change and things will be different. But we’ve noticed a couple things about your strategy:
1) there have been a number of bang-on critiques of state based war machines, without things changing
too much, and 2) we’ve noticed that we might even persuade others that labor under these ideologies that their
position is incoherent, yet they still adhere to it as if the grounds of their ideology didn’t matter much. This leads us to suspect
that there are other causal factors that undergird these social assemblages and cause them to endure is they do. We thought to ourselves,
there are two reasons that an ideological critique can be successful and still fail to produce change: a) the
problem can be one of “distribution”. The critique is right but fails to reach the people who need to hear it and
even if they did receive the message they couldn’t receive it because it’s expressed in the foreign language of
“academese” which they’ve never been substantially exposed to (academics seem to enjoy only speaking to other academics even as they
say their aim is to change the world). Or b) there are other causal factors involved in why social worlds take the form they do

that are not of the discursive, propositional, or semiotic order. My view is that it is a combination of both. I don’t
deny that ideology is one component of why societies take the form they do and why people tolerate intolerable conditions. I
merely deny that this is the only causal factor. I don’t reject your political aims, but merely wonder how
to get there . Meanwhile, you guys behave like a war machine that believes it’s sufficient to drop pamphlets out of an
airplane debunking the ideological reasons that persuade the opposing force’s soldiers to fight this war on
behalf of the state apparatus, forgetting supply lines, that there are other soldiers behind them with guns to
their back, that they have obligations to their fellows, that they have families to feed or debt to pay off, etc. When I
point out these other things it’s not to reject your political aims, but to say that perhaps these are also good things to intervene in if we wish to
change the world. In other words, I’m
objecting to your tendency to use a hammer to solve all problems and to
see all things as a nail ( discursive problems ), ignoring the role that material nonhuman entities play in the form that social
assemblages take. This is the basic idea behind what I’ve called “terraism”. Terraism has three components: 1) “Cartography” or the mapping of
assemblages to understand why they take the form they take and why they endure. This includes the mapping of both semiotic and material
components of social assemblages. 2) “Deconstruction” Deconstruction is a practice. It includes both traditional modes of discursive
deconstruction (Derridean deconstruction, post-structuralist feminist critique, Foucaultian genealogy, Cultural Marxist critique, etc), but also far
more literal deconstruction in the sense of intervening in material or thingly orders upon which social assemblages are reliant. It
is not
simply beliefs, signs, and ideologies that cause oppressive social orders to endure or persist, but also
material arrangements upon which people depend to live as they do. Part of changing a social order
thus necessarily involves intervening in those material networks to undermine their ability to maintain their relations
or feedback mechanisms that allow them to perpetuate certain dependencies for people. Finally, 3) there is “Terraformation”. Terraformation
is the hardest thing of all, as it requires the activist to be something more than a critic , something more than
someone who simply denounces how bad things are , someone more than someone who simply sneers, producing
instead other material and semiotic arrangements rendering new forms of life and social relation
possible. Terraformation consists in building alternative forms of life. None of this, however, is possible without good
mapping of the terrain so as to know what to deconstruct and what resources are available for building
new worlds. Sure, I care about ontology for political reasons because I believe this world sucks and is profoundly unjust. But rather
than waving my hands and cursing because of how unjust and horrible it is so as to feel superior to all those about
me who don’t agree, rather than playing the part of the beautiful soul who refuses to get his hands dirty, I think
we need good maps so we can blow up the right bridges, power lines, and communications networks ,
and so we can engage in effective terraformation

Arms sales are part and parcel of US threat construction of China. The 1AC disrupts
that circulation through analysis of alternative institutional arrangements which is a
necessary compliment to representational critique.
Jennifer Sterling-Folker and Rosemary E. Shinko 05, [Jennifer Sterling-Folker is Associate Professor
of Political Science at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and Rosemary Shinko is Lecturer in Political
Theory and International Relations at the University of Connecticut at Stamford, Accessed: 7/13/19,
Discourses of Power: Traversing the Realist-Postmodern Divide, The Millennium: Journal of International
Studies vol: 33.3]//Lex RA Pgs. 643 - 650

Realist Power Struggle: US-China-Taiwan What does it mean to say ‘the China-Taiwan relationship’? For
a structural realist there is an
obvious reality with respect to Taiwan, but it begins with the US and the PRC, which are both concerned
with the potential damage that the other could do to their national security and economies.14 These
concerns result from each nation-state’s desire to dominate the politics and economics of the region, and
both possess substantial resources in this regard, including large numbers and types of military weapons, large portions of their citizenry engaged in their militaries,
sizeable economies, vast networks of trading partners and linkages, and considerable financial resources and influence. Given the military resources
each possesses, combined with the trade linkages they have developed with one another, both nation-
states seek to avoid direct military confrontations with one another. Yet they also simultaneously seek
to balance one another’s military and economic power in order to avoid any advantage the other might
accrue in their competition for regional domination. From a structural realist perspective, Taiwan
represents a third and relatively weaker entity in the mix. For the PRC, Taiwan represents unfinished
business.15 Originally a province of China, Taiwan is an island 100 miles off the coast of China’s Fukien province, and the body of water that separates them,
the Taiwan Strait, is a major commercial shipping avenue. Taiwan had been annexed to and occupied by the Japanese from 1895 until 1945 when it was returned to
China. When the decades-long Chinese civil war culminated in a communist victory over the mainland in 1949, remnants of the US-supported Nationalists
(Kuomintang or KMT) escaped to the island and established their own government, the Republic of China (ROC). From its inception, the ROC was intended to be a
temporary solution. The Nationalists argued that they were the sole legitimate government of China and insisted that they would some day re-conquer the
mainland. Meanwhile the PRC made plans to reclaim Taiwan after it had consolidated power on the mainland. What prevented this invasion was the US interest in

balancing Chinese aggression in light of the Korean War. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Taiwan became the cornerstone
in the US Cold War containment strategy in Asia. The US sent naval forces into the Taiwan Strait several
times in response to Chinese provocations, it supplied the ROC with economic aid, and it signed a
mutual defense treaty with it in 1954. This Cold War context changed by the early 1970s, however, as China had by then developed a mutual
interest with the US in counter-balancing the Soviet Union, and the US and China explored the possibility of improved relations. In 1979 the US established full
diplomatic relations with the PRC, terminated its 1954 mutual security pact with Taiwan, and reaffirmed the one-China principle that there is only one China and
Taiwan is a part of it. Simultaneously, however, the US adopted the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which declared that the US has a commitment to Taiwan’s security
and is obligated to sell sophisticated defensive arms to it. The US has also consistently argued it has a right to protect Taiwan from the PRC, and in 1996 it
dispatched two aircraft carrier groups to the region in response to Chinese military activities in the strait. The triangular relationship between
the US, the PRC, and the ROC is replete with strategic deterrent calculations. The US attempts to
pacify China with regards to Taiwan while also containing China and protecting Taiwan from it. The PRC
attempts to intimidate Taiwan while preventing direct US involvement in their bilateral conflict. And the ROC seeks to maintain and increase its independence from
China while being careful not to alienate American support. This
trilateral structural relationship can also be examined from a
neoclassical realist perspective, which focuses on the domestic politics of these states. Competing subgroups
within the US, the PRC, and the ROC emphasise either cooperative economic linkages or militaristic policies in their relationships with one another. The extent to
which any of these particular subgroups are in ascendance results from electoral competition in the US and the ROC, and internal bureaucratic struggles in the
PRC.16 Taiwan’s development into a full-fledged democracy in the 1990s has increased hostilities between the ROC and the PRC, because democratisation allowed
the main pro-independence political party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), to gain control over and utilise state power in the pursuit of its nationalist
policies. Given neoclassical realism’s concern with non-systemic variables, the impact of identity formation
on intra-state politics in Taiwan is particularly important. The DPP and other pro-independence groups
are intimately linked to a Taiwanese identity that sees itself as distinct from that of mainland China. These
Taiwanese, who emigrated from Mainland China before World War II and may be divided into two groups (Hoklos and Hakkas) based on linguistic differences,
constitute eighty five percent of the population17 ‘Mainlanders’ are the Mandarinspeaking KMT who retreated to Taiwan after WWII; they constitute only fourteen
percent of the population. As long as the Nationalists prevailed electorally, Taiwan pursued a foreign policy with China that subtly mixed accommodation (including
the public acceptance of the oneChina principle) and resistance (such as pursuing sovereign membership in IGOs). Under the DPP, on the other hand, Taiwan has
declared its intention to become a full-fledged sovereign nation-state within the next ten years; something the PRC has consistently indicated it will use force to
prevent. These internal developments make conflict between the PRC and the ROC even more likely than international structural considerations alone would have
done. Given US strategic interests in the region, the Taiwan Strait is, as David Lampton, Director of China Studies at John Hopkins observes, ‘the only probable place
. . . where two big nuclear powers could come into conflict’. Postmodern
Recognition and Expressions of Doubt From a
postmodern perspective, power is already at play in the ways in which a realist analysis describes and
discusses what it has supposedly objectively framed as a potentially dangerous flashpoint.19 But how can
postmodernism maintain that power is implicit in the very act of describing the realist version of ‘reality’ ? Can this
exercise of power be drawn out and made visible? The key lies in explicating the postmodern claim that not only is IR a discursive process, but that it is ‘a process of
knowledge as power’.20 Starting from this perspective, power is understood in terms of its relational context. Power
relations are made known
where attempts are made to bring ambiguity under control, where a privileged interpretation emerges,
or where conduct is disciplined and discourse limited.21 Thus when we choose to comprehend the world in a certain way, we thereby
impose an order on it which must inevitably be held in place by power; a power which simultaneously produces us as ‘knowers’ of

the world and disciplines us to know the world in accordance with an established mode of certitude.22
Realism is the established mode of certitude through which we have come to know the international,
and it centers on national security as power politics. According to Taiwan’s ‘Guidelines for National Unification’ issued in 1991, for
example, any timeframe for the unification of Taiwan and China must ‘respect the rights and interests of the people in the Taiwan area, and protect their security
and welfare’.23 Realism’s national security power/knowledge grid establishes the order whereby security and
welfare are conflated with the state and deployed to justify the use (or threat) of violence in order to
maintain that discursive equation of state and security/welfare. It is this frame of sovereign certitude that a postmodern
analysis seeks to disrupt. It is not, as George suggests, that postmodernists are attempting to somehow move beyond

power, but rather that they are attempting to shift the focus of the knowledge/power
grid through which we represent the world of IR. 24 In order to radically question the
singular, irreducible version of reality imposed on the world via realist politics, we need to look to the
various marginal sites and be attentive to what Ashley refers to as the ‘reality of human struggles to make life
go on’.25 We need to look at the various local sites where identity and territoriality have been thrown into radical doubt.
This recognition of radical doubt opens a space for individuals to question and resist those who would
marshal the forces of violence in the name of territorial certitude.26 This recognition shifts us from relations of power that
define security in terms of national security, to relations of power that exceed the limited purview of states. One site to deconstruct is the

representation of two titanic foes, the US and China, squaring off in a primordial contest between
good and evil. Such a dichotomous representational frame oversimplifies myriad complexities and also
encourages political practices which necessarily categorise actions, words and thoughts as either/or.
Framing China as a ‘looming menace’ scripts a scenario whereby cross-strait relations become denotated as one of the most dangerous sites in global politics. This
script easily roles over into an attitude of resignation like that clearly expressed by Kurt Campbell, Director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
when he admits that it appears as if almost inexorable forces are at work in the straits area.27 Disrupting this realist representation of reality entails drawing out
counter narratives. Certainly one marginal site where acts of resistance and transgression are transpiring is in the movement of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples for
recognition and cultural survival. There are currently eleven major indigenous peoples in Taiwan who make up less than two percent of the total population.
Prejudice, pressures to assimilate and a general underprivileged status constitute the context within which they struggle to make life go on. It is here, in their
marginal existence, that the power deployed to construct an overarching, unified, national Taiwanese identity becomes visible. Many of these groups have become
politically active at both the local and national levels in order to promote the welfare of their communities and to maintain their expression of difference.28 They
fear the narrative power of Taiwanese national identity, which threatens to subsume and eventually erase their cultural and historical memory.29 These are
marginalised sites of difference, yet they locate a possibility that contests the inevitability of a move toward the solidification of one homogenising national
Taiwanese identity. In these sites of struggle security issues are also of paramount concern, but the security issues here are qualitatively different than those
glimpsed from the triangulation of US, Chinese, and Taiwanese representations of national security. These
sites are fraught with doubt,
contingency and chance, and they expose how focusing on titanic struggles between competing national
identities and strategic foes is merely an attempt to impose a simplistic order on the complexity of life
itself. It is not that the state is irrelevant to postmodern concerns , but in order to
problematise discourses that presume the inevitability and historical necessity of the state, we must
locate sites of contestation that do not conflate state security and survival with that of individuals or
communities. It is the rupture between these paradoxical positions that postmodernism seeks to explore.30 It is not that change is not
possible in realism, or that alternative sites of struggle are not important, but the parameters of and sites of struggle for
change highlighted by postmodernism seem analytically misplaced. If ‘realism’ is not simply explanation by ivory-tower

academics but is what states and policy-makers do (it is, after all, Chinese and US officials who designate one another as menaces, and
it is Taiwanese state officials who equate national security and welfare in their own documents), then why study the marginalised instead

of the states and policy-makers involved? Why not talk about change within the context of state-society
politics and among state policy-makers? The state is one of the ultimate sites of political, economic, and social struggle and power in
contemporary world politics, and it seems counter-productive to look for and promote change in representative

practices while simultaneously ignoring the state and its relationship to these alternative sites of
representation. If change is both possible and afoot in our representations of the world, shouldn’t it be recognisable in the politics
of and struggle over the state and its functions in society? The fact that many states, such as the US and the ROC, are

democracies underscores this point, since they have been institutionally designed to respond to
majorities and minorities within their societies. Even China’s totalitarian regime responds to multiple interests emanating from its
society. Hence it is not clear to realists why a discussion of the marginalised does not also involve understanding the structural mechanisms whereby doubt and
uncertainty are translated into political practice. Conversely, while there is a great deal of radical doubt in the world, but not all of it matters to individual security or
territorial violence and competition among nation-states. If
the radical doubt engendered by the marginalised (in this case,
two percent of Taiwan’s population) is not realised through state structures, then studying them won’t
get us any closer to understanding change and stasis in the China-Taiwan relationship. Wouldn’t our understanding
of change in this triangular relationship be better served by examining how the majority and the minority interact within the political structures, parties, and
interest groups of the US, the PRC, and the ROC and, in so doing, effect the politics and behavior of the other states involved?

Sacred commitments explain Chinese actions toward Taiwan – alternative views have
no explanatory power
Moore 16 — Gregory J. Moore, Associate Professor of International Relations in the Political Science
Department at the School of Public Affairs at Zhejiang University (China), former Assistant Director of
the Center for China-United States Relations at the University of Denver, holds a Ph.D. in International
Relations from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, 2016 (“The
Power of ‘Sacred Commitments’: Chinese Interests in Taiwan,” Foreign Policy Analysis, Volume 12, Issue
2, April, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Oxford University Press Journals)
This study raises the question, what explains China's interest in and fixation on Taiwan, its insistence on
getting Taiwan back? Why won't this issue just go away, so everyone in East Asia can just trade and consume happily? The study
has led to the finding that, as it concerns China's interests in Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait, the term
“sacred commitments,” to be elaborated upon below, explains far more about China's fixation on Taiwan
than do notions of security dilemmas, balancing, or power maximization, and its interests in
Taiwan cannot be understood without taking its socially constructed “sacred commitments” to Taiwan
into account. 1 The theoretical implications of this study are that contrary to the conventional
understanding of Chinese foreign policy as being very much Realist/ realpolitik in orientation, as it
regards Taiwan and this case, Realism is not particularly helpful, for the sorts of factors Realism “majors in”
are not the keys to understanding China's Taiwan policy in this case. The policy implications here are
that while cross-Strait relations are good now with Ma Ying-jeou in office in Taipei, China's commitment to regaining Taiwan
has not changed, nor has the potential for cross-Strait tension or Sino-American conflict over Taiwan
gone away. American policymakers must be absolutely clear that China's interests in Taiwan
are unwavering and are not based on more pragmatic realpolitik considerations, nor is it likely
they will be ameliorated by trade and interdependence. Mainland Chinese commitments to
Taiwan are in fact “sacred,” backed by a commitment to reunification with Taiwan much stronger than
realpolitik calculations might lead us to expect. Footnote 1: This study is one among numerous academic
analyses of Chinese foreign policy that place ideational variables at the forefront, including Iain Johnston's two
key books (1995 , 2008 ), Jeffrey Legro's “What China Will Want” (2007) , Gries (2004) , Qin (2009) , Lieberthal and Wang's work on strategic
distrust (2012), Wang Zheng's work on China's national humiliation (2012), and my own work (2007, 2010, 2014). It
also builds upon a
growing literature that uses constructivism to understand international relations in Asia, including work by
Capie (2008), Maria Rost Rublee's analysis of Japanese nuclear decision making (2008), Amitav Acharya's work on norms in Asia (2004), my own
work on Northeast Asian dyadic cultures (2013), etc.
2ac
 K
Reductive, no link, no structural systemic failure, and contingency’s best.
Susen, 19—Reader in Sociology at the School of Arts and Social Sciences of City, University of London
(Simon, “No escape from the technosystem?,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, October 9, 2019, dml)
A major irony of Feenberg’s book is the following contradiction: on several occasions, he criticizes, and distances himself from, technological
determinism; key parts of his argument suggest, however, that he himself flirts with, if not subscribes to, technological determinism. He rightly
maintains, and convincingly demonstrates, that ‘society and technology are inextricably imbricated’.240 This insight justifies the
underlying assumption that there is no comprehensive study of society without a critical sociology of
technology . Yet, to contend that ‘[s]ocial groups exist through the technologies that bind their members together’241 is misleading.
For not all social groups are primarily defined by the technologies that enable their members to relate
to, and to bond with, one another. Indeed, not all social relations, or social bonds, are based on, let
alone determined by, technology .

Of course, Feenberg is right to argue that ‘technologically mediated groups influence technical design through
their choices and protests’.242 Ultimately, though, the previous assertion is tautological. This becomes clear if, in the above sentence,
we replace the word ‘technological(ly)’ with terms such as ‘cultural(ly)’, ‘linguistical(ly)’, ‘political(ly)’, ‘economic(ally)’, or indeed another
sociological qualifier commonly used to characterize the specificity of a social relation. Hence, we may declare that ‘culturally, linguistically,
politically, and economically mediated groups influence cultural, linguistic, political, and economic conventions through their choices and
protests’. In saying so, we are stating the obvious. If, however, we aim to make a case for cultural, linguistic, political,
determinism, then this is problematic to the extent that we end up reducing the constitution
or economic

of social arrangements to the product of one overriding causal set of forces (whether these be cultural,
linguistic, political, economic, technological, or otherwise).

While declaring that he is a critic of technological determinism, Feenberg – in central passages of his book – gives the impression that he is one
of its fiercest advocates. Feenberg’s techno-Marxist evolutionism is based on the premise that ‘progress is realized essentially through
technosystem change’243 – that is, on the assumption that, effectively, human progress is reducible to technological development. Feenberg is
right to stress that ‘[t]echnical progress is joined indissolubly to the democratic enlargement of access to its benefits and protection from its
harms’.244 ‘Concretization’,245 understood in this way, conceives of progress as a ‘local, context-bound phenomenon uniting technical and
normative dimensions’.246 We may add, however, that progress has not only technical (or technological) but also
economic, cultural, and political dimensions, which contain objective, normative, and subjective
facets. At times, the differentiation between these aspects is blurred, if not lost, in Feenberg’s account, given
his tendency to overstate the power of technology at the expense of other crucial social forces . In other

words, progressis not only ‘inextricably entangled with the technosystem’,247 but it is also indissolubly
entwined with the economic, cultural, and political systems in which it unfolds and for (or against)
which it exerts its objective, normative, and subjective power.
The preceding reflection takes us back to the problem of techno-reductionism:

The struggle over the technosystem began with the labor movement. Workers’ demands for health and safety on the job were public
interventions into production technology.248

All struggles over social (sub)systems have not only a technological but also various other (notably
economic, cultural, and political) dimensions. Demands made by particular subjects (defined by class,
ethnicity, gender, age, or ability – or a combination of these sociological variables) are commonly expressed in public

interventions not only into production technology, but also into economic, cultural, and political
systems. In all social struggles (including class struggle), technology can be an important means to an end, but
it is rarely an end in itself . Put differently, social struggles are partly – but seldom essentially, let alone
exclusively – about technology .

Their theory of virtual war is completely wrong – drones are embedded in an

apparatus of humanity
Caroline Holmqvist, Centre for International Studies, London School of Economics, UK; Swedish
National Defence College, Sweden, June 2013, Millennium, Journal of International Studies, vol. 41 no. 3
535-552

An intuitive response to news about the increased reliance on technologies that allow for ‘killing at
distance’ is that it renders war ‘virtual’ for one side of the conflict. This view follows from discussions of
air power in war more generally, as we saw in the wake of NATO’s bombardment of Kosovo in 1999.22
The drone operator, sitting in the safety and comfort of his control room in Nevada, no longer
experiences war, goes the argument, and killing as a result becomes casual.23 Shielded from physical
harm, the drone operator is no longer part of the fight in an existential sense; there is no risk to his life.

No doubt, drone warfare is infinitely more real for the populations amongst whom attacks take place,
who risk being killed, losing loved ones or having their homes destroyed. Yet, while such arguments
have understandable appeal, close study of drone operators’ activity yields a more complicated picture.
Derek Gregory’s study of drone operators’ experience focuses on the ‘scopic regime’ that enables drone
warfare in the first place and closely examines the different types of vision and imaging that drone
operators are exposed to, from wide area airborne surveillance to the macro-field of micro-vision.24
These visibilities are conditional and conditioning because they are not merely technical feats but
‘techno-cultural accomplishments’.25 Rather than any straightforward abstracting of war into a video
game, the abstracting that takes place is convoluted and paradoxical. Contrary to common perception,
drone warfare is ‘real’ also for those staring at a screen and, as such, the reference to video games is
often simplistic. It is the immersive quality of video games, their power to draw players into their virtual
worlds, that make them potent – this is precisely why they are used in pre-deployment training.26 The
video streams from the UAV are shown to have the same immersive quality on the drone operator –
they produce the same ‘reality-effect’.

Virtual war, it seems, is less virtual than would appear at first glance. This conclusion is strengthened by
the growing realisation that drone operators suffer as high, and possibly higher, rates of post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD) as soldiers engaged in battle as a result of exposure to high-resolution images of
killing, including the details of casualties and body parts that would never be possible to capture with
the human eye.27 In other words, drone operators see more than soldiers in theatre. This is not to imply
any trivialising parallels between operating drones from afar and physical engagement in battle,
however. The view of the ‘hunter-killer’ is, in Gregory’s words, still privileged as the drone operator
empathises with his fellow comrades on the ground in Afghanistan and feels compelled to ‘protect’ and
‘help’ them by instructing to shoot.28 Ultimately, the ‘drone stare’ still furthers the subjugation of those
marked as Other.29 What is of interest to us in examining the interaction of the virtual, material and
human here, however, is that this occurs not through the experience (on the part of the drone operator)
of distance, remoteness or detachment, but rather through the ‘sense of proximity’ to ground troops
inculcated by the video feeds from the aerial platforms.30 The relationship between the fleshy body of
the drone operator and the steely body of the drone and its ever-more sophisticated optical systems
needs to be conceptualised in a way that allows for such paradoxes to be made intelligible.

Moreover, there is clearly a need to think of the study of the experience of war in new ways: if drone
operators are not as shielded from the realities of war as is generally assumed, what might they be
bringing into the wider communities of which they are part? To what extent are their experiences theirs
alone, and to what extent do we see them seeping out in a wider social corpus? In Merleau-Ponty’s
terms, can we see the body (of the drone operator) ‘literally incarnating’ material capacities for agency,
and thereby affecting the political disposition of a wider community?31 It is well established that
soldiers returning from service run a higher risk of committing domestic violence, and the US military
has an established programme for combating domestic violence.32 The high rate of PTSD amongst
drone operators points to the need for follow-up studies of how these individuals behave in their home
communities. By extension, this suggests that those interested in the experience of war need to include
consideration also of the experience of – in this case – Nevada communities amidst which drone
operators live. What such studies might yield we can only guess; yet it seems reasonable to suspect that
the complex assemblage of virtual and material experiences that drone warfare produces might have its
very own repercussions for processes and dynamics of societal militarisation and other manifestations
of members’ violent experiences set in motion by, but far exceeding, war itself. In Merleau-Ponty’s
terms, the human body is not separate from things, matter or representation; rather, ‘the flesh (of the
world or my own) is … a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself’.33 Human bodies are
‘beings-in-the-world’,34 and the material ‘reality’ of robotic warfare, like the flesh of human bodies, is
irredeemably generative. The following section will expand on how.

Agentic Capacities of Material Objects

The targeting logic of drone warfare relies on a clear objectification of people, marking and classifying
them as ‘targets’ of different ‘value’, with ‘high-value targets’ most hotly sought for capture or death,
and the more recent expansion of targeting regimes to cover what are referred to as ‘low level
fighters’.35 Advocates of decapitation strategies using drone warfare often rely on precisely such
objectification of people.36 This is interesting in terms of what is revealed of the ethical relation
between real people – in this case, seemingly allowing for the eschewal of any real encounter involving
mutual recognition and recognisability37 – and raises interesting questions about the way in which that
relation is mediated by technology.

Yet the demarcation between subject and object, between people and things, between the human and
the material, is clearly complicated in more ways than oneby drone warfare. From our discussion of the
screen’s capacity for interpellation as it ‘draws in’ and ‘captures’, we may say that the screen ‘acts’. This,
of course, is in addition to the way in which camera or video footage acts as it enables the
representability or otherwise of human beings.38 The potency of the screen (or any digital imagery) in
this regard, I want to argue, vastly exceeds ‘representation’ (though that too occurs, of course). Rather,
we ought to think of the screen’s capacity for action in a much stronger sense. As such, the force of
materiality goes far beyond what conventional approaches to matter would allow.

The power of the drone to act is thus not confined to the question of the extent to which the drone acts
‘autonomously’. To begin with, drones are already expected to act independently to some extent: the
US Army’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Roadmap 2010–2035 states that drones are expected to be able
to ‘swarm’ with a degree of autonomy and self-awareness.39 Developments towards decision-making
capabilities on the part of drones, and, crucially, their capacity to decide on attack, are no doubt
alarming and worthy of close attention,40 yet the question of whether the drone ought be seen as
‘acting’ does not reside here. Drones provide visuals of the world and human beings therein (they ‘see’
the world); drones filter the information they have in various ways (they ‘interpret’ the world through
pattern recognition, etc.) and rely on their own interpretation to provide ‘information’ about sites of
potential ‘danger’ and the human targets that personify that danger. The subject–object distinction is
called into question by the drone’s capacity to ‘see’ and ‘interpret’, in much the same way as Merleau-
Ponty invites us to eschew the subject–object distinction when examining the ‘seer’ in the form of a
seeing individual, a ‘seer’ who can never be distinguished from what he ‘sees’: ‘the seer and the visible
need no longer be ontological opposites; the horizon includes the seer and the world remains horizon
because “he who sees is of it and is in it”’.41

A phenomenological approach to agency allows us to break free from the conventional liberal
understanding of agency bound up with an ontology of rational individualism and, further, to grasp the
way in which the ability to ‘act’ is practised in various degrees across a continuum ranging from
corporeality, through partially rational embodied subjects, to impersonal structures.42 Drawing on
Coole’s notion of ‘agentic capacity’ (in turn based on Merleau-Ponty) as a property also of innate beings,
of matter, we can address the question of drone autonomy in a very different way from that which
focuses only on the ‘pull the trigger’ aspect of robotic technologies. The drone always and already ‘acts’,
as described above, and a critical materialist reading of drone warfare could, as the discussion above
illustrates, just as well focus on the agentic capacities of the screen as on the actual aerial vehicle
capturing the surveillance images or dropping the bomb. Judith Butler suggests as much in the preface
to the paperback edition of Frames of War, as she invokes drone warfare to call for new approaches to
materiality: "Of course, persons use technological instruments, but instruments surely also use persons
(position them, endow them with perspective, establish the trajectory of their action); they frame and
form anyone who enters into the visual or audible field, and, accordingly, those who do not … there can
surely be, and are, different modalities of violence and of the material instruments of violence.43 "

This step on the part of Butler is an important one, not least given her concern for the way in which
attention to the frames of war allows us to uncover a deeply set politics and ethics of viewing war and
the human beings therein. Taking into account the possibility of material objects having ‘agency’
provides space also for new conceptions of political agency.44 We may thus conceive of the drone even
as a political actor, with the crux of the argument being that drones, in fact, are ‘unbearably human’ in
the sense that they are deeply embedded within the imperial and military apparatus behind them,
though those human relations are ‘masked and mystified’. The ascription of human relations to the
steely construction of the drone is borne out in analysis of how the drone could not have been invented
or constructed other than as part of the particular apparatus of military power that envisaged their
use.45 Thus, they are ‘already’ political agents, regardless of the ‘actual’ autonomy of their decision-
making.
The Stack is wrong
Scannell, 18—teaches sociology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Hunter College (R.
Joshua, “Architectures of Managerial Triumphalism (Review of Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On
Software and Sovereignty),” https://www.boundary2.org/2018/11/r-joshua-scannell-architectures-of-
managerial-triumphalism-review-of-benjamin-bratton-the-stack-on-software-and-sovereignty/, dml)

Design, then, and not theory, because Bratton’s Stack is a speculative document . Given the bewildering and potentially
apocalyptic conditions of the present, he wants to extrapolate outwards. What are the heterotopias-to-come?

What are the constraints? What are the possibilities? Sounding a familiar frustration with the strictures of academic
labor, he argues that this moment requires something more than diagnosis and critique . Rather,

the process by which sovereignty is made more plural becomes a matter of producing more than
discoursing : more about pushing, pulling, clicking, eating, modeling, stacking, prototyping, subtracting, regulating, restoring, optimizing,
leaving alone, splicing, gardening and evacuating than about reading, examining, insisting, rethinking, reminding, knowing full-well, enacting,
finding problematic, and urging. (303)

No doubt. And, not that I don’t share the frustration, but I

wonder what a highly technical , 500-page diagnosis of the
contemporary state of software and sovereignty published and distributed by an academic press and
written for an academic audience is if not discoursing? It seems unlikely that it can serve as a
blueprint for any actually-existing power brokers , even though its insights are tremendous. At the risk of sounding cynical,
calling The Stack a “design brief” seems like a preemptive move to liberate Bratton from having to
seriously engage with the different critical traditions that work to make sense of the world as it is in
order to demand something better. This allows for a certain amount of intellectual play that can
sometimes feel exhilarating but can just as often read as a dodge—as a way of escaping the ethical
and political stakes that inhere in critique.

That is an important elision for a text that is explicitly trying to imagine the geopolitics of the future.
Bratton seems to pose The Stack from a nebulous “Left” position that is equally disdainful of the sort of
“Folk Politics” that Srnicek and Williams (2015) so loathe and the accelerationist tinge of the Speculative Realists with whom he seems
spiritually aligned. This sense of rootlessness sometimes works in Bratton’s favor. There are long stretches in which his cherry picking and
remixing ideas from across a bewildering array of schools of thought yields real insights. But just as often, the “design brief”
characterization seems to be a way out of thinking the implications of the conjuncture through to
their conclusion . There is a breeziness about how Bratton poses futures-as-thought-experiments that is troubling.
For instance, in thinking through the potential impacts of the capacity to measure planetary processes in real time, Bratton suggests that
producing a sensible world is not only a process of generalizing measurement and representation. He argues that

the sensibility of the world might be distributed or organized, made infrastructural, and activated to become part of how the landscape
understands itself and narrates itself. It is not only a diagnostic image then; it is a tool for geo-politics in formation, emerging from the
parametric multiplication and algorithmic conjugation of our surplus projections of worlds to come, perhaps in mimetic accordance with one
explicit utopian conception or another, and perhaps not. Nevertheless, the decision between what is and is not governable may arise as much
from what the model computational image cannot do as much as what it can. (301, emphasis added)

What explicit utopian project is he thinking about? What are the implications
Reading this, I wanted to know:

of it going one way and not another? Why mimetic? What does the last bit about what is and is not governable mean? Or, more
to the point: who and what is going to get killed if it goes one way and not another? There are a great many
instances like this over the course of the book. At the precise moment where analysis might inform an

understanding of where The Stack is taking us, Bratton bows out . He’s set down the stakes, and given a couple of
ideas about what might happen. I guess that’s what a design brief is meant to do.

No impact to future military tech – it’s non-unique and inevitable – but, testing and
safeguards solve.
Ackerman, 15—senior writer for IEEE Spectrum’s award-winning robotics blog, Automaton (Evan,
“We Should Not Ban ‘Killer Robots,’ and Here’s Why,”
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/we-should-not-ban-killer-robots,
dml)

The problem with this argument is that no letter, UN declaration, or even a formal ban ratified by multiple nations
is going to prevent people from being able to build autonomous, weaponized robots. The barriers
keeping people from developing this kind of system are just too low . Consider the “armed quadcopters.” Today you
can buy a smartphone-controlled quadrotor for US $300 at Toys R Us. Just imagine what you’ll be able to buy tomorrow. This technology
exists. It’s improving all the time. There’s simply too much commercial value in creating quadcopters (and
other robots) that have longer endurance, more autonomy, bigger payloads, and everything else that you’d also want in a
military system. And at this point, it’s entirely possible that small commercial quadcopters are just as advanced as (and way cheaper than)
small military quadcopters, anyway. We’re not going to stop that research, though, because everybody wants
delivery drones (among other things). Generally speaking, technology itself is not inherently good or bad: it’s what we choose to
do with it that’s good or bad, and you can’t just cover your eyes and start screaming “STOP!!!” if you see something sinister on the horizon
when there’s so much simultaneous potential for positive progress.

What we really need, then, is a way of making autonomous armed robots ethical, because we’re not going
to be able to prevent them from existing . In fact, the most significant assumption that this letter makes is that
armed autonomous robots are inherently more likely to cause unintended destruction and death than
armed autonomous humans are. This may or may not be the case right now, and either way, I genuinely
believe that it won’t be the case in the future, perhaps the very near future . I think that it will be possible for

robots to be as good (or better) at identifying hostile enemy combatants as humans, since there are
rules that can be followed (called Rules of Engagement, for an example see page 27 of this) to determine whether or not
using force is justified. For example, does your target have a weapon? Is that weapon pointed at you? Has the weapon been fired? Have
you been hit? These are all things that a robot can determine using any number of sensors that currently
exist.
It’s worth noting that Rules of Engagement generally allow for engagement in the event of an imminent attack. In other words, if a hostile
target has a weapon and that weapon is pointed at you, you can engage before the weapon is fired rather than after in the interests of self-
protection. Robots could be even more cautious than this: you could program them to not engage a hostile
target with deadly force unless they confirm with whatever level of certainty that you want that the
target is actively engaging them already. Since robots aren’t alive and don’t have emotions and don’t get tired or stressed or
distracted, it’s possible for them to just sit there, under fire, until all necessary criteria for engagement

are met. Humans can’t do this .

The argument against this is that a robot autonomously making a decision to engage a target with
deadly force, no matter how certain the robot may be, is dangerous and unethical . It is dangerous, and it may be unethical, as
well. However, is it any more dangerous or unethical than asking a human to do the same thing? The real
question that we should be asking is this: Could autonomous armed robots perform better than armed humans in

combat, resulting in fewer casualties (combatant or non-combatant) on both sides? I believe so, which doesn’t really
matter, but so do people who are actually working on this stuff, which does.

In 2009, Ronald C. Arkin, Patrick Ulam, and Brittany Duncan published a paper entitled “An Ethical Governor for Constraining Lethal Action in an
Autonomous System,” which was about how to program an armed, autonomous robot to act within the Laws of War and Rules of Engagement.
h+ Magazine interviewed Arkin on the subject (read the whole thing here), and here’s what he said:

h+: Some researchers assert that no robots or AI systems will be able to discriminate between a combatant and an innocent, that this sensing
ability currently just does not exist. Do you think this is just a short-term technology limitation? What such technological assumptions do you
make in the design of your ethical governor?

RA: I agree this discrimination technology does not effectively exist today, nor is it intended that these systems should be fielded in current
conflicts. These are for the so-called war after next, and the DoD would need to conduct extensive additional research in order to develop the
accompanying technology to support the proof-of-concept work I have developed. But I
don’t believe there is any fundamental
scientific limitation to achieving the goal of these machines being able to discriminate better than
humans can in the fog of war, again in tightly specified situations. This is the benchmark that I use, rather than perfection. But if
that standard is achieved, it can succeed in reducing noncombatant casualties and thus is a goal worth pursuing in my
estimation.

One way to think

about this is like autonomous cars. Expecting an autonomous car to keep you safe 100
percent of the time is unrealistic. But, if an autonomous car is (say) 5 percent more likely to keep you
safe than if you were driving yourself, you’d still be much better off letting it take over. Autonomous
cars, by the way, will likely be much safer than that, and it’s entirely possible that autonomous armed robots will
be, too . And if autonomous armed robots really do have at least the potential reduce casualties, aren’t we then ethically obligated to
develop them?

If there are any doubts about how effective or ethical these systems might be, just test them
exhaustively. Deploy them, load them up with blanks, and watch how they do . Will they screw up
sometimes? Of course they will, both during testing and after. But setting aside the point above about relative effectiveness, the
big
advantage of robots is that their behavior is traceable and they learn programmatically: if one robot
does something wrong, it’s possible to trace the chain of decisions that it made (decisions programmed into it by
a human, by the way) to
find out what happened. Once the error is located, it can be resolved, and you can be
confident that the robot will not make that same mistake again. Furthermore, you can update every
other robot at the same time. This is not something we can do with humans .

I do agree that there is a potential risk with autonomous weapons of making it easier to decide to use force.
But, that’s been true ever since someone realized that they could throw a rock at someone else
instead of walking up and punching them. There’s been continual development of technologies that
allow us to engage our enemies while minimizing our own risk, and what with the ballistic and cruise missiles that we’ve
had for the last half century, we’ve got that pretty well figured out. If you want to argue that autonomous drones or armed
ground robots will lower the bar even farther, then okay, but it’s a pretty low bar as is. And fundamentally,
you’re then placing the blame on technology, not the people deciding how to use the technology.
And that’s the point that I keep coming back to on this: blaming
technology for the decisions that we make involving it
is at best counterproductive and at worst nonsensical. Any technology can be used for evil, and many
technologies that were developed to kill people are now responsible for some of our greatest
achievements , from harnessing nuclear power to riding a ballistic missile into space. If you want to make the argument that this is really
about the decision to use the technology, not the technology itself, then that’s awesome. I’m totally with you. But banning the
technology is not going to solve the problem if the problem is the willingness of humans to use
technology for evil: we’d need a much bigger petition for that.

No impact to autonomous weapons – won’t be scaled up

Paul Scharre 17, Senior Fellow and director of the Technology and National Security Program at the
Center for a New American Security, 12-22-2017, "Why You Shouldn't Fear “Slaughterbots”," IEEE
Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News,
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/why-you-shouldnt-fear-slaughterbots

The “Slaughterbots” video takes this problem and blows it out of proportion, however, suggesting that
drones would be used by terrorists as robotic weapons of mass destruction, killing thousands of people
at a time. Fortunately, this nightmare scenario is about as likely to happen as HAL 9000 locking you
out of the pod bay doors. The technology shown in the video is plausible, but basically everything else
is a bunch of malarkey. The video assumes the following: Governments will mass-produce lethal
microdrones to use them as weapons of mass destruction; There are no effective defenses against lethal
microdrones; Governments are incapable of keeping military-grade weapons out of the hands of
terrorists; Terrorists are capable of launching large-scale coordinated attacks. These assumptions range
from questionable, at best, to completely fanciful. Of course, the video is fictional, and defense planners do often use
fictionalized scenarios to help policymakers think through plausible events that may occur. As a defense analyst at a think tank and in my prior
job as a strategic planner at the Pentagon, I used fictional scenarios to help inform choices about what technologies the United States military
should invest in. To be useful, however, these scenarios need to at least be plausible. They need to be something that could happen. The
scenario depicted in the “Slaughterbots” video fails to account for political and strategic realities about how governments use military
technology. First, there is no evidence that governments are planning to mass-produce small drones to kill
civilians in large numbers . In my forthcoming book, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, I examine next-
generation weapons being built in defense labs around the world. Russia, China, and the United States are all racing ahead
on autonomy and artificial intelligence. But the types of weapons they are building are generally aimed
at fighting other militaries. They are “counter-force” weapons, not “counter-value” weapons that
would target civilians . Counter-force autonomous weapons raise their own sets of concerns, but they aren’t
designed for mass targeting of civilians, nor could they be easily repurposed to do so. Second, in the
video, we’re told the drones can defeat “any countermeasure.” TV pundits scream, “We can’t defend ourselves.” This
isn’t fiction; it’s farce . Every military technology has a countermeasure, and countermeasures against
small drones aren’t even hypothetical. The U.S. government is actively working on ways to shoot down,
jam, fry, hack, ensnare, or otherwise defeat small drones. The microdrones in the video could be
defeated by something as simple as chicken wire. The video shows heavier-payload drones blasting holes through walls so
that other drones can get inside, but the solution is simply layered defenses. Military analysts look at the cost-
exchange ratio between offense and defense, and in this case, the costs heavily favor static defenders. In
a world where terrorists launch occasional small-scale attacks using DIY drones, people are unlikely to absorb the inconveniences of building
robust defenses, just like people don’t wear body armor to protect against the unlikely event of being caught in a mass shooting. But if an
enemy country built hundreds of thousands of drones to wipe out a city, you bet there’d be a run on chicken wire. The
video takes a
plausible problem—terrorist attacks with drones— and scales it up without factoring in how others
would respond . If lethal microdrones were built en masse, defenses and countermeasures would be a
national priority, and in this case the countermeasures are simple. Any weapon that can be defeated
by a net isn’t a weapon of mass destruction. Third, the video assumes that militaries are incapable of
preventing terrorists from getting access to military-grade weapons. But we don’t give terrorists hand
grenades, rocket launchers, or machine guns today. Terrorist attacks with drones are a concern
precisely because they involve DIY explosives strapped to readily available technology. This is a genuine
problem, but again the video scales this threat up in ways that are unrealistic. Even if militaries were to build
lethal microdrones, terrorists are no more likely to get their hands on large numbers of them than other
military technologies. Weapons do proliferate over time to nonstate actors in war zones, but just
because antitank guided missiles are prevalent in Syria doesn’t mean they’re commonplace in New York.
Terrorists use airplanes and trucks for attacks precisely because successfully smuggling military-grade weapons into a

Western country isn’t that easy. Fourth, the video assumes terrorists can carry out coordinated attacks
at a scale that is not plausible . In one scene, two men release a swarm of about 50 drones from the back of a van. This specific
scene is fairly realistic; one of the challenges of autonomy is that a small group of people could launch a larger attack than might otherwise be
possible. Something like a truck full of 50 drones is a reasonable possibility. Again, though, the video takes this scenario to the absurd. The
video claims that 8,300 people are killed in simultaneous attacks. If the men in the van depict a typical attack, then this level of casualties would
equate to over 160 coordinated attacks worldwide. Terrorist groups often launch coordinated attacks, but usually on the scale of single digit
numbers of attacks. The video assumes not just superweapons but ones that are in the hands of supervillains. The
movie uses hype
and fear to skip past these crucial assumptions, and in doing so it undermines any rational debate about
the risk of terrorists acquiring autonomous weapons. The video makes clear we’re supposed to be afraid.
But what are we supposed to be afraid of? A weapon that chooses its own targets (which the video is
actually ambiguous about)? A weapon with no countermeasure? The fact that terrorists can get ahold of
the weapon? The ability of autonomy to scale up attacks? If you want to drum up fears of “killer robots,”
the video is great. But as a substantive analysis of the issue, it falls apart under even the most casual
scrutiny. The video doesn’t put forward an argument. It’s sensationalist fear-mongering.

No tech accidents, no algorithmic arms race.

Michael Shermer 17. Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and
a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. 04/2017. “Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not an Existential
Threat.” Skeptic, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 29–35.

Why AI is not an Existential Threat First, most AI doomsday prophecies are grounded in the false analogy between
human nature and computer nature, or natural intelligence and artificial intelligence. We are thinking
machines, but natural selection also designed into us emotions to shortcut the thinking process because
natural intelligences are limited in speed and capacity by the number of neurons that can be crammed into a skull that has to pass through a
pelvic opening at birth, whereas artificial intelligence need not be so restricted. We don't need to compute the caloric value of foods, for
example, we just feel hungry. We don't need to calculate the waist-to-hip ratio of women or the shoulder-to-waist ratio of men in our quest for
genetically healthy potential mates; we just feel attracted to someone and mate with them. We don't need to work out the genetic cost of
raising someone else's offspring if our mate is unfaithful; we just feel jealous. We don't need to figure the damage of an unfair or non-reciprocal
exchange with someone else; we just feel injustice and desire revenge. Emotionsare proxies for getting us to act in ways that
lead to an increase in reproductive success, particularly in response to threats faced by our Paleolithic ancestors. Anger leads us to
strike out, fight back, and defend ourselves against danger. Fear causes us to pull back, retreat, and escape from risks. Disgust directs us to push
out, eject, and expel that which is bad for us. Computing the odds of danger in any given situation takes too long. We
need to react instantly . Emotions shortcut the information processing power needed by brains that would otherwise become bogged
down with all the computations necessary for survival. Their purpose, in an ultimate causal sense, is to drive behaviors
toward goals selected by evolution to enhance survival and reproduction. AIs -- even AGIs and ASIs -- will have no
need of such emotions and so there would be no reason to program them in unless, say, terrorists chose to do so for their own evil
purposes. But that's a human nature problem, not a computer nature issue. To
believe that an ASI would be "evil" in any
emotional sense is to assume a computer cognition that includes such psychological traits as acquisitiveness,
competitiveness, vengeance, and bellicosity, which seem to be projections coming from the mostly
male writers who concoct such dystopias, not features any programmer would bother including,
assuming that it could even be done. What would it mean to program an emotion into a computer?
When IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess master Garry Kasparov in 1997, did it feel triumphant , vengeful, or
Of course not. It wasn't even "aware" -- in the human sense of self-conscious knowledge -- that
bellicose?

it was playing chess, much less feeling nervous about possibly losing to the reigning world champion (which it did in
the first tournament played in 1996). In fact, toward the end of the first game of the second tournament, on the 44th move, Deep Blue made a
legal but incomprehensible move of pushing its rook all the way to the last row of the opposition side. It accomplished nothing offensively or
defensively, leading Kasparov to puzzle over it out of concern that he was missing something in the computer's strategy. It turned out to be an
error in Deep Blue's programming that led to this fail-safe default move. It was a bug that Kasparov mistook as a feature, and as a result some
chess experts contend it led him to be less confident in his strategizing and to second-guess his responses in the subsequent games. It even led
him to suspect foul play and human intervention behind Deep Blue, and this paranoia ultimately cost him the tournamentt.[ 13] Computers
don't get paranoid, the HAL 9000 computer in 2001 notwithstanding. Or consider Watson , the IBM computer built by David Ferrucci
and his team of IBM research scientists tasked with designing an AI that could rival human champions at the game of Jeopardy! This was a far
more formidable challenge than Deep Blue faced because of the prerequisite to understand language and the often multiple meanings of
words, not to mention needing an encyclopedic knowledge of trivia (Watson had access to Wikipedia for this). After beating the all-time
greatest Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011, did Watson feel flushed with pride after its victory? Did Watson even
know that it won Jeopardy!? I put the question to none other than Ferrucci himself at a dinner party in New York in conjunction with the 2011
Singularity Summit. His answer surprised me: "Yes, Watson knows it won Jeopardy!" I was skeptical. How could that be, since such
self-awareness is not yet possible in computers? "Because I told it that it won," he replied with a wry smile. Sure, and you could even

program Watson or Deep Blue to vocalize a Howard Dean-like victory scream when it wins, but that is still
a far cry from a computer
feeling triumphant. This brings to mind the "hard problem" of consciousness -- if we don't understand
how this happens in humans, how could we program it into computers? As Steven Pinker elucidated in his answer
to the 2015 Edge Question on what to think about machines that think, "AI dystopias project a parochial alpha-male
psychology onto the concept of intelligence. They assume that superhumanly intelligent robots would
develop goals like deposing their masters or taking over the world." It is equally possible , Pinker suggests,
that "artificial intelligence will naturally develop along female lines: fully capable of solving problems, but with no
desire to annihilate innocents or dominate the civilization ."[ 14] So the fear that computers will become
emotionally evil are unfounded, because without the suite of these evolved emotions it will never occur
to AIs to take such actions against us. What about an ASI inadvertently causing our extinction by turning us
into paperclips, or tiling the entire Earth's surface with solar panels? Such scenarios imply yet another emotion -- the
feeling of valuing or wanting something . As the science writer Michael Chorost adroitly notes, when humans resist an
AI from undertaking any form of global tiling, it "will have to be able to imagine counteractions and
want to carry them out." Yet, "until an AI has feelings, it's going to be unable to want to do anything at
all, let alone act counter to humanity's interests and fight off human resistance ." Further, Chorost notes, "the
minute an A.I. wants anything, it will live in a universe with rewards and punishments -- including punishments from us for behaving badly. In
order to
survive in a world dominated by humans, a nascent A.I. will have to develop a humanlike moral
sense that certain things are right and others are wrong. By the time it's in a position to imagine tiling
the Earth with solar panels, it'll know that it would be morally wrong to do so."[ 15] From here Chorost builds on an
argument made by Peter Singer in The Expanding Circle (and Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature[ 16] that I also developed in The
Moral Arc[ 17] and Robert Wright explored in Nonzero[ 18]), and that is the propensity for natural intelligence to evolve moral emotions that
include reciprocity, cooperativeness, and even altruism. Natural intelligences such as ours also includes the capacity to reason, and once you
are on Singer's metaphor of the "escalator of reason" it can carry you upward to genuine morality and concerns about harming others.
"Reasoning is inherently expansionist. It seeks universal application," Singer notes.[ 19] Chorost draws the implication: "AIs
will have to
step on the escalator of reason just like humans have, because they will need to bargain for goods in a
human-dominated economy and they will face human resistance to bad behavior ."[ 20] Finally, for an AI
to get around this problem it would need to evolve emotions on its own, but the only way for this to
happen in a world dominated by the natural intelligence called humans would be for us to allow it to
happen, which we wouldn't because there's time enough to see it coming. Bostrom's "treacherous
turn" will come with road signs ahead warning us that there's a sharp bend in the highway with enough time for us to grab the
wheel. Incremental progress is what we see in most technologies, including and especially AI, which will
continue to serve us in the manner we desire and need . Instead of Great Leap Forward or Giant Fall Backward, think
Small Steps Upward. As I proposed in The Moral Arc, instead of Utopia or dystopia, think protopia , a term coined by the
futurist Kevin Kelly, who described it in an Edge conversation this way: "I call myself a protopian, not a Utopian. I believe in progress in an
incremental way where every year it's better than the year before but not by very much -- just a micro amount."[ 21] Almost all progress in
science and technology, including computers and AI, is of a protopian nature. Rarely, if ever, do technologies lead to either Utopian or
dystopian societies. Pinker agrees that there
is plenty of time to plan for all conceivable contingencies and build
safeguards into our AI systems. "They would not need any ponderous 'rules of robotics' or some
newfangled moral philosophy to do this, just the same common sense that went into the design of
food processors , table saws , space heaters , and automobiles ." Sure, an ASI would be many orders of
magnitude smarter than these machines, but Pinker reminds us of the AI hyperbole we've been fed for
decades: "The worry that an AI system would be so clever at attaining one of the goals programmed into it (like
commandeering energy) that
it would run roughshod over the others (like human safety) assumes that AI will
descend upon us faster than we can design fail-safe precautions. The reality is that progress in AI is
hype-defyingly slow, and there will be plenty of time for feedback from incremental implementations,
with humans wielding the screwdriver at every stage."[ 22] Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt agrees, responding to the
fears expressed by Hawking and Musk this way: "Don't you think the humans would notice this, and start turning off

the computers?" He also noted the irony in the fact that Musk has invested $1 billion into a company called OpenAI that is "promoting
precisely AI of the kind we are describing."[ 23] Google's own DeepMind has developed the concept of an AI off-

switch, playfully described as a "big red button" to be pushed in the event of an attempted AI takeover. "We have proposed
a framework to allow a human operator to repeatedly safely interrupt a reinforcement learning agent while making sure the agent will not
learn to prevent or induce these interruptions," write the authors Laurent Orseau from DeepMind and Stuart Armstrong from the Future of
Humanity Institute, in a paper titled "Safely Interruptible Agents." They even suggest a precautionary scheduled shutdown every night at 2 AM
for an hour so that both humans and AI are accustomed to the idea. "Safe interruptibility can be useful to take control of a
robot that is misbehaving and may lead to irreversible consequences, or to take it out of a delicate situation, or even to temporarily
use it to achieve a task it did not learn to perform or would not normally receive rewards for this."[ 24] As well, it is good to keep in
mind that artificial intelligence is not the same as artificial consciousness. Thinking machines may not
be sentient machines. Finally, Andrew Ng of Baidu responded to Elon Musk's ASI concerns by noting (in a jab at the entrepreneur's
ambitions for colonizing the red planet) it would be "like worrying about overpopulation on Mars when we have not even set foot on the planet
yet."[ 25] Both Utopian and dystopian visions of AI are based on a projection of the future quite unlike anything history has given us. Yet, even
Ray Kurzweil's "law of accelerating returns," as remarkable as it has been has nevertheless advanced at a pace that has allowed for
considerable ethical deliberation with appropriate checks and balances applied to various technologies along the way. With time, evenif an
unforeseen motive somehow began to emerge in an AI we would have the time to reprogram it before
it got out of control. That is also the judgment of Alan Winfield, an engineering professor and co-author of the Principles of Robotics, a
list of rules for regulating robots in the real world that goes far beyond Isaac Asimov's famous three laws of robotics (which were, in any case,
designed to fail as plot devices for science fictional narratives).26 Winfield points out that all of these doomsday scenarios depend
on a long sequence of big ifs to unroll sequentially: "If we succeed in building human equivalent AI and if that AI acquires a
full understanding of how it works, and if it then succeeds in improving itself to produce super-intelligent AI, and if that super-AI, accidentally or
maliciously, starts to consume resources, and if we fail to pull the plug, then, yes, we may well have a problem. The risk, while not
impossible, is improbable ."[ 27]

It’s a nonsense theory with no explanatory power OR solvency.

Hettlinger, 65—chaplain at Kenyon College (Richard, “In the Dream Time,” The Christian Scholar, Vol.
48, No. 3 (FALL, 1965), pp. 252-256, dml)

I have been suspicious of the noosphere and the Omega Point ever since Teilhard in The Phenomenon of Man made the
claim that he was writing in strictly scientific terms and disclaimed any attempt to produce metaphysics or theology. In the
present volume he makes the disarming confession that "Despite the number and importance of the facts that it explains, the theory of
Noogenesis is still far from having established itself as a stronghold in the scientific field" (p. 78). But this must surely
be the understatement of the decade! Not only is the idea of a noosphere "outside and above the biosphere"
encircling the earth like a "new skin" (The Phenomenon of Man, pp. 182, 205) highly speculative and beyond
scientific examination; even within the sphere of normal scientific theory Teilhard commits himself to views
from which the great majority of authorities strongly dissent . And he does so for reasons which can hardly
commend his views to responsible scientists . In this volume, for example, his basic thesis is shown to depend
entirely upon the inheritance of acquired characteristics : "Every living being passes on to his successor the being he
himself inherited, not merely diversified but accentuated in a given direction, according to the line to which he belongs" (p. 26). The author
recognizes that many
biologists (he might have said almost all outside the Soviet Union) flatly deny such transmission. But his
reasons for adopting a position admittedly lacking in convincing evidence make it all too clear that his
science is subordinated to a priori philosophical interests : The prevailing scientific position is, he says, "a highly
improbable hypothesis, having the grave disadvantage that it deprives the individual of all responsibility in the development of the race or the
particular branch of which he is a parť (p. 29, my italics). But what
sort of science is it that arrives at conclusions
regarding the operation of physical laws on the basis of their appropriateness to social or ethical
considerations?

This tendency to claim objective support for what are, in fact, philosophical or speculative
assumptions is even more objectionable when the method is used to provide pseudo-scientific foundations for the
belief in the inevitability of progress. Teilhard does not indeed believe that the progress of any particular indi- vidual or group is inevitable.
There is a "Grand Option" before us: we can with- draw and be swept away (p. 24), or we can identify ourselves with the irresistible movement
toward the "higher state of consciousness" and thus conform to "the secret processes of the world of which we are a part" (p. 49). What we
cannot do is to destroy or divert the process of unification: "To the enlightened observer it is perfectly apparent that we could more easily
prevent the earth from turning than Mankind from progressing, laboriously but inexorably, in a two-fold conjoined movement towards a
personalising totalisation" (p. 239). And this confidence is given an aura of scientific respectability because Teilhard confuses social
evolution and biological evolution. He fails to distinguish , in Max Scheler's phrase, between "sciences of the
person" and "sciences of phenomena": "The fact of organo- psychic development seems to be clearly manifest in Collective
Man: and this, whatever we may think of it, represents as true an advance as the acquisition of an added convolution by the brain"' (p. 69, my
italics). The fallacy lies in the assump- tion that the advances of society become a permanent
endowment of the species, as a physical adaptation does in biological evolution once it has been
selected. But the evidence is all the other way. Civilizations die and much, if not all, of their advance is
reversed . Hitler came perilously close to wiping out the western heritage of personal freedom and respect for human rights. Teilhard is
perfectly entitled to his hope that the threat of destruction by nuclear war will prevent a holocaust; but to claim that there are permanent and
irrevocable guarantees against disaster built into the structure of the noosphere is both factually unproven and (if incorrect) practically
dangerous. Mankind, he writes, "by its very structure cannot fail eventually to achieve peace" (p. 152). And the reasons for this dogmatic
affirma- tion are two:

The first, which we all know and long for, is that the very excess of destructive power placed in our hands must render all armed conflict
impossible. But what is even more important, though we have thought less about it, is that war will be eliminated at its source in our hearts
because, compared with the vast field for conquest which science has disclosed to us, its triumphs will soon appear trivial and outmoded (p.
147).