Impact - Hege Good - GB

heg good – golden bears
Impacts
Impact – Laundry List (Brands)
Primacy prevents great-power conflict — multipolar revisionism fragments the global
order and causes nuclear war.
Brands & Edel, 19 — Hal Brands; PhD, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies. Charles Edel; PhD, Senior Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the United States Studies Centre at the
University of Sydney. (“The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 6: Darkening Horizon; Published by Yale University
Press; //GrRv)
Each of these geopolitical challenges is different, and each reflects the distinctive interests, ambitions, and history of the country
undertaking it. Yet there is growing cooperation between the countries that are challenging the
regional pillars of the U.S.-led order. Russia and China have collaborated on issues such as energy,
sales and development of military technology, opposition to additional U.S. military deployments on the Korean peninsula, and
naval exercises from the South China Sea to the Baltic. In Syria, Iran provided the shock troops that helped keep
Russia’s ally, Bashar al-Assad, in power, as Moscow provided the air power and the diplomatic cover. “Our
cooperation can isolate America,” supreme leader Ali Khamenei told Putin in 2017. More broadly, what links these
challenges together is their opposition to the constellation of power, norms, and relationships
that the U.S.-led order entails, and in their propensity to use violence, coercion, and intimidation as means
of making that opposition effective. Taken collectively, these challenges constitute a geopolitical sea
change from the post-Cold War era.
The revival of great-power competition entails higher international tensions than the world has known for decades,
and the revival of arms races, security dilemmas, and other artifacts of a more dangerous past. It
entails sharper conflicts over the international rules of the road on issues ranging from freedom of navigation to the
illegitimacy of altering borders by force, and intensifying competitions over states that reside at the
intersection of rival powers’ areas of interest. It requires confronting the prospect that rival powers could
overturn the favorable regional balances that have underpinned the U.S.-led order for decades,
and that they might construct rival spheres of influence from which America and the liberal ideas it has long
promoted would be excluded. Finally, it necessitates recognizing that great-power rivalry could lead to great-power
war, a prospect that seemed to have followed the Soviet empire onto the ash heap of history.
Both Beijingand Moscow are, after all, optimizing their forces and exercising aggressively in
preparation for potential conflicts with the United States and its allies; Russian doctrine explicitly
emphasizes the limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve escalation dominance in a war with Washington. In Syria,
U.S. and Russian forces even came into deadly contact in early 2018. American airpower decimated a contingent of
government-sponsored Russian mercenaries that was attacking a base at which U.S. troops were present, an incident demonstrating the
increasing boldness of Russian operations and the corresponding potential for escalation. The world has not yet returned to the epic
clashes for global dominance that characterized the twentieth century, but it has returned to the historical norm of
great-power struggle, with all the associated dangers.
Those dangers may be even greater than most observers appreciate, because if today’s great-power competitions are still most intense at
the regional level, who is to say where these competitions will end? By all appearances, Russia
does not simply want to be a
“regional power” (as Obama cuttingly described it) that dominates South Ossetia and Crimea.37 It aspires to the deep
European and extra-regional impact that previous incarnations of the Russian state enjoyed. Why else
would Putin boast about how far his troops can drive into Eastern Europe? Why else would Moscow be deploying military
power into the Middle East? Why else would it be continuing to cultivate intelligence and military
relationships in regions as remote as Latin America?
Likewise, China is today focused primarily on securing its own geopolitical neighborhood, but its
ambitions for tomorrow are clearly much bolder. Beijing probably does not envision itself fully overthrowing the
international order, simply because it has profited far too much from the U.S.-anchored global economy. Yet China has nonetheless
positioned itself for a global challenge to U.S. influence. Chinese military forces are deploying ever
farther from China’s immediate periphery; Beijing has projected power into the Arctic and established
bases and logistical points in the Indian Ocean and Horn of Africa. Popular Chinese movies depict Beijing replacing
Washington as the dominant actor in sub-Saharan Africa—a fictional representation of a real-life effort long under way. The Belt and
Road Initiative bespeaks an aspiration to link China to countries throughout Central Asia, the Middle
East, and Europe; BRI, AIIB, and RCEP look like the beginning of an alternative institutional architecture to rival Washington’s. In
2017, Xi Jinping told the Nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that Beijing could
now “take center stage in the world” and act as an alternative to U.S. leadership.38
These ambitions may or may not be realistic. But they demonstrate just how significantly the world’s leading authoritarian powers desire
to shift the global environment over time. The revisionism we are seeing today may therefore be only the beginning. As
China’s power continues to grow, or if it is successful in dominating the Western Pacific, it will surely
move on to grander endeavors. If Russia reconsolidates control over the former Soviet space, it may seek to bring parts of the
former Warsaw Pact to heel. Historically, this has been a recurring pattern of great-power behavior—interests
expand with power, the appetite grows with the eating, risk-taking increases as early gambles are seen
to pay off.39 This pattern is precisely why the revival of great-power competition is so concerning—because geopolitical
revisionism by unsatisfied major powers has so often presaged intensifying international conflict,
confrontation, and even war. The great-power behavior occurring today represents the warning light flashing on the dashboard. It
tells us there may be still-greater traumas to come.
The threats today are compelling and urgent, and there may someday come a time when the balance of power has shifted so markedly
that the postwar international system cannot be sustained. Yet that moment of failure has not yet arrived, and so the goal of U.S. strategy
should be not to hasten it by giving up prematurely, but to push it off as far into the future as possible. Rather than
simply
acquiescing in the decline of a world it spent generations building, America should aggressively bolster its
defenses, with an eye to preserving and perhaps even selectively advancing its remarkable
achievements.
A receding US deterrent is a catalyst for great-power conflict — decline causes

transition wars and miscalculation. <<Note—The first part of this card helps
set up realism and AT: Ks very well—you can most likely exclude it
otherwise>>
University of Sydney. (“The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 7: Rediscovering Tragedy; Published by Yale University
Press; //GrRv)
Moreover, if
discussions of “international order” can quickly take on an abstract quality, the consequences
of collapse—the lives lost or ruptured, the prosperity destroyed, the moral depravities committed—can be
frighteningly concrete. Thucydides had it right when he described what happens in such a vacuum of security and morality:
“Death thus raged in every shape … there was no length to which violence did not go.”3
This is all indisputably depressing, but it should not be the least bit surprising. If it were possible to construct an international system that
was truly universal in its appeal; if it were possible to freeze global power relationships at that moment of creation; if
it were possible
for states to put aside the very human ambitions, emotions, and fears that drive their behavior: then,
perhaps, the world could permanently escape the competitive impulses that make international orders
impermanent and their demise so traumatic. But none of this has ever been possible. International
orders, even the most inclusive ones, create winners and losers because they benefit states unequally.
The power balances that underpin a given system shift over time, encouraging new tests of strength. And
although the human desire for peace and prosperity is strong, countries also remain motivated by ideological passion, greed,
and insecurity. The most successful orders can mitigate the effects of these dynamics; they can suppress the
sources of conflict and upheaval. But they cannot eliminate them entirely.
This point is essential in considering the trajectory of the post-1945 order. It

is tempting for individuals in nearly every
geopolitical era to believe that their world is somehow different—that it is immune to the dangers of
conflict and collapse. It is alluring to think that progress can be self-sustaining, and that liberal
principles can triumph even if liberal actors are no longer preeminent. To do so, however, is to fall prey to the same
ahistorical mindset that so predictably precedes the fall. Yes, the American order is exceptional in the level of stability,
prosperity, and liberal dominance it has provided, and in the level of consent it has generated from countries around the
world. Yet it is not so exceptional as to be exempt from the dangers of decline and decay. As the Greeks surely
would have realized, in fact, it is precisely when one succumbs to the illusion that tragedy is impossible that tragedy becomes all the
more likely.
II
This leads to a second component of a tragic sensibility—an appreciation that tragedy is once again stalking global affairs. The U.S.-led system is
undoubtedly strong and resilient in many respects, as shown by the simple fact that it has survived as long as it has. Yet what endured in the
past is not destined to endure in the future, and today the structure is groaning as the stresses mount.
Long-standing principles such as nonaggression and freedom of navigation are being undermined from
Eastern Europe to the South China Sea . International predators like North Korea and radical jihadist groups are using
creative, asymmetric strategies to cause geopolitical disruption out of all proportion to their material power. The democratic wave has
receded amid the growing prevalence and power of authoritarianism. Revisionist
autocracies are reshaping regional
environments in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, and waging sophisticated assaults against the
political systems and geopolitical positions of their competitors. These countries are building privileged
spheres of influence in critical areas of the globe; they are casting ever longer shadows, both strategic and ideological,
across the international landscape. Meanwhile, the countries with the most to lose should the current system crack are too often divided
and demoralized; their strategic torpor and distraction are creating vacuums that the revisionists are all too happy to fill. The protectors
of the post-1945 order seem stuck in neutral, or even reverse, as the attackers push forward. This has historically been a dangerous
combination.
Faced with this daunting panorama, some analysts will take refuge in the hope that these challenges
will simply exhaust themselves, or that revisionist powers will be satiated once their regional ambitions
are fulfilled. Yet most systems tend toward more, rather than less, entropy over time, meaning that
more, rather than less, energy is required to stabilize them. And revisionist powers rarely reach some
natural point at which their aspirations subside; those aspirations often grow with each success.4 Today,
the dissatisfied dictatorships, especially Russia and China, see themselves as being locked in a form of geopolitical
conflict with the United States; they are already using force and other types of coercion to chip away at the
American order. Should they succeed in claiming regional primacy and reestablishing a spheres-of-
influence world, the result would be not to dampen but to inflame international conflict. Competition
among the great powers would intensify as hostile spheres rub up against one another; the security of
the global commons—the foundation of international prosperity—would be threatened by escalating
geopolitical rivalry. The prospects for self-determination and liberalism would fade as small states fall under the sway of stronger,
authoritarian neighbors. And crucially, as Daniel Twining notes, regional dominance could serve as a “springboard for
global contestation”—for the renewed clashes for systemic dominance that Americans thought they had left
behind with the end of the Cold War.5
It is impossible to predict precisely when the pressures on the existing order might become unbearable, or to know how close we are to
that critical inflection point at which the dangers metastasize and the pace of decay dramatically accelerates. One can only speculate
what the terminal crisis of the system will look like if and when it occurs. What is clear is that the telltale signs of erosion are
already ubiquitous and the trend-lines are running in the wrong direction. The first step toward recovery is
admitting you have a problem. Having a tragic sensibility requires seeing the world for what it is and where it is going, especially when
the outlook is ominous.
III
If the international order is under strain, however, it does not follow that its collapse is unavoidable. Here a third
aspect of a tragic sensibility is vital: the ability to reject complacency without falling into fatalism.
Nietzsche defined tragic pleasure as the “reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death.”6 It was just such a rejection of fatalism—of
the belief that the next great global crackup was inevitable—that motivated U.S. policymakers to create the post-1945 order and sustain
it through the crises that followed. Today, it is true enough that the grandest aspirations of the post–Cold War era are unlikely to be
fulfilled anytime soon. Given the instability and revisionism roiling the international environment, it is simply beyond America’s power—
if it was ever possible in the first place—to create a truly global order in which liberal values are universal, geopolitical competition has
ceased, and authoritarian rivals have been fully pacified and converted into “responsible stakeholders.” Yet the existing international
order, incomplete and threatened as it is, still constitutes a remarkable historical achievement. The
creation of a global balance
of power that favors the democracies, the prevention of unchecked aggression and intimidation by predatory
powers, and the promotion of a prosperous and an integrated world in which liberal values have achieved
great prevalence are all triumphs worth preserving. A more reasonable goal, then, would be to defend
this existing order against the depredations of those attacking it, and America undoubtedly has the
power for this essential undertaking.
Military primacy solves economic growth, prolif, and great-power war.

University of Sydney. (“The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 5: The Contemporary Amnesia; Published by Yale
University Press; //GrRv)
As William Wohlforth has noted, American primacy and activism acted as a powerful deterrent to great-power
conflict by creating enormous disincentives for Russia, China, or other actors to incur the “focused
enmity” of the United States.11 The persistence and even extension of the U.S. security blanket smothered
potential instability in unsettled regions such as Eastern Europe, while removing any possibility of German or
Japanese revanchism—a prospect much feared in the early 1990s—by keeping those countries tightly lashed to
Washington. American intervention helped extinguish bloody conflicts in the Balkans before they could spread
to neighboring countries; U.S. diplomatic and military pressure kept aggressive tyrannies such as Iraq, Iran, and
North Korea bottled up and helped slow the spread of nuclear weapons. U.S. support helped democratic forces
triumph in countries from Haiti to Poland, as the number of democracies rose from 76 in 1990 to 120 in 2000; America crucially
assisted the advance of globalization and the broad prosperity that came with it by promoting pro-
market policies and providing the necessary climate of reassurance and stability.12
Impact – LIO
American military power is key to prevent nuclear war and uphold the liberal order.
Kagan, 18 — Robert Kagan; PhD, Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. (9-18-2018;
“The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World;” pg. 160-162; Published by Alfred A. Knopf; //GrRv)
What is likely to follow is a return to the multipolar

power struggles that brought so much devastation to the world
before the United States redirected the course of history. That is where the deep ruts lead, back to the state
of the world prior to 1945. Only this time, the powers competing and clashing will be armed with nuclear
weapons. It is ironic that some of those who spent the Cold War warning that America’s hawkish foreign policies would result in nuclear
holocaust do not seem to fear nuclear war in the competitive multipolar world that may be our future. We have yet to test the question of
whether nations with nuclear weapons can go to war, because so far the
United States and the liberal world order have
prevented such wars. But if history is any guide, to count on the horror of new weaponry alone to
maintain the peace is a most risky bet. Had you cast that bet before the two world wars, you would have lost. These days some
experts tell us it was the existence of nuclear weapons that prevented the United States and the Soviet Union from coming to blows, but few at
the time had any confidence that nuclear weapons were a guarantor of peace. Throughout much of the Cold War there were those who simply
assumed that the world was heading inevitably toward Armageddon. They were wrong that it would come as a result of American Cold War
policies, but in the long run they may still prove right.
These are the quandaries we cannot avoid no matter how hard we try. Reinhold Niebuhr believed that what he called
“the world
problem” could not be solved if America did not “accept its full share of responsibility in solving it.”187
To support a “world community beyond our own borders” he went on, both was virtuous and reflected a “prudent understanding of our own
interests.” But he also predicted that Americans would be “the poorer for the global responsibilities which we
bear.” And poorer not just in a material sense but also in a moral sense. It was impossible “to build a community without the manipulation of
power,” and it was impossible “to use power and remain completely ‘pure.’ ”188 As Hans Morgenthau put it, “Whoever wants to retain his
moral innocence must forsake action altogether.” Niebuhr did not want Americans to have an “easy conscience” about the things they were
going to have to do, for there was always the danger that they would enjoy power too much and would use it to dominate others rather than to
address the “world problem.” But he also did not want their “uneasy conscience” to “tempt us into irresponsibility.”189
Americans, it is fair to say, have not enjoyed power too much. These days, they would prefer to wield it less. Yet the struggle for power in the
international system is eternal, and so is the struggle over beliefs and ideals. If it is not our system of security and our beliefs shaping the world
order, it will be someone else’s. If
we do not preserve the liberal order, it will be replaced by another kind of order, or
more likely by disorder
and chaos of the kind we saw in the twentieth century. That is what the world “as it is” looks like. That is
what history and human nature have led to in the past and will lead to in the future if not continually
shaped, managed, and resisted.
This is a pessimistic view of human existence, but it is not a fatalistic view. Nothing is determined, not the triumph of
liberalism nor its defeat. As we have seen these past seventy-five years, even in a dangerous world tremendous human progress and
human betterment are possible. The “better angels” of human nature can be encouraged and the demons dampened. To
know that the jungle will always be there is not to despair of keeping it at bay, as we have done for decades. In 1956 the German American
historian Fritz Stern wrote that “the deepening of our historical experiences” should not lead us to abandon our faith in “the possibilities of
human progress” but rather to “a stronger sense of the precariousness of human freedom and to a still greater dedication to it.”190 The
liberal order is as precarious as it is precious. It is a garden that needs constant tending lest the jungle
grow back and engulf us all.
Impact – Alliance Filter
A strong alliance network is an impact filter — solves great-power war, growth, and
democracy.
University of Sydney. (“The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 7: Rediscovering Tragedy; Published by Yale University
Press; //GrRv)
What’s true for America is equally true for its broader coalition of like-minded states. In geopolitics as in many things, there
is great
strength in numbers. Yet that strength will hold only if the supporters of the international order lock
arms and commit fully to its defense. Preventing great-power war and international aggression,
promoting an open global economy that averts depression and privation, upholding democracy and human
rights in the face of authoritarian resurgence, and defending liberal norms that are being assaulted are goals that
can be achieved only through strong partnerships and collective effort. If the democracies are divided, the autocracies will
exploit those divisions; if America and its allies struggle to achieve unity of action, they will be
outmaneuvered or overawed by revisionist powers. The trend in today’s environment is, in many ways,
toward greater fragmentation within what was once called the “free world.” But a tragic mindset requires understanding that
greater coordination and solidarity is required if that free world is to prosper.
For defenders of the international order, then, the

question is not whether such coordination and solidarity is
desirable, but how it can best be achieved. Here there is no escaping the centrality of American
leadership. It is fair enough to point out that America pays a disproportionate share of the costs of sustaining an order that benefits so
many. It is entirely reasonable, at a time when threats are rising and challenges multiplying, to demand that collective sacrifices be distributed
more evenly, if only because Americans themselves will tire of supporting that order if they feel that they are doing it alone. To put the matter
baldly, Americans will not be forever willing to send their sons and daughters to die for NATO if some of the richest countries in that alliance
refuse to field minimally capable militaries of their own.
What Americans must remember, though, is that the strong collective measures required to preserve the
international order are far more likely to emerge when America itself is fully committed. Allies and
partners will be more willing to run risks and confront revisionist powers if they are assured of U.S.
support than if they doubt it. An Asia-Pacific without American leadership would not be a region better
positioned to resist Chinese expansionism; it would be a weaker and more divided region, increasingly at
Beijing’s mercy. Likewise, supporters of free markets and democracy are more likely to stand up for those arrangements if the world’s
preeminent free-market democracy is in the vanguard; collective action to meet the greatest global challenges will
materialize more successfully if the United States acts as the convener. America was “the one nation
that has the necessary political, military, and economic instruments at our disposal to catalyze a
successful collective response,” James Baker said during the Persian Gulf crisis in 1990; no other nation can play this
role, even today.13 Finally, Americans must keep in mind that if Washington pursues protectionist economic policies that impoverish its
partners, if it forsakes the liberal principles that have formed the ideological core of its alliances, if it extorts tribute from its allies like some
mafia protection racket, then it will lose the attractive power that allowed it to lead such formidable coalitions in the first place. America
endures its share of inequities and burdens in the service of global order. Yet as a tragic sensibility reminds us, some burdens are tolerable
because they help prevent something far, far worse.
--xt Alliances Stable Now
Allies are reassured now — Trump’s rhetoric is irrelevant.
Lanoszka, 19 — Alexander Lanoszka, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo, has held fellowships at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College. (“Alliances and Nuclear Proliferation in the Trump Era;” The Washington
Quarterly; 41:4; pg. 86; //GrRv)
In this essay, I argue that security

guarantees to U.S. allies are adequate, and will remain so in the foreseeable
future, for deterring allied nuclear proliferation. Abandonment fears have undoubtedly intensified with
the Trump administration, but not to such an extent that nuclear proliferation appears highly likely. Specifically,
the United States still provides deterrence-by-denial capabilities—that is, the capabilities to attrite, if not to defeat, adversaries in defensive
battles—to key allies through its overseas deployments and military planning. It does not depend solely on extended nuclear deterrence or the
threat of nuclear punishment to dissuade potential adversaries from attacking its allies.
Accordingly, allied
states do not rely on the rhetoric of the White House alone to gauge the strength of
their received security guarantees. They also refer to what is happening operationally at the military
level. That is not to say that rhetoric is unimportant, but it is a noisy signal of intentions and can be
interpreted in multiple ways since it can service domestic consumption or even intra-alliance
bargaining over burden sharing. When worrisome rhetoric becomes operational reality, states would be
more likely to get so alarmed as to consider seriously the nuclear option. Yet, such historical moments
are rare: they have occurred only during the Eisenhower (1953-1961) and Nixon administrations (1969-1974), when global nuclear
nonproliferation rules and various enforcement mechanisms were in their infancy.6
Yes Revisionism
1NC – Arm Sales
Russia, China, and Iran are becoming increasingly revisionist, and only containment
policies solve
Mandelbaum 19
[Michael is Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “The New Containment:
Handling Russia, China, and Iran” Oxford University Press. March-April 2019, Accessed
6/24/19. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2019-02-12/new-containment ,
HH-SKS]
The quarter century following the Cold War was the most peaceful in modern history. The world's strongest powers did not I fight one another or even think much about doing so. They did not, on the whole, prepare for war, anticipate war, or conduct negotiations and political maneuvers
In the last several years,

with the prospect of war looming in the background. As U.S. global military hegemony persisted, the possibility of developed nations fighting one another seemed ever more remote. Then history began to change course.
three powers have launched active efforts to revise security arrangements in their respective regions.
Russia has invaded Crimea and other parts of Ukraine and has tried covertly to destabilize European
democracies. China has built artificial island fortresses in international waters, claimed vast swaths of the
western Pacific, and moved to organize Eurasia economically in ways favorable to Beijing. And the
Islamic Republic of Iran has expanded its influence over much of Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen and is
pursuing nuclear weapons. This new world requires a new American foreign policy . Fortunately, the country's own not-so-distant past can offer
During the Cold War, the United States chose to contain the Soviet Union, successfully deterring its
guidance.
military aggression and limiting its political influence for decades. The United States should apply
containment once again, now to Russia, China, and Iran. The contemporary world is similar enough to its
mid-twentieth-century predecessor to make that old strategy relevant but different enough that it
needs to be modified and updated. a new containment policy offers the best chance to
While success is not guaranteed,
defend American interests in the twenty-first century. MICHAEL MANDELBAUM is Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies and the author of The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford University Press, 2019), from which this essay is adapted. March/April 2019 123 Michael Mandelbaum Now as before, the possibility of armed conflict exerts a major influence on the foreign policies of the
The Cold War divided the world into rival camps, with regions and even
United States and countries throughout Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
countries split in two. Today, similar cleavages are developing, with each revisionist power seeking its
own sphere of influence separate from the larger U.S.-backed global order. revisionist powers are Now as before, the
dictatorships that challenge American values as well as American interests. They seek to overturn
political, military, and economic arrangements the United States helped establish long ago and has
supported ever since. Should Vladimir Putin's Russia succeed in reasserting control over parts of the
former Soviet Union, Xi Jinping's China gain control over maritime commerce in the western Pacific, or
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's Iran dominate the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf, the United States, its allies,
and the global order they uphold would suffer a major blow. But today's circumstances differ from those of the past in several important ways. During most of the Cold War,
Washington must cope with three separate adversaries,

con fronted a single powerful opponent, the Soviet Union—the leader of the international communist movement. Now it
each largely independent of the other two. Russia and China cooperate, but they also compete with each other. And
both have good relations with Iran, both also have large and potentially restive Muslim populations,
while
giving them reason to worry about the growth of Iranian power and influence . Cold War containment was a single global undertaking, implemented
Contemporary containment will involve three separate regional initiatives, implemented in

regionally.
coordination. The Soviet Union, moreover, presented a strong ideological challenge, devoted as it was to advancing not just Moscow's geopolitical interests but also its communist principles. Neither Russia nor China has such a crusading ideology today. Russia has
abandoned communism completely, and China has done so partially, retaining the notion of party supremacy but shedding most of the economics and the messianic zeal. And although the Islamic Republic represents a cause and not just a stretch of territory, the potential appeal of its
ideology is largely limited to the Muslim world and, primarily, its Shiite minority. None of today's revisionist powers possesses the Soviet Union's fearsome military capabilities. Russia is a shrunken version of its older FOREIGN AFFAIRS The New Containment BW wwwwwwwwwwwww
WOW WES HE www Wees EN Eye in the sky: a U.S. Navy helicopter in the South China Sea, October 2015 self militarily, and Iran lacks formidable modern military forces. China's economic growth may ultimately allow it to match the United States in all strategic dimensions and pose a true
peer threat, but to date, Beijing is concentrating on developing forces to exclude the United States from the western Pacific, not to project power globally. Moreover, the initiatives each has launched so far-Russia's seizure of Crimea and Middle East meddling, China's island building, Iran's
regional subversion-have been limited probes rather than all-out assaults on the existing order. Lastly, the Soviet Union was largely detached from the U.S.-centered global economy during the Cold War, whereas today's revisionist powers are very much a part of it. Russia and Iran have
relatively small economies and export mostly energy, but China has the world's second largest economy, with deep, wide, and growing connections to countries everywhere. Economic interdependence will complicate containment. China, for example, may be a political and military rival,
but it is also a crucial economic partner. The United States depends on China to finance U.S. NAVY / REUTERS March April 2019 125 Michael Mandelbaum its deficits. China depends on the United States to buy its exports. Containment in Asia will thus require other policies as well,
because although a Chinese military collapse would enhance Asian security, a Chinese economic collapse would bring economic disaster.
Decreasing US arms sales signals withdrawal and functionally ends our containment of
Russia, China, and Iran – without military coercion, the US can’t check revisionist
powers
Mandelbaum 19
[Michael is Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “The New Containment:
Handling Russia, China, and Iran” Oxford University Press. March-April 2019, Accessed
6/24/19. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2019-02-12/new-containment,
HH-SKS]
Together, these differences make today's containment a less urgent challenge than its Cold War predecessor. The United States does not have
to deal with a single mortal threat from a country committed to remaking the entire world in its own image. It must address three serious but
lesser challenges, mounted by countries seeking not heaven on earth but greater regional power and autonomy. But if today's challenges are
less epic, they are far more complicated. The old containment was simple, if not easy. The new containment will have to blend a
variety of policies, carefully coordinated with one another in design and execution. This will tax the
ingenuity and flexibility of the United States and its allies. STRONGER TOGETHER As during the Cold War,
containment today requires American military deployments abroad. In Europe, ground troops are
needed to deter Russian aggression. The Putin regime has already sent forces into Georgia and Ukraine.
The United States is committed to protecting its NATO allies. These include the Baltic states, tiny
countries on Russia's border. By defending them, the United States could encounter some of the same difficulties it did defending
West Berlin, including, in the worst case, having to decide whether to bring nuclear weapons into play rather than accept military defeat. East
Asia requires a robust U.S. naval presence to fend off China's campaign to dominate the western Pacific.
The United States is committed to protecting allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and
maintaining open sea-lanes, and it conducts what it calls “freedom of-navigation operations” in
international waters newly claimed by China to make clear that the rest of the world does not accept
Chinese claims and Chinese dominance there. And in the Middle East, American naval and air forces are
needed to safeguard shipments of Persian Gulf oil to Europe and Asia and to support a successful
rollback of the Iranian nuclear program, should that become necessary. American troops on the ground
are not re quired; it is local forces that must check Iranian efforts at regional subversion (which are
carried out by local militias). FOREIGN AFFAIRS The New Containment Diplomatically, Washington needs to
maintain or assemble broad coalitions of local powers to oppose each revisionist challenge. In Europe,
NATO was created to carry out this very mission and so should be the pillar of the United States'
strategy there. In Asia and the Middle East, the "hub and spoke” pattern of American Cold War alliances
still exists, even as regional powers have begun to collaborate among themselves. Working with
partners exploits Washington's greatest strength: its ability to attract allies and create powerful
coalitions against isolated opponents. Coordinating with other countries also endows American foreign policy with a legitimacy it
would otherwise lack, showing that the United States is not simply acting for itself but defending broad principles of international order that
many others support. The
dependence of the revisionists on access to the global economy gives the United
States and its coalition partners a potential source of leverage. Washington and its allies have tried to
exploit this through sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, tariffs on China for its trade practices,
and sanctions on Iran for its nuclear weapons program. But interdependence cuts both ways. Russia has
tried to pressure Ukraine by restricting Ukrainian access to Russian energy. China has placed targeted
embargoes on Japan and Norway to express displeasure with specific Japanese and Norwegian policies.
Moreover, economic instruments have at best a mixed record in achieving political goals; the broader
the sanctioning coalition is, the greater its impact will be. MAKING IT OFFICIAL The prospect of a twenty-first-century
triple containment strategy raises several questions. Since the United States is already doing much of what is required, how much change in
American foreign policy is needed? Is it necessary or feasible to confront all three revisionist powers at once? And how does all this end? As for
the first, explicitly committing the United States to containment would build on many existing policies while reframing them as part of a
coherent national strategy rather than the products of inertia or inattention. A public commitment to containment would enhance the
credibility of American deterrence and lower the chance of opportunistic attacks by opponents hoping for easy gains (as happened in Korea in
1950 and Iraq in 1990). That, in turn, would reassure actual and potential allies and increase their willingness to join the effort. March/April
2019 127 Michael Mandelbaum Adopting containment as a strategic frame would also help restrain Washington's occasional impulses to do
more (try to transform other societies) or less (retreat from global engagement altogether). As for confronting all three at once, geopolitical
logic and historical experience suggest that reducing the number of threats is the best course, as the United States did by joining with the Soviet
Union to defeat the Nazis and then aligning with Mao Zedong's China to defeat the Soviet Union. Post-Soviet Russia would have been a natural
partner for the West. But Moscow was needlessly alienated from its logical geopolitical partnership by NATO expansion, which brought foreign
armies to its doorstep over its objections. At this point, all three revisionist regimes rely for domestic support on nationalist hostility to the
United States specifically and Western democracies more generally and reject being part of a U.S.-led coalition. Fortunately, Russia is much
weaker than the Soviet Union, China is restrained by both deterrence and the knowledge that military conflict would damage its economy, and
Iran is a regional power. So the United States can afford to pursue the containment of all three simultaneously (so long as it does so as part of
robust coalitions). Cold War containment was an open-ended policy with a hoped-for eventual outcome. The same will be true for the new
version: the policy should continue as long as the threats it is intended to counter continue, and ideally it will end similarly. Constructive regime
change, for example, especially the advent of democracy, would alter the foreign policy orientations of the revisionist powers. Such a change
would have to come about through internal processes and is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Still, none of the regimes can be confident of its
longevity; repeated outbreaks of political turbulence over the years have shown that each faces significant domestic opposition, maintains itself
in power through coercion, and fears its people rather than trusts them. Situations like that can shift rapidly. A well-executed policy of
containment could increase the chances of disruption by creating an external context that would encourage it. But when or, indeed, if it would
bear fruit is impossible to predict. BEWARE OF FREE RIDERS
1NC/2AC – Russia Revisionism Bad
Maintaining US military influence is key to preventing Russia from fulfilling their
revisionist goals – Poland uniquely proves
Ostaszewski 16
[Piotr is a Polish historian, political scientist and translator. Since 24 September 2017
serving as an ambassador to South Korea. “The U.S. - Taiwan and the U.S. - Poland non-
confrontational asymmetry: a comparative analysis,” The Central and Eastern European
Online Library. April 2016,
http://kolegia.sgh.waw.pl/pl/KES/czasopisma/kwartalnik_szpp/Documents/numer
%204%202016/10_Ostaszewski.pdf. HH-SKS]
The U. S. – Russia Relations and the Asymmetry of the American Relations with Poland Obviously, the regional Polish potential does
not match the global potential of Russia or the U. S. President Putin’s policies are based on aspirations to reconstruct the
Russian potential and influence. The traditional sphere of the Russian interests – Central Europe and the Baltic
states – was lost due to the collapse of the USSR. Since then, the Russian ambitions have involved the
sustaining of dependent buffer states like Ukraine of Belarus. It does not accept any pro-Western ambitions within its
close neighbourhood and their potential participation in alliances not of Russian origin are viewed as being of destabilising nature for the
Russian political approach. However, as a global power with interests in other parts of the world, for example in the Middle East, in some
circumstances the Russian interests may turn out to com-plement the European ones. The war in Ukraine has reinvigorated the Polish
diplomacy. Warsaw tried to support the sovereign ambitions of Kiev15. However, Poland
is not perceived by Russia as a
military or economic threat. The Russian propaganda perfectly exploits the historical issues which are
one of the Polish diplomacy weaker points. The false picture of the Russian – Polish history acts as an effective background for
the Rus-sian ongoing political actions – presenting Poland as aggressive yet losing political strength and it works
well in terms of presenting Russia as the only stabilising force in Eastern Europe. However, the American
presence in Poland may mark a significant emanation of the NATO – Russia relations. Traditionally,
military presence (in terms of military bases of any kind) close to the Russian borders is perceived by Moscow as an
interference in the country’s internal affairs and a security threat [TT, 2016].Deploying even small American
forces in Poland drastically complicates the situation . This was proven by the Russian protests against establishing even the
American storage bases for heavy military equipment in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. Russia openly implies that
such actions violate the 1997 NATO-Russian agreement under which the alliance confirmed it would not lo-cate military equipment in new
member states from Central Europe [NATO, 1997]. As evidence of the good Russian intentions Moscow points out that it peacefully withdrew
its military forces from both Central European and Baltic states.For Poland, the dislocation of the American military support, which in the case
of emergency would back up the Polish forces, would be both a boost within the NATO structures and a positive development in terms of
national security in the context of the Moscow-Warsaw relations. The November 2015 Polish-U. S. agreement concerning the deployment of
the American military equipment in Poland is a marked signal that the U. S., despite exhibiting some reservations, perceives this part of Europe,
including Poland, as an important element of its own security system. Additionally,
the upcoming July 2016 NATO summit in
Warsaw will further show a permanent character of the Polish membership in the Alliance16.Thus,
Poland is just one ring in the chain of a collective defensive Pact. Within this Pact it may strengthen its
defensive potential. In that respect, the U. S. military is of central importance, especially in terms of
military bases’ deployment. However, it should be emphasised that from the American perspective Poland remains in the context of
the Russian-related issues. The nature of the American – Polish asymme-try is to a large extent a function of the
relations between Moscow and Washington, regardless of more or less insulting Russian politics toward
Warsaw. This makes Po-land more often an object rather than the subject of the Russian – American political relations. Nevertheless,
as Russia is increasingly more and more often perceived as a security threat to the U. S., the American
relations with Poland may become in-creasingly beneficial for Warsaw. Summary The non-confrontational
asymmetry was analysed on the basis of two different, yet similar cases. The hard and soft power potential of Poland and Taiwan are strik-ingly
different, just as their legal status. However,
the dependency on the American ally and the threat posed by a close
neighbour make some of their behaviours worth comparing. A seemingly weaker Taiwan – basing on the American
support, managed to become an economic powerhouse and to minimise the negative influence of the PRC. Poland – to a certain extent –
achieved similar results by joining the E. U. (which marked the enhancement of its economic potential) and NATO (enhancing national security,
basing mostly on the American military potential). In both cases, contrary
to the common assumptions, the asymmetry
has proven to be beneficial to the weaker partners in question. It has also proved to have the potential
to constitute a burden for the stronger actor, as the volatile behaviour of weaker partners may
negatively impact on the U. S. interests in the geopolitically complex situations.
Russia is seeking to undermine the current global order by forming a new

Authoritarian bloc– functionally reuniting the Soviet Union poses an existential threat
Dibb 16
[Paul Dibb is emeritus professor of strategic studies at The Australian National
University. “Why Russia is a threat to the international order,” Australian Strategic
Policy Institute, June 2016, accessed 6/24/19. https://s3-ap-southeast-
2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/import/Russia.pdf?pIMhBAf0i_aHd1.6Y_Jx3ZGEq547f3yB,
HH-SKS]
The Russian threat to international order We live in an era when geopolitics is reasserting its place in the global order. Contrary to the optimistic prognostications
after the collapse of the USSR, the world hasn’t moved in any substantial way towards a broader embrace of democracy.5 Great-power
revisionism
has now returned, and two great authoritarian powers, China and Russia, are fundamentally challenging
the established international order. Both coercion and the use, or threatened use, of military power are
back in vogue. Russia is seeking to carve out a sphere of influence in what it terms its ‘near abroad’ in
Europe, and China is using coercion in the South and East China seas to assert its rising great power
status. While Russia and China are very different actors, they are leagued together in their rejection of
what they see as US hegemony and their view that the West has imposed on them the current
international order, which must now be rewritten. We run the risk in the second decade of the 21st
century of a confrontation between two new power blocs: the authoritarian continental powers of
China and Russia and the Western democratic maritime states led by America. The Russian challenge imperils security
in Europe. Managing the increasing threats Russia poses to international order is now arguably the most
serious issue facing the West. This is not to underestimate the challenge emanating from an economically powerful China, which also is a rising
military power, but China, unlike Russia, doesn’t pose an existential threat to world peace in the same way. The
prospect of a strategic partnership with a liberal democratic Russia, yearned for by many in the West, ‘has become remote in the face of incompatible interests and
irreconcilable values’ (Giles et al. 2015:vi). The Chatham House paper, The Russian Challenge, argues that Russian ambitions and intentions ‘have been telegraphed
for well over a decade, but the West found it easier at the time to disregard them and indulge in the fantasy that Russia was progressing towards a liberal
democratic model with which the West felt comfortable’ (Giles et al. 2015:vii). As John Besemeres states, the West has been reluctant to view Russia as an
adversary (Besemeres 2015a). The
crux of Russia’s challenge to Europe is Putin’s determination to re-establish
Russian primacy in its near abroad and to use the Russian-speaking populations in Crimea and Ukraine
as an excuse for intervention and the use of force. There are significant numbers of Russian speakers
also in the Baltic states, Belarus and Moldova, as well as in the Central Asian former Soviet republics—
particularly Kazakhstan—so there’s plenty of scope for further Russian mischief. Putin is driven by the
urge to restore Russia as a great power and reverse the humiliation of the years of weakness since the
collapse of the USSR. As Roderic Lyne observes, Moscow’s attitude over the status of the 14 newly independent
states formed out of the collapse of the Soviet Union is that those countries acquired independence
accidentally rather than through a formal settlement of the post-Cold War order , are intimately linked to Russia, are to
a greater or lesser extent historically part of Russia, and
form Russia’s security perimeter (Lyne 2015:7). From Moscow’s
perspective, they must therefore be recognised as within Russia’s ‘sphere of strategic interests’ and must not be permitted to act in
ways that are deemed to be contrary to Russia’s vital interests. Yeltsin’s Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, warned as early as in
April 1995 with regard to the Baltic countries that ‘there may be cases when the use of direct military force may be needed to protect our compatriots abroad’ (Lyne
2015:7). There is, therefore, significant continuity in this post-Soviet paranoia in Moscow. The Russian threat to international order 13 ASPI STRATEGY Figure 1:
Russia in relation to NATO It needs to be recognised that the West has brought some—but by no means all—of this Russian overreaction onto itself. In the early
1990s, as the former Soviet Union was dramatically disintegrating, people lost their life savings, workers were often not paid for months on end, and the West did
little to proffer a helping hand. As then Russian Ambassador Moiseyev in Canberra said to me: Russia needs a Marshall Plan; otherwise, you in the West will have a
Weimar Republic on your hands. Then there’s the issue of the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders. Countries like Australia that are surrounded by sea and share
no common land borders find it hard to comprehend why Russia should feel threatened. The smart solution at the time would have been to find some way to try to
include Russia in NATO membership while President Yeltsin was still inclined to quasi-democratic solutions internally. Now, an authoritarian Putin contemplates
NATO starkly as a military threat. He speaks of it in hostile language that’s redolent of the Cold War in its drumming up of ultranationalist sentiment on the home
front. The
Kremlin isn’t seeking incremental changes to the current order in Europe but aspires to create
a totally new one; it sees post-Soviet borders as something to be revised— with military force, if
necessary (Gressel 2015:2). Some influential Russian commentators regard the system of states and boundaries that took shape as a result of the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991 as ‘illegitimate, random, unstable and therefore fraught with conflict’ (Barabanov et al. 2012:9). Sergei Karaganov (2015a) even compares
NATO’s attitudes at this time with the imposition
Yes – China/Russia
Russia and China are revisionist militarily and economically.
Brands 19 (Hal Brands, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns
Hopkins University. National Interest, "The End of Great Power
Peace," https://nationalinterest.org/feature/end-great-power-peace-46282?page=0%2C1, 3-6-2019, acc
6-24-2019//Sarwa)
Each of these geopolitical challenges is different, and each reflects the distinctive interests, ambitions,
and history of the country undertaking it. Yet there is growing cooperation between the countries that
are challenging the regional pillars of the U.S.-led order. Russia and China have collaborated on issues
such as energy, sales and development of military technology, opposition to additional U.S. military
deployments on the Korean peninsula, and naval exercises from the South China Sea to the Baltic. In
Syria, Iran provided the shock troops that helped keep Russia’s ally, Bashar al-Assad, in power, as
Moscow provided the air power and the diplomatic cover. “Our cooperation can isolate America,”
supreme leader Ali Khamenei told Putin in 2017. More broadly, what links these challenges together is
their opposition to the constellation of power, norms, and relationships that the U.S.-led order entails,
and in their propensity to use violence, coercion, and intimidation as means of making that opposition
effective. Taken collectively, these challenges constitute a geopolitical sea change from the post-Cold
War era.
The revival of great-power competition entails higher international tensions than the world has known
for decades, and the revival of arms races, security dilemmas, and other artifacts of a more dangerous
past. It entails sharper conflicts over the international rules of the road on issues ranging from freedom
of navigation to the illegitimacy of altering borders by force, and intensifying competitions over states
that reside at the intersection of rival powers’ areas of interest. It requires confronting the prospect that
rival powers could overturn the favorable regional balances that have underpinned the U.S.-led order
for decades, and that they might construct rival spheres of influence from which America and the liberal
ideas it has long promoted would be excluded. Finally, it necessitates recognizing that great-power
rivalry could lead to great-power war, a prospect that seemed to have followed the Soviet empire onto
the ash heap of history.
Both Beijing and Moscow are, after all, optimizing their forces and exercising aggressively in preparation
for potential conflicts with the United States and its allies; Russian doctrine explicitly emphasizes the
limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve escalation dominance in a war with Washington. In Syria, U.S.
and Russian forces even came into deadly contact in early 2018. American airpower decimated a
contingent of government-sponsored Russian mercenaries that was attacking a base at which U.S.
troops were present, an incident demonstrating the increasing boldness of Russian operations and the
corresponding potential for escalation. The world has not yet returned to the epic clashes for global
dominance that characterized the twentieth century, but it has returned to the historical norm of great-
power struggle, with all the associated dangers.
Those dangers may be even greater than most observers appreciate, because if today’s great-power
competitions are still most intense at the regional level, who is to say where these competitions will
end? By all appearances, Russia does not simply want to be a “regional power” (as Obama cuttingly
described it) that dominates South Ossetia and Crimea. It aspires to the deep European and extra-
regional impact that previous incarnations of the Russian state enjoyed. Why else would Putin boast
about how far his troops can drive into Eastern Europe? Why else would Moscow be deploying military
ambitions for tomorrow are clearly much bolder. Beijing probably does not envision itself fully
overthrowing the international order, simply because it has profited far too much from the U.S.-
anchored global economy. Yet China has nonetheless positioned itself for a global challenge to U.S.
influence. Chinese military forces are deploying ever farther from China’s immediate periphery; Beijing
has projected power into the Arctic and established bases and logistical points in the Indian Ocean and
Horn of Africa. Popular Chinese movies depict Beijing replacing Washington as the dominant actor in
sub-Saharan Africa—a fictional representation of a real-life effort long under way. The Belt and Road
Initiative bespeaks an aspiration to link China to countries throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and
Europe; BRI, AIIB, and RCEP look like the beginning of an alternative institutional architecture to rival
Washington’s. In 2017, Xi Jinping told the Nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party
that Beijing could now “take center stage in the world” and act as an alternative to U.S. leadership.
These ambitions may or may not be realistic. But they demonstrate just how significantly the world’s
leading authoritarian powers desire to shift the global environment over time. The revisionism we are
seeing today may therefore be only the beginning. As China’s power continues to grow, or if it is
successful in dominating the Western Pacific, it will surely move on to grander endeavors. If Russia
reconsolidates control over the former Soviet space, it may seek to bring parts of the former Warsaw
Pact to heel. Historically, this has been a recurring pattern of great-power behavior—interests expand
with power, the appetite grows with the eating, risk-taking increases as early gambles are seen to pay
off. This pattern is precisely why the revival of great-power competition is so concerning—because
geopolitical revisionism by unsatisfied major powers has so often presaged intensifying international
conflict, confrontation, and even war. The great-power behavior occurring today represents the warning
light flashing on the dashboard. It tells us there may be still-greater traumas to come.
Yes - China
China is revisionist – island building, territorial claims, threatening US allies
Cohen 17 (Jerome A. Cohen, senior fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. Foreign Affairs,
"Asia's Other Revisionist Power," https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2017-02-13/asias-other-
revisionist-power, 2-13-2017, acc 6-24-2019//Sarwa)
SEA CHANGE
Chinese policymakers deny that their country is a revisionist power. They claim that China seeks merely
to defend a regional status quo that the United States is threatening. After all, they argue, China’s claims
to many of the region’s disputed islands date back centuries. For example, Yang Yanyi, China’s
ambassador to the European Union, wrote in a 2016 op-ed that China has enjoyed “sovereignty over the
South China Sea Island . . . and the adjacent waters since ancient times.” Chinese policymakers point out
that the “nine-dash line,” a demarcation of Chinese claims that runs along the edge of the South China
Sea, has appeared on Chinese maps since the 1940s. “China’s relevant claims have never exceeded the
scope of the current international order,” China’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Liu
Xiaoming, argued in a 2016 speech criticizing the decision by an international tribunal in The Hague to
rule against China in the South China Sea dispute. “China’s rejection of the arbitration is to uphold the
postwar international order,” he said. According to Beijing, the South China Sea has always been, and
will always be, Chinese territory; China, in other words, remains a status quo power, not a revisionist
one.
But even if its territorial claims are not new, China rarely sought to enforce them until recently. For the
past few years, however, China has grown increasingly assertive in its territorial disputes. In 2012, to the
dismay of Tokyo and Washington, Beijing declared an “air defense identification zone” over the Senkaku
Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands), which are currently controlled by Japan but which China
also claims, requiring aircraft flying through the zone to identify themselves to Chinese authorities. That
same year, China maneuvered the Philippines out of Scarborough Shoal—a reef just over 100 miles from
the Philippines and more than 500 miles from China. Today, its navy, coast guard, and “maritime
militia” of fishing boats deny Philippine vessels access to the area. Meanwhile, China has presided over
an extraordinary construction project in the South China Sea, building a string of artificial islands. As the
Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, a website that monitors activity in the disputed territory, has
noted, “The number, size, and construction make it clear these are for military purposes—and they are
the smoking gun that shows China has every intention of militarizing the Spratly Islands,” a contested
archipelago. China has drilled for oil in the waters of the contested Paracel Islands, ignoring Vietnamese
protests and keeping Vietnamese ships away from the area. Last year, China sent a swarm of
approximately 230 fishing boats, escorted by coast guard ships, into the waters around the
Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and it has also escalated the situation by sending more powerful military forces
into the area, such as a frigate and an air force bomber.
China is not the only revisionist power in the U.S.-Chinese relationship.
What’s more, over the past few years, China has modernized its military. According to Captain James
Fanell, the former chief of intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, China is building coast guard vessels “at
an astonishing rate,” some of which are among the largest coast guard ships in the world. China is also
improving its conventional ballistic missiles, which threaten U.S. air bases and ports in the region,
including Andersen Air Force Base, on Guam, a crucial U.S. military hub. These moves jeopardize the
entire U.S. strategy for projecting power in East Asia.
In the eyes of all but Beijing, this clearly counts as revisionist behavior. And it has touched off a flurry of
activity among countries that feel threatened. The Philippines, although possibly moving closer to China
under President Rodrigo Duterte, has challenged China’s territorial claims in an international tribunal.
Australia has strengthened its military and deepened its alliance with the United States. Singapore, not a
U.S. treaty ally but a longtime U.S. partner, has increased its defense spending and has begun to work
more closely with the U.S. Navy. Despite the legacy of the Vietnam War, Hanoi and Washington have
begun to move toward closer security cooperation.
Chinese behavior has also shocked Japan into action. Japanese leaders have rejected military statecraft
for more than half a century. But under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan has reinterpreted (and may
eventually revise) its constitution to permit more military activism and is forging closer ties with other
countries worried about Chinese revisionism, including Australia and India.
So far, Japan’s response to China has been restrained. Although changes in the Japanese defense
posture often generate alarmist headlines, Japan’s actions to date have been modest, especially when
compared with how great powers normally behave when confronted by a rising power in their
neighborhood. The Japanese public is preoccupied with a lagging economy and an aging society; it has
no interest in military statecraft and has disapproved of the security reforms pushed by Abe and other
conservatives. But as the world’s third-largest economy, Japan has tremendous latent power; a
sufficiently alarmed Tokyo could decide to increase its military spending from the current one percent of
GDP to two or three percent—an undesirable outcome for Beijing.
Chinese officials argue that U.S. interference has caused its neighbors to respond with alarm, but China’s
own revisionism is to blame. Consider that for the past 60 years, even as Washington constantly
entreated Japan to play a more active military role in the U.S.-Japanese alliance, Tokyo stepped up only
when it felt threatened, as it did in the late 1970s when the Soviet Union launched a military buildup in
Asia. Today, Japan is responding not to U.S. pressure but to Chinese assertiveness. Beijing must
understand how threatening its actions appear if it wishes to successfully manage its relations with its
neighbors and with Washington.
Yes - Russia
Russian revisionism bad – US hegemony key to prevent three scenarios for war.
Baev 18 (Pavel K. Baev, political scientist and security scholar. He is currently a research professor at
the Peace Research Institute Oslo and a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. ICDS,
"Russia’s Reluctant Revisionism in the Arctic," https://icds.ee/russias-reluctant-revisionism-in-the-
arctic/, 5-7-2018, acc 6-24-2019//Sarwa)
Three Worst-case Options to be Prevented
It is not too late to dissuade Russia from attempting to find, in a forceful step in the Arctic, an
asymmetric response to one or other of the accumulating Western offences. Moscow has so far shown
itself reluctant to abandon the commitment to preserving a “zone of peace and cooperation” in the High
North, and China could be an important ally in this dissuasion. It is essential, nevertheless, to outline
specific scenarios that need to be prevented from unfolding, even if such thinking the unthinkable
invites protest from the guardians of common sense.
The first worst-case option is a catastrophic technical failure on a Russian nuclear submarine, and
perhaps the “old warhorses” of the Delta IV-class are more reliable than the new generation of Borei-
class strategic submarines armed with the Bulava missile, which has a chequered record of testing.7The
resonance of such a disaster could be amplified by a political blame-game. Back in the early2000s, Putin
had to mobilise every resource of political will in order to prevail over the admirals, who “suggested”
that the Kursk catastrophe was caused by a collision with a hostile NATO submarine . It is not at all
certain whether he would even want to question such an explanation in the event of a new emergency.
The second option is a sudden Crimea-style occupation of Svalbard by units of “little green men” using
the Russian settlement of Barentsburg as a forward base. Norwegian sovereignty over Svalbard is limited
by the Spitsbergen Treaty (1920), which guarantees the demilitarised status of the archipelago and
leaves open to interpretation the status of its continental shelf.8 Moscow is keen to exploit this
ambivalence and uncertainty, and the Russian defence ministry has even singled out tensions with
Norway over the 200-mile zone around Spitsbergen as a potential threat.9 There is hardly any desire for
establishing permanent control over Svalbard, and the purpose of a possible “hybrid” operation
supported by manoeuvres of the Northern Fleet and enforcement of a no-fly zone would be primarily to
test NATO’s resolve and to deepen divisions within the Alliance.
The third option is a resumption of nuclear testing on the Novaya Zemlya test site. Moscow needs to
turn the nuclear arsenal, modernised thanks to a huge investment which presently pays scant dividend,
into a useful instrument of policy—and a “safe” low-yield explosion is the easiest way to achieve that.
An underground explosion would, in fact, be a more “environmentally friendly” event than a test of the
nuclear-powered cruise missile that Putin described in his address as having already been test-launched
at Novaya Zemlya.10 Sound technical reasons could be presented for justifying testing the reliability of
ageing nuclear warheads, which would not, in fact, signify a violation of international rules, since the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), approved by the UN General Assembly in 1996, has not been
ratified by five states that are parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), including China and
the United States.11
These three options are not alternatives, and could form a sequence, which would constitute a radical
departure from the habitual, slowly evolving status quo and turn Russia into a more radical revisionist
breaker of the established order than it is in most other regions in its neighbourhood, with the obvious
exception of Ukraine/Black Sea. Such a worse-than-bad option should not be seen as probable, but the
diminishing rewards for staying on the status quo course and growing domestic pressure on Putin’s
regime make a new experiment with power projection more likely. The choice to stage it in the Arctic is
preventable—but a concerted prevention is needed, rather than wishful denial, to keep the region safe.
Russian revisionism is at an all-time high – nationalism, Crimea, and BRICS.

OĞUZLU 6-14 (TARIK OĞUZLU, * Professor in the Department of Political Science and International
Relations at Antalya Bilim University "Deciphering the codes of Russian revisionism under Putin,"
https://www.dailysabah.com/op-ed/2019/06/14/deciphering-the-codes-of-russian-revisionism-under-
putin, 06-14-2019, acc 6-28-2019//Sarwa)
As its economy and international prestige recover, Russia more confidently projects its own distinctive
alternatives against Western-centered paradigms
Since President Vladimir Putin came to power in the late 1990s, Russia has been experiencing a national
revival. Having an imperial legacy in the background and acting as one of the two superpowers of the
Cold War era, it is quite natural and understandable that Russia wants to leave the troubled years of the
1990s behind and put a serious claim to global power status in the emerging century. Putin's Russia has
been extremely aghast at the primacy of Western actors in world politics and therefore has been
seeking to help bring into existence a multipolar world order in which Russia shapes the course of global
developments decisively. The historic talk Putin delivered to the Munich Security Conference in 2017 is
now considered by many as the harbinger of Russian desires to hollow out the foundations of the liberal
international order in the years to come.
It is a strong Russian conviction that rather than treating Russia as a defeated power and imposing a
peace settlement on it, similar to what victorious Western powers did to Germany in the immediate
aftermath of World War I, Western powers should have paved the way for Russia's incorporation into
the emerging security order in post-Cold War Europe, similar to how post-Napoleonic France had been
incorporated into the Concert of Europe in 1815.
Re-penetration to Near Abroad
In order to voice its strong criticism against Western aggrandizement, Russia needed to recover from its
economic malaise under the strong leadership of President Putin. The improving Russian economy and
the growing need of Western powers to seek Russia's help in responding to the geopolitical challenges
of the post-9/11 era seem to have emboldened Russian leaders to openly air their grievances with
respect to the pillars of the liberal international order. Besides, Russian leaders believe that Russia's
historical legacy, immense military power capabilities, rich natural resources and huge landmass provide
her with the ability help bring into existence a Russia-friendly regional and global order.
Russia turned out to be vehemently against the color revolutions in the post-Soviet region. From
Russia's perspective these revolutionary movements were masterminded by Western circles and carried
out by local agents. Seen from Moscow, the promotion of democratic values in Russia's near abroad
cannot be seen isolated from the geopolitical competition between Russia and the West.
For some time, Russia has been in the international limelight due to its support for ethnic separatists in
Georgia and eastern Ukraine, its incorporation of Crimea into its territory, its strong backing of the Assad
regime in Syria and the hybrid tools that it employs to wage political warfare against Western liberal
democracies. Hardly a day passes without Russia being accused by Western circles of pursuing
aggressive, assertive and neo-imperial policies in its near abroad.
Lean toward the East
Russian overtures to build a quasi-alliance with China in the greater Eurasian region attract further
Western ire.
However, despite the growing strategic rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing in recent years,
one should not conclude that these countries want to establish a military alliance like NATO. The closer
Russia comes to China, the stronger the Russian message that Russia is not without alternatives. Active
Russian agency in the establishment of the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization and BRICSs (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) should be read as Russia's growing
determination to soft-balance against the West.
Recently, the intensification of the trade war and a Cold War-like confrontation between the United
States and China seem to have added up to Russia's geopolitical clout because this time China appears
to be quite willing to improve its relations with Russia. The recent visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to
Russia in the early June of 2019 has undoubtedly demonstrated that these two countries have now
entered into a new stage in their relations, with strategic considerations shaping the tenor of their
relations more decisively than ever.
Despite some counterfactual arguments, it seems that Western powers promised Russia not to enlarge
NATO eastwards in return for Russia's acquiescence to Germany's unification and its eventual accession
to NATO. However, this is not what has transpired. Therefore, a strong feeling of disillusionment,
containment, and encirclement reigns in today's Russia. The Yeltsin era during the 1990s did not witness
a serious breach in Russia's relations with the West mainly because Russia was weak and the then ruling
elites saw westernization as the only route to modernization and development.
Self-confidence in values
Unlike the developed Western economies that are built on capitalist values, the Russian economy very
much relies on the export of commodities in a semi-closed economy, such as gas and oil. The idea that
capitalist economic modernization would eventually culminate in political liberalization and
democratization does not strike a sympathetic chord with Russia. Russia seems to have adopted a
mercantilist economic model in which many economic activities are closely regulated and monitored by
the state and economic power is a means to the state's political and strategic influence at home and
abroad.
Unlike many Western powers where postmodern ways of arranging state-society relations have taken
deep roots and where issues of security mostly concern low-politics issues, Russia offers an example of
traditional nation-states that tend to define security through the lenses of sovereignty, survival and
territorial integrity.
Russia defines itself as a "sovereign democracy" and abhors Western attempts at preaching the virtues
of liberal democracy and universal human rights. From a Russian perspective, historical experiences,
geopolitical realities and cultural values produce different conceptualizations of democracy across the
globe. Putting the idea of universal human rights at the center of global politics and authorizing the
United Nations or other regional security organizations to help organize multinational peace operations
in conflict-riven places contradicts Russia's state-oriented security and diplomatic culture. Russian
uneasiness with such multilateral UN-led operations can be seen in Kosovo in 1999 and Libya in 2011.
The Russian position on the Syrian crisis also reveals that the principle of not interfering with states'
internal affairs, no matter how severe the internal conditions are, still colors Russia's international
behaviors. Russian rulers do not want to see the principle of "responsibility to protect" drive
international involvement in conflict-riven places.
Recent years have also witnessed that President Putin has been vociferously arguing in favor of the
revival of Russian nationalism imbued with distinctive legacies of communism and Orthodox Christianity.
Ascribing a historic mission to Russia, Russian leaders believe that Russia is the most important defender
of Western civilization against the corrosive impact of extreme consumerist, self-centric and hedonistic
values on predominantly Christian societies.
Moreover, it is also believed that the Russian society is built on the primacy of patriarchal and traditional
communal values instead of self-regarding individualistic morality. Russian society evinces a
predisposition to communitarian ethics over individualistic or cosmopolitan ethics. That is to say that the
meaning of life of an ordinary Russian emanates from his/her belonging to the larger Russian
community in which common societal values take priority over individual quest for happiness and well-
being.
Russia's approach to the liberal world order is informed, among others, by the historical dynamics of its
relations with the Western international community. On one hand exists a strong pro-western tradition
in Russian culture and history, according to which the road to modernity and development goes through
Russia's acceptance of Western values and practices. On the other hand a strong resistance to the West
also exists in Russian history, whose most exemplary manifestation took place during the Cold War era.
Here Russia is defined as the anti-thesis of the West and its liberal values.
Eurasianism stands proud
Finally, the so-called Eurasian school of thought sits somewhere in the middle of these two polar
positions. According to Eurasianism, Russia is both a European and Asian country at the same time and
Russia's historical mission is to unite the diverse communities in the Eurasian region under Russia's
moral and political leadership. Russia is the geopolitical hegemon of the Eurasian region and without
strong Russian leadership neither Russia nor other Eurasian communities would be in a position to
restrain western and eastern encroachments. Given Russia's foreign and security polices over the last
decade, one can argue that Eurasianism has already become the dominant geopolitical school of
thought in Russia.
Russian elites are quite keen on the point that Western values are not superior to Russian values.
Therefore, whenever Westerners question Russia's place in the West and adopt a condescending view
on Russian values, Russian apposition to the Western international order climbs up. This appears to
explain why Putin's regime is trying to boost Russian self-confidence by investing a lot on rewriting
national history and offering patriotic education in schools. For example, Russian schools books highlight
victories against Napoleon's France and Hitler's Germany in such a way to help reconstruct Russian
national identity in the emerging century.
In the emerging century in which realpolitik security practices are likely to gain more salience and hard
power capabilities are to become more critical in the context of geopolitical rivalries, many will continue
to probe into Russia's global aspirations.
Impact – general
Rising revisionist nations and radical non-state actors ensure global chaos—weak
American responses embolden aggression
Ted R. Bromund et. al 17--(Ted R. Bromund, Studies Anglo-American relations, U.S. relations with
Europe and the EU, and the U.S.’s leadership role in the world, Reclaiming American Realism, American
Affairs Journal, accessed 6-28-2019, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/reclaiming-american-
realism/)//ND
To recover that tradition, we should think again about the

purpose of American foreign policy . Yes, it is to preserve the
sovereign and independent American union. Yes, it is to protect our homeland. And yes, it is to keep us
prosperous and at peace. But these are not ends in themselves. They exist to allow Americans, with due regard for the just
laws of others when abroad, to be free—free to preach, to trade, to study, to help, to work, whether overseas or at home. That is how
we conserve free America: by acting to make sure that individual Americans are free to live their own
lives. The true purpose of U.S. foreign policy is to protect and promote the freedom of individual
Americans, who by their own actions are remaking our world. We will enjoy that individual freedom
more fully the more nations embrace the principles of democratic sovereignty on which our own union
was founded. A world of unfree nations, a world divided into spheres of influence controlled by the hostile or
the unfree, would be a world in which the freedom of Americans would be curtailed or, at worst, would
exist only on the sufferance of others. But freedom for the world begins with freedom for America . The
first, irreducible American interest is the preservation of the sovereignty of the United States and the political order of republican government
under the Constitution. If we lose those, our other interests will be irrelevant, because we will not have the
command of our own fortunes. No regime or idea that seeks to traduce the sovereignty of democratic nations is our friend, because
our purposes cannot be realized in a world defined by the unfree. And we should remember one more thing: states
that reject democratic sovereignty are implicitly rejecting our legitimacy . Indeed, our challengers today—
just as in 1776, or 1917, or 1941, or 1950—are enemies of the sovereign democracies . In this most fundamental respect,
nothing has changed: from the American Revolution to today, our challengers have always been imperialists, eager to
claim the right to rule without the democratic consent of the governed. We have faced empires of
power, of race, of class, and of religion—but empire, and the imperial struggle for power, is the
constant. The problem is not that there are other great powers in the world with interests of their own. It is inevitable that great
powers will not accept neighbors who threaten them; what is not acceptable is for great powers to
interpret a desire for independence and good relations with other nations as inherently threatening. To
do this is to claim the right to an imperial sphere that is based on a rejection of national sovereignty. The United States rejected one such claim
in 1776. It has rejected many other, similar claims in the succeeding centuries. The sovereign democratic republic is not merely the freest form
of government ever devised. It also defines the international system into which the United States was born, and on which its system of
government is based. But today, supranationalists contemn the nation-state and muse, in the words of the president of the European
Commission, that “borders were the worst invention ever.” Others are more malignant: Russia seeks to change borders, or
render them meaningless, in order to suborn and dominate its neighbors; China seeks to impose an
acceptance of its national interests on its neighbors; and Iran is making its dream of regional dominance
into a reality—with the aid of Russia and the U.S.-brokered Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Worst of all, ISIS and al-Qaeda
wish to eradicate the sovereign state and replace it with a religious empire .
Receding American military power greenlights autocratic revisionism and collapses
democracy — powers Russian aggression and hybrid warfare, and Chinese
expansionism.
Joshi, 18 — Shashank Joshi; He was previously a senior policy fellow for international affairs in the Renewing the Centre team at the Tony
Blair Institute for Global Change, where he led the Institute’s work on foreign policy, focusing on economic, political and military pressures on
the liberal international order. Shashank is also a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He has been a research
associate at the Changing Character of War Programme at the University of Oxford, regularly lectured at the Defence Academy of the United
Kingdom, and given evidence to the foreign affairs and defence committees of the House of Commons. (6-21-18; "Authoritarian Challenges to
the Liberal Order;" Institute for Global Change; https://institute.global/insight/renewing-centre/authoritarian-challenges-liberal-order; //GrRv)
What does this mean for democracies? Autocracies

present a series of individual challenges to their local rivals: Russia
to the Baltic states, China to Taiwan and North Korea to South Korea, for instance. But the problem they pose
to world order is larger than the sum of these issues. It is, rather, an ideological and systemic challenge
that will reshape the norms of international relations. Will these norms reflect liberal principles such as openness, rule following and
individual rights or competing authoritarian ones such as secrecy, arbitrariness and state power?
This competition over norms will influence not only Western liberal democracies but also the wider
multipolar order that is emerging. In regions with weak political institutions or nascent democracies—parts of Africa, South and Southeast Asia,
and East and Southeast Europe—the regional order is especially malleable. If authoritarian states can shape these
regions in their own image, this bolsters their global standing and puts liberal democracy further on the
back foot. This argument does not require an acceptance that democracies always act in liberal ways or adhere to a single and consistent set of norms.
Authoritarian states also differ widely in levels of openness and repression, the balance between civilian and military authority, and civil versus political freedoms.11
Yet despite this variety, there remain systematic differences between democratic and authoritarian states in attitude, inclination and values—and this has important
foreign policy implications.
TYPES OF AUTHORITARIAN CHALLENGE
The authoritarian challenge to liberal democracy can be broken down into six categories.
The Military Challenge
Authoritarian states represent the most serious military threat to the democracies of Europe and Asia. Russia
has dissolved existing norms
regarding the use of force, conducting in Europe the first annexation of territory and the first use of
chemical weapons since the Second World War.12 Russia’s use of hybrid warfare, which prioritises secrecy,
deception and political warfare, presents a particular danger to rule-bound open societies.13 China, though
more cautious, has also demonstrated increasingly assertive behaviour in the South China Sea, including the
militarisation of reclaimed islands, the rejection of arbitration efforts and an escalation of the
country’s border dispute with India .14
The military challenge posed by authoritarian states is not a quirk of the past few years. Russian
and Chinese behaviour is rooted in their
resentment of the Western order, ambition for great power status and fear of Western power.15 All
three of these drivers are shaped by these countries’ authoritarian political systems . The best available
scholarship continues to show that democracies enjoy more peaceful relations with other democracies
than with autocracies, suggesting that authoritarian states are intrinsically more likely to be
threatening.16 Among states that ratify treaties governing the laws of war, democracies are also more likely to comply with these rules than autocracies
are.17
Impact – Chinese revisionism
China is revisionist challenge to the military and economic order—hegemony is key to
prevent Chinese aggression and global wars
Ji Young Choi 18 – (Ji Young Choi, Associate Professor of Politics and Government, Director of East
Asia Studies, Affiliate Professor of International Studies, “Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on the
Rise of China: Long Cycles, Power Transitions, and China's Ascent,” Asian Perspective, Vol. 42, Issue 1,
January-March 2018, pages 61-84)//ND
I have explored in light of historical and theoretical perspectives whether China is a candidate to become a global hegemonic power. The
next question I will address is whether the ascent of China will lead to a hegemonic war or not. As
mentioned previously, historical and theoretical lessons reveal that a rising great power tends to challenge a
system leader when the former's economic and other major capabilities come too close to those of the
latter and the former is dissatisfied with the latter's leadership and the international rules it created.
This means that the rise of China could produce intense hegemonic competition and even a global
hegemonic war. The preventive motivation by an old declining power can cause a major war with a
newly emerging power when it is combined with other variables (Levy 1987). While a preventive war by a system
leader is historically rare, a newly emerging yet even relatively weak rising power at times challenges a much
more powerful system leader, as in the case of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 (Schweller 1999). A historical
lesson is that "incomplete catch-ups are inherently conflict-prone" (Thompson 2006, 19). This implies that even though it falls
short of surpassing the system leader, the rise of a new great power can produce significant instability in
the interstate system when it develops into a revisionist power. Moreover, the United States and China are
deeply involved in major security issues in East Asia (including the North Korean nuclear crisis, the Taiwan issue, and the
South China Sea disputes), and we cannot rule out the possibility that one of these regional conflicts will develop
into a much bigger global war in which the two superpowers are entangled. According to Allison (2017), who
studied sixteen historical cases in which a rising power confronted an existing power, a war between the United States and
China is not unavoidable, but escaping it will require enormous efforts by both sides . Some Chinese scholars (Jia
2009; Wang and Zhu 2015), who emphasize the transformation of China's domestic politics and the pragmatism of Beijing's diplomacy, have a
more or less optimistic view of the future of US-China relations. Yet my reading of the situation is that since 2009 there has been an increasing
gap between this optimistic view and what has really happened. It is premature to conclude that China is a revisionist state, but in what follows
I will suggest some important signs that show China has revisionist aims at least in the Asia Pacific and could develop
into a revisionist power in the future . Beijing has concentrated on economic modernization since the start of pro-market reforms
in the late 1970s and made efforts to keep a low profile in international security issues for several decades. It followed Deng Xiaoping's
doctrine: "hide one's capabilities, bide one's time, and seek the right opportunity." Since 2003, China's motto has been "Peaceful Rise" or
"Peaceful Development," and Chinese leadership has emphasized that the rise of China would not threaten any
other countries. Recently, however, Beijing has adopted increasingly assertive or even aggressive foreign
policies in international security affairs. In particular, China has been adamant about territorial issues in the
East and South China Seas and is increasingly considered as a severe threat by other nations in the Asia
Pacific region. Since 2009, for example, Beijing has increased naval activities on a large scale in the area of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in
the East China Sea. In 2010, Beijing announced that just like Tibet and Taiwan, the South China Sea is considered a core national interest. We
can identify drastic rhetorical changes as well. In 2010, China's foreign minister publicly stated, "China is a big country . . . and other countries
are small countries and that is just a fact" (Economist 2012). In October 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping also used the words "struggle and
achieve results," emphasizing the importance of China's territorial integrity (Waldron 2014, 166-167). Furthermore, China
has
constructed man-made islands in the South China Sea to seek "de facto control over the resource-rich
waters and islets" claimed as well by its neighboring countries (Los Angeles Times 2015). As of now, China's
strategy is to delay a direct military conflict with the United States as long as possible and use its
economic and political prowess to pressure smaller neighbors to give up their territorial claims (Doran
2012). These new developments and rhetorical signals reflect significant changes in China's foreign policies and signify that China's peaceful rise
seems to be over. A rising great power's consistent and determined policies to increase military buildups can
be read as one of the significant signs of the rising power's dissatisfaction with the existing order and its
willingness to do battle if it is really necessary. In the words of Rapkin and Thompson (2003, 318), "arms buildups and
arms races . . . reflect substantial dissatisfaction on the part of the challenger and an attempt to
accelerate the pace of military catchup and the development of a relative power advantage ." Werner and
Kugler (1996) also posit that if an emerging challenger's military expenditures are increasing faster than those of
a system leader, parity can be very dangerous to the international political order . China's GDP is currently around
60 percent of that of the United States, so parity has not been reached yet. China's military budget, however, has grown
enormously for the past two decades (double-digit growth nearly every year), which is creating concerns among
neighboring nations and a system leader, the United States. In addition to its air force, China's strengthening navy or sea
power has been one of the main goals in its military modernization program. Beijing has invested large
financial resources in constructing new naval vessels, submarines, and aircraft carriers (Economist 2012).
Furthermore, in its new defense white paper in 2015, Beijing made clear a vision to expand the global role for its
military, particularly its naval force, to protect its overseas economic and strategic interests (Tiezzi 2015).
Sea power has special importance for an emerging great power. As Mahan (1987 [1890]) explained cogently in one of
his classic books on naval strategy, Great Britain was able to emerge as a new hegemonic power because of the superiority of its naval capacity
and technology and its effective control of main international sealanes. Naval power has a special significance for China, a
newly emerging power, as well as for both economic and strategic reasons. First, its economy's rapid
growth requires external expansion to ensure raw materials and the foreign markets to sell its products.
Therefore, naval power becomes crucial in protecting its overseas business interests and activities. Second, securing major sea-lanes
becomes increasingly important as they will be crucial lifelines for the supply of energy, raw materials,
and other essential goods should China become involved in a hegemonic war or any other major military
conflict (Friedberg 2011). In light of this, it is understandable why China is so stubborn over territorial issues in
the South China and East China Seas. In fact, history tells us that many rising powers invested in sea power
to expand their global influence, and indeed all the global hegemons including Great Britain and the
United States were predominant naval powers. Another important aspect is that Beijing is beginning to voice its
dissatisfaction with the existing international economic order and take actions that could potentially
change this order. The Chinese economy has overall benefited from the post-World War II international liberal order, but the Bretton
Woods institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have been dominated by the United States and its allies and China does not have much
power or voice in these institutions. Both institutions are based in Washington, DC, and the United States has enjoyed the largest voting shares
with its veto power. Along with other emerging economies, China has called for significant reforms, especially in the
governing system of the IMF, but reform plans to give more power to China and other emerging
economies have been delayed by the opposition of the US Congress (Choi 2013). In response to this, Beijing
recently took the initiative to create new international financial institutions including the AIIB. At this moment,
it is premature to say that these new institutions would be able to replace the Bretton Woods institutions. Nonetheless, this new
development can be read as a starting point for significant changes in global economic and financial
governance that has been dominated by the United States since the end of World War II (Subacchi 2015). China's historical
legacies reinforce the view that China has a willingness to become a global hegemon. From the Ming dynasty in
the late fourteenth century to the start of the first Opium War in 1839, China enjoyed its undisputed hegemonic position in East Asia. "Sino-
centrism" that is related to this historical reality has long governed the mentality of Chinese people. According to this hierarchical world view,
China, as the most advanced civilization, is at the center of East Asia and the world, and all China's neighbors are vassal states (Kang 2010). This
mentality was openly revealed by the Chinese foreign minister's recent public statement that I quoted previously: "China is a big country . . .
and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact" (Economist 2012). This view is related to Chinese people's ancient superiority
complex that developed from the long history and rich cultural heritage of Chinese civilization (Jacques 2012). In a sense, Chinahas
always been a superpower regardless of its economic standing at least in most Chinese people's mind-
set. The strong national or civilizational pride of Chinese people, however, was severely damaged by "the Century of Humiliation," a period
between the first Opium War (1839) and the end of the Chinese Civil War (1949). During this period, China was encroached on by the West and
invaded by Japan, experienced prolonged civil conflicts, and finally became a semicolony of Great Britain while its northern territory was
occupied by Japan. China's economic modernization is viewed as a national project to lay an economic foundation to overcome this bitter
Viewed from this perspective,
experience of subjugation and shame and recover its traditional position and old glory (Choi 2015).
economic modernization or the accumulation of wealth is not an ultimate objective of China. Rather, its
final goal is to return to its traditional status by expanding its global political and military as well as
economic influence. What it ultimately desires is recognition (Anerkennung), respect (Respekt), and status (Stellung). These are
important concepts for constructivists who see ideational motives as the main driving forces behind interstate conflicts (Lebow 2008). This
reveals that constructivist elements can be combined with long cycle and power transition theories in explaining the rise and fall of great
powers, although further systematic studies on it are needed. Considering all this, China
has always been a territorial power
rather than a trading state. China does not seem to be satisfied only with the global expansion of
international trade and the conquest of foreign markets. It also wants to broaden its (particularly maritime)
territories and spheres of influence to recover its traditional political status as the Middle Kingdom. As
emphasized previously, the type or nature and goals or ideologies of a rising power matter. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (territorial
powers) experienced rapid economic expansion and sought to expand their territories and influence in the first half of the twentieth century.
For example, during this period Japan's goal was to create the Japanese empire in East Asia under the motto of the East Asian Co-prosperity
Sphere. On the other hand, democratized Germany and Japan (trading powers) that enjoyed a second economic expansion did not pursue the
expansion of their territories and spheres of influence in the post-World War II era. Twentiethcentury history suggests that political regimes
predicated upon nondemocratic or nonliberal values and cultures (for instance, Nazism in Germany and militarism in Japan before the mid-
twentieth century, and communism in the Soviet Union during the Cold War) can pose significant challenges to democratic and liberal regimes.
The empirical studies of Lemke and Reed (1996) show that the democratic peace thesis can be used as a subset of power transition theory.
According to their studies, states organized similarly to the dominant powers politically and economically (liberal democracy) are generally
satisfied with the existing international rules and order and they tend to be status quo states. Another historical lesson is that economic
interdependence alone cannot prevent a war for hegemony. Germany was one of the main trade partners of Great Britain before World War I
(Friedberg 2011), and Japan was the number three importer of American products before its attack on Pearl Harbor (Keylor 2011). A relatively
peaceful relationship or transition is possible when economic interdependence is supported by a solid democratic alliance between a rising
great power and an existing or declining one. Some scholars such as Ikenberry (2008) emphasize nuclear deterrence and the high costs of a
nuclear war. Power transition theorists agree that the high costs of a nuclear war can constrain a war among great powers but do not view
them as "a perfect deterrent" to war (Kugler and Zagare 1990; Tammen et al. 2000). The idea of nuclear deterrence is based upon the
assumption of the rationality of actors (states): as long as the costs of a (nuclear) war are higher than its benefits, an actor (state) will not
initiate the war. However, even some rationalists admit that certain actors (such as exceedingly ambitious risk-taking states) do not behave
rationally and engage in unexpected military actions or pursue military overexpansion beyond its capacity (Glaser 2010). The state's behaviors
are driven by its values, perceptions, and political ambitions as well as its rational calculations of costs and benefits. Especially, national pride,
historical memories, and territorial disputes can make states behave emotionally. The possibility of a war between a democratic nation and a
nondemocratic regime increases because they do not share the same values and beliefs and, therefore, the level of mistrust between them
tends to be very high. China
and the United States have enhanced their cooperation to address various global
issues like global warming, international terrorism, energy issues, and global economic stability. But
these issues are not strong enough to bring them together to overcome their mistrust that stems from
their different values, beliefs, and perceptions (Friedberg 2011). What is more important is whether they can set mutually
agreeable international rules on traditional security issues including territorial disputes.
Chinese expansionism causes nuclear war.

Rando 15 — Consultant- Asymmetric Global Solutions DBA, MPH/MS-Biomedical Sciences & US Correspondent-Chemical, Biological,
Nuclear Warfare Journal. (Fire on the Water: The South China Sea and Nuclear Confrontation, 9/29, http://www.cbrneportal.com/fire-on-the-
water-the-south-china-sea-and-nuclear-confrontation/)
Robert Kaplan, one of the world’s foremost experts on China, has stated “ The
South China Sea will be the 21st Century’s
defining battleground.” The obsession with supremacy in the South China Sea is certainly not a new phenomenon in the realms of
international security and maritime strategy. In opinionated discussions related to naval warfare, prominent political scientists and military
strategists have been addressing the geopolitical and military significance of the region for decades. For example, the enlightening 1997 article
“The Chinese Way”, written in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists by Professor Chalmers Johnson of the University of California-San Diego, noted
significantly increased defense budgets and expenditures in the region. In addition, the article eludes to the fact that China had claimed the
entire South China Sea and would use its naval forces to counter any encroachment. The argument for an increased U.S. naval presence in East
Asia is certainly not without precedent. This contested aquatic region has tremendous geopolitical, strategic and
economic significance. While, the Persian Gulf has immense importance and global recognition due to its strategic location in the
Middle East, as well its significance to global commerce, industry and sought after oil, the South China Sea is crucially important
to nations seeking to obtain their economic riches and geopolitical advantages . The South China Sea is
geographically located near the Pacific Ocean and encompasses an area of 1.4 million square miles (3.5 million square kilometers). As a semi-
closed area, the South China Sea extends from the Singapore Strait to the Taiwan Strait, with China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the
Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan surrounding it. In
terms of economic value, fishery stocks and potential fossil fuel
reserves are two major commodities that may spark an armed conflict, even to the point of nuclear
confrontation. As a rich source of the region’s staple diet, fish, the sea guarantees a steady flow of food to the countries of the region.
Control and supremacy of the sea would also assure claiming the much touted hydrocarbon reserves in the seabed, possibly exceeding those of
the OPEC nations such as Iraq and Kuwait. The conquest of this vast resource would virtually assure energy independence and high monetary
returns for those that would gain supremacy over the South China Sea. Thus, seizing the opportunity to gain dominance will lead to control and
manipulation of vital food and energy resources, economic wealth and geopolitical power in the region. A
scenario of regional and
maritime domination and control could lead to the partial or total exclusion of adjacent nation-states to
access any food or natural resources derived from a sea ruled with an iron hand; leading to a massive complex
humanitarian catastrophe of immense proportions from malnutrition and starvation, limitations in
energy production, and economic collapse . These factors make the South China Sea a national security priority for nations in
the region, including one of the world’s superpowers, China. The dependence of China and other regional nations surrounding the South China
Sea on the Strait of Malacca is analogous in geopolitical and economic terms, to the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. Approximately one
-third of all global trade funnels through the strait and also serves as a conduit for raw materials and energy needs for China and other adjacent
nation-states. Such
potential dominance in any region, leads to a high-stakes game of brinkmanship, and at
least the possibility of a regional war which could conceivably escalate to engulf nation-states external
to the regional sphere. Tensions and skirmishes have the propensity to evolve into armed conflict and
full-scale war, and apprehensive leaders and military planners in such a contested region serve as the facilitators for disaster. China
continues to assert sovereignty by constructing man made islands using sand dredged from the sea bottom and these artificial islands could be
militarized. China has even affirmed its desire to have a military presence on these islands; however, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, also
professes the use of these land masses to facilitate commerce via shipping lanes and to protect Chinese fishing and other vessels from piracy.
China will never cease its quest for supremacy and its perceived “ownership” of the South China Sea, as the legitimacy and structure of the
Chinese government is based on nationalism and achievement of the “Chinese Dream”. The Chinese regime continues to vehemently assert
their perceived “right” to the South China Sea, and it forges ahead with plans and operations that could lead to naval warfare and conflict
escalation. The knowledge that China possesses formidable naval capacity and capabilities, including nuclear-capable ballistic missile
submarines, is, indeed, disconcerting at the very least. As we examine and evaluate the “submarine factor”, it is evident that China’s
submarines have no practical value in its disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines. Essentially, nuclear ballistic missile capable submarines
serve as a deterrent against thermonuclear war. Without doubt, the primary reason that China possesses nuclear-capable submarines is to
deter an American attack, although India’s nuclear weapons are also a consideration for Beijing. Nuclear capable submarines are capable of
deep dive capabilities and shorter launch to target times. While China’s submarine capabilities may appear worrisome to some, sudden
deployment from port in a geopolitical crisis would serve as a critical indicator to the US and Western allies, and its submarine fleet still remains
somewhat noisy and detectable. China has already demonstrated its aggression at sea in several instances, such as the ramming and sinking of
a Vietnamese fishing boat in disputed waters claimed by both countries in the region and an ominous presence and military mobilization
exercises which have been monitored by military and intelligence assets. A report by the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, indicates
that Chinese SSBNs are able to target portions of the U.S. from strategic operational positions near the Chinese coast. China’s Global Times
published an unprecedented report that revealed a nuclear missile strike on the western U.S. with JL-2 missiles could generate up to 12 million
American fatalities. The Obama administration and senior U.S. naval officials have not retorted to China’s claims of a potentially devastating
nuclear threat, which included graphics showing radiological plumes and collateral damage induced by radiation. The possibilities of China’s
anti-satellite strategies to disable communications and intelligence-gathering capabilities must also be taken seriously. Most assuredly, the
South China Sea would serve as an obvious arena for the projection of Chinese power, including
conventional and, potentially, nuclear scenarios. Rando2China’s South Sea naval facilities have seen significant upgrading and expansion,
such as the facilities on Hainan, and the nuclear submarine base at Longpo serves as the first nuclear submarine base in the South China Sea.
The base also includes a submarine tunnel that is part of an underwater complex of nuclear facilities on Hainan. Also, Chinese-Russian
wargames are worrisome, which adds to the concerns of nuclear confrontation and consequences globally. The
Chinese have asserted their right to defend its territories , which in their view, includes the South China Sea, and they have
stated verbally, and by their aggressive actions, that they will continue to pursue their strategic goals despite the threat of confrontation and
conflict. Many of the issues in contention in the South China Sea will remain unresolved for, probably, several years to come. We must remain
balanced, and not overzealous in our approaches to assisting with conflict resolution in the area. We must apply reasonable diplomacy, without
stirring up a hornet’s nest that would serve to be counterproductive and enhance animosities. However, the
US, its allies, and other
concerned nation-states must not refrain from being ever so vigilant and proactive in achieving peaceful
resolution, while at the same time maintaining our national defense and security postures.
Impact – Russian revisionism
Russian hybrid war escalates.

Trenin 18 — Dmitri, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, chairs the research council and the Foreign and Security Policy Program,
“Avoiding U.S.-Russia Military Escalation During the Hybrid War,” U.S.-Russia Insight, 1-25-2018, http://carnegie.ru/2018/01/25/avoiding-u.s.-
russia-military-escalation-during-hybrid-war-pub-75277
Since February 2014, the Russian leadership has been in a de facto war mode with regard to the United States.
The Kremlin saw the developments in Ukraine that led to the ouster of former president Viktor Yanukovych as a threefold
threat: a U.S.-supported political invasion of Russia’s vital strategic buffer, an attempt to prevent
Moscow-led integration in post-Soviet Eurasia, and a move to build a barrier between Russia and the
rest of Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin, taken by surprise, responded with the use of force in Ukraine—first to
secure Crimea for Russia and then to protect a rebel stronghold in Donbass. The events that followed
have developed into a virtual Russo-American war—but a different kind of war compared to those the
countries have fought in the past. The crisis over Ukraine put an end to a quarter century of cooperative relations
between Russia and the West and resulted in Russia’s confrontation with the U nited States and its
estrangement from Europe. This confrontation has often been labeled a second Cold War.1 The analogy, however, is flawed: the world has changed too much since the 1980s to suggest that today’s
antagonism is merely a revival of an old conflict. The new confrontation is better described as a Hybrid War—a term which, like its predecessor, is capitalized
here to highlight its distinct place in the history of international relations. This time, the U.S.-Russia conflict is not central to the world system, but, nevertheless, its outcome will help shape the future of that system. The
current Hybrid War is a conflict essentially between Russia and the U nited States over the issue of the world
order. It is not the result of misunderstanding or miscalculation but rather the opposite; Russia, in
particular, has a deliberate outcome in mind. Moscow is pursuing a set of objectives—the most
important of which is to reassert its role as a great power with a global reach. In Europe, specifically, it
seeks to prevent NATO from moving forward into former Soviet territory, particularly Ukraine . As for Ukraine itself,
the Kremlin wants it to serve as a buffer between Russia and NATO . Russia has important objectives outside
of Europe as well, including in the Middle East . Since September 2015, Moscow has been waging a military campaign in Syria. The main purpose of the intervention—apart
from the immediate need to prevent a major victory for Islamist extremists—was to return Russia to the regional and global stage as an active geopolitical player with considerable military capabilities. Russian actions in these and
Even
other areas therefore undermine the United States’ global dominance of the post–Cold War period, even though the Russian Federation (unlike the Soviet Union) does not seek to impose its own model on the world.
as Russia opposes U.S. global hegemony and favors a more distributed balance of power among several
major nations (including itself), the United States feels the challenge to the international liberal order that it
began building after the end of World War II and has dominated since the end of the Cold War. As long
as all major powers, including China and Russia, subscribed to the rules and norms of that order—and, in
China’s case, also benefited from it2—it was a genuine Pax Americana: a state of peace among the major
powers, who all deferred to the United States. With Russia’s breakout from the post–Cold War system, that unique period of peaceful relations among the principal players is now history.
Even though the scale of the current conflict is much smaller, the stakes are high once more. For the
Kremlin, this is a battle for survival—of Russia’s status as an independent player capable of defining and
defending its interests and of the Russian leadership, which has been personally targeted by Western
financial sanctions and various public accusations ranging from corruption to war crimes. Originally,
Moscow believed that this conflict would be a short-term problem, but it now appears to be more
prolonged than previously anticipated and may take a generation to resolve . FEATURES OF THE HYBRID WAR This Hybrid
War’s most distinguishing feature is that it is being fought in a truly global, virtually borderless
environment. International interaction is no longer restricted by walls or other state-imposed barriers. Traditional distinctions between strategy and
tactics have been all but erased. The hybrid warriors include many more players than was the case during the Cold War—from national governments and transnational corporations to
nongovernmental actors and even private individuals. The war is being fought simultaneously in a number of spheres, on different
levels, and in the never-ending, twenty-four-hour news cycle. This aspect of warfare is particularly true
of the field of information, which is of prime importance in the Information Age that emerged with the
end of the Cold War. From cyber conflicts and the use of artificial intelligence to the predominance of
propaganda and fake news, the main battles of the Hybrid War are taking place outside of the purely
physical realm and in the domain of new information technologies. Just as important to the Hybrid War is economics, which has been the key driver of
globalization that paralleled the rise of these innovative information technologies. The prominence of the U.S. media and the U nited States’ immense
financial power give it a huge advantage in both fields. As a result, the weapons of choice in the Hybrid
War are those that use information and economic power to discredit and sanction one’s adversaries.3
Politically, the Hybrid War includes the outside stimulation of political changes in other countries
through street activism and the promotion of specific values, parties, or popular movements. It has
been characterized by interference in elections, political transitions, and other political processes,
including various efforts to hack sensitive information, spread compromising or damaging materials and
fake news, encourage character assassinations, and impose personal and other noneconomic sanctions
(for example, restrictions on travel, seizure of assets, imprisonment, or deportation) on opponents. The existence of a common information space
makes waging political warfare on foreign territory much easier and more attractive than ever before . Cross-
border promotion of democracy and support for the color revolutions that dominated the 2000s (for example, the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine) have now found counterparts in
emerging solidarity among those who espouse more conservative and traditionalist values, such as political systems based on authoritarian models and strict national sovereignty.4 Military power is not out of the picture—though
Nuclear deterrence
its use is different than in the Cold War. The static standoff of million-strong armies in Europe and the long shadow of the nuclear arms race have drawn down or faded.
between Russia and the West remains in place but at lower and more stable levels than during the Cold
War. Today’s risks of miscalculation derive from potential incidents involving conventional forces. A
token military standoff has reemerged along Russia’s border with NATO countries , but, to date, this standoff bears no resemblance
in either scale or scope to the forces that faced each other during the Cold War. The main focus is on developing new military technologies and
novel means and ways of prosecuting warfare—from outer space to cyberspace—that blur or eliminate
the distinction between wartime and peacetime. Like its predecessor, the Hybrid War is a war in the
time of peace. Even more than in the past, however, the onus is on national leaderships to minimize the number of casualties, ideally to zero. Russian military strategists had developed the concept of hybrid
warfare even before the actual conflict broke out in earnest between the United States and Russia in early 2014. Analyzing the experience of the post-Soviet color revolutions and the 2011 Arab Spring, Chief of the General Staff
Valery Gerasimov wrote in February 2013 that the “consequences of new conflicts are comparable to those of a real war”; in many cases, nonmilitary methods “are substantially more effective than the power of arms,” and greater
emphasis is placed on “political, economic, information, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary means” and “covert military measures,” including “information warfare and actions by special forces.” In this environment, “overt use of
military force, often in the form of peacekeeping or crisis management, takes place only at a certain stage, mainly to achieve final success in a conflict.” With regard to the U.S.-Russia confrontation, another key feature has
surfaced: asymmetry between the sides’ capabilities. POWER ASYMMETRIES AND ASYMMETRIC ACTIONS Although Gerasimov was referring to a hybrid war when discussing new means and methods of warfare, this analysis uses
the newly fashionable term to describe the current U.S.-Russia confrontation. Unlike its Cold War predecessor, this conflict is asymmetrical. At least since the 1970s, the Soviet Union was the United States’ equal in terms of both
nuclear and conventional military power. Even beyond its own vast land mass and immediate sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, it wielded considerable ideological power in many Western countries and in the Third World and
presided over a system of alliances in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. The Russian Federation, by contrast, has few formal allies, no satellite states, and a handful of protectorates, if one includes the self-
proclaimed states of Abkhazia, Donbass, South Ossetia, and Transnistria. It has no ideology to compare with the comprehensive dogma of Marxism-Leninism, and although it is still a nuclear superpower, it lags far behind the
United States in non-nuclear military capabilities. Economically, Russia—with its estimated 1.5 percent of the global gross domestic product—is a dwarf. Neither the balance nor the
correlation of forces, however, will determine the outcome of this confrontation . Despite the glaring asymmetries in the national
power of the two sides of the conflict, the course of events is not predetermined. As a nonlinear, highly asymmetrical
conflict, the outcome likely will result from domestic developments in Russia or the U nited States or both.
Both countries are facing serious problems that could prove decisive in the final calculations of the
Hybrid War. The United States is going through a triple crisis of its political system, exemplified but not caused
by the arrival of President Donald Trump and the virulent domestic opposition to him and his policies . A crisis of social
values lies beneath this political crisis and points to a widening gap between the more liberal and the
largely conservative parts of the country. At the same time, the U nited States faces a crisis within its own
foreign policy as it struggles to reconcile the conflict between the more inward-looking U.S. national
interest and the international liberal order of the U.S.-led global system . Russia, though outwardly stable,
is approaching its own major crisis as the political regime created by Putin faces an uncertain future after the
eventual departure of its figurehead. Putin’s Kremlin is already working on a political transition that would rejuvenate the elite and improve its competence and performance, but, at the same time, Russian
society is also changing and Putin’s heirs cannot take its support for granted . Gross inequality, sluggish economic growth, low vertical
mobility, and high-level corruption will present a range of serious challenges to the future Russian leadership. The eventual outcome of the Hybrid War could be reminiscent of the downfall of the Soviet Union, which was far less
the result of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War than of a misguided effort to reform the Soviet Union itself. Russia might break down and break up again, or it might decide on a foreign policy more geared toward its economic needs than to
a certain concept of world order. As for the United States, it might decide to limit its global commitments and redesign its international role as the world’s preeminent but no longer dominant state. Yet, in doing so, it will need to
accept that its change in status will come with a certain price and that it will not be able to take advantage of the benefits of the position it once enjoyed. Asymmetries in power lead to asymmetric actions, which as Gerasimov
suggested are intended to “neutralize the enemy’s superiority in warfare” or “identify and exploit the enemy’s vulnerabilities.”5 By an order of magnitude—or more—Russia is outgunned, outmanned, and outspent by the
combined forces of the United States and its allies. To stay in the fight, it must rely on its few comparative advantages and seek to use them to maximum effect. These advantages include the geographical proximity of some of the
main theaters of operation, such as Crimea and eastern Ukraine, where Russia has escalation dominance; the Russian political system, which allows for secretive, swift, and decisive action; and Moscow’s willingness to take much
higher risks in view of the disproportionally higher stakes involved for the Russian leadership and a national culture that historically has tolerated higher losses in defense or protection of the Motherland. Through swift decisions
and actions, made without prior warning, Russia is capable of surprising its adversaries and keeping them off-balance. This situation promises an uncertain, hard-to-predict, and risky environment, where miscalculation can lead to
incidents or collisions that, in turn, lead to escalation. Granted, these incidents would be of a different kind than the tank standoff at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie in late October 1961 or the Cuban Missile Crisis barely a year later.
The Hybrid War is

Escalation resulting from miscalculation would not be automatic, but the wider damage it could cause needs to be taken seriously. AVOIDING MISTAKES LEADING TO ESCALATION
highly dynamic and, so far, has no agreed-upon rules. In this sense, it resembles the Cold War of the early 1950s rather than that of the 1970s. However,
it is possible, up to a point, to avoid military escalation during the Hybrid War. U.S.-Russian antagonism
does not mean that the two countries’ interests are in total opposition . Unlike in the second half of the twentieth century, neither
party envisions a real shooting war against its adversary and neither wants to allow the situation to
become uncontrollable. The most obvious ways to manage the confrontation are incident prevention,
confidence building, and arms control . Incident prevention, on the face of it, should be easy. Since the early 1970s, Moscow and Washington have had
agreements in place to avoid incidents, which in the Cold War days carried the risk of escalation to nuclear levels. Effective prevention requires a degree of professionalism,
adequate safety measures, and reliable channels of communications. However, during a Hybrid War,
these preconditions cannot be taken for granted . Acting from a position of relative weakness, Russia is
likely to compensate for its inferior overall strength by raising the stakes of confrontation.
Russia is actively trying to dismantle American and European democracies so it can

pursue global supremacy – the impact is the obsolescence of democratic institutions
Kirchick 17
[James Kirchick is a visiting fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe and
Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. He is also an
American reporter, foreign correspondent, author, and columnist. “Russia’s plot against
the West” Politico, 3/17/17, Accessed 6/24/19. https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-
plot-against-the-west-vladimir-putin-donald-trump-europe/. HH-SKS]
To paraphrase Vladimir Lenin, the

West may not seek any conflict with Russia, but Russia seeks conflict with the
West. That is because the Putin regime— nationalist, revisionist, territorially expansionist—cannot
coexist alongside a democratic Europe willing to stand up for its principles. Moscow sees liberal
democracy as a threat and therefore must defeat it, either by force of arms in Ukraine and an attempted coup in
Montenegro, or through non-violent means in the West, bringing us down to the Kremlin’s own, depraved
level through corruption, disinformation and support for nationalist political movements. If the
Kremlin’s intention has been to bring about “a civilization-warping crisis of public trust” in the American body
politic, as Sen. Ben Sasse recently described the increasingly hysterical debate over President Trump’s alleged relationship to Russia, it’s clearly
winning. Obama was also dead wrong to say that Russia does not lead a “bloc of nations” or disseminate a “global ideology.” Shorn of Marxist-
Leninism, the Kremlin today is driven by an ideologically versatile illiberalism willing to work with any political faction amenable to its revisionist
aims. Whereas once Moscow allied with local communists and other fellow travelers, now, in addition to
those left-wing allies, they can also count upon a growing number of sympathizers on the right . Russia has
reverted to its place as, in the words of the liberal writer Paul Berman, “the historical center of world reaction,” headquarters of the new
counter-Enlightenment. Only now, after Russia’s audacious interference in the American presidential election,
have Obama and his allies in the Democratic Party belatedly awoken to the ideological challenge posed
by Putin’s counter-Enlightenment, one that exports kleptocracy and disorder through a European fifth
column of front organizations, political parties, media organs, reactivated KGB networks and plain hired
hands. Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, meets Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, meets
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán | Sean Gallup/Getty Images The avatar of the Kremlin-friendly conservative is Hungarian Prime Minister
Viktor Orban, who, over the last quarter century, has undergone one of the more remarkable transformations in European politics from liberal,
anti-communist firebrand to Putin’s closest ally in the EU. Despite being the leader of a proud nation brutally invaded and occupied by the
Soviet Union, Orban is the most vocal opponent of EU sanctions placed on Russia over its meddling in Ukraine (a neighbor of Hungary) and has
signed a major nuclear power deal with Moscow. Orban also aligns with the Kremlin on a more profound level, championing “illiberal
democracy,” echoing Russian-promulgated narratives on Western decline, the advantages of “ethnic homogeneity” over cosmopolitanism, and
the threat posed to Christian civilization from Islam. The embrace of the Russian strongman by Western leaders like Orban, Le Pen—and yes,
Trump—is the culmination of Moscow’s assiduous, years-long cultivation of the global right. One of the most potent narratives Russia has
weaponized in this regard is that of a Judeo-Christian civilization under siege from a rising Islamic threat. A powerful vector through which
Russia blends its informational and kinetic warfare is migration, the consequences of which threaten the future of the European project
perhaps more than any other crisis. Russia’s military intervention in Syria and support for the warlord ruling Eastern Libya have created what
Russian political analyst Leonid Futini calls a “crescent of instability” around the continent. Having colluded in the conditions driving massive
numbers of migrants to Europe through its support of the Assad regime, Moscow then “weaponizes” their presence on the continent by aiding
and abetting xenophobic populist movements. Long before the term “fake news” was on everybody’s lips, Moscow ginned up the infamous
“Lisa” case, wherein Russian state media falsely alleged that a gang of migrant Muslim men had raped an ethnic Russian girl in Berlin and that
German authorities had covered up the crime. As fears of demographic and societal change have taken hold in Europe, Russia has subtly
insinuated itself into Western politics to an extent unprecedented since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its narrative of impending civilizational
doom increasingly adopted in the parts of Europe traditionally most resistant to Russian meddling, and by conservative Central and Eastern
Europeans with anti-Soviet pedigrees. The
Kremlin’s overall strategy to dismantle the Western alliance is best
encapsulated by a 2013 article in a Russian military journal, where what’s since become known as the
“Gerasimov Doctrine” was laid down in writing. Adopting tactics of subterfuge traditionally associated
with “non-linear” or “hybrid” war, the doctrine calls for the use of non-military over military measures
by a four-to-one ratio, thus allowing a conventionally weaker power like Russia (whose military budget is one-tenth
that of NATO’s) to fight asymmetrically by exploiting its adversaries’ weaknesses . Ignored at the time of the article’s
publication, the Gerasimov Doctrine was essentially the blueprint for Russia’s strategy in the annexation
of Crimea, where special-operations troops without insignia carried out a bloodless takeover while a
confused and listless West sat stupefied. Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel lay flowers at Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow | Ria Novosti/EPA via Host Photo Agency A
primary component of hybrid war is disinformation. Finely attuned to the particular grievances of a diverse array of Western audiences, Russian
psychological operatives produce narratives that find fertile ground in Europe, where resentment over the Iraq War, fallout from the 2008
financial crisis and revelations of National Security Agency surveillance continue to breed anti-American sentiment and undermine societal
resilience to Russian agitprop. Kremlin “active measures” (Soviet-style lies aimed at influencing an adversary’s decision-making) about Western
political and financial corruption, the subservience of Western leaders to shadowy and unaccountable corporations and America’s insatiable
quest for global domination— disseminated through social media bot networks that, by manipulating algorithms, create the impression that
such information is at the very least widely believed if not factually valid—find resonance across the ideological spectrum, uniting everyone
from left-wing anti-globalization activists to right-wing cultural traditionalists. Part of what makes Russia’s
war on truth so ominous is
transcends ideology. Once Moscow had Pravda and espoused the virtues of the international
that it
proletariat. Today it uses “fake news” as part of a long-term strategy to transform Western publics into
conspiracy-addled zombies. Take the case of the disturbed young man who shot up a Washington, D.C.
pizza parlor last year, convinced it was sheltering a child sex ring run by associates of Hillary Clinton. The
assailant came to this conclusion after marinating in a stew of conspiracy websites that developed the story based upon email correspondence
stolen by Russian hackers from Democratic Party servers. While
this was a lone wolf incident, it is not difficult to fathom
the prospect of more aimless, politically malleable young men in the West (a demographic
disproportionately supportive of Trump and other far-right movements) “self-radicalizing” through the
path of inflammatory material propagated by Russia or its proxies on the internet, à la Islamic jihadists.
The annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine is a warning shot across the bow of the
West, a message, written in blood, that the old ways of doing business are over.
Internals/Turns
I/L – Allied Prolif
Conventional military overmatch is key to prevent allied prolif — it outweighs all other
commitments.
Quarterly; 41:4; pg. 87-88; //GrRv)
If treaty pledges are insufficient and threats of nuclear retaliation lack believability, then what information does
an ally use to evaluate the strength of its received security guarantees? The answer is that the ally examines the foreign policy doctrine
and military deployments of the guarantor to estimate the support the ally can expect if attacked. Foreign
policy doctrine conveys information on the interests of the guarantor. Does the United States have the same threat assessment regarding a
particular adversary, and does it pursue a similar strategy for containing or confronting that adversary? To what extent does the United States
accord importance to the regional theater in which an ally is situated? Like rhetoric, however, foreign
policy doctrine can be a
noisy indicator: what a guarantor like the United States broadcasts to the world in key policy documents may not reflect what it does in a
crisis. Allies thus monitor how and where the United States is spending money on its overseas
deployments and military operations to evaluate the credibility of security guarantees.
The most tangible indicator is where (and to what extent) the United States is positioning its forward-
deployed forces.13 Yet, the significance of conventional military deployments is often misunderstood
since many analysts usually regard all frontline troops as tripwires. According to tripwire theory, these forces are
garrisoned on an ally’s territory in order to create additional risks for an adversary. If the adversary attacks the ally and U.S. soldiers happen to
die in action, then Washington would be under pressure to retaliate by expanding the conflict beyond what the adversary is willing to tolerate.
The tripwire effect is important because it enhances deterrence-by-punishment. But forward-deployed U.S. forces have an
additional, often obscured, advantage if they can mass firepower. They can have the capacity to raise the
costs of aggression directly by killing an adversary’s attacking soldiers. That is, they can enhance local
deterrence-by-denial, which refers to the ability to hinder the adversary from achieving operational success on the battlefield or from
executing military faits accomplis at acceptable cost.
The history of nuclear proliferation demonstrates that the

military infrastructure undergirding an alliance matters for
curbing states’ appetites for nuclear weapons. During the 1950s, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer
appeared satisfied with U.S. security guarantees despite the Eisenhower administration’s stated rhetorical reliance on nuclear weapons to deter
Soviet aggression in its New Look strategy. But Adenauer’s confidence
appeared to rest in the U.S. troop presence in
his country. He so valued that presence that when he read in the New York Times that the U.S. military was planning
massive personnel cuts (which in turn would reduce U.S. forces in Europe), he became despondent and lost faith in
U.S. security guarantees. Shortly thereafter, Adenauer entered into an arrangement with France and Italy to develop a European
nuclear deterrent.14 This initiative was short-lived, but questions over West Germany’s nuclear intentions troubled U.S. decision makers for
another decade.
Alliances are resilient to every factor besides military power.

Quarterly; 41:4; pg. 96-97; //GrRv)
Alliances Are Thicker Than Bluster
U.S. security guarantees have been strained in the last decade due to weariness with wars abroad and
economic difficulties at home. The Trump factor has appeared to make matters worse: tense leadership summits,
confrontational rhetoric, political volatility, and the rough handling of long-standing international partners on issues like trade and burden
sharing do not inspire confidence. Nevertheless ,
we have some reasons to be relatively optimistic. Large-scale troop
withdrawals from major regional theaters of operations have not happened; nor do they appear to be
happening anytime soon. Because its force posture remains largely intact, the United States still has on-
the-ground preparations to help allies defend themselves against an adversarial attack. This is true of key
allies, like Germany and South Korea, that might be major candidates for reevaluating existing weapons policies and nonproliferation pledges in
the age of Trump.
None of this analysis suggests that we can be flippant about allied nuclear proliferation risks or the
direction of U.S. foreign policy. We should be vigilant about early warning signs that could foreshadow
heightened proliferation risks such as substantial and unilateral changes in U.S. military deployments as
well as operations from the European and East Asian theaters, leaving allies exposed to the depredations of adversaries. Yet, none
appears afoot at the present. Indeed, what the preceding discussion suggests is that alliances are much more resilient
institutions than commonly presumed. Their underlying military infrastructures remain in place
because they help the United States project power abroad and thus advance foreign policy goals. To jettison them
quickly and abruptly would be self-sabotaging even if the Trump administration cares less about the liberal international order than its
predecessors, and is willing to use threats to increase its leverage in burden-sharing or trade negotiations. In the end, the
core of the
administration’s defense strategy concerns strategic competition with Russia, China, and North
Korea.67 To pursue great power competition effectively, the United States will not only have to
maintain its key alliances, but it will also have to bolster local deterrence and defense measures so that
those adversaries will have limited opportunities to extend their power and influence.
Alliances are thus much more resilient than is often assumed. Their resiliency draws more on actual force
deployment than what may or may not be said by leaders in public. Accordingly, concerns about allied proliferation in
countries like Germany and South Korea may be overblown . As long as force deployments remain consistent and robust
in the face of external aggression, history shows that host countries will have few incentives to pursue
an independent nuclear weapons capability.
I/L - Econ/Alliances
Unipolarity sustains the global economy and global alliance networks—hegemonic
stability theory proves
Doug Stokes 18--(Doug Stokes, Professor in International Security and Strategy in the Department of
Politics at the University of Exeter, Foreign Affairs, Trump, American Hegemony, and the Future of the
Liberal International Order, International Affairs 94: I, 2018 issue,
https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/images/ia/INTA94_1_8_238_Stokes.pdf)//ND
At the end of the Second World War, the United States possessed almost half the world’s manufacturing capacity, the
majority of its food supplies, nearly all of its capital reserves and a military power unparalleled in human
history. In this context, the US national interest became globalized as America set about using its hegemonic
leadership to fashion a new world order. Whereas closed economic blocs had exacerbated the rise of nationalist extremism after
the First World War, after 1945 American foreign policy elites sought to use the new US hegemony to create an
international order based on economic interdependence, a conditional and institutionally bound
multilateralism and strategic alliance networks under US leadership. These networks existed in part to
contain Soviet expansionism militarily, but also to dampen geopolitical competition from other centres of
world power such as Japan or western Europe.14 The promotion of the LIO thus represented the
institutional instantiation of the kind of world order that would allow the U nited States to thrive while also
remaining first among equals in a Pax Americana.15 This order, while allowing the United States to flourish, also carried
substantial costs, with the emergence of economic challenges from other states . Both Germany and Japan,
formerly locked into an existential struggle for world mastery, emerged as economic challengers to the
United States a little over three decades after the cessation of hostilities. This was, then, a remarkably
benign form of hegemony, giving rise to the question: why would the United States choose this form of
hegemonic leadership, and the often steep concomitant costs in blood and treasure, to maintain a system that, in economic
terms at least, allowed other centres of power to emerge ? At this point we can usefully turn to IR theory, and in particular
hegemonic stability theory (HST), which can help us to understand the structural logic underpinning hegemonic leadership. Broadly
speaking, HST argues that the international system is more likely to be stable when a single state is the
dominant power within that system. The existence of a hegemon helps eliminate collective action
problems associated with the generation of often costly global public goods necessary to world commerce
and to the underwriting of the political and strategic contexts of global economic interdependence —
problems that have long bedevilled international politics. Aside from the alleged efficacy of world hegemonic leadership, what does HST tell us
about why a preponderant power would seek this often costly role of global leadership? The first explanation is most closely associated with
Kindleberger, and argues that a hegemon provides leadership as a form of benevolent service to the international
community.16 In this sense, the hegemon seeks to promote not only its own interests but also the collective
interests of the states that it leads: a form of noblesse oblige . In so far as hegemonic leadership is ‘thought of as the
provision of the public good of responsibility, rather than exploitation of followers or the private good of prestige, it remains a positive
idea’. Importantly, hegemonic leadership can help to pacify forms of economic rivalry inherent within the global economy. That is,
leadership can help ‘pool sovereignties to limit the capacity of separate countries to work against the
general interest; such pooling is virtually attained today in some of the functions needed to stabilize the
world economic system’ and is ‘necessary in the absence of delegated authority’ .17 The hegemon is
benign as its net resource transfers to the rest of the international community through the costs of the
public goods it supplies, including security public goods in the form of alliance networks such as NATO ,
are extremely costly. This implies that the United States is not predominantly seeking either its own immediate advantage or its own one-sided
long-term strength vis-à-vis other economic centres. Instead, it is promoting change in the collective interests of world
prosperity through the exercise of a benign hegemony.
I/L - Alliances
Hegemony sustains the global alliance system and offshore balancing fails—weak
American responses spark global instability
Ted R. Bromund et. al 17--(Ted R. Bromund, Studies Anglo-American relations, U.S. relations with
Europe and the EU, and the U.S.’s leadership role in the world, Reclaiming American Realism, American
Affairs Journal, accessed 6-28-2019, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/reclaiming-american-
realism/)//ND
As Americans, we should know what it is to live in a tough, competitive world, because it was the world our nation was born into. That world
endures, and no amount of post–Cold War fantasizing will make it disappear. From the start, we made our way in that world
thanks to our alliances—for it was a military alliance with France that helped us win our independence .
Provided that we retain the power to decide if we will fight—and we do—our alliances today raise no questions of principle .
After all, we claimed the right to contract alliances in the Declaration of Independence itself. Nor are our
alliances an act of charity. First and foremost, they have mostly been made with strategically important
countries, traditionally those that have been able to help uphold order in their regions. Today, there is
little disagreement in America that our allies should pay more , so as to do more. Every president since Eisenhower has
asked for that, and with rare exceptions—such as Britain under Margaret Thatcher—they have asked in vain. We cannot sustain our
alliances unless the American people believe that every member nation is making a fair contribution . But
the problem is not that our allies are free riding on us, for when we cut our defenses, they do not
increase theirs. It is that the history, culture, and politics of our allies now make them unwilling to accept that military strength is vital to
diplomacy and deterrence alike. They have profound incentives to minimize, dismiss, and ignore threats—and hence not to spend enough on
defense. For our European allies and Japan, the demands of the social welfare state, mixed with an understandably lingering horror at the
memories of war, have combined over decades to make unpalatable most discussion of hard power and the need for martial readiness. The
fear that returning to the world of machtpolitik will put at risk all they have built since 1945 is understandable, if unsuited to the current
geopolitical environment. Yet we should still appreciate what we have in our allies. Tens
of thousands of brave Americans gave
their lives to create the alliances we have today. The costs we pay now are maintenance expenses on
the peace they won. Of course, our allies benefit from this. But precisely because we are on top, we benefit most from the
world as it is today, even if our complacency sometimes allows others to take advantage of the stability we created for their own malignant
purposes. Our democratic allies, who wish—a little too hard—only to live in peace, feel the same way about the status quo. That does not mean
we need to excuse the failings of our allies, indulge their supranational fantasies, outsource the defense of our interests to them, or allow them
to completely outsource theirs to us. Instead, we need to have just as much realism about our allies as we have about our enemies. That means
recognizing that what our allies lack is the luck that we in the United States enjoy. We are fortunate to have Canada and Mexico as neighbors;
our allies, unfortunately, are next door to China, Russia, autocrats, and Islamists . Given our good
fortune, and our strength, it is inevitable that we are the ones who are forward deployed, because we
are the ones who have the geopolitical freedom to help . But we should remember that our deployments
defend our place in the world—and the ability of Americans to be free in it—just as much as they defend
our allies. Without our close alliances and the forward yet benign deployment of our forces, we would
look out onto an unwelcoming Middle East and an increasingly troubled Asia , where Americans would be seen
simply as outsiders, not as welcome partners by some. Moreover, the allies we have, such as the United Kingdom,
Israel, Japan, and South Korea, are part of a global network of liberal societies and economies that
dynamically interact and add immeasurably to global wealth, not least back in the United States . We
cannot avoid becoming involved merely by retreating from our allies. American indifference or perceived
weakness can engender instability that is not in our interests, and which forces us to consider more risky
forms of involvement. For example, China’s buildup of forces in the South China Sea, and its efforts to
dominate strategic waterways and raise doubts about future freedom of navigation, occurred in part
due to its perception that America’s lack of active military alliances in Southeast Asia would make the
United States unable to counter its expansion. To China, America is an interloper in areas it has
traditionally dominated and considered part of its sphere of influence; thus, it believed that U.S. naval
and air forces (which currently can only be transiently present in Southeast Asia), were a paper tiger and could be
intimidated into eventual withdrawal. Washington, indeed, has struggled with trying to prove its credibility
in keeping open vital sea lanes in the South China Sea, without having bases from which it can project a
regular presence. That is why offshore balancing is an attractive concept in theory ; in the real world, it
would be all offshore and no balancing, as our allies and others would doubt our commitment to play a
meaningful role during a crisis, and as the costs of “fighting our way back in” would be politically
unacceptable at home. Our alliances also help us in another way. Without us, our smaller yet strategic
allies would be unable to defend themselves, and our larger ones—Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and
South Korea, to name four—would have to fend for themselves. The cheapest way to do that would be to acquire
nuclear weapons, which could lead to a cascade of nuclear proliferation. The resulting regional environments would be tense and unstable, and
future crises could well become violent. We therefore need to reassure our friends as we deter our enemies—for the sake of greater stability
that reduces the chances of a major conflagration in strategic areas drawing in American forces. Happily, our alliances, backed by our strength,
are a means for us to do both at once. Part of the answer to the problems we face with our allies is for the free world to stop doing the things
that alienate its publics and make it vulnerable to autocratic blandishments. Above all, we must stop centralizing power in the hands of
unaccountable experts, an approach that, as the EU is belatedly discovering, only makes rejecting democracy more appealing. Another part of
the answer is for the United States to make clear what side it is on. Starry-eyed “resets” or “open hands” towards aggressive, repressive
regimes only confuse those who wish to rally beneath a flag of freedom and liberalism. Trying to win over the whole world risks losing those
already on our side. Finally, our first choice should always be to deter trouble where it matters most, not to fight it: the example of Western
Europe after 1945 is proof of the value of resolutely holding the line. Thus, the danger in this competitive world is not that we will be too
strong. It
is our weakness, not our strength, that is provocative, because American weakness makes our
allies fearful and encourages our competitors to take chances. Providing strong defenses is both necessary for peace
and a charge laid upon Congress by the Constitution. This charge must be fulfilled.
I/L - Econ
Hegemony sustains the economy—it creates a beneficial positive feedback loop
Doug Stokes 18--(Doug Stokes, Professor in International Security and Strategy in the Department of
Politics at the University of Exeter, Foreign Affairs, Trump, American Hegemony, and the Future of the
Liberal International Order, International Affairs 94: I, 2018 issue, accessed 6-24-2019,
https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/images/ia/INTA94_1_8_238_Stokes.pdf)//ND
26
The third image, that of the structurally advantaged hegemon, is the one that I argue best captures the nature of US hegemony. Here,
leadership gives the hegemon the capacity to shape world order in ways that confer upon it advantages
that will enable it not only to recover the costs of supplying public goods, but to accrue other positional advantages.
That is, the hegemon acquires the benefits of cooperation without having to resort to coercion, while
reinforcing its position by extracting resources from the rest of the international community and
reinvesting them in ways that help prolong its hegemony. Moreover, the hegemon can do this as other states
accept the hegemon’s overall international order as legitimate, at least for as long as the opportunity costs of major systemic
revision outweigh the costs of staying with the status quo. The hegemon is therefore in the position of enjoying resource
inflows from the rest of the international community. In this sense, the United States is thus both a ‘system
maker’ and a ‘privilege taker’, and accrues advantages through structuring world order in ways that
benefit its interests while delivering enough benefits to other states to discourage them from seeking to
revise the US-led order.27 What, then, are some of the key positional advantages that the US enjoys?
I/L - SCS/Taiwan
Collapse of US naval hegemony causes conflict over Taiwan and SCS
Edward Wong 18--(Edward Wong, Military Competition in Pacific Endures as Biggest Flash Point
Between U.S. and China, No Publication, 11-14-2018 accessed 6-28-2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/world/asia/usa-china-trade-pacific.html?rref=collection
%2Ftimestopic%2FUnited%20States%20Politics%20and
%20Government&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics
%C2%AEion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=31&
pgtype=collectionWASHINGTON)//ND
WASHINGTON — Trade disputes have for months been the focus of souring relations between the United States
and China. But intractable problems in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait underscore that
competition for dominance of the Pacific Ocean remains the most volatile source of conflict between
the two nations — and the tensions are rising. That became clear in barbed comments during a meeting in Washington last week in which Mike Pompeo,
the secretary of state, and Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, negotiated with their Chinese counterparts. And it is evident as Vice President Mike Pence is in Asia this week
to talk to East Asian and Southeast Asian leaders to shore up support for American efforts to
counterbalance China. Mr. Pence’s trip includes stops at two Asia-Pacific summit meetings, where he
plans to speak about checking China’s influence and power projection. Since his broad speech last month on American competition
with China, Mr. Pence has become the face of the administration’s aggressive approach to Beijing . Some Asia analysts say,
though, that President Trump’s absence sends a signal that the U nited States is not committed to the region: President
Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia are each attending at least one of the gatherings . Strategy for the
region, in Washington and Beijing, revolves around how each country can assert military dominance in
the Pacific. For now, the most powerful military in the region is still that of the United States, which relies on the
ability to have unfettered naval access to the South China Sea and the support of the self-governing
island of Taiwan to bolster its standing. But China has become more aggressive in trying to assert
dominance over both. And its state-owned companies are making inroads in the islands of Oceania — from Saipan to Vanuatu — with infrastructure projects. American
officials say those could eventually become beachheads for the People’s Liberation Army, which would pose a challenge to the United States Navy’s operational command in the far island
the South Pacific has traditionally been its sphere of influence. Closer to home, China
chains. Australia is also watching closely because
has continued to place military equipment and installations on rocks and reefs in the South China Sea,
over which it claims sovereignty. And it is persuading some nations to sever diplomatic ties with
Taiwan while forcing foreign companies, including hotels and airlines, to drop any mention of Taiwan. There is a
consensus in Washington that American officials need to find ways of pushing back. In the S outh China Sea,
that has mainly taken the form of what are called freedom-of-navigation operations by the Navy, in
which ships sail near the islands or features claimed by Beijing to establish that the waters are
international — and not Chinese territory. On Sept. 30, American and Chinese warships nearly collided, coming within 45 yards of each other. On Tuesday, Mr. Pence’s plane flew
over the South China Sea to Singapore, where he attended the annual summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Mr. Pence told a Washington Post columnist on the
plane that the flight, which passed within 50 miles of the contested Spratly Islands, was a type of freedom-of-navigation operation. “We will not be intimidated,” he said. “We will not stand
down. We will continue to exercise freedom of navigation.” Graham Allison, a Harvard Kennedy School professor who wrote a book on the potential for war between the United States and
China, said most people in the region had thought it was “game over” on the South China Sea — too late to roll back China’s presence from rocks and reefs, as well as islands it created by
dredging sand. But “the Trump administration now means to fight back vigorously on all fronts, including on the South China Sea — and perhaps even on Taiwan,” Mr. Allison said. Last Friday,
at the close of the Washington meeting with their Chinese counterparts, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mattis made sharp comments on Pacific issues. “Regarding our strong ties with a democratic
Taiwan, I reiterated the U.S. policy has not changed and that we are concerned about China’s increasing efforts to coerce others, constraining Taiwan’s international space,” Mr. Pompeo said,
notably, in opening remarks to journalists. Later, Gen. Wei Fenghe, the Chinese defense minister, made his own assertive comments on Taiwan, referencing the American Civil War and the
United States Pledge of Allegiance. “To achieve reunification is a mission for our party and our country,” General Wei said. “In the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S., there is this sentence saying
this is a nation under God, indivisible. So it is the same with Taiwan. It is an inalienable part of China.” If “this territorial integrity is under threat,” he said, China would move to maintain it “at
any cost,” just as the United States had to do “in the Civil War.” Analysts in Washington took note of the remarks. “I believe it’s rare that the U.S. side raises Taiwan in a news conference with
the Chinese in an opening statement,” said Bonnie S. Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Pompeo referred to ‘democratic Taiwan.’ That will
surely rankle the Chinese. I expect China’s remarks in private regarding Taiwan were even sharper.” The United States has been more aggressive in defending Taiwanese interests since John R.
Bolton became national security adviser in April. Last month, the Pentagon sailed two warships through the Taiwan Strait, which underscored the potential for conflict. The White House had
initially considered sending an aircraft carrier through the strait — something the United States has not done since 2007. That most likely would have ignited a furious response from China.
Instead, the Pentagon sent a cruiser and a destroyer. Defense Department officials had argued that the carrier would be too provocative at a time when Washington and Beijing are already at
loggerheads over trade and other issues. That includes Communist Party repression of ethnic Uighur Muslims, which Mr. Pompeo regularly denounces. On Wednesday, American
legislators introduced bills calling on the Trump administration to take actionto defend the Uighurs. Mr. Mattis and Mr. Wei have tried to lower the temperature on tensions in the Pacific.
Before the Washington talks, the two met in Singapore last month on the sidelines of a conclave of Southeast Asian defense ministers. But one Defense Department official said that cordial
talks were the limits of what the two nations could achieve for now. Both countries have dug into seemingly nonnegotiable positions on China’s militarization of disputed land features in the
South China Sea — the issue that most bedevils the military relationship. The Chinese do not describe their actions as militarization; they accuse the United States of militarizing the sea with its
freedom-of-navigation ship operations and overflights. Now, officials from Britain and France say their navies are also taking part in the operations, even though Southeast Asian nations
contesting China’s claims have not publicly committed to participating. Yang Jiechi, the senior Chinese foreign policy official who attended the Washington meeting, said China was building
what he described as civilian facilities and necessary defense facilities “on its own territory.”“The Chinese side made it clear to the United States that it should stop sending its vessels and
military aircraft close to Chinese islands and reefs, and stop actions that undermine China’s sovereignty and security interest,” Mr. Yang said. Michael Pillsbury, an author on the Chinese
interpreting these
military cited by Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence, said the Chinese would no doubt continue to see the actions in a hostile light. They are, he said, “
freedom-of-navigation exercises, even when they’re innocent passage, as something more —

provocations, or a declining hegemon trying to maintain its power .”
Goes nuclear
Jason Lemon 18--(Jason Lemon, The threat of a U.S.-China nuclear war is greater than most people
realize, a security expert has warned, Newsweek, 10-17-2018 accessed 6-29-2019, <span
class="skimlinks-unlinked">https://www.newsweek.com/us-china-nuclear-war-threat-greater-most-
people-realize-expert-warns-1175610)//ND
According to Talmadge, most U.S. and Chinese analysts have generally dismissed the possibility of a nuclear
confrontation altogether. However, looking at the Pentagon's preferred war tactics in recent conflicts, the professor
pointed out that typical U.S. strategy involves punching "deep into enemy territory in order to rapidly knock
out the opponent's key military assets at minimal cost." "The Pentagon developed this formula in wars against
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia, none of which was a nuclear power," Talmadge wrote. In China, nuclear and other more
conventional military weapons are closely intertwined, meaning the U.S. would likely purposefully or
inadvertently target Beijing's nuclear capabilities early on. Recognizing this possibility, the Chinese may consider
using their nuclear arsenal before it could be taken out. Talmadge suggested that such a scenario could arise if Beijing were
to move to invade Taiwan. A conflict could also erupt over territorial rights in the South China Sea, where Beijing has staked claim to what much
of the world sees as international waters. Tensions
have remained high between U.S. and Chinese naval patrols
within the region. Although Talmadge maintains that such military scenarios are not highly likely, the risk has increased as
tensions between China and the U.S. have escalated . "This sobering reality should encourage leaders on both sides to find
ways of resolving political, economic and military disputes without resorting to a war that could rapidly turn catastrophic for the region and the
world," she concluded her article. The warning comes as the Trump administration has raised concern about the growing threat from China,
arguing that it is working to interfere in U.S. elections. While many security and intelligence experts have pointed to
Beijing's ambitions for greater dominance, analysts have also cautioned that little evidence exists that the Chinese are working
to interfere directly in U.S. polls. But experts agree that China is working to interfere domestically in the U.S. in other ways. Dmitri Alperovitch,
chief technology officer of U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, also said earlier this month that "unfortunately, the Chinese are back,"
according to Reuters. He said Chinese hackers are now "the most predominant threat actors we see threatening institutions all over this
country and Western Europe."
AT—Heg Bad
AT: Impact Turns (Top Level)
Even if hegemony is imperfect, it’s worth preserving—international structures sustain
it and deploying hard power deters aggressors
Kagan 19—(Robert Kagan, Senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations, “The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled
World”, Alfred A. Knopf)//ND
Despite everything that has happened, if we reject the counsels of the new “realism” and resume our support for
the liberal world order, it is still within our capacity to defend it and put off its collapse, perhaps for quite some
time. Today the order remains intact, despite the hostility of the present administration and the weakness
of the last. The international structures supporting it are durable . This is partly because they rest on
geographical realities and a distribution of power that still favor the liberal order and still pose obstacles
to those who would disrupt it. It is also because liberal values, though under assault, remain a force that binds the
democratic nations of the world together. Authoritarianism also has its appeal and will always compete with
liberalism, but the authoritarian governments do not feel the same sense of commonality as the
monarchies and aristocracies of the early nineteenth century. The Chinese and Russians are not
adversaries, but they are not allies either. They share little except their antipathy to liberalism . The
democratic nations, however, are bound together by more than common adversaries, as the post–Cold War era has proved. America’s
alliances in Europe and Asia have so far held, therefore, despite the weakening of America’s
commitment under two administrations. There is still a liberal world order to be salvaged , if the American
people decide it is worth salvaging. They will also have to decide that they are prepared to pay the costs, and those costs have not changed . It
took great and consistent exertions of American power and influence to create and sustain this world
order. It will take no less to continue upholding it into the future. Americans over the past two decades have become
convinced that the United States is doing too much when actually it has been doing too little. Much of what needs to be done to
shore up the order requires only diplomatic and economic measures . The United States needs to return to
the deep engagement with Europe that characterized the relationship from the postwar years to the
early post–Cold War years. Americans must understand that a healthy liberal Europe is the anchor of the
order from which they benefit. Therefore such matters as the negotiation of Britain’s withdrawal from the
EU, the Eurozone crisis, the cyber threats from Russia, and European energy supplies must be addressed
not just transatlantic problems that affect the United States, too. The United States also needs to work
with European governments to address the democratic backsliding in Europe . Nations that entered the EU and
NATO after the Cold War had to meet high standards of democratic governance in order to gain membership. If some have ceased to meet
those standards, they need to be suspended from membership or denied some of the benefits of membership. Hungary and Turkey cannot
expect to enjoy the benefits of NATO, and, in Hungary’s case, EU membership, so long as they celebrate their “illiberalism” and reject the basic
premises of the liberal world order. Finally, the United States needs to return to the liberal compact when it comes to trade and international
institutions. It was a serious blow to the liberal order when the United States walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership—and a great
boon to China. The order will suffer further if American trade policies seek “wins” over close allies like Canada and Germany. Americans need to
understand that the free trade regime undergirds the order from which they benefit as much or more than anyone. It
is not a “win” if
that regime collapses into the protectionism that characterized the decades before World War II. Then
there is the question of maintaining America’s military predominance in the international system . For all
the talk of “soft” power and “smart” power, it is ultimately the American security guarantee, the
ability to deploy hard power to deter and defeat potential aggressors, that provides the essential
foundation without which the liberal world order could never survive. Members of Congress from both parties
have underfunded the military since the beginning of the post–Cold War era, but especially over the last decade. Defense secretaries from both
parties have raised alarms about the increasing inability of the armed forces to perform their missions of deterrence around the world. And the
dangers of war have only grown in recent years, not diminished. Americans need to remember that deterring a war is much less expensive than
fighting one. “It is not only the money to preserve power, however, but also the willingness to apply that power, with all the pain
and the suffering, the uncertainties and the errors, the failures and follies, the immorality and brutality, the lost lives and the lost treasure.
Most of what we need to do to sustain the liberal order will not require sending troops, but there will be times when it will be necessary. It is
simply dishonest to tell the American people that the relative security and prosperity they have enjoyed can be sustained without the
occasional threat or use of force. There will be challenges on the Korean Peninsula, “in the South China Sea, in the Middle East, and along the
fault lines between Russia and NATO. We would like to be sure that there will be no more Iraqs and Vietnams, and we should do our best,
learning from past mistakes, to avoid such failures. But it would be foolish to imagine we can avoid mistakes and failures entirely. There is no
doctrine other than pure isolation and inaction that can prevent such tragedies. The Obama administration offered a doctrine of not doing
“stupid” things; others have spoken of the need to fight only “necessary” not “unnecessary” wars; in the past people have argued for fighting
only for “vital” national interests in “core” areas and avoiding fights in the “periphery.” The problem with all of these sensible-sounding
proposals is that it is often only in hindsight that we can be sure what was “stupid” and what was “necessary,” what was “vital” and what was
“peripheral” and safely ignored. There were many smart people who believed that American intervention in Vietnam was essential to forestall a
communist victory, that it was a vital strategic interest for the United States, partly to protect Japan and partly in the overall effort to resist
aggression. An equally long and distinguished list of foreign policy thinkers and politicians supported the war in Iraq because they believed it
was vital to protect the world from what most believed were Iraq’s WMD programs and from a serial aggressor and mass killer. Later on, when
those efforts failed, when the intelligence proved faulty and the political-military strategies inadequate, many of those who supported those
wars declared not only that they were a mistake but they were an obvious and avoidable mistake—even though they themselves did not see it
at the time. That is one of the problems: many mistakes are not obvious until they are made. So, too, the distinction between supposedly
“necessary” and “unnecessary” wars. Prior to December 1941 and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States, many American experts
and the great majority of the American people did not think it was necessary to go to war in Europe to defeat Hitler. As for wars on the
periphery, the world is not a collection of distinct regions neatly walled off from one another. We may call one region “Europe,” one “Asia,” and
one “the Middle East,” and we may say we will intervene in one but not the other. This is an artificial construct, however. Regions abut one
another and bleed into one another; their histories, cultures, and religions as well as their economies are tightly entangled. Great
powers
have been intervening in the Middle East and Persian Gulf for centuries, before there was oil and before
there was a Suez Canal. To extricate ourselves from the Middle East would mean extricating ourselves
from the world connected to and through the whole region. Even that might not keep us from having to intervene. In
recent decades we have learned, tragically, that what happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East. Americans would love never
to have to think about the Middle East again, but no administration has succeeded in extricating the United States from it—not even Obama.
Meanwhile, the more we rely on proxies like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel to determine the course of
events in the Middle East, the less it will be a course we would choose. Even if they could manage the task without
us, which seems unlikely, it will be their interests they will be protecting, not ours, and not those of the liberal order. “For the United States, it is
not a question of all in or all out. We cannot intervene everywhere, and we haven’t ever come close to doing so. In
the Middle East and
elsewhere, we will still be required to make decisions: when to intervene, how to intervene, how much
to commit, and how long to stay, and the answers will not be obvious and the outcomes will not be
certain or even predictable. Nor will our interventions “solve” the problem; or they will solve one problem and create others. Those
who insist on outcomes that pose no further dangers and require no further involvement are asking the impossible. Our intervention in World
War II defeated Hitler but led to Soviet communist control of half of Europe and four decades of Cold War. That is the messy reality. President
Obama said he didn’t like the idea of just putting a lid on problems like Syria. But the most masterful foreign policies in history, whether those
of a Bismarck or a Disraeli, have always been about containing rather than solving problems. America’s entire grand strategy since World War II
has been about putting lids on problems, in Europe, in Asia, and elsewhere. Whether that is good or bad depends on what’s under the lid and
whether it is better to keep things under it than to let them out. “The American people would like a foreign policy that avoids mistakes and
disasters, and who can blame them? But that is a bit like wanting to throw touchdowns but not interceptions, to make only good investment
decisions, or to win all your cases. The
price of failures in foreign policy is measured in human lives and national
treasure, and therefore the greatest care must be taken to get it right, but it nevertheless remains a
human activity and therefore subject both to our foibles and the failure of our best-intentioned efforts
to predict the future. People don’t stop what they’re doing after a mistake is made; they try to do a
better job next time.
AT: Containment -> War
Containment is necessary to void war
Sempa 2019 - adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University
Francis P, "The Case for Containing China," Jun 29, https://thediplomat.com/2019/06/the-case-for-
containing-china/
The only sensible U.S. policy, therefore, is a policy of “firm and vigilant containment,” in the words of
George F. Kennan written in the early years of the Cold War. Kennan was the ultimate realist, unblinded
by ideology or sentiment. He counseled patience and prudence and took the long view, understanding
that there are no permanent solutions to international problems.
Containment does not mean war, though war is a possibility in any great power rivalry and should be
adequately prepared for. American sea power, its Asian allies (especially Japan and hopefully India), and
the geography of the East Asian littoral make containment doable. What is needed from the United
States is an unambiguous policy that will not be misunderstood by the Chinese leadership. Containment
is passive and reactive, not bellicose, but it demands American willpower and steadfastness.
China, like the Soviet Union before it, is a peer competitor of the United States but it is not invincible.
Like the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, it has domestic problems and economic vulnerabilities
that can be patiently and prudently exploited. When George Kennan wrote about containment in 1947,
he said that Americans should find no cause for complaint, but rather should “experience a certain
gratitude to Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has
made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the
responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.”
AT: China Leadership Good
Letting China surpass the US ensures geopolitical chaos and great-power war.
Glickman, 18 — Gabriel Glickman is a nonresident associate fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan
University. (2-12-2018; "Back to the Future: The Potential of Great-Power Conflict;" National Interest;
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/back-the-future-the-potential-great-power-conflict-24464; //GrRv)
What does the DOD mean by “order?” In the field of international relations, the terms “revisionist state” and “status-quo state” are used
to describe, respectively, countries that seek to change the current international system and those that uphold it. In the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, the
international system has been defined by American hegemony and the
spread of Western liberal democracy rather than its challengers—notably, fascism and socialism. This is commonly referred
to as the liberal world order.
Under that world order, the United States is the most powerful country in the world. It often intervenes in international conflicts at
a high cost, thus keeping dissatisfied nations from overturning the system . The NDS, however, refers to a recent
shift in the current world order with an observation that, “We are facing global disorder, characterized by decline
in the long-standing rules-based international order.”
The basis for that observation is the argument that the United States under the Obama administration took a brief, but arguably
consequential, step back from the job of world-order maintenance. As proof of this, foreign-policy pundits often refer to Obama’s favorite
quote (which he got from Martin Luther King Jr., who in turn got it from a nineteenth-century clergyman named Theodore Parker):
“[T]he arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The implication of this quote is that history is ultimately on the side
of good rather than evil (e.g., dictatorships), and therefore the United States needn’t concern itself with great power competition or world
order strategy. Critics point out that the president’s faith in that sentiment was put to poor use, however, because it led him to apologize
for American power and to enact amore restrained foreign policy that in turn allowed revisionist states
like Russia, China and Iran to flourish at the expense of their respective regions’ security. As Charles
Krauthammer harshly wrote in the final months of the administration: “The consequent withdrawal of American power
… has yielded nothing but geopolitical chaos and immense human suffering. (See Syria.).”
And that's not exactly a partisan argument either. In addition to conservative critics like Krauthammer, left-leaning foreign policy
scholars, like Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute, also have been critical of the results of the Obama administration's well-intentioned
foreign policy.
The NDS promises to reverse the “arc of history” approach to security policy with a three-tiered approach that prioritizes the “revisionist
powers” of China and Russia, then “rogue regimes” like Iran and North Korea, and finally “nonstate actors” such as ISIS.
Of course, this new approach may alleviate serious concerns about the NSS—including my own—that the United States government no
longer cares about global security. But policy will only follow well-written sentiment if President Trump himself can accept that
America is the glue holding together an entire world order.
With China now poised to reclaim its previous spot in world history as a global hegemon, the
proverbial clock is turning back. And that appears to be the reason why the DOD is serious about America being in the
business of world order maintenance. As stated in the NDS: “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern
in U.S. national security.”
Indeed, China already has a strong economy. It represents almost 15 percent of the global GDP to
America’s roughly 24 percent. But, to put that in a slightly different perspective, China has grown astronomically in the last decade to
overtake Japan as the second largest global economy. Thus,
there is a real possibility that in the near future (likely
decades) it may be
able to surpass even the United States and then harness its capital to develop
superior military technology. At that point, China would be capable of overthrowing the
current international system.
The world has not seen global conflict the likes of World War I and II since the United States became the
dominant power. Nor, for that matter, has it seen a recurrence of the great power conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. As the new defense strategy implies, take
U.S. hegemony out of that equation and great powers may
clash once again to the detriment of a cherished world order.
AT: Multipolarity
Multipolarity fails—it generates violent fill in and risks nuclear war
Kagan 19—(Robert Kagan, Senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations, “The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled
World”, Alfred A. Knopf)//ND
At the root of such thinking is the belief that there is an escape from power or that it is possible to wield power without error and without
failure. Americans, blessed by their favorable geography and wealth, still believe
they have a choice between engaging
the world and letting the world fend for itself . There has been no shortage of realists, idealists,
progressives, and conservatives telling them that substantially disengaging from our alliances and
overseas commitments is possible and cost-free . But the real choice we face is not between the good and the bad but
between the bad and the worse. It is between maintaining the liberal world order, with all the moral and material costs that
entails, or letting it collapse and courting the catastrophes that must inevitably follow. What is likely to
follow is a return to the multipolar power struggles that brought so much devastation to the world
before the United States redirected the course of history. That is where the deep ruts lead, back to the state of the
world prior to 1945. Only this time, the powers competing and clashing will be armed with nuclear weapons. It
is ironic that some of those who spent the Cold War warning that America’s hawkish foreign policies would result in nuclear holocaust do not
seem “democracies would result in nuclear holocaust do not seem to fear nuclear war in the competitive multipolar world that may be our
future. We have yet to test the question of whether nations with nuclear weapons can go to war, because so far the United States and the
liberal world order have prevented such wars. But if
history is any guide, to count on the horror of new weaponry
alone to maintain the peace is a most risky bet. Had you cast that bet before the two world wars, you would have lost. These
days some experts tell us it was the existence of nuclear weapons that prevented the United States and the
Soviet Union from coming to blows, but few at the time had any confidence that nuclear weapons were
a guarantor of peace. Throughout much of the Cold War there were those who simply assumed that the world was heading inevitably
toward Armageddon. They were wrong that it would come as a result of American Cold War policies, but in the long run they may still prove
right.
Hegemony Good — Brands
Primacy prevents great-power conflict — multipolar revisionism fragments the global order and causes
nuclear war.
Brands & Edel, 19 — Hal Brands; PhD, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Charles Edel; PhD, Senior Fellow and Visiting
Scholar at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. (“The Lessons of Tragedy:
Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 6: Darkening Horizon; Published by Yale University Press; //GrRv)
Each of these geopolitical challenges is different, and each reflects the distinctive interests, ambitions,
and history of the country undertaking it. Yet there is growing cooperation between the countries that
are challenging the regional pillars of the U.S.-led order. Russia and China have collaborated on issues
such as energy, sales and development of military technology, opposition to additional U.S. military
deployments on the Korean peninsula, and naval exercises from the South China Sea to the Baltic. In
Syria, Iran provided the shock troops that helped keep Russia’s ally, Bashar al-Assad, in power, as
Moscow provided the air power and the diplomatic cover. “Our cooperation can isolate America,”
supreme leader Ali Khamenei told Putin in 2017. More broadly, what links these challenges together is
their opposition to the constellation of power, norms, and relationships that the U.S.-led order entails,
and in their propensity to use violence, coercion, and intimidation as means of making that opposition
effective. Taken collectively, these challenges constitute a geopolitical sea change from the post-Cold
War era.
The revival of great-power competition entails higher international tensions than the world has known
for decades, and the revival of arms races, security dilemmas, and other artifacts of a more dangerous
past. It entails sharper conflicts over the international rules of the road on issues ranging from freedom
of navigation to the illegitimacy of altering borders by force, and intensifying competitions over states
that reside at the intersection of rival powers’ areas of interest. It requires confronting the prospect that
rival powers could overturn the favorable regional balances that have underpinned the U.S.-led order
for decades, and that they might construct rival spheres of influence from which America and the liberal
ideas it has long promoted would be excluded. Finally, it necessitates recognizing that great-power
rivalry could lead to great-power war, a prospect that seemed to have followed the Soviet empire onto
the ash heap of history.
Both Beijing and Moscow are, after all, optimizing their forces and exercising aggressively in preparation
for potential conflicts with the United States and its allies; Russian doctrine explicitly emphasizes the
limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve escalation dominance in a war with Washington. In Syria, U.S.
and Russian forces even came into deadly contact in early 2018. American airpower decimated a
contingent of government-sponsored Russian mercenaries that was attacking a base at which U.S.
troops were present, an incident demonstrating the increasing boldness of Russian operations and the
corresponding potential for escalation. The world has not yet returned to the epic clashes for global
dominance that characterized the twentieth century, but it has returned to the historical norm of great-
power struggle, with all the associated dangers.
Those dangers may be even greater than most observers appreciate, because if today’s great-power
competitions are still most intense at the regional level, who is to say where these competitions will
end? By all appearances, Russia does not simply want to be a “regional power” (as Obama cuttingly
described it) that dominates South Ossetia and Crimea.37 It aspires to the deep European and extra-
regional impact that previous incarnations of the Russian state enjoyed. Why else would Putin boast
about how far his troops can drive into Eastern Europe? Why else would Moscow be deploying military
ambitions for tomorrow are clearly much bolder. Beijing probably does not envision itself fully
overthrowing the international order, simply because it has profited far too much from the U.S.-
anchored global economy. Yet China has nonetheless positioned itself for a global challenge to U.S.
influence. Chinese military forces are deploying ever farther from China’s immediate periphery; Beijing
has projected power into the Arctic and established bases and logistical points in the Indian Ocean and
Horn of Africa. Popular Chinese movies depict Beijing replacing Washington as the dominant actor in
sub-Saharan Africa—a fictional representation of a real-life effort long under way. The Belt and Road
Initiative bespeaks an aspiration to link China to countries throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and
Europe; BRI, AIIB, and RCEP look like the beginning of an alternative institutional architecture to rival
Washington’s. In 2017, Xi Jinping told the Nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party
that Beijing could now “take center stage in the world” and act as an alternative to U.S. leadership.38
These ambitions may or may not be realistic. But they demonstrate just how significantly the world’s
leading authoritarian powers desire to shift the global environment over time. The revisionism we are
seeing today may therefore be only the beginning. As China’s power continues to grow, or if it is
successful in dominating the Western Pacific, it will surely move on to grander endeavors. If Russia
reconsolidates control over the former Soviet space, it may seek to bring parts of the former Warsaw
Pact to heel. Historically, this has been a recurring pattern of great-power behavior—interests expand
with power, the appetite grows with the eating, risk-taking increases as early gambles are seen to pay
off.39 This pattern is precisely why the revival of great-power competition is so concerning—because
geopolitical revisionism by unsatisfied major powers has so often presaged intensifying international
conflict, confrontation, and even war. The great-power behavior occurring today represents the warning
light flashing on the dashboard. It tells us there may be still-greater traumas to come.
The threats today are compelling and urgent, and there may someday come a time when the balance of
power has shifted so markedly that the postwar international system cannot be sustained. Yet that
moment of failure has not yet arrived, and so the goal of U.S. strategy should be not to hasten it by
giving up prematurely, but to push it off as far into the future as possible. Rather than simply
acquiescing in the decline of a world it spent generations building, America should aggressively bolster
its defenses, with an eye to preserving and perhaps even selectively advancing its remarkable
achievements.
A receding US deterrent is a catalyst for great-power conflict — decline causes transition wars and
miscalculation. <<Note—The first part of this card helps set up realism and AT: Ks very well—you can
most likely exclude it otherwise>>
Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 7: Rediscovering Tragedy; Published by Yale University Press; //GrRv)
Moreover, if discussions of “international order” can quickly take on an abstract quality, the
consequences of collapse—the lives lost or ruptured, the prosperity destroyed, the moral depravities
committed—can be frighteningly concrete. Thucydides had it right when he described what happens in
such a vacuum of security and morality: “Death thus raged in every shape … there was no length to
which violence did not go.”3
This is all indisputably depressing, but it should not be the least bit surprising. If it were possible to
construct an international system that was truly universal in its appeal; if it were possible to freeze
global power relationships at that moment of creation; if it were possible for states to put aside the very
human ambitions, emotions, and fears that drive their behavior: then, perhaps, the world could
permanently escape the competitive impulses that make international orders impermanent and their
demise so traumatic. But none of this has ever been possible. International orders, even the most
inclusive ones, create winners and losers because they benefit states unequally. The power balances
that underpin a given system shift over time, encouraging new tests of strength. And although the
human desire for peace and prosperity is strong, countries also remain motivated by ideological passion,
greed, and insecurity. The most successful orders can mitigate the effects of these dynamics; they can
suppress the sources of conflict and upheaval. But they cannot eliminate them entirely.
This point is essential in considering the trajectory of the post-1945 order. It is tempting for individuals
in nearly every geopolitical era to believe that their world is somehow different—that it is immune to
the dangers of conflict and collapse. It is alluring to think that progress can be self-sustaining, and that
liberal principles can triumph even if liberal actors are no longer preeminent. To do so, however, is to
fall prey to the same ahistorical mindset that so predictably precedes the fall. Yes, the American order is
exceptional in the level of stability, prosperity, and liberal dominance it has provided, and in the level of
consent it has generated from countries around the world. Yet it is not so exceptional as to be exempt
from the dangers of decline and decay. As the Greeks surely would have realized, in fact, it is precisely
when one succumbs to the illusion that tragedy is impossible that tragedy becomes all the more likely.
II
This leads to a second component of a tragic sensibility—an appreciation that tragedy is once again
stalking global affairs. The U.S.-led system is undoubtedly strong and resilient in many respects, as
shown by the simple fact that it has survived as long as it has. Yet what endured in the past is not
destined to endure in the future, and today the structure is groaning as the stresses mount.
Long-standing principles such as nonaggression and freedom of navigation are being undermined from
Eastern Europe to the South China Sea. International predators like North Korea and radical jihadist
groups are using creative, asymmetric strategies to cause geopolitical disruption out of all proportion to
their material power. The democratic wave has receded amid the growing prevalence and power of
authoritarianism. Revisionist autocracies are reshaping regional environments in Europe, the Middle
East, and East Asia, and waging sophisticated assaults against the political systems and geopolitical
positions of their competitors. These countries are building privileged spheres of influence in critical
areas of the globe; they are casting ever longer shadows, both strategic and ideological, across the
international landscape. Meanwhile, the countries with the most to lose should the current system crack
are too often divided and demoralized; their strategic torpor and distraction are creating vacuums that
the revisionists are all too happy to fill. The protectors of the post-1945 order seem stuck in neutral, or
even reverse, as the attackers push forward. This has historically been a dangerous combination.
Faced with this daunting panorama, some analysts will take refuge in the hope that these challenges will
simply exhaust themselves, or that revisionist powers will be satiated once their regional ambitions are
fulfilled. Yet most systems tend toward more, rather than less, entropy over time, meaning that more,
rather than less, energy is required to stabilize them. And revisionist powers rarely reach some natural
point at which their aspirations subside; those aspirations often grow with each success.4 Today, the
dissatisfied dictatorships, especially Russia and China, see themselves as being locked in a form of
geopolitical conflict with the United States; they are already using force and other types of coercion to
chip away at the American order. Should they succeed in claiming regional primacy and reestablishing a
spheres-of-influence world, the result would be not to dampen but to inflame international conflict.
Competition among the great powers would intensify as hostile spheres rub up against one another; the
security of the global commons—the foundation of international prosperity—would be threatened by
escalating geopolitical rivalry. The prospects for self-determination and liberalism would fade as small
states fall under the sway of stronger, authoritarian neighbors. And crucially, as Daniel Twining notes,
regional dominance could serve as a “springboard for global contestation”—for the renewed clashes for
systemic dominance that Americans thought they had left behind with the end of the Cold War.5
It is impossible to predict precisely when the pressures on the existing order might become unbearable,
or to know how close we are to that critical inflection point at which the dangers metastasize and the
pace of decay dramatically accelerates. One can only speculate what the terminal crisis of the system
will look like if and when it occurs. What is clear is that the telltale signs of erosion are already
ubiquitous and the trend-lines are running in the wrong direction. The first step toward recovery is
admitting you have a problem. Having a tragic sensibility requires seeing the world for what it is and
where it is going, especially when the outlook is ominous.
III
If the international order is under strain, however, it does not follow that its collapse is unavoidable.
Here a third aspect of a tragic sensibility is vital: the ability to reject complacency without falling into
fatalism.
Nietzsche defined tragic pleasure as the “reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death.”6 It was
just such a rejection of fatalism—of the belief that the next great global crackup was inevitable—that
motivated U.S. policymakers to create the post-1945 order and sustain it through the crises that
followed. Today, it is true enough that the grandest aspirations of the post–Cold War era are unlikely to
be fulfilled anytime soon. Given the instability and revisionism roiling the international environment, it is
simply beyond America’s power—if it was ever possible in the first place—to create a truly global order
in which liberal values are universal, geopolitical competition has ceased, and authoritarian rivals have
been fully pacified and converted into “responsible stakeholders.” Yet the existing international order,
incomplete and threatened as it is, still constitutes a remarkable historical achievement. The creation of
a global balance of power that favors the democracies, the prevention of unchecked aggression and
intimidation by predatory powers, and the promotion of a prosperous and an integrated world in which
liberal values have achieved great prevalence are all triumphs worth preserving. A more reasonable
goal, then, would be to defend this existing order against the depredations of those attacking it, and
America undoubtedly has the power for this essential undertaking.
Hegemony Good — Laundry List !
Military primacy solves economic growth, prolif, and great-power war.
Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 5: The Contemporary Amnesia; Published by Yale University Press;
//GrRv)
As William Wohlforth has noted, American primacy and activism acted as a powerful deterrent to great-
power conflict by creating enormous disincentives for Russia, China, or other actors to incur the
“focused enmity” of the United States.11 The persistence and even extension of the U.S. security
blanket smothered potential instability in unsettled regions such as Eastern Europe, while removing any
possibility of German or Japanese revanchism—a prospect much feared in the early 1990s—by keeping
those countries tightly lashed to Washington. American intervention helped extinguish bloody conflicts
in the Balkans before they could spread to neighboring countries; U.S. diplomatic and military pressure
kept aggressive tyrannies such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea bottled up and helped slow the spread of
nuclear weapons. U.S. support helped democratic forces triumph in countries from Haiti to Poland, as
the number of democracies rose from 76 in 1990 to 120 in 2000; America crucially assisted the advance
of globalization and the broad prosperity that came with it by promoting pro-market policies and
providing the necessary climate of reassurance and stability.12
Hegemony Good — Uncertainty Magnifier
Overwhelming power is key — uncertainty alone emboldens revisionism and erodes alliances.
Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 6: The Darkening Horizon; Published by Yale University Press; //GrRv)
Concerns about American reliability are not new, of course, and too much U.S. activism can be as
discomfiting as too little. But the fact remains that there is now surging global uncertainty about the
future of U.S. foreign policy, and that uncertainty is itself a destabilizing factor in international affairs.
It may promote hedging by U.S. allies and partners who no longer believe that America’s security
commitments are so ironclad and its red lines so red. It may provoke stronger revisionist challenges
from aggressors who assess that their moment has arrived because the forces arrayed against them are
no longer so purposeful or unified. Most broadly, if Washington continues to behave so erratically on
the international stage, the perception of U.S. steadiness of purpose that has traditionally backstopped
the international order could be eroded.
All these processes will take time to unfold, but they are occurring already. Countries such as the
Philippines seem to be adjusting their geopolitical postures due to doubts about U.S. effectiveness and
resolve; debates about the future of alliance with America are intensifying in other countries.65
European countries are discussing measures they might take to protect themselves in a post-American
age. As the United States turns toward protectionism, countries are cutting trade deals that exclude
Washington or increasingly looking to Beijing as an economic partner.66 And Chinese leaders appear to
be sensing that their window of opportunity is opening. “China has never seen such a moment,” writes
Evan Osnos, “when its pursuit of a larger role in the world coincides with America’s pursuit of a smaller
one.”67 A period of growing international turmoil and danger is a bad time to sow doubt about
America’s global role, but this is precisely what is happening. The effects are unlikely to be either trivial
or benign.
Hegemony Good — LIO !
American military power is key to prevent nuclear war and uphold the liberal order.
Kagan, 18 — Robert Kagan; PhD, Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Council
on Foreign Relations. (9-18-2018; “The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World;” pg. 160-
162; Published by Alfred A. Knopf; //GrRv)
What is likely to follow is a return to the multipolar power struggles that brought so much devastation
to the world before the United States redirected the course of history. That is where the deep ruts lead,
back to the state of the world prior to 1945. Only this time, the powers competing and clashing will be
armed with nuclear weapons. It is ironic that some of those who spent the Cold War warning that
America’s hawkish foreign policies would result in nuclear holocaust do not seem to fear nuclear war in
the competitive multipolar world that may be our future. We have yet to test the question of whether
nations with nuclear weapons can go to war, because so far the United States and the liberal world
order have prevented such wars. But if history is any guide, to count on the horror of new weaponry
alone to maintain the peace is a most risky bet. Had you cast that bet before the two world wars, you
would have lost. These days some experts tell us it was the existence of nuclear weapons that prevented
the United States and the Soviet Union from coming to blows, but few at the time had any confidence
that nuclear weapons were a guarantor of peace. Throughout much of the Cold War there were those
who simply assumed that the world was heading inevitably toward Armageddon. They were wrong that
it would come as a result of American Cold War policies, but in the long run they may still prove right.
These are the quandaries we cannot avoid no matter how hard we try. Reinhold Niebuhr believed that
what he called “the world problem” could not be solved if America did not “accept its full share of
responsibility in solving it.”187 To support a “world community beyond our own borders” he went on,
both was virtuous and reflected a “prudent understanding of our own interests.” But he also predicted
that Americans would be “the poorer for the global responsibilities which we bear.” And poorer not just
in a material sense but also in a moral sense. It was impossible “to build a community without the
manipulation of power,” and it was impossible “to use power and remain completely ‘pure.’ ”188 As
Hans Morgenthau put it, “Whoever wants to retain his moral innocence must forsake action altogether.”
Niebuhr did not want Americans to have an “easy conscience” about the things they were going to have
to do, for there was always the danger that they would enjoy power too much and would use it to
dominate others rather than to address the “world problem.” But he also did not want their “uneasy
conscience” to “tempt us into irresponsibility.”189
Americans, it is fair to say, have not enjoyed power too much. These days, they would prefer to wield it
less. Yet the struggle for power in the international system is eternal, and so is the struggle over beliefs
and ideals. If it is not our system of security and our beliefs shaping the world order, it will be someone
else’s. If we do not preserve the liberal order, it will be replaced by another kind of order, or more likely
by disorder and chaos of the kind we saw in the twentieth century. That is what the world “as it is” looks
like. That is what history and human nature have led to in the past and will lead to in the future if not
continually shaped, managed, and resisted.
This is a pessimistic view of human existence, but it is not a fatalistic view. Nothing is determined, not
the triumph of liberalism nor its defeat. As we have seen these past seventy-five years, even in a
dangerous world tremendous human progress and human betterment are possible. The “better angels”
of human nature can be encouraged and the demons dampened. To know that the jungle will always be
there is not to despair of keeping it at bay, as we have done for decades. In 1956 the German American
historian Fritz Stern wrote that “the deepening of our historical experiences” should not lead us to
abandon our faith in “the possibilities of human progress” but rather to “a stronger sense of the
precariousness of human freedom and to a still greater dedication to it.”190 The liberal order is as
precarious as it is precious. It is a garden that needs constant tending lest the jungle grow back and
engulf us all.
Hegemony Good — China
Causes
Rogin, 19 — Josh Rogin; Columist, Citing a Center for a New American Security. (6-6-2019; "To avoid
conflict, the United States must deter Chinese aggression;" Washington Post;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/to-avoid-conflict-the-united-states-must-
deter-chinese-aggression/2019/06/06/400b8ef0-8899-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html; //GrRv)
Despite what you may have read, the United States’ strategy toward China does not entail launching
another Cold War, imposing a zero-sum game or even winning a “clash of civilizations.” In fact, the
entire objective of the Trump administration’s Asia approach is to avoid outright conflict with China. But
to do that, Beijing must be deterred from continuing on its aggressive path.
The idea that the White House’s new approach to confront China’s economic aggression and military
expansion represents a “Cold War mentality” is popular with pundits both in Washington and in Beijing.
But that accusation misunderstands what the United States is trying to do with China. It also mistakenly
absolves Beijing for its malign actions, which the United States is trying to counter — or, better yet,
prevent.
“A competitive strategy isn’t meant to take us to conflict,” Adm. Philip S. Davidson, the head of U.S.
Indo-Pacific Command, told me during an interview last weekend at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a security
conference in Singapore hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “A competitive
strategy is defined as a deterrence strategy, to prevent conflict going forward.”
The U.S. military is just one part of the government that is trying to reorient away from decades of focus
on the Middle East and terrorism-related conflict to focus on the strategic competition with China.
There’s a widespread recognition that China is accelerating its efforts to expand its influence across its
region and around the world.
Davidson said the goal of U.S. military strategy in Asia is “to dissuade China from pursuing their
ambitions, which are centered on the first island chain in the near term but are much more broadly and
globally ambitious in the long term.”
There’s overwhelming evidence that China’s military expansion is spreading well beyond Asia. Last
weekend, the People’s Liberation Army tested a new submarine-launched ballistic missile that drastically
expands China’s worldwide nuclear capability. On Wednesday, Beijing announced it had launched a
rocket bound for space from a ship for the first time. Chinese naval ships have visited more countries in
the past 28 months than they did in the previous 28 years, Davidson said.
At the Shangri-La Dialogue, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe defended Beijing’s militarization of
artificial features in the South China Sea — which has broken a promise made by Chinese President Xi
Jinping and flouted international law — as a response to U.S. aggression. Wei also criticized countries
coming from “outside the region” to interfere in Asian security and stability, a comment clearly directed
at the United States.
Davidson said Wei’s remarks show that China’s leaders are looking to overturn the “Free and Open Indo-
Pacific” vision that underpins the current order in the region and replace it with their own. “They’ve
made quite plain that they would like to supplant the U.S.-led international order and lead one with
Chinese characteristics,” Davidson said. “When you think about that, being led by a nation that has a
closed and authoritarian internal order, it’s got to send a chill down everybody’s spine across the globe.”
That raises the crucial question of whether China can be deterred, and how. Davidson called for more
investments in cyber defense, electronic warfare, long-range precision fire, and integrated air and
missile defense. Congress also hasn’t funded several other items the U.S. military needs to counter
China in the Pacific, including funding for troops, military construction and technology in the region,
Davidson wrote in a letter to Congress in April.
A new report by the Center for a New American Security warns that China is trying to “leapfrog” U.S.
capabilities by rapidly developing the technologies needed to “offset” the military advantages the
United States has enjoyed for decades. The report was written by former deputy defense secretary
Robert Work, who was in charge of the U.S. project to offset China’s technology during the Obama
administration.
“Chinese technological capabilities are growing as rapidly as its economic power,” the report states.
“The Soviets were never able to match, much less overcome, America’s technological superiority. The
same may not be true for China.”
Those who criticize U.S. policy on China argue that the United States went looking for another enemy
after the fall of the Soviet Union. Some point to the unfortunate remarks by Kiron Skinner, the State
Department’s policy planning director, who called the U.S.-China competition “a fight with a really
different civilization and ideology.” That was an error, not a defining statement on U.S. policy.
The U.S.-China competition is completely different from the Cold War for many reasons. China is more
economically integrated than was the Soviet Union. The world can’t be divided into two camps. The
competition extends to technology and commerce.
But there is one lesson from the Cold War that can be applied to China. If the United States and its
partners want to avoid a hot war, we must try to deter the authoritarian power from expanding
aggressively without pushback. One thing is clear: China is not yet deterred. One thing is not clear:
whether it can be.
Letting China surpass the US ensures geopolitical chaos and great-power war.
Glickman, 18 — Gabriel Glickman is a nonresident associate fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for
Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University. (2-12-2018; "Back to the Future: The Potential of Great-Power
Conflict;" National Interest; https://nationalinterest.org/feature/back-the-future-the-potential-great-
power-conflict-24464; //GrRv)
What does the DOD mean by “order?” In the field of international relations, the terms “revisionist state”
and “status-quo state” are used to describe, respectively, countries that seek to change the current
international system and those that uphold it. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the
international system has been defined by American hegemony and the spread of Western liberal
democracy rather than its challengers—notably, fascism and socialism. This is commonly referred to as
the liberal world order.
Under that world order, the United States is the most powerful country in the world. It often intervenes
in international conflicts at a high cost, thus keeping dissatisfied nations from overturning the system.
The NDS, however, refers to a recent shift in the current world order with an observation that, “We are
facing global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order.”
The basis for that observation is the argument that the United States under the Obama administration
took a brief, but arguably consequential, step back from the job of world-order maintenance. As proof of
this, foreign-policy pundits often refer to Obama’s favorite quote (which he got from Martin Luther King
Jr., who in turn got it from a nineteenth-century clergyman named Theodore Parker): “[T]he arc of the
moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The implication of this quote is that history is
ultimately on the side of good rather than evil (e.g., dictatorships), and therefore the United States
needn’t concern itself with great power competition or world order strategy. Critics point out that the
president’s faith in that sentiment was put to poor use, however, because it led him to apologize for
American power and to enact a more restrained foreign policy that in turn allowed revisionist states like
Russia, China and Iran to flourish at the expense of their respective regions’ security. As Charles
Krauthammer harshly wrote in the final months of the administration: “The consequent withdrawal of
American power … has yielded nothing but geopolitical chaos and immense human suffering. (See
Syria.).”
And that's not exactly a partisan argument either. In addition to conservative critics like Krauthammer,
left-leaning foreign policy scholars, like Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute, also have been critical of
the results of the Obama administration's well-intentioned foreign policy.
The NDS promises to reverse the “arc of history” approach to security policy with a three-tiered
approach that prioritizes the “revisionist powers” of China and Russia, then “rogue regimes” like Iran
and North Korea, and finally “nonstate actors” such as ISIS.
Of course, this new approach may alleviate serious concerns about the NSS—including my own—that
the United States government no longer cares about global security. But policy will only follow well-
written sentiment if President Trump himself can accept that America is the glue holding together an
entire world order.
With China now poised to reclaim its previous spot in world history as a global hegemon, the proverbial
clock is turning back. And that appears to be the reason why the DOD is serious about America being in
the business of world order maintenance. As stated in the NDS: “Inter-state strategic competition, not
terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”
Indeed, China already has a strong economy. It represents almost 15 percent of the global GDP to
America’s roughly 24 percent. But, to put that in a slightly different perspective, China has grown
astronomically in the last decade to overtake Japan as the second largest global economy. Thus, there is
a real possibility that in the near future (likely decades) it may be able to surpass even the United States
and then harness its capital to develop superior military technology. At that point, China would be
capable of overthrowing the current international system.
The world has not seen global conflict the likes of World War I and II since the United States became the
dominant power. Nor, for that matter, has it seen a recurrence of the great power conflicts of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the new defense strategy implies, take U.S. hegemony out of
that equation and great powers may clash once again to the detriment of a cherished world order.
Offense—Allies
Alliance Impact
A strong alliance network is an impact filter — solves great-power war, growth, and democracy.
Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 7: Rediscovering Tragedy; Published by Yale University Press; //GrRv)
What’s true for America is equally true for its broader coalition of like-minded states. In geopolitics as in
many things, there is great strength in numbers. Yet that strength will hold only if the supporters of the
international order lock arms and commit fully to its defense. Preventing great-power war and
international aggression, promoting an open global economy that averts depression and privation,
upholding democracy and human rights in the face of authoritarian resurgence, and defending liberal
norms that are being assaulted are goals that can be achieved only through strong partnerships and
collective effort. If the democracies are divided, the autocracies will exploit those divisions; if America
and its allies struggle to achieve unity of action, they will be outmaneuvered or overawed by revisionist
powers. The trend in today’s environment is, in many ways, toward greater fragmentation within what
was once called the “free world.” But a tragic mindset requires understanding that greater coordination
and solidarity is required if that free world is to prosper.
For defenders of the international order, then, the question is not whether such coordination and
solidarity is desirable, but how it can best be achieved. Here there is no escaping the centrality of
American leadership. It is fair enough to point out that America pays a disproportionate share of the
costs of sustaining an order that benefits so many. It is entirely reasonable, at a time when threats are
rising and challenges multiplying, to demand that collective sacrifices be distributed more evenly, if only
because Americans themselves will tire of supporting that order if they feel that they are doing it alone.
To put the matter baldly, Americans will not be forever willing to send their sons and daughters to die
for NATO if some of the richest countries in that alliance refuse to field minimally capable militaries of
their own.
What Americans must remember, though, is that the strong collective measures required to preserve
the international order are far more likely to emerge when America itself is fully committed. Allies and
partners will be more willing to run risks and confront revisionist powers if they are assured of U.S.
support than if they doubt it. An Asia-Pacific without American leadership would not be a region better
positioned to resist Chinese expansionism; it would be a weaker and more divided region, increasingly at
Beijing’s mercy. Likewise, supporters of free markets and democracy are more likely to stand up for
those arrangements if the world’s preeminent free-market democracy is in the vanguard; collective
action to meet the greatest global challenges will materialize more successfully if the United States acts
as the convener. America was “the one nation that has the necessary political, military, and economic
instruments at our disposal to catalyze a successful collective response,” James Baker said during the
Persian Gulf crisis in 1990; no other nation can play this role, even today.13 Finally, Americans must
keep in mind that if Washington pursues protectionist economic policies that impoverish its partners, if
it forsakes the liberal principles that have formed the ideological core of its alliances, if it extorts tribute
from its allies like some mafia protection racket, then it will lose the attractive power that allowed it to
lead such formidable coalitions in the first place. America endures its share of inequities and burdens in
the service of global order. Yet as a tragic sensibility reminds us, some burdens are tolerable because
they help prevent something far, far worse.
Allied Prolif Internal
Conventional military overmatch is key to prevent allied prolif — it outweighs all other commitments.
Lanoszka, 19 — Alexander Lanoszka, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo, has
held fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College. (“Alliances and
Nuclear Proliferation in the Trump Era;” The Washington Quarterly; 41:4; pg. 87-88; //GrRv)
If treaty pledges are insufficient and threats of nuclear retaliation lack believability, then what
information does an ally use to evaluate the strength of its received security guarantees? The answer is
that the ally examines the foreign policy doctrine and military deployments of the guarantor to estimate
the support the ally can expect if attacked. Foreign policy doctrine conveys information on the interests
of the guarantor. Does the United States have the same threat assessment regarding a particular
adversary, and does it pursue a similar strategy for containing or confronting that adversary? To what
extent does the United States accord importance to the regional theater in which an ally is situated?
Like rhetoric, however, foreign policy doctrine can be a noisy indicator: what a guarantor like the United
States broadcasts to the world in key policy documents may not reflect what it does in a crisis. Allies
thus monitor how and where the United States is spending money on its overseas deployments and
military operations to evaluate the credibility of security guarantees.
The most tangible indicator is where (and to what extent) the United States is positioning its forward-
deployed forces.13 Yet, the significance of conventional military deployments is often misunderstood
since many analysts usually regard all frontline troops as tripwires. According to tripwire theory, these
forces are garrisoned on an ally’s territory in order to create additional risks for an adversary. If the
adversary attacks the ally and U.S. soldiers happen to die in action, then Washington would be under
pressure to retaliate by expanding the conflict beyond what the adversary is willing to tolerate. The
tripwire effect is important because it enhances deterrence-by-punishment. But forward-deployed U.S.
forces have an additional, often obscured, advantage if they can mass firepower. They can have the
capacity to raise the costs of aggression directly by killing an adversary’s attacking soldiers. That is, they
can enhance local deterrence-by-denial, which refers to the ability to hinder the adversary from
achieving operational success on the battlefield or from executing military faits accomplis at acceptable
cost.
The history of nuclear proliferation demonstrates that the military infrastructure undergirding an
alliance matters for curbing states’ appetites for nuclear weapons. During the 1950s, West German
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer appeared satisfied with U.S. security guarantees despite the Eisenhower
administration’s stated rhetorical reliance on nuclear weapons to deter Soviet aggression in its New
Look strategy. But Adenauer’s confidence appeared to rest in the U.S. troop presence in his country. He
so valued that presence that when he read in the New York Times that the U.S. military was planning
massive personnel cuts (which in turn would reduce U.S. forces in Europe), he became despondent and
lost faith in U.S. security guarantees. Shortly thereafter, Adenauer entered into an arrangement with
France and Italy to develop a European nuclear deterrent.14 This initiative was short-lived, but
questions over West Germany’s nuclear intentions troubled U.S. decision makers for another decade.
Alliances are resilient to every factor besides military power.
Nuclear Proliferation in the Trump Era;” The Washington Quarterly; 41:4; pg. 96-97; //GrRv)
Alliances Are Thicker Than Bluster
U.S. security guarantees have been strained in the last decade due to weariness with wars abroad and
economic difficulties at home. The Trump factor has appeared to make matters worse: tense leadership
summits, confrontational rhetoric, political volatility, and the rough handling of long-standing
international partners on issues like trade and burden sharing do not inspire confidence. Nevertheless,
we have some reasons to be relatively optimistic. Large-scale troop withdrawals from major regional
theaters of operations have not happened; nor do they appear to be happening anytime soon. Because
its force posture remains largely intact, the United States still has on-the-ground preparations to help
allies defend themselves against an adversarial attack. This is true of key allies, like Germany and South
Korea, that might be major candidates for reevaluating existing weapons policies and nonproliferation
pledges in the age of Trump.
None of this analysis suggests that we can be flippant about allied nuclear proliferation risks or the
direction of U.S. foreign policy. We should be vigilant about early warning signs that could foreshadow
heightened proliferation risks such as substantial and unilateral changes in U.S. military deployments as
well as operations from the European and East Asian theaters, leaving allies exposed to the
depredations of adversaries. Yet, none appears afoot at the present. Indeed, what the preceding
discussion suggests is that alliances are much more resilient institutions than commonly presumed.
Their underlying military infrastructures remain in place because they help the United States project
power abroad and thus advance foreign policy goals. To jettison them quickly and abruptly would be
self-sabotaging even if the Trump administration cares less about the liberal international order than its
predecessors, and is willing to use threats to increase its leverage in burden-sharing or trade
negotiations. In the end, the core of the administration’s defense strategy concerns strategic
competition with Russia, China, and North Korea.67 To pursue great power competition effectively, the
United States will not only have to maintain its key alliances, but it will also have to bolster local
deterrence and defense measures so that those adversaries will have limited opportunities to extend
their power and influence.
Alliances are thus much more resilient than is often assumed. Their resiliency draws more on actual
force deployment than what may or may not be said by leaders in public. Accordingly, concerns about
allied proliferation in countries like Germany and South Korea may be overblown. As long as force
deployments remain consistent and robust in the face of external aggression, history shows that host
countries will have few incentives to pursue an independent nuclear weapons capability.
Allied Prolif UQ
Allies are reassured now — Trump’s rhetoric is irrelevant.
Nuclear Proliferation in the Trump Era;” The Washington Quarterly; 41:4; pg. 86; //GrRv)
In this essay, I argue that security guarantees to U.S. allies are adequate, and will remain so in the
foreseeable future, for deterring allied nuclear proliferation. Abandonment fears have undoubtedly
intensified with the Trump administration, but not to such an extent that nuclear proliferation appears
highly likely. Specifically, the United States still provides deterrence-by-denial capabilities—that is, the
capabilities to attrite, if not to defeat, adversaries in defensive battles—to key allies through its overseas
deployments and military planning. It does not depend solely on extended nuclear deterrence or the
threat of nuclear punishment to dissuade potential adversaries from attacking its allies.
Accordingly, allied states do not rely on the rhetoric of the White House alone to gauge the strength of
their received security guarantees. They also refer to what is happening operationally at the military
level. That is not to say that rhetoric is unimportant, but it is a noisy signal of intentions and can be
interpreted in multiple ways since it can service domestic consumption or even intra-alliance bargaining
over burden sharing. When worrisome rhetoric becomes operational reality, states would be more likely
to get so alarmed as to consider seriously the nuclear option. Yet, such historical moments are rare: they
have occurred only during the Eisenhower (1953-1961) and Nixon administrations (1969-1974), when
global nuclear nonproliferation rules and various enforcement mechanisms were in their infancy.6
Offense—Navy
Hegemony Good — Naval Power Impact
Strong naval power solves Middle Eastern failed states, ISIS rise, and the refugee crisis.
Abenheim et al., 19 — Donald Abenheim is an Associate Professor in the Department of National

Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. Ryan Gingeras serves as an Associate Professor in the
Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. James A. Russell is an
Associate Professor in the Depatment of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in
Monterey, CA. James J. Wirtz is the Dean of the School for International Graduate Studies at the Naval
Postgraduate School. Thomas-Durell Young is the Program Manager for Europe, Center for Civil-Military
Relations and Academic Associate for comparative defense planning curriculum, Department of National
Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA. Christopher Twomey serves as an Associate
Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey,
CA. (March 25th, 2019; “American sea power in the contemporary security environment;” Comparative
Strategy; 37:5; pg. 398-399; DOI: 10.1080/01495933.2018.1526566; //GrRv)
Despite significant surges in deployment as a result of the 1991 and 2003 wars in Kuwait and Iraq, the
overall size of the Sixth Fleet has shrunk considerably since the close of the Cold War. Similar levels of
retrenchment can be seen among allied naval contingents in the region. Although NATO remains the
basis for many cooperative efforts, recent crises—such as the 2011 war in Libya—have led to debates
over the priorities and effectiveness of NATO in the region. In the midst of this significant cutback in
American forces in the Mediterranean, the politics of the Middle East and North Africa have
fundamentally changed. Many states in this region are politically weaker than at any point since the
start of the 20th century. A series of localized crises, including the Iraq War of 2003 and the revolts
encompassing the Arab Spring, have produced a number of governments incapable of fully maintaining
domestic order, let alone contributing to regional stability.
The most profound of these threats is ISIS. Since rising to prominence in 2014, ISIS has done more than
threaten the domestic security of the United States and its allies through acts of terrorism. In seizing
large swaths of land spanning the Levant and Mesopotamia, it has undermined the legitimacy of the
borders and governments spanning the Middle East. If left unchecked, the precedents set by the Islamic
State may lead to far more destructive conflicts in the future. Given the weakening or even collapse of
these regional states, the U.S. Navy is increasingly important in supporting land commanders
prosecuting the fight against ISIS. Flexible deployment postures and sustained presence is a hallmark of
the U.S. Navy. Regional political re-alignments may be throwing standing assumptions about basing
rights and land access routes into question, thus the importance of the U.S. Navy’s ability to operate
independently and to sustain the joint force from the sea creates important national capability.
The U.S. Navy is also critical in managing the social and humanitarian fallout of the Islamic State’s rise—
fallout that has had far-reaching consequences for European and Western security and stability. The
dangers posed by ISIS have served to amplify other challenges confronting U.S. naval forces operating in
the Mediterranean region. The outbreak of conflicts across the wider Mediterranean rim has led to a
refugee crisis not seen since the end of the Second World War. Attempts to mitigate the outflow and
suffering of displaced persons fleeing across the sea have had an adverse impact upon the United States
and its allies. In addition to tasking sizable contingents of personnel, aircraft, and ships to monitor the
outflow of refugees, this humanitarian crisis has affected the security of states in and beyond the
immediate region. The establishment of pro-ISIS factions in Libya and the Sinai Peninsula demonstrates
the ability of terrorist groups to use refugee flows as a means of exporting their campaigns abroad.
Apprehension regarding the spread of the ISIS “refugee threat” is especially felt within northern Europe
in light of recent attacks in Paris and Brussels. The rise of far-right nationalist movements in Europe can
be traced in part to the fear of immigration from the war-torn Middle East.
AND — key to nuclear deterrence, the economy, and overall readiness.
Abenheim et al., 19 — Donald Abenheim is an Associate Professor in the Department of National

Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Ryan Gingeras serves as an Associate
Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. James A.
Russell is an Associate Professor in the Depatment of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate
School. James J. Wirtz is the Dean of the School for International Graduate Studies at the Naval
Postgraduate School. Thomas-Durell Young is the Program Manager for Europe, Center for Civil-Military
Relations and Academic Associate for comparative defense planning curriculum, Department of National
Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School. Christopher Twomey serves as an Associate Professor in the
Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. (March 25th, 2019; “American
sea power in the contemporary security environment;” Comparative Strategy; 37:5; pg. 394-395; DOI:
10.1080/01495933.2018.1526566; //GrRv)
21st century maritime strategy and sea power
The end of the Cold War saw the U.S. Navy continually deployed around the world performing a diverse
array of flexible missions. Today, the Navy performs such vital tasks as strategic nuclear deterrence,
ballistic missile defense, humanitarian and disaster relief operations, patrol of critical sea lines of
communications and trade, freedom of navigation demonstrations, and strike and indirect fire support
for littoral and land operations wherever necessary. The Navy has boiled down these different tasks into
five functions, essential components of the joint force: all domain access, deterrence, sea control, power
projection, and maritime security.12 Peter Swartz states a similar idea in a more colorful way, “the U.S.
Navy is a ‘full-service Navy.’”13 The Navy has also contributed to the construction of a network of global
maritime relationships with allied and partner navies around the world, which has made a significant
contribution to the U.S. national interest as well as global security and stability. Today, the world’s
navies cooperatively police the world’s oceans—a domain that is today almost completely free of
sustained political violence. The systemic breakdown of order within states bordering the littorals has
thus far not manifested itself at sea on a wide scale. The U.S. Navy deserves significant credit for this
achievement through the formal and informal maritime cooperation structures it has developed in
locales ranging from the Bab el Mandab to the Straits of Malacca to the Gulf of Guinea to the Strait of
Hormuz. Furthermore, the Navy has been instrumental in developing and supporting the wide array of
anti-piracy and smuggling task forces off the Horn of Africa and Somalia. Without any doubt, the U.S.
Navy is the glue for this vast and unprecedented system of global maritime security.
So far in the post-World War II era, no developed state has deemed it in their interests to disrupt the
world’s ocean waterways and trade routes. The free movement of goods and services on the world’s
oceans is the lifeblood of the global economy and is essential to the prosperity of the states that
participate in it. Over 90 percent of global trade moves across the world’s oceans, and it is unlikely that
any other transportation medium will emerge to replace ocean-going trade. In the post-World War II
era, developed states have faced a basic contradiction: disrupting global trade at sea would threaten
their own survival. The benefits of the orderly and peaceful functioning of global markets far outweigh
the costs entailed in disrupting those markets. The greatest threat to the peaceful functioning of the
world’s seaborne trade system would come from a developed state’s belief that the benefits of
defection from this system outweighed the benefits of continued cooperation; the historical example of
Japan in 1941 presents one possible outcome if a state came to believe that military intervention was
necessary to preserve its access to markets and resources because of great power tension and
conflict.14 Nevertheless, the current movements seeking to rebalance exposure to the forces of
globalization are unlikely to fundamentally restructure these trade flows. Whilst Britain may have voted
to leave the European Union, it evinces no interest in withdrawing from global commerce and adopting
autarkic economic policies. Indeed, the most impassioned issue in this nativist trend centers on the
challenges of immigration, with only minor implications for the importance of the maritime sphere.
Connected to this basic calculus is the difficulty that any state actor would face in disrupting this vast
global system. Nevertheless, there are a few critical chokepoints (e.g., Bab el Mandab, Strait of Hormuz,
Straits of Malacca) and economically vital nodes (e.g., the Ras Tanura oil export complex as well as
crucial container transit ports such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Dubai, etc.) where sustained disruption
would produce significant shocks to the global economy. Only the U.S. Navy is capable of producing this
type of disruption because it has the force structure to intervene in the world’s trading system on a
systemic basis. It would be unthinkable, however, for the United States to use its Navy in this way. No
state in the international system has been more committed to the orderly and functioning of global
markets than the United States. Indeed, a principal purpose of the U.S. Navy has been to preserve the
orderly functioning of global markets.
Following the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Navy provided key support to army-commanded campaigns of
irregular wars on land that grew out of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. In these wars, it served its
traditional strategic role of instrumentalizing land power, making it possible keep ground forces in the
field via support from the sea. The Navy also directly supported land forces with naval aviation and
other strike forces along with thousands of naval personnel that served with the land forces as
augmentees. Carrier strike groups provided direct tactical support to the land forces on a nearly-
continuous basis. Navy strike groups today remain involved in strike operations against the Islamic State
of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its affiliates across the wider Middle East and Africa.
Offense—Democracy
Hegemony Good — Democracy
Receding American military power greenlights autocratic revisionism and collapses democracy —
powers Russian aggression and hybrid warfare and Chinese expansionism.
Joshi, 18 — Shashank Joshi; He was previously a senior policy fellow for international affairs in the
Renewing the Centre team at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, where he led the Institute’s
work on foreign policy, focusing on economic, political and military pressures on the liberal international
order. Shashank is also a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He has
been a research associate at the Changing Character of War Programme at the University of Oxford,
regularly lectured at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, and given evidence to the foreign
affairs and defence committees of the House of Commons. (6-21-18; "Authoritarian Challenges to the
Liberal Order;" Institute for Global Change; https://institute.global/insight/renewing-
centre/authoritarian-challenges-liberal-order; //GrRv)
What does this mean for democracies? Autocracies present a series of individual challenges to their
local rivals: Russia to the Baltic states, China to Taiwan and North Korea to South Korea, for instance. But
the problem they pose to world order is larger than the sum of these issues. It is, rather, an ideological
and systemic challenge that will reshape the norms of international relations. Will these norms reflect
liberal principles such as openness, rule following and individual rights or competing authoritarian ones
such as secrecy, arbitrariness and state power?
This competition over norms will influence not only Western liberal democracies but also the wider
multipolar order that is emerging. In regions with weak political institutions or nascent democracies—
parts of Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and East and Southeast Europe—the regional order is
especially malleable. If authoritarian states can shape these regions in their own image, this bolsters
their global standing and puts liberal democracy further on the back foot. This argument does not
require an acceptance that democracies always act in liberal ways or adhere to a single and consistent
set of norms. Authoritarian states also differ widely in levels of openness and repression, the balance
between civilian and military authority, and civil versus political freedoms.11 Yet despite this variety,
there remain systematic differences between democratic and authoritarian states in attitude, inclination
and values—and this has important foreign policy implications.
TYPES OF AUTHORITARIAN CHALLENGE
The authoritarian challenge to liberal democracy can be broken down into six categories.
The Military Challenge
Authoritarian states represent the most serious military threat to the democracies of Europe and Asia.
Russia has dissolved existing norms regarding the use of force, conducting in Europe the first annexation
of territory and the first use of chemical weapons since the Second World War.12 Russia’s use of hybrid
warfare, which prioritises secrecy, deception and political warfare, presents a particular danger to rule-
bound open societies.13 China, though more cautious, has also demonstrated increasingly assertive
behaviour in the South China Sea, including the militarisation of reclaimed islands, the rejection of
arbitration efforts and an escalation of the country’s border dispute with India.14
The military challenge posed by authoritarian states is not a quirk of the past few years. Russian and
Chinese behaviour is rooted in their resentment of the Western order, ambition for great power status
and fear of Western power.15 All three of these drivers are shaped by these countries’ authoritarian
political systems. The best available scholarship continues to show that democracies enjoy more
peaceful relations with other democracies than with autocracies, suggesting that authoritarian states
are intrinsically more likely to be threatening.16 Among states that ratify treaties governing the laws of
war, democracies are also more likely to comply with these rules than autocracies are.17
Russian hybrid war escalates.

Trenin 18 — Dmitri, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, chairs the research council and the Foreign
and Security Policy Program, “Avoiding U.S.-Russia Military Escalation During the Hybrid War,” U.S.-
Russia Insight, 1-25-2018, http://carnegie.ru/2018/01/25/avoiding-u.s.-russia-military-escalation-during-
hybrid-war-pub-75277
Since February 2014, the Russian leadership has been in a de facto war mode with regard to the United
States. The Kremlin saw the developments in Ukraine that led to the ouster of former president Viktor
Yanukovych as a threefold threat: a U.S.-supported political invasion of Russia’s vital strategic buffer, an
attempt to prevent Moscow-led integration in post-Soviet Eurasia, and a move to build a barrier
between Russia and the rest of Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin, taken by surprise, responded
with the use of force in Ukraine—first to secure Crimea for Russia and then to protect a rebel stronghold
in Donbass. The events that followed have developed into a virtual Russo-American war—but a different
kind of war compared to those the countries have fought in the past. The crisis over Ukraine put an end
to a quarter century of cooperative relations between Russia and the West and resulted in Russia’s
confrontation with the United States and its estrangement from Europe. This confrontation has often
been labeled a second Cold War.1 The analogy, however, is flawed: the world has changed too much
since the 1980s to suggest that today’s antagonism is merely a revival of an old conflict. The new
confrontation is better described as a Hybrid War—a term which, like its predecessor, is capitalized here
to highlight its distinct place in the history of international relations. This time, the U.S.-Russia conflict is
not central to the world system, but, nevertheless, its outcome will help shape the future of that system.
The current Hybrid War is a conflict essentially between Russia and the United States over the issue of
the world order. It is not the result of misunderstanding or miscalculation but rather the opposite;
Russia, in particular, has a deliberate outcome in mind. Moscow is pursuing a set of objectives—the
most important of which is to reassert its role as a great power with a global reach. In Europe,
specifically, it seeks to prevent NATO from moving forward into former Soviet territory, particularly
Ukraine. As for Ukraine itself, the Kremlin wants it to serve as a buffer between Russia and NATO. Russia
has important objectives outside of Europe as well, including in the Middle East. Since September 2015,
Moscow has been waging a military campaign in Syria. The main purpose of the intervention—apart
from the immediate need to prevent a major victory for Islamist extremists—was to return Russia to the
regional and global stage as an active geopolitical player with considerable military capabilities. Russian
actions in these and other areas therefore undermine the United States’ global dominance of the post–
Cold War period, even though the Russian Federation (unlike the Soviet Union) does not seek to impose
its own model on the world. Even as Russia opposes U.S. global hegemony and favors a more distributed
balance of power among several major nations (including itself), the United States feels the challenge to
the international liberal order that it began building after the end of World War II and has dominated
since the end of the Cold War. As long as all major powers, including China and Russia, subscribed to the
rules and norms of that order—and, in China’s case, also benefited from it2—it was a genuine Pax
Americana: a state of peace among the major powers, who all deferred to the United States. With
Russia’s breakout from the post–Cold War system, that unique period of peaceful relations among the
principal players is now history. Even though the scale of the current conflict is much smaller, the stakes
are high once more. For the Kremlin, this is a battle for survival—of Russia’s status as an independent
player capable of defining and defending its interests and of the Russian leadership, which has been
personally targeted by Western financial sanctions and various public accusations ranging from
corruption to war crimes. Originally, Moscow believed that this conflict would be a short-term problem,
but it now appears to be more prolonged than previously anticipated and may take a generation to
resolve. FEATURES OF THE HYBRID WAR This Hybrid War’s most distinguishing feature is that it is being
fought in a truly global, virtually borderless environment. International interaction is no longer restricted
by walls or other state-imposed barriers. Traditional distinctions between strategy and tactics have been
all but erased. The hybrid warriors include many more players than was the case during the Cold War—
from national governments and transnational corporations to nongovernmental actors and even private
individuals. The war is being fought simultaneously in a number of spheres, on different levels, and in
the never-ending, twenty-four-hour news cycle. This aspect of warfare is particularly true of the field of
information, which is of prime importance in the Information Age that emerged with the end of the Cold
War. From cyber conflicts and the use of artificial intelligence to the predominance of propaganda and
fake news, the main battles of the Hybrid War are taking place outside of the purely physical realm and
in the domain of new information technologies. Just as important to the Hybrid War is economics, which
has been the key driver of globalization that paralleled the rise of these innovative information
technologies. The prominence of the U.S. media and the United States’ immense financial power give it
a huge advantage in both fields. As a result, the weapons of choice in the Hybrid War are those that use
information and economic power to discredit and sanction one’s adversaries.3 Politically, the Hybrid
War includes the outside stimulation of political changes in other countries through street activism and
the promotion of specific values, parties, or popular movements. It has been characterized by
interference in elections, political transitions, and other political processes, including various efforts to
hack sensitive information, spread compromising or damaging materials and fake news, encourage
character assassinations, and impose personal and other noneconomic sanctions (for example,
restrictions on travel, seizure of assets, imprisonment, or deportation) on opponents. The existence of a
common information space makes waging political warfare on foreign territory much easier and more
attractive than ever before. Cross-border promotion of democracy and support for the color revolutions
that dominated the 2000s (for example, the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the 2004 Orange
Revolution in Ukraine) have now found counterparts in emerging solidarity among those who espouse
more conservative and traditionalist values, such as political systems based on authoritarian models and
strict national sovereignty.4 Military power is not out of the picture—though its use is different than in
the Cold War. The static standoff of million-strong armies in Europe and the long shadow of the nuclear
arms race have drawn down or faded. Nuclear deterrence between Russia and the West remains in
place but at lower and more stable levels than during the Cold War. Today’s risks of miscalculation
derive from potential incidents involving conventional forces. A token military standoff has reemerged
along Russia’s border with NATO countries, but, to date, this standoff bears no resemblance in either
scale or scope to the forces that faced each other during the Cold War. The main focus is on developing
new military technologies and novel means and ways of prosecuting warfare—from outer space to
cyberspace—that blur or eliminate the distinction between wartime and peacetime. Like its
predecessor, the Hybrid War is a war in the time of peace. Even more than in the past, however, the
onus is on national leaderships to minimize the number of casualties, ideally to zero. Russian military
strategists had developed the concept of hybrid warfare even before the actual conflict broke out in
earnest between the United States and Russia in early 2014. Analyzing the experience of the post-Soviet
color revolutions and the 2011 Arab Spring, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov wrote in
February 2013 that the “consequences of new conflicts are comparable to those of a real war”; in many
cases, nonmilitary methods “are substantially more effective than the power of arms,” and greater
emphasis is placed on “political, economic, information, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary means”
and “covert military measures,” including “information warfare and actions by special forces.” In this
environment, “overt use of military force, often in the form of peacekeeping or crisis management,
takes place only at a certain stage, mainly to achieve final success in a conflict.” With regard to the U.S.-
Russia confrontation, another key feature has surfaced: asymmetry between the sides’ capabilities.
POWER ASYMMETRIES AND ASYMMETRIC ACTIONS Although Gerasimov was referring to a hybrid war
when discussing new means and methods of warfare, this analysis uses the newly fashionable term to
describe the current U.S.-Russia confrontation. Unlike its Cold War predecessor, this conflict is
asymmetrical. At least since the 1970s, the Soviet Union was the United States’ equal in terms of both
nuclear and conventional military power. Even beyond its own vast land mass and immediate sphere of
influence in Eastern Europe, it wielded considerable ideological power in many Western countries and in
the Third World and presided over a system of alliances in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the
Middle East. The Russian Federation, by contrast, has few formal allies, no satellite states, and a handful
of protectorates, if one includes the self-proclaimed states of Abkhazia, Donbass, South Ossetia, and
Transnistria. It has no ideology to compare with the comprehensive dogma of Marxism-Leninism, and
although it is still a nuclear superpower, it lags far behind the United States in non-nuclear military
capabilities. Economically, Russia—with its estimated 1.5 percent of the global gross domestic product—
is a dwarf. Neither the balance nor the correlation of forces, however, will determine the outcome of
this confrontation. Despite the glaring asymmetries in the national power of the two sides of the
conflict, the course of events is not predetermined. As a nonlinear, highly asymmetrical conflict, the
outcome likely will result from domestic developments in Russia or the United States or both. Both
countries are facing serious problems that could prove decisive in the final calculations of the Hybrid
War. The United States is going through a triple crisis of its political system, exemplified but not caused
by the arrival of President Donald Trump and the virulent domestic opposition to him and his policies. A
crisis of social values lies beneath this political crisis and points to a widening gap between the more
liberal and the largely conservative parts of the country. At the same time, the United States faces a
crisis within its own foreign policy as it struggles to reconcile the conflict between the more inward-
looking U.S. national interest and the international liberal order of the U.S.-led global system. Russia,
though outwardly stable, is approaching its own major crisis as the political regime created by Putin
faces an uncertain future after the eventual departure of its figurehead. Putin’s Kremlin is already
working on a political transition that would rejuvenate the elite and improve its competence and
performance, but, at the same time, Russian society is also changing and Putin’s heirs cannot take its
support for granted. Gross inequality, sluggish economic growth, low vertical mobility, and high-level
corruption will present a range of serious challenges to the future Russian leadership. The eventual
outcome of the Hybrid War could be reminiscent of the downfall of the Soviet Union, which was far less
the result of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War than of a misguided effort to reform the Soviet Union itself. Russia
might break down and break up again, or it might decide on a foreign policy more geared toward its
economic needs than to a certain concept of world order. As for the United States, it might decide to
limit its global commitments and redesign its international role as the world’s preeminent but no longer
dominant state. Yet, in doing so, it will need to accept that its change in status will come with a certain
price and that it will not be able to take advantage of the benefits of the position it once enjoyed.
Asymmetries in power lead to asymmetric actions, which as Gerasimov suggested are intended to
“neutralize the enemy’s superiority in warfare” or “identify and exploit the enemy’s vulnerabilities.”5 By
an order of magnitude—or more—Russia is outgunned, outmanned, and outspent by the combined
forces of the United States and its allies. To stay in the fight, it must rely on its few comparative
advantages and seek to use them to maximum effect. These advantages include the geographical
proximity of some of the main theaters of operation, such as Crimea and eastern Ukraine, where Russia
has escalation dominance; the Russian political system, which allows for secretive, swift, and decisive
action; and Moscow’s willingness to take much higher risks in view of the disproportionally higher stakes
involved for the Russian leadership and a national culture that historically has tolerated higher losses in
defense or protection of the Motherland. Through swift decisions and actions, made without prior
warning, Russia is capable of surprising its adversaries and keeping them off-balance. This situation
promises an uncertain, hard-to-predict, and risky environment, where miscalculation can lead to
incidents or collisions that, in turn, lead to escalation. Granted, these incidents would be of a different
kind than the tank standoff at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie in late October 1961 or the Cuban Missile
Crisis barely a year later. Escalation resulting from miscalculation would not be automatic, but the wider
damage it could cause needs to be taken seriously. AVOIDING MISTAKES LEADING TO ESCALATION The
Hybrid War is highly dynamic and, so far, has no agreed-upon rules. In this sense, it resembles the Cold
War of the early 1950s rather than that of the 1970s. However, it is possible, up to a point, to avoid
military escalation during the Hybrid War. U.S.-Russian antagonism does not mean that the two
countries’ interests are in total opposition. Unlike in the second half of the twentieth century, neither
party envisions a real shooting war against its adversary and neither wants to allow the situation to
become uncontrollable. The most obvious ways to manage the confrontation are incident prevention,
confidence building, and arms control. Incident prevention, on the face of it, should be easy. Since the
early 1970s, Moscow and Washington have had agreements in place to avoid incidents, which in the
Cold War days carried the risk of escalation to nuclear levels. Effective prevention requires a degree of
professionalism, adequate safety measures, and reliable channels of communications. However, during
a Hybrid War, these preconditions cannot be taken for granted. Acting from a position of relative
weakness, Russia is likely to compensate for its inferior overall strength by raising the stakes of
confrontation.
Extinction — overcomes historical checks.
Fisher 15 — Max, foreign policy editor at Vox. former reporter at the Washington Post and foreign
editor at The Atlantic, M.A. international security, Johns Hopkins University, “How World War III became
possible,” Vox, 6-29-2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8845913/russia-war
How World War III became possible A nuclear conflict with Russia is likelier than you think It was in
August 2014 that the real danger began, and that we heard the first warnings of war. That month,
unmarked Russian troops covertly invaded eastern Ukraine, where the separatist conflict had grown out
of its control. The Russian air force began harassing the neighboring Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania, which are members of NATO. The US pledged that it would uphold its commitment to defend
those countries as if they were American soil, and later staged military exercises a few hundred yards
from Russia's border. Both sides came to believe that the other had more drastic intentions. Moscow is
convinced the West is bent on isolating, subjugating, or outright destroying Russia. One in three
Russians now believe the US may invade. Western nations worry, with reason, that Russia could use the
threat of war, or provoke an actual conflict, to fracture NATO and its commitment to defend Eastern
Europe. This would break the status quo order that has peacefully unified Europe under Western
leadership, and kept out Russian influence, for 25 years. Fearing the worst of one another, the US and
Russia have pledged to go to war, if necessary, to defend their interests in the Eastern European
borderlands. They have positioned military forces and conducted chest-thumping exercises, hoping to
scare one another down. Putin, warning repeatedly that he would use nuclear weapons in a conflict,
began forward-deploying nuclear-capable missiles and bombers. Europe today looks disturbingly similar
to the Europe of just over 100 years ago, on the eve of World War I. It is a tangle of military
commitments and defense pledges, some of them unclear and thus easier to trigger. Its leaders have
given vague signals for what would and would not lead to war. Its political tensions have become
military buildups. Its nations are teetering on an unstable balance of power, barely held together by a
Cold War–era alliance that no longer quite applies. If you take a walk around Washington or a Western
European capital today, there is no feeling of looming catastrophe. The threats are too complex, with
many moving pieces and overlapping layers of risk adding up to a larger danger that is less obvious.
People can be forgiven for not seeing the cloud hanging over them, for feeling that all is well — even as
in Eastern Europe they are digging in for war. But this complacency is itself part of the problem, making
the threat more difficult to foresee, to manage, or, potentially, to avert. "There’s a low nuclear threshold
now that didn’t exist during the Cold War" There is a growing chorus of political analysts, arms control
experts, and government officials who are sounding the alarm, trying to call the world's attention to its
drift toward disaster. The prospect of a major war, even a nuclear war, in Europe has become thinkable,
they warn, even plausible. What they describe is a threat that combines many of the hair-trigger
dangers and world-ending stakes of the Cold War with the volatility and false calm that preceded World
War I — a comparison I heard with disturbing frequency. They describe a number of ways that an
unwanted but nonetheless major war, like that of 1914, could [cause] break out in the Eastern European
borderlands. The stakes, they say, could not be higher: the post–World War II peace in Europe, the lives
of thousands or millions of Eastern Europeans, or even, in a worst-case scenario that is remote but real,
the nuclear devastation of the planet. [Update, Nov. 24: If you're reading this in response to Turkey
reportedly shooting down a Russian warplane today, read here for why that incident will not lead to
war, and why it's very different from the scenarios described in this story.] I. The warnings: "War is not
something that's impossible anymore" Everyone in Moscow tells you that if you want to understand
Russia's foreign policy and its view of its place the world, the person you need to talk to is Fyodor
Lukyanov. Sober and bespectacled, with an academic's short brown beard, Lukyanov speaks with the
precision of a political scientist but the occasional guardedness of someone with far greater access than
your average analyst. Widely considered both an influential leader and an unofficial interpreter of
Russia's foreign policy establishment, Lukyanov is chief of Russia's most important foreign policy think
tank and its most important foreign policy journal, both of which reflect the state and its worldview. He
is known to be close to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. I met Lukyanov around the corner from
the looming Foreign Ministry compound (his office is nearby), at a small, bohemian cafe in Moscow that
serves French and Israeli food to a room packed with gray suits. He was candid and relaxed. When the
discussion turned to the risks of war, he grew dire. "The atmosphere is a feeling that war is not
something that’s impossible anymore," Lukyanov told me, describing a growing concern within
Moscow's foreign policy elite. "A question that was absolutely impossible a couple of years ago, whether
there might be a war, a real war, is back," he said. "People ask it." Read the full interview with Fyodor
Lukyanov I asked how this had happened. He said that regular Russian people don't desire war, but
rather feared it would become necessary to defend against the implacably hostile United States. "The
perception is that somebody would try to undermine Russia as a country that opposes the United States,
and then we will need to defend ourselves by military means," he explained. Such fears, vague but
existential, are everywhere in Moscow. Even liberal opposition leaders I met with, pro-Western types
who oppose Putin, expressed fears that the US posed an imminent threat to Russia's security. I had
booked my trip to Moscow in December, hoping to get the Russian perspective on what were, at the
time, murmurings among a handful of political and arms control analysts that conflict could come to
Europe. By the time I arrived in the city, in late April, concerns of an unintended and potentially
catastrophic war had grown unsettlingly common. Lukyanov, pointing to the US and Russian military
buildups along Eastern Europe, also worried that an accident or provocation could be misconstrued as a
deliberate attack and lead to war. In the Cold War, he pointed out, both sides had understood this risk
and installed political and physical infrastructure — think of the "emergency red phone" — to manage
tensions and prevent them from spiraling out of control. That infrastructure is now gone. "All those
mechanisms were disrupted or eroded," he said. "That [infrastructure] has been degraded since the end
of the Cold War because the common perception is that we don’t need it anymore." That the world
does not see the risk of war hanging over it, in other words, makes that risk all the likelier. For most
Americans, such predictions sound improbable, even silly. But the dangers are growing every week, as
are the warnings. "One can hear eerie echoes of the events a century ago that produced the catastrophe
known as World War I," Harvard professor and longtime Pentagon adviser Graham Allison — one of the
graybeards of American foreign policy — wrote in a May cover story for the National Interest, co-
authored with Russia analyst Dimitri Simes. Their article, "Russia and America: Stumbling to War,"
warned that an unwanted, full-scale conflict between the US and Russia was increasingly plausible. In
Washington, the threat feels remote. It does not in Eastern Europe. Baltic nations, fearing war, have
already begun preparing for it. So has Sweden: "We see Russian intelligence operations in Sweden — we
can't interpret this in any other way — as preparation for military operations against Sweden," a
Swedish security official announced in March. In May, Finland's defense ministry sent letters to 900,000
citizens — one-sixth of the population — telling them to prepare for conscription in case of a "crisis
situation." Lithuania has reinstituted military conscription. Poland, in June, appointed a general who
would take over as military commander in case of war. Though Western publics remain blissfully
unaware, and Western leaders divided, many of the people tasked with securing Europe are treating
conflict as more likely. In late April, NATO and other Western officials gathered in Estonia, a former
Soviet republic and NATO member on Russia's border that Western analysts most worry could become
ground zero for a major war with Russia. At the conference, Deputy Secretary General Alexander
Vershbow spoke so openly about NATO's efforts to prepare for the possibility of Russia launching a
limited nuclear strike in Europe that, according to the journalist Ahmed Rashid, who was in attendance,
he had to be repeatedly reminded he was speaking on the record. One of the scenarios Vershbow said
NATO was outlining, according to Rashid's paraphrase, was that Russia could "choose to use a tactical
weapon with a small blast range on a European city or a Western tank division." A few weeks later, the
Guardian reported that NATO is considering plans to "upgrade" its nuclear posture in Europe in
response to Russia's own nuclear saber-rattling. One proposal: for NATO's military exercises to include
more nuclear weapons use, something Russia already does frequently. II. The gamble: Putin's plan to
make Russia great again Should the warnings prove right, and a major war break out in Europe between
Russia and the West, then the story of that war, if anyone is still around to tell it, will begin with Russian
President Vladimir Putin trying to solve a problem. That problem is this: Putin's Russia is weak. It can no
longer stand toe to toe with the US. It no longer has Europe divided in a stalemate; rather, it sees the
continent as dominated by an ever-encroaching anti-Russian alliance. In the Russian view, the country's
weakness leaves it at imminent risk, vulnerable to a hostile West bent on subjugating or outright
destroying Russia as it did to Iraq and Libya. This is made more urgent for Putin by his political problems
at home. In 2012, during his reelection, popular protests and accusations of fraud weakened his sense of
political legitimacy. The problem worsened with Russia's 2014 economic collapse; Putin's implicit
bargain with the Russian people had been that he would deliver economic growth and they would let
him erode basic rights. Without the economy, what did he have to offer them? Putin's answer has been
to assert Russian power beyond its actual strength — and, in the process, to recast himself as a national
hero guarding against foreign enemies. Without a world-power-class military or economy at his disposal,
he is instead wielding confusion and uncertainty — which Soviet leaders rightly avoided as existential
dangers — as weapons against the West. Unable to overtly control Eastern Europe, he has fomented
risks and crises there, sponsoring separatists in Ukraine and conducting dangerous military activity along
NATO airspace and coastal borders, giving Russia more leverage there. Reasserting a Russian sphere of
influence over Eastern Europe, he apparently believes, will finally give Russia security from the hostile
West — and make Russia a great power once more. Knowing his military is outmatched against the
Americans, he is blurring the distinction between war and peace, deploying tactics that exist in, and thus
widen, the gray between: militia violence, propaganda, cyberattacks, under a new rubric the Russian
military sometimes calls "hybrid war." "This was the theory of the Kaiser before World War I: The more
threatening you are, the more people will submit to your will. Putin’s going to threaten and threaten
and hope that NATO bends. But the long run of international relations suggests that it goes the other
way." Unable to cross America's red lines, Putin is doing his best to muddy them — and, to deter the
Americans, muddying his own. Turning otherwise routine diplomatic and military incidents into games of
high-stakes chicken favors Russia, he believes, as the West will ultimately yield to his superior will. To
solve the problem of Russia's conventional military weakness, he has dramatically lowered the threshold
for when he would use nuclear weapons, hoping to terrify the West such that it will bend to avoid
conflict. In public speeches, over and over, he references those weapons and his willingness to use
them. He has enshrined, in Russia's official nuclear doctrine, a dangerous idea no Soviet leader ever
adopted: that a nuclear war could be winnable. Putin, having recast himself at home as a national hero
standing up to foreign enemies, is more popular than ever. Russia has once more become a shadow
hanging over Eastern Europe, feared and only rarely bowed to, but always taken seriously. Many
Western Europeans, asked in a poll whether they would defend their own Eastern European allies from
a Russian invasion, said no. Russia's aggression, born of both a desire to reengineer a European order
that it views as hostile and a sense of existential weakness that justifies drastic measures, makes it far
more willing to accept the dangers of war. As RAND's F. Stephen Larrabee wrote in one of the
increasingly urgent warnings that some analysts are issuing, "The Russia that the United States faces
today is more assertive and more unpredictable — and thus, in many ways, more dangerous — than the
Russia that the United States confronted during the latter part of the Cold War." Joseph Nye, the dean of
Harvard University's school of government and one of America's most respected international relations
scholars, pointed out that Russia's weakness-masking aggression was yet another disturbing parallel to
the buildup to World War I. "Russia seems doomed to continue its decline — an outcome that should be
no cause for celebration in the West," Nye wrote in a recent column. "States in decline — think of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914 — tend to become less risk-averse and thus much more dangerous."
III. The drift: How the unthinkable became possible The Cold War was a dangerous game, but it was a
game in which everyone knew and agreed upon the stakes and the rules. That is not the case today. The
Western side believes it is playing a game where the rules are clear enough, the stakes relatively
modest, and the competition easily winnable. The Russian side, however, sees a game where the rules
can be rewritten on the fly, even the definition of war itself altered. For Russia, fearing a threat from the
West it sees as imminent and existential, the stakes are unimaginably high, justifying virtually any action
or gamble if it could deter defeat and, perhaps, lead to victory. Separately, the ever-paranoid Kremlin
believes that the West is playing the same game in Ukraine. Western support for Ukraine's government
and efforts to broker a ceasefire to the war there, Moscow believes, are really a plot to encircle Russia
with hostile puppet states and to rob Russia of its rightful sphere of influence. Repeated Russian
warnings that it would go to war to defend its perceived interests in Ukraine, potentially even nuclear
war, are dismissed in most Western capitals as bluffing, mere rhetoric. Western leaders view these
threats through Western eyes, in which impoverished Ukraine would never be worth risking a major
war. In Russian eyes, Ukraine looks much more important: an extension of Russian heritage that is
sacrosanct and, as the final remaining component of the empire, a strategic loss that would
unacceptably weaken Russian strength and thus Russian security. Both side are gambling and guessing in
the absence of a clear understanding of what the other side truly intends, how it will act, what will and
will not trigger the invisible triplines that would send us careening into war. Today's tensions bear far
more similarity to the period before World War I During the Cold War, the comparably matched
Western and Soviet blocs prepared for war but also made sure that war never came. They locked Europe
in a tense but stable balance of power; that balance is gone. They set clear red lines and vowed to
defend them at all costs. Today, those red lines are murky and ill-defined. Neither side is sure where
they lie or what really happens if they are crossed. No one can say for sure what would trigger war. That
is why, analysts will tell you, today's tensions bear far more similarity to the period before World War I:
an unstable power balance, belligerence over peripheral conflicts, entangling military commitments,
disputes over the future of the European order, and dangerous uncertainty about what actions will and
will not force the other party into conflict. Today's Russia, once more the strongest nation in Europe and
yet weaker than its collective enemies, calls to mind the turn-of-the-century German Empire, which
Henry Kissinger described as "too big for Europe, but too small for the world." Now, as then, a rising
power, propelled by nationalism, is seeking to revise the European order. Now, as then, it believes that
through superior cunning, and perhaps even by proving its might, it can force a larger role for itself.
Now, as then, the drift toward war is gradual and easy to miss — which is exactly what makes it so
dangerous. But there is one way in which today's dangers are less like those before World War I, and
more similar to those of the Cold War: the apocalyptic logic of nuclear weapons. Mutual suspicion, fear
of an existential threat, armies parked across borders from one another, and hair-trigger nuclear
weapons all make any small skirmish a potential armageddon. In some ways, that logic has grown even
more dangerous. Russia, hoping to compensate for its conventional military forces' relative weakness,
has dramatically relaxed its rules for using nuclear weapons. Whereas Soviet leaders saw their nuclear
weapons as pure deterrents, something that existed precisely so they would never be used, Putin's view
appears to be radically different. Russia's official nuclear doctrine calls on the country to launch a
battlefield nuclear strike in case of a conventional war that could pose an existential threat. These are
more than just words: Moscow has repeatedly signaled its willingness and preparations to use nuclear
weapons even in a more limited war. This is a terrifyingly low bar for nuclear weapons use, particularly
given that any war would likely occur along Russia's borders and thus not far from Moscow. And it
suggests Putin has adopted an idea that Cold War leaders considered unthinkable: that a "limited"
nuclear war, of small warheads dropped on the battlefield, could be not only survivable but winnable.
"It’s not just a difference in rhetoric. It’s a whole different world," Bruce G. Blair, a nuclear weapons
scholar at Princeton, told the Wall Street Journal. He called Putin's decisions more dangerous than those
of any Soviet leader since 1962. "There’s a low nuclear threshold now that didn’t exist during the Cold
War." Nuclear theory is complex and disputable; maybe Putin is right. But many theorists would say he
is wrong, that the logic of nuclear warfare means a "limited" nuclear strike is in fact likely to trigger a
larger nuclear war — a doomsday scenario in which major American, Russian, and European cities would
be targets for attacks many times more powerful than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even if a nuclear war did somehow remain limited and contained, recent studies suggest that
environmental and atmospheric damage would cause a "decade of winter" and mass crop die-outs that
could kill up to 1 billion people in a global famine. IV. How it would happen: The Baltics scenario In
September of last year, President Obama traveled to Estonia, a nation of 1.3 million people that most
Americans have never heard of, and pledged that the United States would if necessary go to war with
Russia to defend it. Estonia, along with Latvia and Lithuania — together known as the Baltic states — are
at the far edge of Eastern Europe, along Russia's border. They were formerly part of the Soviet Union.
And they are where many Western analysts fear World War III is likeliest to start. These small countries
are "the most likely front line of any future crisis," according to Stephen Saideman, an international
relations professor at Carleton University. Allison and Simes, in their essay warning of war, called the
Baltics "the Achilles’ heel of the NATO alliance." A full quarter of Estonia's population is ethnically
Russian. Clustered on the border with Russia, this minority is served by the same Russian state media
that helped stir up separatist violence among Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. But unlike Ukraine,
the Baltic states are all members of NATO, whose charter states that an attack on one member is an
attack on them all. Whereas a Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted Western sanctions, a Russian
invasion of Estonia would legally obligate the US and most of Europe to declare war on Moscow. "We'll
be here for Estonia. We will be here for Latvia. We will be here for Lithuania. You lost your
independence once before. With NATO, you will never lose it again," Obama pledged in his September
speech in Estonia. Less than 48 hours after Obama's address, Russian agents blanketed an Estonia-Russia
border crossing with tear gas, stormed across, and kidnapped an Estonian state security officer, Eston
Kohver, who specialized in counterintelligence. Kohver has been held illegally in a Russian prison for nine
months now. It was something like an act of geopolitical trolling: aggressive enough to assert Russian
dominion over Estonia, but not so aggressive as to be considered a formal act of war that would trigger
a Western counterattack. And it was one of several signs that Putin's Russia is asserting a right to
meddle in these former Soviet territories. The Russian military has already begun pressing the Baltic
states. Russian warships were spotted in Latvian waters 40 times in 2014. Russian military flights over
the Baltics are now routine, often with the planes switching off their transponders, which makes them
harder to spot and increases the chances of an accident. Military activity in the region had reached Cold
War levels. NATO, fearing the worst, is increasing military exercises in the Baltics. The US is installing
heavy equipment. And in February, the US military paraded through the Russian-majority Estonian city
of Narva, a few hundred yards from Russia's borders. "Without any intention to create the big conflict, it
might happen. One step, another step, and reciprocity can become very dangerous." It's a textbook
example of what political scientists call the security dilemma: Each side sees its actions as defensive and
the other side's as offensive. Each responds to the other's perceived provocations by escalating further,
a self-reinforcing cycle that can all too easily lead to war. It is considered, for example, a major
contributor to the outbreak of World War I. That it is entirely foreseeable does little to reduce the risk.
Even if Russia in fact has no designs on the Baltics, its bluffing and posturing has already created the
conditions for an unwanted war. In early April, for example, a Russian fighter jet crossed into the Baltic
Sea and "buzzed" a US military plane, missing it by only 20 feet. It was one of several recent near-misses
that, according to a think tank called the European Leadership Institute, have had a "high probability of
causing casualties or a direct military confrontation between Russia and Western states." Meanwhile,
Russia has been flying its nuclear-capable strategic bombers along NATO airspace, often with the planes'
transponders switched off, making an accident or misperception more likely. As if that weren't
dangerous enough, the bombers — hulking, decades-old Tupolev Tu-95 models — have become prone
to accidents such as engine fires. What if a Tu-95 went down unexpectedly, say, off the coast of
Norway? What if it was carrying nuclear warheads, or it went down during a moment of high tension?
Such incidents can lead to misunderstandings, and such misunderstandings can lead to war. By late
April, when NATO officials gathered at the security conference in Estonia's capital of Tallinn, the severity
of the danger had become unmistakable. As Ahmed Rashid wrote from the conference: Baltic presidents
and NATO officials were unusually blunt in describing the extent to which the security architecture in
Eastern Europe has collapsed, how Russia poses the gravest threat to peace since World War II, and how
the conflict in Ukraine and the loss of the Crimea has left the Baltic states on the front line of an
increasingly hostile standoff. Amid these tensions, the thought of a plane crash leading to war seems
scarily plausible. It is not just Western officials who fear such an incident could spark war. Fyodor
Lukyanov, the prominent Russian analyst who is considered close to the government, worried that the
NATO military exercises in the Baltics meant to deter Russia were also contributing to the problem.
"Russia reacts to that because Russia perceives it as a hostile approach to the Russian border," he
explained. "And it’s a vicious circle." It is easy to imagine, Lukyanov said, any number of ways that the
powder keg could explode. "Without any intention to create the big conflict, it might happen," he said.
"One step, another step, and reciprocity can become very dangerous. Say a Russian aircraft comes very
close to an area that NATO believes is prohibited while Russia believes it’s not prohibited, and then
British aircraft respond. It might be manageable, and in most cases of course it will be, but who knows."
V. How it would happen: A plot to break NATO It was Andrei Piontkovsky, a Russian political analyst and
frequent Kremlin critic, who first suggested the theory, last August, that Putin's plan for the Baltics was
more sophisticated, and more calculated, than anybody realized. Piontkovsky was trying to answer a
question that Western analysts and policymakers had been puzzling over since Russian provocations
began in the Baltics last fall: What does Putin want? Unlike in Ukraine, with which Russia has a long
shared history, there is little demand among the Russian public for intervention in the Baltic states. They
are of modest strategic value. And the risks of Russia's aggression there are potentially catastrophic.
Why bother? His is a theory that is now taken much more seriously by Western policymakers — and
appears more plausible all the time. "This is his most cherished objective, to destroy NATO. The risk is
big, yes? But the prize is enormous." Putin hopes to spark a conflict in the Baltics, Piontkovsky wrote, so
as to force Western European leaders into an impossible choice: Fulfill their NATO obligation to defend
the Baltics and counterattack, even if it means fighting World War III over a tiny post-Soviet republic
most Europeans couldn't care less about — or do nothing. The implications of doing nothing,
Piontkovsky pointed out, would extend far beyond the Baltics. It would lay bare NATO's mutual defense
provision as a lie, effectively dissolving the military alliance, ending a quarter-century of Europe's
security unification under Western leadership, and leaving Eastern Europe once more vulnerable to
Russian domination. In this way, Putin could do what Soviet leaders never came close to: defeat NATO.
"This is his most cherished objective," Piontkovsky told me when we talked in his kitchen, in a leafy
Moscow neighborhood across the river from Gorky Park. "It's an enormous temptation. He may retreat
at any stage, but the temptation is enormous, to destroy NATO. ... The risk is big, yes? But the prize is
enormous." "To destroy NATO, to demonstrate that Article V does not work, the Baltic republics of
Estonia and Latvia are the best place for this," he said. "It's happening now, every day. Intrusions into
the airspace, psychological pressure, the propaganda on TV." He suggested that Putin, rather than
rolling Russian tanks across the border, would perhaps seed unmarked Russian special forces into, say,
the Russian-majority city of Narva in Estonia, where they would organize localized violence or a phony
independence referendum. A handful of such unacknowledged forces, whom Putin referred to as "little
green men" after they appeared in Crimea, would perhaps be dressed as local volunteers or a far-right
gang; they might be joined by vigilantes, as they were in eastern Ukraine. They would almost certainly
be aided by a wave of Russian propaganda, making it harder for outsiders to differentiate unmarked
Russian troops from civilian volunteers, to determine who was fighting where and had started what.
Such an intervention would force NATO into an impossible choice: Are you really going to open fire on
some hoodlums stirring up trouble in Estonia, knowing they might actually be unmarked Russian troops?
Would you risk the first major European war since 1945, all to eject some unmarked Russian troops from
the Estonian town of Narva? Putin, Piontkovsky believes, is gambling that the answer is no. That NATO
would not intervene, thus effectively abandoning its commitment to defend its Eastern European
member states. Piontkovsky's scenario, once considered extreme, is now widely seen by Western
security experts and policymakers as plausible. At the end of 2014, the military intelligence service of
Denmark, a member of NATO, issued a formal paper warning of precisely that: Russia may attempt to
test NATO’s cohesion by engaging in military intimidation of the Baltic countries, for instance with a
threatening military build-up close to the borders of these countries and simultaneous attempts of
political pressure, destabilization and possibly infiltration. Russia could launch such an intimidation
campaign in connection with a serious crisis in the post-Soviet space or another international crisis in
which Russia confronts the United States and NATO. "The concern is that what Putin wants to do is
break NATO, and the best way to do that would be to poach on the Baltics," Saideman, the political
scientist, told me on a call from a European security conference where he said the scenario was being
taken very seriously. "And if Germany doesn’t respond to incursions in the Baltics, if France doesn’t
respond and it’s just an American operation, then it will lead to the breaking of NATO, is the theory," he
said. "That’s the biggest concern." Saideman described a variation on this scenario that I heard from
others as well: that Putin might attempt to seize some small sliver of the Baltics quickly and bloodlessly.
This would make it politically easier for Western European leaders to do nothing — how to rally your
nation to war if hardly anyone has even been killed? — and harder to counterattack, knowing it would
require a full-scale invasion. "I think they’re very serious about this," Saideman said. "There’s a real
concern." VI. How it would happen: The fog of hybrid war In early 2015, Pew pollsters asked citizens of
several NATO states the exact question that analysts and policymakers from Washington to Moscow are
gaming out: "If Russia got into a serious military conflict with one of its neighboring countries that is our
NATO ally, do you think our country should or should not use military force to defend that country?" The
numbers from Western Europe were alarming: Among Germans, only 38 percent said yes; 58 percent
said no. If it were up to German voters — and to at least some extent, it is — NATO would effectively
surrender the Baltics to Russia in a conflict. This poll is even worse than it looks. It assumes that Russia
would launch an overt military invasion of the Baltics. What would actually happen is something far
murkier, and far more likely to leverage European hesitation: the playbook from Ukraine, where Russia
deployed its newly developed concepts of postmodern "hybrid war," designed to blur the distinction
between war and not-war, to make it as difficult as possible to differentiate grassroots unrest or
vigilante cyberattacks from Russian military aggression. Putin may already be laying the groundwork. In
March of 2014, shortly after Russia had annexed Crimea, Putin gave a speech there pledging to protect
Russians even outside of Russia, which many took as a gesture to the substantial Russian minorities in
the Baltics. "That kind of misperception situation is definitely possible, and that’s how wars start" Then,
in October, Putin warned that "open manifestations of neo-Nazism" had "become commonplace in
Latvia and other Baltic states" — repeating the language that he and Russian state media had earlier
used to frighten Russian speakers in Ukraine into taking up arms. This April, several Russian outlets
issued spurious reports that Latvia was planning to forcibly relocate ethnic Russians into Nazi-style
ghettos — an echo of similar scaremongering Russian propaganda broadcast in the runup in Ukraine.
Martin Hurt, a former senior official of the country's defense ministry, warned that his country's ethnic
Russian minority could be "receptive to Kremlin disinformation." Moscow, he said, could generate
unrest "as a pretext to use military force against the Baltic states." In early 2007, Estonia's parliament
voted to relocate a Soviet-era military statue, the Bronze Soldier, that had become a cultural symbol and
annual rallying point for the country's ethnic Russians. In response, Russian politicians and state media
accused the Estonian government of fascism and Nazi-style discrimination against ethnic Russians; they
issued false reports claiming ethnic Russians were being tortured and murdered. Protests broke out and
escalated into riots and mass looting. One person was killed in the violence, and the next day hackers
took many of the country's major institutions offline. Russia could do it again, only this time gradually
escalating further toward a Ukraine-style conflict. NATO is just not built to deal with such a crisis. Its
mutual defense pledge, after all, rests on the assumption that war is a black-and-white concept, that a
country is either at war or not at war. Its charter is from a time when war was very different than it is
today, with its many shades of gray. Russia can exploit this flaw by introducing low-level violence that
more hawkish NATO members would consider grounds for war but that war-averse Western European
states might not see that way. Disagreement among NATO's member states would be guaranteed as
they hesitated over where to declare a moment when Russia had crossed the line into war. Meanwhile,
Russian state media, which has shown real influence in Western Europe, would unleash a flurry of
propaganda to confuse the issue, make it harder to pin blame on Moscow for the violence, and gin up
skepticism of any American calls for war. Germany, which is widely considered the deciding vote on
whether Europe would go to war, would be particularly resistant to going to war. The legacy of World
War II and the ideology of pacifism and compromise make even the idea of declaring war on Russia
unthinkable. German leaders would come under intense political pressure to, if not reject the call to
arms, then at least delay and negotiate — a de facto rejection of NATO's collective self-defense. In such
a scenario, it is disturbingly easy to imagine how NATO's European member states could split over
whether Russia had even crossed their red line for war, much less whether to respond. Under a fog of
confusion and doubt, Russia could gradually escalate until a Ukraine-style conflict in the Baltics was
foregone, until it had marched far across NATO's red line, exposing that red line as meaningless. But the
greatest danger of all is if Putin's plan were to stumble: By overreaching, by underestimating Western
resolve to defend the Baltics, or by starting something that escalates beyond his control, it could all too
easily lead to full-blown war. "That kind of misperception situation is definitely possible, and that’s how
wars start," Saideman said, going on to compare Europe today with 1914, just before World War I. "The
thing that makes war most thinkable is when other people don’t think it’s thinkable." In 1963, a few
months after the Cuban missile crisis had almost brought the US and Soviet Union to blows, President
John F. Kennedy gave a speech drawing on the lessons of the world's brush with nuclear war: "Above all,
while defending our vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an
adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war." That is the choice that Putin may
well force upon NATO. VII. How it would happen: The Ukraine scenario Evgeny Buzhinsky has spent
much of his professional life with the threat of global nuclear destruction hanging over his head. A
lifelong Russian military officer, he earned his PhD in military sciences in 1982, just as the Cold War
entered one of its most dangerous periods, and rose to the General Staff, where he remained for years
after the Soviet Union's collapse, through periods of calm and of tension. He retired in 2009 as a
lieutenant general and remains active in Russian national security circles, now heading the PIR Center, a
well-respected Russian think tank that focuses on military, national security, and arms control issues.
Buzhinsky, when I met him in Moscow, had a warning for me. Those in the West who worried about the
possibility of a major war breaking out in the Baltics were missing the real threat: Ukraine. The US, he
feared, does not appreciate how far Russia is willing to go to avoid a defeat in Ukraine, and this
miscalculation could pull them into conflict. "Ukraine, for Russia, is a red line," he warned. "And
especially a Ukraine that is hostile to Russia is a definite red line. But the US administration decided that
it's not." This was a concern I heard more than once in Russia. When Fyodor Lukyanov, the Moscow
foreign policy insider, warned that Russian foreign policy officials saw a major war as increasingly
possible, and I asked him how they thought it would happen, he cited Ukraine. "For example, massive
military help to Ukraine from the United States — it could start as a proxy war, and then ..." he trailed
off Lukyanov worried that the US does not understand Russia's sense of ownership over Ukraine, the
lengths it would go to protect its interests there. "It’s seen by many people as something that’s actually
a part of our country, or if not part of our country then a country that’s absolutely essential to Russia’s
security," he said. Buzhinsky is one of those people. Like Lukyanov and other Russian analysts, he
worried that the United States had wrongly concluded that Putin would ultimately acquiesce if he faced
likely defeat in Ukraine. The Americans, he said, were dangerously mistaken. Gregarious, bear-sized, and
clearly accustomed to dealing with Westerners from overseeing arms control treaties during much of
the 1990s, Buzhinsky sipped a grapefruit juice when we met in downtown Moscow. "A year ago, I was
absolutely convinced Russia would never intervene militarily," he said about the possibility of a full,
overt Russian invasion of Ukraine. "Now I'm not so sure." The view of the Russian government, he said,
was that it could never allow the defeat of the pro-Russia separatist rebels in the eastern Ukraine region
sometimes called Donbas. (In August, when those rebels appeared on the verge of defeat, Russia
provided them with artillery support and covertly sent troops to fight alongside them, none of which
Moscow has acknowledged.) If Ukrainian forces were about to overrun the separatist rebels, Buzhinsky
said, he believed that Russia would respond not just with an overt invasion, but by marching to
Ukraine's capital of Kiev. "A massive offensive on the Ukrainian side" against the rebels, he said, would
lead Russia to openly enter the war. "A war with Russia in Ukraine — if Russia starts a war, it never stops
until it takes the capital." When I asked Buzhinsky if he really believed Putin would launch a full Russian
invasion of Kiev in response to a Ukrainian effort to retake Donbas, he answered, "Yes, definitely. He
said twice publicly, 'I won't let it happen.' As he is a man of his word, I am sure he will." Such a scenario,
he said, could lead to a larger conflict no one wants. The Americans believe that "Russia will never dare,
Putin will never dare, to interfere," leaving the US unprepared in case it should happen. "And then I
could not predict the reaction of the United States and NATO." Buzhinsky outlined another way he
feared Ukraine could lead to a larger war. If the US provided sophisticated military equipment to
Ukraine that required putting American trainers or operators near the front lines, and one of them was
killed, he believed the US might feel compelled to intervene outright in Ukraine. Would Russia really risk
a major war over Ukraine, one of Europe's poorest countries? For months, Moscow has been suggesting
that Western military involvement in Ukraine, even something as mild as providing the Ukrainian
military with certain arms, would be taken as an act of war against Russia. Like Putin's threats to use
nuclear weapons, this has been shrugged off as bluster, mere rhetoric, just for scoring domestic political
points. What Buzhinsky was trying to underline to me was that the threats are real — that Russia might
consider its interests in Ukraine so vital that it would risk or even fight a war to protect them. He was
not alone in saying this — I heard it from many others in Moscow, including Russian analysts who are
critical of their country's Ukraine policy as too aggressive. Buzhinsky explained that Russia had set this as
a red line out of the fear that a Ukrainian reconquest of eastern Ukraine would lead to "the physical
extermination of the people of Donbas," many of whom are Russian speakers with cultural links to
Russia. Russian state media has drilled this fear into the peoples of Ukraine and Russia for a year now. It
does not have to be true to serve as casus belli; Moscow deployed a similar justification for its
annexation of Crimea. "You don't get to walk this back" The connection to Ukraine is often expressed by
everyday Russians as an issue of cultural heritage; Kievan Rus, a medieval Slavic federation with its
capital in the present-day Ukrainian capital of Kiev, is something like Russia's predecessor state. But this
is likely about more than nationalism or kinship with Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Moscow is notorious
for its conviction that the US is bent on Russia's destruction, or at least its subjugation. It is paranoid and
painfully aware of its isolation and its comparative weakness. A hostile and pro-Western Ukraine, Putin
may have concluded, would pose an existential threat by further weakening Russia beyond what it can
afford. Allison and Simes, in their essay on the risk of war, described Ukraine as a potential ground zero
for wider conflict because of this. "Russia’s establishment sentiment holds that the country can never be
secure if Ukraine joins NATO or becomes a part of a hostile Euro-Atlantic community," they wrote.
"From [Moscow's] perspective, this makes Ukraine’s non-adversarial status a non-negotiable demand
for any Russia powerful enough to defend its national-security interests." It is practically a cliché in
international relations: "Russia without Ukraine is a country, Russia with Ukraine is an empire." Putin's
Russia appears to believe that reclaiming great-power status is the only way it can guarantee security
against a hostile West. Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert, traced this Russian government obsession
with Ukraine back to Putin's political weakness at home, as well as Russia's sense of military insecurity
against a hostile and overwhelmingly powerful West. "I suspect that the desire to unite the Russian
world and to subjugate the non-Russian neighbors is driven by a fundamental sense of insecurity," Lewis
said in a much-circulated September podcast on Putin's nuclear threats. "That, like the Soviet leadership,
he has to try very hard to stay in power, and so there’s a tendency as his legitimacy declines to try to
blame outside forces. And the problem is that when you try to look at the world in that conspiratorial
way, there’s always a justification for subjugating the next set of neighbors." This means that should the
US or other Western countries become sufficiently involved in Ukraine that Russia cannot maintain
control of the conflict, then Russia may feel this puts it at such existential threat that it has no choice but
to escalate in response. Even at the risk of war. Russia knows it would lose a full-blown war with NATO,
of course, but it has other options. An official with the Russian Defense Ministry's public advisory board
told the Moscow Times that should Western countries arm Ukraine's military, it would respond by
escalating in Ukraine itself as well as "asymmetrically against Washington or its allies on other fronts."
Russian asymmetrical acts — cyberattacks, propaganda operations meant to create panic, military
flights, even little green men — are all effective precisely because they introduce uncertainty and risk. If
that sounds dangerous, it is. American and NATO red lines for what acts of "asymmetry" would and
would not trigger war are unclear and poorly defined. Russia could easily cross such a line without
meaning to, or could create enough confusion that the US believes it or its allies are under a severe
enough threat to demand retaliation. "You don't get to walk this back," Matthew Rojansky, the director
of the Kennan Institute, warned in comments to the New York Times about what could happen if the US
armed Ukraine's military, as Congress is pushing Obama to do. "Once we have done this we become a
belligerent party in a proxy war with Russia, the only country on Earth that can destroy the United
States," Rojansky said. "That’s why this is a big deal." VIII. The nuclear dangers: The red line is closer
than you think This August, as the Russian military launched its undeclared and unofficial invasion of
eastern Ukraine to defend separatist rebels there against defeat, Putin attended an annual youth
conference at Lake Seliger, just north of Moscow. During a Q&A session, a teaching student asked an
odd question about the "cyclical" nature of history and concerns that Russia could be "drawn into a new,
open global conflict." Putin, in his answer, did something that the leaders of major nuclear powers
generally avoid doing — he rattled the nuclear saber a bit: Let me remind you that Russia is one of the
world’s biggest nuclear powers. These are not just words — this is the reality. What’s more, we are
strengthening our nuclear deterrent capability and developing our armed forces. They have become
more compact and effective and are becoming more modern in terms of the weapons at their disposal.
There is a certain fear in Russia, never far from the surface, that the only thing preventing the West from
realizing its dream of destroying or subjugating Russia is its nuclear arsenal. (Three months later, Putin
warned that the West wanted to tame the Russian bear so as to "tear out his fangs and his claws," which
he explained meant its nuclear weapons.) "There is a widespread belief that the only guarantee for
Russian security, if not sovereignty and existence, is the nuclear deterrent," Lukyanov, the Russian
foreign policy expert, explained. "After the Yugoslavia wars, Iraq War, Libyan intervention, it’s not an
argument anymore, it’s conventional wisdom: 'If Russia were not a nuclear superpower, the regime
change of an Iraqi or Libyan style would be inevitable here. The Americans are so unhappy with the
Russian regime, they would do it. Praise God, we have a nuclear arsenal, and that makes us
untouchable.'" But Russia faced a problem: Its conventional military forces are now so much weaker
than NATO's, and its capital city so close to NATO's forces in the Baltics, that it feared NATO tank
divisions could push all the way to Moscow and quickly win a war without ever using a nuclear weapon.
Both the US and Russia had pledged to use nuclear weapons only to deter one another from nuclear
attacks. This kept the Cold War cold. But because the US would not need its ICBMs to win a war, that
deterrence is no longer enough to keep Russia safe. In response, Russia has been gradually lowering its
bar for when it would use nuclear weapons, and in the process upending the decades-old logic of
mutually assured destruction, adding tremendous nuclear danger to any conflict in Europe. The
possibility that a limited or unintended skirmish could spiral into nuclear war is higher than ever.
Russia's nuclear doctrine, a formal document the Kremlin publishes every few years outlining when it
will and will not use nuclear weapons, declares that the Russian military can launch nuclear weapons not
just in the case of a nuclear attack, but in case of a conventional military attack that poses an existential
threat. In other words, if Russia believes that American tanks could be bound for the Kremlin, it has
declared it may respond by dropping nuclear bombs. The danger that this adds to any possible
confrontation, particularly along the Baltic states, is difficult to overstate. If an accident or miscalculation
were to lead to a border skirmish, all it would take is for the Kremlin to misperceive the fighting as the
beginning of an assault toward Moscow and its own doctrine would call for using nuclear weapons.
Indeed, it would be the only way to avoid total defeat. There is another layer of danger and uncertainty
to this: It is not clear what Russia would consider a conventional threat worthy of a nuclear response. A
few months after he'd annexed Crimea, Putin revealed that during Russia's undeclared invasion of the
territory he had considered putting his country's nuclear forces on alert; his government has signaled it
would consider using nuclear force to defend Crimea from an attack, something Russian analysts told
me was not just bluster. The United States, of course, has no intention of militarily retaking Crimea,
despite surprisingly common fears to the contrary in Russia. But Russian paranoia about such a threat,
and a possible willingness to use nuclear weapons to avert it, adds more danger to the already
dangerous war in eastern Ukraine and the fears that greater Russian or Western involvement there
could spark a broader conflict. And the Crimea revelation raises a disconcerting question: Where exactly
does Moscow place the line for a threat severe enough to use nuclear weapons? Its doctrine says they
should be used only against an existential threat, but an attack on Crimea would be far from existentially
dangerous. We can only guess where the real red line lays, and hope not to cross it by mistake. IX. The
nuclear dangers: How Putin is pushing us back to the brink There is a specific moment that arms control
experts often cite to highlight the dangers of nuclear weapons, how they kept the world poised, for
years at a time, mere minutes away from nuclear devastation. That moment was September 26, 1983.
That evening, a Russian lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov settled in for his shift overseeing the
Soviet Union's missile attack early warning system. Petrov had a top-secret network of satellites, all
pointed squarely at the United States and its arsenal of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles,
which pointed back at him. The US and Soviet Union were ramping up development of ICBMs, which
could circle the globe in 30 minutes and reduce an enemy city to ash. Both sides were driven by fear that
the other could one day gain the ability to launch a preemptive nuclear strike so devastating and so fast
that it would start and win the war within hours. Each sought to develop ever more sensitive warning
systems, and ever more rapid mechanisms for retaliation, to deter the threat. Petrov ran one such
warning system. If he caught an American attack as soon as it crossed his sensors, it would give the
Soviet leadership about 20 minutes of warning time. That was their window to determine how to
respond. The space for mistakes was effectively zero. Five hours into Petrov's shift that night, something
he had never encountered in his 11-year career happened: The system went into full alarm. The word
"LAUNCH" displayed in large red letters. The screen announced a "high reliability" of an American ICBM
barreling toward the Soviet Union. Petrov had to make a decision: Would he report an incoming
American strike? If he did, Soviet nuclear doctrine called for a full nuclear retaliation; there would be no
time to double-check the warning system, much less seek negotiations with the US. If he didn't, and he
was wrong, he would have left his country defenseless, an act tantamount to treason. His gut instinct
told him the warning was in error, but when he flipped through the incoming imagery and data and he
could reach no hard conclusion from it. After a few moments, he called his superiors and stated
categorically that it was a false alarm. There was, he insisted, no attack. Petrov waited in agony for 23
minutes — the missile's estimated time to target — before he knew for sure that he'd been right. Only a
few people were aware of it at the time, but thanks to Petrov, the world had only barely avoided World
War III and, potentially, total nuclear annihilation. The US and Soviet Union, shaken by this and other
near-misses, spent the next few years stepping back from the brink. They decommissioned a large
number of nuclear warheads and signed treaties to limit their deployment. One of their most important
measures was a 1987 agreement called the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which saw
both sides conclude that the medium-range, land-based nuclear missiles they'd stuffed across Europe
were simply too dangerous and destabilizing to be allowed. Because the missiles could reach Moscow or
Berlin or London at lightening speeds, they shortened the "response time" to any crisis — the window in
which a Soviet or Western leader would have to decide whether the country was under attack before
such an attack would hit — to just a few minutes. They made the danger of an unintended escalation, or
of an error like the that one Petrov only barely prevented, far greater. The risk they posed was deemed,
in the 1987 INF Treaty, unacceptable to the world. And the weapons were removed. Putin has taken
several steps to push Europe back toward the nuclear brink, to the logic of nuclear escalation and hair-
trigger weapons that made the early 1980s, by many accounts, the most dangerous time in human
history. Perhaps most drastically, he appears to have undone the 1987 INF Treaty, reintroducing the
long-banned nuclear weapons. In March, Russia announced it would place nuclear-capable bombers and
medium-range, nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad — only an hour,
by commercial airliner, from Berlin. Meanwhile, it has been testing medium-range, land-based missiles.
The missiles, to the alarm of the United States, appear to violate the INF Treaty. This is far from Putin's
only nuclear escalation. He is developing more nuclear weapons, and calling frequent attention to them,
as apparent cover for his aggression and adventurism in Europe. There are suspicions, for example, that
Russia may have deployed nuclear-armed submarines off of the US Eastern Seaboard. What makes this
so dangerous is that Putin appears to believe, as the scholar Edward Lucas outlined in a recent report for
the Center for European Policy Analysis, that he has a greater willingness than NATO to use nuclear
weapons, and thus that his superior will allows him to bully the otherwise stronger Western powers
with games of nuclear chicken. This is a substantial, and indeed terrifying, break from Cold War–era
nuclear thinking, in which both sides rightly feared nuclear brinksmanship as too dangerous to
contemplate and used their weapons primarily to deter one another. "Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling is
unjustified, destabilizing and dangerous," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in a May speech
in Washington. Putin is acting out of an apparent belief that increasing the nuclear threat to Europe, and
as a result to his own country, is ultimately good for Russia and worth the risks. It is a gamble with the
lives of hundreds of millions of Europeans, and perhaps many beyond, at stake. X. The nuclear dangers:
An atomic gun to the world's head The view among many Western analysts is that the nuclear-capable
missiles are meant as a gun against the heads of the Americans and the Europeans: You better not mess
with us Russians, or who knows what we'll do. Putin himself endorsed this view in a 2014 speech in
Sochi, where he approvingly cited Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's 1960 address to the United Nations,
when he hammered his shoe on the podium. "The United States and NATO thought, 'This Nikita is best
left alone, he might just go and fire a missile. We better show some respect for them,'" Putin said. This
sort of a nuclear threat could be a perfect way for Putin to attempt the sort of NATO-splitting scenario
described by analysts like Piontkovsky. What if, Lucas asked as an example in his report, Putin found
some excuse to declare a Russian "military exclusion zone" in the Baltic Sea, thus physically cutting off
the Baltic states from the rest of NATO? "Would America really risk a nuclear standoff with Russia over a
gas pipeline?" Lucas asked. "If it would not, NATO is over. The nuclear bluff that sustained the Western
alliance through all the decades of the Cold War would have been called at last." Putin's love of
brinksmanship, while perhaps born of Russia's weakness, is also deeply worrying for what it says about
the leader's willingness and even eagerness to take on huge geopolitical risk. "Either he has a very weird
theory of nuclear weapons, or he just doesn’t take the West seriously and is trying to cow us with
whatever threat he can make," Saideman, the political scientist, said, going on to draw yet another of
the many parallels analysts have drawn to the onset of World War I. "There are two visions of
international relations: One is that threats work, and one is that threats don’t, where they cause
counter-balancing," Saideman continued. "This was the theory of the [German] Kaiser before World War
I: the more threatening you are, the more people will submit to your will. That might be Putin’s logic,
that he’s just going to threaten and threaten and hope that NATO bends. But the long run of
international relations suggests that it goes the other way, where the more threatening you are the
more you produce balancing." In other words, Putin is hoping to compensate for his weakness by
expressing his willingness to go further, and to raise the stakes higher, than the more powerful Western
nations. But his actions are premised on a flawed understanding of how the world works. In fact, he is
virtually forcing the West to respond in kind, raising not just the risk of a possible war, but the ease with
which such a war would go nuclear. XI. The nuclear dangers: Does Putin believe nuclear war can be
"won"? There is a corollary in Russia's nuclear doctrine, a way in which the Russians believe they have
solved the problem of Western military superiority, that is so foolhardy, so dangerous, that it is difficult
to believe they really mean it. And yet, there is every indication that they do. That corollary is Russia's
embrace of what it calls a "de-escalation" nuclear strike. Go back to the scenario spelled out in Russia's
military doctrine: a conventional military conflict that poses an existential threat to the country. The
doctrine calls for Russia to respond with a nuclear strike. But imagine you're a Russian leader: How do
you drop a nuclear bomb on NATO's troops without forcing the US to respond with a nuclear strike in
kind, setting off a tit-for-tat cycle of escalation that would end in total nuclear war and global
devastation? Russia's answer, in the case of such a conflict, is to drop a single nuclear weapon — one
from the family of smaller, battlefield-use nukes known as "tactical" weapons, rather than from the
larger, city-destroying "strategic" nuclear weapons. The idea is that such a strike would signal Russia's
willingness to use nuclear weapons, and would force the enemy to immediately end the fight rather
than risk further nuclear destruction. Nikolai Sokov, a nuclear weapons expert and former official in the
Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry, explained in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that this is not a far-
fetched option of last resort; it has become central to Russian war planning. "Such a threat is envisioned
as deterring the United States and its allies from involvement in conflicts in which Russia has an
important stake, and in this sense is essentially defensive," Sokov wrote. "Yet, to be effective, such a
threat also must be credible. To that end, all large-scale military exercises that Russia conducted
beginning in 2000 featured simulations of limited nuclear strikes." Buzhinsky, the recently retired
member of Russia's General Staff, confirmed in our meeting that this is something the military sees as a
viable option. "If Russia is heavily attacked conventionally, yes, of course, as it's written in the doctrine,
there may be limited use of nonstrategic nuclear weapons," he said. "To show intention, as a de-
escalating factor." It is difficult to imagine a more dangerous idea in the world of military planning today
than of a "limited" nuclear war. Scholars have debated for decades, and still debate today, whether the
concept of limited nuclear war is realistic, or whether such a conflict would inevitably spiral into total
nuclear war. Put another way, no one knows for sure whether Russia's military planners have sown the
seeds for global nuclear destruction. Seen from the Russian side, it is at least possible to imagine how
this doctrine might make sense: The threat of NATO's conventional forces is widely seen as both
overwhelming and imminent, making such an extreme step worth considering. Ever since the fall of the
Soviet Union, Russia's strategic culture has increasingly emphasized its nuclear arsenal, the one
remaining legacy of its fearsome great-power status. It is a sort of Russian cult of the nuclear weapon, or
even a certain strategic fetish. With nukes so central to Russian strategic thinking, it is little wonder
Moscow sees them as the solution to its greatest strategic problem. But when you consider this doctrine
from the American side, you begin to see what makes it dangerous, even insane. Imagine that you are
an American leader and your forces in Eastern Europe have somehow been drawn into conflict with the
Russians. Perhaps, as artillery and planes from within Russia hammer your forces, you counterattack on
Russian soil to take them out. The Kremlin, fearing the start of an invasion to take Moscow, drops a
tactical nuclear warhead on your forces in Estonia or Latvia. You have no idea whether more Russian
nuclear strikes are coming, either on the battlefield, more widely on Europe, or even against
Washington or New York. Do you respond with an in-kind tactical nuclear strike, opening the risk of
gradual escalation to total nuclear war? Do you, fearing the worst, move to take out the Russian
leadership before they can order more attacks? Or do you announce a unilateral ceasefire, drawing your
forces back in humiliation, rewarding Russia with a victory? It is difficult to imagine a more dangerous
idea than "limited" nuclear war Russia's nuclear doctrine is betting that any American leader — not to
mention the leaders of nuclear-armed France and the UK — would choose the last of those three
options. If that prediction turned out to be wrong, it would mean nuclear war, perhaps global nuclear
war and thus annihilation. This doctrine, in other words, is gambling with the fate of the world. Such a
scenario, to be clear, is remote, as are all of the nuclear scenarios. It would require a cascading series of
events, and for neither side to pull back in time as those events built. The odds of this happening are
quite low. But they are greater than zero, and growing. Such a scenario is within the realm of possibility
— if it were not, then Russia would not regularly conduct military exercises that imagine exactly this
outcome. And recall that Alexander Vershbow, the deputy secretary general of NATO, told a conference
in late April that NATO is gaming out exactly such a crisis. There are yet more worrying implications to
this Russian doctrine. Its logical conclusion is that Russia sees itself as able to fight a war with the
conventionally superior United States without losing, and that it can do this by using battlefield nuclear
weapons. Under this doctrine, Moscow is deeming not only full-blown war against the US as imaginable,
but a full-blown war with at least one nuclear detonation. That, perhaps, can help explain why Putin has
seemed so willing to ratchet up the possibility of a real war with the United States, even one involving
nuclear threats — he may believe that through his superior will and brinksmanship, he can avoid defeat.
Adding a nuclear element to any conflict would also seem to increase the odds of NATO's Western
European members splitting over how to respond, particularly if Russian propaganda can make the
circumstances leading up to the detonation unclear. But this also shows the degree to which his entire
strategy may rest in part on a shoddy premise — that "limited" nuclear war can be winnable — and one
that puts the entire world at risk. XII. The nuclear dangers: End games President Dwight Eisenhower held
office at a time when the prospect of a nuclear war was relatively new and military planners unsure how
to account for the possibility of a conflict with the Soviet Union in which both sides might use nuclear
weapons. Though some in his administration urged him to consider plans for nuclear conflict,
Eisenhower, no stranger to war, rejected the idea as unthinkable. "You just can't have this kind of war,"
Eisenhower said in 1957. "There aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets." Putin
believes he has found a way around this problem, relying on smaller, battlefield-use warheads that could
win a war without escalating to a global conflict in which whole cities were sacrificed. But even a limited
nuclear war could be catastrophic, and not just for the nations where the bombs would fall, but for the
whole world. A 2008 study (updated in 2014) on the environmental effects of a "small" nuclear war
described what would happen if 100 Hiroshima-strength bombs were detonated in a hypothetical
conflict between India and Pakistan. This is equivalent to less than 1 percent of the combined nuclear
arsenals of the US and Russia. The explosions, the study found, would push a layer of hot, black smoke
into the atmosphere, where it would envelop the Earth in about 10 days. The study predicted that this
smoke would block sunlight, heat the atmosphere, and erode the ozone for many years, producing what
the researchers call without hyperbole "a decade without summer." As rains dried and crops failed
worldwide, the resulting global famine would kill 1 billion people. "We escaped the Cold War without a
nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in
greatest proportion," General George Lee Butler of the US Strategic Air Command told the journalist Eric
Schlosser for his book on the dangers of nuclear weapons. We may have escaped the Cold War, but we
have not escaped the nuclear threat, which not only remains but is growing. The sense that this danger
is resigned to history books, common in Washington and other Western capitals, is precisely part of its
danger. It is another echo of the months and years before World War I, when the world drifted
unknowingly toward disaster. In April of last year, just after Russia had annexed Crimea, the London-
based think tank Chatham House published a report on the dangers of unintended nuclear conflict. It
was not pegged to the events in Ukraine, and at that point few people, including the report's authors,
saw Crimea as the potential beginning of a larger conflict. Even still, it was dire in its warnings. "The
probability of inadvertent nuclear use is not zero and is higher than had been widely considered," it
stated. "The risk associated with nuclear weapons is high" and "under-appreciated." Their warnings
were widely ignored. As the report itself noted, the world has concluded, wrongly, that nuclear weapons
no longer pose an imminent threat. Attention has moved on. But the seeds of a possible war are being
sown in Europe. Should the worst happen, which is a remote but real possibility, the consequences will
follow all Americans to their homes.
Chinese expansionism causes nuclear war.
Rando 15 — Consultant- Asymmetric Global Solutions DBA, MPH/MS-Biomedical Sciences & US

Correspondent-Chemical, Biological, Nuclear Warfare Journal. (Fire on the Water: The South China Sea
and Nuclear Confrontation, 9/29, http://www.cbrneportal.com/fire-on-the-water-the-south-china-sea-
and-nuclear-confrontation/)
Robert Kaplan, one of the world’s foremost experts on China, has stated “The South China Sea will be
the 21st Century’s defining battleground.” The obsession with supremacy in the South China Sea is
certainly not a new phenomenon in the realms of international security and maritime strategy. In
opinionated discussions related to naval warfare, prominent political scientists and military strategists
have been addressing the geopolitical and military significance of the region for decades. For example,
the enlightening 1997 article “The Chinese Way”, written in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists by Professor
Chalmers Johnson of the University of California-San Diego, noted significantly increased defense
budgets and expenditures in the region. In addition, the article eludes to the fact that China had claimed
the entire South China Sea and would use its naval forces to counter any encroachment. The argument
for an increased U.S. naval presence in East Asia is certainly not without precedent. This contested
aquatic region has tremendous geopolitical, strategic and economic significance. While, the Persian Gulf
has immense importance and global recognition due to its strategic location in the Middle East, as well
its significance to global commerce, industry and sought after oil, the South China Sea is crucially
important to nations seeking to obtain their economic riches and geopolitical advantages. The South
China Sea is geographically located near the Pacific Ocean and encompasses an area of 1.4 million
square miles (3.5 million square kilometers). As a semi-closed area, the South China Sea extends from
the Singapore Strait to the Taiwan Strait, with China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines,
Vietnam, and Taiwan surrounding it. In terms of economic value, fishery stocks and potential fossil fuel
reserves are two major commodities that may spark an armed conflict, even to the point of nuclear
confrontation. As a rich source of the region’s staple diet, fish, the sea guarantees a steady flow of food
to the countries of the region. Control and supremacy of the sea would also assure claiming the much
touted hydrocarbon reserves in the seabed, possibly exceeding those of the OPEC nations such as Iraq
and Kuwait. The conquest of this vast resource would virtually assure energy independence and high
monetary returns for those that would gain supremacy over the South China Sea. Thus, seizing the
opportunity to gain dominance will lead to control and manipulation of vital food and energy resources,
economic wealth and geopolitical power in the region. A scenario of regional and maritime domination
and control could lead to the partial or total exclusion of adjacent nation-states to access any food or
natural resources derived from a sea ruled with an iron hand; leading to a massive complex
humanitarian catastrophe of immense proportions from malnutrition and starvation, limitations in
energy production, and economic collapse. These factors make the South China Sea a national security
priority for nations in the region, including one of the world’s superpowers, China. The dependence of
China and other regional nations surrounding the South China Sea on the Strait of Malacca is analogous
in geopolitical and economic terms, to the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. Approximately one -third
of all global trade funnels through the strait and also serves as a conduit for raw materials and energy
needs for China and other adjacent nation-states. Such potential dominance in any region, leads to a
high-stakes game of brinkmanship, and at least the possibility of a regional war which could conceivably
escalate to engulf nation-states external to the regional sphere. Tensions and skirmishes have the
propensity to evolve into armed conflict and full-scale war, and apprehensive leaders and military
planners in such a contested region serve as the facilitators for disaster. China continues to assert
sovereignty by constructing man made islands using sand dredged from the sea bottom and these
artificial islands could be militarized. China has even affirmed its desire to have a military presence on
these islands; however, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, also professes the use of these land
masses to facilitate commerce via shipping lanes and to protect Chinese fishing and other vessels from
piracy. China will never cease its quest for supremacy and its perceived “ownership” of the South China
Sea, as the legitimacy and structure of the Chinese government is based on nationalism and
achievement of the “Chinese Dream”. The Chinese regime continues to vehemently assert their
perceived “right” to the South China Sea, and it forges ahead with plans and operations that could lead
to naval warfare and conflict escalation. The knowledge that China possesses formidable naval capacity
and capabilities, including nuclear-capable ballistic missile submarines, is, indeed, disconcerting at the
very least. As we examine and evaluate the “submarine factor”, it is evident that China’s submarines
have no practical value in its disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines. Essentially, nuclear ballistic
missile capable submarines serve as a deterrent against thermonuclear war. Without doubt, the primary
reason that China possesses nuclear-capable submarines is to deter an American attack, although India’s
nuclear weapons are also a consideration for Beijing. Nuclear capable submarines are capable of deep
dive capabilities and shorter launch to target times. While China’s submarine capabilities may appear
worrisome to some, sudden deployment from port in a geopolitical crisis would serve as a critical
indicator to the US and Western allies, and its submarine fleet still remains somewhat noisy and
detectable. China has already demonstrated its aggression at sea in several instances, such as the
ramming and sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat in disputed waters claimed by both countries in the
region and an ominous presence and military mobilization exercises which have been monitored by
military and intelligence assets. A report by the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, indicates that
Chinese SSBNs are able to target portions of the U.S. from strategic operational positions near the
Chinese coast. China’s Global Times published an unprecedented report that revealed a nuclear missile
strike on the western U.S. with JL-2 missiles could generate up to 12 million American fatalities. The
Obama administration and senior U.S. naval officials have not retorted to China’s claims of a potentially
devastating nuclear threat, which included graphics showing radiological plumes and collateral damage
induced by radiation. The possibilities of China’s anti-satellite strategies to disable communications and
intelligence-gathering capabilities must also be taken seriously. Most assuredly, the South China Sea
would serve as an obvious arena for the projection of Chinese power, including conventional and,
potentially, nuclear scenarios. Rando2China’s South Sea naval facilities have seen significant upgrading
and expansion, such as the facilities on Hainan, and the nuclear submarine base at Longpo serves as the
first nuclear submarine base in the South China Sea. The base also includes a submarine tunnel that is
part of an underwater complex of nuclear facilities on Hainan. Also, Chinese-Russian wargames are
worrisome, which adds to the concerns of nuclear confrontation and consequences globally. The
Chinese have asserted their right to defend its territories, which in their view, includes the South China
Sea, and they have stated verbally, and by their aggressive actions, that they will continue to pursue
their strategic goals despite the threat of confrontation and conflict. Many of the issues in contention in
the South China Sea will remain unresolved for, probably, several years to come. We must remain
balanced, and not overzealous in our approaches to assisting with conflict resolution in the area. We
must apply reasonable diplomacy, without stirring up a hornet’s nest that would serve to be
counterproductive and enhance animosities. However, the US, its allies, and other concerned nation-
states must not refrain from being ever so vigilant and proactive in achieving peaceful resolution, while
at the same time maintaining our national defense and security postures.
AT—Offshore Balancing
AT: OSB
Offshore balancing fails — wrecks power projection, credibility, and can’t solve their offense.
Brands & Feaver, 16 — Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments. Peter D. Feaver is a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University,
where he heads the Program in American Grand Strategy and the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.
(November/December 2016; "Should America Retrench?" Foreign Affairs;
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/should-america-retrench; //GrRv)
Not only is the case for offshore balancing based on bad history and miscalculated costs and benefits; it
also rests on several flawed (and mostly unstated) assumptions. First, Mearsheimer and Walt assume
that once Washington disengages from a region, it will still be easy to sense and react to adverse shifts
in the balance of power. Ideally, in their view, the United States would remain offshore until some
intervention was required, but before a D-Day-style invasion became necessary. Yet although the right
moment for intervening can sometimes be seen in hindsight, identifying it in real time, amid enormous
uncertainty, is far harder. Even alert and determined leaders have found it impossible to time onshore
interventions perfectly, as President Franklin Roosevelt discovered in Europe and East Asia, President
Harry Truman discovered in Korea, and President George H. W. Bush discovered in the Persian Gulf. In
each case, the president realized the need for onshore intervention, or gathered the necessary political
consensus, only after a regional balance had been fundamentally disrupted or overturned. Offshore
balancing simply offers too little margin for error.
Second, Mearsheimer and Walt make heroic assumptions about the United States’ ability to reach
faraway places without its current network of global deployments. They would have the United States
end those commitments but then rush back if a regional hegemon appeared. Today, the United States
can indeed rapidly project combat power in the Middle East, the Pacific, and Europe, but only because
of the global network of bases and logistics chains developed to maintain the grand strategy that
offshore balancing would jettison. Had the United States not had forces and bases in Europe in 1990, for
example, it would have been nearly impossible to project decisive military power into the Persian Gulf
so soon after Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait. Take away an onshore grand strategy, and you take away
the capacity for timely force projection on which offshore balancing relies.
Third, offshore balancing assumes that the United States can get other countries to do more of its dirty
work simply by doing less itself. Mearsheimer and Walt claim that the United States’ globe-spanning
military presence incentivizes its regional partners to free-ride and that the United States should instead
pass the buck and “make its allies do as much of the heavy lifting as possible.” But there is little reason
to believe that the United States’ absence would motivate others to act in accordance with U.S.
interests. On the contrary, it is far more likely that Washington can influence other states when they are
confident about its commitment to their security. The painful experience in post-Saddam Iraq illustrates
the case. Although the Iraqi government never fully lived up to U.S. expectations, it came closest to
fulfilling them during the 2007–9 surge, when the U.S. commitment was at its greatest. By contrast, the
Iraqis underperformed most from 2012 to 2014, when the United States withdrew its troops.
AT: Terror
Military presence doesn’t cause blowback and offshore balancing makes it worse.
Furthermore, the notion that offshore balancing would suddenly defuse the terrorist threat is wishful
and even dangerous thinking. As the rise of ISIS has demonstrated, terrorist groups can mobilize even
after the United States has withdrawn from a region. In fact, such groups may find it easier to operate in
the subsequent security vacuum. To be sure, onshore deployments serve as a convenient rallying cry for
terrorist propaganda, forming part of Osama bin Laden’s casus belli against the United States in the
1990s, for example. But as al Qaeda’s own propagandists have made clear, other irritants—above all,
U.S. backing of authoritarian Arab regimes—also figure prominently in the jihadist indictment of U.S.
policy. By forcing Washington to redouble its support for such regimes as pillars of regional stability,
offshore balancing might actually fan the flames of jihadist resentment.
AT: Prolif
OSB spurs prolif — eliminates security leverage AND leads to perceptions of abandonment.
To make matters worse, offshore balancing encourages nuclear proliferation. Throughout the postwar
era, maintaining an onshore presence has given the United States leverage to restrain allies’ nuclear
ambitions while also mitigating the insecurity that might otherwise have driven such countries as
Germany, Japan, and South Korea to pursue the bomb. Withdrawing offshore threatens to have the
opposite effect. It is no surprise that South Korea expressed nuclear aspirations when the United States
gestured at withdrawing its troops from the peninsula during the 1970s, or that Taiwan did likewise
when U.S. rapprochement with China appeared to jeopardize the United States’ commitment to the
island’s security. Offshore balancers may wave away the dangers of proliferation; given the destructive
power of nuclear weapons, policymakers can hardly be so cavalier.
AT: Debt / Military Spending
ZERO debt internal link — forward presence is subsidized and the costs of fighting back into crises
outweigh.
Mearsheimer and Walt use a similar accounting gimmick to inflate the benefits of offshore balancing.
They claim that it would dramatically reduce defense expenditures. But because host nations usually
subsidize the costs of U.S. forward deployments, the savings of going offshore are often negligible.
Moreover, the costs of rapidly moving forces back onshore during a crisis must also be considered, and
those costs—as in World War II and the Korean War—can be prohibitive. The United States would thus
save significant amounts of money only if it eliminated the very forces needed to fight its way back
onshore, an approach that would look more like full-fledged isolationism than the minimalist strategy
Mearsheimer and Walt propose.
AT—Heg Bad
Hegemony Good — AT: Concert
Hegemony is a precondition to multilateralism — the absence of a unipole causes great-power

competition, which eliminates the incentive for cooperation.
Mazarr & Brands, 17 — Michael J. Mazarr is senior political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND
Corporation and associate director of the Strategy, Doctrine and Resources Program of the RAND Arroyo
Center. He co-leads the RAND Project on Building a Sustainable International Order. Hal Brands is the
Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of
Advanced International Studies. (4-5-2017; "Navigating Great Power Rivalry in the 21st Century;" War on
the Rocks; https://warontherocks.com/2017/04/navigating-great-power-rivalry-in-the-21st-
century/; //GrRv)
It is a nice idea — and one that probably won’t work. History suggests that in order for concerts to
emerge and endure, a number of critical geopolitical prerequisites must be met. There must be a stable
configuration of power among the leading powers in the international system. Those powers must be
willing to respect a shared set of rules. They must have some ideological commonality — what unites
them ideologically must be greater than what divides them. Finally, concerts generally take shape when
there is some looming threat — or memory of some great cataclysm — that impels cooperation. Where
these preconditions have been present — most notably, during the 19th century concert of Europe —
sustained great power cooperation in support of a common vision of international order has been
possible. Where even some of these factors have been absent — in the wake of World War II, for
instance — great power concerts have proven impossible to achieve.
The problem today is that the structural preconditions for a concert simply do not exist. The
configuration of power in the international system is changing, which is precisely why revisionist powers
such as Russia and China feel empowered to challenge American primacy. The United States and its
great power rivals do not accept a common set of global rules. Moscow and Beijing are challenging the
norms that Washington prefers, from non-aggression in Eastern Europe to freedom of navigation in the
South China Sea. The ideological differences between the great powers are far less severe than they
were during the Cold War, but the cleavage between the world’s leading democracy and its two
foremost authoritarian powers is significant enough to be a source of conflict. And finally, more than 70
years after the last great power war, there does not appear to be any commonly perceived threat
powerful enough to overcome these other factors and compel sustained cooperation. The focus of many
great powers today seems to be on a opportunistic grab for influence rather than an urgent fear that
disaster will befall them if they cannot find ways to coordinate their actions with others.
Efforts to form a great power concert are thus likely to prove unavailing; making concessions to Russia
or China in hopes of drawing them into such a concert could well be more destabilizing than stabilizing.
But managing these relationships — and doing so while preserving the greatest degree of stability
possible — remains an urgent task for the United States. In the coming years, U.S. officials will be in the
market for strategies and concepts to guide their interaction with other great powers: If it cannot be a
concert, what concept or structure would promote U.S. interests? It is too early to sketch the final shape
that such a structure would take—but it is not too early to be sure that U.S. strategists are at least
asking the right questions about the future of great power relations.
Hegemony Good — Epistemology
No bias or ‘echo chamber’ — hegemony persists because it works. Our authors or reflexive and unbiased
— critiques of primacy don’t withstand statistical scrutiny.
Feaver & Brands, 19 — Peter D. Feaver is a professor of political science and public policy at Duke
University, where he heads the Program in American Grand Strategy and the Triangle Institute for
Security Studies. Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments. (Spring 2019; “Correspondence: The Establishment and U.S. Grand Strategy;” International
Security; 43(4); pg. 197–204; doi:10.1162/isec_c_00347; //GrRv)
In his article “Why America’s Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy
Establishment,” Patrick Porter argues that the continuity of U.S. grand strategy since World War II has
resulted from a group-think mentality fostered by a powerful foreign policy elite—”the Blob”—that
stifles debate and prevents needed course corrections.1 Porter’s provocative argument is ultimately
unpersuasive, because it overstates the degree of conformity and consensus in U.S. strategy while
slighting the most obvious explanations for the strategy’s endurance. Below we highlight several
problems with his argument.
First, Porter exaggerates the degree of consensus in U.S. foreign policy since World War II. In fact,
despite a bipartisan consensus on the necessity of U.S. global leadership in support of a congenial
international order (what Porter calls “primacy”), intense debates about how that strategy should be
operationalized have been common in U.S. foreign policy circles. Policymakers, elected officials, and
policy commentators argued heatedly over such fundamental issues as whether to pursue a Europe-first
or Asia-first strategy in the 1950s, whether and how aggressively to combat Soviet and communist
influence in the developing world, whether to make or avoid defense commitments on the Asian
mainland, whether to pursue détente or confrontation with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, whether to
use force to reverse Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990–91, whether to expand the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization after the Cold War, and whether to invade Iraq in 2003. These debates
reflected genuine intellectual disagreements that pitted members of the Blob against one another.
Porter would likely respond that such debates were essentially about tactics, but the fact that the
foreign policy community has engaged in knock-down, drag-out debates over issues of such enormous
strategic importance shows that it is not as unified, and the marketplace of ideas not as limited, as
Porter claims.
Second, although Porter argues that dissenting foreign policy views advocating an approach he calls
“restraint” tend to be marginalized, departures from a strategy of U.S. leadership have time and again
received a hearing at the highest levels of government. In the 1950s and 1960s, Presidents Dwight
Eisenhower and John Kennedy repeatedly considered withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe.2 Similar
debates occurred in Congress in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When Jimmy Carter took office, he
strongly favored withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea.3 In the early 1990s, the George H.W. Bush
and Bill Clinton administrations initially delegated management of the crisis in the former Yugoslavia to
the European NATO allies. In 2011, Barack Obama withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq as part of a broader
move toward an offshore balancing strategy in the Middle East.4 In other words, presidents and other
political leaders in the United States have often been willing to consider significant changes in U.S.
strategy, and they have sometimes even implemented policies that represented a meaningful shift
toward retrenchment and restraint.
Third, the reason that many of these departures were not ultimately undertaken—or proved fleeting—is
not because policymakers denied them a fair, open hearing. It is because they were judged—or later
shown—to be substantively inferior to more assertive policies. Eisenhower never withdrew U.S. troops
from Europe, because he understood that doing so would have threatened to destabilize the
interlocking series of arrangements that deterred the Soviet Union while pacifying Germany and
Western Europe.5 Carter never withdrew U.S. troops from South Korea, for fear that doing so would
have risked incentivizing South Korean nuclear proliferation and destabilizing the fragile balance in a
critical part of the world.6 The United States ultimately took the lead in addressing the crackup of
Yugoslavia when the inability of the Europeans to deal with the crisis had become clear. Obama did
draw down U.S. forces in Iraq, but large swaths of that country (and Syria) were subsequently overrun
by the [ISIL] Islamic State, compelling a reassertion of U.S. military and diplomatic engagement.7 In
these and other cases, an emphasis on U.S. leadership has persisted, because that approach has been
deemed—after significant debate or hard experience—superior to the alternatives.
Fourth, and related, Porter slights the simplest explanation for why there has been substantial
consistency in U.S. strategy: because it works. As scholars have demonstrated, the past seventy years
have been among the best in human history in terms of rising global and U.S. prosperity, the spread of
democracy and human rights, the avoidance of great power war, and the decline of war in general.8 It
has also been a period when the world’s leading power consistently pursued a grand strategy geared
explicitly toward achieving those goals. To prove that U.S. grand strategy persists for reasons other than
utility, Porter would have to show that U.S. leadership has not been necessary to those outcomes or
that it is no longer necessary. But he does not do so (or even really try to do so), and his article does not
engage the relevant social science scholarship and historical literature establishing a causal connection
between U.S. engagements and key aspects of the relatively benign global order.9
Finally, critics of primacy consistently argue, as Porter does, that their ideas are censored or excluded
from policy debates. Yet, critics of U.S. grand strategy are prominent within the academy, including at
prestigious institutions such as the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Their op-eds and essays appear in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs,
among other prominent “mainstream” outlets, and their work receives generous funding. Leading critics
of primacy are regular participants in U.S. government–sponsored outreach initiatives such as the
National Intelligence Council’s Intelligence Associates program. Not least, although Porter and many
other realists in the academy deplore key aspects of the current president’s foreign policy, that
president’s own core critique of the foreign policy elite echoes those made by academic realists.10 If
this is censorship, it is a remarkably ineffective form of censorship. Perhaps the reason primacy endures
is not that the marketplace of ideas is broken, but that it is working fairly well.
Sustainable
Sustainable — AT: Debt, Financial Insolvency
Financial reasons for unsustainability are wrong — free trade, dollar strength, and capital inflow
preserve financial stability.
Norrlof & Wohlforth, 19 — Carla Norrlof: PhD in IR, Discipline Representative of Political Science at the
University of Toronto. William C. Wohlforth; PhD in Political Science from Yale; Daniel Webster Professor
of Government in the Dartmouth College Department of Government. (“Is US grand strategy self-
defeating? Deep engagement, military spending and sovereign debt;” Conflict Management and Peace
Science; //GrRv)
Retrenchment proponents see American military spending as contributing to the growth of public debt3
and the country’s relative economic decline, and they argue that as it approaches its credit limit, the US
should cut military spending and act preemptively to forestall steeper decline and even bankruptcy.
Some retrenchment supporters also fear that negative feedback between military overstretch and
economic decline will eventually put America’s coercive hegemony at risk because economic might is
the wellspring of military might (Calleo, 1982; Chace, 1981; Kennedy, 1987a, 1987b; MacDonald and
Parent, 2011). In short, retrenchment proponents agree that reducing military spending is an economic
necessity, although they disagree about the extent to which the US should reduce its spending and
overseas presence as well as the desirability of sustaining military primacy.
This argument is noteworthy not only because of its centrality to the retrenchment argument, but also
because academic defenders of deep engagement have as yet no direct response. Scholars and
policymakers who oppose retrenchment maintain that American military dominance has produced
significant economic benefits and warn that reductions in military spending will reduce these benefits
(Brooks, et al., 2013; Brooks and Wohlforth, 2016; Gottlieb, 2012; Kagan, 2012; Sestanovich, 2014).
Three main arguments point to such benefits. First, according to a research program closely connected
with the work of Robert Gilpin and Stephen Krasner, military power underwrites an open economic
order. In a series of books, Gilpin and Krasner explain the logic and evidence for hegemonic orders that
rest in part on an outsized global military role (Gilpin, 1975; Gilpin, 1981, 1987, 2001; Krasner, 1978). A
dominant military power that equates its own interest with expanding economic globalization benefits
from providing a stable political context that makes economic exchange more secure and predictable
(Brooks, et al., 2013; Brooks and Wohlforth, 2016; Norrlof, 2008, 2010).
Second, military primacy generates other direct benefits, such as official support for the hegemon’s
currency; sustained capital inflows during times of distress; protection of residents’ foreign investments;
and economic contributions to the hegemon’s military activities, including economic transfers through
basing fees (Beckley, 2011; Helleiner, 2008; James, 2009; McNamara, 2008, Norrlof, 2008, 2010; Posen,
2008).
Third, the preeminent military power leverages security to extract economic favors from allies in
exchange for protection. As a background condition, security allows the hegemonic power to win
concessions in economic and trade negotiations (Ikenberry, 2011; Mastanduno, 2009; Norrlof, 2010).
Economic agreements flow from the barrel of a gun.
No link or impact to debt — hegemony is entirely decoupled from deficit growth.
Norrlof & Wohlforth, 19 — Carla Norrlof: PhD in IR, Discipline Representative of Political Science at the
University of Toronto. William C. Wohlforth; PhD in Political Science from Yale; Daniel Webster Professor
of Government in the Dartmouth College Department of Government. (“Is US grand strategy self-
defeating? Deep engagement, military spending and sovereign debt;” Conflict Management and Peace
Science; //GrRv)
Findings This article scrutinizes the argument that growth in military spending is responsible for growth
in US public debt. As illustrated in Figure 2, the paces of change in the two variables have moved in
opposite directions at least as frequently as they have moved together. If changes in US military
spending do not correlate with changes in US public debt, the mechanism specified by retrenchment
supporters has no empirical support. While there may be other causal pathways whereby military
spending contributes to economic decline, evidence against the hypothesis that growth in military
expenditures drives US debt constitutes evidence against the case for retrenchment based on debt-
fueled decline. The results in Table 1 demonstrate that we must reject H1. We find no significant
association between quarter-to-quarter increases in the growth of military expenditures and public
debt. Growth in US military spending does not correlate with growth in US debt. The most significant
explanatory variable for growth in America’s public debt is income tax. This variable is substantively
important and significant across all six estimation techniques. Given rising levels of debt, and the
negative association between income tax and the public debt, we infer that tax cuts have been a main
contributor to the expansion of public debt in the US. Consequently, raising taxes should lower the debt.
It is noteworthy that even social benefits, which includes spending items such as health care and other
forms of welfare spending that are usually singled out as responsible for increasing the debt, are not
statistically significant drivers of the debt. We also note that R2 is rather low across the models (higher
in the smaller samples). Given our inclusion of principal contributors to the debt, as well as our
diagnostic test indicating that the functional form of our models is not mis-specified, we interpret this as
suggesting that public debt is difficult to predict Retrenchment proponents might object that long-term
associations are less important than key periods in which the grand strategy leads to major buildups,
such as the 1980s and the post-9/11 decade. These were two periods that featured major increases in
military spending, international activism, large deficits and widespread concern over debt and decline.
Table 2 runs the same regression between the first quarter of 1983—when Ronald Reagan intensified
the arms race with the Soviet Union—and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the fourth quarter of
1991. This period also coincides with the Panama Invasion 1989–1990 and the 1991 Gulf War led by
George HW Bush. Yet, during this time military spending does not have a statistically significant impact
on the debt.7 During this time, some of our models suggest that growth in interest payments on the
debt, social benefits and GDP significantly impact growth in the debt. The positive association between a
growing economy and rising debt may seem counterintuitive. We should expect economic slowdown to
put more pressure on the government to spend as tax revenues shrink with rising unemployment while
demands for federal benefits increase. But governments are not necessarily responsive to these
pressures. Some governments spend procyclically, continuing to spend as GDP increases and/or do not
try to cushion economic downturns, in which case falling GDP would have coincided with lower
government spending. If spending was not curtailed during times of expansion, demands to reduce
deficits and debt may result in austerity policies as the economy contracts. Table 3 reports regression
results between the third quarter of 2001 and the fourth quarter of 2011, corresponding to the Wars on
Terror launched against Afghanistan and Iraq in response to the attacks against the United States on
September 11, 2001. During this period, as ‘‘non war’’, that is, base defense spending rocketed up 40%,
from $390 to $540 billion in constant (2010) terms, we still see no evidence of military spending
augmenting the debt. Caution is however warranted in interpreting these results owing to the omission
of OCO funding, which financed a substantial part of the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and which is not
included in base defense spending. Changes in taxes and GDP are significant determinants of the public
debt with tax cuts and economic growth increasing the debt. While the results in Tables 2 and 3 are
suggestive, we warn against drawing strong inferences based upon them in light of the few observations
in the regression. The core implication of these results—that defense spending in the post-Second
World War era is frequently [overshadowed] dwarfed by other drivers of public debt even during
periods of defense buildups and activist foreign policy—is consistent with analyses conducted by the
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). After declining steadily in the post-war period (including
in the Vietnam War years) federal debt held by the public climbed sharply in the Reagan presidency,
from 24.5% of GDP in the last pre-Reagan year to 39% in the first post contributors (notably much higher
interest payments owing to the Federal Reserve’s antiinflationary monetary policy) outweighed military
spending in CBO’s retrospective analysis (CBO, 1988). The same goes for the post 9/11 decade. In
explaining how its 2001 forecast of a $5.6 trillion surplus by 2011 ended up as a $6.1 trillion deficit, CBO
(2012) estimated that economic changes alone contributed far more than all increased military
spending, including on all OCO in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.8 Our findings also support the CBO’s
assessment that lower than expected tax revenues including tax cuts significantly contributed to
increasing the debt. Overall, the findings reported above suggest that the growth in military spending is
not responsible for the growth in America’s sovereign debt. Our findings cast doubt on the central claim
made by retrenchment proponents. While more restrictive criteria for these propositions may establish
them as conditionally true, the available evidence does not support their current formulation.
Sustainable — AT: Drezner
Drezner agrees — American hegemony is sustainable.
Drezner, 19 — Daniel W. Drezner, Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, is Professor of
International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. (4-4-2019; "The Uncertain State of
American Hegemony;" Washington Post;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/04/04/uncertain-state-american-hegemony/?
noredirect=on&utm_term=.a77b05506de7; //GrRv)
There is a schizophrenia at the heart of debates about U.S. hegemony. On the one hand, the Trump
administration has made it easy for critics to argue that America has ended. Long-term trends show that
China is catching up to the United States on just about every conceivable capability metric. Short-term
trends show the European Union is a more potent regulatory power and the United States has become
more isolated on questions of, say, aviation regulation.
At the same time, serious international relations scholars have argued that U.S. hegemonic power has
persisted. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth made the case a few years ago that the United States
remained the preeminent power in the world. My Tufts University colleague Michael Beckley made a
similar argument last year. Andrea and Mauro Gilli have further argued that China will be unable to
catch up in technological sophistication to the U.S. military.
The latest addition to the latter genre comes from Adam Tooze in the London Review of Books. Tooze
does not dispute the low caliber of current American foreign policy. Rather, he asks whether it matters
in the grand scheme of things. On the military front, for example, Tooze writes:
Never before in history has military power been as skewed as it is today. For better or worse, it is
America’s preponderance that shapes whatever we call the international order. And given how freely
that power has been used, to call it a Pax Americana seems inapposite. A generation of American
soldiers has grown used to fighting wars on totally asymmetrical terms. That for them is what the
American world order means.
Tooze makes similar points on the economic side of the power equation: “The hegemony of the dollar-
Treasury nexus in global finance remains unchallenged. The dollar’s role in global finance didn’t just
survive the crisis of 2008: it was reinforced by it. As the world’s banks gasped for dollar liquidity, the
Federal Reserve transformed itself into a global lender of last resort.”
Tooze’s conclusion is that “two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an
end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power — military and financial — are still
firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political
model.”
Is Tooze correct? He does hit upon the central paradox of the current state of world politics. Not even
the incompetence of the Trump administration can necessarily dent U.S. structural power (though I am
more worried about the dollar than Tooze).
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has noted repeatedly that the Trump administration has
accomplished next to nothing in rewriting the deals that make the world go round. Its strategy of
antagonizing allies at the same time that it antagonizes adversaries has been self-defeating. America’s
soft power has been temporarily eviscerated. Despite all this, however, U.S. military and economic
capabilities remain pretty formidable. The United States is at the center of most of the key networks
that drive world politics and the global economy.
Sustainable — AT: Trump
Trump doesn’t thump — he’s maintaining US security commitments, deterrence, and alliances.
Carpenter, 19 — Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a
contributing editor at the National Interest. (6-23-2019; "Wrong: Trump Is Not an Isolationist;" Cato
Institute; https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/wrong-trump-not-isolationist; //GrRv)
Second, the notion that Trump’s foreign policy has been a dramatic departure from those of his
predecessors since World War II is a myth. That is especially true regarding security issues. Although the
president’s rhetoric toward Washington’s longtime allies has sometimes been abrasive and less collegial,
his actions have differed little from the post-World War II norm. There certainly is no credible evidence
that he is orchestrating a withdrawal from Washington’s multitude of global security commitments and
initiatives.
Indeed, allegations of a retreat into isolationism are especially bizarre as America seems poised on the
brink of war with Iran. And those making the “abandonment of global leadership,” “retreat from
responsibility” and “embrace of isolationism” arguments have considerable difficulty citing concrete
Trump administration actions that correspond to those cliches. Where, exactly, have such examples
taken place?
Despite Trump’s rhetoric in the 2016 election campaign that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan should
be terminated, he promptly reneged on that position, and Washington’s war in that country goes on
with no apparent end in sight. Likewise, the United States maintains a military presence in Syria and still
pursues the increasingly quixotic effort to unseat Bashar al-Assad’s government. Indeed, U.S. military
action escalated, with air and missile strikes on Syrian government forces.
Nor has Trump terminated the Obama administration’s policy of making the United States an
accomplice in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, despite the proliferation of war crimes by Washington’s allies.
Indeed, overall ties with Riyadh have expanded under Trump, and the president vetoed a congressional
measure terminating U.S. involvement in the coalition’s Yemen war effort. Even more worrisome, the
Trump administration has ratcheted-up its confrontational policy toward Iran. One will look in vain for
any signs of a U.S. “retreat” in the Middle East.
Furthermore, allegations of withdrawal have no greater validity regarding U.S. security behavior in East
Asia. The U.S. Navy has increased its “freedom of navigation” patrols throughout the South China Sea
during the Trump years, despite Beijing’s vehement complaints. Washington’s support for Taiwan has
grown rather than diminished. Trump eagerly signed the new Taiwan Travel Act, which for the first time
authorized meetings between high-level U.S. and Taiwanese officials. In May, the administration
implemented that provision with a meeting between National Security Adviser John Bolton and his
Taiwanese counterpart.
Trump also has gone out of his way to stress that Washington’s ties with Japan, America’s principal ally
in East Asia, remain as strong as ever. And although there have been some differences with South Korea
about policy toward North Korea, there are no signs that the United States is about to downgrade, much
less terminate, its military alliance with Seoul. So, again, where is the substantive evidence of U.S.
retreat or abandonment?
Such evidence also is lacking with respect to Washington’s relations with the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization countries. During the 2016 campaign, Trump did call NATO “obsolete,” and he raised
doubts about whether he embraced the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article 5 commitment that an attack on
one member would be treated as an attack on all. But once in office, he and his associates quickly
reversed course. Trump’s annoyance with the allies now is largely confined to traditional burden-sharing
complaints.
Meanwhile, other U.S. actions indicate that Washington’s security policy in Europe is as active as ever.
Contrary to the myth Trump’s domestic critics foster that he is willing to “do Putin’s bidding,”
administration actions point unmistakably to the opposite conclusion.
Washington has supported expanding rather than contracting NATO, backing Montenegro and
Macedonia as new members. U.S. forces have joined in an accelerating number of NATO military
exercises in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea. Additionally, the Trump administration is now in
negotiations to build a permanent base in Poland. Moreover, contrary to assertions that Trump seeks to
appease Russia, the United States has been training Ukrainian troops and has concluded not one, but
two, arms sales to Kyiv. That is curious behavior for an administration determined to conduct a policy of
retreat from Europe.
The theory that Washington is relinquishing its global leadership role on non-military matters is not
quite as absurd, but only marginally so. The Trump administration’s repudiation of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership did herald a narrower, nationalistic orientation on trade issues. So, too, have Trump’s
bilateral trade feuds with Canada, Mexico, and China. Nevertheless, there is scant evidence that U.S.
officials want America to be less involved in global commerce. Instead, they seem to be angling for trade
on better terms for U.S. producers. The wisdom of that strategy is certainly questionable, but the
approach is still a far cry from succumbing to isolationism.
When pressed, Trump’s critics scramble to point out actions such as his decision to end U.S. adherence
to the Paris climate accord—an agreement that the Obama administration never even submitted to the
Senate for ratification. Such examples smack of desperation. An unwillingness to endorse a largely
symbolic, unenforceable measure reflecting hysteria on climate change is hardly credible evidence of a
U.S. retreat from global leadership.
AT: China Rise
No China rise — structural barriers.

Brooks, 6-19 — Stephen Brooks; PhD from Yale, Professor of Government in the Department of
Government at Dartmouth College. (6-19-2019; “Power transitions, then and now: five new structural
barriers that will constrain China’s rise;” https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs42533-019-
00009-8.pdf; China International Strategy Review; pg. 16-18; //GrRv) **Corrections made to preserve
grammatical integrity; brackets denote a change
8 Conclusion
This analysis shows that China confronts five structural barriers in its ascent that no rising power has
faced before. Although each of them is independently significant, it is their combined effect that has
particularly stark ramifications for China’s ability to rise in power.
Of course, while it may be true that these five structural barriers undermine China’s ability to rise in
power as compared to past rising states, one might reasonably ask whether one or more of them also
simultaneously constrain[s] the United States’ ability to sustain its current global leadership. This line of
argument would seem especially relevant regarding the third structural barrier discussed above. On one
hand, the huge current levels of military spending by the United States mean that China is now chasing a
moving target: the United States is already far ahead in the military realm and it now devotes ten times
as much to military R&D than China. But on the other hand, perhaps the current high levels of U.S.
military spending will drag down U.S. economic growth and/or create financial pressures that will soon
require a dramatic reduction of expenditures in this realm? Perhaps. But as I have explained in detail
elsewhere in my work with Wohlforth, this does not seem very likely (see Brooks and Wohlforth 2016,
122–133).
It is also important to recognize that just as the world can change in ways that make it harder for a rising
state to ascend, the same can be true in reverse: global shifts can also potentially make rising easier. In
the introduction, I noted that analysts highlight two key global shifts as having eased China’s ascendance
in recent decades: economic globalization and today’s modern information technologies. These two
factors can be termed “structural enablers,” and their existence prompts an obvious question: how do
they match up with the five structural barriers delineated in this article? Is China lucky to be rising in this
era because it benefits from these two structural enablers more so than it is harmed by the five
structural barriers reviewed here? Or is it the reverse: is China unlucky to be rising now because, on net,
the world has changed more significantly in ways that limit its capacity to ascend in power?
Answering this question is not easy, but my strong sense is that luck is not on China’s side in this regard:
that overall the world has changed in ways that ultimately make it harder for China to rise—much
harder, in fact—than was the case for all past rising states. A key reason I reach this conclusion is that
the two key structural enablers analysts highlight are, in fact, double-edged swords for China. Regarding
economic globalization, it has certainly helped China’s rise in the economic realm; yet at the same time,
it was underscored here that it also constrains its rise in the military realm because, unlike all past rising
powers, China is not in a position to rely on its own firms in defense-related production if it wants to
generally be on the cutting edge in weaponry.
In turn, modern information technology has certainly given China a greater capacity to secure
knowledge and data than past rising powers; yet at the same time, today’s technologies have also
placed a much higher premium on how much and what kinds of information are needed for states and
firms that want to be on the cutting edge. In the military realm, a recent comprehensive analysis by Gilli
and Gilli shows that China’s greater ability to secure information than past rising powers in no way
compensates for the fact that it needs to gather, understand, process, and effectively use a far larger
volume of information as compared to the ascending states of the past; in the end, they conclude that
China’s military rise is actually constrained more than it is enabled by today’s modern information
technologies (Gilli and Gilli 2018/2019).
If the world has, on net, changed such that it will be much harder for China to ascend than past rising
powers, then what implications does this have for security policy? For the U.S., there are two key
implications. First, U.S. analysts and policymakers should not over-react to China’s rise in the military
realm. Looking at the speed of past power transitions, it would appear that China is now poised to soon
rise to a comparable level of military power with the United States; based on these past experiences, it
would seem China could reach this kind of status in just a few years if it decided to extract lots of
resources for the military. But past power transitions are simply not useful for understanding China’s
rise; the world has changed far too much for these past experiences to be a useful guide. A proper
understanding of the new structural barriers constraining China’s rise indicates that it cannot possibly
pose anything like a peer-like military challenge to the United States in the short- or medium-term.
Accordingly, it would seem unnecessary and/or needlessly risky for the U.S. to consider taking any
provocative actions to try and constrain China in the military realm anytime soon.
Second, although China’s rise does complicate the ability of the U.S. to continue pursuing its current
“deep engagement” strategy in Asia, the nature and speed of this rise does not portend a situation in
which the U.S. will be unable to sustain this grand strategic approach anytime soon. China’s rise means
that remaining in Asia now involves a more complicated set of choices for Washington, but it does retain
the overall capacity to stay, and this seems unlikely to soon change. The key point to understand is that
although China has now gained the capacity to push U.S. surface ships and aircraft away from its coasts,
this is not the same thing as gaining the capacity to project military power in the region if the U.S. were
to oppose such an effort.
For China, a proper understanding of the range of structural barriers constraining its rise also leads to
two key implications for its security policy. The first is straightforward: in light of the current limitations
on China’s power projection capacity and how difficult it would be to rectify them anytime soon, this
suggests that a wise Chinese grand strategy would shy away from being militarily provocative towards
the U.S. or its allies in the region in the short- and medium-term.
Second, this analysis raises an important question for Chinese analysts and policymakers: is it even
worth trying to develop a substantial power projection capacity? The core takeaway of this analysis is
that it will be very expensive and hard—and thus will take an extremely long time—before China can be
anything like a military peer of the U.S. on the world stage. My assessment is that even under the best of
circumstances, reaching this level of military power would take China at least three decades. But
attaining this level of military would probably take China a lot longer than this. Indeed, it is even possible
that China could devote huge resources to this goal over many decades and still fall short of being a true
military peer of the U.S. For one thing, it should be reiterated that the U.S. is clearly a moving target in
the military realm—one that currently spends around ten times as much as China does on military R&D.
Moreover, China cannot count on being successful in developing the full range of needed systems and in
learning to use them effectively; rather, a lot would have to go right in this effort even if China devotes
massive resources toward it. Consider China’s continued inability to develop effective engines for its
combat aircraft, despite devoting huge resources—more than $20 billion during the 2010–2015 period
alone—to this task (Gilli and Gilli 2018/2019, 182–183).
Although the U.S. now has a substantial power projection capacity, this does not mean it makes sense
for China to seek to also acquire it. Indeed, moving in this direction would likely be very costly for China.
For one thing, it would certainly be extraordinarily expensive in terms of direct expenditures and in
terms of opportunity cost: large amounts of resources and personnel would have to be drained away
from the commercial economy and into a military buildup for such an effort to possibly succeed. Second,
the U.S. and other countries in Asia may well react very negatively to this kind of Chinese military
buildup; at worst, a true security dilemma could result. It should not be forgotten that the last time a
military peer to the United States existed on the world stage—the Cold War—was a period in history
that was extraordinarily dangerous for both America and the Soviet Union (with both countries
repeatedly engaging in brinkmanship that ran the risk of escalation to global thermonuclear
destruction).
There is also the question of what the security upsides would be for China if it were to develop a
substantial power projection capacity. It is important to remember that the United States owes its
massive power projection capabilities to the existential imperatives of the Cold War. The country would
never have borne the massive burden it did to create this kind of capacity had policymakers not faced
the challenge of balancing the Soviet Union, a superpower with the potential to dominate Eurasia.
China will never surpass the United States — their authors mis-measure economic and military power.
Beckley, 18 — Michael Beckley; Ph.D., Fellow in the International Security Program at Harvard Kennedy
School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and assistant professor of political science at
Tufts University. (2018; “Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower;” pg. 1-2;
Published by Cornell University Press; //GrRv)
Yet in terms of wealth and military capabilities—the pillars of global power—the United States is in a
league of its own. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for 25
percent of global wealth, 35 percent of world innovation, and 40 percent of global military spending. 4 It
is home to nearly 600 of the world’s 2,000 most profitable companies and 50 of the top 100 universities.
5
And it is the only country that can fight major wars beyond its home region and strike targets anywhere
on earth within an hour, with 587 bases scattered across 42 countries and a navy and air force stronger
than that of the next ten nations combined. 6 According to Yale historian Paul Kennedy, “Nothing has
ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing.” The United States is, quite simply, “the greatest
superpower ever.” 7
Why is the United States so dominant? And how long will this imbalance of power last? In the following
pages, I argue that the United States will remain the world’s sole superpower for many decades, and
probably throughout this century. We are not living in a transitional post–Cold War era. Instead, we are
in the midst of what could be called the unipolar era—a period as profound as any epoch in modern
history. This conclusion challenges the conventional wisdom among pundits, policymakers, and the
public. 8 Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have dismissed unipolarity as a fleeting “moment” that
would soon be swept away by the rise of new powers. 9
Bookstores feature bestsellers such as The Post-American World and Easternization: Asia’s Rise and
America’s Decline ; 10 the U.S. National Intelligence Council has issued multiple reports advising the
president to prepare the country for multipolarity by 2030; 11 and the “rise of China” has been the most
read-about news story of the twenty-fi rst century. 12 These writings, in turn, have shaped public
opinion: polls show that most people in most countries think that China is overtaking the United States
as the world’s leading power. 13
How can all of these people be wrong? I argue that the current literature suffers from two shortcomings
that distort peoples’ perceptions of the balance of power. First, the literature mismeasures power. Most
studies size up countries using gross indicators of economic and military resources, such as gross
domestic product (GDP) and military spending. 14 These indicators tally countries’ resources without
deducting the costs countries pay to police, protect, and provide services for their people. As a result,
standard indicators exaggerate the wealth and military power of poor, populous countries like China and
India—these countries produce vast output and field large armies, but they also bear massive welfare
and security burdens that drain their resources.
To account for these costs, I measure power in net rather than gross terms. In essence, I create a
balance sheet for each country: assets go on one side of the ledger, liabilities go on the other, and net
resources are calculated by subtracting the latter from the former. When this is done, it becomes clear
that America’s economic and military lead over other countries is much larger than typically assumed—
and the trends are mostly in its favor.
The technology gap is massive.
00009-8.pdf; China International Strategy Review; pg. 5-6; //GrRv)
3 Structural barrier #1: the large technological gap
The sheer size of the technological gap with the United States is one structural barrier China now faces.
Past rising states had levels of technological prowess similar to those of leading ones. During the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the United States did not lag far behind the
United Kingdom in terms of technology, nor did Germany lag far behind the erstwhile Allies during the
interwar years, nor was the Soviet Union technologically backward compared to the United States
during the early Cold War. Compared to past rising powers, China simply has a much wider technological
gap to close when it comes to matching the leading state.
In previous analyses with Wohlforth, we argued that the current size of the technological disparity
between the United States and China is now actually so large that the latter country simply has no
available policy option to close this gap over the short- and medium-term. The core basis for this
conclusion was a detailed analysis of a very wide range of technological output measures (Brooks and
Wohlforth 2015/2016, 22–26, 2016, 22–31; for some additional technological indicators that reach the
same conclusion, see Beckley 2018).
Out of all of these technological output indicators, the World Bank’s data on receipts of technology
royalty and license fees arguably provides the most revealing measure of the sizeable technological gap
between the U.S. and China. In 2013, the U.S. received $128 billion in technology payments—an amount
more than four times higher than the country in second place, Japan. By contrast, although China
imports technologies on a massive scale, it received less than $1 billion in receipts in 2013 for the use of
its technology. Of course, China has been devoting massive amounts of money to R&D and other
technology inputs during the past decade, and we would, therefore, expect it to now be closing this
massive technology payments gap with America. This is indeed happening: in 2017, the U.S. again
received $128 billion in such technology payments, while China increased its receipts of such
technological royalties to almost $5 billion (World Bank 2017). The bottom line is that the technology
gap is clearly narrowing due to China’s intense eforts, but this is happening very, very slowly because
the sheer size of the disparity is so big.
In sum, given how massive the technological gap is—and given that America’s great strength in this area
is the cumulative result of decades of effort by U.S. firms, researchers, and government agencies—China
simply cannot close it quickly. In this regard, it is important to recognize that there are real limits as to
how fast China (or indeed, any state) can shift its underlying technological capacity in the short- and
medium-term via increases in technological inputs. In the end, China seems almost certain to remain in
an unprecedented position as compared to all past rising powers for decades into the future: at a
fundamentally lower—rather than a comparable—level of technological capacity compared to the
leading state.
China lacks the capability to translate its wealth into military might.
00009-8.pdf; China International Strategy Review; pg. 6-7; //GrRv)
4 Structural barrier #2: the level of difficulty and complexity of developing and using top-end military
equipment is much higher than in previous eras
Many observers look at Germany’s experience in the 1930s—in which it transformed itself in just a few
years from the disarmed loser of World War I into a military power capable of taking over Europe—as
revealing just how quickly big countries can become formidable global military players once they
strongly seek to extract military capabilities from their economies. Yet, as my previous solo and
coauthored work with Wohlforth has stressed, the world has fundamentally changed in this regard: top-
end military equipment is now much more complex than in previous eras, and, therefore, developing
and effectively using such systems is much harder and takes far longer than before (see Brooks 2005,
77–78, 89–90, 108–112, 234–238; Brooks and Wohlforth 2015/2016, 35–38, 2016, 53–58; see also Gilli
and Gilli 2018/2019 for a recent, in-depth analysis of this issue that reaches the same conclusion). The
development of top-end systems used to be measured in years: in the early twentieth century, for
example, Germany was able to copy the United Kingdom’s revolutionary new dreadnought battleship in
a mere 3 years. Nowadays, in contrast, the development time of many top-end systems such as combat
aircraft, military satellites, and nuclear attack submarines is measured in decades because they are so
much more complex than in previous eras. Consider combat aircraft: “in the 1930s, combat aircraft
consisted of hundreds of components, a figure that surged into the tens of thousands in the 1950s and
to 300,000 in the 2010s;” moreover, the number of software code lines increased from “1,000 in the F-4
Phantom II (1958), to 1.7 million in the F-22 (2006), and to 5.6 million in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter/
Lightning II (2015)” (Gilli and Gilli 2018/2019, 150–151).
For China, it is important to recognize that the increased complexity of developing modern weaponry
has an interactive effect with the structural barrier noted in the previous section (the country’s relatively
low level of technological capacity compared to the leading state). In the past two decades, China has
been able to make rapid progress in a number of areas (such as precision-strike missiles, counter-space
systems, and cybersecurity) and, as a result, it has developed a significant capacity to deny the U.S.
access to the area close to its coast.1 But regarding many other systems—including many of the kinds
that are needed to develop a significant power projection capacity—China is just not yet in a strong
enough technological position to be ready to even start producing them. Consider nuclear attack
submarines. China is now capable of producing nuclear attack submarines that are roughly comparable
in quietness to the kinds that the U.S. Navy commissioned in the 1950s. But submarines with this level of
quietness can be easily tracked by the United States, which has invested a huge amount of effort and
resources over many decades to develop an incredibly sophisticated set of anti-submarine warfare
capabilities. It is not clear when China will be technologically ready to produce nuclear submarines that
would be quiet enough to effectively avoid U.S. tracking, but this would seem at least several decades
away in light of where it is today.
In addition, it is not simply that making many of the advanced weapons systems of today is extremely
difficult; effectively using many of these systems also takes a very particular set of skills and
infrastructure that take an incredibly long time to develop. Employing these weapons systems is difficult
not just because many of them are so complex, but also because they typically need to be used in a
coordinated manner. To use an obvious example, deploying a carrier battle group is a remarkably
complicated logistical exercise; all of the ships and their associated aircraft have to be able to work
together in real time. But even a “simple” system like a drone is really only effective when married with
the appropriate infrastructural requirements for employing it, which includes not only a wide range of
highly trained personnel but also the technological and organizational capacity to rapidly gather,
coordinate, process, and act upon information about the battlefield. Whether China can develop an
ability to effectively use advanced systems in a coordinated manner in a way that allows it to effectively
match up with U.S. forces is unclear, but any effort to do so would be a very long-term process that
would be especially hampered by the institutional structures of China’s military (which does not
emphasize either delegation or flexibility).
AT: Concert
Hegemony is a precondition to multilateralism — the absence of a unipole
causes great-power competition, which eliminates the incentive for
cooperation.
Mazarr & Brands, 17 — Michael J. Mazarr is senior political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and
associate director of the Strategy, Doctrine and Resources Program of the RAND Arroyo Center. He co-leads the RAND Project on Building
a Sustainable International Order. Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins
University’s School of Advanced International Studies. (4-5-2017; "Navigating Great Power Rivalry in the 21st Century;" War on the
Rocks; https://warontherocks.com/2017/04/navigating-great-power-rivalry-in-the-21st-century/; //GrRv)
It is a nice idea — and one that probably won’t work. History suggests that in
order for concerts to emerge and
endure, a number of critical geopolitical prerequisites must be met. There must be a stable
configuration of power among the leading powers in the international system. Those powers must be willing to
respect a shared set of rules. They must have some ideological commonality — what unites them ideologically must be
greater than what divides them. Finally, concerts generally take shape when there is some looming threat — or memory of some great
cataclysm — that impels cooperation. Where these preconditions have been present — most notably, during the 19th century concert of
Europe — sustained great power cooperation in support of a common vision of international order has been possible. Where even some
of these factors have been absent — in the wake of World War II, for instance — great power concerts have proven impossible to achieve.
The problem today is that the structural preconditions for a concert simply do not exist. The
configuration of power in the international system is changing, which is precisely why revisionist
powers such as Russia and China feel empowered to challenge American primacy. The United States
and its great power rivals do not accept a common set of global rules. Moscow and Beijing are challenging the norms
that Washington prefers, from non-aggression in Eastern Europe to freedom of navigation in the
South China Sea. The ideological differences between the great powers are far less severe than they were during the Cold War, but
the cleavage between the world’s leading democracy and its two foremost authoritarian powers is significant enough to be a source of
conflict. And finally, more than 70 years after the last great power war, there does not appear to be any commonly perceived threat
powerful enough to overcome these other factors and compel sustained cooperation. The focus of many great powers today seems to be
on a opportunistic grab for influence rather than an urgent fear that disaster will befall them if they cannot find ways to coordinate their
actions with others.
Efforts to form a great power concert are thus likely to prove unavailing; making concessions to
Russia or China in hopes of drawing them into such a concert could well be more destabilizing
than stabilizing. But managing these relationships — and doing so while preserving the greatest degree of stability possible —
remains an urgent task for the United States. In the coming years, U.S. officials will be in the market for strategies and concepts to guide
their interaction with other great powers: If it cannot be a concert, what concept or structure would promote U.S. interests? It is too early
to sketch the final shape that such a structure would take—but it is not too early to be sure that U.S. strategists are at least asking the
right questions about the future of great power relations.
AT: Trump Bad
Trumps strategy of linkage is currently working – tying military change to political
change allows the administration to put pressure on China and Israel
Ferguson 19 [Niall Ferguson, Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Previously a senior research
fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and also taught at Harvard University., 6-24-19, "Don’t underestimate
Trump’s foreign policy", Boston Globe, eshttps://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/06/24/don-
underestimate-trump-foreign-policy/kCD0qX8yigFqldDEvtFtgN/story.html //mh]
‘Linkage” was a term introduced to American diplomacy by Henry Kissinger at the outset of the Nixon administration. Linkage, Kissinger wrote in his memoir,
“White House Years,” could

be an explicit gambit — for example, making “progress in settling the Vietnam War . . . a condition for
advance in areas of interest to the Soviets, such as the Middle East, trade, or arms limitation .” But linkage
was also an implicit reality in an increasingly interdependent world.
Few commentators on international relations would credit Donald Trump with such sophistication. When we think of the current president, the word “links” tends
to conjure up golf courses rather than grand strategy. And yet the Trump administration’s foreign policy is too frequently
underestimated. Linkage is central to it.
Consider the following linked issues. First, there is Trump’s use of tariffs to force China to change its behavior with
respect to trade. Second, there is the related “tech war,” which is being waged not only against the Chinese company Huawei but more generally in
the area of artificial intelligence. Third, there is Washington’s effort to alter the balance of power in the Middle East to the
disadvantage of Iran — an effort that very nearly led to a retaliatory air strike on Thursday night after the Iranians shot down a US drone.
Finally, there is the president’s desire to keep the American economy growing , which explains his renewed pressure on
the Federal Reserve and especially its chair, Jerome Powell. Investors probably ought to be more worried about the US-China trade war, and the danger of war with
Iran, than they are. But as long as the Fed looks like it will give Trump the rate cuts he wants, markets will remain exuberant, consumers will stay confident, and the
2020 reelection campaign will stay on track.
A recent visit to Washington taught me two things about the new linkage that I had not fully understood before. First, the
administration as a
whole wants to ramp up the pressure on President Xi Jinping. On Monday, Vice President Mike Pence was due to deliver another
major speech on China. The one he gave at the Hudson Institute last October focused on the geopolitical rationale for a tougher American stance. According to
sources close to Pence, this new speech was to come at Beijing from a different angle, focusing on the Chinese government’s mistreatment of political dissidents
and religious minorities, both Muslim and Christian.
This would have upped the ante at a time when Beijing is reeling from the vast show of people power in Hong Kong that forced the suspension of a law to facilitate
extradition to the mainland.
As he loves to do, the president has teased both Beijing and Wall Street by promising “an extended meeting ” with Xi
at the G20 in Osaka. On Friday, he postponed Pence’s speech. I suppose Trump might, on a whim, agree to a trade deal over dinner. But that would run
counter to all the other moves his administration has been making . With the Fed poised to cut rates next month, and the
stock market at new highs, Trump has no incentive to let Xi off the hook. Better to save the trade deal for election
year.
The other thing I now understand better is the administration’s Middle East strategy. As T rump revealed when he canceled Thursday night’s planned air strikes,
he is
not itching for war. His goal is to maintain the pressure on — and the isolation of — Tehran for
diplomatic reasons.
No journalist I know takes seriously Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace initiative, the first part of which will be unveiled at a conference in Bahrain next week. “Dead
before arrival” is the conventional wisdom. But I take a contrarian view.
When you reflect on the changes in the region since his father-in-law’s inauguration, two things leap out at you. The first is that Israel
is no longer
beleaguered, surrounded by foes. It has become part of an American-led Arab-Israeli coalition against Iran . The
second is that the Palestinians, whose status as victims was once so useful to both Arab nationalists and Islamists, have been marginalized.
Previous peace initiatives put the big constitutional and territorial questions first. Big, but insoluble. Kushner’s goal
is to begin with the small matter of money, which in reality is not so small. Large-scale investment in the West Bank and Gaza, funded in part by the oil-
rich Gulf states, stands a chance of weaning at least some Palestinians away from Hamas. The lesson of the Arab revolutions was that there is a
constituency of small-business owners who are as sick of the rackets run by terrorists as they are of the
extortions of corrupt governments.
The unforeseen hitch has been the failure of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to form a new coalition, which is sending his country back to the polls
in distant September. That is bound to weaken the linkage from economic opportunities to political concessions.
“Linkage . . . is not a natural concept for Americans ,” Kissinger admitted in his memoir. “Our bureaucratic
organizations . . . compound the tendency to compartmentalize.” But Trump’s contempt for the
bureaucratic mindset means that linkage comes quite naturally to him.
Still, let’s not get carried away. Linkage can backfire if a single failure causes a chain reaction. Linkage also needs allies to play their part — and right now the
Europeans would prefer to be nonaligned in the tech war, neutral in the trade war, and signed up to the old Iran nuclear deal.
No matter how ingenious, linkage may not compensate for the effect of Trump’s wrecking-ball style on American influence around the world, which can best be
summed up in a single world: shrinkage.
AT: Heg Lead Inevitable
Overwhelming power is key — uncertainty alone emboldens revisionism and
erodes alliances.
University of Sydney. (“The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 6: The Darkening Horizon; Published by Yale University
Press; //GrRv)
Concerns about American reliability are not new, of course, and too much U.S. activism can be as discomfiting as too little. But the fact
remains that there
is now surging global uncertainty about the future of U.S. foreign policy, and that
uncertainty is itself a destabilizing factor in international affairs.
It may promote hedging by U.S. allies and partners who no longer believe that America’s security
commitments are so ironclad and its red lines so red. It may provoke stronger revisionist challenges
from aggressors who assess that their moment has arrived because the forces arrayed against them are no longer so purposeful or
unified. Most broadly, if Washington continues to behave so erratically on the international stage, the perception of U.S.
steadiness of purpose that has traditionally backstopped the international order could be eroded.
All these
processes will take time to unfold, but they are occurring already. Countries such as the Philippines
seem to be adjusting their geopolitical postures due to doubts about U.S. effectiveness and resolve;
debates about the future of alliance with America are intensifying in other countries.65 European countries are
discussing measures they might take to protect themselves in a post-American age. As the United States turns toward protectionism,
countries are cutting trade deals that exclude Washington or increasingly looking to Beijing as an economic partner.66 And Chinese
leaders appear to be sensing that their window of opportunity is opening. “China has never seen such a moment,” writes Evan Osnos,
“when its pursuit of a larger role in the world coincides with America’s pursuit of a smaller one.”67 A
period of growing
international turmoil and danger is a bad time to sow doubt about America’s global role, but this is
precisely what is happening. The effects are unlikely to be either trivial or benign.
AT: OSB/Realism
AT: OSB
Offshore balancing fails — wrecks power projection, credibility, and can’t solve their
offense.
Brands & Feaver, 16 — Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Peter D. Feaver is a professor of political
science and public policy at Duke University, where he heads the Program in American Grand Strategy and the Triangle Institute for Security
Studies. (November/December 2016; "Should America Retrench?" Foreign Affairs; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/should-america-
retrench; //GrRv)
Not only is the case for offshore balancing based on bad history and miscalculated costs and benefits; it
also rests on several flawed (and mostly unstated) assumptions. First, Mearsheimer and Walt assume that once
Washington disengages from a region, it will still be easy to sense and react to adverse shifts in the
balance of power. Ideally, in their view, the United States would remain offshore until some intervention was
required, but before a D-Day-style invasion became necessary. Yet although the right moment for intervening can sometimes be seen in
hindsight, identifying it in real time, amid enormous uncertainty, is far harder. Even alert and determined leaders have found
it impossible to time onshore interventions perfectly, as President Franklin Roosevelt discovered in Europe and East Asia,
President Harry Truman discovered in Korea, and President George H. W. Bush discovered in the Persian Gulf. In each case, the president
realized the need for onshore intervention, or gathered the necessary political consensus, only after a
regional balance had been fundamentally disrupted or overturned. Offshore balancing simply offers too
little margin for error.
Second, Mearsheimer and Walt make heroic assumptions about the United States’ ability to reach
faraway places without its current network of global deployments. They would have the United States end those
commitments but then rush back if a regional hegemon appeared. Today, the United States can indeed rapidly project combat
power in the Middle East, the Pacific, and Europe, but only because of the global network of bases and logistics
chains developed to maintain the grand strategy that offshore balancing would jettison. Had the United States
not had forces and bases in Europe in 1990, for example, it would have been nearly impossible to project decisive military power into the
Persian Gulf so soon after Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait. Take away an onshore grand strategy, and you take away the
capacity for timely force projection on which offshore balancing relies.
Third, offshore
balancing assumes that the United States can get other countries to do more of its dirty
work simply by doing less itself. Mearsheimer and Walt claim that the United States’ globe-spanning military presence incentivizes
its regional partners to free-ride and that the United States should instead pass the buck and “make its allies do as much of the heavy lifting as
possible.” But there
is little reason to believe that the United States’ absence would motivate others to act
in accordance with U.S. interests. On the contrary, it is far more likely that Washington can influence
other states when they are confident about its commitment to their security. The painful experience in post-
Saddam Iraq illustrates the case. Although the Iraqi government never fully lived up to U.S. expectations, it came closest to fulfilling them
during the 2007–9 surge, when the U.S. commitment was at its greatest. By contrast, the Iraqis underperformed most from 2012 to 2014, when
the United States withdrew its troops.
AT: Terror
Military presence doesn’t cause blowback and offshore balancing makes it worse.
retrench; //GrRv)
Furthermore, the notion that offshore balancing would suddenly defuse the terrorist threat is wishful and
even dangerous thinking. As the rise of ISIS has demonstrated, terrorist groups can mobilize even after the United
States has withdrawn from a region. In fact, such groups may find it easier to operate in the subsequent security
vacuum. To be sure, onshore deployments serve as a convenient rallying cry for terrorist propaganda, forming
part of Osama bin Laden’s casus belli against the United States in the 1990s, for example. But as al Qaeda’s own propagandists have made
clear, other irritants—above all, U.S. backing of authoritarian Arab regimes—also figure prominently in the
jihadist indictment of U.S. policy. By forcing Washington to redouble its support for such regimes as
pillars of regional stability, offshore balancing might actually fan the flames of jihadist resentment.
AT: Prolif
OSB spurs prolif — eliminates security leverage AND leads to perceptions of
abandonment.
retrench; //GrRv)
To make matters worse, offshore balancing encourages nuclear proliferation. Throughout the postwar era, maintaining an
onshore presence has given the United States leverage to restrain allies’ nuclear ambitions while also
mitigating the insecurity that might otherwise have driven such countries as Germany, Japan, and South Korea to
pursue the bomb. Withdrawing offshore threatens to have the opposite effect. It is no surprise that South
Korea expressed nuclear aspirations when the United States gestured at withdrawing its troops from
the peninsula during the 1970s, or that Taiwan did likewise when U.S. rapprochement with China appeared to jeopardize the United
States’ commitment to the island’s security. Offshore balancers may wave away the dangers of proliferation ; given
the destructive power of nuclear weapons, policymakers can hardly be so cavalier.
AT: Debt / Military Spending
ZERO debt internal link — forward presence is subsidized and the costs of fighting
back into crises outweigh.
retrench; //GrRv)
Mearsheimer and Walt use a similar accounting gimmick to inflate the benefits of offshore balancing. They claim
that it would dramatically reduce defense expenditures. But because host nations usually subsidize the
costs of U.S. forward deployments, the savings of going offshore are often negligible. Moreover, the costs of
rapidly moving forces back onshore during a crisis must also be considered, and those costs—as in World
War II and the Korean War—can be prohibitive. The United States would thus save significant amounts of
money only if it eliminated the very forces needed to fight its way back onshore, an approach that
would look more like full-fledged isolationism than the minimalist strategy Mearsheimer and Walt propose.
AT: Mearsheimer/Walt
Mearsheimer and Walt’s analysis fails – they do not factor Russia’s growing power and
revisionism into their analysis of the effectiveness of offshore balancing
Motyl 17 [Alexander Motyl, Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University-Newark, 2-3-2017,
"Offshore Balancing and Its Contradictions," Bulgaria Analytica,
http://bulgariaanalytica.org/en/2017/02/03/offshore-balancing-and-its-contradictions/ //mh]
John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt make a powerful case for offshore balancing as a grand strategy for the United
States, but, when it comes to Russia and Europe, they refuse to draw the logical consequences of their own
framework. As a result, their analysis implodes. Here’s how Mearsheimer and Walt define offshore balancing: Washington
would forgo ambitious efforts to remake other societies and concentrate on what really matters: preserving U.S. dominance in the Western
Hemisphere and countering potential hegemons in Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf. Instead of policing the world, the United
States would encourage other countries to take the lead in checking rising powers, intervening itself only when necessary. “How would it
work?” they ask. Here’s the answer: the United States should turn to regional forces as the first line of defense, letting them uphold the balance
of power in their own neighborhood… If those
powers cannot contain a potential hegemon on their own, however,
the United States must help get the job done , deploying enough firepower to the region to shift the balance in its favor. Just
what is a “potential hegemon”? Such a state would have abundant economic clout, the ability to develop sophisticated weaponry, the potential
to project power around the globe, and perhaps even the wherewithal to outspend the United States in an arms race. Such a state might even
ally with countries in the Western Hemisphere and interfere close to U.S. soil. And who might these potential hegemons be? Thus,
the
United States’ principal aim in Europe and Northeast Asia should be to maintain the regional balance of
power so that the most powerful state in each region — for now, Russia and China, respectively —
remains too worried about its neighbors to roam into the Western Hemisphere. It would appear to follow from Mearsheimer
and Walt’s own analysis that Russia is a potential hegemon. If so, it would also appear to follow that the United States should turn to the
Europeans as the “first line of defense,” while being ready to “help get the job done,” if they fail to “contain” Russia “on their own.” In sum,
Russia either already requires or may soon require offshore balancing. Bizarrely, however, when
Mearsheimer and Walt then focus on Europe and Russia, they fail to draw the logical consequences of
their own analysis. First, they say, consistent with their argument, that “In Europe, the United States
should end its military presence and turn NATO over to the Europeans.” Then they continue with a non
sequitur: “There is no good reason to keep U.S. forces in Europe , as no country there has the capability to dominate
that region. The top contenders, Germany and Russia, will both lose relative power as their populations shrink in size, and no other potential
hegemon is in sight.” But wait: didn’t Mearsheimer and Walt define Russia and China as potential hegemons? Why, then, do they engage in an
about-face and conclude that Russia does not have the capacity to dominate the region? No less puzzling is their assertion that Germany is a
“top” contender. The one thing that unites all German elites and publics is the guilt-ridden desire never to be a top contender. In contrast, the
one thing that unites all Russian elites and publics is the desire to make Russia great again, not just in its
“near abroad,” but in Europe and, as Russia’s recent engagement in Syria demonstrates , in the world.
Especially fatuous is Mearsheimer and Walt’s claim that Germany and Russia “will both lose relative
power as their populations shrink in size.” While this claim is no doubt true — and could be made with equally
breathtaking glibness about the United States and China — it fails to confront the fact that population decline is a long-
term process. Russia may lose its relative power to the point of insignificance fifty years from now, but it would still have forty-nine to
wreak mayhem throughout the world. Mearsheimer and Walt must suspect that their argument is weak, as they continue with the following
sentences: “Admittedly, leaving European security to the Europeans could increase the potential for trouble there. If a conflict did arise,
however, it would not threaten vital U.S. interests. Thus, there is no reason for the United States to spend billions of dollars each year (and
pledge its own citizens’ lives) to prevent one.” Trouble indeed! Putin Russia
has launched two wars already — in Georgia
and Ukraine, is threatening to seize Belarus, is rattling sabers and violating the borders of the Baltic
states, is arming Kaliningrad and Crimea with medium- and long-range missiles, has officially stated that it would use nuclear
weapons in response to a conventional threat, and is actively supporting anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-European
parties in Europe and the “Western Hemisphere”. If Putin launches a massive invasion of Ukraine, Belarus, or the Baltic states — eventualities
that some of his minions have openly aired — the consequences would be deeply destabilizing for Europe and the United States. Forget the
crushing of democracy or the possibility of genocide — eventualities that might little disturb hard-nosed realists like Mearsheimer and Walt —
and consider only the steams of refugees, the spill-over into Poland, Finland, Hungary, and other states, and the likelihood of Russia’s imperial
overreach and possible subsequent collapse. Would vital U.S. interests be threatened if Putin went on the warpath in Europe? Of course.
Should the United States be concerned and attempt to prevent such an outcome? Obviously. And Mearsheimer and Walt, at least for most of
their argument, would agree. How could they have missed something so obvious, and so obviously consist with their own argument? One
suspects that their hard-nosed
realist willingness to explain Putin Russia’s recent aggressions in terms of
American policy and NATO enlargement holds the k ey. Since, in their version of reality, Putin invaded Ukraine because of
some ephemeral possibility of Ukraine’s joining NATO — a possibility that no one, in Ukraine’s policy circles or in NATO’s, would consider
serious — then it would follow that, by defanging the United States and NATO, Putin will turn pacific and abjure expansion. If,
alternatively, one takes Putin and his minions at their own word, then one has to realize that Russian
aggression is to a large degree motivated by an imperial ideology that serves Putin’s power and has deep
roots in Russian political culture. And if, alternatively, one dispassionately examines the military capacities of NATO
states and sees that they pose no conceivable threat to Russia, then one may also have to realize that Putin’s
invocation of the NATO threat is either a cynical ploy or the symptom of a paranoid megalomania. Scholars
rarely admit they were wrong, and Mearsheimer and Walt are no exception to this rule. Fortunately, they have now formulated a powerful
argument for containing Russia— even if they refuse to accept their own logic.
Proponents of offshore balancing do not consider Russia and China’s revisionism or

major threats like climate change that require collaboration to solve
Sullivan 19 [Jake Sullivan, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He
served as Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State in 2011–13 and as National Security
Adviser to the U.S. Vice President in 2013–14, Jan/Feb 2019, "More, Less, or Different?," Foreign Affairs,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2018-12-11/more-less-or-different //mh]
Walt’s and Mearsheimer’s basic strategic premise appears to be that U.S. withdrawal would probably make the world more dangerous, but
given its geography and its power, the United States could both avoid the resulting risks and manipulate them to its advantage. Setting aside
the grim quality of this logic, it’s not at all clear that it’s right. Walt
cites the first half of the twentieth century as proof
that offshore balancing—the hands-off approach to regional security that he prefers—has a “reassuring
history.” But is there anything reassuring in two catastrophic world wars that inevitably drew in the
United States? It is difficult to embrace an approach that counts the 1930s as a success. There are other
reasons for the Mars-Venus quality of the conversation between policymakers and these two scholars. Walt and Mearsheimer can gloss over
the expense of bringing U.S. troops home from around the world and then sending them back out when trouble arises, while policymakers have
to take those costs into account. Walt and Mearsheimer can downplay the instability that would come from a country like Iran acquiring
nuclear weapons, while policymakers think about worst-case scenarios, including a regional arms race and the possibility of the bomb falling
into the hands of terrorists. They can argue for stripping liberalism out of U.S. foreign policy, but policymakers have to deal with the fact that
the United States’ system, and not just its strategy, points toward liberalism. That is, authoritarian governments face pressure not just from the
U.S. government but also from U.S. society—The New York Times, for example, is not going to stop investigating corruption in the Chinese
Communist Party, and the release of the Panama Papers provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ire as much as NATO expansion did—and
that’s not going to stop. Finally, when
Walt writes that Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald
Trump are basically indistinguishable in their approach to foreign policy, he is operating at a level of such
extreme generality that the analysis loses meaning. HARD CHOICES But in a way, all that is something of a distraction. The
battle lines between the realists and the liberal internationalists have been so well drawn, the debates so well rehearsed, that it is hard to add
much to them now. Fighting over how things would have looked today had Washington adopted the Walt and Mearsheimer approach over the
last 25 years is not as productive as debating what it should do for the next 25. And even as they insist that it would be easy for policymakers to
get things right if only they followed a few simple rules, both
authors have remarkably little to say about the central
debates in U.S. foreign policy today—the vexing questions that the Blob has been wrestling with since 2016. The first is how
to shape a deteriorating U.S.-Chinese relationship so that it advances U.S. interests without turning into
outright confrontation. The “responsible stakeholder” consensus in the American strategic community,
premised on integrating China into a U.S.-led order, has come apart . The emerging theme is that Washington got
China wrong, and the watchword of the day is “strategic competition” (although competition to what end is not clear, especially if one assumes
that China, unlike the Soviet Union, is not destined to fail). It has been disorienting to watch the pendulum swing so fast
from a benign view of China to a dark one. The books are surprisingly short on guidance for how to proceed in this new context.
Walt basically throws up his hands, writing that “Asia may be the one place where U.S. leadership is
indeed ‘indispensable.’” (For someone who must hate the words “indispensable” and “leadership,” that is quite a statement.) If
Walt has to carve out an exception for the biggest national security issue of our time, this suggests that
his overall approach may need rethinking. Mearsheimer, who was a China hawk before it was fashionable, has argued in the
past that realism and restraint have to diverge when it comes to China. But in this most recent book, he is so fixated on
destroying “liberal hegemony” that he comes close to rooting for China’s continued rise, seeing an
increasingly powerful China as less of a threat to international stability than sustained American
unipolarity. That may or may not be sound as an argument from the perspective of the international system, but it is not particularly useful
for U.S. policymakers looking out for national interests. Nor does either author help policymakers prepare for
competition on an emerging field of play that is as much about economics, technology, and ideas as it is
about traditional security considerations. That is a serious gap in their analysis, as geopolitics unfolds across an expanding range
of domains—cyberspace, space, economics and energy, and so on. This flaw leads to a second hard question, inextricably tied to the first: To
what extent are the United States’ main competitors systematically exporting their illiberalism, and
what are the implications for U.S. strategy ? Observers such as Kelly Magsamen and her co-authors at the Center for American
Progress are increasingly emphasizing that both China and Russia have an overriding objective of maintaining their authoritarian models, which
creates incentives for them to increase the pressure on liberalism abroad as a means of reducing the pressure on their regimes at home. As
Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution has put it, China and
Russia “share the objective of targeting free and open
societies to make the world a safer place for authoritarianism,” and therefore U.S. foreign policy needs to privilege the
defense of democracy in the context of great-power competition. Both Walt and Mearsheimer presume that the United States’ major
competitors are acting largely according to realist dictates, that domestic politics isn’t a major factor. As a result, they offer a backward-looking
critique of the American “impulse to spread democracy,” as Mearsheimer puts it, without really addressing the challenge of defending
democracy against increasingly ambitious, organized, and effective dictatorships. The foreign policy community’s emerging diagnosis may be
wrong or overstated, but if it is, neither of these two authors explains why. They don’t deal with the range of practices that
U.S. competitors are pursuing to put pressure on the American economic and political system, from
direct election interference to the strategic use of corruption and state capitalism as tools for building
leverage and influence. And if the emerging diagnosis is right, would their preferred strategy of unraveling NATO, pulling out of Europe,
and telling like-minded allies to bid for U.S. affection really be a logical next step? Mearsheimer does posit that pursuing
“liberalism abroad undermines liberalism at home.” But his modern-day examples of domestic
consequences (wiretapping, government secrecy, the “deep state”) relate to the war on terrorism, which was hardly a
liberal project. That raises a third hard question: Given their constrained bandwidth, how should decision-makers deal with the gap
between the objective threat posed by terrorism and the subjective threat felt by the American public? Both Walt and Mearsheimer develop an
elaborate caricature of a bloodthirsty foreign policy community dragging a more pacifistic public into foreign military adventures. But when it
comes to fighting terrorism abroad, the public—encouraged by politicians who themselves are skeptics of liberal internationalism—sees
terrorism as an urgent, even existential priority that requires the use of military force. The foreign policy community is increasingly responding
to that demand rather than driving it. Consider Obama’s experience with Iraq. He had taken a page out of the Walt/Mearsheimer playbook by
pulling every last U.S. troop out in 2011. Then, in the summer of 2014, the Islamic State, or ISIS, swept into Mosul and shot to the center of the
American public consciousness. Those of us on the president’s national security team had vigorous debates about whether and how to respond
with U.S. military force. But that debate was quickly swamped by public sentiment: after the beheading of two American journalists, the public
demanded action, swift and decisive, not to contain ISIS but to defeat it. In that instance, the public was more right, more quickly than the
professionals. But the broader dynamic remains: the political dimensions of the terrorism issue, and its susceptibility to demagoguery, mean
that policymakers have to place it in a different category from other national security challenges, and objective measures of the threat have
their limits. In debates about strategy and resources in the years ahead, figuring out how to manage this dynamic will be essential. It is a blind
spot for both Walt and Mearsheimer. Another blind spot concerns a fourth question that policymakers are presently grappling with: In light
of both rising geopolitical competition among states and the diffusion of power away from states, how
do policymakers design effective mechanisms to address major threats shared by all? Cooperation is
required to tackle climate change, pandemic disease, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and
the risk of another global economic crisis. At least in the context of mobilizing this kind of collective action, Mearsheimer misses
that the motivating theory for many in the foreign policy community may actually be closer to classical republicanism—with its emphasis on
institutions, interdependence, and the rule of law—than to classical liberalism. And neither Walt nor Mearsheimer provides a
convincing explanation for how such cooperation will come about without U.S. leadership, or without sound
rules rooted in sound institutions, or without taking into account the roles of nonstate and substate actors. Walt and Mearsheimer offer
surprisingly little guidance on the future of humanitarian intervention. They do both pay homage to effective diplomacy, but neither gives a
credible account of how a significant U.S. retrenchment would enhance, rather than detract from, the United States’ ability to conduct it. Walt,
for example, seems to like the Iran nuclear deal, but he gives little credit to the role that crippling sanctions, combined with the credible threat
of military force, played in helping bring it about. The demonstration of reassurance and resolve in the service of diplomacy is a key advantage
of having U.S. forces deployed globally, and it raises the question, Which does Walt value more—making it harder to make mistakes like Libya
or making it easier to engage in successful diplomacy like Iran? The final area where Walt and Mearsheimer offer surprisingly little guidance is
on the future of humanitarian intervention. After the last 25 years, Washington is grappling with the question, What is the right set of
conditions, if any, for U.S. military intervention on humanitarian grounds? Criticizing past interventions is a central pillar in both scholars’ cases
against liberal internationalism. And yet neither comes out and says that such interventions should never be attempted. Mearsheimer’s critique
of the Libya operation is not that the United States shouldn’t have intervened to stop a massacre. Instead, he simply declares that the threat of
a massacre was a “false pretext”—in other words, it was all made up. This provides a convenient way for him to avoid the real question. As for
Walt, he is surprisingly supportive of the use of American power to “prevent wars, halt genocides, or
persuade other countries to improve their human rights performance.” Indeed, he would “countenance using force
to halt mass killings when (1) the danger was imminent, (2) the anticipated costs to the United States were modest, (3) the ratio of foreign lives
saved to U.S. lives risked was high, and (4) it was clear that intervention would not make things worse or lead to an open-ended commitment.”
These are the same criteria that policymakers have applied to each of the humanitarian interventions the United States has pursued over the
last quarter century. (Iraq belongs in a separate category because it was not a war waged on humanitarian grounds.) The various post–Cold War
interventions mainly met the first three criteria. Walt provides no more guidance on the fourth, which is where most of the debate over
whether to act (Libya) or not act (Syria) takes place, and where most of the difficult tradeoffs lie. There is also the problem that neither scholar
considers that humanitarian interventions can also have strategic motives. Letting Syria burn didn’t just risk a massive loss of life; it also risked
destabilizing not one but two areas (Europe and the Persian Gulf) that both Walt and Mearsheimer consider vital. THE NEW CONVERGENCE This
list of hard questions is hardly exhaustive. The Trump era, along with broader changes in the international environment, has put many
assumptions back up for debate. Walt,
especially, sees this moment as a golden opportunity for progressives,
libertarians, and academic realists to join together to defeat the liberal internationalists. The real trend
appears to be going in a different direction. A number of recent meditations, including foreign policy commentaries by Senator
Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, point the way toward a kind of convergence of the left and the
center. This
convergence will hardly be complete, but some common priorities are coming into focus: an
elevated concern for the distributional effects of international economic policy, a concentration on
combating corruption and kleptocracy and neofascism, an emphasis on diplomacy over the use of
military force, an enduring commitment to democratic allies. Perhaps most important, the left and the center share a growing recognition
and appreciation of the fact that many successes of the liberal project have been profound—such as the advances against global poverty and
disease and the enduring peace between France and Germany, which formed the European Union rather than being doomed to compete. None
of this is to discount the role that Walt and Mearsheimer can and should play in the debates to come. Their focus on first principles is especially
important at a moment when so much is up for grabs. Their admonition to think differently is useful in a time of rapid change. Policymakers
should read these books and consider their arguments carefully. And Walt and Mearsheimer, for their part, should welcome the chance, in
good faith and with goodwill, to engage with policymakers on the difficult questions about how to approach the decades ahead
UQ – No Shift
No shift to offshore balancing – the foreign policy community, interest groups,
corporations, and lobbies will oppose a transition
Walt 18 [Stephan M. Walt, American professor of international affairs at Harvard University's John F.
Kennedy School of Government, 2018, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and
the Decline of U.S. Primacy. //mh]
Needless to say, the bulk of the foreign policy community will be dead set against the more restrained
policy of offshore balancing. The interest groups, corporations, and lobbies that have long shaped U.S.
foreign policy will oppose such a shift for fear that it would reduce the attention the United States
devotes to their particular agendas. Most members of the foreign policy establishment will be similarly
skeptical, in part because they hold benevolent views of U.S. leadership but also because their roles,
status, and power would diminish were the United States to adopt a less interventionist foreign
policy.34
Indeed, an active campaign to discredit offshore balancing is already under way, with a cottage industry
of prominent pundits, former U.S. officials, and academics offering up spirited defenses of the status
quo and attacking any suggestion that the United States might modify or reduce its global ambitions
even slightly.35 Not surprisingly, they invoke all the familiar arguments about the indispensability of
America’s current world role and the adverse consequences that will supposedly occur should the
United States try a different approach. And whenever Donald Trump even hinted that he might move
toward a more restrained approach, a chorus of critics quickly attacked him for ignorantly abandoning
America’s supposedly essential leadership role.36 Once again, Americans are being told that they face a
world filled with threats both near and far, and that U.S. power must be deployed around the world in
order to keep those dangers at bay. If the United States were to shift to offshore balancing, they warn,
important allies would lose confidence in U.S. security guarantees, adversaries would be emboldened,
and renewed great power competition would erupt, undermining today’s globalized world economy and
threatening U.S. prosperity. States accustomed to U.S. protection would be tempted to acquire nuclear
weapons, and curtailing active efforts to spread democracy and human rights would imperil freedom
around the globe and eliminate hopes for a broader “democratic peace.”
If China’s rise continues offshore balancing will not be able to stop escalation – US
leadership is necessary
Walt 18 [Stephan M. Walt, American professor of international affairs at Harvard University's John F.
Kennedy School of Government, 2018, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and
the Decline of U.S. Primacy. //mh]
What would offshore balancing look like today? The good news is that a serious challenge to American
hegemony in the Western Hemisphere is unlikely and there are presently no potential hegemons in
Europe or the Persian Gulf. Now for the bad news: if China’s impressive rise continues, it is likely to seek
a dominant position in Asia. The United States should make a major effort to prevent it from succeeding,
for Chinese hegemony in Asia would give Beijing the latitude to project power around the world—much
as the United States does today—including in the Western Hemisphere. From the standpoint of U.S.
national security, it is better if China has to focus its attention and effort closer to home. In an ideal
world, Washington would rely on local powers to contain China, but that strategy may not work. Not
only is China likely to be much more powerful than its neighbors, but these states are located far from
each other and do not always get along, making it more difficult for them to maintain an effective
balancing coalition. The United States will almost certainly have to coordinate their efforts and may have
to throw its considerable weight behind them. In the years ahead, Asia may be the one place where U.S.
leadership is indeed “indispensable.”17
AT: Unsustainable
Pursuit Inevitable
Pursuit of hegemony is inevitable – the established security order influences Trump’s
actions and mitigate his effect on US strategy
Porter 18 [Patrick Porter, Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of
Birmingham. He is also Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, 5-4-2018, "Why
America's Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment,"
MIT Press Journals, https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/isec_a_00311 //mh]
Another significant test case for my argument is the first year of the Trump administration. Inaugurated on January 20, 2017, Trump
posed
a greater challenge to the established security order than any incoming president since Nixon. As an
outsider, he was elected on a wave of revolt against the costs and burdens of primacy— and against the Blob.
Trump rejected the bipartisan cause of U.S. leadership. His slogan, “America First,” evoked interwar
isolationism and zero-sum nationalism. The critical test is how Trump behaved in office and whether an iconoclastic president
ultimately conformed with tradition. Preliminary observation suggests that his behavior accords with my argument's forecasts. Trump is not a
typical president. But on grand strategic questions, tradition imposed constraints. A property tycoon and media celebrity, Trump ran for
office as an insurgent against the establishment. He was the first president without elective office
experience since Dwight Eisenhower. He based his campaign on hostility toward the status quo and the
policy elite that guarded it. He characterized government officials and lobbyists as a corrupt oligarchy, vowing to “drain the swamp”
and “look for new people.”144 Trump threatened to shred traditional alliances, accommodate major adversaries,
tolerate nuclear proliferation, abandon the frequent use of military force, and exchange free trade for
protectionism. Former senior security officials, defense intellectuals, and ex-presidents attacked his probity, sanity, and legitimacy. Both
sides presented the November 2016 election as a contest over the fundamentals of the United States' role in the world.145 As Trump took aim
at traditional U.S. grand strategy, some foreign policy experts predicted that he would run an experiment in applying retrenchment-based
strategies long advocated by academic realists, bring primacy to an end,146 and convert the Pax Americana into a “transactional protection
racket.”147 Traditionalists feared that Trump stirred a popular tide against the burdens of U.S. primacy, thus destroying the domestic
basis for it. Voters may not have elected Trump primarily because of his stances on alliances or nuclear proliferation. They did, however,
respond to his assaults on free trade, failed wars, free-riding allies, and the negative consequences of
globalization for American workers. Registered Trump voters ranked foreign policy high on their list of
priorities.148 Trump's broader attack on existing grand strategy and the foreign policy establishment resonated. Yet in Trump's first
year, there was more continuity than change regarding grand strategic issues . Within months, Trump
“abandoned stances that were at the bedrock of his establishment-bashing campaign.” 149 His first choices
were surprisingly “mainstream,” to the approval of traditionalists and displeasure of revisionists. 150 The power of the Blob and
tradition constrained Trump's administration, making his stance toward U.S. global commitments more
orthodox than was expected, in substance if not in style. TRUMP'S CONTINUITY Before becoming president, Trump
threatened to tear up long-standing alliances. He branded NATO outmoded, expensive, irrelevant to
contemporary security problems, and “obsolete .”151 At other times, he threatened to change the basis of
alliances, making what had been permanent U.S. commitments more conditional and transactional,
issuing threats to allies in Europe and Asia that the United States might abandon them if they did not
pay up.152 Trump implied similar policies for the Persian Gulf. As a candidate, Trump argued that Saudi Arabia, as the traditional bulwark of
U.S. power projection in the Gulf, should pay more for the United States' “tremendous service,” accusing it of complicity in the September 11
attacks.153 Trump suggested that he would accommodate the United States' rivals, especially Russia. He promised to give Russia, NATO's
resurgent adversary, a freer geopolitical hand. He would shift burdens by forcing allies to pay for protection. Such open
threats struck
against the grand strategy of primacy, which regards permanent commitments as essential even if the distribution of sacrifices is
lopsided. Within only months of his presidency, Trump altered both the rhetoric and substance of his
stance toward allies. By April 2017, NATO was “no longer obsolet e.”154 In May, Trump increased by 40
percent the United States' European Reassurance Initiative, established by Obama to signal the U.S.
commitment to Europe with increased troops, infrastructure, and exercises after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014.155 In
addresses in Brussels in May 2017 and Warsaw in July, Trump signaled support for NATO while insisting its members
contribute more.156 By June, he had reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to Article 5 of the NATO Charte r.157 At
the urging of advisers, Trump now took only a more abrasive version of the position taken by every president since Eisenhower—that NATO is
vital, but that member states should contribute more. In the Middle East, Trump
embraced Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
monarchies in the United States' traditional role as armorer and protector; i n his May visit to Riyadh, he signed
a $110 billion arms deal and jettisoned “America First” rhetoric in favor of “bipartisan
internationalism.”158 Within six months of taking office, Trump's strategic vision for the world's key power centers
—the Gulf, Europe, and East Asia—held the United States to be the principal security provider. In Asia,
Secretary for Defense James Mattis reassured Japan and South Korea of U.S. alliance commitments .159
Toward Russia, Trump did not lift sanctions imposed to penalize Moscow's adventurism in the Ukraine. He
authorized the sale of “defensive” weapons to Ukraine against Russia-leaning separatists, sold Patriot
missiles to Poland, and demanded that Russia withdraw from Crimea . In its 2017 National Security Strategy, the
Trump administration promised continued primacy, dominance in key regions, and counterproliferation, while more explicitly acknowledging
competition with rivals.160 Trump also has rededicated the United States to military preponderance and the frequent use of force that is a
hallmark of U.S. unipolarity. Campaigning for office, Trump denounced his opponent's hawkishness. He promised to reduce and focus the use of
force, to “stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with,” to withdraw from
Afghanistan,161 to avoid nation-building expeditions, and to focus on the Islamic State and counterterrorism.162 Upon taking office, Trump
showed a propensity toward using force. By July 31, 2017, he had overseen the unleashing of 80 percent of the total number of bombs dropped
by the United States under Obama during the whole of 2016, including the most bombs dropped on Afghanistan since 2012.163 He
also
increased the U.S. ground commitment to Afghanistan. 164 In the name of deterring the use of chemical weapons,
Trump bombed President Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. He also bolstered U.S. military deployments
to NATO's eastern flank. Trump declared an increased defense budget and an ambition for nuclear supremacy. His combination of
arms buildup and budget expansion amounted to “warmed-over Reaganism”; and like Reagan, Trump's administration formulated its budget on
the advice of the primacist Heritage Foundation.165 Trump also conformed with the tradition of “inhibition,” forcefully confronting North Korea
over its nuclear and missile programs. While campaigning, he suggested he would tolerate nuclear proliferation by South Korea, Japan, and
Saudi Arabia. He imagined negotiating with the “rogue” proliferator, North Korea's ruler Kim Jong-un, suggesting that nuclear proliferation was
both inevitable and acceptable.166 These sentiments violated decades of tradition, whereby the United States has inhibited proliferation
through security guarantees, troop deployments, arms sales, nuclear umbrellas, and sanctions threats .
By the summer of 2017,
Trump had converted to denuclearization and was engaged in brinkmanship with North Korea,
attempting to coerce Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions . In July 2017, he approved plans to increase U.S.
freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, to resist Chinese expansion.167 Trump's America exercises military
preponderance, maintains alliances, and pursues counterproliferati on—even at the risk of war—to forestall the
emergence of challengers and prevent a return to multipolar disorder. EXPLAINING CONTINUITY: TRUMP AND THE BLOB Trump's conformity on
major grand-strategic questions fits my argument's predictions. He took office at a time when the electorate was buffeted by war weariness
and the long-term stresses of the 2008 global financial crisis. These pressures could have been a basis for grand strategic revision. Yet Trump is
not trying to overhaul grand strategy. He has been unwilling to spend the political capital that such a revision would require. In the absence of a
determined agent of change, the Blob's advantages persist. The Blob has a privileged position in presidential staffing and
security expertise; it exerts dominance over the security discourse; and it is reinforced by the demands
of allies. With Trump elected, the Blob urged capable bureaucrats to boycott the administration. At the
same time, they lobbied the president to uphold tradition .168 Trump suffered a staffing dilemma. To
appoint experienced officials to key positions would install defenders of the status quo . Yet to appoint
untutored outsiders would raise risks of error, and to mix both groups would threaten coherence.169 In forming his transition team, Trump
leaned heavily on Washington insiders he had once denounced, including former administration officials
and corporate lobbyists. Trump reached into the “big pool” of his party for the “most highly qualified” candidates.170 His senior
appointees were mostly primacists who had the Blob's blessing. These included Secretary of Defense James Mattis, a retired Marine general
and former Hoover Institution fellow, who with Vice President Mike Pence assured NATO of the United States' continued support.171 Trump
appointed as director of central intelligence Mike Pompeo, known for his hawkish stances against nuclear proliferation and Russian
adventurism, as well as support for arms sales to Israel and Taiwan.172 Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a former oil executive endorsed by
Robert Gates, vowed to assert U.S. primacy against China's expansion and to oppose nuclear proliferation.173 Trump appointed as
national security adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster, a protégé of the orthodox Gen. David Petraeus. McMaster has argued
that the provision of U.S. security is indispensable, and that retrenchment will create dangerous
vacuums.174 Trump appointed former senator, lobbyist, and diplomat Dan Coats as director of national intelligence. He appointed
critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin to every major national security post, significant given that Russia is the
focal point of criticisms that his diplomacy is compromised.175 These included former presidential candidate, governor and ambassador Jon
Huntsman as ambassador to Russia; Wess Mitchell, who coauthored a study cautioning against the weakening or abandonment of alliances, as
assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs; and Fiona Hill, a Brookings Kremlin analyst skeptical of the possibility of a Russia-
U.S. accommodation, as White House senior director for Europe and Russia.176 Partly because of the Blob's mobilization against the new
president, the
administration remained significantly understaffed. The failure to appoint many subcabinet
posts meant that many senior advisers are career civil servants of what Trump denounced as the
“permanent government.” Valuable expertise also explains the retention of holdovers from the Obama administration, such as
diplomat Brett McGurk with his “almost impossible-to-replicate, case-specific knowledge.”177 Trump appointed some government outsiders
with unorthodox views, such as his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the anti-globalist Steve Bannon. But in the White House, a power
center emerged of traditionalist military figures with a commitment to primacy, who exerted restraining
influence.178 Significantly, after initially appointing Bannon to the NSC Principals Committee and removing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff and the director of national intelligence, Trump stripped Bannon of his NSC role and restored the chairman and director.179 With the
anti-globalists sidelined, an intensive and coordinated briefing on July 20, 2017, by the traditionalists Pence, Mattis, and Tillerson influenced
Trump, “explaining the critical importance of forward worldwide deployments” and dangers of retrenchment, tailoring the “Open Door” logic to
Trump's background, and emphasizing the value of “military, intelligence officers and diplomats” in “making the world safe for American
businesses.”180 In his inner convictions, Trump does not have to convert to primacy for primacy to persist. On major questions, he felt its
constraints, even when watching television, as he frequently did. As the scholar Daniel Drezner suggested, “The more mainstream foreign
policy advisers are better at being on television.”181 The Blob enjoys a number of advantages. As well as influence within the security
bureaucracy, it can attack the legitimacy of measures that offend tradition. It can act through the courts and
the quiet resistance of civil servants, and articulate alternatives through well-funded think tanks. It has
strong institutional platforms in Congress, links to a powerful business community, and a network of
nongovernmental organizations. Trump, with his inchoate worldview, was not a determined revisionist who could overcome these
obstacles, and, instead, on security issues, if not on tariffs and protectionism, quickly fell into line. Conclusion The habitual ideas of the
U.S. foreign policy establishment, the Blob, make U.S. grand strategy hard to chang e. Change is possible, but
only in conditions shocking enough to undermine assumptions, and even then, only when a president is determined to overhaul primacy and
absorb the political costs of doing so. I have demonstrated this assessment using the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. In both
cases, candidates came to office promising change, in fluid conditions that ought to have stimulated revision. The demand for a peace dividend
created an appetite for change in Clinton's case and constraints on resources and popular discontent did so in Trump's. Yet the Blob
mostly got its way on grand strategic questions. Grand strategy emerged organically rather than through instrumental
planning. Alternative grand strategies hardly penetrated decisionmaking within the executive branch. Decisionmakers were biased toward
legacy institutions. Unspoken assumptions, suppression, and self-censorship narrowed choices. Internal review was ideologically circumscribed,
concerned about how rather than whether to apply primacy. In identifying the Blob's constraining influence in Washington, former Obama
adviser Benjamin Rhodes was right. U.S.
military capabilities enable the United States to adopt a grand strategy of
primacy. This does not explain, however, why it has maintained that choice, even in conditions that
create incentives for revision. Theories that stress the importance of ideas and domestic politics are part of the explanation. But how
ideas are transmitted is just as important as the content of those ideas. This is where the process of habit intervenes. Having been a
superpower for decades is a condition that leaves the United States averse to revising fundamental assumptions and to considering
alternatives. The
Blob believes that the assumptions underpinning primacy are self-evidently true and that
grand strategies based on retrenchment are unworthy of serious consideration. Habit-driven style
impoverishes decisionmaking by insulating the most consequential assumptions from scrutiny. As a result, the
starting point for most discussion of grand strategic questions reflects an intramural debate about how best to practice primacy. Defenders of
primacy may resist the suggestion that a flawed process drives grand strategy, arguing that the current grand strategy endures because it is
superior. The strategy's excellence, though, is not self-evident. It entails trillions of dollars of investment that could be spent more productively.
It makes the United States prone to frequent uses of force, including several disappointing wars. It threatens the U.S. Constitution, by
increasing the power of the state. Finally, it implicates the country in potential conflicts worldwide. President Trump is aggressively reasserting
the grand strategy of primacy, a strategy that has put the country where it now is: struggling under the weight of spiraling debt, multiplying
conflicts, domestic discord, and set on a collision course with rivals. These stakes are high enough to warrant systematic review. Yet if my
argument is correct, such a review is unlikely except in atypical circumstances. Until that hour, Washington's decades-old design will endure
without a proper audit, as the master, not the servant, of American democracy.
AT: Debt, Financial Insolvency
Financial reasons for unsustainability are wrong — free trade, dollar strength, and
capital inflow preserve financial stability.
Norrlof & Wohlforth, 19 — Carla Norrlof: PhD in IR, Discipline Representative of Political Science at the University of
Toronto. William C. Wohlforth; PhD in Political Science from Yale; Daniel Webster Professor of Government in the Dartmouth College
Department of Government. (“Is US grand strategy self-defeating? Deep engagement, military spending and sovereign debt;” Conflict
Management and Peace Science; //GrRv)
Retrenchment proponents see American military spending as contributing to the growth of

public debt3 and the country’s relative economic decline, and they argue that as it approaches its credit
limit, the US should cut military spending and act preemptively to forestall steeper decline and even bankruptcy. Some
retrenchment supporters also fear that negative feedback between military overstretch and
economic decline will eventually put America’s coercive hegemony at risk because economic might is
the wellspring of military might (Calleo, 1982; Chace, 1981; Kennedy, 1987a, 1987b; MacDonald and Parent, 2011). In
short, retrenchment proponents agree that reducing military spending is an economic necessity,
although they disagree about the extent to which the US should reduce its spending and overseas presence as well as the desirability of
sustaining military primacy.
This argument is noteworthy not only because of its centrality to the retrenchment argument, but also because academic defenders of
deep engagement have as yet no direct response. Scholars and policymakers who oppose retrenchment maintain that American
military dominance has produced significant economic benefits and warn that reductions in military
spending will reduce these benefits (Brooks, et al., 2013; Brooks and Wohlforth, 2016; Gottlieb, 2012; Kagan, 2012; Sestanovich, 2014).
Three main arguments point to such benefits. First, according to a research program closely connected with the work of Robert Gilpin
and Stephen Krasner, military power underwrites an open economic order. In a series of books, Gilpin and
Krasner explain the logic and evidence for hegemonic orders that rest in part on an outsized global military role (Gilpin, 1975; Gilpin,
1981, 1987, 2001; Krasner, 1978). A
dominant military power that equates its own interest with
expanding economic globalization benefits from providing a stable political context that makes
economic exchange more secure and predictable (Brooks, et al., 2013; Brooks and Wohlforth, 2016; Norrlof, 2008,
2010).
Second, military primacy

generates other direct benefits, such as official support for the
hegemon’s currency; sustained capital inflows during times of distress; protection of residents’
foreign investments; and economic contributions to the hegemon’s military activities, including
economic transfers through basing fees (Beckley, 2011; Helleiner, 2008; James, 2009; McNamara, 2008, Norrlof, 2008,
2010; Posen, 2008).
Third, the preeminent military power leverages security to extract economic favors from allies
in exchange for protection. As a background condition, security allows the hegemonic power to win
concessions in economic and trade negotiations (Ikenberry, 2011; Mastanduno, 2009; Norrlof, 2010).
Economic agreements flow from the barrel of a gun.
No link or impact to debt — hegemony is entirely decoupled from deficit growth.

Norrlof & Wohlforth, 19 — Carla Norrlof: PhD in IR, Discipline Representative of Political Science at the University of
Toronto. William C. Wohlforth; PhD in Political Science from Yale; Daniel Webster Professor of Government in the Dartmouth College
Department of Government. (“Is US grand strategy self-defeating? Deep engagement, military spending and sovereign debt;” Conflict
Management and Peace Science; //GrRv)
Findings This
article scrutinizes the argument that growth in military spending is responsible for
growth in US public debt. As illustrated in Figure 2, the paces of change in the two variables have moved in
opposite directions at least as frequently as they have moved together. If changes in US military
spending do not correlate with changes in US public debt, the mechanism specified by
retrenchment supporters has no empirical support. While there may be other causal pathways whereby military
spending contributes to economic decline, evidence against the hypothesis that growth in military expenditures drives US debt
constitutes evidence against the case for retrenchment based on debt-fueled decline. The results in Table 1 demonstrate that we must
reject H1. We find no significant association between quarter-to-quarter increases in the growth of military expenditures and public
debt. Growthin US military spending does not correlate with growth in US debt. The most
significant explanatory variable for growth in America’s public debt is income tax. This variable is
substantively important and significant across all six estimation techniques. Given rising levels of debt, and the negative association
between income tax and the public debt, we infer that tax cuts have been a main contributor to the expansion of public debt in the US.
Consequently, raising taxes should lower the debt. It is noteworthy that even social benefits, which includes spending items such as
health care and other forms of welfare spending that are usually singled out as responsible for increasing the debt, are not statistically
significant drivers of the debt. We also note that R2 is rather low across the models (higher in the smaller samples). Given our inclusion
of principal contributors to the debt, as well as our diagnostic test indicating that the functional form of our models is not mis-specified,
we interpret this as suggesting that public debt is difficult to predict Retrenchment proponents might object that long-term associations
are less important than key periods in which the grand strategy leads to major buildups, such as the 1980s and the post-9/11 decade.
These were two periods that featured major increases in military spending, international activism, large deficits and widespread concern
over debt and decline. Table 2 runs the same regression between the first quarter of 1983—when Ronald Reagan intensified the arms
race with the Soviet Union—and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the fourth quarter of 1991. This period also coincides with the
Panama Invasion 1989–1990 and the 1991 Gulf War led by George HW Bush. Yet, during this time military spending does not have a
statistically significant impact on the debt.7 During this time, some of our models suggest that growth in interest payments on the debt,
social benefits and GDP significantly impact growth in the debt. The positive association between a growing economy and rising debt
may seem counterintuitive. We
should expect economic slowdown to put more pressure on the
government to spend as tax revenues shrink with rising unemployment while demands for
federal benefits increase. But governments are not necessarily responsive to these pressures.
Some governments spend procyclically, continuing to spend as GDP increases and/or do not try
to cushion economic downturns, in which case falling GDP would have coincided with lower
government spending. If spending was not curtailed during times of expansion, demands to
reduce deficits and debt may result in austerity policies as the economy contracts. Table 3 reports
regression results between the third quarter of 2001 and the fourth quarter of 2011, corresponding to the Wars on Terror launched
against Afghanistan and Iraq in response to the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. During this period, as ‘‘non
war’’, that is, base defense spending rocketed up 40%, from $390 to $540 billion in constant (2010) terms, we still see no evidence of
military spending augmenting the debt. Caution is however warranted in interpreting these results owing to the omission of OCO
funding, which financed a substantial part of the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and which is not included in base defense spending.
Changes in taxes and GDP are significant determinants of the public debt with tax cuts and economic growth increasing the debt. While
the results in Tables 2 and 3 are suggestive, we warn against drawing strong inferences based upon them in light of the few observations
in the regression. The core implication of these results—that defense
spending in the post-Second World War era is frequently
[overshadowed] dwarfed by other drivers of public debt even during periods of defense buildups
and activist foreign policy—is consistent with analyses conducted by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
After declining steadily in the post-war period (including in the Vietnam War years) federal debt held by the public climbed sharply in
the Reagan presidency, from 24.5% of GDP in the last pre-Reagan year to 39% in the first post contributors (notably much higher
interest payments owing to the Federal Reserve’s antiinflationary monetary policy) outweighed military spending in CBO’s retrospective
analysis (CBO, 1988). The same goes for the post 9/11 decade. In explaining how its 2001 forecast of a $5.6 trillion surplus by 2011
ended up as a $6.1 trillion deficit, CBO (2012) estimated that economic changes alone contributed far more than all increased military
spending, including on all OCO in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.8 Our findings also support the CBO’s assessment that lower than
expected tax revenues including tax cuts significantly contributed to increasing the debt. Overall, the findings reported above suggest
that the growth in military spending is not responsible for the growth in America’s sovereign debt.
Our findings cast doubt on the central claim made by retrenchment proponents. While more restrictive criteria for these propositions
may establish them as conditionally true, the available evidence does not support their current formulation.
AT: Drezner
Drezner agrees — American hegemony is sustainable.
Drezner, 19 — Daniel W. Drezner, Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, is Professor of International Politics at the
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. (4-4-2019; "The Uncertain State of American Hegemony;" Washington Post;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/04/04/uncertain-state-american-hegemony/?
noredirect=on&utm_term=.a77b05506de7; //GrRv)
There is a schizophrenia at the heart of debates about U.S. hegemony. On the one hand, the Trump administration has
made it
easy for critics to argue that America has ended. Long-term trends show that China is catching up to the United States on
just about every conceivable capability metric. Short-term trends show the European Union is a more potent regulatory power and the
United States has become more isolated on questions of, say, aviation regulation.
At the same time, serious

international relations scholars have argued that U.S. hegemonic power has
persisted. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth made the case a few years ago that the United States remained the preeminent
power in the world. My Tufts University colleague Michael Beckley made a similar argument last year. Andrea and Mauro Gilli have
further argued that China will be unable to catch up in technological sophistication to the U.S. military.
The latest addition to the latter genre comes from Adam Tooze in the London Review of Books. Tooze does not dispute the low caliber of
current American foreign policy. Rather, he asks whether it matters in the grand scheme of things. On the military front, for example,
Tooze writes:
Never before in history has military power been as skewed as it is today. For better or worse, it is America’s preponderance that
shapes whatever we call the international order. And given how freely that power has been used, to call it a Pax Americana seems
inapposite. A generation of American soldiers has grown used to fighting wars on totally asymmetrical terms. That for them is what
the American world order means.
Tooze makes similar points on the economic side of the power equation: “ The
hegemony of the dollar-Treasury nexus in
global finance remains unchallenged. The dollar’s role in global finance didn’t just survive the crisis of
2008: it was reinforced by it. As the world’s banks gasped for dollar liquidity, the Federal Reserve
transformed itself into a global lender of last resort.”
Tooze’s conclusion is that “two

years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to
the American world order. The two pillars of its global power — military and financial — are still firmly
in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model.”
Is Tooze correct? He does hit upon the central paradox of the current state of world politics. Not even the incompetence of the Trump
administration can necessarily dent U.S. structural power (though I am more worried about the dollar than Tooze).
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has noted repeatedly that the Trump administration has accomplished next to nothing in
rewriting the deals that make the world go round. Its strategy of antagonizing allies at the same time that it antagonizes adversaries has
been self-defeating. America’s soft power has been temporarily eviscerated. Despite
all this, however, U.S. military and
economic capabilities remain pretty formidable. The United States is at the center of most of the key
networks that drive world politics and the global economy.
AT: Trump
Trump doesn’t thump — he’s maintaining US security commitments, deterrence, and
alliances.
Carpenter, 19 — Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at the National
Interest. (6-23-2019; "Wrong: Trump Is Not an Isolationist;" Cato Institute; https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/wrong-
trump-not-isolationist; //GrRv)
Second, the
notion that Trump’s foreign policy has been a dramatic departure from those of his
predecessors since World War II is a myth. That is especially true regarding security issues. Although the president’s
rhetoric toward Washington’s longtime allies has sometimes been abrasive and less collegial, his actions
have differed little from the post-World War II norm. There certainly is no credible evidence that he is orchestrating
a withdrawal from Washington’s multitude of global security commitments and initiatives.
Indeed, allegations of a retreat into isolationism are especially bizarre as America seems poised on the brink of war with Iran. And those making
the “abandonment of global leadership,” “retreat from responsibility” and “embrace of isolationism” arguments have considerable difficulty
citing concrete Trump administration actions that correspond to those cliches. Where, exactly, have such examples taken
place?
Despite Trump’s rhetoric in the 2016 election campaign that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan should be
terminated, he promptly reneged on that position, and Washington’s war in that country goes on with no apparent end in
sight. Likewise, the United States maintains a military presence in Syria and still pursues the increasingly quixotic effort to unseat Bashar al-
Assad’s government. Indeed, U.S. military action escalated, with air and missile strikes on Syrian government forces.
Nor has Trump terminated the Obama administration’s policy of making the United States an accomplice in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, despite
the proliferation of war crimes by Washington’s allies. Indeed, overall ties with Riyadh have expanded under Trump, and the president vetoed a
congressional measure terminating U.S. involvement in the coalition’s Yemen war effort. Even more worrisome, the Trump administration has
ratcheted-up its confrontational policy toward Iran. One will look in vain for any signs of a U.S. “retreat” in the Middle East.
Furthermore, allegations
of withdrawal have no greater validity regarding U.S. security behavior in East Asia.
The U.S. Navy has increased its “freedom of navigation” patrols throughout the South China Sea during
the Trump years, despite Beijing’s vehement complaints. Washington’s support for Taiwan has grown rather than diminished. Trump
eagerly signed the new Taiwan Travel Act, which for the first time authorized meetings between high-level U.S. and Taiwanese officials. In May,
the administration implemented that provision with a meeting between National Security Adviser John Bolton and his Taiwanese counterpart.
Trump also has gone out of his way to stress that Washington’s
ties with Japan, America’s principal ally in East Asia, remain as
strong as ever. And although there have been some differences with South Korea about policy toward
North Korea, there are no signs that the United States is about to downgrade, much less terminate, its
military alliance with Seoul. So, again, where is the substantive evidence of U.S. retreat or
abandonment?
Such evidence also is lacking with respect to Washington’s relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries. During the
2016 campaign, Trump did call NATO “obsolete,” and he raised doubts about whether he embraced the North Atlantic
Treaty’s Article 5 commitment that an attack on one member would be treated as an attack on all. But once in office, he and his
associates quickly reversed course. Trump’s annoyance with the allies now is largely confined to
traditional burden-sharing complaints.
Meanwhile, other U.S. actions indicate that Washington’s security policy in Europe is as active as ever. Contrary to the myth Trump’s domestic
critics foster that he is willing to “do Putin’s bidding,” administration actions point unmistakably to the opposite conclusion.
Washington has supported expanding rather than contracting NATO, backing Montenegro and
Macedonia as new members. U.S. forces have joined in an accelerating number of NATO military
exercises in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea. Additionally, the Trump administration is now in negotiations to build a permanent base in
Poland. Moreover, contrary to assertions that Trump seeks to appease Russia, the United States has been training Ukrainian troops and has
concluded not one, but two, arms sales to Kyiv. That is curious behavior for an administration determined to conduct a policy of retreat from
Europe.
The theory that Washington is relinquishing its global leadership role on non-military matters is not quite as
absurd, but only marginally so. The Trump administration’s repudiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership did herald a narrower, nationalistic
orientation on trade issues. So, too, have Trump’s bilateral trade feuds with Canada, Mexico, and China. Nevertheless, there is scant
evidence that U.S. officials want America to be less involved in global commerce. Instead, they seem to
be angling for trade on better terms for U.S. producers. The wisdom of that strategy is certainly questionable, but the
approach is still a far cry from succumbing to isolationism.
When pressed, Trump’s critics scramble to point out actions such as his decision to end U.S. adherence to the Paris
climate accord—an agreement that the Obama administration never even submitted to the Senate for ratification. Such examples smack of
desperation. An unwillingness to endorse a
largely symbolic, unenforceable measure reflecting hysteria on climate change is
hardly credible evidence of a U.S. retreat from global leadership.
AT: China Rise
No China rise — structural barriers.
Brooks, 6-19 — Stephen Brooks; PhD from Yale, Professor of Government in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. (6-
19-2019; “Power transitions, then and now: five new structural barriers that will constrain China’s rise;”
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs42533-019-00009-8.pdf; China International Strategy Review; pg. 16-18; //GrRv)
**Corrections made to preserve grammatical integrity; brackets denote a change
8 Conclusion
This analysis shows that China confronts five structural barriers in its ascent that no rising power has faced before. Although each
of them is independently significant, it is their combined effect that has particularly stark ramifications for China’s
ability to rise in power.
Of course, while it may be true that these five structural barriers undermine China’s ability to rise in power as compared to past rising states,
one might reasonably ask whether one or more of them also simultaneously constrain[s] the United States’ ability to sustain its current global
leadership. This line of argument would seem especially relevant regarding the third structural barrier discussed above. On one hand, the huge
current levels of military spending by the United States mean that China is now chasing a moving target:
the United States is already far ahead in the military realm and it now devotes ten times as much to
military R&D than China. But on the other hand, perhaps the current high levels of U.S. military spending will
drag down U.S. economic growth and/or create financial pressures that will soon require a dramatic reduction of expenditures in
this realm? Perhaps. But as I have explained in detail elsewhere in my work with Wohlforth, this does not seem very likely (see
Brooks and Wohlforth 2016, 122–133).
It is also important to recognize that just as the world can change in ways that make it harder for a rising state to ascend, the same can be true
in reverse: global shifts can also potentially make rising easier. In the introduction, I noted that analysts highlight two key global shifts as having
eased China’s ascendance in recent decades: economic globalization and today’s modern information technologies. These two factors can be
termed “structural enablers,” and their existence prompts an obvious question: how do they match up with the five structural barriers
delineated in this article? Is China lucky to be rising in this era because it benefits from these two structural enablers more so than it is harmed
by the five structural barriers reviewed here? Or is it the reverse: is China unlucky to be rising now because, on net, the world has changed
more significantly in ways that limit its capacity to ascend in power?
Answering this question is not easy, but my strong sense is that luckis not on China’s side in this regard: that overall the
world has changed in ways that ultimately make it harder for China to rise—much harder, in fact—than
was the case for all past rising states. A key reason I reach this conclusion is that the two key structural enablers analysts highlight
are, in fact, double-edged swords for China. Regarding economic globalization, it has certainly helped China’s rise in the economic
realm; yet at the same time, it was underscored here that it also constrains its rise in the military realm because , unlike all
past rising powers, China is not in a position to rely on its own firms in defense-related production if it wants
to generally be on the cutting edge in weaponry.
In turn, modern information technology has certainly given China a greater capacity to secure knowledge and data than past rising powers; yet
at the same time, today’s technologies have also placed a much higher premium on how much and what kinds of information are needed for
states and firms that want to be on the cutting edge. In the military realm, a recent comprehensive analysis by Gilli and Gilli shows that
China’s greater ability to secure information than past rising powers in no way compensates for the fact
that it needs to gather, understand, process, and effectively use a far larger volume of information as
compared to the ascending states of the past ; in the end, they conclude that China’s military rise is actually
constrained more than it is enabled by today’s modern information technologies (Gilli and Gilli 2018/2019).
If the world has, on net, changed such that it will be much harder for China to ascend than past rising powers, then what implications does this
have for security policy? For the U.S., there are two key implications. First, U.S.
analysts and policymakers should not over-
react to China’s rise in the military realm. Looking at the speed of past power transitions, it would appear that China is now
poised to soon rise to a comparable level of military power with the United States; based on these past
experiences, it would seem China could reach this kind of status in just a few years if it decided to extract lots of resources for the military. But
past power transitions are simply not useful for understanding China’s rise; the world has changed far
too much for these past experiences to be a useful guide. A proper understanding of the new structural
barriers constraining China’s rise indicates that it cannot possibly pose anything like a peer-like military
challenge to the United States in the short- or medium-term. Accordingly, it would seem unnecessary
and/or needlessly risky for the U.S. to consider taking any provocative actions to try and constrain
China in the military realm anytime soon.
the
Second, although China’s rise does complicate the ability of the U.S. to continue pursuing its current “deep engagement” strategy in Asia,
nature and speed of this rise does not portend a situation in which the U.S. will be unable to sustain this
grand strategic approach anytime soon. China’s rise means that remaining in Asia now involves a more
complicated set of choices for Washington, but it does retain the overall capacity to stay, and this seems
unlikely to soon change. The key point to understand is that although China has now gained the capacity to push
U.S. surface ships and aircraft away from its coasts, this is not the same thing as gaining the capacity to
project military power in the region if the U.S. were to oppose such an effort.
For China, a proper understanding of the range of structural barriers constraining its rise also leads to two key implications for its security
policy. The first is straightforward: in light of the current limitations on China’s power projection capacity and how difficult it would be to rectify
them anytime soon, this suggests that a wise Chinese grand strategy would shy away from being militarily provocative towards the U.S. or its
allies in the region in the short- and medium-term.
Second, this analysis raises an important question for Chinese analysts and policymakers: is it even worth trying to develop a substantial power
projection capacity? The core takeaway of this analysis is that it
will be very expensive and hard—and thus will take an
extremely long time—before China can be anything like a military peer of the U.S. on the world stage.
My assessment is that even under the best of circumstances , reaching this level of military power would take
China at least three decades. But attaining this level of military would probably take China a lot longer
than this. Indeed, it is even possible that China could devote huge resources to this goal over many
decades and still fall short of being a true military peer of the U.S. For one thing, it should be reiterated that the
U.S. is clearly a moving target in the military realm—one that currently spends around ten times as much
as China does on military R&D. Moreover, China cannot count on being successful in developing the full
range of needed systems and in learning to use them effectively; rather, a lot would have to go right in this effort even
if China devotes massive resources toward it. Consider China’s continued inability to develop effective engines for its
combat aircraft, despite devoting huge resources—more than $20 billion during the 2010–2015 period alone— to this task
(Gilli and Gilli 2018/2019, 182–183).
Although the U.S. now has a substantial power projection capacity, this does not mean it makes sense for China to seek to also acquire it.
Indeed, movingin this direction would likely be very costly for China. For one thing, it would certainly be
extraordinarily expensive in terms of direct expenditures and in terms of opportunity cost: large
amounts of resources and personnel would have to be drained away from the commercial economy
and into a military buildup for such an effort to possibly succeed. Second, the U.S. and other countries in Asia may well react very
negatively to this kind of Chinese military buildup; at worst, a true security dilemma could result. It should not be forgotten that the last time a
military peer to the United States existed on the world stage—the Cold War—was a period in history that was extraordinarily dangerous for
both America and the Soviet Union (with both countries repeatedly engaging in brinkmanship that ran the risk of escalation to global
thermonuclear destruction).
There is also the question of what the security upsides would be for China if it were to develop a
substantial power projection capacity. It is important to remember that the United States owes its massive power projection
capabilities to the existential imperatives of the Cold War. The country would never have borne the massive burden it did to create this kind of
capacity had policymakers not faced the challenge of balancing the Soviet Union, a superpower with the potential to dominate Eurasia.
China will never surpass the United States — their authors mis-measure
economic and military power.
Beckley, 18 — Michael Beckley; Ph.D., Fellow in the International Security Program at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center
for Science and International Affairs and assistant professor of political science at Tufts University. (2018; “Unrivaled: Why America Will
Remain the World’s Sole Superpower;” pg. 1-2; Published by Cornell University Press; //GrRv)
Yet in terms of wealth and military capabilities—the pillars of global power—the United States
is in a league of its own. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for 25 percent
of global wealth, 35 percent of world innovation, and 40 percent of global military spending. 4 It
is home to nearly 600 of the world’s 2,000 most profitable companies and 50 of the top 100
universities. 5
And it is the only country that can fight major wars beyond its home region and strike targets
anywhere on earth within an hour, with 587 bases scattered across 42 countries and a navy and
air force stronger than that of the next ten nations combined. 6 According to Yale historian Paul Kennedy,
“Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power ; nothing.” The United States is, quite simply, “the
greatest superpower ever.” 7
Why is the United States so dominant? And how long will this imbalance of power last? In the following pages, I argue that the United
States will remain the world’s sole superpower for many decades, and probably throughout this century. We are
not living in a transitional post–Cold War era. Instead, we are in the midst of what could be called the unipolar era—a period as profound
as any epoch in modern history. This conclusion challenges the conventional wisdom among pundits, policymakers, and the public. 8
Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have dismissed unipolarity as a fleeting “moment” that would soon be
swept away by the rise of new powers. 9
Bookstores feature bestsellers such as The Post-American World and Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline ; 10 the U.S.
National Intelligence Council has issued multiple reports advising the president to prepare the country for multipolarity by 2030; 11 and
the “rise of China” has been the most read-about news story of the twenty-fi rst century. 12 These
writings, in turn, have shaped public opinion: polls show that most people in most countries think that China is
overtaking the United States as the world’s leading power. 13
How can all of these people be wrong? I argue that the current literature suffers from two shortcomings that
distort peoples’ perceptions of the balance of power. First, the literature mismeasures power.
Most studies size up countries using gross indicators of economic and military resources, such as gross domestic product
(GDP) and military spending. 14 These indicators tally countries’ resources without deducting the
costs countries pay to police, protect, and provide services for their people. As a result, standard
indicators exaggerate the wealth and military power of poor, populous countries like China and India—
these countries produce vast output and field large armies, but they also bear massive welfare
and security burdens that drain their resources.
To account for these costs, I measure power in net rather than gross terms. In essence, I create a balance
sheet for each country: assets go on one side of the ledger, liabilities go on the other, and net resources
are calculated by subtracting the latter from the former . When this is done, it becomes clear that America’s
economic and military lead over other countries is much larger than typically assumed—and the
trends are mostly in its favor.
The technology gap is massive.

3 Structural barrier #1: the large technological gap

The sheer size of the technological gap with the United States is one structural barrier China now faces.
Past rising states had levels of technological prowess similar to those of leading ones. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
for example, the United States did not lag far behind the United Kingdom in terms of technology, nor did Germany lag far behind the erstwhile
Allies during the interwar years, nor was the Soviet Union technologically backward compared to the United States during the early Cold War.
Compared to past rising powers, China simply has a much wider technological gap to close when it
comes to matching the leading state.
In previous analyses with Wohlforth, we argued that the current

size of the technological disparity between the United
States and China is now actually so large that the latter country simply has no available policy option to
close this gap over the short- and medium-term. The core basis for this conclusion was a detailed analysis of a very wide range of
technological output measures (Brooks and Wohlforth 2015/2016, 22–26, 2016, 22–31; for some additional technological indicators that reach
the same conclusion, see Beckley 2018).
Out of all of these technological output indicators, the World

Bank’s data on receipts of technology royalty and license fees arguably
provides the most revealing measure of the sizeable technological gap between the U.S. and China. In
2013, the U.S. received $128 billion in technology payments—an amount more than four times higher than the country in second place, Japan.
By contrast, although China imports technologies on a massive scale, it received less than $1 billion in receipts in 2013 for the use of its
technology. Of course, China has been devoting massive amounts of money to R&D and other technology inputs during the past decade, and
we would, therefore, expect it to now be closing this massive technology payments gap with America. This is indeed happening: in
2017,
the U.S. again received $128 billion in such technology payments, while China increased its receipts of
such technological royalties to almost $5 billion (World Bank 2017). The bottom line is that the technology
gap is clearly narrowing due to China’s intense eforts, but this is happening very, very slowly because the sheer
size of the disparity is so big.
In sum, given how massive the technological gap is—and given that America’s
great strength in this area is the cumulative
result of decades of effort by U.S. firms, researchers, and government agencies—China simply cannot
close it quickly. In this regard, it is important to recognize that there are real limits as to how fast China (or
indeed, any state) can shift its underlying technological capacity in the short- and medium-term via increases in technological
inputs. In the end, China seems almost certain to remain in an unprecedented position as compared to all past rising powers for
decades into the future: at a fundamentally lower—rather than a comparable—level of technological capacity
compared to the leading state.
China lacks the capability to translate its wealth into military might.
4 Structural barrier #2: the level of difficulty and complexity of developing and using top-end military equipment is much higher than in
previous eras
Many observers look at Germany’s experience in the 1930s—in which it transformed itself in just a few years from the disarmed loser of World
War I into a military power capable of taking over Europe—as revealing just how quickly big countries can become formidable global military
players once they strongly seek to extract military capabilities from their economies. Yet, as my previous solo and coauthored work with
Wohlforth has stressed, the world has fundamentally changed in this regard: top-end
military equipment is now much more
complex than in previous eras, and, therefore, developing and effectively using such systems is much
harder and takes far longer than before (see Brooks 2005, 77–78, 89–90, 108–112, 234–238; Brooks and Wohlforth 2015/2016,
35–38, 2016, 53–58; see also Gilli and Gilli 2018/2019 for a recent, in-depth analysis of this issue that reaches the same conclusion). The
development of top-end systems used to be measured in years: in the early twentieth century, for example, Germany was able to copy the
United Kingdom’s revolutionary new dreadnought battleship in a mere 3 years. Nowadays, in contrast ,
the development time of
many top-end systems such as combat aircraft, military satellites , and nuclear attack submarines is
measured in decades because they are so much more complex than in previous eras. Consider combat aircraft: “in the
1930s, combat aircraft consisted of hundreds of components, a figure that surged into the tens of thousands in the 1950s and to 300,000 in the
2010s;” moreover, the number of software code lines increased from “1,000 in the F-4 Phantom II (1958), to 1.7 million in the F-22 (2006), and
to 5.6 million in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter/ Lightning II (2015)” (Gilli and Gilli 2018/2019, 150–151).
For China, it is important to recognize that the increased complexity of developing modern weaponry has an interactive effect with the
structural barrier noted in the previous section (the country’s relatively low level of technological capacity compared to the leading state). In
the past two decades, China has been able to make rapid progress in a number of areas (such as precision-strike missiles, counter-space
systems, and cybersecurity) and, as a result, it has developed a significant capacity to deny the U.S. access to the area close to its coast.1 But
regarding many other systems—including many of the kinds that are needed to develop a significant power
projection capacity—China is just not yet in a strong enough technological position to be ready to even
start producing them. Consider nuclear attack submarines. China is now capable of producing nuclear attack
submarines that are roughly comparable in quietness to the kinds that the U.S. Navy commissioned in
the 1950s. But submarines with this level of quietness can be easily tracked by the United States, which has invested a huge amount of
effort and resources over many decades to develop an incredibly sophisticated set of anti-submarine warfare capabilities. It is not clear when
China will be technologically ready to produce nuclear submarines that would be quiet enough to effectively avoid U.S. tracking, but this would
seem at least several decades away in light of where it is today.
In addition, it
is not simply that making many of the advanced weapons systems of today is extremely
difficult; effectively using many of these systems also takes a very particular set of skills and
infrastructure that take an incredibly long time to develop. Employing these weapons systems is difficult not just
because many of them are so complex, but also because they typically need to be used in a coordinated manner. To use an obvious example,
deploying a carrier battle group is a remarkably complicated logistical exercise; all of the ships and their associated aircraft have to be able to
work together in real time. But even
a “simple” system like a drone is really only effective when married with
the appropriate infrastructural requirements for employing it, which includes not only a wide range of highly trained
personnel but also the technological and organizational capacity to rapidly gather, coordinate, process, and act upon information about the
battlefield. Whether China can develop an ability to effectively use advanced systems in a coordinated manner in a way that allows it to
effectively match up with U.S. forces is unclear, but any effort to do so would be a very long-term process that would be especially hampered by
the institutional structures of China’s military (which does not emphasize either delegation or flexibility).
Authors Debate
Our Epistemology Valid
Empirical approaches to international relations and nuclear warfare are
epistemologically valid — prefer quantitative analyses because they’re falsifiable,
robust, and enable us to draw lines of causality between contingent events and their
outcomes.
Fuhrmann, 14 — Matthew Fuhrmann is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University. Matthew Kroenig
is an Associate Professor and International Relations Field Chair in the Department of Government at Georgetown University and a
Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at The Atlantic Council. Todd S. Sechser is an Assistant
Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. He has held research fellowships at Stanford University and Harvard University, and
from 2011-12 was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. (2014; “The Case for Using Statistics to Study
Nuclear Security;” H-Diplo/ISSF Forum, No. 2; pg. 41-46; https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Forum-2.pdf; //GrRv)
The questions we ask in our articles require a more comprehensive approach to data collection. By
collecting information
about dozens (or hundreds) of cases rather than just one or two, we can gain insights into whether
the patterns we observe in any individual case are representative of broader trends. The implicit
question in our research is always ‘what would have happened if conditions had been different?’ Of course, it is impossible to answer this
counterfactual with certainty since history happens only once, and we cannot repeat the ‘experiment’ in a laboratory. But that does not
mean we should shrug our shoulders and abandon the enterprise.
Instead, we can gain insight by looking at cases in which conditions were, in fact, different. To illustrate, let’s return to the smoking
example above. Studying a single smoker in depth might give us an accurate and textured
understanding of the role of smoking in this person’s life, but it would be a poor way to learn
about the broader health effects of smoking, because we could not make an informed guess about what would have
happened had he not smoked. Our approach described earlier, in contrast, allows us to generalize about the effects
of smoking on health. For precisely this reason, large-scale quantitative analysis is the primary method by which medical
researchers have tackled the health effects of tobacco smoke. To be sure, some of the data in our hypothetical study would surely be
inaccurate, and we would know comparatively little about the lives of each individual subject. But the
loss in individual case
knowledge would be more than compensated by the increase in information about the variables
we hope to study.
So it is with nuclear weapons. To understand how nuclear weapons impact international
crises, we must examine crises in which nuclear ‘conditions’ were different. For Kroenig, this means
comparing the fortunes of crisis participants that enjoyed nuclear superiority to those that did not. For Sechser and Fuhrmann, it means
comparing the effectiveness of coercive threats made by nuclear states to those made by nonnuclear states. By
making these
comparisons, we can begin to engage in informed and evidence-based speculation about how
nuclear weapons change (or do not change) crisis dynamics. Indeed, the statistical models we employ require this
comparison – they will return no results if all of our cases look the same.
Gavin argues that the Berlin/Cuba episode is sufficient for understanding the dynamics of nuclear weapons because it is the “most important and representative” case of nuclear deterrence and coercion.12 There are two distinct (and contradictory) claims here: that the case
is the most important crisis episode for studying nuclear weapons, and that it is representative of the broader universe of such episodes. With respect to the first claim, Gavin offers no criteria for evaluating what an “important” case might be. What makes a case important –
its profile among the general public? Its consequences? The availability of information about it? The countries involved? Moreover, for whom must the case be important? Gavin may view the 1958–1962 case as critical for understanding nuclear dynamics, but it is by no
means clear that policymakers today look to this example for guidance about dealing with Iran or North Korea. This is not to say that we disagree with Gavin’s assessment – undoubtedly the 1958–1962 episode is important in many respects. But importance, like beauty, is in
the eye of the beholder. The second claim is equally dubious: that the 1958–1962 episode is somehow representative of the ways in which nuclear weapons typically shape international politics. Without first examining other cases, Gavin simply has no grounds on which to
base this claim. Moreover, there is tension between this claim and his previous assertion that the case is important: one key reason the Cuba/Berlin episode is often seen as important is because it was not like other Cold War crises: nuclear weapons were brandished more
explicitly, and stoked more public anxiety about nuclear war, than any other crisis before or since. In the broader universe of crises, this episode actually may be quite anomalous. If so, then studying it to the exclusion of other cases would yield misleading conclusions about
the role of nuclear weapons in world politics.
A key advantage of quantitative methods is that the researcher need not make questionable
judgments about which cases are more or less important: unless explicitly instructed otherwise, statistical
models assign equal weight to each case. Likewise, statistical models provide ways to identify – and
exclude – anomalous cases that deviate markedly from dominant trends. Indeed, a quantitative analysis can be a useful
precursor to the selection of individual cases for in-depth analysis, precisely because it allows us to locate cases that either represent or
deviate from the overall pattern. These selections, however, are based on careful comparisons with other cases, not opaque judgments.
A second advantage is that quantitative

analyses provide greater transparence about methods,
judgments, and conclusions. One of Gavin’s central critiques is that various cases in our quantitative
analyses have been miscoded. In other words, he argues, we have mismeasured important factors.13 This criticism –
irrespective of its validity14 – is possible only because our coding decisions are unambiguous
and easily ascertained from our datasets. Moreover, each of our studies sets forth clear rules for how each variable in
our datasets was coded. This does not mean that our coding decisions are all correct and beyond dispute, but it does mean that they are
clearly stated for outside scholars to evaluate. This degree of transparency is a key strength of quantitative
research. Because each case in a quantitative analysis necessarily must be clearly coded,15 there is no ambiguity about how the
researcher has classified each case. If other researchers believe a case should be coded differently, they can make that change and rerun
the analysis.
By extension, quantitative research designs permit scholars to easily evaluate how much a study’s findings depend on individual coding
decisions. Simply noting a few coding errors or differences of interpretation in a large quantitative dataset is of little consequence unless
one can demonstrate that those differences are responsible for generating incorrect inferences. In a quantitative study, this typically
amounts to recoding disputed cases and repeating the core statistical models to determine whether the results change substantially. 16
Not only are the original coding decisions laid bare, but it is also straightforward to determine whether the study’s inferences depend on
them. This high
level of transparency — and the external quality-control it enables – is one of the
most attractive features of quantitative research designs. Transparency is useful not because it
produces scholarly consensus, but because it allows opposing sides to identify the precise
nature and implications of their disagreements.
Consider, for example, the 1990 exchange in World Politics between Paul Huth and Bruce Russett on one hand, and Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein on the other. highlights the similarities between this debate and the present exchange, separated by almost twenty-
five years, as evidence that quantitative analysis has made little progress in understanding nuclear issues. We see the issue differently. Both debates, in fact, illustrate a key strength of quantitative analysis: the ability to assess the importance of individual coding decisions. In
the World Politics debate, Lebow and Stein objected that Huth and Russett had improperly coded many cases in their deterrence dataset, much as Gavin has disputed some of our classifications But Huth and Russett responded by noting that “even if Lebow and Stein’s
recodings of our cases are accepted, the statistical and substantive findings of our past research remain fundamentally unchanged.”18 Similarly, as we report in our articles, our central findings do not change even if we accept Gavin’s arguments. In a quantitative study, simply
showing that certain coding decisions can be contested is insufficient: one must also demonstrate that the core results depend on those decisions. While Gavin is correct to argue that coding cases is a tricky exercise, quantitative approaches allow us to evaluate the
substantive importance of questionable coding decisions. Qualitative research, by contrast, is not always so amenable to external oversight. Whereas quantitative models demand clear coding decisions, qualitative research designs can be much more forgiving of ambiguous
classifications. Gavin’s critique of our coding decisions illustrates this problem: while he criticizes the way we have coded particular cases in our datasets, he offers no clear alternative coding scheme. He raises questions about our coding decisions, but then declines to answer
them. This ambiguity allows him to have his cake and eat it too: he can criticize our classifications without being liable for his own. Uncertainty, of course, is inherent to any scientific enterprise, and quantification is sometimes criticized for presenting a false illusion of
certainty. To be clear, quantitative research cannot create certainty where the evidence is ambiguous. Just because a case is coded a certain way does not mean that the broader scholarly community (or even the researcher) has reached a consensus about that case. Likewise,
the problem of ambiguity is not inherent to qualitative research: nothing intrinsic to historical research precludes scholars from laying their assumptions bare. But by compelling scholars to take a clear initial position on coding cases, the process of quantification allows
scholars to debate each decision and evaluate whether potentially questionable choices are decisive in generating a study’s core results. This transparency is central to peer evaluation and, ultimately, scientific advancement.
A third advantage of statistical analysis is that it is designed to cope with probabilistic events. Inthe physical world, causal
relationships are often deterministic: a certain amount of force imparted to an object will cause
that object to move a certain distance. So long as conditions are kept constant, this result will
obtain again and again, no matter how many times the experiment is repeated . In the social world, however, we
are not blessed with such ironclad reliability. No two individual people are exactly identical, and even in carefully
controlled environments it is rare to find a “force” that begets exactly the same effect on all people with perfect regularity. The
causal relationships we observe are not deterministic – they are probabilistic, occurring with
imperfect regularity.19
The ‘force’ of interest to us in our articles is, broadly, the possession of nuclear weapons. When this force is applied to crisis bargaining situations, what happens? Implicit in this question, however, is a question about probability: when nuclear weapons are inserted into a
crisis bargaining situation, what is the likelihood of a particular outcome? Kroenig’s study, for example, asks: in a nuclear crisis, what is the likelihood that the nuclear-superior side will achieve its basic goals? Likewise, Sechser and Fuhrmann seek to discover the likelihood
that a coercive demand made by a nuclear-armed state will be met. The central difficulty with posing our research questions in this way is that we cannot actually see the thing we care about: probability is inherently unobservable. We cannot examine a crisis and directly
observe the probability of one side capitulating; we can only observe whether it actually capitulated.20 How, then, can we begin to answer our original research question?
Quantitative research is designed for precisely this sort of situation. If we cannot directly observe whether we are holding a loaded six-
sided die, for example, we can throw it many times, observe the result, and infer the underlying probability from the results. Throwing
Only after
the die just one time would tell us little, since all six numbers are theoretically possible even if the die were loaded.
observing the pattern of results across many events can we determine the underlying
probabilities of each number turning up.
The single-case approach Gavin proposes cannot cope with probabilistic events as effectively. Knowing
that one smoker
happened to die of cancer does not tell us much about the broader health effects of tobacco.
Based on this single data point, we might conclude that smoking leads to cancer 100 percent of the time. Yet we know this to be false:
there are heavy smokers who remain cancer-free, just as there are nonsmokers who still get cancer .
The true relationship
between smoking and cancer emerges only after looking at a large number of cases . Similarly, even if we determine
that nuclear weapons appeared to “matter” from 1958-1962, we cannot safely infer from this observation that nuclear weapons influence
crisis outcomes in general. Any relationships observed during this particular period could have been due to any number of chance events
that might be unlikely to recur. Studying just one episode allows us to say much about that episode but little about the underlying
relationships.
Fourth, statistical analysis allows researchers to uncover causal relationships in social

phenomena even if the participants themselves do not record, record accurately, or understand these relationships. Gavin’s
approach, in contrast, requires finding primary source documents and learning what participants themselves
believed to be the relevant causal factors at play. His essay conveys an exceptionally narrow conception of
how one should gather knowledge about the effect of nuclear weapons on international
politics. Gavin believes that if one wants to “really understand” the effect of nuclear weapons on international politics,21 archival
research is “the only way to get real insight.”22 While we agree that studying primary documents has great value, we believe that there
are many other ways to generate useful knowledge, and that a narrow focus on primary documents can often lead
a scholar astray.
AT: Epistemology Args
No bias or ‘echo chamber’ — hegemony persists because it works. Our authors
or reflexive and unbiased — critiques of primacy don’t withstand statistical
scrutiny.
Feaver & Brands, 19 — Peter D. Feaver is a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, where he
heads the Program in American Grand Strategy and the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger
Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments. (Spring 2019; “Correspondence: The Establishment and U.S. Grand Strategy;” International Security; 43(4); pg.
197–204; doi:10.1162/isec_c_00347; //GrRv)
Porter
In his article “Why America’s Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment,” Patrick
argues that the continuity of U.S. grand strategy since World War II has resulted from a group-think
mentality fostered by a powerful foreign policy elite—”the Blob”—that stifles debate and prevents needed course
corrections.1 Porter’s provocative argument is ultimately unpersuasive, because it overstates the
degree of conformity and consensus in U.S. strategy while slighting the most obvious
explanations for the strategy’s endurance. Below we highlight several problems with his argument.
First, Porter exaggerates the degree of consensus in U.S. foreign policy since World War II. In fact, despite a
bipartisan consensus on the necessity of U.S. global leadership in support of a congenial international order (what Porter calls
“primacy”), intense debates about how that strategy should be operationalized have been common in U.S. foreign policy circles.
Policymakers, elected officials, and policy commentators argued heatedly over such fundamental issues as
whether to pursue a Europe-first or Asia-first strategy in the 1950s, whether and how aggressively to combat
Soviet and communist influence in the developing world, whether to make or avoid defense commitments on the Asian mainland,
whether to pursue dé tente or confrontation with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, whether to use force to reverse Saddam Hussein’s
invasion of Kuwait in 1990–91, whether
to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after the Cold War,
and whether to invade Iraq in 2003. These debates reflected genuine intellectual disagreements
that pitted members of the Blob against one another. Porter would likely respond that such debates were essentially about tactics, but
the fact that the foreign policy community has engaged in knock-down, drag-out debates over
issues of such enormous strategic importance shows that it is not as unified, and the marketplace of ideas
not as limited, as Porter claims.
Second, although Porter argues that dissenting foreign policy views advocating an approach he calls “restraint”
tend to be marginalized, departures from a strategy of U.S. leadership have time and again
received a hearing at the highest levels of government. In the 1950s and 1960s, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John
Kennedy repeatedly considered withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe.2 Similar debates occurred in Congress in
the late 1960s and early 1970s. When Jimmy Carter took office, he strongly favored withdrawing U.S. troops from
South Korea.3 In the early 1990s, the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations initially delegated management
of the crisis in the former Yugoslavia to the European NATO allies. In 2011, Barack Obama withdrew U.S. troops
from Iraq as part of a broader move toward an offshore balancing strategy in the Middle East.4 In other words, presidents and other
political leaders in the United States have often been willing to consider significant changes in U.S.
strategy, and they have sometimes even implemented policies that represented a meaningful shift
toward retrenchment and restraint.
Third, the reason that many of these departures were not ultimately undertaken—or proved fleeting—is not
because policymakers denied them a fair, open hearing. It is because they were judged—or later shown—
to be substantively inferior to more assertive policies. Eisenhower never withdrew U.S. troops from
Europe, because he understood that doing so would have threatened to destabilize the interlocking
series of arrangements that deterred the Soviet Union while pacifying Germany and Western Europe.5 Carter never
withdrew U.S. troops from South Korea, for fear that doing so would have risked incentivizing South
Korean nuclear proliferation and destabilizing the fragile balance in a critical part of the world.6 The United States
ultimately took the lead in addressing the crackup of Yugoslavia when the inability of the Europeans to deal with the crisis had become
clear. Obama did draw down U.S. forces in Iraq, but large swaths of that country (and Syria) were
subsequently overrun by the [ISIL] Islamic State, compelling a reassertion of U.S. military and diplomatic engagement.7 In
these and other cases, an emphasis on U.S. leadership has persisted, because that approach has been
deemed—after significant debate or hard experience—superior to the alternatives.
Fourth, and related, Porter
slights the simplest explanation for why there has been substantial
consistency in U.S. strategy: because it works. As scholars have demonstrated, the past seventy years have
been among the best in human history in terms of rising global and U.S. prosperity, the spread of
democracy and human rights, the avoidance of great power war, and the decline of war in general .8 It
has also been a period when the world’s leading power consistently pursued a grand strategy geared explicitly toward achieving those
goals.
To prove that U.S. grand strategy persists for reasons other than utility, Porter would have to
show that U.S. leadership has not been necessary to those outcomes or that it is no longer necessary. But
he does not do so (or even really try to do so), and his article does not engage the relevant social
science scholarship and historical literature establishing a causal connection between U.S.
engagements and key aspects of the relatively benign global order.9
Finally, critics of primacy consistently argue, as Porter does, that their ideas are censored or excluded from
policy debates. Yet, critics of U.S. grand strategy are prominent within the academy, including at
prestigious institutions such as the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their op-eds
and essays appear in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs, among other prominent
“mainstream” outlets, and their work receives generous funding. Leading critics of primacy are
regular participants in U.S. government–sponsored outreach initiatives such as the National Intelligence
Council’s Intelligence Associates program. Not least, although Porter and many other realists in the academy deplore key aspects of the
current president’s foreign policy, that president’s own core critique of the foreign policy elite echoes those made by academic realists.10
If this is censorship, it is a remarkably ineffective form of censorship. Perhaps the
reason primacy endures is not that
the marketplace of ideas is broken, but that it is working fairly well.
AT: Mearsheimer
Mearsheimer is WRONG: Offensive realism fails to describe any modern superpower –
it’s too reductionist
Kirshner 6/18
[Jonathan Kirshner is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston
College and a professor at Cornell University.. His research and teaching interests focus
on international relations, political economy (especially macroeconomics and money),
and politics and film. “Offensive realism, Thucydides traps, and the tragedy of unforced
errors: classical realism and US–China relations,” China International Strategy Review,
6/18/19, accessed 6/28/19. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42533-019-
00013-y. HH-SKS]
Destined for War gets its Thucydides wrong, but its intentions—to warn that China and the US are on course to stumble into an unwanted war
—are noble. John Mearsheimer also sees a looming tragedy, one that (he argues) is inevitable . Deriving a theory of
structural realism that he has famously branded “offensive realism,” Mearsheimer speaks with admirable clarity: “China
cannot rise peacefully.” Rather, it will become “an aggressive state determined to achieve regional hegemony.” Furthermore, the
US must “do what it can to slow the rise of China” (Mearsheimer 2001: 401–402, 2005a).
The theory of offensive realism is analytically slippery. Presented as a deterministic theory of how states will inevitably
behave, it also proffers urgent policy advice (which ought not to be necessary if the theory is right). As Mearsheimer puts it:
“offensive realism is mainly a descriptive theory… but it is also a prescriptive theory . States should behave
according to the dictates of offensive realism, because it outlines the best way to survive in a dangerous world” (Mearsheimer 2001: 11–12).
That would not pass muster at a dissertation defense, but, more important, it is also wrong—the theory
of offensive realism is fundamentally mistaken in both its positive and normative guises.
Offensive realism is built on five basic assumptions , all of which are eminently reasonable: the existence of anarchy
(and thus, ultimately, of a self-help system, in which there is no guarantee that the behavior of others will be unconstrained); that other
states, regardless of their intentions, have the potential to be dangerous ; that the intentions of other
states are uncertain; that states seek to survive; and that they are rational. These last two assumptions are worth
quoting explicitly: “Survival is the primary goal of great powers. Specifically, states seek to maintain their territorial integrity and the autonomy
of their domestic political order”; and “great powers are rational actors” (note also the focus on great powers) (Mearsheimer 2001:30).
But Mearsheimer then makes a giant and illogical leap, which drives his entire argument. He observes ,
plausibly, that the most secure state in a system is a regional hegemon. (Actually, there has only been one
regional hegemon in modern history, the United States ). Therefore, he asserts, “States quickly understand that the best way to
ensure their survival is to be the most powerful state in the system,” and therefore “only a misguided state would pass up an opportunity to be
the hegemon in the system.” But this is wrong, and it does not flow from the five bedrock assumptions of the
model. The fatal flaw in the theory of offensive realism is its failure to distinguish between the attractive aspects
of being a regional hegemon and the perilous, mortal dangers of bidding for hegemony . Recall the assumptions
that “survival is the number one goal of great powers,” and that they are rational (Mearsheimer 2001: 34, 46). Thus, the question is not
whether being a regional hegemon would be attractive; rather, it is whether bidding for hegemony
would make it more or less likely that the state will survive. And here any rational great power would
draw the same conclusion: bidding for hegemony is perhaps the only thing that can possibly lead to its
utter destruction, and thus such follies should be avoided.
As Mearsheimer observes, five modern states sought regional hegemony. The US succeeded; all of the
others—imperial Japan, Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine Germany, and Nazi Germany—were utterly destroyed. And the
exceptional American case was, indeed, quite exceptional, as it was distinctly lucky to be surrounded by
weak neighbors and even weaker adversaries. No other geopolitical neighborhood, past or present,
looks anything like that setting. Moreover, and this bears repeating: it is the case that although most great powers are extremely
likely to survive; most great powers that bid for hegemony do not. Yet Mearsheimer insists that great powers will
“invariably be tempted to emulate the United States ” (Mearsheimer 2001: 212, 213).
This conclusion is incompatible with the assumptions of rationality and the primacy of the survival
objective. Consider contemporary China. Given its military prowess, economic capacity, continental size, and
vast population, it is hard to imagine the foreign power that threatens its very survival . Indeed, the only
thing that might bring it to ruin —a la Thucydides—is if it embarked upon a reckless and unnecessary military
adventure. And even if somehow, against all odds, China managed to pull off such a dangerous and unlikely feat, how much “more” secure
would it be after all was said and done? The difference would be marginal at best, and certainly not worth the high-
stakes gamble. China’s survival would not be threatened, as Mearsheimer suggests, if it failed to act according to the tenets of offensive
realism; to the contrary, acting like an offensive realist would be one of the very few paths that might threaten
its survival.
This would be the case even in the absence of nuclear weapons , which were not present during any of the other
modern bids for hegemony. But the existence of robust nuclear deterrents (which contemporary great powers have)
undermines the logic of offensive realism still further . As Mearsheimer observes, “states with
survivable nuclear weapons are likely to fear each other less”; and “there is no question that MAD [Mutual
Assured Destruction] makes war among the great powers less likely ” (Mearsheimer 2001: 44, 129, 146). It also, he fails to add,
raises the question as to whether great powers with secure nuclear deterrents (like China) need to embark on bids for hegemony to ensure
their survival (and whether the actual or latent nuclear capabilities of other regional powers might make such a bid still more difficult,
dangerous, and counterproductive).
Mearsheimer’s prescriptions for the US are on even shakier ground. After all, the US is already a regional
hegemon, which is the big brass ring that all states seek; moreover, it is almost preternaturally secure, with a unique and enviable
geographical position—in Mearsheimer’s words, as an “insular state” protected by the “stopping power of
water” not to mention a massive and secure nuclear deterrent (Mearsheimer 2001: 114–19, 126, 141). Will US
“survival” be threatened if it fails to reach across the Pacific (apparently shrugging off the formidable
stopping power of water) to try to crush China before it becomes too powerful? It is hard to fathom why
that would be the case, if the US is rational and values its own survival more than anything else.
Mearsheimer gestures at the notion that as a regional hegemon, China might seek to cause trouble for the US by meddling in its backyard.
Regardless of whether that would constitute a threat to American survival, one need not be a regional hegemon to meddle in the backyards of
others, as the behavior of Russia in parts of South America and elsewhere illustrates. In sum, the theory of offensive realism is deductively
unsound, and the policy prescriptions of offensive realism—for both China and the US—are misguided and dangerous. If followed, they would
make war between the two powers more rather than less likely.
the
Of course, as the model assumes that such a war is inevitable—the result of deterministic forces—that last concern can be set aside. But
deterministic nature of the theory of offensive realism is one of its fundamental flaws. This is one of the
key areas where classical realism stands in stark contrast to offensive realism (and to structural realism more
generally). Hans Morgenthau spoke plainly to this point, this basic error, which he called “the illusion of a social science imitating a model of the
natural sciences.” John Maynard Keynes also emphasized this basic, unbridgeable difference between the natural and social sciences.
Economics, he emphasized, dealt with “motives, expectations [and] psychological uncertainties.” As
such, it cannot be studied in the same way you would study physics. “One has to be constantly on guard
against treating the material as constant and homogenous,” he admonished. “It is as though the fall of
the apple to the ground, depended on the apple’s motives” (Keynes 1973a/1938: 299, 300; Morgenthau 1946: 121, 139).
A key characteristic of classical realism, which distinguishes it from offensive realism (and structural
realism more generally), is its emphasis on uncertainly and contingency. This thread weaves its way
throughout classical realism, all the way back to Thucydides, who, far from being a determinist,
repeatedly illustrates how, but for unpredictable developments, important events in his History could
have turned out differently.11 In contemporary social science, the emphasis on the consequences of the unknowable (even in a
probabilistic sense) has resurfaced in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–08, which rekindled debates over the difference
between risk and uncertainty (Kirshner 2015; Nelson and Katzenstein 2014). Before the crisis, risk—the assumption that actors could calculate
and share the relevant and known probability distributions—was the widespread mainstream view. But the failure of such hyper-rationalist
models has led more scholars to return to notions of uncertainty associated with Keynes, Frank Knight, and Friedrich von Hayek (who also
emphasized the basic distinction between the natural and social sciences). As Keynes put it, “The orthodox theory assumes that we have a
knowledge of the future of a kind quite different from that which we actually possess” and underestimates the crucial role “of the concealed
factors of utter doubt, precariousness, hope and fear” (von Hayek 1945; von Hayek 1974; Keynes 1973b/1937: 122; Knight 1971/1921: 241,
311).
Mearsheimer takes other IR theories out of context to fit his narrative – reject his
scholarship
Kirshner 6/18
[Jonathan Kirshner is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston
College and a professor at Cornell University.. His research and teaching interests focus
on international relations, political economy (especially macroeconomics and money),
and politics and film. “Offensive realism, thucydides traps, and the tragedy of unforced
errors: classical realism and US–China relations,” China International Strategy Review,
6/18/19, accessed 6/28/19. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42533-019-
00013-y. HH-SKS]
Mearsheimer’s theory of offensive realism is also problematic in that, in fact, it is in many ways radically
antithetical to the core tenets of realism. This is illustrated by the profoundly problematic way
Mearsheimer invokes E. H. Carr to support his argument. For as Allison misreads his would-be patron
Thucydides, so Mearsheimer fundamentally misreads Carr.
Mearsheimer considers Carr’s influential study, The Twenty Years Crisis, to be “a seminal realist work.”
Indeed, Carr is “a realist on the basis of his arguments” articulated there; for that reason, Carr “is widely
—and correctly—seen as a realist.” In particular, Mearsheimer lauds The Twenty Years Crisis for its
trenchant criticism of “the utopian,” who “believes in the possibility of more or less radically rejecting
reality, and substituting his utopia for it by an act of will,” a perspective that is left intellectually
bankrupt by “ignoring power almost completely” (Mearsheimer 2005b: 141, 143, c: 355).
But in urging confrontation with China, Mearsheimer turns Carr’s advice on its head. Offensive realism
is utopianism, ignoring the realities of power. China’s power has increased; realism demands that
stubborn fact be acknowledged and reckoned with. Carr’s perspective on such issues was unambiguous
—and the opposite of Mearsheimer’s: “defense of the status quo is not a policy which can be lastingly
successful. It will end in war as surely as rigid conservatism will end in revolution.” Carr is not naive nor
sanguine about the perils of anarchy: “we shall do our best to make ourselves as powerful as we can,”
but he understands—even insists—that realism requires “adjustment to the changes of the balance of
power”—that is the central point of The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Preserving a stable international order as
the balance of power changes will require “sufficient concessions,” from those at the top (Carr 1946: 91,
169, 222).
Such clear-eyed respect for the realities of power (however, much we might normatively prefer that
circumstances were different) is a core tenet of realism. Morgenthau repeatedly castigates “the
crusader,” for whom “compromise is a synonym for appeasement,” and for whom recognizing spheres
of influence “reveals both weakness and vice.” For the crusader, he warns, the “middle ground of
compromise and peaceful settlement is lost”. Similarly, George F. Kennan also counseled recognizing
power, and respecting spheres of influence. He advocated for a “less ambitious” pursuit of the national
interest, with “an attitude of detachment and soberness… unsullied by arrogance or… delusions of
superiority” (Carr 1946: 222; Kennan 1951: 88; Kennan 1967: 235, 491, 493, 495–496; Morgenthau
1951: 133, 150).
Again, this is the opposite of “offensive realism”—but Mearsheimer’s prescriptions are not realist—
they are reckless. The theory of offensive realism offers dangerous and self-defeating policy advice to
both China and the US; in a world where politics matters and state choices shape systemic pressures,
offensive realism is less a predictive theory revealing deterministic forces tragically beyond the influence
of any state than it is an impetuous prescription that promises a dystopic, self-fulfilling prophesy. In
stark contrast, realism (and especially classical realism), places an enormous premium on prudence. For
Morgenthau, “Realism, then, considers prudence… to be the supreme virtue in politics” (Morgenthau
1960: 10).13 As noted, this fundamental realist pedigree traces its roots all the way back to Thucydides,
who attributed the fall of Athens not to the designs of its enemies , but in its self-defeating recklessness.
AT – Parent & McDonald
Parent and MacDonald’s research is inflated
Haynes et al. (Kyle, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, William R. Thompson,
Distinguished and Rogers Professor Emeritus, Political Science at IU, Paul K. MacDonald, associate
professor of political science, Joseph M. Parent, associate professor of political science at the University
of Notre Dame, “Decline and Retrenchment—Peril or Promise?”, International Security, Vol. 36, No. 4,
Spring 2012, pg. 194-195, MIT Press, accessed via JSTOR)//EAW
Yet MacDonald and Parent make five related and highly debatable assumptions that produce misleading
findings and conclusions. They assume that the behavior of all great powers is equally germane to all
questions of decline (e.g., the decline of the fifth- ranked power is no different than the decline of the
first-ranked power). Next they assume that aggregated and highly heterogeneous findings from the past
necessarily tell us much about a potential future case of some magnitude. They complicate the
interpretation problem by measuring great powers and decline in novel but dubious ways. In particular,
they focus far too much on gross domestic product (GDP) as their sole criiterion of relative power.
Finally, and whether or not one suspects the validity of choices made about indicators, they assume that
all cases of transition (an outcome of decline) are equivalent.
If we are most interested in possible occurrences such as a China-U.S. transition, we would be on more
solid ground if we looked at earlier periods of transition between numbers 1 and 2 in the great power
hierarchy. Relative decline and transitions among numbers 3, 4, and 5 should prove to be a much
different proposition because, presumably, much less is at stake in these fluctuations. MacDonald and
Parent's design also precludes a more focused comparison by overlooking systemic leadership decline
almost altogether (p. 10).
Yet even if one accepts MacDonald and Parent's argument that all great powers are more or less alike, a
characteristic assumption of neorealist approaches, it is an ecological fallacy to rely on aggregate
findings to discuss specific dyads such as the United States and China. If the database from which the
findings are drawn was rock solid, it still would be impossible to know whether a China-U.S. transition
and U.S. relative decline were likely to be conflictual or peaceful. If the database is deemed to be
something less than rock solid, analytical and policy caution is all the more warranted. One reason to be
wary of the database used by MacDonald and Parent is that the great power pool is determined by an
elite identification procedure that no scholar has ever employed before.2 They first stipulate a list of
great powers, and then require that states must have at least a 10 percent share of total great power
GDP to qualify for the purposes of the analysis. 3 If a great power changes its rank order position for a
period of at least five years, it has experienced acute relative decline.
MacDonald and Parent's primary justification for the decline measure is that great powers "cannot
maintain their position in the system if others have a persistently higher share of GDP" (p. 24). A second
justification is that relying on GDP alone is preferable to utilizing some mixture of economic and military
variables, because the latter approach would conflate consequences (military shares) with causes
(economic shares). It is not clear, however, that we know these things to be true. System leaders, in
particular, have not always had the largest GDP in the system. Some scholars argue that military
spending is a cause of "hegemonic" decline. Alternatively, some states lost their relative position when
they were eclipsed by the emergence of larger states. In this context, it may be more a matter of
population size and resource endowment being the most responsible for relative decline.

Impact - Hege Good - GB

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heg good – golden bears

A receding US deterrent is a catalyst for great-power conflict — decline causes

This point is essential in considering the trajectory of the post-1945 order. It

Military primacy solves economic growth, prolif, and great-power war.

What is likely to follow is a return to the multipolar

For defenders of the international order, then, the

In this essay, I argue that security

In the last several years,

Washington must cope with three separate adversaries,

Contemporary containment will involve three separate regional initiatives, implemented in

Russia is seeking to undermine the current global order by forming a new

China is not the only revisionist power in the U.S.-Chinese relationship.

Three Worst-case Options to be Prevented

Russian revisionism is at an all-time high – nationalism, Crimea, and BRICS.

Re-penetration to Near Abroad

Lean toward the East

Eurasianism stands proud

To recover that tradition, we should think again about the

What does this mean for democracies? Autocracies

TYPES OF AUTHORITARIAN CHALLENGE

The Military Challenge

Chinese expansionism causes nuclear war.

Russian hybrid war escalates.

The Hybrid War is

Russia is actively trying to dismantle American and European democracies so it can

To paraphrase Vladimir Lenin, the

The history of nuclear proliferation demonstrates that the

Alliances are resilient to every factor besides military power.

Alliances Are Thicker Than Bluster

freedom-of-navigation exercises, even when they’re innocent passage, as something more —

Hegemony Good — Brands

Hegemony Good — Laundry List !

Military primacy solves economic growth, prolif, and great-power war.

Hegemony Good — Uncertainty Magnifier

Hegemony Good — LIO !

Allied Prolif Internal

Alliances are resilient to every factor besides military power.

Alliances Are Thicker Than Bluster

Allies are reassured now — Trump’s rhetoric is irrelevant.

Hegemony Good — Naval Power Impact

Abenheim et al., 19 — Donald Abenheim is an Associate Professor in the Department of National

AND — key to nuclear deterrence, the economy, and overall readiness.

Abenheim et al., 19 — Donald Abenheim is an Associate Professor in the Department of National

21st century maritime strategy and sea power

Hegemony Good — Democracy

TYPES OF AUTHORITARIAN CHALLENGE

The Military Challenge

Russian hybrid war escalates.

Extinction — overcomes historical checks.

Chinese expansionism causes nuclear war.

Rando 15 — Consultant- Asymmetric Global Solutions DBA, MPH/MS-Biomedical Sciences & US

AT: Debt / Military Spending

Hegemony Good — AT: Concert

Hegemony is a precondition to multilateralism — the absence of a unipole causes great-power

Hegemony Good — Epistemology

Sustainable — AT: Debt, Financial Insolvency

No link or impact to debt — hegemony is entirely decoupled from deficit growth.

Sustainable — AT: Drezner

Drezner agrees — American hegemony is sustainable.

Sustainable — AT: Trump

AT: China Rise

No China rise — structural barriers.

The technology gap is massive.

3 Structural barrier #1: the large technological gap