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1AC - Liberal admissions
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 4 | Opponent: St Francis RS | Judge: Bryan Gaston
Competitiveness
Contention 1 is competitiveness:
It’s good:
1) Economic power solves all impacts including nuclear miscalc – causes extinction
O’Hanlon 12 — Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution, former Professor at the University of Michigan, served as special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asia on the National Security Council, holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Director of Research and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University, Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, 2012 ("The Real National Security Threat: America’s Debt," Los Angeles Times, July 10th, Available Online at http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/07/10-economy-foreign-policy-lieberthal-ohanlon, Accessed 07-12-2012)
Second, such a chronic economic decline would undercut what has been 70 years of AND America became even more prosperous, and all major segments of society benefited. Alas, globalization and automation trends of the last generation have increasingly called the American AND trillion dollars in defense spending annually yet seems correlated with more job losses. Lastly, American economic weakness undercuts U.S. leadership abroad. Other countries AND regions will likely become less stable. Major war will become more likely. When running for president last time, Obama eloquently articulated big foreign policy visions: AND really possible if that fundamental prerequisite to effective foreign policy is not reestablished.
2) Competitiveness is key to hegemony – solves transition wars
Khalilzad 11 — former United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations, former director of policy planning at the Defense Department (Zalmay, "The Economy and National Security", The National Review, 2/8/2011, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/259024)
Today, economic and fiscal trends pose the most severe long-term threat to AND leading the world toward a new, dangerous era of multi-polarity.
It’s good – empirically solves conflict
Wohlforth 8—Daniel Webster Professor of Government, Dartmouth. BA in IR, MA in IR and MPhil and PhD in pol sci, Yale (William, Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War, October 2008, World Politics Vol. 61, Iss. 1; pg. 28, 31 pgs, Proquest, AMiles)
Despite increasingly compelling findings concerning the importance of status seeking in human behavior, research AND are also consistent with power transition and other rationalist theories of hegemonic war.
Causality proves we support every factor that correlates with peace
Our colleagues at Simon Fraser University are brave indeed. That may sound like a AND academic debates, this might get mildly theoretical and even more mildly methodological. Concerning international wars, one version of the "nuclear-peace" theory is not in fact laid to rest by the data. It is certainly true that nuclear-armed states have been involved in many wars. They have even been attacked (think of Israel), which falsifies the simple claim of "assured destruction"—that any nuclear country A will deter any kind of attack by any country B because B fears a retaliatory nuclear strike from A. But the most important "nuclear-peace" claim has been about mutually assured AND that states with a second-strike capability will not fight one another. Their colossal atomic arsenals neither kept the United States at peace with North Vietnam during AND War III, and little about the wisdom of banning the Bomb now. Regarding the downward trend in international war, Professor Mack is friendlier to more palatable AND superpower support for rival rebel factions in so many Third-World countries). These are all plausible mechanisms for peace. What is more, none of them AND and whether both might support international cooperation, including to end civil wars. We would still need to explain how this charmed circle of causes got started, however. And here let me raise another factor, perhaps even less appealing than the "nuclear peace" thesis, at least outside of the United States. That factor is what international relations scholars call hegemony—specifically American hegemony. A theory that many regard as discredited, but that refuses to go away, AND been good for the world that the United States has been so predominant. There is no obvious reason why hegemonic stability theory could not apply to other areas of international cooperation, including in security affairs, human rights, international law, peacekeeping (UN or otherwise), and so on. What I want to suggest here—suggest, not test—is that American hegemony might just be a deep cause of the steady decline of political deaths in the world. How could that be? After all, the report states that United States is the third most war-prone country since 1945. Many of the deaths depicted in Figure 10.4 were in wars that involved the United States (the Vietnam War being the leading one). Notwithstanding politicians’ claims to the contrary, a candid look at U.S. foreign policy reveals that the country is as ruthlessly self-interested as any other great power in history. The answer is that U.S. hegemony might just be a deeper cause AND War most of its allies accepted some degree of market-driven growth. Second, the U.S.-led western victory in the Cold War damaged AND in part by the emergence of the United States as the global hegemon.
The most complex and inclusive models prove hegemonic stability theory
Murray 12 – Professor of Political Science @ Alberta Robert, "Arctic politics in the emerging multipolar system: challenges and consequences," The Polar Journal, 2.1 It is no overstatement to say that the end of the Cold War was one AND the structure are very likely to translate into changes to state security strategies.
The larger problem is that without clear causal links between materially identifiable events and factors AND ? Or perhaps it’s actually born of utilisation of many different possible explanations.
But, collapse is inevitable absent immediate and substantial immigration reform – status quo bills fail
Clemens 7/8 (Michael, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, PhD from Harvard in economics, MA from Johns Hopkins in Geography and Environmental Engineering, BS from the California Institute of Technology in Engineering and Applied Science, expert in migration and development, economic growth, aid effectiveness, and economic history, Foreign Policy, July 8, 2013, "More Unskilled Workers, Please," http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/07/08/immigration_bill_unskilled_labor?page=0,1, alp)
In the congressional battle over immigration reform, some of the most heated fighting has AND could have had, or a continued, escalating crisis of unauthorized immigration.
The plan solves:
====1) High-skilled workers – they boost the competitiveness of high tech US industries==== Johnson 7 (Kevin, October, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, B.A. Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Epsilon J.D., magna cum laude, Harvard University, "Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws," http://site.ebrary.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/lib/michstate/docDetail.action?docID=10210080, jkim) Put simply, a more open U.S. immigration policy could benefit the AND effects on other nations, which in turn would implicate moral concerns. 34 Because of the United States’s position as a global economic leader, thousands of skilled AND , and the nation, to more readily benefit from this labor source.
2) Low-skilled workers – they spur jobs, innovation, and stable wages
Dalmia 12 *mobility, cheap services means higher wages, communication skills (Shikha, November, "An Argument for Opening America’s Borders," senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation, a nonprofit think tank advancing free minds and free markets. Dalmia is a Bloomberg View contributor, a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and writes regularly for Reason magazine. She is also a frequent contributor to the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal and numerous other publications such as the Los Angeles Times, New York Post, The Weekly Standard, Business Week, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. She previously served as a columnist for Forbes. Dalmia was co-winner of the first 2009 Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism for her columns in Forbes and Reason. From 1996 to 2004, Dalmia was as an award-winning editorial writer at the Detroit News, covering a variety of policy issues, including the environment, immigration, Social Security, welfare reform, health care and foreign policy. She also worked as a reporter for the Patriot, a national daily newspaper based in New Delhi, India, where she grew up and earned her B.S. degree in chemistry and biology from the University of Delhi. Dalmia frequenlty appears on Fox Business Network and other television and radio outlets. Dalmia, who taught news writing courses at Michigan State University, earned a Master’s degree in mass communication from Louisiana State University. She also holds a post graduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communications, ellipses in original, http://reason.org/files/immigration_policy_opening_american_borders.pdf, jkim) Open borders in goods—free trade—allows physical resources to flow where they can be deployed most productively for their highest and best use. Likewise, open borders for workers—immigration—allows human resources (even more crucial than physical resources) to flow where they can be deployed most productively for their highest and best use. And increased productivity is a win-win for all. No one disputes that open immigration policies would be a huge economic boon for immigrants AND would double world GDP in a few decades, virtually eliminating global poverty. This is not to suggest that rich countries have a moral obligation to fight world poverty. But they do have a moral obligation to maximize the economic well-being of their own citizens—or, rather, to not prevent their citizens from maximizing their own economic well-being. Jefferson did, after all, promise Americans the right to pursue their own happiness. So long as restrictive immigration policies are the law of the land, that promise will remain unfulfilled. Let’s just examine the benefits of immigration for America, the putative land of immigrants. Economists unanimously agree that immigrants increase native earnings from somewhere between 246 billion to AND they testify to the strong evidence that immigration and economic growth are connected. Not too many outside restrictionist circles believe that high-skilled foreigners are anything but AND and contribute more to public coffers in taxes than they consume in welfare. A Kauffman Foundation study calculated that nationwide, immigrant-founded companies produced 2452 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005. Indeed, 25 of high-tech companies founded during 1995 to 2005 had at least one immigrant founder. Over 40 percent of companies on the 2010 Fortune 500 list were founded by immigrants or their children. Highly-educated immigrants obtain patents at double the rate of highly-educated natives. As for jobs, a 2011 American Enterprise Institute study by economist Madeline Zavodny, which examined data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, found that between 2000 and 2007 every additional 100 immigrants with advanced degrees in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields from American universities created 262 new native jobs. Yet our immigration policies are so cumbersome that they routinely drive many of these talented foreigners out of the country upon graduation. Even foreigners with degrees from overseas universities create jobs for Americans—86 for every 100 foreigners—and yet our labor laws require employers to jump through hoops to prove that there are no qualified Americans available for a job before hiring them. The real controversy is about the economic impact of low-skilled immigrants. But, again, the controversy is more in the political realm. Among economists, there is a great deal of consensus that even these immigrants are a net economic asset. Perhaps a personal example will help illustrate some broader points in the vast economic literature AND finally found one run by an Iraqi Chaldean. Let’s call him Jacob. Why could Jacob offer us a better price? Because he had somehow managed to AND they command much better wages than if they had been just pulling weeds. If Jacob couldn’t hire cheap Mexican labor, it wouldn’t mean that he would just AND The upshot would be a net attrition in economic activity or productivity losses. There are three broad lessons of this story, each borne out by academic literature AND to tasks for which we are better suited and likely get paid more). The presence of low-skilled immigrants is especially good for women because it makes AND the effective supply of high-skilled labor," concludes UCLA’s Gordon Hanson. Second, more low-skilled immigration doesn’t mean fewer jobs for the native-born, as restrictionists claim, because jobs are not a zero-sum game. Just like Jacob’s Mexican workforce, immigrants create the jobs they have, not snatch them from someone else. In the process, they allow businesses to form that support better-paying jobs for Americans. In other words, Mexican workers become part of the so-called American underclass, which, for them, is better than being middle-class in Mexico. And the Americans, who, in their absence, might have been part of the underclass, become the middleclass. It is no co-incidence that a Cato Institute study in October ago found that Arizona’s crackdown on undocumented aliens—or paperless workers, as I prefer to call them— hasn’t resulted in more jobs for native born in industries such as construction and agriculture that Mexicans previously occupied. Rather, Arizona has experienced a greater loss of jobs in these industries relative to California and New Mexico. What’s more, the composition of immigration tracks labor market logic so that the immigrants AND far greater substitutability among them than is warranted. Kerr and Kerr conclude: The large majority of studies suggest that immigration does not exert significant effects on native labor market outcomes. Even large, sudden inflows of immigrants ~such as in the Mariel boat incident in 1980~ were not found to reduce native…employment significantly. (Interestingly, even in Europe there is very little displacement of natives. This AND , which would explain Europe’s assimilation problem and the ghettoization of its immigrants.) Third, not only do immigrants not cost American jobs, they don’t threaten American wages either. That’s because their presence allows natives—such as Jacob’s American supervisors—to exploit their language and communication skills, where they have a far bigger comparative advantage. Restrictionists argue that the laws of supply and demand dictate that as the supply of immigrant labor increases, overall wages would decrease. The best evidence for that claim comes, again, from Borjas. But even this evidence is weak. In a 2003 paper, gloomily titled "The Labor Demand Curve is Downward Sloping AND findings. For everyone else, the impact was either negligible or positive. Borjas’ work initially made a splash because he used national—not just regional— AND even high school dropouts—lose in the long run due to immigration. Essentially, they discovered two reasons for the discrepancy between their findings and Borjas’. First, Borjas over-estimated the substitutability of immigrants and natives without high-school degrees and therefore ignored the comparative advantage that native skills bestowed upon them in the wake of greater immigration. As Caplan puts it: "When immigration increases, physical skills become more plentiful relative to demand but language skills become more scarce. Since most jobs are a mix of physical and language skills, and people can change jobs, immigration might actually increase native wages." (Emphasis original). Even more crucially, perhaps, Borjas made the Malthusian assumption that capital wouldn’t adjust AND effect to native wages in the short run," conclude Peri and Ottaviano. In summary, more relaxed immigration policies are a win for immigrants who can escape poverty and otherwise improve their lives; a win for native consumers of immigrant services whose real wages increase as their cost of goods and services decreases; and a win for native workers who experience productivity gains as their natural skills become more unique and hence fetch them a better market premium. But before we conclude, let’s consider one powerful objection that immigration foes make to AND the benefits of immigrants to employers, but socializes the costs to taxpayers.
3) Global markets – immigrants realign the US economy to flourish globally
Johnson 7 *Domestic Labor Market to interact globally (Kevin, October, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, B.A. Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Epsilon J.D., magna cum laude, Harvard University, "Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws," http://site.ebrary.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/lib/michstate/docDetail.action?docID=10210080,jkim) The arguments for facilitating the migration of highly skilled immigrant workers to the United States have become increasingly powerful in light of the globalization of the international economy. In the midst of globalizing markets in capital and goods, adherents of closed borders must justify the exclusion of labor from a system of increasingly permeable borders. Economic arguments generally favor easy migration between nations and the ready mobility of labor to its most productive use. The labor market benefits of immigrant workers to the United States are undeniable. Nonetheless, as one policy analyst put it, U.S immigration policy is based on denial. Most lawmakers in the United AND conflict with economic reality will do nothing to address the underlying problem. 6 In a similar vein, the Immigration Policy Center contends that "current U.S. immigration policies remain largely unresponsive to the labor needs of the U.S. economy by imposing arbitrary and static limits on employment-based immigration that have merely diverted labor migration to the undocumented channels or further clogged the family-based immigration system." 7 Despite their inconsistency with economic reality, border enforcement efforts, like tough-on AND .S. economy and seriously distort domestic labor markets in troubling ways. As many economists have observed, in order to achieve steady economic growth with a AND particularly easy for employers to fill in many parts of the country. 10 Many sectors of the global economy have become increasingly competitive. Some U.S. employers bank— figuratively and literally— on undocumented labor in order to compete in the global marketplace. Lowcost immigrant labor increases a business’s capacity to compete by providing certain benefits to employers and the U.S. economy as a whole. Consumers benefit from lower prices for many commodities, including fruits and vegetables, and meat and poultry, and for services such as domestic-service work, hotels and restaurants, and construction. In addition, the money spent by undocumented immigrants on goods and services spurs further economic activity and benefits every economic actor. These expenditures have ripple effects through all sectors of the U.S. economy. Large employers in certain industries often rely heavily on undocumented immigrants. Recently, several high-profile companies have had their hiring practices exposed. The poultry giant Tyson Foods faced a criminal indictment, and was later acquitted, for participating in a scheme to traffic immigrant workers. Its employment of undocumented workers, however, could not seriously be disputed. 11 Wal-Mart repeatedly makes the news for its employment of undocumented immigrants. 12 Entire industries, such as agriculture, meat and poultry processing, construction, and AND – 12 billion as the shock worked its way through the sector." 14 Without undocumented workers, businesses in some industries would be forced to close. Such a collapse would drag down the U.S. economy. As the preeminent economist John Kenneth Galbraith stated, Were all the illegals in the United States suddenly to return home, the effect AND being. . . . Without them, the American economy would suffer. The popular 2004 film "A Day Without a Mexican" offered a tonguein-cheek look at how the U.S. economy would dramatically stop in its tracks without Mexican workers. As with all humor, the movie offered a grain of truth. We know in our heart of hearts that at least part of the U.S. economy would grind to a sudden halt if immigrant workers were no longer available. Despite the tangible economic benefits bestowed on the nation by immigrants, U.S AND fluctuations in the supply of labor, which necessarily affects productivity and profits. Billions of dollars are spent on enforcing immigration laws that are in effect unenforceable. The nation’s massive border enforcement efforts resemble a never-ending war in Vietnam or, more recently, Afghanistan and Iraq. Like those wars, border enforcement results in the expenditure of billions of dollars and thousands of deaths with no tangible benefit. Nothing resembling victory, or even stabilization of the immigration flow, is currently in sight. Economically, nothing can justify this deadweight loss. While the political clamor for immigration enforcement continues unabated, and Congress approves such misplaced AND have come to dominate the economies of many nations all over the world. The dramatic escalation in the trade of goods and services between and among nations led one observer to opine that we live in a "borderless world." 16 Absent cataclysmic change, there is no way to reverse globalization at this juncture. But, despite globalization, and despite the increasingly interlinked economies between nations, borders, border guards, and border enforcement limit the movement of people into the United States. Although the legal distinction between labor and capital is well established, the economic distinction AND such fears for the most part are grossly exaggerated and lack empirical support. Oddly enough, the United States continues to treat labor and goods and services differently AND subject to greater restrictions than at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution." 17 There is one critically important— and rather obvious— difference between goods and people AND In certain instances, such fears have been allowed to trump economic imperatives. It is true that immigrants transform the societies they join. But this transformation has occurred time and time again in world, and U.S., history. In many respects, change in societies is natural, expected, and essential to survival. Immigrants therefore should be viewed as the economic, social, and cultural lifeblood of U.S. society, rather than as a threat to be feared and punished. Even though Congress passes immigration laws without considering the true economic impacts of immigration and AND costs of immigration shows that the benefits of immigration exceed the costs." 19 Freer migration makes economic sense for the United States. Only time will tell whether the nation will realize that liberal immigration admissions will handsomely benefit its economy and act accordingly.
It’s reverse causal
Parra et al 13 (Carlos A. de la Parra, Francisco Lara-Valencia, Rick Van Schoik, Kristofer Patron-Soberano, Eric L. Olson, Erik Lee, Andrew Selee, Christopher E. Wilson, May, The Report is comprised of Arizona State University’s North American Center for Transborder Studies, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. The Report seeks to provide a comprehensive yet accessible look at the state of affairs in border management and the border region, focusing on four core areas: trade and economic development, security, sustainability, and quality of life. The project was made possible by generous support from the Council of State Governments-WEST and USAID. Thanks are also due to Arizona State University’s School of Transborder Studies, where Francisco Lara-Valencia serves as professor. The authors would like to thank Mayra Melgar of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF) for her support in compiling most of the statistics used in the analysis and in the construction of the Quality of Life index, as well as Alejandro Figueroa, Gabriella Ippolito and Ashley Garcia for their research assistance. We would like to thank Duncan Wood for his thoughtful reading and comments of draft versions. Thanks also to Allison Cordell, Miguel Salazar, and Pedro Ramirez for their invaluable support editing the report. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the Border Legislative Conference, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute, the Center for Research on North America at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce for inviting us to present some of the ideas contained in the report as we developed them."The STaTe of The Border report: A Comprehensive Analysis of the U.S.-Mexico Border," http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/mexico_state_of_border_0.pdf, jkim)
Though far from easy to achieve, success in managing the intense interaction and incredible AND , the competitiveness of the entire North American economy depends on the border.
Plan
Thus the plan: The United States federal government should allow liberal admissions across the Mexico-United States border.
Mexico
Contention 2 is Mexico:
Relations are good:
Solve all your DAs
State Department 12 (Department of State http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35749.htm "U.S. Relations With Mexico" BUREAU OF WESTERN HEMISPHERE AFFAIRS June 25, 2012, nkj) U.S. relations with Mexico are important and complex. The two countries AND diseases and seeking greater integration to respond to challenges of transnational organized crime.
They also solve drug violence
Thompson and Mazetti 11 (Ginger and Mark, "U.S. Drones Fight Mexican Drug Trade," March 16, Bachelor of Arts degree in public policy and history from Duke University Summa Cum Laude. Masters in modern history from Oxford University, Pulitzer prize winner and finalist, Gerald R Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, NYT writer, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/americas/16drug.html?pagewanted=all26_r=0, jkim) Pentagon, State Department, Homeland Security and Mexican officials declined to comment publicly about the introduction of drones in Mexico’s counternarcotics efforts. But some officials, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, said the move was evidence of the two countries’ deepening cooperation in efforts to prevail over a common threat. In addition to expanding the use of drones, the two leaders agreed to open a counternarcotics "fusion" center, the second such facility in Mexico, where Mexican and American agencies would work together, the officials said. In recent years, the United States has steadily stepped up its role in fighting Mexican drug trafficking, though officials offer few details of the cooperation. The greatest growth involves intelligence gathering, with Homeland Security and the American military flying manned aircraft and drones along the United States’ southern border — and now over Mexican territory — that are capable of peering deep into Mexico and tracking criminals’ communications and movements, officials said. In addition, the United States trains thousands of Mexican troops and police officers, collaborates with specially vetted Mexican security units, conducts eavesdropping in Mexico and upgrades Mexican security equipment and intelligence technology, according to American law enforcement and intelligence officials. "It wasn’t that long ago when there was no way the D.E.A. could conduct the kinds of activities they are doing now," said Mike Vigil, a retired chief of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. "And the only way they’re going to be able to keep doing them is by allowing Mexico to have plausible deniability." In addition to wariness by Mr. Calderón’s government about how the American intervention might be perceived at home, the Mexican Constitution prohibits foreign military and law enforcement agents from operating in Mexico except under extremely limited conditions, Mexican officials said, so the legal foundation for such activity may be shaky. In the United States, lawmakers have expressed doubts that Mexico, whose security agencies are rife with corruption, is a reliable partner. Before Mr. Obama met with Mr. Calderón at the White House, diplomatic AND to drug violence only when it took the life of an American citizen. In the end, however, mutual interests prevailed in the March 3 meeting after a frank exchange of grievances, Mexican and American officials said. Mr. Calderón told Mr. Obama that his country had borne the brunt of a scourge driven by American guns and drug consumption, and urged the United States to do more to help. Mr. Obama, worried about Mexico falling into chaos and about violence spilling over the border, said his administration was eager to play a more central role, the officials said. The leaders emphasized "the value of information sharing," a senior Mexican official said, adding that they recognized "the responsibilities shared by both governments in the fight against criminal organizations on both sides of the border." A senior American administration official noted that all "counternarcotics activities were conducted at the request and direction of the Mexican government." Mr. Calderón is "intensely nationalistic, but he’s also very pragmatic," said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "He’s not really a fan of the United States, but he knows he needs their help, so he’s willing to push the political boundaries." Mexican and American officials said that their cooperative efforts had been crucial to helping Mexico capture and kill at least 20 high-profile drug traffickers, including 12 in the last year alone. All those traffickers, Mexican officials said, had been apprehended thanks to intelligence provided by the United States. Still, much of the cooperation is shrouded in secrecy. Mexican and American authorities, for example, initially denied that the first fusion center, established over a year ago in Mexico City, shared and analyzed intelligence. Some officials now say that Mexican and American law enforcement agencies work together around the clock, while others characterize it more as an operational outpost staffed almost entirely by Americans. Mexican and American officials say Mexico turns a blind eye to American wiretapping of the telephone lines of drug-trafficking suspects, and similarly to American law enforcement officials carrying weapons in violation of longstanding Mexican restrictions. Officials on both sides of the border also said that Mexico asked the United States to use its drones to help track suspects’ movements. The officials said that while Mexico had its own unmanned aerial vehicles, they did not have the range or high-resolution capabilities necessary for certain surveillance activities. One American military official said the Pentagon had flown a number of flights over the past month using the Global Hawk drones — a spy plane that can fly higher than 60,000 feet and survey about 40,000 square miles of territory in a day. They cannot be readily seen by drug traffickers — or ordinary Mexicans — on the ground. But no one would say exactly how many drone flights had been conducted by the United States, or how many were anticipated under the new agreement. The officials cited the secrecy of drug investigations, and concerns that airing such details might endanger American and Mexican officials on the ground. Lt. Col. Robert L. Ditchey, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday that "the Department of Defense, in coordination with the State Department, is working closely with the Mexican military and supports their efforts to counter transnational criminal organizations," but did not comment specifically on the American drone flights. Similarly, Matt Chandler, a Homeland Security spokesman, said it would be "inappropriate to comment" on the use of drones in the Zapata case, citing the continuing investigation.
Drug violence collapses the Mexican state
Kurtzman 9 (Joel, Senior Fellow; Executive Director, Senior Fellows Program; Publisher, The Milken Institute Review, business editor and columnist at The New York Times, member of the editorial board of Harvard Business School, AB at the University of California, Recipient of the Eisner Memorial Award, master’s at the University of Houston, recipient of a Moody Foundation Fellowship, "Mexico’s Instability Is a Real Problem", the Wall Street Journal, 1/16/2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123206674721488169.html) Don’t discount the possibility of a failed state next door. Mexico is now in AND possibly military law-enforcement personnel to the border should that be necessary.¶
Nuclear war
Debusmann 9 (Bernd, Reuters Columnist, "Among top U.S. fears: A failed Mexican state," Jan 9, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/world/americas/09iht-letter.1.19217792.html?_r=0, jkim) But the little-studied phenomenon of "rapid collapse," according to the study, "usually comes as a surprise, has a rapid onset, and poses acute problems." Think Yugoslavia and its disintegration in 1990 into a chaotic tangle of warring nationalities and bloodshed on a horrific scale. Nuclear-armed Pakistan, where Al Qaeda has established safe havens in the rugged regions bordering Afghanistan, is a regular feature in dire warnings. Thomas Fingar, who retired as the chief U.S. intelligence analyst in December, termed Pakistan "one of the single most challenging places on the planet." This is fairly routine language for Pakistan, but not for Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile, or 3,200-kilometer, border with the United States. Mexico’s mention beside Pakistan in a study by an organization as weighty as the Joint Forces Command, which controls almost all conventional forces based in the continental United States, speaks volumes about growing concern over what is happening south of the U.S. border. Vicious and widening violence pitting drug cartels against each other and against the Mexican state have left more than 8,000 Mexicans dead over the past two years. Kidnappings have become a routine part of Mexican daily life. Common crime is widespread. Pervasive corruption has hollowed out the state. In November, in a case that shocked even those (on both sides of the border) who consider corruption endemic in Mexico, the former drug czar Noé Ramírez was charged with accepting at least 24450,000 a month in bribes from a drug cartel in exchange for information about police and anti-narcotics operations. A month later, a Mexican army major, Arturo González, was arrested on suspicion that he sold information about President Felipe Calderón’s movements for 24100,000 a month. González belonged to a special unit responsible for protecting the president. Depending on one’s view, the arrests are successes in a publicly declared anticorruption drive or evidence of how deeply criminal mafias have penetrated the organs of the state. According to the Joint Forces study, a sudden collapse in Mexico is less likely than in Pakistan, "but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state." It added: "Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone." What form such a response might take is anyone’s guess, and the study does not spell it out, nor does it address the economic implications of its worst-case scenario. Mexico is the third biggest trade partner of the United States (after Canada and China) and its third-biggest supplier of oil (after Canada and Saudi Arabia). No such ties bind the United States and Pakistan. But the study sees a collapse there not only as more likely but as more catastrophic. It would bring "the likelihood of a sustained violent and bloody civil and sectarian war, an even bigger haven for violent extremists and the question of what would happen to its nuclear weapons. That ’perfect storm’ of uncertainty alone might require the engagement of U.S. and coalition forces into a situation of immense complexity and danger." The study then warns of "the real possibility that nuclear weapons might be used." It is not clear where on the long list of actual and potential crises around the world Mexico and Pakistan will rank once Barack Obama takes office as U.S. president on Jan. 20. During the election campaign, Obama repeatedly criticized Pakistan for not cracking down hard enough on terrorists inside its borders. Since then a new Pakistani president has come to power. Not long after that, tensions between Pakistan and India, also a nuclear power, rose sharply after gunmen attacked two luxury hotels and other sites in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, and killed 163 people. India described the attack as a conspiracy hatched in Pakistan and carried out by Pakistanis. Closer to home, the U.S. economic crisis looks likely to slow down a 241.4 billion assistance program - including military equipment, training, technology - to help the Mexican government gain the upper hand over the drug cartels and re-establish control over what some have called "failed cities" along the border, places where shootouts, beheadings and kidnappings have become routine.
It also causes Latin American instability
Shirk 11 (David A., "The Drug War in Mexico Confronting a Shared Threat," March, Associate Professor, Political Science, and Director, Trans-Border Institute, University of San Diego, http://www.cfr.org/mexico/drug-war-mexico/p24262?cid-emc-MexicoCSR_pressblast-032811, jkim) Third, Mexican stability serves as an important anchor for the region. With networks AND DTO operations and violence into the region would have a gravely destabilizing effect.
Nuclear war
Manwaring 5 (General Douglas MacArthur Chair and Prof of Military Strategy @ U.S. Army War College, Ret U.S. Army Colonel, Adjunct Professor of International Politics @ Dickinson College (Max G, October, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivarian Socialism, and Asymmetric Warfare", Strategic Studies Institute, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB628.pdf) President Chávez also understands that the process leading to state failure is the most dangerous AND they and their associated problems endanger global security, peace, and prosperity.
Relations exist now but fail at combatting drug violence
Priest 5/1 (Dana, "U.S. role to decrease as Mexico’s drug-war strategy shifts," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post, 2013, http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2020902455_mexicoobamaxml.html, jkim) U.S. role to decrease as Mexico’s drug-war strategy shifts The new administration in Mexico has shifted priorities away from the U.S.-backed strategy of arresting kingpins and toward an emphasis on keeping Mexico’s streets safe. President Obama in Mexico visit MEXICO CITY — For the past seven years, Mexico and the United States have forged an unparalleled alliance against Mexico’s drug cartels, one based on sharing sensitive intelligence, U.S. training and joint operational planning. But much of that hard-earned cooperation may be in jeopardy. President Obama heads off Thursday on a three-day visit to Mexico to cement relations with the newly elected president, Enrique Peña Nieto, with vows of neighborly kinship and future cooperation. Obama’s visit comes as the fight over border security and immigration overhaul has begun to consume Congress. The December inauguration of Peña Nieto brought the nationalistic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) back to power after 13 years, and with it a whiff of resentment over the deep U.S. involvement in Mexico’s fight against narco-traffickers. The new administration has shifted priorities away from the U.S.-backed strategy of arresting kingpins, which sparked an unprecedented level of violence among the cartels, and toward an emphasis on prevention and keeping Mexico’s streets safe and calm, Mexican authorities said. Some U.S. officials fear the coming of an unofficial truce with cartel leaders. The Mexicans see it otherwise. "The objective of fighting organized crime is not in conflict with achieving peace," said Eduardo Medina-Mora, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States. Two weeks after Peña Nieto assumed office Dec. 1, the new president sent his top five security officials to an unusual meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. The new attorney general and interior minister sat in silence next to the new leaders of the army, navy and Mexican intelligence agency. Also at the Dec. 15 meeting were representatives from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the CIA, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other U.S. agencies charged with helping Mexico destroy the drug cartels that had besieged the country for the past decade. The Mexicans remained stone-faced as they learned how entwined the two countries had become during the battle against narco-traffickers, and how, in the process, the United States had been given near-complete access to Mexico’s territory and the secrets of its citizens, according to several U.S. officials familiar with the meeting. The administration of the previous president, Felipe Calderón, had granted U.S AND kits and airborne cameras that could read license plates from three miles away. Under a classified program code-named SCENIC, the CIA was training Mexicans how to target and vet potential assets for recruitment and how to guard against infiltration by narco-traffickers. In deference to their visitors, the U.S. briefers left out that most of the 25 kingpin taken off the streets in the past five years had been removed because of U.S.-supplied information, according to people familiar with the meeting. Also unremarked upon was the mounting criticism that success against the cartels’ leadership had helped incite more violence than anyone had predicted, more than 60,000 deaths and 25,000 disappearances in the past seven years. Meanwhile, Mexico remains the U.S. market’s largest supplier of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine and the transshipment point for 95 percent of its cocaine. When the Dec. 15 meeting concluded, Mexico’s new security officials remained poker-faced. "They said they were very appreciative to have received so much information," said one U.S. official familiar with the meeting. We will be in touch, they added, and left. Forging ties U.S. involvement in Mexico’s deteriorating internal security first peaked in the mid-1980s. In 1986, President Reagan signed a National Security Decision Directive instructing U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to help defeat the growing narco-trafficking menace worldwide. Beginning in the late 1980s, a massive U.S. air, sea and land effort was shutting down many Caribbean drug routes. The traffickers were increasingly forced to move their product through the only territory left unhindered: Mexico. Mexico’s secret security ties with the United States date at least to the Cold War, when Mexico City was a hub of intrigue. To keep an eye on the United States, the Soviet Union and China had their largest embassies in Mexico City, necessitating a large CIA presence. Then the Mexican intelligence service, CISEN, "was basically run by the CIA," according to one former CISEN official. Although that has changed, the unusually close relationship between Mexican presidents and CIA chiefs has not. In 2000, the 71-year political rule of the authoritarian and corrupt PRI ended with the election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party as president. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States turned the new openness into unprecedented bilateral action against terrorism. The two countries fortified the border with personnel and surveillance technology. Eventually, a protocol was worked out for Mexico to stop, detain and interrogate non-Mexicans traveling north toward the United States. Mexican authorities allow U.S. officials to remotely question third-country nationals of concern to the United States, according to Mexican and U.S. officials. Clamping down on illegal border crossings, however, had an unintended consequence: It upset agreements among the cartels over smuggling routes, sparking more violent competition. Death toll climbs By the time Calderón was inaugurated in late 2006, many experts believed Mexico was losing control of parts of the country. Before his inauguration, Calderón pleaded with President George W. Bush to help the Mexican military quash the cartels, according to Antonio Garza, then U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Bush agreed to help, and the Merida Initiative, a 241.9 billion aid package for military training and equipment and judicial reform, set the framework for a new level of U.S.-Mexico cooperation. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence took a leading role in the U.S. effort to defeat the cartels. By then, cartels had begun using assassination squads, according to Guillermo Valdes, director of CISEN at the time. CISEN discovered from a captured videotape and a special analytical group it set up that some of the cartels had hired former members of the U.S.-trained Guatemalan special forces, the Kaibiles, to create sociopathic killers who could behead a man, torture a child or immerse a captive in acid. To fight back, the CIA proposed electronically emptying the bank accounts of drug kingpins but was turned down by the Treasury Department and the Bush administration, which feared unleashing chaos in the banking system. As the Mexican death toll mounted, Calderón pleaded with Bush for armed drones. The administration rejected the request because it was far too likely to result in collateral damage, they said. By 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, horrific scenes had become commonplace in Mexico: severed heads thrown onto a dance floor, a half-dozen bodies hanging from a bridge, bombs embedded in cadavers. Ciudad Juárez, a stone’s throw from El Paso, was a virtual killing zone. Obama approved an intensification of bilateral measures. Deputy national-security adviser John Brennan led the U.S. side. His Mexican partner was CISEN director Valdes. Every new program was vetted by Mexico’s security team and often by Calderón. The first important decision was to use the same "high-value target" strategy that had been successful against al-Qaida in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. authorities used real-time intelligence against kingpins on a priority list — including cellphone geolocation, wiretaps, electronic intercepts and tracking of digital records — to help Mexican authorities target them. The second was to clean up the Mexican units that would be responsible for carrying out raids. As early as 1997, the DEA had funded the creation of Sensitive Investigative Units (SIU) made up of foreign nationals, first in Colombia, then in Bolivia, Peru and Mexico, and eventually in nine other countries. By mid-2006, the DEA had two units with a total of 184 members in Mexico, according to a DEA inspector general’s report. Mexico does not allow U.S. agents to take part in the raids, but they can be involved in planning and can direct them remotely. The CIA also has trained units in raid tactics, protection of senior officials, intelligence collecting and in gathering and preserving evidence. To guard against penetration from the cartels, members were polygraphed, drug-tested and vetted for criminal and financial irregularities. But operations were still routinely exposed by moles. So, beginning in 2009, the size of the units was cut significantly. Those who remained worked under cover and lived in secret safe houses. There are six or seven SIUs in Mexico, sponsored by the DEA, CIA and at least one other U.S. law-enforcement agency. Quest for drones The two countries also have constructed an elaborate physical infrastructure and developed protocols for sharing sensitive, often real-time intelligence. By 2011, the infrastructure extended to a CIA-run fusion center in Mexico City, a DEA-sponsored fusion center in Monterrey, a federal police bunker, also in the capital city, and separate military and federal police intelligence centers and one inside the headquarters of CISEN. The bulk of the U.S. work finding cartel members depends on the DEA’s network of informants and undercover agents. DEA-provided information led to the killing of cartel leader Arturo Beltrán Leyva in December 2009. The carte moved significant quantities of cocaine into the United States and had penetrated the highest level of Mexico’s institutions. His death gave Calderón his first significant victory in the anti-cartel campaign. In another successful mission, the DEA in 2010 located the multiple cellphones of U.S.-born kingpin Edgar Valdez Villarreal, known as "La Barbie" for his Ken-doll good looks. The drug agency tracked his travels over time, allowing Mexican authorities to pursue him through five Mexican states. He was captured in August 2010 and is in Mexican custody, awaiting extradition to the United States. Drones became part of the mix, too. U.S. pilots sitting in the U.S. would control the planes remotely, but a Mexican military or federal police commander would direct the pilot within the boundaries of a Mexico-designated grid. By late 2010, drones were flying deeper into Mexico to spy on the cartels, as they did during the two-day gunbattle involving 800 federal police that resulted in the death of Nazario Moreno González, head of La Familia Michoacana cartel. By then, Mexican authorities had grown so enamored with drones that they were requesting more flights than the United States could deliver. So Mexican authorities bought their own drones. Roots of change In a visit to Washington two weeks ago, Mexico’s top security team shared the outlines of the new plan with U.S. agencies, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. It contains many changes. The president will not be nearly as directly involved in counterdrug efforts as was Calderón, the officials said. The interior minister will coordinate the relationships among Mexican and U.S. agencies and other Mexican units. Given the corruption of Mexican law enforcement and armed forces, U.S. officials said privately they would be unwilling to share sensitive information until they have vetted the people involved. The Mexican government also plans to create five regional intelligence fusion centers and to build a 10,000-member super police force. This force would be steeped in military discipline but would use police tactics, rather than military force, to keep violence to a minimum. Medina-Mora, the Mexican ambassador, said in an interview that his nation considers U.S. help in the drug war "a centerpiece" of Mexico’s counternarcotics strategy. But the Mexican delegation also told U.S. authorities that Americans will no longer be allowed to work inside any fusion center.
The plan solves – immigration policies are destroying cooperative relations – openness is key
Johnson 7 (Kevin, October, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, B.A. Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Epsilon J.D., magna cum laude, Harvard University, "Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws," http://site.ebrary.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/lib/michstate/docDetail.action?docID=10210080, jkim) Immigration has sporadically produced tensions between the United States and other nations. A move toward open entry would tend to reduce international tensions. It also could well improve this nation’s relations with other countries and heighten the nation’s stature in the eyes of the world. Specifically, immigration has resulted in serious rifts between Mexico and the United States. AND the U.S. House of Representatives at the end of 2005. The Mexican government also protested the U.S. Congress’s passage of a bill in 2006 authorizing the extension of the fence along the U.S. Mexico border. From 2001 to the present, the governments of Mexico and the United States have AND lawmakers have failed to enact little more than laws that increase border enforcement. A much-needed reconceptualization of the meaning and nature of the U.S.-Mexico border stands to benefit both nations. 128 An immigration scheme consistent with the economic, political, and social needs of the two nations, as has been outlined here, could be constructed. A more realistic legal regime would remedy the problems that plague immigration enforcement today and avoid repetitions of the mistakes of the past. International tensions over migration are not limited to the United States and Mexico. Tighter AND United States, and would increase the need for State Department resources." 130 U.S. law generally seeks to limit the potential for negative foreign relations AND courts provides a degree of assurance that foreigners will receive fair treatment. 132 Liberal admission would further U.S. foreign-policy interests. 133 A AND were welcomed, respected, and the equals of citizens of other nations. The potential foreign-policy benefits are not limited to U.S-Mexican relations. Open borders could relieve tensions between the United States and other nations, as well. Multilateralism will be essential to fighting terrorism in the future, 134 as well as ensuring peace. Consequently, improving foreign relations through liberal admissions of immigrants is a benefit well worth considering.
The plan spills over to broad relations
Delacroix and Nikiforov 9 ("If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border Freely," Summer, p 101-103, Jacques Delacroix, a sociologist by training and formerly a university professor of management, is an independent writer living in Santa Cruz, California; Sergey Nikiforov, a native of Russia, lives in Silicon Valley and works in business development, http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_6_delacroix.pdf, jkim) Second, improvements in border relations would likely improve all relations with Mexico. The Mexican government bureaucracy might conceivably become less inclined to drag its feet in implementing NAFTA and subsequent economic agreements if relations between the two countries were warmer. One might envisage making better reception for U.S. corporations and products south of the border a condition of negotiations leading to the opening of that border to the free movement of people.
It’s reverse causal – border complications hurt all relations
The relationship between the United States and Mexico has historically been a strong one, but internal politics in both countries today are preventing a potentially closer and more productive alliance. Problems at the border loom large in the political calculation of decision makers both in Washington, D.C., and Mexico City. Daily news reports seem to imply that problems developing at the border stand to derail AND next four years to advance common goals such as economic prosperity and security. This report on the U.S.–Mexico border aims to aid policymakers in AND that are more likely to hinder, rather than promote, common goals.
Illegal immigration’s inevitable – only an economically sound immigration framework solves
Johnson 7 (Kevin, October, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, B.A. Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Epsilon J.D., magna cum laude, Harvard University, "Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws," http://site.ebrary.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/lib/michstate/docDetail.action?docID=10210080, jkim)
As with the United States’s failed prohibition of the alcohol trade in the early twentieth AND courts, and undermines the very legitimacy and moral force of the law. Open borders would help address these problems and offer other policy benefits. They would AND nuances of the story of every noncitizen seeking to enter the United States. Chapter 6 contends that, in important respects, open borders are inevitable. Nobody AND and easy. Knowledge about opportunities in different places helps to fuel migration. Global transportation and information networks make immigration much easier than in the past. Moreover AND migration issues will remain in play throughout the world for the foreseeable future. The issue is not whether we can close our borders but how we might best manage the flow of migrants into the country and integrate those who live here. We as a nation must ensure that our immigration laws comport with modern political, economic, and social reality. If not, they will prove to be untenable, just as they are today.
9/22/13
1AC Cuban Embargo
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 2 | Opponent: Edina SR | Judge: Tracy McFarland 1AC Russia Contention 1 is Russia US Russian nuclear war is inevitable unless we act to reduce the risk Baum 12 Seth Baum, Executive Director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, Nuclear War Group Discusses Ongoing Risk Of US-Russia Nuclear War, 12/30/2012, Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, http://gcrinstitute.org/nuclear-war-group-discusses-ongoing-risk-of-us-russia-nuclear-war/, JLB The key statistic here is the probability of US-Russia nuclear war per unit time. The 1 annual probability previously estimated by Martin Hellman 2 corresponds to approximately 10 per decade, 63 per century, and very close to 100 per millennium – that is, if the annual probability stays the same over time. 3 The point is, unless we do something to make it less likely that a US-Russia nuclear war would occur during any given year, then eventually the war is virtually guaranteed to occur. Note that this logic also applies to other types of events, including other possible global catastrophes, not just US-Russia nuclear war. With the Cold War over, it may seem to many Americans that the annual probability of US-Russia nuclear war is quite low. But this sentiment is not universally shared. For example, earlier in 2012, then-Presidential candidate Mitt Romney referred to Russia as the US’s “number one geopolitical foe”. Previously, US Senator John McCain wrote on Twitter “Dear Vlad, The #ArabSpring is coming to a neighborhood near you”. These comments suggest ongoing American concerns about Russia. Meanwhile Russia’s ongoing concerns about the US may be even greater. Many in Russia retain the Cold War view of the US as seeking global domination. Two big factors are the ongoing expansion of NATO into eastern Europe and NATO’s involvement in the 2008 South Ossetia (Georgia) war, the latter of which came close to having US and Russian troops firing at each other. Indeed, Putin thanked Romney for Romney’s “number one geopolitical foe” comment because it draws attention to and helps confirm Putin’s concerns about NATO plans for a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. US-Russian nuclear conflict would be an existential threat to humankind Bostrom 2 (Nick, Dir. Future of Humanity Institute and Prof. Philosophy – Oxford U., Journal of Evolution and Technology, “Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards”, 9, March, http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html) The first manmade existential risk was the inaugural detonation of an atomic bomb. At the time, there was some concern that the explosion might start a runaway chain-reaction by “igniting” the atmosphere. Although we now know that such an outcome was physically impossible, it qualifies as an existential risk that was present at the time. For there to be a risk, given the knowledge and understanding available, it suffices that there is some subjective probability of an adverse outcome, even if it later turns out that objectively there was no chance of something bad happening. If we don’t know whether something is objectively risky or not, then it is risky in the subjective sense. The subjective sense is of course what we must base our decisions on.2 At any given time we must use our best current subjective estimate of what the objective risk factors are.3 A much greater existential risk emerged with the build-up of nuclear arsenals in the US and the USSR. An all-out nuclear war was a possibility with both a substantial probability and with consequences that might have been persistent enough to qualify as global and terminal. There was a real worry among those best acquainted with the information available at the time that a nuclear Armageddon would occur and that it might annihilate our species or permanently destroy human civilization. Russia and the US retain large nuclear arsenals that could be used in a future confrontation, either accidentally or deliberately. There is also a risk that other states may one day build up large nuclear arsenals. Note however that a smaller nuclear exchange, between India and Pakistan for instance, is not an existential risk, since it would not destroy or thwart humankind’s potential permanently. Such a war might however be a local terminal risk for the cities most likely to be targeted. Unfortunately, we shall see that nuclear Armageddon and comet or asteroid strikes are mere preludes to the existential risks that we will encounter in the 21st century. US-Russia nuclear war has the quickest time frame for extinction Helfand and Pastore 9 (Ira Helfand, M.D., and John O. Pastore, M.D., are past presidents of Physicians for Social Responsibility, March 31, 2009, “U.S.-Russia nuclear war still a threat”, http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_pastoreline_03-31-09_EODSCAO_v15.bbdf23.html) President Obama and Russian President Dimitri Medvedev are scheduled to Wednesday in London during the G-20 summit. They must not let the current economic crisis keep them from focusing on one of the greatest threats confronting humanity: the danger of nuclear war. Since the end of the Cold War, many have acted as though the danger of nuclear war has ended. It has not. There remain in the world more than 20,000 nuclear weapons. Alarmingly, more than 2,000 of these weapons in the U.S. and Russian arsenals remain on ready-alert status, commonly known as hair-trigger alert. They can be fired within five minutes and reach targets in the other country 30 minutes later. Just one of these weapons can destroy a city. A war involving a substantial number would cause devastation on a scale unprecedented in human history. A study conducted by Physicians for Social Responsibility in 2002 showed that if only 500 of the Russian weapons on high alert exploded over our cities, 100 million Americans would die in the first 30 minutes. An attack of this magnitude also would destroy the entire economic, communications and transportation infrastructure on which we all depend. Those who survived the initial attack would inhabit a nightmare landscape with huge swaths of the country blanketed with radioactive fallout and epidemic diseases rampant. They would have no food, no fuel, no electricity, no medicine, and certainly no organized health care. In the following months it is likely the vast majority of the U.S. population would die. Recent studies by the eminent climatologists Toon and Robock have shown that such a war would have a huge and immediate impact on climate world wide. If all of the warheads in the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals were drawn into the conflict, the firestorms they caused would loft 180 million tons of soot and debris into the upper atmosphere — blotting out the sun. Temperatures across the globe would fall an average of 18 degrees Fahrenheit to levels not seen on earth since the depth of the last ice age, 18,000 years ago. Agriculture would stop, eco-systems would collapse, and many species, including perhaps our own, would become extinct. It is common to discuss nuclear war as a low-probabillity event. But is this true? We know of five occcasions during the last 30 years when either the U.S. or Russia believed it was under attack and prepared a counter-attack. The most recent of these near misses occurred after the end of the Cold War on Jan. 25, 1995, when the Russians mistook a U.S. weather rocket launched from Norway for a possible attack. Jan. 25, 1995, was an ordinary day with no major crisis involving the U.S. and Russia. But, unknown to almost every inhabitant on the planet, a misunderstanding led to the potential for a nuclear war. The ready alert status of nuclear weapons that existed in 1995 remains in place today. Tensions are on the brink – the US must reassure Russia’s allies to resolve hostilities Corboy et al 4/18 (2013, NYT, Denis Corboy, a visiting senior research fellow at Kings College, London, served as European Commission ambassador to Armenia and Georgia. William Courtney was U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia, and special assistant to the president for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia. Kenneth Yalowitz served as U.S. ambassador to Belarus and Georgia, “Rising Tensions With Russia,” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/global/rising-tensions-with-russia.html?_r=0, jkim) Russia’s relations with the West are again plunging. This time the cause is repression in Russia and the Western reaction to it. Last time it was the invasion of Georgia in 2008, and before that NATO expansion to the east. Unless the West develops an enduring and resilient strategy toward Russia, the deterioration in ties may be prolonged. Popular support for President Vladimir Putin and his semi-authoritarian rule is ebbing. In late 2011 he began facing large demonstrations against his government. Polls by the respected Levada Center show that although 64 percent of respondents support Putin, 55 percent want him to leave office in 2018 when his third term ends. The head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee says corruption amounts to $300 billion annually. Seemingly unnerved by the opposition, Putin is responding with repression. Last May the police beat participants in a Moscow demonstration. Fearing a democratic “color revolution” — as Georgia and Ukraine experienced in the mid-2000s — Putin arranged for a law that requires civil society groups to register as foreign “agents.” The authorities are raiding their offices. In December, a U.S. law provided for sanctions on those responsible for the punishment and death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was investigating official corruption, and for other gross violations of human rights in Russia. Putin then banned U.S. adoptions of Russian children, leaving thousands of orphans stranded. Political show trials, a Soviet relic, seem to be resuming. This week Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader, went on trial on trumped-up charges of embezzling timber from a state company. Demonstrators from last May 6 are being threatened with years in prison or psychiatric confinement, another Soviet-era punishment. Putin’s retrograde steps mask deeper troubles. Educated elites are alienated by the turn toward authoritarian rule, even if they have yet to organize an effective democratic opposition. Discrimination against Muslim and ethnic minorities is a cancer. Putin adds to concerns by tacking closer to the Russian Orthodox Church. With the prospect of a declining population, the economy needs increasing numbers of migrant laborers from Central Asia and the Caucasus, yet they face frequent mistreatment. Last year, according to the Sova Center in Moscow, the level of xenophobia and radical nationalism in Russia remained high: Hate attacks left 19 people dead and injured 187. Putin’s nationalization of certain key industries combined with his anti-American posturing erodes the investment climate. The economy is at risk because of high dependence on oil and gas exports, earnings from which may drop as productivity declines in older West Siberian oil fields and competition for gas export markets sharpens amid rising world production. Western trade and investment is needed. Russia’s difficulties with the West are spreading. Last week hundreds demonstrated during Putin’s visit to Germany, and Chancellor Angela Merkel had sharp words on human rights. In the Cyprus banking crisis, the West was unwilling to ease difficulties for Russian depositors, many of whom were suspected of laundering ill-gotten gains. How can relations with Russia be put on a more stable footing? The answer lies in implementing consistent and sustainable policies. Pragmatic cooperation must continue. Examples are lessening nuclear dangers, operating the International Space Station and developing the Arctic. In Moscow this week the U.S. national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, registered dismay over human rights abuses while encouraging progress on common interests. Western support for the security of Russia’s neighbors reduces risks of the destabilizing effects of overreach by the Kremlin. After a Russian cyberattack on Estonia in 2007, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization placed a major cyberdefense center there. Last year, when Moscow warned that putting NATO missile defenses in Poland would cause Russia to base new nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad, the West objected and reassured Poland of its support. Consistent Western support for human rights and political freedoms is critical. The West should expose political show trials, find creative ways to aid besieged civil society groups, and help Internet users circumnavigate censorship. The West ought to continue backing Russia’s international economic engagement, such as its new World Trade Organization membership, but on the same basis as it does for other nations. Holding Russia to accepted standards while providing technical assistance will send the right signal. The West is in for a difficult period with Russia. It must combine principles with realism. The Russians will determine the pace of their democratic evolution, but the West can help by nurturing collaboration while keeping faith with those who seek a more open Russia. The plan solves – ending the embargo allows Russia-Cuba military cooperation – that eliminates the risk of Russian flashpoints Lee 8 Rens Lee President of Global Advisory Service, Stanford PhD, Foreign affairs, Rethinking the Embargo, November, December 2008 http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64618/rens-lee/rethinking-the-embargo, JLB Jorge Castañeda (and#34;Morning in Latin America,and#34; September/October 2008) argues for rethinking the United Statesand#39; Cuba policy because it has not worked and is increasingly irrelevant. Yet there are also compelling economic and security reasons for ending the isolation of Cuba now, without imposing preconditions or waiting for a democratic transition. Current U.S. policy makes Cuba a target of opportunity for a resurgent and increasingly hostile Russia. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin talks openly about and#34;restoring Russiaand#39;s position in Cuba,and#34; and hints are surfacing in Moscow that Russia might reestablish a military and intelligence presence on the island in response to the planned U.S. missile defense shield in eastern Europe. Points of cooperation under consideration include using Cuba as a refueling stop for long-range bombers and for reconnaissance ships and aircraft and reopening a gigantic Soviet-era electronic monitoring and surveillance facility near Havana. A state visit to Havana in July by the hard-line Russian deputy prime minister, Igor Sechin (a reported former KGB agent and a member of Putinand#39;s inner circle), and the head of Russiaand#39;s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, could presage a new strategic dialogue between Moscow and Havana, even though the visit was officially touted as investment-related.¶ Also, it is hardly coincidental that the warming of Cuban-Russian ties and the discussion of a renewed military relationship have followed closely on the accession of Raul Castro as the de facto Cuban leader. Moscow has historically regarded Rauland#39;s brother Fidel as emotionally volatile, a view stemming from Fideland#39;s erratic behavior during the Cuban missile crisis, when, in the Sovietsand#39; view, Fidel was trying to provoke a U.S.-Soviet nuclear conflict. With Raul -- who resembles a Soviet-style apparatchik -- in charge, Russia may feel more comfortable deploying strategic or intelligence assets on the island.
1AC OFAC Contention 2 is OFAC OFAC is overstretched—the plan is key to effective sanctions Johnson et al 10 - Andy Johnson, Director, National Security Program, Kyle Spector, Policy Advisor, National Security Program, Kristina Lilac, National Security Program, Senior Fellows of The Third Way Institute, (“End the Embargo of Cuba”, Article for The Third Way Institute, 9/16/10, http://content.thirdway.org/publications/326/Third_Way_Memo_-_End_the_Embargo_of_Cuba.pdf, Accessed 7/02/13, AW)
Keeping the embargo in place requires that the US government devote time and resources to fighting a Cold War -8 era threat. Senator Chris Dodd argued in a 2005 op ed that the US spends “extraordinary resources” each year to enforce the sanctions instead of devoting such resources to the fight against terrorism. 4 While the financial resources dedicated to enforcing the embargo may be limited compared to resources dedicated to other causes, lifting the Cuban embargo could put the US in a better position to fight terrorist organizations by freeing up resources currently enforcing the embargo. For example, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which governs travel and trade between the US and Cuba, is also responsible for maintaining sanctions against truly problematic countries, including Iran and North Korea. OFAC also is responsible for responding to economic threats posed by terrorist organizations and narcotics traffickers. By ending OFAC’s need to regulate the Cuban embargo, OFAC could instead devote those resources to respond to the current threats posed by rogue states and terrorist networks That revamps sanctions on Iran – previous lack of focus and disorganization Maberry and Jensen 13 – J. Scott Maberry, J.D, Georgetown University Law Center, International Trade partner in the Government Contracts, Investigations and International Trade Practice Group, Mark L. Jensen, J.D, Harvard Law School, International Trade associate in the Government Contracts, Investigations and International Trade Practice Group, (“OFAC gets hot, bothered on Iran and Cuba: how economic sanctions work today”, Report for Sheppard Mullin Richter and Hampton LLP, 5/7/13, http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=8657e6ce-454a-4eaf-ba8b-d225ea59ecdd, Accessed 7/9/13, AW)
People who practice U.S. economic sanctions law like to talk about how sanctions are policy-oriented, or an engine of U.S. foreign policy. Whereas some laws may be more opaquely political, economic sanctions and embargoes seem to express most bluntly how international leverage works through regulation. And yet, a few recent regulatory developments show that the direction that sanctions take is not always predictable. The U.S. Department of Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) has had a raucously busy year. A torrent of development in laws and regulations on Iran served as the unsurprising focus of this year’s OFAC symposium, held on March 19, 2013, in Washington D.C. Among the developments were sanctions imposed on non-U.S. banks, a new executive order related to the purchase of petroleum and petrochemical products from Iran, an expanded scope of the Iran Transactions and Sanctions Regulations to companies “owned or controlled” by U.S. companies, and a new statute that targets sectors of the economy related to goods and services to Iran, including secondary financial transactions in energy, shipping, shipbuilding, precious metal, and graphite. See our recent posts on Iran here and here. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Iran sanctions program is its proliferation into not only additional laws and regulations, but also additional regulatory regimes. The Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (“CISADA”), the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 (“NDAA”), and Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012 (“ITR”), have created a polyglot system focused on individual sectors of the economy. OFAC presenters at the March symposium gave the sense of a proliferation of laws that is undoubtedly aimed at accomplishing U.S. foreign policy goals. But the laws are paradoxically both targeted (at industries, vessels, banks) and incredibly expansive in jurisdiction. The system is the embodiment of the powerful yet somewhat disorganized U.S. government piling on everything it can to economically overwhelm Iran. The Iran program also serves as a good case study of how far and wide economic sanctions can be made to reach. If legislation of past years has proved anything, it is that the U.S. Congress appears ready to use any and all means within its legislative authority to sanction Iran. Insofar as Congress is able to map out the reach of the U.S. financial system and economy further, it seems likely that additional sanctions will be applied.
Sanctions solve Iran prolif – multilateral coalitions – international position of strength DeLeon et al 12 - Rudy deLeon, National and International Security, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Recipient of The Defense Civilian Distinguished Service Award in 1994, 1995, and 2001, National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal in 2001, Former US Senior Department of Defense Official, Senior Vice President of National Security and International Policy at American Progress, with Brian Katulis, Peter Juul, Matt Duss and Ken Sofer, (“Strengthening America’s Options on Iran”, Report for The Center for American Progress, April 2012, http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2012/04/pdf/iran_10questions_INTRO.pdf, Accessed 7/10/13, AW) *NOTE: P5+1 is comprised of: United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom, France and Germany*
Indeed, amid an array of political transitions and military conflicts around the globe, the prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons has galvanized a global debate on how to stop the regime in Tehran from getting the bomb. This debate has spilled over into the domestic politics of the world’s great powers, becoming a talking point in the 2012 U.S. presidential election and the subject of behind-the-scenes discussion during China’s transition to its next generation of political leadership at their Party Congress this fall. In the Middle East and Central Asia, Iran’s nuclear program has implications for the ongoing civil war in Syria, a political transition beset by economic troubles in Egypt, and U.S. and NATO ground combat operations in Afghanistan entering their 10th year. Oil price surges worldwide threaten economic recoveries around the globe—recoveries Iran could thwart in a number of ways depending on how it reacts to global pressure to come clean on its nuclear program. Events are quickly producing a decision point: A concerned Israel warns the diplomatic community that its window for military options to delay or deny Iran’s potential weapon is not unlimited due to the progress Iran has made in hardening its nuclear facilities beyond Israeli capability to penetrate them. At the same time, a vigorous roster of nations is tightening the burden of economic sanctions against Iran—isolating the country’s already feeble economy, which survives only because of its vast oil reserves. Iran—a longtime supporter of terrorism, both directly and through its proxies, with a track record of dissimulation on its nuclear ambitions—has no reservoir of credibility or good will, and its repeated professions that its nuclear program is peaceful deserve no benefit of the doubt. Of course Iran could quickly defuse the crisis and allow the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency full access to all facilities of interest so it can measure and catalogue Iran’s capability to produce highly enriched uranium (the essential element required for weapons production), and Iran could come clean on its known nuclear weapons research. As IAEA Director General Yukio Amano affirms, Iran needs “to cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency on all outstanding issues, particularly those which give rise to concerns about the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program, including by providing access without delay to all sites, equipment, persons and documents requested by the Agency.” It is Iran’s lack of response that fuels concerns about their nuclear ambitions. Importantly, there is a strong bipartisan consensus in America and within the inter national community on this single point—an Iranian nuclear weapon would destabilize the one of the world’s most important oil-producing regions at a critical point in the global economic recovery, would harm Israel’s security, and would severely undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Unfortunately, much of the political debate in this U.S. election year now distracts from these central realities. Today the United States is leading a successful three-year global effort to isolate Iran diplomatically and implement a broad range of strict economic sanctions targeted at undermining its nuclear program. The Obama administration’s initial outreach to the Iranian regime in 2009 did not achieve immediate constructive results, but the demonstration of American good faith forged greater international unity around the problem and served as an important force multiplier for subsequent successful efforts to pressure the regime. Now, as talks with the P5+1 approach, Iran must choose how to respond to the growing global concerns about its nuclear program and make the choice to live up to its international obligations or face increased international isolation. During the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama defended his proposed engagement policy by explaining that “we’re not going to be able to execute the kind of sanctions we need without some cooperation with some countries like Russia and China that...have extensive trade with Iran but potentially have an interest in making sure Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.” Affirming his goal of “tough, direct diplomacy with Iran,” Obama acknowledged that diplomacy “may not work, but if it doesn’t work, then we have strengthened our ability to form alliances to impose tough sanctions.” Over the past three years, this is precisely what the Obama administration achieved. The engagement policy has served as an important force multiplier for efforts to pressure the Iranian government. By giving Iran repeated opportunities to meet its international responsibilities, this administration has been able to forge a far stronger and more enduring international coalition to pressure Iran. Far from strengthening the Iranian regime, as some critics have alleged, Obama’s engagement effort has in fact further isolated it. The United States and its partners in the P5+1 group are operating from a position of strength that would have been hard to imagine four short years ago. U.S. policy on Iran should not be determined by partisan politics and easy sound bites. Nor will U.S. policy objectives be quickly accomplished. Instead, this crisis requires policymakers and all citizens to challenge their own preconceived notions and make decisions based on facts while preparing fully for all contingencies.
Iran and North Korea are trying to proliferate now Tirone 7/17 (Jonathan, 2013, “Iran’s North Korea Links Draw Scrutiny at Nuclear-Weapon Meeting,” Bloomberg reporter, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-17/iran-s-north-korea-links-draw-scrutiny-at-nuclear-weapon-meeting.html, jkim) The possibility that North Korea is sharing nuclear-weapon test data with Iran cannot be ruled out and is a proliferation risk, the former chief of a U.S. atomic-bomb laboratory said today at a meeting in Vienna. “Sharing test information is a very dangerous thing to do,” Siegfried Hecker, director emeritus at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, nuclear-weapons lab and a researcher at Stanford University, told a meeting of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty Organization in the Austrian capital. He called the potential sharing “very troublesome.” North Korea has tested three nuclear weapons with the most recent detonation on Feb. 12. Iran, under investigation for a decade over alleged nuclear-weapons work, maintains “strong” weapons ties with the secretive Asian regime, according to U.S. intelligence reports, which add that North Korea “retains the potential for exporting nuclear materials or technology.” “Iran doesn’t need a nuclear weapon and has never claimed it would need to test in the future,” Seyed Hosseini, Iran’s deputy envoy to the CTBTO, said following Hecker’s remarks. “There is no diversion for military purposes.” Hecker, 69, toured North Korean nuclear facilities in 2010 and was first to report on the country’s uranium-enrichment program. Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who sold atomic equipment to both North Korea and Iran, may have also provided data on his country’s nuclear-weapon tests, Hecker said. Recognized nuclear-weapons states like Russia and the U.S. have detonated thousands of atomic bombs to increase the reliability and yield of their devices. Data on weapon effectiveness are closely held secrets. The nuclear-test-ban treaty wants to restrict proliferation by eliminating the ability of countries to experiment with new bomb designs. ‘Nuclear Option’ “Iran has put all the things in place to build a bomb without taking a decision to do so,” said Hecker. “They want the nuclear option.” In order to keep that option without conducting a nuclear test of its own, Iran will need data from other nuclear-weapons countries, Hecker said, adding that North Korea will have to conduct additional testing in order to build a miniaturized nuclear device capable of fitting on a missile. “They have a tunnel that’s ready to go if they want to test again,” Hecker said, pointing to satellite imagery showing a test facility south of February’s blast.
OFAC administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, and those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. OFAC acts under the President’s wartime and national emergency powers, as well as under authority granted by specific legislation, to impose controls on transactions and freeze assets under U.S. jurisdiction. Many of the sanctions are based on United Nations and other international mandates, are multilateral in scope, and involve close cooperation with allied governments. OFAC requirements are separate and distinct from the BSA, but both OFAC and the BSA share a common national security goal. For this reason, many financial institutions view compliance with OFAC sanctions as related to BSA compliance obligations; supervisory examination for BSA compliance is logically connected to the examination of a financial institution’s compliance with OFAC sanctions.
If and when Iran gets nuclear weapons it would set off a global nightmare. Most obviously, Iran could use nuclear arms to attack Israel. Itand#39;s easy to say that Iranand#39;s leaders would be cautious, but what if ideology, error, or an extremist faction decides to wipe the Jewish state off the map? Even a 10-percent chance of nuclear holocaust is terrifying. And if Israel decides its existence is at risk, it would launch a preemptive attack that would also produce a big crisis. Thatand#39;s just for starters. Once Iran has nuclear weapons, every Arab state, with the exception of Iranand#39;s ally Syria, would also be imperiled. Those countries would beg for U.S. protection. But could they depend on America, under the Barack Obama administration, to go to war - especially a nuclear one - to shield them? Uncertain of U.S. reliability, these governments would rush to appease Iran. To survive, the Arab states will do whatever Iran wants - which would come at high cost for America: alliances would weaken and military bases would close down. No Arab state would dare support peace with Israel, either. But Arab states wouldnand#39;t feel safe with just appeasement. An armsand#39; race would escalate in which several other countries would try to buy or build nukes of their own. Tension and chance for nuclear war, whether through accident or miscalculation, would soar. The United States would eventually have to get dragged in. European allies would also be scared. As reluctant as they are to help America in the Middle East, that paralysis would get worse. As willing as they are to appease Tehran, theyand#39;d go far beyond that. Meanwhile, an emboldened Iran would push to limit oil and gas production and increase prices. Other oil producers would feel compelled to move away from their former, more responsible practices. Consumersand#39; fears would push up the prices further. Yet thereand#39;s worse. Flush with a feel of victory, Iran and its allies - Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iraqi insurgents - would recruit more members to its cause. These terrorist groups would interpret the retreat of more moderate Arab countries and the West as signs of weakness and use it to fuel more aggression. Indeed, all Islamists, even those hostile to Iran, would view its achievement as a great Islamic victory. Hundreds of thousands would join or become active supporters of radical Islamist groups throughout the Middle East, in Europe and elsewhere. Fervent with a sense of divine favor and imminent victory, theyand#39;d escalate their operations. The result would be increased violence and possible civil war in every Arab state and far more terrorism in the West. Such a terrible scenario is likely even if Iran never actually uses a nuclear weapon on another country. This new era in the Middle East would bring risks and the probability of war for America that would dwarf all the regionand#39;s current troubles and the crises faced by the United States in the whole world. And thatand#39;s why itand#39;s so important to avoid Iran getting nuclear weapons in the first place.
Sanctions solve Korean prolif Bishop, United States Army War College, 2004 (Colonel David J., “DISMANTLING NORTH KOREA’S NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAMS”, USAWC Strategy Research Project, March 19th) CONTAINMENT A second course of action is to pursue a policy of containment. One dictionary defines containment as “a policy of creating strategic alliances in order to check the expansion of a hostile power or ideology or to force it to negotiate peacefully.”54 Containment seeks to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions through a series of punitive actions. In other words, the DRPK would have to comply with internationally imposed conditions to avoid negative consequences of coercive diplomacy and economic sanctions. The goal of a containment policy would be to isolate North Korea in order to pressure the Kim government to comply with nuclear control regimes. A containment policy would emphasize the military 7 element of power (short of preemption), along with coercive diplomacy and further economic sanctions. Because a credible threat is the engine of containment, this option precludes the offer of a security guarantee by the United States. Finally, a successful containment strategy requires multilateral solidarity (especially among key regional actors) in isolating North Korea. Some example of containment concepts follow. Military actions could include aggressive interdiction of vessels inbound to and outbound from North Korean ports, with an option to upgrade to quarantine if WMD proliferation efforts are discovered.55 Long-term deployment of an additional aircraft carrier battle group, surface combatants and additional bomber aircraft to the Western Pacific should precede such actions to prepare for potential escalation of tensions.56 Also, as part of a containment policy, the U.S. should take prudent defensive actions to protect its interests in Korea. To enhance deterrence, the U.S. could revert to its former policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula, to deter the Kim regime from taking escalatory action.57 Relocation of all U.S. forces south of the Han River (and out of range of most of North Korea’s threatening arsenal), and upgrade of air defense, and nuclear, biological and chemical protective measures would significantly reduce risks to U.S. forces in Korea.58 Additionally, a United Nations Security Council Resolution against North Korea condemning its nuclear weapons program and a reprioritization of humanitarian food shipments to more deserving countries would help the long term success of containment. 59 Reintroduction of IAEA inspections should be included in a containment strategy as well. Finally, another tool in a containment strategy is to interdict the illicit activities of the Pyongyang regime. From 1995 to 2001, the North Korean GNP fell from $22.3 billion to $15.7 billion. In 2001, legitimate businesses exports totaled only $650 million, compared to illegal income from drugs which was estimated somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. Also, North Korea made over $560 million in profit from missile sales and sold over $100 million in counterfeit U.S. currency worldwide. By shutting down Kim Jong Il’s illegal revenues from missiles, drugs and counterfeiting, the U.S. could greatly hinder North Korea’s ability to finance its nuclear weapons programs.60 The U.S. led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) is a promising program currently under development. The PSI program involves multilateral interdiction of the transport or transfer of WMD and missile technology. Eleven nations currently participate including the following Asian states: Australia, Japan and Singapore (China is not a participant). Although the PSI has not successfully seized WMD, it has been successful in seizing illegal narcotics.61 8 Advantages and Disadvantages of Containment The main advantage of containment is it directly addresses the risk presented by North Korea’s nuclear weapons today as well as the risk of proliferation in the future through a direct path to resolving the issue.62 However this approach presents significant operational and political risks.
Korean prolif causes nuclear war Hayes and Hamel-Green 9—Professor of International Relations, RMIT University, Executive Director of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development, degree in History, PhD from Berkeley—AND—Michael Hamel-Green, Professor, Executive Dean, Faculty of Arts, Education and Human Development @ Victoria University, BA MA Melb, DipEd Hawthorn, PhD La Trobe (Peter, 14 December 2009, The Path Not Taken, The Way Still Open: Denuclearizing The Korean Peninsula And Northeast Asia,and#34; The Asia-Pacific Journal, http://www.japanfocus.org/-Michael-Hamel_Green/3267, RBatra)
The consequences of failing to address the proliferation threat posed by the North Korea developments, and related political and economic issues, are serious, not only for the Northeast Asian region but for the whole international community. At worst, there is the possibility of nuclear attack1, whether by intention, miscalculation, or merely accident, leading to the resumption of Korean War hostilities. On the Korean Peninsula itself, key population centres are well within short or medium range missiles. The whole of Japan is likely to come within North Korean missile range. Pyongyang has a population of over 2 million, Seoul (close to the North Korean border) 11 million, and Tokyo over 20 million. Even a limited nuclear exchange would result in a holocaust of unprecedented proportions. But the catastrophe within the region would not be the only outcome. New research indicates that even a limited nuclear war in the region would rearrange our global climate far more quickly than global warming. Westberg draws attention to new studies modelling the effects of even a limited nuclear exchange involving approximately 100 Hiroshima-sized 15 kt bombs2 (by comparison it should be noted that the United States currently deploys warheads in the range 100 to 477 kt, that is, individual warheads equivalent in yield to a range of 6 to 32 Hiroshimas).The studies indicate that the soot from the fires produced would lead to a decrease in global temperature by 1.25 degrees Celsius for a period of 6-8 years.3 In Westberg’s view: That is not global winter, but the nuclear darkness will cause a deeper drop in temperature than at any time during the last 1000 years. The temperature over the continents would decrease substantially more than the global average. A decrease in rainfall over the continents would also follow…The period of nuclear darkness will cause much greater decrease in grain production than 5 and it will continue for many years...hundreds of millions of people will die from hunger…To make matters even worse, such amounts of smoke injected into the stratosphere would cause a huge reduction in the Earth’s protective ozone.4 These, of course, are not the only consequences. Reactors might also be targeted, causing further mayhem and downwind radiation effects, superimposed on a smoking, radiating ruin left by nuclear next-use. Millions of refugees would flee the affected regions. The direct impacts, and the follow-on impacts on the global economy via ecological and food insecurity, could make the present global financial crisis pale by comparison. How the great powers, especially the nuclear weapons states respond to such a crisis, and in particular, whether nuclear weapons are used in response to nuclear first-use, could make or break the global non proliferation and disarmament regimes. There could be many unanticipated impacts on regional and global security relationships5, with subsequent nuclear breakout and geopolitical turbulence, including possible loss-of-control over fissile material or warheads in the chaos of nuclear war, and aftermath chain-reaction affects involving other potential proliferant states. The Korean nuclear proliferation issue is not just a regional threat but a global one that warrants priority consideration from the international community. North Korea is currently believed to have sufficient plutonium stocks to produce up to 12 nuclear weapons.6 If and when it is successful in implementing a uranium enrichment program - having announced publicly that it is experimenting with enrichment technology on September 4, 20097 in a communication with the UN Security Council - it would likely acquire the capacity to produce over 100 such weapons. Although some may dismiss Korean Peninsula proliferation risks on the assumption that the North Korean regime will implode as a result of its own economic problems, food problems, and treatment of its own populace, there is little to suggest that this is imminent. If this were to happen, there would be the risk of nuclear weapons falling into hands of non-state actors in the disorder and chaos that would ensue. Even without the outbreak of nuclear hostilities on the Korean Peninsula in either the near or longer term, North Korea has every financial incentive under current economic sanctions and the needs of its military command economy to export its nuclear and missile technologies to other states. Indeed, it has already been doing this for some time. The Proliferation Security Initiative may conceivably prove effective in intercepting ship-borne nuclear exports, but it is by no means clear how air-transported materials could similarly be intercepted. Given the high stakes involved, North Korean proliferation, if unaddressed and unreversed, has the potential to destabilize the whole East Asian region and beyond. Even if a nuclear exchange does not occur in the short term, the acute sense of nuclear threat that has been experienced for over five decades by North Koreans as a result of US strategic deterrence is now likely to be keenly felt by fellow Koreans south of the 38th Parallel and Japanese across the waters of the Sea of Japan. China, too, must surely feel itself to be at risk from North Korean nuclear weapons, or from escalation that might ensue from next-use in the Korean Peninsula resulting not only in the environmental consequences noted above, but in regime collapse and massive refugee flows. South Korea and Japan appear willing to rely on their respective bilateral security pacts with the United States to deter North Korean nuclear attack for the time being. However, should South Korea and/or Japan acquire nuclear weapons, the outcome would be destabilizing, especially if this resulted from rupture of their alliance relationships with the United States. Both have the technical capability to do so very rapidly. South Korea has previously engaged in nuclear weapons research but desisted after US pressure. Japan still proclaims its adherence to the three Non-Nuclear Principles although recent confirmation that the United States routinely transited nuclear weapons through Japan and retains the right of emergency reintroduction of nuclear weapons has tarnished Japan’s non-nuclear image. Moreover, it has large stockpiles of plutonium that could rapidly be used to produce nuclear warheads. Such responses, already advocated by conservative and nationalist groups within South Korea and Japan, could trigger a regional nuclear arms race involving the Koreas, Japan, Taiwan, and China, with incalculable wider consequences for Southeast Asia, South Asia and the whole Pacific and beyond. These developments would spell the demise of the current global non-proliferation regime as underpinned by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Failure to reverse the DPRK’s nuclear breakout is also an important factor driving a general malaise in the exercise of American power which one of the authors has characterized elsewhere as “the end of American nuclear hegemony.”8
Plan
Thus the plan: The United States federal government should normalize its economic relations with the Republic of Cuba.
1AC Latin America Contention 3 is Latin America relations
They solve nuclear material transfer and warming Shifter 12 (Michael is an Adjunct Professor of Latin American Studies at Georgetown Universityand#39;s School of Foreign Service. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and writes for the Counciland#39;s journal Foreign Affairs. He serves as the President of Inter-American Dialogue. “Remaking the Relationship: The United States and Latin America,” April, IAD Policy Report, http://www.thedialogue.org/PublicationFiles/IAD2012PolicyReportFINAL.pdf)
Cuba, too, poses a significant challenge for relations between the United States and Latin America. The 50-year-old US embargo against Cuba is rightly criticized throughout the hemisphere as a failed and punitive instrument. It has long been a strain on US-Latin American relations. Although the United States has recently moved in the right direction and taken steps to relax restrictions on travel to Cuba, Washington needs to do far more to dismantle its severe, outdated constraints on normalized relations with Cuba. Cuba is one of the residual issues that most obstructs more effective US-Latin American engagement. At the same time, Cuba’s authoritarian regime should be of utmost concern to all countries in the Americas. At present, it is the only country without free, multi-party elections, and its government fully controls the press. Latin American and Caribbean nations could be instrumental in supporting Cuba’s eventual transition to democratic rule. An end to the US policy of isolating Cuba, without setting aside US concern about human rights violations, would be an important first step. Many of the issues on the hemispheric agenda carry critical global dimensions. Because of this, the United States should seek greater cooperation and consultation with Brazil, Mexico, and other countries of the region in world forums addressing shared interests. Brazil has the broadest international presence and influence of any Latin American nation. In recent years it has become far more active on global issues of concern to the United States. The United States and Brazil have clashed over such issues as Iran’s nuclear program, non-proliferation, and the Middle East uprisings, but they have cooperated when their interests converged, such as in the World Trade Organization and the G-20 (Mexico, Argentina, and Canada also participate in the G-20), and in efforts to rebuild and provide security for Haiti. Washington has worked with Brazil and other Latin American countries to raise the profile of emerging economies in various international financial agencies, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In addition to economic and financial matters, Brazil and other Latin American nations are assuming enhanced roles on an array of global political, environmental, and security issues. Several for which US and Latin American cooperation could become increasingly important include: As the world’s lone nuclear-weapons-free region, Latin America has the opportunity to participate more actively in non-proliferation efforts. Although US and Latin American interests do not always converge on non-proliferation questions, they align on some related goals. For example, the main proliferation challenges today are found in developing and unstable parts of the world, as well as in the leakage—or transfer of nuclear materials—to terrorists. In that context, south-south connections are crucial. Brazil could play a pivotal role. Many countries in the region give priority to climate change challenges. This may position them as a voice in international debates on this topic. The importance of the Amazon basin to worldwide climate concerns gives Brazil and five other South American nations a special role to play Mexico already has assumed a prominent position on climate change and is active in global policy debates. Brazil organized the first-ever global environmental meeting in 1992 and, this year, will host Rio+20. Mexico hosted the second international meeting on climate change in Cancún in 2010. The United States is handicapped by its inability to devise a climate change policy. Still, it should support coordination on the presumption of shared interests on a critical policy challenge. Latin Americans are taking more active leadership on drug policy in the hemisphere and could become increasingly influential in global discussions of drug strategies. Although the United States and Latin America are often at odds on drug policy, they have mutual interests and goals that should allow consultation and collaboration on a new, more effective approach to the problem.
Now is the key time for improved US-Latin American ties. Permanent collapse is coming. Shifter ‘12 (Michael is an Adjunct Professor of Latin American Studies at Georgetown Universityand#39;s School of Foreign Service. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and writes for the Counciland#39;s journal Foreign Affairs. He serves as the President of Inter-American Dialogue. “Remaking the Relationship: The United States and Latin America,” April, IAD Policy Report, http://www.thedialogue.org/PublicationFiles/IAD2012PolicyReportFINAL.pdf)
If the United States and Latin America do not make the effort now, the chance may slip away. The most likely scenario then would be marked by a continued drift in their relationship, further deterioration of hemisphere-wide institutions, a reduced ability and willingness to deal with a range of common problems, and a spate of missed opportunities for more robust growth and greater social equity. The United States and Latin America would go their separate ways, manage their affairs independently of one another, and forego the opportunities that could be harvested by a more productive relationship. There are risks of simply maintaining the status quo. Urgent problems will inevitably arise that require trust and effective collaboration to resolve. And there is a chance that tensions between the United States and Latin America could become much worse, adversely affecting everyone’s interests and wellbeing. It is time to seize the moment and overhaul hemispheric relations.
The risk of nuclear terrorism is high Brill and Luongo ’12 (Kenneth C. Brill is a former U.S. ambassador to the I.A.E.A.Kenneth N. Luongo is president of the Partnership for Global Security. Both are members of the Fissile Material Working Group, a nonpartisan nongovernmental organization, “Nuclear Terrorism: A Clear Danger”, March 15, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/opinion/nuclear-terrorism-a-clear-danger.html, CMR)
Terrorists exploit gaps in security. The current global regime for protecting the nuclear materials that terrorists desire for their ultimate weapon is far from seamless. It is based largely on unaccountable, voluntary arrangements that are inconsistent across borders. Its weak links make it dangerous and inadequate to prevent nuclear terrorism.¶ Later this month in Seoul, the more than 50 world leaders who will gather for the second Nuclear Security Summit need to seize the opportunity to start developing an accountable regime to prevent nuclear terrorism.¶ There is a consensus among international leaders that the threat of nuclear terrorism is real, not a Hollywood confection. President Obama, the leaders of 46 other nations, the heads of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations, and numerous experts have called nuclear terrorism one of the most serious threats to global security and stability. It is alsopreventable with more aggressive action.¶ At least four terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, have demonstrated interest in using a nuclear device. These groups operate in or near states with histories of questionable nuclear security practices. Terrorists do not need to steal a nuclear weapon. It is quite possible to make an improvised nuclear device from highly enriched uranium or plutonium being used for civilian purposes. And there is a black market in such material. There have been 18 confirmed thefts or loss of weapons-usable nuclear material. In 2011, the Moldovan police broke up part of a smuggling ring attempting to sell highly enriched uranium; one member is thought to remain at large with a kilogram of this material.
Cooperation is key to check terrorist acquisition – that ensures retaliation which escalates Ayson 10 Robert – Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington – “After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, July, obtained via InformaWorld
A terrorist nuclear attack, and even the use of nuclear weapons in response by the country attacked in the first place, would not necessarily represent the worst of the nuclear worlds imaginable. Indeed, there are reasons to wonder whether nuclear terrorism should ever be regarded as belonging in the category of truly existential threats. A contrast can be drawn here with the global catastrophe that would come from a massive nuclear exchange between two or more of the sovereign states that possess these weapons in significant numbers. Even the worst terrorism that the twenty-first century might bring would fade into insignificance alongside considerations of what a general nuclear war would have wrought in the Cold War period. And it must be admitted that as long as the major nuclear weapons states have hundreds and even thousands of nuclear weapons at their disposal, there is always the possibility of a truly awful nuclear exchange taking place precipitated entirely by state possessors themselves. But these two nuclear worlds—a non-state actor nuclear attack and a catastrophic interstate nuclear exchange—are not necessarily separable. It is just possible that some sort of terrorist attack, and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events leading to a massive exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that possess them. In this context, today’s and tomorrow’s terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during the early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as raising the risks of a catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem. It may require a considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially plausible situation where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to such a massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States, it might well be wondered just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the picture, not least because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible to be involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten them as well. Some possibilities, however remote, do suggest themselves. For example, how might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the act of nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks, FN 40 and if for some reason Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of that nuclear material to a particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be “spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the materials used and, most important … some indication of where the nuclear material came from.”41 Alternatively, if the act of nuclear terrorism came as a complete surprise, and American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible at all) suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like the United Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program continues, and possibly Pakistan. But at what stage would Russia and China be definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo? In particular, if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in Washington’s relations with Russia and/or China, and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers, would officials and political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring would only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war, as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The reverse might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict with the United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible perpetrator or encourager of the attack? Washington’s early response to a terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided) confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example, in the noise and confusion during the immediate aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be expected to place the country’s armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of alert. In such a tense environment, when careful planning runs up against the friction of reality, it is just possible that Moscow and/or China might mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the temptations to preempt such actions might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with a devastating response. As part of its initial response to the act of nuclear terrorism (as discussed earlier) Washington might decide to order a significant conventional (or nuclear) retaliatory or disarming attack against the leadership of the terrorist group and/or states seen to support that group. Depending on the identity and especially the location of these targets, Russia and/or China might interpret such action as being far too close for their comfort, and potentially as an infringement on their spheres of influence and even on their sovereignty. One far-fetched but perhaps not impossible scenario might stem from a judgment in Washington that some of the main aiders and abetters of the terrorist action resided somewhere such as Chechnya, perhaps in connection with what Allison claims is the “Chechen insurgents’ … long-standing interest in all things nuclear.”42 American pressure on that part of the world would almost certainly raise alarms in Moscow that might require a degree of advanced consultation from Washington that the latter found itself unable or unwilling to provide.There is also the question of how other nuclear-armed states respond to the act of nuclear terrorism on another member of that special club. It could reasonably be expected that following a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States, both Russia and China would extend immediate sympathy and support to Washington and would work alongside the United States in the Security Council. But there is just a chance, albeit a slim one, where the support of Russia and/or China is less automatic in some cases than in others. For example, what would happen if the United States wished to discuss its right to retaliate against groups based in their territory? If, for some reason, Washington found the responses of Russia and China deeply underwhelming, (neither “for us or against us”) might it also suspect that they secretly were in cahoots with the group, increasing (again perhaps ever so slightly) the chances of a major exchange. If the terrorist group had some connections to groups in Russia and China, or existed in areas of the world over which Russia and China held sway, and if Washington felt that Moscow or Beijing were placing a curiously modest level of pressure on them, what conclusions might it then draw about their culpability? If Washington decided to use, or decided to threaten the use of, nuclear weapons, the responses of Russia and China would be crucial to the chances of avoiding a more serious nuclear exchange. They might surmise, for example, that while the act of nuclear terrorism was especially heinous and demanded a strong response, the response simply had to remain below the nuclear threshold. It would be one thing for a non-state actor to have broken the nuclear use taboo, but an entirely different thing for a state actor, and indeed the leading state in the international system, to do so. If Russia and China felt sufficiently strongly about that prospect, there is then the question of what options would lie open to them to dissuade the United States from such action: and as has been seen over the last several decades, the central dissuader of the use of nuclear weapons by states has been the threat of nuclear retaliation. If some readers find this simply too fanciful, and perhaps even offensive to contemplate, it may be informative to reverse the tables. Russia, which possesses an arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads and that has been one of the two most important trustees of the non-use taboo, is subjected to an attack of nuclear terrorism. In response, Moscow places its nuclear forces very visibly on a higher state of alert and declares that it is considering the use of nuclear retaliation against the group and any of its state supporters. How would Washington view such a possibility? Would it really be keen to support Russia’s use of nuclear weapons, including outside Russia’s traditional sphere of influence? And if not, which seems quite plausible, what options would Washington have to communicate that displeasure? If China had been the victim of the nuclear terrorism and seemed likely to retaliate in kind, would the United States and Russia be happy to sit back and let this occur? In the charged atmosphere immediately after a nuclear terrorist attack, how would the attacked country respond to pressure from other major nuclear powers not to respond in kind? The phrase “how dare they tell us what to do” immediately springs to mind. Some might even go so far as to interpret this concern as a tacit form of sympathy or support for the terrorists. This might not help the chances of nuclear restraint. FN 40. One way of reducing, but probably not eliminating, such a prospect, is further international cooperation on the control of existing fissile material holdings.
Warming is real and anthropogenic -~-- causes extinction Flournoy 12 – PhD and MA from the University of Texas, Former Dean of the University College @ Ohio University, Former Associate Dean @ State University of New York and Case Institute of Technology, Project Manager for University/Industry Experiments for the NASA ACTS Satellite, Currently Professor of Telecommunications @ Scripps College of Communications @ Ohio University (Don, and#34;Solar Power Satellites,and#34; January, Springer Briefs in Space Development, Book)
In the Online Journal of Space Communication , Dr. Feng Hsu, a NASA scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center, a research center in the forefront of science of space and Earth, writes, “The evidence of global warming is alarming,” noting the potential for a catastrophic planetary climate change is real and troubling (Hsu 2010 ) . Hsu and his NASA colleagues were engaged in monitoring and analyzing climate changes on a global scale, through which they received first-hand scientific information and data relating to global warming issues, including the dynamics of polar ice cap melting. After discussing this research with colleagues who were world experts on the subject, he wrote: I now have no doubt global temperatures are rising, and that global warming is a serious problem confronting all of humanity. No matter whether these trends are due to human interference or to the cosmic cycling of our solar system, there are two basic facts that are crystal clear: (a) there is overwhelming scientific evidence showing positive correlations between the level of CO2 concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere with respect to the historical fluctuations of global temperature changes; and (b) the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientific community is in agreement about the risks of a potential catastrophic global climate change. That is, if we humans continue to ignore this problem and do nothing, if we continue dumping huge quantities of greenhouse gases into Earth’s biosphere, humanity will be at dire risk (Hsu 2010 ) . As a technology risk assessment expert, Hsu says he can show with some confidence that the planet will face more risk doing nothing to curb its fossil-based energy addictions than it will in making a fundamental shift in its energy supply. “This,” he writes, “is because the risks of a catastrophic anthropogenic climate change can be potentially the extinction of human species, a risk that is simply too high for us to take any chances” (Hsu 2010 ) . It was this NASA scientist’s conclusion that humankind must now embark on the next era of “sustainable energy consumption and re-supply, the most obvious source of which is the mighty energy resource of our Sun” (Hsu 2010 ) (Fig . 2.1 ).
Global warming is real and anthropogenic—positive feedbacks cause nuclear war Kaku 11 – Michio Kaku, co-creator of string field theory, a branch of string theory. He received a B.S. (summa cum laude) from Harvard University in 1968 where he came first in his physics class. He went on to the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972. In 1973, he held a lectureship at Princeton University. Michio continues Einstein’s search for a “Theory of Everything,” seeking to unify the four fundamental forces of the universe—the strong force, the weak force, gravity and electromagnetism. He is the author of several scholarly, Ph.D. level textbooks and has had more than 70 articles published in physics journals, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. Professor of Physics — He holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York, where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as New York University (NYU). “Physics of the Future” http://213.55.83.52/ebooks/physics/Physics20of20the20Future.pdf Accessed 6/26/12 BJM
By midcentury, the full impact of a fossil fuel economy should be in full swing: global warming. It is now indisputable that the earth is heating up. Within the last century, the earth’s temperature rose 1.3° F, and the pace is accelerating. The signs are unmistakable everywhere we look: The thickness of Arctic ice has decreased by an astonishing 50 percent in just the past fifty years. Much of this Arctic ice is just below the freezing point, floating on water. Hence, it is acutely sensitive to small temperature variations of the oceans, acting as a canary in a mineshaft, an early warning system. Today, parts of the northern polar ice caps disappear during the summer months, and may disappear entirely during summer as early as 2015. The polar ice cap may vanish permanently by the end of the century, disrupting the world’s weather by altering the flow of ocean and air currents around the planet. Greenland’s ice shelves shrank by twenty-four square miles in 2007. This figure jumped to seventy-one square miles in 2008. (If all the Greenland ice were somehow to melt, sea levels would rise about twenty feet around the world.) Large chunks of Antarctica’s ice, which have been stable for tens of thousands of years, are gradually breaking off. In 2000, a piece the size of Connecticut broke off, containing 4,200 square miles of ice. In 2002, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island broke off the Thwaites Glacier. (If all Antarctica’s ice were to melt, sea levels would rise about 180 feet around the world.) For every vertical foot that the ocean rises, the horizontal spread of the ocean is about 100 feet. Already, sea levels have risen 8 inches in the past century, mainly caused by the expansion of seawater as it heats up. According to the United Nations, sea levels could rise by 7 to 23 inches by 2100. Some scientists have said that the UN report was too cautious in interpreting the data. According to scientists at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, by 2100 sea levels could rise by 3 to 6 feet. So gradually the map of the earth’s coastlines will change. Temperatures started to be reliably recorded in the late 1700s; 1995, 2005, and 2010 ranked among the hottest years ever recorded; 2000 to 2009 was the hottest decade. Likewise, levels of carbon dioxide are rising dramatically. They are at the highest levels in 100,000 years. As the earth heats up, tropical diseases are gradually migrating northward. The recent spread of the West Nile virus carried by mosquitoes may be a harbinger of things to come. UN officials are especially concerned about the spread of malaria northward. Usually, the eggs of many harmful insects die every winter when the soil freezes. But with the shortening of the winter season, it means the inexorable spread of dangerous insects northward. CARBONDIOXIDE—GREENHOUSEGAS According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists have concluded with 90 percent confidence that global warming is driven by human activity, especially the production of carbon dioxide via the burning of oil and coal. Sunlight easily passes through carbon dioxide. But as sunlight heats up the earth, it creates infrared radiation, which does not pass back through carbon dioxide so easily. The energy from sunlight cannot escape back into space and is trapped. We also see a somewhat similar effect in greenhouses or cars. The sunlight warms the air, which is prevented from escaping by the glass. Ominously, the amount of carbon dioxide generated has grown explosively, especially in the last century. Before the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide content of the air was 270 parts per million (ppm). Today, it has soared to 387 ppm. (In 1900, the world consumed 150 million barrels of oil. In 2000, it jumped to 28 billion barrels, a 185-fold jump. In 2008, 9.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide were sent into the air from fossil fuel burning and also deforestation, but only 5 billion tons were recycled into the oceans, soil, and vegetation. The remainder will stay in the air for decades to come, heating up the earth.) VISIT TO ICELAND The rise in temperature is not a fluke, as we can see by analyzing ice cores. By drilling deep into the ancient ice of the Arctic, scientists have been able to extract air bubbles that are thousands of years old. By chemically analyzing the air in these bubbles, scientists can reconstruct the temperature and carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere going back more than 600,000 years. Soon, they will be able to determine the weather conditions going back a million years. I had a chance to see this firsthand. I once gave a lecture in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, and had the privilege of visiting the University of Iceland, where ice cores are being analyzed. When your airplane lands in Reykjavik, at first all you see is snow and jagged rock, resembling the bleak landscape of the moon. Although barren and forbidding, the terrain makes the Arctic an ideal place to analyze the climate of the earth hundreds of thousands of years ago. When I visited their laboratory, which is kept at freezing temperatures, I had to pass through thick refrigerator doors. Once inside, I could see racks and racks containing long metal tubes, each about an inch and a half in diameter and about ten feet long. Each hollow tube had been drilled deep into the ice of a glacier. As the tube penetrated the ice, it captured samples from snows that had fallen thousands of years ago. When the tubes were removed, I could carefully examine the icy contents of each. At first, all I could see was a long column of white ice. But upon closer examination, I could see that the ice had stripes made of tiny bands of different colors. Scientists have to use a variety of techniques to date them. Some of the ice layers contain markers indicating important events, such as the soot emitted from a volcanic eruption. Since the dates of these eruptions are known to great accuracy, one can use them to determine how old that layer is. These ice cores were then cut in various slices so they could be examined. When I peered into one slice under a microscope, I saw tiny, microscopic bubbles. I shuddered to realize that I was seeing air bubbles that were deposited tens of thousands of years ago, even before the rise of human civilization. The carbon dioxide content within each air bubble is easily measured. But calculating the temperature of the air when the ice was first deposited is more difficult. (To do this, scientists analyze the water in the bubble. Water molecules can contain different isotopes. As the temperature falls, heavier water isotopes condense faster than ordinary water molecules. Hence, by measuring the amount of the heavier isotopes, one can calculate the temperature at which the water molecule condensed.) Finally, after painfully analyzing the contents of thousands of ice cores, these scientists have come to some important conclusions. They found that temperature and carbon dioxide levels have oscillated in parallel, like two roller coasters moving together, in synchronization over many thousands of years. When one curve rises or falls, so does the other. Most important, they found a sudden spike in temperature and carbon dioxide content happening just within the last century. This is highly unusual, since most fluctuations occur slowly over millennia. This unusual spike is not part of this natural heating process, scientists claim, but is a direct indicator of human activity. There are other ways to show that this sudden spike is caused by human activity, and not natural cycles. Computer simulations are now so advanced that we can simulate the temperature of the earth with and without the presence of human activity. Without civilization producing carbon dioxide, we find a relatively flat temperature curve. But with the addition of human activity, we can show that there should be a sudden spike in both temperature and carbon dioxide. The predicted spike fits the actual spike perfectly. Lastly, one can measure the amount of sunlight that lands on every square foot of the earth’s surface. Scientists can also calculate the amount of heat that is reflected into outer space from the earth. Normally, we expect these two amounts to be equal, with input equaling output. But in reality, we find the net amount of energy that is currently heating the earth. Then if we calculate the amount of energy being produced by human activity, we find a perfect match. Hence, human activity is causing the current heating of the earth. Unfortunately, even if we were to suddenly stop producing any carbon dioxide, the gas that has already been released into the atmosphere is enough to continue global warming for decades to come. As a result, by midcentury, the situation could be dire. Scientists have created pictures of what our coastal cities will look like at midcentury and beyond if sea levels continue to rise. Coastal cities may disappear. Large parts of Manhattan may have to be evacuated, with Wall Street underwater. Governments will have to decide which of their great cities and capitals are worth saving and which are beyond hope. Some cities may be saved via a combination of sophisticated dikes and water gates. Other cities may be deemed hopeless and allowed to vanish under the ocean, creating mass migrations of people. Since most of the commercial and population centers of the world are next to the ocean, this could have a disastrous effect on the world economy. Even if some cities can be salvaged, there is still the danger that large storms can send surges of water into a city, paralyzing its infrastructure. For example, in 1992 a huge storm surge flooded Manhattan, paralyzing the subway system and trains to New Jersey. With transportation flooded, the economy grinds to a halt. FLOODING BANGLADESH AND VIETNAM A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change isolated three hot spots for potential disaster: Bangladesh, the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, and the Nile Delta in Egypt. The worst situation is that of Bangladesh, a country regularly flooded by storms even without global warming. Most of the country is flat and at sea level. Although it has made significant gains in the last few decades, it is still one of the poorest nations on earth, with one of the highest population densities. (It has a population of 161 million, comparable to that of Russia, but with 1/120 of the land area.) About 50 percent of the land area will be permanently flooded if sea levels rise by three feet. Natural calamities occur there almost every year, but in September 1998, the world witnessed in horror a preview of what may become commonplace. Massive flooding submerged two-thirds of the nation, leaving 30 million people homeless almost overnight; 1,000 were killed, and 6,000 miles of roads were destroyed. This was one of the worst natural disasters in modern history. Another country that would be devastated by a rise in sea level is Vietnam, where the Mekong Delta is particularly vulnerable. By midcentury, this country of 87 million people could face a collapse of its main food-growing area. Half the rice in Vietnam is grown in the Mekong Delta, home to 17 million people, and much of it will be flooded permanently by rising sea levels. According to the World Bank, 11 percent of the entire population would be displaced if sea levels rise by three feet by midcentury. The Mekong Delta will also be flooded with salt water, permanently destroying the fertile soil of the area. If millions are flooded out of their homes in Vietnam, many will flock to Ho Chi Minh City seeking refuge. But one-fourth of the city will also be underwater. In 2003 the Pentagon commissioned a study, done by the Global Business Network, that showed that, in a worst-case scenario, chaos could spread around the world due to global warming. As millions of refugees cross national borders, governments could lose all authority and collapse, so countries could descend into the nightmare of looting, rioting, and chaos. In this desperate situation, nations, when faced with the prospect of the influx of millions of desperate people, may resort to nuclear weapons. “Envision Pakistan, India, and China—all armed with nuclear weapons—skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable land,” the report said. Peter Schwartz, founder of the Global Business Network and a principal author of the Pentagon study, confided to me the details of this scenario. He told me that the biggest hot spot would be the border between India and Bangladesh. In a major crisis in Bangladesh, up to 160 million people could be driven out of their homes, sparking one of the greatest migrations in human history. Tensions could rapidly rise as borders collapse, local governments are paralyzed, and mass rioting breaks out. Schwartz sees that nations may use nuclear weapons as a last resort. In a worst-case scenario, we could have a greenhouse effect that feeds on itself. For example, the melting of the tundra in the Arctic regions may release millions of tons of methane gas from rotting vegetation. Tundra covers nearly 9 million square miles of land in the Northern Hemisphere, containing vegetation frozen since the last Ice Age tens of thousands of years ago. This tundra contains more carbon dioxide and methane than the atmosphere, and this poses an enormous threat to the world’s weather. Methane gas, moreover, is a much deadlier greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It does not stay in the atmosphere as long, but it causes much more damage than carbon dioxide. The release of so much methane gas from the melting tundra could cause temperatures to rapidly rise, which will cause even more methane gas to be released, causing a runaway cycle of global warming.
Throughout his career, the autocratic Mr. Chávez used our embargo as a wedge with which to antagonize the United States and alienate its supporters. His fuel helped prop up the rule of Mr. Castro and his brother Raúl, Cuba’s current president. The embargo no longer serves any useful purpose (if it ever did at all); President Obama should end it, though it would mean overcoming powerful opposition from Cuban-American lawmakers in Congress.¶ An end to the Cuba embargo would send a powerful signal to all of Latin America that the United States wants a new, warmer relationship with democratic forces seeking social change throughout the Americas.
C) brings us into line with the region McKenna and Kirk ’09 (Peter McKenna and John M. Kirk are the co-authors of the recently released book, Fighting Words: Competing Voices from Revolutionary Cuba, April 17, 2009, “U.S.-Cuba relations ripe for change; If Washington wants to revitalize its role in the Americas, it must repeal Cuban embargo” from the Toronto Star, Accessed 7/17/2013 on Lexis Nexis) At the Summit of the Americas that begins today in Trinidad and Tobago, the elephant in the room will clearly be revolutionary Cuba. It is worth noting here that all of the countries of the Americas, with the exception of the United States, have now established full diplomatic relations with Havana.¶ While it was not officially invited to the summit proceedings, a number of Latin American and Caribbean countries have promised to make Raul Castroand#39;s Cuba a major priority. Venezuelaand#39;s Hugo Chavez was unequivocal: and#34;Cuba is Latin America. Itand#39;s no longer the Cuba that was kicked out of the OAS (Organization of American States) by those governments subordinate to the Pentagon.and#34;¶ Many others, including regional heavyweights Mexico and Brazil, have called for the reintegration of Cuba into the hemispheric fold. They are adamantly opposed to the decades-long U.S. embargo and want the Obama administration to push for its repeal.¶ There is serious talk in Washington these days that Barack Obamaand#39;s administration is going to announce a significant shift in the near comatose U.S.-Cuba relationship. The White House announced Monday that Cuban-Americans will now be able to visit the island as often as they like and send as much money as they want to relatives. But speculation is rampant that Obama is going to end permanently the U.S. travel ban - first imposed in 1963 - to Cuba for all Americans.¶ Although this is a step in the right direction, the Obama team would be well-advised to go much further. It might begin by acknowledging that Cuba is a major player in the Americas and punches above its weight, hemispherically speaking.¶ If the Obama administration wants to reverse the damaging neglect of the region during the Bush years, it needs to secure some form of accommodation with Havana. There is simply no way for Washington to revitalize its role in the Americas without first radically changing its sterile Cuba policy.¶ Significantly, the Obama White House should look to embrace dialogue with the Cuban government, increase commercial exchange, undertake friendly persuasion, and strive for more person-to-person contacts. And since Raul Castro has offered on several occasions to partake in a diplomatic dialogue with the United States, there is no reason why the U.S. should not extend a hand to the Cubans.¶ In emulating Canadaand#39;s modus operandi toward Cuba, the United States should carefully choose its words when it does eventually sit down at the table with the Cubans. It certainly behooves official Washington to set the correct tone for diplomatic discussions by acknowledging the Cuban revolutionand#39;s notable social achievements. And as Canada has learned all too well, it is exceedingly counterproductive to hector and preach to the Cubans only on human rights questions, to ignore their nationalistic pride and deep desire for independence and autonomy, or to attach significant social, political and economic reforms as a precondition to any bilateral dialogue.¶ In borrowing a page from Canadaand#39;s Cuba policy of constructive engagement, officialdom in Washington could move to swiftly implement a series of confidence-building measures. Along with Obamaand#39;s decisions to remove restrictions on travel and remittances for Cuban-Americans, revoke the ban on U.S. telecommunications companies and close down the Guantanamo detention centre, the president should focus on eliminating the harsh rhetoric directed at the Cuban government, issuing visas to Cuban academic and cultural representatives, and ending the restrictions on U.S. academic and educational travel.¶ On a more controversial note, but in the face of a less monolithic Cuban-American community, it should also give serious consideration to pressing for the removal of the U.S. economic embargo, terminating Radio and TV Marti, and pardoning the so-called and#34;Cuban Fiveand#34; agents now being held in a U.S. prison. Additionally, the Obama White House could move to take Cubaand#39;s name off the U.S. state department list of terrorism-supporting countries, permanently end the complicated payment system for agricultural purchases by the Cuban government, and launch low-level discussions between U.S. and Cuban officials.¶ The fact of the matter is that there will be little opportunity for any improvement in U.S.-Cuba relations as long as the blockade remains in place. Obama can strongly urge the Congress to rescind what Canadian officials have long chastised - the anti-Cuba Helms-Burton law.¶ Of course, removing the U.S. embargo will not be an easy undertaking or one that will happen in short order, but Obama can use the presidential and#34;bully pulpitand#34; to galvanize the American public against those members of Congress who insist on living in a Cold War time warp. Indeed, political pressure could go some way toward weakening any congressional opposition to a lifting of the outmoded blockade.¶ By undertaking these policy initiatives, Washington will put itself in a far better position than it is today to cultivate a positive relationship with those Cubans who will be shaping Cubaand#39;s future path.¶ The only thing that stands in the U.S. presidentand#39;s way is a nonsensical and reflexive impulse to cling to a badly outdated and discredited policy of hostility and pettiness toward Cuba. The fifth Summit of the Americas offers Obama a perfect opportunity to fundamentally alter that policy approach, and to set U.S.-Cuba relations on a course for eventual normalization.
1) Economic power solves all impacts O’Hanlon 12 — Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution, former Professor at the University of Michigan, served as special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asia on the National Security Council, holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and Michael E. O'Hanlon, Director of Research and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University, Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, 2012 (“The Real National Security Threat: America's Debt,” Los Angeles Times, July 10th, Available Online at http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/07/10-economy-foreign-policy-lieberthal-ohanlon, Accessed 07-12-2012)
Second, such a chronic economic decline would undercut what has been 70 years of strong national political consensus in favor of an activist and engaged American foreign policy. One reason the United States was so engaged through the Cold War and the first 20 years of the post-Cold War world was fear of threats. But the other reason was that the strategy was associated with improvements in our quality of life as well. America became even more prosperous, and all major segments of society benefited. Alas, globalization and automation trends of the last generation have increasingly called the American dream into question for the working classes. Another decade of underinvestment in what is required to remedy this situation will make an isolationist or populist president far more likely because much of the country will question whether an internationalist role makes sense for America — especially if it costs us well over half a trillion dollars in defense spending annually yet seems correlated with more job losses. Lastly, American economic weakness undercuts U.S. leadership abroad. Other countries sense our weakness and wonder about our purported decline. If this perception becomes more widespread, and the case that we are in decline becomes more persuasive, countries will begin to take actions that reflect their skepticism about America's future. Allies and friends will doubt our commitment and may pursue nuclear weapons for their own security, for example; adversaries will sense opportunity and be less restrained in throwing around their weight in their own neighborhoods. The crucial Persian Gulf and Western Pacific regions will likely become less stable. Major war will become more likely. When running for president last time, Obama eloquently articulated big foreign policy visions: healing America's breach with the Muslim world, controlling global climate change, dramatically curbing global poverty through development aid, moving toward a world free of nuclear weapons. These were, and remain, worthy if elusive goals. However, for Obama or his successor, there is now a much more urgent big-picture issue: restoring U.S. economic strength. Nothing else is really possible if that fundamental prerequisite to effective foreign policy is not reestablished.
2) Competitiveness is key to hegemony – solves transition wars Khalilzad 11 — former United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations, former director of policy planning at the Defense Department (Zalmay, “The Economy and National Security”, The National Review, 2/8/2011, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/259024)
Today, economic and fiscal trends pose the most severe long-term threat to the United States’ position as global leader. While the United States suffers from fiscal imbalances and low economic growth, the economies of rival powers are developing rapidly. The continuation of these two trends could lead to a shift from American primacy toward a multi-polar global system, leading in turn to increased geopolitical rivalry and even war among the great powers. The current recession is the result of a deep financial crisis, not a mere fluctuation in the business cycle. Recovery is likely to be protracted. The crisis was preceded by the buildup over two decades of enormous amounts of debt throughout the U.S. economy — ultimately totaling almost 350 percent of GDP — and the development of credit-fueled asset bubbles, particularly in the housing sector. When the bubbles burst, huge amounts of wealth were destroyed, and unemployment rose to over 10 percent. The decline of tax revenues and massive countercyclical spending put the U.S. government on an unsustainable fiscal path. Publicly held national debt rose from 38 to over 60 percent of GDP in three years. Without faster economic growth and actions to reduce deficits, publicly held national debt is projected to reach dangerous proportions. If interest rates were to rise significantly, annual interest payments — which already are larger than the defense budget — would crowd out other spending or require substantial tax increases that would undercut economic growth. Even worse, if unanticipated events trigger what economists call a “sudden stop” in credit markets for U.S. debt, the United States would be unable to roll over its outstanding obligations, precipitating a sovereign-debt crisis that would almost certainly compel a radical retrenchment of the United States internationally. Such scenarios would reshape the international order. It was the economic devastation of Britain and France during World War II, as well as the rise of other powers, that led both countries to relinquish their empires. In the late 1960s, British leaders concluded that they lacked the economic capacity to maintain a presence “east of Suez.” Soviet economic weakness, which crystallized under Gorbachev, contributed to their decisions to withdraw from Afghanistan, abandon Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and allow the Soviet Union to fragment. If the U.S. debt problem goes critical, the United States would be compelled to retrench, reducing its military spending and shedding international commitments. We face this domestic challenge while other major powers are experiencing rapid economic growth. Even though countries such as China, India, and Brazil have profound political, social, demographic, and economic problems, their economies are growing faster than ours, and this could alter the global distribution of power. These trends could in the long term produce a multi-polar world. If U.S. policymakers fail to act and other powers continue to grow, it is not a question of whether but when a new international order will emerge. The closing of the gap between the United States and its rivals could intensify geopolitical competition among major powers, increase incentives for local powers to play major powers against one another, and undercut our will to preclude or respond to international crises because of the higher risk of escalation. The stakes are high. In modern history, the longest period of peace among the great powers has been the era of U.S. leadership. By contrast, multi-polar systems have been unstable, with their competitive dynamics resulting in frequent crises and major wars among the great powers. Failures of multi-polar international systems produced both world wars. American retrenchment could have devastating consequences. Without an American security blanket, regional powers could rearm in an attempt to balance against emerging threats. Under this scenario, there would be a heightened possibility of arms races, miscalculation, or other crises spiraling into all-out conflict . Alternatively, in seeking to accommodate the stronger powers, weaker powers may shift their geopolitical posture away from the United States. Either way, hostile states would be emboldened to make aggressive moves in their regions. As rival powers rise, Asia in particular is likely to emerge as a zone of great-power competition. Beijing's economic rise has enabled a dramatic military buildup focused on acquisitions of naval, cruise, and ballistic missiles, long-range stealth aircraft, and anti-satellite capabilities. China's strategic modernization is aimed, ultimately, at denying the United States access to the seas around China. Even as cooperative economic ties in the region have grown, China's expansive territorial claims -- and provocative statements and actions following crises in Korea and incidents at sea -- have roiled its relations with South Korea, Japan, India, and Southeast Asian states. Still, the United States is the most significant barrier facing Chinese hegemony and aggression. Given the risks, the United States must focus on restoring its economic and fiscal condition while checking and managing the rise of potential adversarial regional powers such as China. While we face significant challenges, the U.S. economy still accounts for over 20 percent of the world's GDP. American institutions -- particularly those providing enforceable rule of law -- set it apart from all the rising powers. Social cohesion underwrites political stability. U.S. demographic trends are healthier than those of any other developed country. A culture of innovation, excellent institutions of higher education, and a vital sector of small and medium-sized enterprises propel the U.S. economy in ways difficult to quantify. Historically, Americans have responded pragmatically, and sometimes through trial and error, to work our way through the kind of crisis that we face today. The policy question is how to enhance economic growth and employment while cutting discretionary spending in the near term and curbing the growth of entitlement spending in the out years. Republican members of Congress have outlined a plan. Several think tanks and commissions, including President Obama's debt commission, have done so as well. Some consensus exists on measures to pare back the recent increases in domestic spending, restrain future growth in defense spending, and reform the tax code (by reducing tax expenditures while lowering individual and corporate rates). These are promising options. The key remaining question is whether the president and leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill have the will to act and the skill to fashion bipartisan solutions. Whether we take the needed actions is a choice, however difficult it might be. It is clearly within our capacity to put our economy on a better trajectory. In garnering political support for cutbacks, the president and members of Congress should point not only to the domestic consequences of inaction -- but also to the geopolitical implications. As the United States gets its economic and fiscal house in order, it should take steps to prevent a flare-up in Asia. The United States can do so by signaling that its domestic challenges will not impede its intentions to check Chinese expansionism. This can be done in cost-efficient ways. While China's economic rise enables its military modernization and international assertiveness, it also frightens rival powers. The Obama administration has wisely moved to strengthen relations with allies and potential partners in the region but more can be done. Chinese policies encourage other parties to join with the United States, and the U.S. should not let these opportunities pass. China's military assertiveness should enable security cooperation with countries on China's periphery -- particularly Japan, India, and Vietnam -- in ways that complicate Beijing's strategic calculus. China's mercantilist policies and currency manipulation -- which harm developing states both in East Asia and elsewhere -- should be used to fashion a coalition in favor of a more balanced trade system. Since Beijing's over-the-top reaction to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese democracy activist alienated European leaders, highlighting human-rights questions would not only draw supporters from nearby countries but also embolden reformers within China. Since the end of the Cold War, a stable economic and financial condition at home has enabled America to have an expansive role in the world. Today we can no longer take this for granted. Unless we get our economic house in order, there is a risk that domestic stagnation in combination with the rise of rival powers will undermine our ability to deal with growing international problems. Regional hegemons in Asia could seize the moment, leading the world toward a new, dangerous era of multi-polarity.
It’s good – empirically solves conflict Wohlforth 8—Daniel Webster Professor of Government, Dartmouth. BA in IR, MA in IR and MPhil and PhD in pol sci, Yale (William, Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War, October 2008, World Politics Vol. 61, Iss. 1; pg. 28, 31 pgs, Proquest, AMiles)
Despite increasingly compelling findings concerning the importance of status seeking in human behavior, research on its connection to war waned some three decades ago.38 Yet empirical studies of the relationship between both systemic and dyadic capabilities distributions and war have continued to cumulate. If the relationships implied by the status theory run afoul of well-established patterns or general historical findings, then there is little reason to continue investigating them. The clearest empirical implication of the theory is that status competition is unlikely to cause great power military conflict in unipolar systems. If status competition is an important contributory cause of great power war, then, ceteris paribus, unipolar systems should be markedly less war-prone than bipolar or multipolar systems. And this appears to be the case. As Daniel Geller notes in a review of the empirical literature: "The only polar structure that appears to influence conflict probability is unipolarity."39 In addition, a larger number of studies at the dyadic level support the related expectation that narrow capabilities gaps and ambiguous or unstable capabilities hierarchies increase the probability of war.40 These studies are based entirely on post-sixteenth-century European history, and most are limited to the post-1815 period covered by the standard data sets. Though the systems coded as unipolar, near-unipolar, and hegemonic are all marked by a high concentration of capabilities in a single state, these studies operationalize unipolarity in a variety of ways, often very differently from the definition adopted here. An ongoing collaborative project looking at ancient interstate systems over the course of two thousand years suggests that historical systems that come closest to the definition of unipolarity used here exhibit precisely the behavioral properties implied by the theory. 41 As David C. Kang's research shows, the East Asian system between 1300 and 1900 was an unusually stratified unipolar structure, with an economic and militarily dominant China interacting with a small number of geographically proximate, clearly weaker East Asian states.42 Status politics existed, but actors were channeled by elaborate cultural understandings and interstate practices into clearly recognized ranks. Warfare was exceedingly rare, and the major outbreaks occurred precisely when the theory would predict: when China's capabilities waned, reducing the clarity of the underlying material hierarchy and increasing status dissonance for lesser powers. Much more research is needed, but initial exploration of other arguably unipolar systems-for example, Rome, Assyria, the Amarna system-appears consistent with the hypothesis.43 Status Competition and Causal Mechanisms Both theory and evidence demonstrate convincingly that competition for status is a driver of human behavior, and social identity theory and related literatures suggest the conditions under which it might come to the fore in great power relations. Both the systemic and dyadic findings presented in large-N studies are broadly consistent with the theory, but they are also consistent with power transition and other rationalist theories of hegemonic war.
Causality proves we support every factor that correlates with peace Owen, Ph.D. in IR from Harvard, 11—associate professor in the University of Virginia’s Department of Politics, Ph.D. in international relations from Harvard (John, 2/11/11, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/02/11/john-owen/dont-discount-hegemony/, RBatra)
Our colleagues at Simon Fraser University are brave indeed. That may sound like a setup, but it is not. I shall challenge neither the data nor the general conclusion that violent conflict around the world has been decreasing in fits and starts since the Second World War. When it comes to violent conflict among and within countries, things have been getting better. (The trends have not been linear—Figure 1.1 actually shows that the frequency of interstate wars peaked in the 1980s—but the 65-year movement is clear.) Instead I shall accept that Mack et al. are correct on the macro-trends, and focus on their explanations they advance for these remarkable trends. With apologies to any readers of this forum who recoil from academic debates, this might get mildly theoretical and even more mildly methodological. Concerning international wars, one version of the “nuclear-peace” theory is not in fact laid to rest by the data. It is certainly true that nuclear-armed states have been involved in many wars. They have even been attacked (think of Israel), which falsifies the simple claim of “assured destruction”—that any nuclear country A will deter any kind of attack by any country B because B fears a retaliatory nuclear strike from A. But the most important “nuclear-peace” claim has been about mutually assured destruction, which obtains between two robustly nuclear-armed states. The claim is that (1) rational states having second-strike capabilities—enough deliverable nuclear weaponry to survive a nuclear first strike by an enemy—will have an overwhelming incentive not to attack one another; and (2) we can safely assume that nuclear-armed states are rational. It follows that states with a second-strike capability will not fight one another. Their colossal atomic arsenals neither kept the United States at peace with North Vietnam during the Cold War nor the Soviet Union at peace with Afghanistan. But the argument remains strong that those arsenals did help keep the United States and Soviet Union at peace with each other. Why non-nuclear states are not deterred from fighting nuclear states is an important and open question. But in a time when calls to ban the Bomb are being heard from more and more quarters, we must be clear about precisely what the broad trends toward peace can and cannot tell us. They may tell us nothing about why we have had no World War III, and little about the wisdom of banning the Bomb now. Regarding the downward trend in international war, Professor Mack is friendlier to more palatable theories such as the “democratic peace” (democracies do not fight one another, and the proportion of democracies has increased, hence less war); the interdependence or “commercial peace” (states with extensive economic ties find it irrational to fight one another, and interdependence has increased, hence less war); and the notion that people around the world are more anti-war than their forebears were. Concerning the downward trend in civil wars, he favors theories of economic growth (where commerce is enriching enough people, violence is less appealing—a logic similar to that of the “commercial peace” thesis that applies among nations) and the end of the Cold War (which end reduced superpower support for rival rebel factions in so many Third-World countries). These are all plausible mechanisms for peace. What is more, none of them excludes any other; all could be working toward the same end. That would be somewhat puzzling, however. Is the world just lucky these days? How is it that an array of peace-inducing factors happens to be working coincidentally in our time, when such a magical array was absent in the past? The answer may be that one or more of these mechanisms reinforces some of the others, or perhaps some of them are mutually reinforcing. Some scholars, for example, have been focusing on whether economic growth might support democracy and vice versa, and whether both might support international cooperation, including to end civil wars. We would still need to explain how this charmed circle of causes got started, however. And here let me raise another factor, perhaps even less appealing than the “nuclear peace” thesis, at least outside of the United States. That factor is what international relations scholars call hegemony—specifically American hegemony. A theory that many regard as discredited, but that refuses to go away, is called hegemonic stability theory. The theory emerged in the 1970s in the realm of international political economy. It asserts that for the global economy to remain open—for countries to keep barriers to trade and investment low—one powerful country must take the lead. Depending on the theorist we consult, “taking the lead” entails paying for global public goods (keeping the sea lanes open, providing liquidity to the international economy), coercion (threatening to raise trade barriers or withdraw military protection from countries that cheat on the rules), or both. The theory is skeptical that international cooperation in economic matters can emerge or endure absent a hegemon. The distastefulness of such claims is self-evident: they imply that it is good for everyone the world over if one country has more wealth and power than others. More precisely, they imply that it has been good for the world that the United States has been so predominant. There is no obvious reason why hegemonic stability theory could not apply to other areas of international cooperation, including in security affairs, human rights, international law, peacekeeping (UN or otherwise), and so on. What I want to suggest here—suggest, not test—is that American hegemony might just be a deep cause of the steady decline of political deaths in the world. How could that be? After all, the report states that United States is the third most war-prone country since 1945. Many of the deaths depicted in Figure 10.4 were in wars that involved the United States (the Vietnam War being the leading one). Notwithstanding politicians’ claims to the contrary, a candid look at U.S. foreign policy reveals that the country is as ruthlessly self-interested as any other great power in history. The answer is that U.S. hegemony might just be a deeper cause of the proximate causes outlined by Professor Mack. Consider economic growth and openness to foreign trade and investment, which (so say some theories) render violence irrational. American power and policies may be responsible for these in two related ways. First, at least since the 1940s Washington has prodded other countries to embrace the market capitalism that entails economic openness and produces sustainable economic growth. The United States promotes capitalism for selfish reasons, of course: its own domestic system depends upon growth, which in turn depends upon the efficiency gains from economic interaction with foreign countries, and the more the better. During the Cold War most of its allies accepted some degree of market-driven growth. Second, the U.S.-led western victory in the Cold War damaged the credibility of alternative paths to development—communism and import-substituting industrialization being the two leading ones—and left market capitalism the best model. The end of the Cold War also involved an end to the billions of rubles in Soviet material support for regimes that tried to make these alternative models work. (It also, as Professor Mack notes, eliminated the superpowers’ incentives to feed civil violence in the Third World.) What we call globalization is caused in part by the emergence of the United States as the global hegemon.
The most complex and inclusive models prove hegemonic stability theory Murray 12 – Professor of Political Science @ Alberta Robert, “Arctic politics in the emerging multipolar system: challenges and consequences,” The Polar Journal, 2.1 It is no overstatement to say that the end of the Cold War was one of the most important events in recent world history. Scholars from many areas of study have used the fall of the Soviet Union as a starting point to explain shifts in security, globalization, humanitarianism and institutional integration, all of which played important roles in world affairs in the immediate post-Cold War era. Since 1991, explanatory models for international and global politics have broadened their scope to include variables such as individual preferences, capitalist oppression, ideational construction, environmentalism, gender and sexual politics, and discursive power to levels previously unforeseen throughout the Cold War years. As such, we now see the world as a far more complex and nefarious arena in which power and dominance are exercised each day. At the systemic level, the fall of the Soviet Union equated to nothing short of a monumental shift in the way states would make foreign and defence strategy. For 50 years, the bipolar system was dominated by two superpowers constantly competing and building arms in an effort to balance one another. The end of the Cold War signalled a major shift in systemic arrangement, as the system went from being bipolar to the world entering what was often referred to as the “unipolar moment.”1 The era of unipolarity and American hegemony in the international system has been marked by stability in an interstate sense, and the realignment of various spheres of influence in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise. Far from being just a theoretical notion, the unipolar moment has also provided states with an environment in which to pursue their national self-interest where the likelihood of conflict is decreased and great power security competition has been minimized.2 As such, new areas of foreign affairs and defence strategy have become far more important than they could have been throughout the bipolar con- strained Cold War years. One of the most notable examples in this regard has been the increased desire for territorial protection and extension in the Arctic region. In an era of state preoccupation with humanitarianism, terrorism and economic reces- sion, it is being suggested by some observers that the Arctic has become the primary stage through which states, both great and minor in power, can pursue their self-interest in a way that combines soft power cooperation through bodies of gov- ernance with hard power and military build-up. As things presently stand, there are a variety of nations and institutions all seek- ing to claim governing authority over different parts of the circumpolar region. Nations making claims to parts of the Arctic Ocean or other northern waters include Canada, Russia, the United States, Norway, Iceland and Denmark/Greenland. On the institutional side, Arctic governance has been debated and defined by bodies such as the United Nations, the European Union, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the Arctic Council.3 To date, no clear resolution to competing claims is in sight, and in some cases the situation is on the verge of becoming far more competitive as nations such as Russia have resorted to asserting possible military solutions to contested Arctic issues to bolster their declarations. It is important to note the increased levels of interest over Arctic relations between states, but, on this point, little attention has been given to the influence of the international system over this situation. If the unipolar moment has been defined as an era of relative stability and diplomatic coexistence, and tensions in the Arctic are already on the rise, what is to happen when the multipolar system finally emerges in the near future? Since 2005, the status of the United States as systemic hegemon has been in decline due to economic, military and political strains placed on American power capabilities throughout the Bush era and beyond. This decrease in relative power preponderance has been even further exacerbated by the economic recession starting in 2008 and the nation’s inability to stabilize its markets. As such, the predictions of those like Christopher Layne and John Mearsheimer are on the verge of coming to fruition, in that the unipolar moment is about to end.4 New great powers are ris- ing, the United States is no longer able to prevent these nations from balancing their power, and the once obvious prevalence of American power is far murkier than it was a decade ago. As the multipolar era becomes increasingly likely, one must ponder the effects this shift might have on state foreign and defence strategy- making, especially towards the Arctic region. To date, though its relative power position has declined significantly in recent years, the United States remains the hegemon of the international system, but it is contended here that such status is soon to evaporate. In this context, this article argues that the emergence of a multipolar systemic arrangement is very likely to increase security competition in the system as a whole, and the Arctic will be at the epicentre of such conflict. To lend support to this hypothesis, an examination of the impending shift from unipolarity to multipolarity will be made, as will an account of current security dynamics in the circumpolar region. The article concludes with a stark warning that without some kind of real action towards settling competing Arctic claims, it will be left to states to secure their own territorial assertions through hard power and forceful means. The system is unipolar ... for now In order to evaluate the polarity of the international system in a given historical period, one must identify the hierarchy of power in terms of the number of super or great powers dominating international outcomes. Counting great or super powers can be somewhat difficult in contemporary international relations, as scholars have begun to expand the notions of power and capabilities, but the clearest guideline for being able to identify great powers is through determining capabilities. The rea- son it is essential to understand the great powers in international relations is that they, above all other states, institutions, non-state actors and ideational forces, are responsible for the daily conduct of behaviour in the international system, and they have been historically accountable for substantial alterations to power distribution since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Measuring capabilities allows observers to explain which states are most likely to affect the behaviour of other states, to use force or violence; also, the number of great powers in a given era determines how stable or unstable the international system will be. Identifying great powers is literally done by evaluating each state’s capabilities in essential areas of political life that can maximize security or extend one’s power. When discussing the distribution of power across states, there is a clear hierarchy of capabilities among states that leads observers to classify these utility maximizing, rational actors as super, great, major, middle or minor powers in the international system. In terms of actual measurement, Kenneth Waltz argues: “Their rank depends on how they score on all of the following items: size of population and territory, resource endowment, economic capability, military strength, political stability and competence.”5 Once these various factors are taken into account, one can clearly determine the given polarity of the system at a given moment in history. Why is polarity important? According to structural realist theory, the number of great powers in the system determines how conflictual, violent or stable interna- tional politics will be. While the overall structure of the system remains anarchic, meaning a clear absence of a governing authority above states that can control their actions, there can be consequential variations within the anarchic structure that can impact how states will evaluate their foreign and defence policy strategies and affect their overall behaviour. Waltz claims that “ ‘consequential’ variations in number are changes of number that lead to different expectations about the effect of structure on units.”6 There are three types of structure within the system that have been determined throughout the history of the modern state system – unipolarity, bipolar- ity and multipolarity. The consequential variations described by Waltz take place when great powers either rise or fall, and induce shifts from one type of polarity to another. The rise and fall of great powers is perhaps the most important explanatory aspect of international politics because it is these states that “inherently possess some offensive military capability, which gives them the wherewithal to hurt and possibly destroy each other.”7 Though the primary motivation for all states is secu- rity maximization, great powers become the most important actors because while they are capable of defending themselves, they also have the ability to extend their sphere of influence in offensive posturing. It is in this context that the polarity of the system becomes even more vital, in that the more great powers there are, the greater likelihood of violence and conflict there is. In each systemic arrangement, the abilities of great powers to pursue their ultimate goal, which is hegemony, dic- tates whether foreign and defence policy strategies will be overtly defensive or potentially offensive. All states are like-units, in that they all strive for survival by making rational calculations about how to best pursue their interests in an anarchic system. Of course, strategies of states will differ greatly based on the distribution of power, meaning that great powers are able to pursue their goals more freely than minor powers because they can operate without allies or institutions in achieving their goals. Lesser powers, however, typically try to increase their power position in world affairs through various alliance blocs and institutional binding. In doing so, it is hoped that middle and minor powers are able to guarantee their survival by align- ing themselves with powers larger than themselves. Given the arrangement of the system, the number of alliances or blocs of power will differ, which also contributes to just how stable or violent the system will be. Conflict, or the possibility of it, is a constant problem in international relations due to the anarchic structure of the international system. Anarchy, by its definition, denotes a lack of overarching authority and thus states, especially the most powerful states, are able to behave as they would like, without any external body capable of controlling their actions. Robert Art and Robert Jervis aptly define anarchy by argu- ing: “States can make commitments and treaties, but no sovereign power ensures compliance and punished deviation. This – the absence of a supreme power – is what is meant by the anarchic environment of international politics.”8 In anarchy, just as in the state of nature or war prior to the establishment of civilized human society, there is no harmony and actors are left to their own inclinations to pursue their self-interest. The key elements of anarchy that precipitate conflict are the con- stant distrust of others’ motives, the assumption that other actors may not be as rational as oneself, and, as Waltz notes, “a state will use force to attain its goals if, after assessing the prospects for success, it values those goals more than it values the pleasures of peace.”9 The constant tensions between states, and the ability of great powers to more freely pursue their national interests, contributes to a system where security and survival are at a premium, and the polarity of the system matters to all states. By definition, bipolar systems are the most stable. According to Mearsheimer, this assumption is made based on three criteria: First, the number of conflict dyads is fewer, leaving fewer possibilities for war. Sec- ond, deterrence is easier, because imbalances of power are fewer and more easily averted. Third, the prospects for deterrence are greater because miscalculations of rela- tive power and opponents’ resolve are fewer and less likely.10 By contrast, multipolar systems have a far greater probability of conflict, tension and distrust among states. War is far more likely in multipolar systems because major power dyads are more numerous, each posing the potential for conflict. Conflict could also erupt across dyads involving major and minor powers. Dyads between minor powers could also lead to war .... Wars in a multipolar world involving just minor powers or only one major power are not likely to be as devastating as a conflict between two major powers. However, local wars tend to widen and escalate. Hence there is always a chance that a small war will trigger a general conflict.11 While bipolarity is considered to be the most stable arrangement, and multipolarity the least stable, there is also the rare time when the system is unipolar in character. Put simply, unipolarity occurs when there is such a preponderance of power by one state that others are incapable of balancing against it. According to William Wohl- forth, unipolarity is also a stable and peaceful arrangement: unipolarity favors the absence of war among the great powers and comparatively low levels of competition for prestige or security for two reasons: the leading state’s power advantage removes the problem of hegemonic rivalry from world politics, and it reduces the salience and stakes of balance-of-power politics among the major states.12 The status of the hegemonic power in a unipolar system allows for the expansion of its normative agenda, but also allows it to pacify international affairs because it lacks both a hegemonic rival and the effects of balance of power politics.13 As such, unipolar systems can be stable, depending on whom the hegemon is and what its vision for dominance might be. Since the end of World War II, only two types of polarity have been seen. Between 1945 and 1991, the system was bipolar, in that there were only two super- powers dominating the affairs of international politics. This bipolar arrangement was surprisingly stable and though smaller proxy wars erupted throughout the years of the Cold War, the relations between the two dominant powers, namely the United States and the Soviet Union, never came to a head. There are various explanations for why this was the case, but John Mearsheimer provides perhaps the most concise and accurate explanations as he contends that the absence of war in Europe and beyond throughout the Cold War can be attributed to three specific factors: the bipolar distribution of military power on the European Continent; the rough mili- tary equality between the two states comprising the two poles in Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union; and the fact that each superpower was armed with a large nuclear arsenal.14 At the conclusion of the Cold War, there was a clear and major shift in the distribution of power in the system, which translated into the unipolar moment. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States retained its superpower status and held a preponderance of power in virtually all areas of capabilities measurement. Christopher Layne contends that American hegemony is contingent upon two factors: First, the United States enjoys a commanding preeminence in both military and eco- nomic power. Second, since the Soviet Union’s disappearance, no other great power has emerged to challenge US preponderance. In this sense, US hegemony is the result of objective material conditions.15 Throughout the Clinton and early years of the Bush administrations, the role of the United States as systemic hegemon was virtually unquestioned, and it seemed as if American hegemony could last for a very long time. It was not until the latter years of the Bush administration that the waning of American hegemony began to become apparent. One of the key reasons the system remains unipolar is that there has yet to be a state that can balance against US power in either the hard or soft power senses. That said, the main reason for the decline in American hegemony has been a costly set of irrational and ill-advised foreign policy decisions, combined with years of economic overvaluation that eroded the hegemonic position of the world’s lone superpower.16 Both the intervention into Iraq, starting in 2003, and the fallout of the 2008 recession have served to substantially weaken the United States in both the hard and soft power contexts, and thus it is clear that a multipolar system is on the horizon. As Layne notes, “although a new geopolitical balance has yet to emerge, there is considerable evidence that other states have been engaging in bal- ancing against the United States – including hard balancing.”17 The emerging great powers, especially China and Russia, will have a profound impact on the conduct of international relations in the years to come. Perhaps the most important area of security competition that has gone under- scrutinized from a systemic standpoint is the increased level of interest in the Arctic. Currently, the competing claims for the circumpolar region are mostly peaceful and focusing on diplomatic and legal battles, but recent trends suggest that non-violent strategy may not continue. As the era of American hegemony comes to an end, and a multipolar system begins to emerge, the impact on the Arctic region is likely to be profound due to the militaristic nature of state security strategies, unpredictability and a potential retreat from cooperation normally seen in multipolar structures. The Arctic in the unipolar moment One of the cornerstones of America’s unipolar moment has been the remarkable decline in interstate conflict. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the interna- tional system has not been on the verge of any major war, nor have great powers aggressively pursued policies that would balance against American power in a way that would be taken seriously. According to many scholarly studies, the world since the end of the Cold War has become far more secure in the interstate sense, and security and defence policies of states are now preoccupied more with human- centric and intrastate variables than anything else. Though it is difficult to deny that the world has become more stable at the systemic level, the role of hard power and military capabilities did not disappear with the Soviet Union; instead, the use of militarism to achieve national goals in the unipolar moment greatly decreased as a direct result of the values and grand strategy of the United States. The impact of a unipolar systemic arrangement on state behaviour is best explained by the hegemonic stability theory.18 According to this theory, a unipolar structure is able to pacify the relations of states because there is recognition of the hegemon’s ability to control or intervene in conflicts that may threaten its power, or the order of the system. Wohlforth summarizes the basic precept of hegemonic stability theory by contending: The theory stipulates that especially powerful states (“hegemons”) foster international orders that are stable until differential growth in power produces a dissatisfied state with the capability to challenge the dominant state for leadership. The clearer and lar- ger the concentration of power in the leading state, the more peaceful the international order associated with it will be ... If the system is unipolar, the great power hierar- chy should be much more stable than any hierarchy lodged within a system of more than one pole. Because unipolarity is based on a historically unprecedented concentra- tion of power in the United States, a potentially important source of great power con- flict – hegemonic rivalry – will be missing.19 It is essential to note two things about the status of the United States as systemic hegemon throughout the immediate post-Cold War era – first, that its preponderance of power in every area of capability measurement created a stable and less tense system in which states were able to interact; and second, that the United States’ time as hegemon has fostered the growth of multilateral institutions and agreements rather than a bullying type of unipolarity.20 From a systemic standpoint, it would seem that there is little reason to be concerned about military aggression, arms racing and distrustful competition in the modern system, but one vital concern to note is that much of the unipolar and hegeomic stability literature completely ignores the role of the Arctic in state security calculations. Throughout an era of institutional binding, regional integra- tion, humanitarianism and soft power growth, the competition for the Arctic was following much of the same pattern, with states preferring to make their claims in institutional or legal settings. Yet, as the unipolar moment has started to decline, and multipolarity is on the horizon, the competition in the circumpolar region has taken on a very different tone. Competing claims over Arctic territories, such as the Northwest Passage, Beaufort Sea and other maritime boundaries, and the use of the region as a space for military exercises are by no means new and they have not come to the forefront of the strategic security agendas of states since the post-9/11 era. Rather, throughout the Cold War, the Arctic was a realm of constant supervision, not because either superpower wanted to develop the region, but more because of the mutual fear each side had of offensive attacks being launched over the pole. Even throughout the unipolar moment, the Arctic has been a space for sovereignty competition, but the nature of the competition had been mostly legal, institutional or soft power focused.21 Worth noting as well is the very complex nature of reasons for state interests in the Arctic. Mark Nuttall effectively summarizes the complexities of the high north as he claims: In the post-Cold War world the Arctic is seen as a natural scientific laboratory, under- stood as a homeland for indigenous peoples, a place of sovereignty conflicts, an emerg- ing hydrocarbon province with which the world is coming to think of as one of the last major frontiers for oil and gas, and a region of dramatic environmental change.22 Though the intricacies of Arctic competition are intriguing to note, it is how states are strategically asserting their claims that is of particular importance. The start of America’s hegemonic decline has allowed states to revisit their approaches to the Arctic as nations jockey for position by balancing or rivalling American preferences. As a result, the nature of Arctic competition has incorporated both soft power and hard power elements. Further, the nature of militarism and hard power tension has increased due to the recent spending and strategic shifts by many Arctic states in recent years, including Canada, Norway, Sweden and Russia.23 The reasons for America’s decline are relatively unsurprising – military overextension in Afghanistan and Iraq; the lack of international support for American foreign policy objectives throughout the Bush era; the 2008 economic recession; and the utter dis- trust by most states, including close American allies, of the United States’ political objectives.24 The system remains unipolar, of course, but as stated above, the pre- ponderance of power capabilities has substantially diminished, opening the door for others to balance and rival American power in the coming years. Coincidentally, it has also been the revelations of science in recent years that have also promoted a faster pace for those states making Arctic claims. The role of climate change and its impact over the Arctic has allowed for states to more freely move into the region and pursue strategies previously unavailable.25 According to Lotta Numminen, climate change has recently affected states’ perceptions of the possible economic opportunities in the Arctic in four ways: first, that the subsurface of the Arctic Ocean floor is assumed to contain substantial oil and gas reserves, to which there will be increased access; second, that melting waters will provide new waters for international fisheries; third, the increase in research strategies; and fourth, is the greater access to sea passages.26 One of the main reasons states see the Arctic region as such a lucrative area is the potential for increasing their respec- tive economic and natural resource capabilities. Previously, the northern ice caps prevented states from entering most of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding areas, but as these environmental situations change, states have readily identified the high north as a priority in both their security and economic strategies. Among the main reasons the Arctic has not been more readily seen as a poten- tial area for security competition and conflict is the interpretation that the United States has little or no interest in the circumpolar region at all. According to Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, American hegemony throughout the post-Cold War era was seen as passive, stable and enduring because of the lack of counterpower being demonstrated in the system: Bounded by oceans to the east and west and weak, friendly powers to the north and south, the United States is both less vulnerable than previous aspiring hegemons and also less threatening to others. The main potential challengers to its unipolarity, mean- while – China, Russia, Japan, and Germany – are in the opposite position. They can- not augment their military capabilities so as to balance the United States without simultaneously becoming an immediate threat to their neighbors. Politics, even interna- tional politics, is local. Although American power attracts a lot of attention globally, states are usually more concerned with their own neighborhoods than with the global equilibrium. Were any of the potential challengers to make a serious run at the United States, regional balancing efforts would almost certainly help contain them, as would the massive latent power capabilities of the United States, which could be mobilized as necessary to head off an emerging threat.27 Almost completely omitted from such interpretations, however, are America’s north- ern borders over Alaska and into the Arctic. Latitudinal thinking would seem to indicate that Brooks and Wohlforth are correct in terms of America’s interests in many areas of the globe, but this ignores what has been happening at the top of the world in the high north. It is not as if the United States has been ignorant of its own decline in power, especially regarding the Arctic. In 2009, the United States issued National Security Presidential Directive 66 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 25 that deal exclusively with American Arctic policy. According to these directives, the altera- tions to national policies of other states regarding the Arctic compelled the United States to clearly outline the security and development strategies they would use to protect its Arctic interests. Among the first, and most clear, elements of the direc- tives is the clear intention of the United States to defend their national security interests. According to Article III, subsection B 1 of the directives: The United States has broad and fundamental national security interests in the Arctic region and is prepared to operate either independently or in conjunction with other states to safeguard these interests. These interests include suchmatters as missile defense and early warning; deployment ofsea and air systems for strategic sealift, strategic deterrence, maritime presence, and maritime security operations; and ensuring freedom of navigation and overflight.28 The contemporary changes to the international system as the era of American hegemony has begun to wane, the effects of climate change and greater access, and the increasingly militaristic strategies of most every Arctic state have led to a situa- tion where tensions are at an all time high, and that legal or institutional processes are unlikely to resolve anything amicably. As the system continues its transition away from unipolarity, observers are left to ponder what might come next after an era of relative interstate stability. Multipolarity and the circumpolar In their 2002 article on the nature of United States primacy and the enduring aspects of American hegemony, Brooks and Wohlforth argue that the United States would have to act as a benevolent hegemon in order to prevent counterbalancing and to be able to build effective regimes worldwide. They argue: Magnanimity and restraint in the face of temptation are tenets of successful statecraft that have proved their worth from classical Greece onward. Standing taller than lead- ing states of the past, the United States has unprecedented freedom to do as it pleases. It can play the game for itself alone or for the system as a whole; it can focus on small returns today or larger ones tomorrow. If the administration truly wants to be loved as well as feared, the policy answers are not hard to find.29 The problem with such analyses of American hegemony is that the Bush administration chose to ignore utterly such warnings and, rather than acting mag- nanimously, post-9/11 American foreign policy did precisely what it should not have. Pre-emption, coercion and irrational interventions, combined with a major economic recession, all serve to explain why American hegemony began to decline by 2005 in terms of both actual power levels and perceptions of legitimate hege- monic status.30 The clearest sign that American exceptionalism has been decreasing is the aggressive and regional balancing dynamics taking place between states in the Arctic region. Security strategy in the circumpolar region has altered dramatically since 2005, with more states showing interest, hard power spending increasing, and legal pro- cesses being coupled by at times overtly offensive strategy.31 Russia, Canada and a number of European states, especially Norway and Sweden, exemplify this line of argument about how sovereignty claims have become focused on traditional inter- state arms racing and militarism while soft power components, like governance structures and legal processes, continually evolve.32 As mentioned previously, even the United States has woken up to see that, as their hegemony declines, other states have begun to balance against them in the Arctic, thus provoking the 2009 Presi- dential Directives. Even so, Arctic interested nations have not yielded to American claims, nor has there been any evidence of America’s closest allies backing down in the face of its Arctic assertions, most clearly evidenced by Canada’s continued claims over the Northwest Passage.33 In the international relations canon, most observers point to either India or China as emerging great powers that are the most likely to counterbalance Ameri- can power. The 2004 American National Intelligence Council report highlights this theory by stating: The likely emergence of China and India as new major global players – similar to the rise of Germany in the 19th century and the United States in the early 20th century – will transform the geopolitical landscape, with impacts potentially as dramatic as those of the previous two centuries. In the same way that commentators refer to the 1900s as the American Century, the early 21st century may be seen as the time when some in the developing world led by China and India came into their own.34 Both China and India have recently expressed their interest in Arctic affairs, but no power is as close to rivalling or challenging American power in hard power terms than Russia. This is especially true in the Arctic, as Russia’s Arctic policies have made its intentions towards asserting its control over territory it deems to be sovereign very clear. The role of the Arctic in Russian foreign policy cannot be understated. According to Russia’s 2008 Arctic policy document, the region is seen as the epicentre of Russia’s military and socio-economic development. The top two priorities for Russian Arctic interests are defined as follows: (a) In the sphere of socio-economic development – the expansion of the resource base of the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation, in order to substantially satisfy Russia’s needs in hydrocarbon resources, hydro-biological resources, and other types of strate- gic raw materials; (b) In the sphere of military security, defense, and safekeeping of the state borders of the Russian Federation located in the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation – the upkeep of a favorable operational regime in the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federa- tion, including the maintenance of the required combat potential of military groupings under the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, other troops, military formations and agencies in this region ...35 In order to achieve these goals, the Russians have created a unique military brigade to be permanently posted in the Arctic, have placed a Russian Federation flag on the Arctic Ocean seabed, have conducted various missile tests, have sailed their nuclear submarines through contested waters and have openly challenged the abilities of other states to enforce their own claims. In response to Russian offensive posturing and the inability of the United States to dissuade security competition in the area, middle and minor powers have begun to use hard power as a means of trying to enforce their sovereignty. Perhaps the best example here is Canada, whose military capabilities are extremely weak, but strong rhetoric and a drastically increased level of high-north military spending since 2006 seems to indicate that the Canadian government cannot rely on its American alliances to protect its interests, and that posturing by states like Russia or even Denmark clearly threaten Canada’s national interests. As Norway, Sweden and Denmark have begun to put an emphasis on hard power capabilities to extend or defend northern claims, Canada has done the same. Worth noting as well in the Canadian context is that, while great powers like Russia and the United States can easily defeat any middle or minor power, Canada’s capabilities are being either rivalled or surpassed by European states like Norway.36 Canada’s realization of the evolving security and environmental climate in the Arctic has compelled changes to its domestic and foreign security policies, each seeking to assert Canadian sovereignty over areas of the Arctic, especially the Northwest Passage. One of the main components of now Prime Minister Harper’s 2005–06 campaign was to bolster Arctic security resources, as many Canadians have identified the region as an essential part of Canada’s national security and identity.37 Rob Huebert argues: The Harper government has increasingly recognized the significance of maintaining a strong presence in the Arctic and has vigorously begun to improve Canada’s northern abilities ... The Harper government has also made a series of promises to consider- ably expand Canada’s northern capability ... If these promises are implemented, Canada will have significantly improved its ability to control activity in its Arctic.38 In virtually any other area of the world, Canadian national security cannot be divorced from the United States, which is a partial explanation for why Canada has traditionally been considered a middle power since the end of World War II.39 Yet, since the start of American decline, the Canadian government has recognized that its fate in the Arctic will be its own, and not intrinsically tied to the protection of the United States, as the Americans have their own interests in the region and have shown a complete disregard for Canadian claims over the Northwest Passage and the Beaufort Sea. As the world moves towards multipolarity, it has become increasingly obvious that the Arctic region represents an area of increased security competition and a potentially conflictual region in the future. Multipolar systems are the most unsta- ble, and history has shown these to produce military conflict due to the natural effects brought by a larger number of self-interested powers vying for power and security. Further, as new great powers begin to emerge, American strategic consid- erations will be spread so thin that they will be unable to prevent against their even- tual loss of hegemony. The largest mistake being made at this time by international security scholars and policymakers is their normal obsession with China, India and latitudinal thinking. The next area of major war is not likely to be the Middle East, the Indian Ocean or the South China Sea, due to traditional security balancing, deterrence and economic interests in each of these areas. Multipolarity naturally brings the possibility of war. Mearsheimer contends that war is far more likely in multipolar systems for three reasons: First, there are more opportunities for war, because there are more potential conflict dyads in a multipolar system. Second, imbalances of power are more commonplace in a multipolar world, and thus great powers are more likely to have the capability to win a war, making deterrence more difficult and war more likely. Third, the potential for miscalculation is greater in multipolarity: states might think they have the capabil- ity to coerce or conquer another state when, in fact, they do not.40 Presently, there is little reason to believe that tension and strategic posturing will lead to the outbreak of war in the near future. That said, as America’s influence continues to wane, other states have shown their desire to take full advantage of the United States’ inability to control northern affairs. If the United States does lose its hegemony, which many commentators believe is inevitable, there will be at least four dyads in security calculations, with Russia, China and India entering the fray, and two of those states have Arctic borders and a historical legacy of conflict. Power imbalance in the Arctic is already apparent, with only Russia and the United States as great powers, while the other Arctic states are middle or minor powers with no hope of preventing a great power from doing as it pleases. Lastly, miscalculation is evident in the present context, as Sweden and Norway are both arming for possible Russian aggression, though Russia has shown little or no overtly aggressive tendencies towards Nordic nations. Unipolarity was not going to last forever, but as it fades the probability of northern conflict is ever increasing. The shift to hard power strategies, the effects of cli- mate change, and the decline of the United States all speak to the fact that multipolarity can increase levels of tension and mistrust, thus altering the currently stable nature of Arctic affairs. Efforts at Arctic governance through institutional binding or legal claims, as seen in the Arctic Council and UNCLOS, are able at present to mitigate the ongoing and ever increasing security competition in the high north, but as the system changes from unipolarity to multipolarity, constraining state behaviour becomes increasingly difficult. As such, observers must be mindful of the systemic variables at play when explaining and forecasting Arctic politics, as changes to the structure are very likely to translate into changes to state security strategies.
The larger problem is that without clear causal links between materially identifiable events and factors any assessment within the argument actually becomes nonsensical. Mirroring the early inability to criticise, if we have no traditional causational discussion how can we know what is happening? For example, Jackson details how the rhetoric of anti-terrorism and fear is obfuscating the real problems. It is proposed that the real world killers are not terrorism, but disease or illegal drugs or environmental issues. The problem is how do we know this? It seems we know this because there is evidence that illustrates as much – Jackson himself quoting to Dr David King who argued global warming is a greater that than terrorism. The only problem of course is that discourse analysis has established (as argued by Jackson) that King’s argument would just be self-contained discourse designed to naturalise another arguments for his own reasons. Ultimately it would be no more valid than the argument that excessive consumption of Sugar Puffs is the real global threat. It is worth repeating that I don’t personally believe global terrorism is the world’s primary threat, nor do I believe that Sugar Puffs are a global killer. But without the ability to identify real facts about the world we can simply say anything, or we can say nothing. This is clearly ridiculous and many post-structuralists can see this. Their argument is that there “are empirically more persuasive explanations.”xi The phrase ‘empirically persuasive’ is however the final undermining of post-structural discourse analysis. It is a seemingly fairly obvious reintroduction of traditional methodology and causal links. It implies things that can be seen to be right regardless of perspective or discourse. It again goes without saying that logically in this case if such an assessment is possible then undeniable material factors about the word are real and are knowable outside of any cultural definition. Language or culture then does not wholy constitute reality. How do we know in the end that the world not threatened by the onslaught of an oppressive and dangerous breakfast cereal? Because empirically persuasive evidence tells us this is the case. The question must then be asked, is our understanding of the world born of evidential assessment, or born of discourse analysis? Or perhaps it’s actually born of utilisation of many different possible explanations.
Prefer our truth claims over postmodern indicts of our theory Houghton 8 – Associate Professor of International Relations Theory at the University of Central Florida (David Patrick, Positivism ‘vs’ Postmodernism: Does Epistemology Make a Difference? International Politics (2008) 45 )
As long ago as 1981, Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach effectively laid the influence of the dogmatic behaviouralism of the 1960s to rest in their book The Elusive Quest, signaling the profound disillusionment of mainstream IR with the idea that a cumulative science of IR would ever be possible (Ferguson and Mansbach, 1988). The popularity of the ‘naïve’ form of positivism, wed to a view of inexorable scientific progress and supposedly practiced by wide-eyed scholars during the 1960s, has long been a thing of the past. Postmodernists hence do the discipline a disservice when they continue to attack the overly optimistic and dogmatic form of positivism as if it still represented a dominant orthodoxy, which must somehow be overthrown. Equally, supporters of the contemporary or ‘neo-’ version of positivism perform a similar disservice when they fail to articulate their epistemological assumptions clearly or at all. Indeed, the first error is greatly encouraged by the second, since by failing to state what they stand for, neo-positivists have allowed postmodernists to fashion a series of straw men who burn rapidly at the slightest touch. Articulating a full list of these assumptions lies beyond the scope of this article, but contemporary neo-positivists are, I would suggest, committed to the following five assumptions, none of which are especially radical or hard to defend: (1) That explaining the social and political world ought to be our central objective, (2) That — subjective though our perceptions of the world may be — many features of the political world are at least potentially explainable. What remains is a conviction that there are at least some empirical propositions, which can be demonstrably shown to be ‘true’ or ‘false’, some underlying regularities that clearly give shape to IR (such as the proposition that democracies do not fight one another), (3) That careful use of appropriate methodological techniques can establish what patterns exist in the political world, (4) That positive and normative questions, though related, are ultimately separable, although both constitute valid and interesting forms of enquiry. There is also a general conviction (5) that careful use of research design may help researchers avoid logical pitfalls in their work. Doubtless, there are some who would not wish to use the term ‘positivism’ as an umbrella term for these five assumptions, in which case we probably require a new term to cover them. But to the extent that there exists an ‘orthodoxy’ in the field of IR today, this is surely it. Writing in 1989, Thomas Biersteker noted that ‘the vast majority of scholarship in international relations (and the social sciences for that matter) proceeds without conscious reflection on its philosophical bases or premises. In professional meetings, lectures, seminars and the design of curricula, we do not often engage in serious reflection on the philosophical bases or implications of our activity. Too often, consideration of these core issues is reserved for (and largely forgotten after) the introductory weeks of required concepts and methods courses, as we socialize students into the profession’ (Biersteker, 1989). This observation — while accurate at the time — would surely be deemed incorrect were it to be made today. Even some scholars who profess regret at the philosophically self-regarding nature of contemporary of IR theory, nevertheless feel compelled to devote huge chunks of their work to epistemological issues before getting to more substantive matters (see for instanceWendt, 1999). The recent emphasis on epistemology has helped to push IR as a discipline further and further away from the concerns of those who actually practice IR. The consequent decline in the policy relevance of what we do, and our retreat into philosophical self-doubt, is ironic given the roots of the field in very practical political concerns (most notably, how to avoid war). What I am suggesting is not that IR scholars should ignore philosophical questions, or that such ‘navel gazing’ is always unproductive, for questions of epistemology surely undergird every vision of IR that ever existed. Rather, I would suggest that the existing debate is sterile and unproductive in the sense that the various schools of thought have much more in common than they suppose; stated more specifically, postpositivists have much more in common than they would like to think with the positivists they seek to condemn. Consequently, to the extent that there is a meaningful dialogue going on with regard to epistemological questions, it has no real impact on what we do as scholars when we look at the world ‘out there’. Rather than focusing on epistemology, it is inevitably going to be more fruitful to subject the substantive claims made by positivists (of all metatheoretical stripes) and postpositivists to the cold light of day. My own view, as the reader may have gathered already, is that the empirical claims of scholars like Der Derian and Campbell will not often stand up to such harsh scrutiny given the inattention to careful evidence gathering betrayed by both, but this is a side issue here; the point is that substantive theoretical and empirical claims, rather than metatheoretical or epistemological ones, ought to be what divides the international relations scene today.
But, collapse is inevitable absent immediate and substantial immigration reform Clemens 7/8 (Michael, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, PhD from Harvard in economics, MA from Johns Hopkins in Geography and Environmental Engineering, BS from the California Institute of Technology in Engineering and Applied Science, expert in migration and development, economic growth, aid effectiveness, and economic history, Foreign Policy, July 8, 2013, “More Unskilled Workers, Please,” http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/07/08/immigration_bill_unskilled_labor?page=0,1, alp)
In the congressional battle over immigration reform, some of the most heated fighting has centered on employment visas for less-skilled essential workers -- elder-care workers, farmworkers, builders, cleaners, servers, warehousers. In these debates, someone is usually thinking or saying, "If we create visas for less-skilled work, that amounts to saying that U.S. workers are too 'lazy' to do these jobs or 'can't cut it.'" That's wrong, and it's an undeserved insult to U.S. workers. In fact, the economy's need for essential workers from abroad is a sign of American workers' strength. And if the United States doesn't address this crucial shortage, the reform efforts currently on the table will likely have limited impact on the number of undocumented workers coming into the country. The bedrock fact is that there aren't enough U.S. workers to do these essential jobs. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the United States will need 3 million additional workers over the next decade to fill the least-skilled jobs -- jobs that do not require a high school degree -- in order to achieve projected economic growth. These include jobs in home health, food preparation, freight, child care, cleaning, landscaping, and construction. Over the same period, the total number of U.S. workers entering the labor force at all skill levels, between the ages of 25 and 54, will be 1.7 million. (At younger ages, 24 years and below, the labor force will actually shrink.) Think on that a moment. Even if every single young American dropped out of college and high school now, so that at the end of the coming decade they would be performing essential less-skilled jobs, they could only fill about half of these new openings. And of course all those kids won't and shouldn't stop getting educated. Around 10 percent of those new labor-force entrants will have less than a high school education; around 30 percent will have high school only. Bottom line: At least three out of four of these new, essential jobs will be filled by workers coming to the United States from abroad, or they won't be filled at all. This has nothing to do with laziness. It's about numbers. It's not only that there aren't enough less-skilled Americans to do these jobs. There aren't enough Americans period. This economic reality is at the center of what drives immigration. But it has been at the fringe of the political theater shaping U.S. immigration reform, perhaps because would-be reformers would rather the face of immigration be a software engineer from Mumbai with a master's degree rather than an uneducated factory worker from Mexico. The Senate's recently passed bill would create relatively small numbers of work visas for low-skilled jobs. (The House has no bill yet.) The Senate bill would create only a few hundred thousand temporary work visas at a time -- the "W" visa -- with a floating cap that could rise to a hypothetical maximum of 600,000 people in the country at any one moment. And it creates a negligible number of low-skill permanent work visas. Who will staff the millions of new low-skilled jobs the U.S. economy will create in the next decade, jobs American workers will not fill? There are the current undocumented workers in the country who may be regularized under immigration reform -- but they're already in the United States, so the BLS's estimates of new jobs already account for the jobs they fill. Perhaps some of these jobs will be filled by people who come on family-reunification visas, but no one knows how many of them there will be, and it will almost certainly be too few. Family-based immigrants have not been filling many of the low-skilled jobs currently filled by unauthorized workers, and the Senate bill will reduce the number of family-based visas. All this implies that even if the United States regularizes millions of immigrants now, it is likely to have another unauthorized immigration crisis several years ahead. The last mass regularization, under President Ronald Reagan in 1986, barely altered the stock of unauthorized immigrants in the medium term. Before the regularization there were around 3 million unauthorized immigrants; just five years later there were once again around 3 million. The main reason was that the reform was a political showpiece built around the politics of "amnesty" and "security," rather than the needs of the U.S. economy. It was never designed to fill America's economic needs for low-skilled labor, but instead was a rickety political compromise among farmers, labor and Hispanic groups, and other interests. In the aftermath, employers had an awful choice: either turn to the black market for labor or face the consequences of a low-skilled labor shortage -- stunted businesses, closed farms, infants and grandparents without proper care. The latest efforts at reform might be the best that can be hoped for from Capitol Hill. But they will similarly herald a new wave of unauthorized immigration unless their low-skill work visa caps are made much more flexible, starting from the essential labor needs of U.S. employers. And that's unlikely. The country's low-skilled labor dilemma is a sign of U.S. workers' high skill and productivity. It's one of many things to celebrate about the United States. High school completion rates in America have been broadly rising for decades, in all ethnic groups. And skilled workers create more skilled jobs; an MBA launching a new product needs skilled marketers and programmers. Skilled workers work with skilled workers, and that kind of teamwork is obvious. But another kind of teamwork is at the heart of the skilled economy: More skilled workers also create more less-skilled jobs. That kind of teamwork is less obvious, so it's worth thinking through. How can that MBA launch a new product? Only by depending critically on a small army of essential low-skilled workers. She needs someone to clear the table after a client lunch, empty the garbage at her office, and run the lot where she parks. She needs someone to pick the vegetables she eats and resurface the road she drives home on. She might need someone to care for her child, or grandfather, so she can work late. All of that is just the beginning. This other form of teamwork is less obvious because it's often invisible. Apart from the care workers, this MBA might never meet or only briefly glimpse the rest of these less-skilled workers. Yet every step of her daily life critically depends on them as much as it depends on her skilled co-workers. They make her more productive, and she them. This is simultaneously the reason that there are so many less-skilled jobs in America's future and the reason that fewer Americans do those jobs. People who acquire higher skills create less-skilled jobs that they themselves aren't suited for. Less-skilled immigrants fill that gap. Machines may be able to take over a few of these jobs; that's why you're seeing more self-checkout registers in retail stores. But no machine we'll have anytime soon can help the elderly bathe safely, clear tables at restaurants, or profitably pick cucumbers. People who do less-skilled essential jobs make skilled work in America possible, and together they make American competitiveness possible. You might never see the people who clean Google's offices, but the company's massive contribution to U.S. competitiveness would not exist without them. There's nothing new here. This is how America has been filling essential jobs since 1776 -- by giving opportunities to hardworking, less-skilled people from around the world. My great-great-great-grandfather came to the United States from Germany as a livestock tender because the bankers and architects of the 1840s needed him to do that work. The Senate's immigration reform bill continues that tradition with employment visas specific to less-skilled work: the "blue card" for farmworkers and the W visa for nonagricultural workers. It is essential to include those provisions and make them as flexible as possible to meet needs for decades to come. They are a sign of U.S. workers' skill, excellence, and productive power. Without provisions like these, any reform of immigration law will leave only two roads ahead: either throwing away economic growth and competitiveness that the United States could have had, or a continued, escalating crisis of unauthorized immigration.
The plan solves:
1) High-skilled workers – boost the competitiveness of high tech US industries Johnson 7 (Kevin, October, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, B.A. Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Epsilon J.D., magna cum laude, Harvard University, “Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws,” http://site.ebrary.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/lib/michstate/docDetail.action?docID=10210080, jkim) Put simply, a more open U.S. immigration policy could benefit the national economy by encouraging the migration of skilled immigrants. Skilled workers would benefit certain employers and tend to stabilize, or possibly even push down, wages in those fields that, at various times, have seen shortages of skilled labor, such as the high-tech industry and nursing. The resulting “brain drain” from other nations would benefit the United States economically and offer opportunities to skilled immigrants the world over. By taking a nation’s most skilled workers, it might, however, have negative effects on other nations, which in turn would implicate moral concerns. 34 Because of the United States’s position as a global economic leader, thousands of skilled workers migrate here annually. The desire to migrate already exists. However, there are many obstacles. The employment visa process “has been widely criticized as a broken system that is, at best grossly inefficient and, at worst, irrational.” 35 Employers frequently complain about the labor certification process for legally bringing skilled workers into the United States because of the time and expense involved. Skilled workers must navigate a complex set of time consuming and costly requirements that require the assistance of skilled —and often high-priced— attorneys. This unquestionably inhibits their migration. More open borders would eliminate many of the obstacles associated with the immigration of skilled workers and allow employers, and the nation, to more readily benefit from this labor source.
2) Low-skilled workers – spur jobs, innovation, and stable wages Dalmia 12 *mobility, cheap services means higher wages, communication skills (Shikha, November, “An Argument for Opening America’s Borders,” senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation, a nonprofit think tank advancing free minds and free markets. Dalmia is a Bloomberg View contributor, a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and writes regularly for Reason magazine. She is also a frequent contributor to the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal and numerous other publications such as the Los Angeles Times, New York Post, The Weekly Standard, Business Week, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. She previously served as a columnist for Forbes. Dalmia was co-winner of the first 2009 Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism for her columns in Forbes and Reason. From 1996 to 2004, Dalmia was as an award-winning editorial writer at the Detroit News, covering a variety of policy issues, including the environment, immigration, Social Security, welfare reform, health care and foreign policy. She also worked as a reporter for the Patriot, a national daily newspaper based in New Delhi, India, where she grew up and earned her B.S. degree in chemistry and biology from the University of Delhi. Dalmia frequenlty appears on Fox Business Network and other television and radio outlets. Dalmia, who taught news writing courses at Michigan State University, earned a Master's degree in mass communication from Louisiana State University. She also holds a post graduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communications, ellipses in original, http://reason.org/files/immigration_policy_opening_american_borders.pdf, jkim) Open borders in goods—free trade—allows physical resources to flow where they can be deployed most productively for their highest and best use. Likewise, open borders for workers—immigration—allows human resources (even more crucial than physical resources) to flow where they can be deployed most productively for their highest and best use. And increased productivity is a win-win for all. No one disputes that open immigration policies would be a huge economic boon for immigrants in relatively less well-off countries. Indeed, a Guatemalan increases his wages six-fold for the same work simply by setting foot in America. A Mexican two-anda-half times, adjusted for purchasing power parity. A 2005 World Bank report found that if the 30 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries allowed a 3 percent rise in the size of their labor forces through loosened immigration restrictions, the gains to citizens of poor countries would amount to about $300 billion. That’s $230 billion more than the developed world currently allocates in foreign aid for poor countries. Fully open borders would double world GDP in a few decades, virtually eliminating global poverty. This is not to suggest that rich countries have a moral obligation to fight world poverty. But they do have a moral obligation to maximize the economic well-being of their own citizens—or, rather, to not prevent their citizens from maximizing their own economic well-being. Jefferson did, after all, promise Americans the right to pursue their own happiness. So long as restrictive immigration policies are the law of the land, that promise will remain unfulfilled. Let’s just examine the benefits of immigration for America, the putative land of immigrants. Economists unanimously agree that immigrants increase native earnings from somewhere between $6 billion to $22 billion (in 2003 dollars) annually. Even Harvard University’s George Borjas—the favorite economist of restrictionists—agrees that immigrants, even low skilled ones, “grease the wheels” of the U.S. economy because they are far more mobile than the native population, quickly moving where their skills are most needed. Indeed, given the strong correlation between an area’s economic dynamism and immigrant presence, cities stuck in a spiral of decline like Baltimore, Detroit and Cleveland are thinking up schemes to attract immigrants through special incentives in the desperate hope that they will jump-start their economies. These efforts might be misguided, but they testify to the strong evidence that immigration and economic growth are connected. Not too many outside restrictionist circles believe that high-skilled foreigners are anything but an unmitigated economic blessing. Restrictionists at the Center for Immigration Studies and elsewhere want to shut the door on even these immigrants, but not even Borjas believes that would be a good idea. In an advanced knowledge economy such as ours, their innovations and high-tech entrepreneurship are vital for growth and jobs. There is near unanimous agreement among economists that high-skilled immigrants benefit the American economy in every possible way—they create jobs, have a positive effect on native wages and contribute more to public coffers in taxes than they consume in welfare. A Kauffman Foundation study calculated that nationwide, immigrant-founded companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005. Indeed, 25 of high-tech companies founded during 1995 to 2005 had at least one immigrant founder. Over 40 percent of companies on the 2010 Fortune 500 list were founded by immigrants or their children. Highly-educated immigrants obtain patents at double the rate of highly-educated natives. As for jobs, a 2011 American Enterprise Institute study by economist Madeline Zavodny, which examined data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, found that between 2000 and 2007 every additional 100 immigrants with advanced degrees in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields from American universities created 262 new native jobs. Yet our immigration policies are so cumbersome that they routinely drive many of these talented foreigners out of the country upon graduation. Even foreigners with degrees from overseas universities create jobs for Americans—86 for every 100 foreigners—and yet our labor laws require employers to jump through hoops to prove that there are no qualified Americans available for a job before hiring them. The real controversy is about the economic impact of low-skilled immigrants. But, again, the controversy is more in the political realm. Among economists, there is a great deal of consensus that even these immigrants are a net economic asset. Perhaps a personal example will help illustrate some broader points in the vast economic literature on the impact of low-skilled immigration: I have a house with a rather large yard in Michigan. Some five years ago, after struggling with weeds and pests, and close to doing permanent damage to my back, I couldn’t keep up. My husband Irenewed our search for an affordable yard maintenance service—something that is extremely hard to find in Michigan—and finally found one run by an Iraqi Chaldean. Let’s call him Jacob. Why could Jacob offer us a better price? Because he had somehow managed to find some cheap Mexican labor, which is not as common a commodity in Michigan asit isin California and Arizona. Over a period of time, Jacob’s business has expanded from home to commercial landscaping. However, his Mexican yard workers with their meager English-speaking skills are unable to communicate with his business clientsso he has hired a cadre of native-born kids, barely out of high school, to accompany the Mexican teams on every job. These Americans kids don’t have to do much except oversee the Mexican laborers and talk to the client when the need arises. Yet they command much better wages than if they had been just pulling weeds. If Jacob couldn’t hire cheap Mexican labor, it wouldn’t mean that he would just pay more for American labor, as restrictionists insist. It would mean that his business wouldn’t get off the ground because he couldn’t offer his service for a price that would be affordable to people like me. I’d either just give up on my yard or I would have to forego writing opportunities—where my real comparative advantage lies—in order to do yard work. The upshot would be a net attrition in economic activity or productivity losses. There are three broad lessons of this story, each borne out by academic literature: First, the most obvious one that no one disputes is that most Americans (like me) are not competitors but customers of low skilled immigrants. Immigrant presence therefore increases our real wages (as goods and services become cheaper allowing us to buy more with the same income) and productivity (as we can devote ourselves to tasks for which we are better suited and likely get paid more). The presence of low-skilled immigrants is especially good for women because it makes it possible for them to devote more time on non-household-related chores, increasing their workforce participation. Indeed, Boston University’s Patricia Cortes has found that metro areas with a large presence of low-skilled immigrants have lower prices for dry cleaning, child care, house cleaning and yard care which, in turn, translates into more hours spent on the job by highly-educated women. “Low-skilled immigration thus indirectly contributes to productivity growth by raising the effective supply of high-skilled labor,” concludes UCLA’s Gordon Hanson. Second, more low-skilled immigration doesn’t mean fewer jobs for the native-born, as restrictionists claim, because jobs are not a zero-sum game. Just like Jacob’s Mexican workforce, immigrants create the jobs they have, not snatch them from someone else. In the process, they allow businesses to form that support better-paying jobs for Americans. In other words, Mexican workers become part of the so-called American underclass, which, for them, is better than being middle-class in Mexico. And the Americans, who, in their absence, might have been part of the underclass, become the middleclass. It is no co-incidence that a Cato Institute study in October ago found that Arizona’s crackdown on undocumented aliens—or paperless workers, as I prefer to call them— hasn’t resulted in more jobs for native born in industries such as construction and agriculture that Mexicans previously occupied. Rather, Arizona has experienced a greater loss of jobs in these industries relative to California and New Mexico. What’s more, the composition of immigration tracks labor market logic so that the immigrants who come to the U.S. are ones whose skills complement those of the native born, instead of competing with them. In economic parlance, immigrants and natives are not substitutes. Indeed, there is a great deal of literature suggesting that if immigrants compete with anyone, it is other immigrants whose skills are similar to theirs. The only economist who has found significant displacement of natives by low-skilled immigrants in America, according to a comprehensive meta-analysis of the existing literature by Sari and William Kerr, is Borjas—and that’s because he assumes far greater substitutability among them than is warranted. Kerr and Kerr conclude: The large majority of studies suggest that immigration does not exert significant effects on native labor market outcomes. Even large, sudden inflows of immigrants such as in the Mariel boat incident in 1980 were not found to reduce native…employment significantly. (Interestingly, even in Europe there is very little displacement of natives. This is surprising given that Europe’s more generous minimum wage and other labor laws make it difficult for wages to adjust in response to an increase in labor supply, something one would expect would squeeze out native jobs. One possible reason for this is that the rise in unemployment affects immigrants themselves the most, not natives, which would explain Europe’s assimilation problem and the ghettoization of its immigrants.) Third, not only do immigrants not cost American jobs, they don’t threaten American wages either. That’s because their presence allows natives—such as Jacob’s American supervisors—to exploit their language and communication skills, where they have a far bigger comparative advantage. Restrictionists argue that the laws of supply and demand dictate that as the supply of immigrant labor increases, overall wages would decrease. The best evidence for that claim comes, again, from Borjas. But even this evidence is weak. In a 2003 paper, gloomily titled “The Labor Demand Curve is Downward Sloping”, Borjas disaggregated the impact of low-skilled immigration on different native groups. He found that as well as having a net negative impact on Americans wages overall, lowskilled immigration also had a negative impact on every cohort of American. However, this was only in the short run. In the long run, the overall impact was zero. What’s more, only one group—high school drop outs—felt a noticeable negative impact, according to a nifty little chart that Bryan Caplan of George Mason University prepared,summarizing Borjas’ findings. For everyone else, the impact was either negligible or positive. Borjas’ work initially made a splash because he used national—not just regional—data as previous studies had done. He argued—correctly—that the ability of capital and labor to move meant that the effect on native wages would spread across the nation, not be localized to the region where there was a concentration of foreign workers. However, a subsequent study by Giovanni Peri and Gianmarco Ottaviano using national data failed to corroborate Borjas’ findings even for native high-school dropouts. They found a negative, short-run effect on the wages of native high-school dropouts of 0.7 percent and a positive long-run effect of 0.3 percent. In other words, no one—not even high school dropouts—lose in the long run due to immigration. Essentially, they discovered two reasons for the discrepancy between their findings and Borjas’. First, Borjas over-estimated the substitutability of immigrants and natives without high-school degrees and therefore ignored the comparative advantage that native skills bestowed upon them in the wake of greater immigration. As Caplan puts it: “When immigration increases, physical skills become more plentiful relative to demand but language skills become more scarce. Since most jobs are a mix of physical and language skills, and people can change jobs, immigration might actually increase native wages.” (Emphasis original). Even more crucially, perhaps, Borjas made the Malthusian assumption that capital wouldn’t adjust much in response to the greater availability of immigrant labor. In other words, his model essentially took the existing amount of capital and divided it among a greater number of workers, thereby lowering wages. That, however, is empathically not what happens. As cheaper labor allows businesses to generate greater profits, they accumulate more capital to invest and grow. “Borjas’ failure to account for capital adjustment in the short run adds an implausibly larger negative effect to native wages in the short run,” conclude Peri and Ottaviano. In summary, more relaxed immigration policies are a win for immigrants who can escape poverty and otherwise improve their lives; a win for native consumers of immigrant services whose real wages increase as their cost of goods and services decreases; and a win for native workers who experience productivity gains as their natural skills become more unique and hence fetch them a better market premium. But before we conclude, let’s consider one powerful objection that immigration foes make to open borders: namely, that open immigration policies might be well and good in the absence of a welfare state, but that in its presence, immigrants don’t earn their full keep. In essence, because they get free schools and other welfare benefits, their employers can pay them less and they can still make ends meet. The welfare state privatizes the benefits of immigrants to employers, but socializes the costs to taxpayers.
3) Global markets – immigrants realign the US economy to flourish globally Johnson 7 *Domestic Labor Market to interact globally (Kevin, October, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, B.A. Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Epsilon J.D., magna cum laude, Harvard University, “Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws,” http://site.ebrary.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/lib/michstate/docDetail.action?docID=10210080,jkim) The arguments for facilitating the migration of highly skilled immigrant workers to the United States have become increasingly powerful in light of the globalization of the international economy. In the midst of globalizing markets in capital and goods, adherents of closed borders must justify the exclusion of labor from a system of increasingly permeable borders. Economic arguments generally favor easy migration between nations and the ready mobility of labor to its most productive use. The labor market benefits of immigrant workers to the United States are undeniable. Nonetheless, as one policy analyst put it, U.S immigration policy is based on denial. Most lawmakers in the United States have largely embraced the process of economic “globalization,” yet stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that increased migration, especially from developing nations, is an integral and inevitable part of this process. Instead, they continue in an impossible quest that began shortly after World War II: the creation of a transnational market in goods and services without a corresponding transnational market for the workers who make those goods and provide those services. In defiance of economic logic, U.S. lawmakers formulate immigration policies to regulate the entry of foreign workers into the country that are largely unrelated to the economic policies they formulate to regulate international commerce. Even in the case of Mexico . . . , the U.S. government tries to impose the same arbitrary limits on immigration as it does on a country as remote as Mongolia. Moreover, while the global trade of goods, services, and capital is regulated through multilateral institutions and agreements, U.S. policymakers persist in viewing immigration as primarily a matter of domestic law enforcement. . . . Lawmakers must devise a realistic solution to this dilemma. Perpetuating the status quo by pouring ever larger amounts of money into the enforcement of immigration policies that are in conflict with economic reality will do nothing to address the underlying problem. 6 In a similar vein, the Immigration Policy Center contends that “current U.S. immigration policies remain largely unresponsive to the labor needs of the U.S. economy by imposing arbitrary and static limits on employment-based immigration that have merely diverted labor migration to the undocumented channels or further clogged the family-based immigration system.” 7 Despite their inconsistency with economic reality, border enforcement efforts, like tough-on-crime measures, find ready and willing support among the public and politicians. At the same time, they offer precious little likelihood of success. Heightened border enforcement, like Prohibition and its similarly misplaced successor, the “war on drugs,” offers a politically popular response to a perceived problem that fails to deliver the goods. This should not be surprising. Strict border enforcement runs squarely against economic currents that the law simply cannot overcome. To make matters worse, immigration controls ultimately damage the U.S. economy and seriously distort domestic labor markets in troubling ways. As many economists have observed, in order to achieve steady economic growth with a minimum of inflation, an economy requires an expanding labor force. Over the past fifty years, the addition of immigrant labor to the economy has unquestionably had a dramatic effect on the domestic labor market. Economists have credited the influx of immigrant labor with helping to spark the economic boom times of the 1990s, one of the more sustained periods of economic growth in U.S. history. 8 Crediting the economic growth of the 1990s to immigrant labor, the much-revered former chair of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, further suggested that immigrants contributed more than their fair share to the economy. 9 Fundamentally, many immigrants take on low-wage jobs that are not particularly easy for employers to fill in many parts of the country. 10 Many sectors of the global economy have become increasingly competitive. Some U.S. employers bank— figuratively and literally— on undocumented labor in order to compete in the global marketplace. Lowcost immigrant labor increases a business’s capacity to compete by providing certain benefits to employers and the U.S. economy as a whole. Consumers benefit from lower prices for many commodities, including fruits and vegetables, and meat and poultry, and for services such as domestic-service work, hotels and restaurants, and construction. In addition, the money spent by undocumented immigrants on goods and services spurs further economic activity and benefits every economic actor. These expenditures have ripple effects through all sectors of the U.S. economy. Large employers in certain industries often rely heavily on undocumented immigrants. Recently, several high-profile companies have had their hiring practices exposed. The poultry giant Tyson Foods faced a criminal indictment, and was later acquitted, for participating in a scheme to traffic immigrant workers. Its employment of undocumented workers, however, could not seriously be disputed. 11 Wal-Mart repeatedly makes the news for its employment of undocumented immigrants. 12 Entire industries, such as agriculture, meat and poultry processing, construction, and the hotel and restaurant sector, have come to rely heavily on undocumented labor to remain competitive. This dependence on undocumented labor has led to vigorous resistance to federal enforcement efforts. For example, when the federal government began an operation to enforce the laws barring the employment of undocumented immigrants in meat-packing plants in Nebraska in 1999, state and local politicians protested because of the impacts on the state economy. 13 An American Farm Bureau Federation study concluded that, “if agriculture’s access to migrant labor were cut off, as much as $5– 9 billion in annual production of . . . commodities . . . would be lost in the short term. Over the longer term, this annual loss would increase to $6.5– 12 billion as the shock worked its way through the sector.” 14 Without undocumented workers, businesses in some industries would be forced to close. Such a collapse would drag down the U.S. economy. As the preeminent economist John Kenneth Galbraith stated, Were all the illegals in the United States suddenly to return home, the effect on the United States economy would...be little less than disastrous. . . . A large amount of useful, if often tedious, work . . . would go unperformed. Fruits and vegetables in Florida, Texas, and California would go unharvested. Food prices would rise spectacularly. Mexicans wish to come to the United States; they are wanted; they add visibly to our well-being. . . . Without them, the American economy would suffer. The popular 2004 film “A Day Without a Mexican” offered a tonguein-cheek look at how the U.S. economy would dramatically stop in its tracks without Mexican workers. As with all humor, the movie offered a grain of truth. We know in our heart of hearts that at least part of the U.S. economy would grind to a sudden halt if immigrant workers were no longer available. Despite the tangible economic benefits bestowed on the nation by immigrants, U.S. immigration law has been deeply ambivalent, if not downright schizophrenic, about immigration and immigrant workers. Overall, the law has done a poor job of balancing the economic interests at stake. The U.S. government often fails to even consider basic labor economics in formulating immigration law and policy. As a result, the nation has created a system in which undocumented workers are integral to the national economy but, at the very same time, find themselves exploited, marginalized, and abused. To make matters worse, because the labor pool depends on the vagaries of immigration enforcement, employers may face fluctuations in the supply of labor, which necessarily affects productivity and profits. Billions of dollars are spent on enforcing immigration laws that are in effect unenforceable. The nation’s massive border enforcement efforts resemble a never-ending war in Vietnam or, more recently, Afghanistan and Iraq. Like those wars, border enforcement results in the expenditure of billions of dollars and thousands of deaths with no tangible benefit. Nothing resembling victory, or even stabilization of the immigration flow, is currently in sight. Economically, nothing can justify this deadweight loss. While the political clamor for immigration enforcement continues unabated, and Congress approves such misplaced measures as extending border fences, attention to the economic consequences of immigration has been minimal. Globalization of the world economy has been steadily proceeding over the post– World War II period. By the end of the twentieth century, economic integration of national economies had been achieved at a level never previously attained. For better or worse, multinational corporations have come to dominate the economies of many nations all over the world. The dramatic escalation in the trade of goods and services between and among nations led one observer to opine that we live in a “borderless world.” 16 Absent cataclysmic change, there is no way to reverse globalization at this juncture. But, despite globalization, and despite the increasingly interlinked economies between nations, borders, border guards, and border enforcement limit the movement of people into the United States. Although the legal distinction between labor and capital is well established, the economic distinction is far from clear. From an economic standpoint, both are substitutable factors of production. Absent special justification, the law should treat the two as equivalents. A corollary of the anti-immigrant economic argument is that open borders in a welfare state will bankrupt the nation as immigrants overconsume public benefits. As explained later in the chapter, such fears for the most part are grossly exaggerated and lack empirical support. Oddly enough, the United States continues to treat labor and goods and services differently. It embraces comprehensive immigration restrictions as it simultaneously opens its borders to trade and flows of capital, goods, and services. As Kitty Calavita has aptly observed, “the irony is that in this period of globalization marked by its free movement of capital and goods, the movement of labor is subject to greater restrictions than at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.” 17 There is one critically important— and rather obvious— difference between goods and people: Workers are human beings. New people bring families, cultures, languages, and change to the nation. What they bring therefore is qualitatively different from what is brought by an influx of foreign capital or goods. As Max Frisch wrote in discussing guest workers in Germany, “we wanted workers, but humans came.” 18 This fact, as a political matter, seriously complicates the debate over immigration. People fear the cultural and other changes, including to the national identity, brought by new people. That fear animates the nativism that has arisen time and again in U.S. history. In certain instances, such fears have been allowed to trump economic imperatives. It is true that immigrants transform the societies they join. But this transformation has occurred time and time again in world, and U.S., history. In many respects, change in societies is natural, expected, and essential to survival. Immigrants therefore should be viewed as the economic, social, and cultural lifeblood of U.S. society, rather than as a threat to be feared and punished. Even though Congress passes immigration laws without considering the true economic impacts of immigration and immigrant labor, the U.S. government fully appreciates that immigration, including undocumented immigration, affects the national economy. The 2005 Economic Report of the President analyzes in detail the positive effects of immigration on the economy. The Report unequivocally concludes, in a passage that received virtually no public attention, that “a comprehensive accounting of the benefits and costs of immigration shows that the benefits of immigration exceed the costs.” 19 Freer migration makes economic sense for the United States. Only time will tell whether the nation will realize that liberal immigration admissions will handsomely benefit its economy and act accordingly.
Plan
Text: The United States federal government should adopt an economic engagement policy with Mexico that ends restrictions on the movement of people and goods between Mexico and the United States.
Mexico Contention 2 is Mexico:
Relations are good:
They solve drug violence Thompson and Mazetti 11 (Ginger and Mark, “U.S. Drones Fight Mexican Drug Trade,” March 16, Bachelor of Arts degree in public policy and history from Duke University Summa Cum Laude. Masters in modern history from Oxford University, Pulitzer prize winner and finalist, Gerald R Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, NYT writer, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/americas/16drug.html?pagewanted=alland_r=0, jkim) Pentagon, State Department, Homeland Security and Mexican officials declined to comment publicly about the introduction of drones in Mexico’s counternarcotics efforts. But some officials, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, said the move was evidence of the two countries’ deepening cooperation in efforts to prevail over a common threat. In addition to expanding the use of drones, the two leaders agreed to open a counternarcotics “fusion” center, the second such facility in Mexico, where Mexican and American agencies would work together, the officials said. In recent years, the United States has steadily stepped up its role in fighting Mexican drug trafficking, though officials offer few details of the cooperation. The greatest growth involves intelligence gathering, with Homeland Security and the American military flying manned aircraft and drones along the United States’ southern border — and now over Mexican territory — that are capable of peering deep into Mexico and tracking criminals’ communications and movements, officials said. In addition, the United States trains thousands of Mexican troops and police officers, collaborates with specially vetted Mexican security units, conducts eavesdropping in Mexico and upgrades Mexican security equipment and intelligence technology, according to American law enforcement and intelligence officials. “It wasn’t that long ago when there was no way the D.E.A. could conduct the kinds of activities they are doing now,” said Mike Vigil, a retired chief of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. “And the only way they’re going to be able to keep doing them is by allowing Mexico to have plausible deniability.” In addition to wariness by Mr. Calderón’s government about how the American intervention might be perceived at home, the Mexican Constitution prohibits foreign military and law enforcement agents from operating in Mexico except under extremely limited conditions, Mexican officials said, so the legal foundation for such activity may be shaky. In the United States, lawmakers have expressed doubts that Mexico, whose security agencies are rife with corruption, is a reliable partner. Before Mr. Obama met with Mr. Calderón at the White House, diplomatic tensions threatened to weaken the cooperation between their governments. State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks had reported criticism of the Mexican government by American diplomats, setting off a firestorm of resentment in Mexico. Then in February, outrage in Washington over Mr. Zapata’s murder prompted Mexican officials to complain that the United States government paid attention to drug violence only when it took the life of an American citizen. In the end, however, mutual interests prevailed in the March 3 meeting after a frank exchange of grievances, Mexican and American officials said. Mr. Calderón told Mr. Obama that his country had borne the brunt of a scourge driven by American guns and drug consumption, and urged the United States to do more to help. Mr. Obama, worried about Mexico falling into chaos and about violence spilling over the border, said his administration was eager to play a more central role, the officials said. The leaders emphasized “the value of information sharing,” a senior Mexican official said, adding that they recognized “the responsibilities shared by both governments in the fight against criminal organizations on both sides of the border.” A senior American administration official noted that all “counternarcotics activities were conducted at the request and direction of the Mexican government.” Mr. Calderón is “intensely nationalistic, but he’s also very pragmatic,” said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “He’s not really a fan of the United States, but he knows he needs their help, so he’s willing to push the political boundaries.” Mexican and American officials said that their cooperative efforts had been crucial to helping Mexico capture and kill at least 20 high-profile drug traffickers, including 12 in the last year alone. All those traffickers, Mexican officials said, had been apprehended thanks to intelligence provided by the United States. Still, much of the cooperation is shrouded in secrecy. Mexican and American authorities, for example, initially denied that the first fusion center, established over a year ago in Mexico City, shared and analyzed intelligence. Some officials now say that Mexican and American law enforcement agencies work together around the clock, while others characterize it more as an operational outpost staffed almost entirely by Americans. Mexican and American officials say Mexico turns a blind eye to American wiretapping of the telephone lines of drug-trafficking suspects, and similarly to American law enforcement officials carrying weapons in violation of longstanding Mexican restrictions. Officials on both sides of the border also said that Mexico asked the United States to use its drones to help track suspects’ movements. The officials said that while Mexico had its own unmanned aerial vehicles, they did not have the range or high-resolution capabilities necessary for certain surveillance activities. One American military official said the Pentagon had flown a number of flights over the past month using the Global Hawk drones — a spy plane that can fly higher than 60,000 feet and survey about 40,000 square miles of territory in a day. They cannot be readily seen by drug traffickers — or ordinary Mexicans — on the ground. But no one would say exactly how many drone flights had been conducted by the United States, or how many were anticipated under the new agreement. The officials cited the secrecy of drug investigations, and concerns that airing such details might endanger American and Mexican officials on the ground. Lt. Col. Robert L. Ditchey, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday that “the Department of Defense, in coordination with the State Department, is working closely with the Mexican military and supports their efforts to counter transnational criminal organizations,” but did not comment specifically on the American drone flights. Similarly, Matt Chandler, a Homeland Security spokesman, said it would be “inappropriate to comment” on the use of drones in the Zapata case, citing the continuing investigation.
Drug violence collapses the Mexican state Kurtzman 9 (Joel, Senior Fellow; Executive Director, Senior Fellows Program; Publisher, The Milken Institute Review, business editor and columnist at The New York Times, member of the editorial board of Harvard Business School, AB at the University of California, Recipient of the Eisner Memorial Award, master's at the University of Houston, recipient of a Moody Foundation Fellowship, “Mexico's Instability Is a Real Problem”, the Wall Street Journal, 1/16/2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123206674721488169.html) Don't discount the possibility of a failed state next door. Mexico is now in the midst of a vicious drug war. Police officers are being bribed and, especially near the United States border, gunned down. Kidnappings and extortion are common place. And, most alarming of all, a new Pentagon study concludes that Mexico is at risk of becoming a failed state. Defense planners liken the situation to that of Pakistan, where wholesale collapse of civil government is possible.¶ One center of the violence is Tijuana, where last year more than 600 people were killed in drug violence. Many were shot with assault rifles in the streets and left there to die. Some were killed in dance clubs in front of witnesses too scared to talk.¶ It may only be a matter of time before the drug war spills across the border and into the U.S. To meet that threat, Michael Chertoff, the outgoing secretary for Homeland Security, recently announced that the U.S. has a plan to "surge" civilian and possibly military law-enforcement personnel to the border should that be necessary.¶ Nuclear war Debusmann 9 (Bernd, Reuters Columnist, “Among top U.S. fears: A failed Mexican state,” Jan 9, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/world/americas/09iht-letter.1.19217792.html?_r=0, jkim) But the little-studied phenomenon of "rapid collapse," according to the study, "usually comes as a surprise, has a rapid onset, and poses acute problems." Think Yugoslavia and its disintegration in 1990 into a chaotic tangle of warring nationalities and bloodshed on a horrific scale. Nuclear-armed Pakistan, where Al Qaeda has established safe havens in the rugged regions bordering Afghanistan, is a regular feature in dire warnings. Thomas Fingar, who retired as the chief U.S. intelligence analyst in December, termed Pakistan "one of the single most challenging places on the planet." This is fairly routine language for Pakistan, but not for Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile, or 3,200-kilometer, border with the United States. Mexico's mention beside Pakistan in a study by an organization as weighty as the Joint Forces Command, which controls almost all conventional forces based in the continental United States, speaks volumes about growing concern over what is happening south of the U.S. border. Vicious and widening violence pitting drug cartels against each other and against the Mexican state have left more than 8,000 Mexicans dead over the past two years. Kidnappings have become a routine part of Mexican daily life. Common crime is widespread. Pervasive corruption has hollowed out the state. In November, in a case that shocked even those (on both sides of the border) who consider corruption endemic in Mexico, the former drug czar Noé Ramírez was charged with accepting at least $450,000 a month in bribes from a drug cartel in exchange for information about police and anti-narcotics operations. A month later, a Mexican army major, Arturo González, was arrested on suspicion that he sold information about President Felipe Calderón's movements for $100,000 a month. González belonged to a special unit responsible for protecting the president. Depending on one's view, the arrests are successes in a publicly declared anticorruption drive or evidence of how deeply criminal mafias have penetrated the organs of the state. According to the Joint Forces study, a sudden collapse in Mexico is less likely than in Pakistan, "but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state." It added: "Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone." What form such a response might take is anyone's guess, and the study does not spell it out, nor does it address the economic implications of its worst-case scenario. Mexico is the third biggest trade partner of the United States (after Canada and China) and its third-biggest supplier of oil (after Canada and Saudi Arabia). No such ties bind the United States and Pakistan. But the study sees a collapse there not only as more likely but as more catastrophic. It would bring "the likelihood of a sustained violent and bloody civil and sectarian war, an even bigger haven for violent extremists and the question of what would happen to its nuclear weapons. That 'perfect storm' of uncertainty alone might require the engagement of U.S. and coalition forces into a situation of immense complexity and danger." The study then warns of "the real possibility that nuclear weapons might be used." It is not clear where on the long list of actual and potential crises around the world Mexico and Pakistan will rank once Barack Obama takes office as U.S. president on Jan. 20. During the election campaign, Obama repeatedly criticized Pakistan for not cracking down hard enough on terrorists inside its borders. Since then a new Pakistani president has come to power. Not long after that, tensions between Pakistan and India, also a nuclear power, rose sharply after gunmen attacked two luxury hotels and other sites in Mumbai, India's commercial capital, and killed 163 people. India described the attack as a conspiracy hatched in Pakistan and carried out by Pakistanis. Closer to home, the U.S. economic crisis looks likely to slow down a $1.4 billion assistance program - including military equipment, training, technology - to help the Mexican government gain the upper hand over the drug cartels and re-establish control over what some have called "failed cities" along the border, places where shootouts, beheadings and kidnappings have become routine.
It also causes Latin American instability Shirk 11 (David A., “The Drug War in Mexico Confronting a Shared Threat,” March, Associate Professor, Political Science, and Director, Trans-Border Institute, University of San Diego, http://www.cfr.org/mexico/drug-war-mexico/p24262?cid-emc-MexicoCSR_pressblast-032811, jkim) Third, Mexican stability serves as an important anchor for the region. With networks stretching into Central America, the Carib-bean, and the Andean countries, Mexican DTOs undermine the secu-rity and reliability of other U.S. partners in the hemisphere, corrupting high-level officials, military operatives, and law enforcement person¬nel; undermining due process and human rights; reducing public sup¬port for counter-drug efforts; and even provoking hostility toward the United States. Given the fragility of some Central American and Caribbean states, expansion of DTO operations and violence into the region would have a gravely destabilizing effect.
Nuclear war Manwaring 5 (General Douglas MacArthur Chair and Prof of Military Strategy @ U.S. Army War College, Ret U.S. Army Colonel, Adjunct Professor of International Politics @ Dickinson College (Max G, October, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivarian Socialism, and Asymmetric Warfare”, Strategic Studies Institute, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB628.pdf) President Chávez also understands that the process leading to state failure is the most dangerous long-term security challenge facing the global community today. The argument in general is that failing and failed state status is the breeding ground for instability, criminality, insurgency, regional con?ict, and terrorism. These conditions breed massive humanitarian disasters and major refugee ?ows. They can host “evil” networks of all kinds, whether they involve criminal business enterprise, narco-traf?cking, or some form of ideological crusade such as Bolivarianismo. More speci?cally, these conditions spawn all kinds of things people in general do not like such as murder, kidnapping, corruption, intimidation, and destruction of infrastructure. These means of coercion and persuasion can spawn further human rights violations, torture, poverty, starvation, disease, the recruitment and use of child soldiers, traf?cking in women and body parts, traf?cking and proliferation of conventional weapons systems and WMD, genocide, ethnic cleansing, warlordism, and criminal anarchy. At the same time, these actions are usually uncon?ned and spill over into regional syndromes of poverty, destabilization, and con?ict. Peru’s Sendero Luminoso calls violent and destructive activities that facilitate the processes of state failure “armed propaganda.” Drug cartels operating throughout the Andean Ridge of South America and elsewhere call these activities “business incentives.” Chávez considers these actions to be steps that must be taken to bring about the political conditions necessary to establish Latin American socialism for the 21st century.63 Thus, in addition to helping to provide wider latitude to further their tactical and operational objectives, state and nonstate actors’ strategic efforts are aimed at progressively lessening a targeted regime’s credibility and capability in terms of its ability and willingness to govern and develop its national territory and society. Chávez’s intent is to focus his primary attack politically and psychologically on selected Latin American governments’ ability and right to govern. In that context, he understands that popular perceptions of corruption, disenfranchisement, poverty, and lack of upward mobility limit the right and the ability of a given regime to conduct the business of the state. Until a given populace generally perceives that its government is dealing with these and other basic issues of political, economic, and social injustice fairly and effectively, instability and the threat of subverting or destroying such a government are real.64 But failing and failed states simply do not go away. Virtuallyanyone can take advantage of such an unstable situation. The tendency is that the best motivated and best armed organization on the scene will control that instability. As a consequence, failing and failed states become dysfunctional states, rogue states, criminal states, narco-states, or new people’s democracies. In connection with the creation of new people’s democracies, one can rest assured that Chávez and his Bolivarian populist allies will be available to provide money, arms, and leadership at any given opportunity. And, of course, the longer dysfunctional, rogue, criminal, and narco-states and people’s democracies persist, the more they and their associated problems endanger global security, peace, and prosperity.
Relations exist now but fail at combatting drug violence Priest 5/1 (Dana, “U.S. role to decrease as Mexico’s drug-war strategy shifts,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post, 2013, http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2020902455_mexicoobamaxml.html, jkim) U.S. role to decrease as Mexico’s drug-war strategy shifts The new administration in Mexico has shifted priorities away from the U.S.-backed strategy of arresting kingpins and toward an emphasis on keeping Mexico’s streets safe. President Obama in Mexico visit MEXICO CITY — For the past seven years, Mexico and the United States have forged an unparalleled alliance against Mexico’s drug cartels, one based on sharing sensitive intelligence, U.S. training and joint operational planning. But much of that hard-earned cooperation may be in jeopardy. President Obama heads off Thursday on a three-day visit to Mexico to cement relations with the newly elected president, Enrique Peña Nieto, with vows of neighborly kinship and future cooperation. Obama’s visit comes as the fight over border security and immigration overhaul has begun to consume Congress. The December inauguration of Peña Nieto brought the nationalistic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) back to power after 13 years, and with it a whiff of resentment over the deep U.S. involvement in Mexico’s fight against narco-traffickers. The new administration has shifted priorities away from the U.S.-backed strategy of arresting kingpins, which sparked an unprecedented level of violence among the cartels, and toward an emphasis on prevention and keeping Mexico’s streets safe and calm, Mexican authorities said. Some U.S. officials fear the coming of an unofficial truce with cartel leaders. The Mexicans see it otherwise. “The objective of fighting organized crime is not in conflict with achieving peace,” said Eduardo Medina-Mora, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States. Two weeks after Peña Nieto assumed office Dec. 1, the new president sent his top five security officials to an unusual meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. The new attorney general and interior minister sat in silence next to the new leaders of the army, navy and Mexican intelligence agency. Also at the Dec. 15 meeting were representatives from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the CIA, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other U.S. agencies charged with helping Mexico destroy the drug cartels that had besieged the country for the past decade. The Mexicans remained stone-faced as they learned how entwined the two countries had become during the battle against narco-traffickers, and how, in the process, the United States had been given near-complete access to Mexico’s territory and the secrets of its citizens, according to several U.S. officials familiar with the meeting. The administration of the previous president, Felipe Calderón, had granted U.S. spy planes access to Mexican airspace to gather intelligence. Unarmed Customs and Border Protection drones had flown from U.S. bases in support of Mexican military and federal police raids against drug targets and to track movements that would establish suspects’ “patterns of life.” The United States had also provided electronic signals technology, ground sensors, voice-recognition gear, cellphone-tracking devices, data-analysis tools, computer hacking kits and airborne cameras that could read license plates from three miles away. Under a classified program code-named SCENIC, the CIA was training Mexicans how to target and vet potential assets for recruitment and how to guard against infiltration by narco-traffickers. In deference to their visitors, the U.S. briefers left out that most of the 25 kingpin taken off the streets in the past five years had been removed because of U.S.-supplied information, according to people familiar with the meeting. Also unremarked upon was the mounting criticism that success against the cartels’ leadership had helped incite more violence than anyone had predicted, more than 60,000 deaths and 25,000 disappearances in the past seven years. Meanwhile, Mexico remains the U.S. market’s largest supplier of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine and the transshipment point for 95 percent of its cocaine. When the Dec. 15 meeting concluded, Mexico’s new security officials remained poker-faced. “They said they were very appreciative to have received so much information,” said one U.S. official familiar with the meeting. We will be in touch, they added, and left. Forging ties U.S. involvement in Mexico’s deteriorating internal security first peaked in the mid-1980s. In 1986, President Reagan signed a National Security Decision Directive instructing U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to help defeat the growing narco-trafficking menace worldwide. Beginning in the late 1980s, a massive U.S. air, sea and land effort was shutting down many Caribbean drug routes. The traffickers were increasingly forced to move their product through the only territory left unhindered: Mexico. Mexico’s secret security ties with the United States date at least to the Cold War, when Mexico City was a hub of intrigue. To keep an eye on the United States, the Soviet Union and China had their largest embassies in Mexico City, necessitating a large CIA presence. Then the Mexican intelligence service, CISEN, “was basically run by the CIA,” according to one former CISEN official. Although that has changed, the unusually close relationship between Mexican presidents and CIA chiefs has not. In 2000, the 71-year political rule of the authoritarian and corrupt PRI ended with the election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party as president. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States turned the new openness into unprecedented bilateral action against terrorism. The two countries fortified the border with personnel and surveillance technology. Eventually, a protocol was worked out for Mexico to stop, detain and interrogate non-Mexicans traveling north toward the United States. Mexican authorities allow U.S. officials to remotely question third-country nationals of concern to the United States, according to Mexican and U.S. officials. Clamping down on illegal border crossings, however, had an unintended consequence: It upset agreements among the cartels over smuggling routes, sparking more violent competition. Death toll climbs By the time Calderón was inaugurated in late 2006, many experts believed Mexico was losing control of parts of the country. Before his inauguration, Calderón pleaded with President George W. Bush to help the Mexican military quash the cartels, according to Antonio Garza, then U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Bush agreed to help, and the Merida Initiative, a $1.9 billion aid package for military training and equipment and judicial reform, set the framework for a new level of U.S.-Mexico cooperation. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence took a leading role in the U.S. effort to defeat the cartels. By then, cartels had begun using assassination squads, according to Guillermo Valdes, director of CISEN at the time. CISEN discovered from a captured videotape and a special analytical group it set up that some of the cartels had hired former members of the U.S.-trained Guatemalan special forces, the Kaibiles, to create sociopathic killers who could behead a man, torture a child or immerse a captive in acid. To fight back, the CIA proposed electronically emptying the bank accounts of drug kingpins but was turned down by the Treasury Department and the Bush administration, which feared unleashing chaos in the banking system. As the Mexican death toll mounted, Calderón pleaded with Bush for armed drones. The administration rejected the request because it was far too likely to result in collateral damage, they said. By 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, horrific scenes had become commonplace in Mexico: severed heads thrown onto a dance floor, a half-dozen bodies hanging from a bridge, bombs embedded in cadavers. Ciudad Juárez, a stone’s throw from El Paso, was a virtual killing zone. Obama approved an intensification of bilateral measures. Deputy national-security adviser John Brennan led the U.S. side. His Mexican partner was CISEN director Valdes. Every new program was vetted by Mexico’s security team and often by Calderón. The first important decision was to use the same “high-value target” strategy that had been successful against al-Qaida in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. authorities used real-time intelligence against kingpins on a priority list — including cellphone geolocation, wiretaps, electronic intercepts and tracking of digital records — to help Mexican authorities target them. The second was to clean up the Mexican units that would be responsible for carrying out raids. As early as 1997, the DEA had funded the creation of Sensitive Investigative Units (SIU) made up of foreign nationals, first in Colombia, then in Bolivia, Peru and Mexico, and eventually in nine other countries. By mid-2006, the DEA had two units with a total of 184 members in Mexico, according to a DEA inspector general’s report. Mexico does not allow U.S. agents to take part in the raids, but they can be involved in planning and can direct them remotely. The CIA also has trained units in raid tactics, protection of senior officials, intelligence collecting and in gathering and preserving evidence. To guard against penetration from the cartels, members were polygraphed, drug-tested and vetted for criminal and financial irregularities. But operations were still routinely exposed by moles. So, beginning in 2009, the size of the units was cut significantly. Those who remained worked under cover and lived in secret safe houses. There are six or seven SIUs in Mexico, sponsored by the DEA, CIA and at least one other U.S. law-enforcement agency. Quest for drones The two countries also have constructed an elaborate physical infrastructure and developed protocols for sharing sensitive, often real-time intelligence. By 2011, the infrastructure extended to a CIA-run fusion center in Mexico City, a DEA-sponsored fusion center in Monterrey, a federal police bunker, also in the capital city, and separate military and federal police intelligence centers and one inside the headquarters of CISEN. The bulk of the U.S. work finding cartel members depends on the DEA’s network of informants and undercover agents. DEA-provided information led to the killing of cartel leader Arturo Beltrán Leyva in December 2009. The carte moved significant quantities of cocaine into the United States and had penetrated the highest level of Mexico’s institutions. His death gave Calderón his first significant victory in the anti-cartel campaign. In another successful mission, the DEA in 2010 located the multiple cellphones of U.S.-born kingpin Edgar Valdez Villarreal, known as “La Barbie” for his Ken-doll good looks. The drug agency tracked his travels over time, allowing Mexican authorities to pursue him through five Mexican states. He was captured in August 2010 and is in Mexican custody, awaiting extradition to the United States. Drones became part of the mix, too. U.S. pilots sitting in the U.S. would control the planes remotely, but a Mexican military or federal police commander would direct the pilot within the boundaries of a Mexico-designated grid. By late 2010, drones were flying deeper into Mexico to spy on the cartels, as they did during the two-day gunbattle involving 800 federal police that resulted in the death of Nazario Moreno González, head of La Familia Michoacana cartel. By then, Mexican authorities had grown so enamored with drones that they were requesting more flights than the United States could deliver. So Mexican authorities bought their own drones. Roots of change In a visit to Washington two weeks ago, Mexico’s top security team shared the outlines of the new plan with U.S. agencies, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. It contains many changes. The president will not be nearly as directly involved in counterdrug efforts as was Calderón, the officials said. The interior minister will coordinate the relationships among Mexican and U.S. agencies and other Mexican units. Given the corruption of Mexican law enforcement and armed forces, U.S. officials said privately they would be unwilling to share sensitive information until they have vetted the people involved. The Mexican government also plans to create five regional intelligence fusion centers and to build a 10,000-member super police force. This force would be steeped in military discipline but would use police tactics, rather than military force, to keep violence to a minimum. Medina-Mora, the Mexican ambassador, said in an interview that his nation considers U.S. help in the drug war “a centerpiece” of Mexico’s counternarcotics strategy. But the Mexican delegation also told U.S. authorities that Americans will no longer be allowed to work inside any fusion center.
The plan solves – immigration policies are destroying cooperative relations – openness is key Johnson 7 (Kevin, October, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, B.A. Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Epsilon J.D., magna cum laude, Harvard University, “Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws,” http://site.ebrary.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/lib/michstate/docDetail.action?docID=10210080, jkim) Immigration has sporadically produced tensions between the United States and other nations. A move toward open entry would tend to reduce international tensions. It also could well improve this nation’s relations with other countries and heighten the nation’s stature in the eyes of the world. Specifically, immigration has resulted in serious rifts between Mexico and the United States. 122 Border enforcement strategies and U.S. authorities’ harsh treatment of Mexican nationals have contributed to the conflict. Nor has the Mexican government remained silent. For example, when, in the 1990s, the U.S. government named one of its new border enforcement operations in El Paso, Texas, “Operation Blockade,” the Mexican government strongly protested. In response, the U.S. government changed the name to “Operation Hold-the-Line.” 123 Similarly, Mexican officials vocally protested the anti-Mexican sentiment underlying the campaign in California for Proposition 187, a voter-approved initiative that would have barred undocumented immigrants from receiving public benefits. 124 In 2005 and 2006, Mexico reacted negatively to border enforcement bills pending in Congress. Eleven Latin American countries, including Mexico, lobbied against a strict border enforcement bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives at the end of 2005. The Mexican government also protested the U.S. Congress’s passage of a bill in 2006 authorizing the extension of the fence along the U.S. Mexico border. From 2001 to the present, the governments of Mexico and the United States have had ongoing discussions about migration, a major issue of interest to the two governments. 126 For the Mexican government, ending human rights abuses and ensuring the continued flows of remittances from migrants in the United States to Mexico 127 make U.S. immigration law relevant to its own national interests. Neither are served by border enforcement-only reforms. For well over a decade, however, U.S. lawmakers have failed to enact little more than laws that increase border enforcement. A much-needed reconceptualization of the meaning and nature of the U.S.-Mexico border stands to benefit both nations. 128 An immigration scheme consistent with the economic, political, and social needs of the two nations, as has been outlined here, could be constructed. A more realistic legal regime would remedy the problems that plague immigration enforcement today and avoid repetitions of the mistakes of the past. International tensions over migration are not limited to the United States and Mexico. Tighter border controls on the northern U.S. border after September 11 elicited protests from the Canadian government over the treatment of its citizens. 129 More generally, the proposed elimination of a visa waiver program for citizens of certain nations, designed to improve U.S. security, may have foreign-relations repercussions. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, “the decision to eliminate the program could negatively affect U.S. relations with participating countries, could discourage some business and tourism in the United States, and would increase the need for State Department resources.” 130 U.S. law generally seeks to limit the potential for negative foreign relations consequences. For example, federal preemption of state regulation of immigration was premised in part on the potential for immigration law and its enforcement to have adverse foreign relations consequences. The foreign-policy implications of immigration decisions were also an important rationale for the plenary power doctrine, which shields the immigration laws from meaningful judicial review. 131 In addition, federal jurisdiction over disputes involving noncitizens and foreign states in the federal courts provides a degree of assurance that foreigners will receive fair treatment. 132 Liberal admission would further U.S. foreign-policy interests. 133 A move toward open entry would tend to reduce international tensions. Migrants from any particular nation would not feel disfavored. Their governments would not see U.S. policy as discriminating against its nationals, as is the case today. Absent the elaborate mazes of exclusions, most migrants and potential migrants, as well as the governments of their homelands, would feel that they were welcomed, respected, and the equals of citizens of other nations. The potential foreign-policy benefits are not limited to U.S-Mexican relations. Open borders could relieve tensions between the United States and other nations, as well. Multilateralism will be essential to fighting terrorism in the future, 134 as well as ensuring peace. Consequently, improving foreign relations through liberal admissions of immigrants is a benefit well worth considering.
The plan spills over to broad relations Delacroix and Nikiforov 9 (“If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border Freely,” Summer, p 101-103, Jacques Delacroix, a sociologist by training and formerly a university professor of management, is an independent writer living in Santa Cruz, California; Sergey Nikiforov, a native of Russia, lives in Silicon Valley and works in business development, http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_6_delacroix.pdf, jkim) Second, improvements in border relations would likely improve all relations with Mexico. The Mexican government bureaucracy might conceivably become less inclined to drag its feet in implementing NAFTA and subsequent economic agreements if relations between the two countries were warmer. One might envisage making better reception for U.S. corporations and products south of the border a condition of negotiations leading to the opening of that border to the free movement of people.
Immigration enforcement is impossible – the plan is key to integrating prospective immigrants into the legal system Johnson 7 (Kevin, October, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, B.A. Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Epsilon J.D., magna cum laude, Harvard University, “Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws,” http://site.ebrary.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/lib/michstate/docDetail.action?docID=10210080, jkim)
As with the United States’s failed prohibition of the alcohol trade in the early twentieth century, it has proven to be virtually impossible to enforce the immigration laws and put a halt to undocumented immigration. Otherwise law-abiding people surreptitiously enter the United States or overstay their temporary visas. Otherwise law-abiding citizens, even nominees for high positions in the federal government with significant immigration enforcement responsibilities such as the Attorney General, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, have employed undocumented immigrants. U.S. society at large simply does not generally consider either the employers or the undocumented immigrants to be criminals, even though they have violated the law. Employers are engaged in conduct that is widespread and, with little more than a wink and a nod, accepted by all parties. To make matters worse, as discussed in Chapter 5, modern border enforcement, like Prohibition, promotes criminal activity, leads to abusive law enforcement practices, contributes to a caseload crisis in the immigration bureaucracy and the courts, and undermines the very legitimacy and moral force of the law. Open borders would help address these problems and offer other policy benefits. They would reduce racial discrimination and reduce the federal/state and international tensions growing out of disputes over border enforcement. Importantly, liberalized immigration admissions would improve national security by allowing immigration authorities to focus on true dangers to public safety and national security, rather than spread themselves thin as they seek to check in detail the many nuances of the story of every noncitizen seeking to enter the United States. Chapter 6 contends that, in important respects, open borders are inevitable. Nobody can deny that it is far easier to migrate in the modern world than in days past. Transportation makes movement much easier than it was for all of human history, with international flights available today that were inconceivable just a few decades ago. Trade in goods and services require people to travel around the world. Technology makes the exchange of information fast and easy. Knowledge about opportunities in different places helps to fuel migration. Global transportation and information networks make immigration much easier than in the past. Moreover, economic and political opportunity in the United States attracts people to this country from the world over. Ultimately, the pressures for global migration will not go away— at least not in the foreseeable future. In a world of stark economic disparities, easy transportation, free flows of information, and less uncertainty about what one might encounter in a new land, migration of people will undoubtedly occur at higher rates than in the past. Indeed, one might logically conjecture that migration of people to countries might increase dramatically as the new millennium advances, with transportation and technological innovation and increased economic trade and other connections between people across borders resulting from globalization. Such developments, in turn, suggest, at a minimum, that migration issues will remain in play throughout the world for the foreseeable future. The issue is not whether we can close our borders but how we might best manage the flow of migrants into the country and integrate those who live here. We as a nation must ensure that our immigration laws comport with modern political, economic, and social reality. If not, they will prove to be untenable, just as they are today.
4/13/14
Soft Power - Cuban Embargo
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 4 | Opponent: Crosby LV | Judge: Dan Rowe Contention 2 is Soft Power The embargo undermines soft power Lance Koenig, Colonel in the US Army, 11/3/10 (Time for a new Cuba Policy, www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA518130?) Internationally, the world is nearly unanimous in its opposition to the United States policy towards Cuba. In fact, on 28 October 2009, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a non-binding resolution to lift the embargo with 187 votes in favor of the resolution, three votes against (the United States, Israel, and Palau) and two abstentions (Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands). The nearly universal unpopularity of this policy takes away from the soft power of the United States and is an obstacle to the bilateral relations between the United States and numerous other nations.
Solves all your impacts Nye 9 — Joseph S. Nye, Jr., University Distinguished Service Professor and Former Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, 2009 (“American Power in the Twenty-First Century,” Project Syndicate, September 10th, Available Online at http://www.project-syndicate.org/print/american-power-in-the-twenty-first-century, Accessed 05-27-2013) The United States government’s National Intelligence Council projects that American dominance will be “much diminished” by 2025, and that the one key area of continued American superiority – military power – will be less significant in the increasingly competitive world of the future. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has called the 2008 financial crisis a sign that America’s global leadership is coming to an end. The leader of Canada’s opposition Liberal Party, Michael Ignatieff, suggests that US power has passed its mid-day. How can we know if these predictions are correct? One should beware of misleading metaphors of organic decline. Countries are not like humans with predictable life spans. For example, after Britain lost its American colonies at the end of the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole lamented Britain’s reduction to “as insignificant a country as Denmark or Sardinia.” He failed to foresee that the industrial revolution would give Britain a second century of even greater ascendency. Rome remained dominant for more than three centuries after the apogee of Roman power. Even then, Rome did not succumb to another state, but suffered a death of a thousand cuts inflicted by various barbarian tribes. Indeed, for all the fashionable predictions of China, India, or Brazil surpassing the US in the coming decades, the classical transition of power among great states may be less of a problem than the rise of modern barbarians – non-state actors. In an information-based world of cyber-insecurity, power diffusion may be a greater threat than power transition. So, what will it mean to wield power in the global information age of the twenty-first century? What resources will produce power? In the sixteenth century, control of colonies and gold bullion gave Spain the edge; seventeenth-century Holland profited from trade and finance; eighteenth-century France gained from its larger population and armies; and nineteenth-century British power rested on its industrial primacy and its navy. Conventional wisdom has always held that the state with the largest military prevails, but in an information age it may be the state (or non-state) with the best story that wins. Today, it is far from clear how the balance of power is measured, much less how to develop successful survival strategies. In his inaugural address in 2009, President Barack Obama stated that “our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America. We must use what has been called ‘smart power,’ the full range of tools at our disposal.” Smart power means the combination of the hard power of command and the soft power of attraction. Power always depends on context. The child who dominates on the playground may become a laggard when the context changes to a disciplined classroom. In the middle of the twentieth century, Josef Stalin scornfully asked how many divisions the Pope had, but four decades later, the Papacy was still intact while Stalin’s empire had collapsed. In today’s world, the distribution of power varies with the context. It is distributed in a pattern that resembles a three-dimensional chess game. On the top chessboard, military power is largely unipolar, and the US is likely to remain the only superpower for some time. But on the middle chessboard, economic power has already been multi-polar for more than a decade, with the US, Europe, Japan, and China as the major players, and others gaining in importance. The bottom chessboard is the realm of cross-border transactions that occur outside of government control. It includes diverse non-state actors, such as bankers electronically transferring sums larger than most national budgets, and, at the other extreme, terrorists transferring weapons or hackers threatening cyber-security. It also includes new challenges like pandemics and climate change. On this bottom board, power is widely dispersed, and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity, multipolarity, hegemony, or any other cliché. Even in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the giddy pace of technological change is likely to continue to drive globalization and transnational challenges. The problem for American power in the twenty-first century is that there are more and more things outside the control of even the most powerful state. Although the US does well on military measures, there is much going on that those measures fail to capture. Under the influence of the information revolution and globalization, world politics is changing in a way that prevents America from achieving all its international goals acting alone. For example, international financial stability is vital to Americans’ prosperity, but the US needs the cooperation of others to ensure it. Global climate change, too, will affect Americans’ quality of life, but the US cannot manage the problem alone. In a world where borders are more porous than ever to everything from drugs to infectious diseases to terrorism, America must help build international coalitions and institutions to address shared threats and challenges. In this sense, power becomes a positive sum game.
Soft power key to solve extinction and is the only way to make heg effective Jervis 9—chaired prof of IR at Columbia. PhD (Robert, Unipolarity; A Structural Perspective, World Politics 61;1 Jan 2009)
To say that the system is unipolar is not to argue that the unipole can get everything it wants or that it has no need for others. American power is very great, but it is still subject to two familiar limitations: it is harder to build than to destroy, and success usually depends on others’ decisions. This is particularly true of the current system because of what the U.S. wants. If Hitler had won World War II, he might have been able to maintain his system for some period of time with little cooperation from others because “all” he wanted was to establish the supremacy of the Aryan race. The U.S. wants not only to prevent the rise of a peer competitor but also to stamp out terrorism, maintain an open international economic system, spread democracy throughout the world, and establish a high degree of cooperation among countries that remain juridically equal. Even in the military arena, the U.S. cannot act completely alone. Bases and overflight rights are always needed, and support from allies, especially Great Britain, is important to validate military action in the eyes of the American public. When one matches American forces, not against those of an adversary but against the tasks at hand, they often fall short.54 Against terrorism, force is ineffective without excellent intelligence. Given the international nature of the threat and the difficulties of gaining information about it, international cooperation is the only route to success. The maintenance of international prosperity also requires joint efforts, even leaving aside the danger that other countries could trigger a run on the dollar by cashing in their holdings. Despite its lack of political unity, Europe is in many respects an economic unit, and one with a greater gdp than that of the U.S. Especially because of the growing Chinese economy, economic power is spread around the world much more equally than is military power, and the open economic system End Page 210 could easily disintegrate despite continued unipolarity. In parallel, on a whole host of problems such as aids, poverty, and international crime (even leaving aside climate change), the unipole can lead and exert pressure but cannot dictate. Joint actions may be necessary to apply sanctions to various unpleasant and recalcitrant regimes; proliferation can be stopped only if all the major states (and many minor ones) work to this end; unipolarity did not automatically enable the U.S. to maintain the coalition against Iraq after the first Gulf War; close ties within the West are needed to reduce the ability of China, Russia, and other states to play one Western country off against the others. But in comparison with the cold war era, there are fewer incentives today for allies to cooperate with the U.S. During the earlier period unity and close coordination not only permitted military efficiencies but, more importantly, gave credibility to the American nuclear umbrella that protected the allies. Serious splits were dangerous because they entailed the risk that the Soviet Union would be emboldened. This reason for avoiding squabbles disappeared along with the USSR, and the point is likely to generalize to other unipolar systems if they involve a decrease of threats that call for maintaining good relations with the superpower. This does not mean that even in this particular unipolar system the superpower is like Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. In some areas opposition can be self-defeating. Thus for any country to undermine American leadership of the international economy would be to put its own economy at risk, even if the U.S. did not retaliate, and for a country to sell a large proportion of its dollar holding would be to depress the value of the dollar, thereby diminishing the worth of the country’s remaining stock of this currency. Furthermore, cooperation often follows strong and essentially unilateral action. Without the war in Iraq it is not likely that we would have seen the degree of cooperation that the U.S. obtained from Europe in combating the Iranian nuclear program and from Japan and the PRC in containing North Korea. Nevertheless, many of the American goals depend on persuading others, not coercing them. Although incentives and even force are not irrelevant to spreading democracy and the free market, at bottom this requires people to embrace a set of institutions and values. Building the world that the U.S. seeks is a political, social, and even psychological task for which unilateral measures are likely to be unsuited and for which American military and economic strength can at best play a supporting role. Success requires that others share the American vision and believe that its leadership is benign. End Page 211
Criticizing Western “imperialism” obscures more insidious practices by regional powers Shaw 2 – Sussex IR Professor (Martin, The Problem of the Quasi-Imperial State, www.martinshaw.org/empire.htm)
Nor have many considered the possibility that if the concept of imperialism has a relevance today, it applies to certain aggressive, authoritarian regimes of the non-Western world rather than to the contemporary West. In this paper I fully accept that there is a concentration of much world power - economic, cultural, political and military - in the hands of Western elites. In my recent book, Theory of the Global State, I discuss the development of a and#39;global-Western state conglomerateand#39; (Shaw 2000). I argue that and#39;globaland#39; ideas and institutions, whose significance characterizes the new political era that has opened with the end of the Cold War, depend largely - but not solely - on Western power. I hold no brief and intend no apology for official Western ideas and behaviour. And yet I propose that the idea of a new imperialism is a profoundly misleading, indeed ideological concept that obscures the realities of power and especially of empire in the twenty-first century. This notion is an obstacle to understanding the significance, extent and limits of contemporary Western power. It simultaneously serves to obscure many real causes of oppression, suffering and struggle for transformation against the quasi-imperial power of many regional states. I argue that in the global era, this separation has finally become critical. This is for two related reasons. On the one hand, Western power has moved into new territory, largely uncharted -- and I argue unchartable -- with the critical tools of anti-imperialism. On the other hand, the politics of empire remain all too real, in classic forms that recall both modern imperialism and earlier empires, in many non-Western states, and they are revived in many political struggles today. Thus the concept of a and#39;new imperialismand#39; fails to deal with both key post-imperial features of Western power and the quasi-imperial character of many non-Western states. The concept overstates Western power and understates the dangers posed by other, more authoritarian and imperial centres of power. Politically it identifies the West as the principal enemy of the worldand#39;s people, when for many of them there are far more real and dangerous enemies closer to.
We control empirics – heg is good Wohlforth 8—Daniel Webster Professor of Government, Dartmouth. BA in IR, MA in IR and MPhil and PhD in pol sci, Yale (William, Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War, October 2008, World Politics Vol. 61, Iss. 1; pg. 28, 31 pgs, Proquest, AMiles)
Despite increasingly compelling findings concerning the importance of status seeking in human behavior, research on its connection to war waned some three decades ago.38 Yet empirical studies of the relationship between both systemic and dyadic capabilities distributions and war have continued to cumulate. If the relationships implied by the status theory run afoul of well-established patterns or general historical findings, then there is little reason to continue investigating them. The clearest empirical implication of the theory is that status competition is unlikely to cause great power military conflict in unipolar systems. If status competition is an important contributory cause of great power war, then, ceteris paribus, unipolar systems should be markedly less war-prone than bipolar or multipolar systems. And this appears to be the case. As Daniel Geller notes in a review of the empirical literature: and#34;The only polar structure that appears to influence conflict probability is unipolarity.and#34;39 In addition, a larger number of studies at the dyadic level support the related expectation that narrow capabilities gaps and ambiguous or unstable capabilities hierarchies increase the probability of war.40 These studies are based entirely on post-sixteenth-century European history, and most are limited to the post-1815 period covered by the standard data sets. Though the systems coded as unipolar, near-unipolar, and hegemonic are all marked by a high concentration of capabilities in a single state, these studies operationalize unipolarity in a variety of ways, often very differently from the definition adopted here. An ongoing collaborative project looking at ancient interstate systems over the course of two thousand years suggests that historical systems that come closest to the definition of unipolarity used here exhibit precisely the behavioral properties implied by the theory. 41 As David C. Kangand#39;s research shows, the East Asian system between 1300 and 1900 was an unusually stratified unipolar structure, with an economic and militarily dominant China interacting with a small number of geographically proximate, clearly weaker East Asian states.42 Status politics existed, but actors were channeled by elaborate cultural understandings and interstate practices into clearly recognized ranks. Warfare was exceedingly rare, and the major outbreaks occurred precisely when the theory would predict: when Chinaand#39;s capabilities waned, reducing the clarity of the underlying material hierarchy and increasing status dissonance for lesser powers. Much more research is needed, but initial exploration of other arguably unipolar systems-for example, Rome, Assyria, the Amarna system-appears consistent with the hypothesis.43 Status Competition and Causal Mechanisms Both theory and evidence demonstrate convincingly that competition for status is a driver of human behavior, and social identity theory and related literatures suggest the conditions under which it might come to the fore in great power relations. Both the systemic and dyadic findings presented in large-N studies are broadly consistent with the theory, but they are also consistent with power transition and other rationalist theories of hegemonic war.
The larger problem is that without clear causal links between materially identifiable events and factors any assessment within the argument actually becomes nonsensical. Mirroring the early inability to criticise, if we have no traditional causational discussion how can we know what is happening? For example, Jackson details how the rhetoric of anti-terrorism and fear is obfuscating the real problems. It is proposed that the real world killers are not terrorism, but disease or illegal drugs or environmental issues. The problem is how do we know this? It seems we know this because there is evidence that illustrates as much – Jackson himself quoting to Dr David King who argued global warming is a greater that than terrorism. The only problem of course is that discourse analysis has established (as argued by Jackson) that King’s argument would just be self-contained discourse designed to naturalise another arguments for his own reasons. Ultimately it would be no more valid than the argument that excessive consumption of Sugar Puffs is the real global threat. It is worth repeating that I don’t personally believe global terrorism is the world’s primary threat, nor do I believe that Sugar Puffs are a global killer. But without the ability to identify real facts about the world we can simply say anything, or we can say nothing. This is clearly ridiculous and many post-structuralists can see this. Their argument is that there “are empirically more persuasive explanations.”xi The phrase ‘empirically persuasive’ is however the final undermining of post-structural discourse analysis. It is a seemingly fairly obvious reintroduction of traditional methodology and causal links. It implies things that can be seen to be right regardless of perspective or discourse. It again goes without saying that logically in this case if such an assessment is possible then undeniable material factors about the word are real and are knowable outside of any cultural definition. Language or culture then does not wholy constitute reality. How do we know in the end that the world not threatened by the onslaught of an oppressive and dangerous breakfast cereal? Because empirically persuasive evidence tells us this is the case. The question must then be asked, is our understanding of the world born of evidential assessment, or born of discourse analysis? Or perhaps it’s actually born of utilisation of many different possible explanations.
Hegemony underlies all the self-reinforcing systems that correlate with inter-state peace Owen, Ph.D. in IR from Harvard, 11—associate professor in the University of Virginia’s Department of Politics, Ph.D. in international relations from Harvard (John, 2/11/11, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/02/11/john-owen/dont-discount-hegemony/, RBatra)
Our colleagues at Simon Fraser University are brave indeed. That may sound like a setup, but it is not. I shall challenge neither the data nor the general conclusion that violent conflict around the world has been decreasing in fits and starts since the Second World War. When it comes to violent conflict among and within countries, things have been getting better. (The trends have not been linear—Figure 1.1 actually shows that the frequency of interstate wars peaked in the 1980s—but the 65-year movement is clear.) Instead I shall accept that Mack et al. are correct on the macro-trends, and focus on their explanations they advance for these remarkable trends. With apologies to any readers of this forum who recoil from academic debates, this might get mildly theoretical and even more mildly methodological. Concerning international wars, one version of the “nuclear-peace” theory is not in fact laid to rest by the data. It is certainly true that nuclear-armed states have been involved in many wars. They have even been attacked (think of Israel), which falsifies the simple claim of “assured destruction”—that any nuclear country A will deter any kind of attack by any country B because B fears a retaliatory nuclear strike from A. But the most important “nuclear-peace” claim has been about mutually assured destruction, which obtains between two robustly nuclear-armed states. The claim is that (1) rational states having second-strike capabilities—enough deliverable nuclear weaponry to survive a nuclear first strike by an enemy—will have an overwhelming incentive not to attack one another; and (2) we can safely assume that nuclear-armed states are rational. It follows that states with a second-strike capability will not fight one another. Their colossal atomic arsenals neither kept the United States at peace with North Vietnam during the Cold War nor the Soviet Union at peace with Afghanistan. But the argument remains strong that those arsenals did help keep the United States and Soviet Union at peace with each other. Why non-nuclear states are not deterred from fighting nuclear states is an important and open question. But in a time when calls to ban the Bomb are being heard from more and more quarters, we must be clear about precisely what the broad trends toward peace can and cannot tell us. They may tell us nothing about why we have had no World War III, and little about the wisdom of banning the Bomb now. Regarding the downward trend in international war, Professor Mack is friendlier to more palatable theories such as the “democratic peace” (democracies do not fight one another, and the proportion of democracies has increased, hence less war); the interdependence or “commercial peace” (states with extensive economic ties find it irrational to fight one another, and interdependence has increased, hence less war); and the notion that people around the world are more anti-war than their forebears were. Concerning the downward trend in civil wars, he favors theories of economic growth (where commerce is enriching enough people, violence is less appealing—a logic similar to that of the “commercial peace” thesis that applies among nations) and the end of the Cold War (which end reduced superpower support for rival rebel factions in so many Third-World countries). These are all plausible mechanisms for peace. What is more, none of them excludes any other; all could be working toward the same end. That would be somewhat puzzling, however. Is the world just lucky these days? How is it that an array of peace-inducing factors happens to be working coincidentally in our time, when such a magical array was absent in the past? The answer may be that one or more of these mechanisms reinforces some of the others, or perhaps some of them are mutually reinforcing. Some scholars, for example, have been focusing on whether economic growth might support democracy and vice versa, and whether both might support international cooperation, including to end civil wars. We would still need to explain how this charmed circle of causes got started, however. And here let me raise another factor, perhaps even less appealing than the “nuclear peace” thesis, at least outside of the United States. That factor is what international relations scholars call hegemony—specifically American hegemony. A theory that many regard as discredited, but that refuses to go away, is called hegemonic stability theory. The theory emerged in the 1970s in the realm of international political economy. It asserts that for the global economy to remain open—for countries to keep barriers to trade and investment low—one powerful country must take the lead. Depending on the theorist we consult, “taking the lead” entails paying for global public goods (keeping the sea lanes open, providing liquidity to the international economy), coercion (threatening to raise trade barriers or withdraw military protection from countries that cheat on the rules), or both. The theory is skeptical that international cooperation in economic matters can emerge or endure absent a hegemon. The distastefulness of such claims is self-evident: they imply that it is good for everyone the world over if one country has more wealth and power than others. More precisely, they imply that it has been good for the world that the United States has been so predominant. There is no obvious reason why hegemonic stability theory could not apply to other areas of international cooperation, including in security affairs, human rights, international law, peacekeeping (UN or otherwise), and so on. What I want to suggest here—suggest, not test—is that American hegemony might just be a deep cause of the steady decline of political deaths in the world. How could that be? After all, the report states that United States is the third most war-prone country since 1945. Many of the deaths depicted in Figure 10.4 were in wars that involved the United States (the Vietnam War being the leading one). Notwithstanding politicians’ claims to the contrary, a candid look at U.S. foreign policy reveals that the country is as ruthlessly self-interested as any other great power in history. The answer is that U.S. hegemony might just be a deeper cause of the proximate causes outlined by Professor Mack. Consider economic growth and openness to foreign trade and investment, which (so say some theories) render violence irrational. American power and policies may be responsible for these in two related ways. First, at least since the 1940s Washington has prodded other countries to embrace the market capitalism that entails economic openness and produces sustainable economic growth. The United States promotes capitalism for selfish reasons, of course: its own domestic system depends upon growth, which in turn depends upon the efficiency gains from economic interaction with foreign countries, and the more the better. During the Cold War most of its allies accepted some degree of market-driven growth. Second, the U.S.-led western victory in the Cold War damaged the credibility of alternative paths to development—communism and import-substituting industrialization being the two leading ones—and left market capitalism the best model. The end of the Cold War also involved an end to the billions of rubles in Soviet material support for regimes that tried to make these alternative models work. (It also, as Professor Mack notes, eliminated the superpowers’ incentives to feed civil violence in the Third World.) What we call globalization is caused in part by the emergence of the United States as the global hegemon.
You should discard non-empirical theories of war Moore 4 – Dir. Center for Security Law @ University of Virginia (7-time Presidential appointee, and Honorary Editor of the American Journal of International Law, Solving the War Puzzle: Beyond the Democratic Peace, John Norton Moore, page xxii-xxvi
The and#34;causeand#34; of the and#34;democratic peaceand#34; is likely not any single factor. Rather it is a combination of factors inherent in differences between the culture of democracy and the culture of Hegelian and#34;statism.and#34; These factors probably include: differential incentive structures for regime elites, and particularly the greater ability of such elites in statist systems to externalize costs on others while internalizing the benefits of their actions; differences in leaders assuming power through public appeal versus violence; differences between ideologies of human freedom versus statist ideologies, including pervasive differences concerning the rule of law, modalities for resolution of disputes, and deification of those in power; individual empowerment versus the collective, and many other important differences in subjectivities; higher levels of external trade and international interaction between democracies; greater internal checks and balances on the decision for war; resulting greater democratic nation wealth, which may predispose to greater caution in efforts at risky expansion of values; and many other pervasive differences in culture. Of these, and#34;incentive theoryand#34; would suggest that one particularly important factor is likely to be the first on the list; that is, the differential effect on incentives for decision elites from all of these factors together; • Contrary to entrenched conventional wisdom within the social science community, democracies are considerably less likely to initiate aggressive war than nondemocracies. Further, the differences in total casualties between democratic and nondemocratic initiated aggression is overwhelming—on the order of one to a hundred; • Nondemocracies are frequently getting into major war through aggression. A principal path to war for democracies, and an additional path to war for nondemocracies, is an absence of effective deterrence; • An absence of effective deterrence, that is, of effective incentives from the international system, is a crucial factor in major war; • For this latter reason, deterrence, rather than simply levels of power, is a more important variable than power in the origin of major war. A common absence of effective deterrence results from a failure to communicate an intent to deter, whatever the specific reason for this failure; • The democracy/deterrence syndrome is an important recurrent feature in major war; • Because of the importance of deterrence in war avoidance, theory will benefit from a more objective scoring system for measuring levels of deterrence, as we now enjoy with several systems for the scoring of democracy. This book uses an initial effort at such a scoring system developed within the authorand#39;s War and Peace Seminar; • The practice of deterrence should incorporate behavioral insights from cognitive psychology, particularly including and#34;prospect theory.and#34; Other such behavioral insights should be incorporated into broader theory as relevance is demonstrated; • Incentive theory suggests a focus of deterrence on regime decision makers (that is, reducing their incentives for war), and this feature of incentive theory is already making its way into practice; • Original studies are referenced showing correlations between form of government and terrorism, state involvement in the drug trade, refugee flows, and corruption. These supplement important studies by others showing the correlation between democracy and war, democide, economic development, famine, infant mortality, and environmental protection; • Incentive theory likely is useful in analyzing civil war, terrorism, and minor coercion, as well as major war. Specific key variables and resulting incentives, however, may be different in these settings. For example, civil war does not lend itself readily to an analysis as to which party is an aggressor under international law; • Incentive theory suggests that a crucial role in strengthening collective security is to begin to think about enhancing the role of the United Nations and other collective security mechanisms in deterrence terms; that is, thinking about mechanisms to provide advance deterrence against aggression and democide rather than leaving such action to possible collective action after the event; • Stable trade not only serves to enhance economic development, it also serves to create incentives militating against major war. The effort to remove trade barriers should continue while retaining our sensitivity to labor and the environment; • Effective foreign policy should seek both a long-run strategy of democracy enlargement and a strategy of providing effective deterrence against rogue regimes as needed to deter war, democide, and terrorism; • Democratic nations should work together to strengthen pro- democracy initiatives, such as the and#34;Community of Democraciesand#34;; • The United States might want to create a new position of Special Representative of the President for Democracy Assistance; and • The United States might want to add a more focused and#34;warning-responseand#34; mechanism to the National Security Council charged with the specific responsibility of formulating and presenting to the President proposals for war avoidance in war crisis settings when alerted to such crises from the intelligence community. It should be clearly understood that the demonstration of correlation does not necessarily prove causation. As such, while this book seeks to integrate the best of the empirical work with the best of the theoretical work, it presents, and can only present, an hypothesis. We should, however, certainly discard theories that are not consistent with the available empirical evidence about war. Similarly, even if and#34;incentive theoryand#34; proves a more useful focus in seeking to predict and control war, it does not offer a slot-machine for simple answers. The decision for war is affected by a complex aggregate of incentives. Even rejecting poorer modes of focus will not provide instant answers in specific cases any more than understanding that night air does not cause plague will by itself lead to a discovery of penicillin. Until we set aside pervasive myths about war and focus our attention on the critical variables, we will have little chance to control this age-old scourge of mankind. It is hoped that this book may make an at least modest contribution to its goal.
Prefer theories of prozimate cause-best empirics Scott D. Sagan – Department of Political Science, Stanford University – ACCIDENTAL WAR IN THEORY AND PRACTICE – 2000 – available via: www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/sagan.doc
To make reasonable judgements in such matters it is essential, in my view, to avoid the common and#34;fallacy of overdetermination.and#34; Looking backwards at historical events, it is always tempting to underestimate the importance of the immediate causes of a war and argue that the likelihood of conflict was so high that the war would have broken out sooner or later even without the specific incident that set it off. If taken too far, however, this tendency eliminates the role of contingency in history and diminishes our ability to perceive the alternative pathways that were present to historical actors. The point is perhaps best made through a counterfactual about the Cold War. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a bizarre false warning incident in the U.S. radar systems facing Cuba led officers at the North American Air Defense Command to believe that the U.S. was under attack and that a nuclear weapon was about to go off in Florida. Now imagine the counterfactual event that this false warning was reported and believed by U.S. leaders and resulted in a U.S. nuclear and#34;retaliationand#34; against the Russians. How would future historians have seen the causes of World War III? One can easily imagine arguments stressing that the war between the U.S. and the USSR was inevitable. War was overdetermined: given the deep political hostility of the two superpowers, the conflicting ideology, the escalating arms race, nuclear war would have occurred eventually. If not during that specific crisis over Cuba, then over the next one in Berlin, or the Middle East, or Korea. From that perspective, focusing on this particular accidental event as a cause of war would be seen as misleading. Yet, we all now know, of course that a nuclear war was neither inevitable nor overdetermined during the Cold War.
The world is getting better Goklany 7 (Indur, scholar who has 25 years of experience working and writing on global and national environmental issues. He has published several peer-reviewed papers and book chapters on an array of issues Author of The Improving State of the World: Why Weand#39;re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, Mar. 23, http://www.reason.com/news/show/119252.html, twm)
Environmentalists and globalization foes are united in their fear that greater population and consumption of energy, materials, and chemicals accompanying economic growth, technological change and free trade—the mainstays of globalization—degrade human and environmental well-being. Indeed, the 20th century saw the United States’ population multiply by four, income by seven, carbon dioxide emissions by nine, use of materials by 27, and use of chemicals by more than 100. Yet life expectancy increased from 47 years to 77 years. Onset of major disease such as cancer, heart, and respiratory disease has been postponed between eight and eleven years in the past century. Heart disease and cancer rates have been in rapid decline over the last two decades, and total cancer deaths have actually declined the last two years, despite increases in population. Among the very young, infant mortality has declined from 100 deaths per 1,000 births in 1913 to just seven per 1,000 today. These improvements haven’t been restricted to the United States. It’s a global phenomenon. Worldwide, life expectancy has more than doubled, from 31 years in 1900 to 67 years today. India’s and China’s infant mortalities exceeded 190 per 1,000 births in the early 1950s; today they are 62 and 26, respectively. In the developing world, the proportion of the population suffering from chronic hunger declined from 37 percent to 17 percent between 1970 and 2001 despite a 83 percent increase in population. Globally average annual incomes in real dollars have tripled since 1950. Consequently, the proportion of the planetand#39;s developing-world population living in absolute poverty has halved since 1981, from 40 percent to 20 percent. Child labor in low income countries declined from 30 percent to 18 percent between 1960 and 2003. Equally important, the world is more literate and better educated than ever. People are freer politically, economically, and socially to pursue their well-being as they see fit. More people choose their own rulers, and have freedom of expression. They are more likely to live under rule of law, and less likely to be arbitrarily deprived of life, limb, and property. Social and professional mobility have also never been greater. It’s easier than ever for people across the world to transcend the bonds of caste, place, gender, and other accidents of birth. People today work fewer hours and have more money and better health to enjoy their leisure time than their ancestors. Man’s environmental record is more complex. The early stages of development can indeed cause some environmental deterioration as societies pursue first-order problems affecting human well-being. These include hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy, and lack of education, basic public health services, safe water, sanitation, mobility, and ready sources of energy. Because greater wealth alleviates these problems while providing basic creature comforts, individuals and societies initially focus on economic development, often neglecting other aspects of environmental quality. In time, however, they recognize that environmental deterioration reduces their quality of life. Accordingly, they put more of their recently acquired wealth and human capital into developing and implementing cleaner technologies. This brings about an environmental transition via the twin forces of economic development and technological progress, which begin to provide solutions to environmental problems instead of creating those problems. All of which is why we today find that the richest countries are also the cleanest. And while many developing countries have yet to get past the “green ceiling,” they are nevertheless ahead of where today’s developed countries used to be when they were equally wealthy. The point of transition from and#34;industrial periodand#34; to and#34;environmental consciousand#34; continues to fall. For example, the US introduced unleaded gasoline only after its GDP per capita exceeded $16,000. India and China did the same before they reached $3,000 per capita. This progress is a testament to the power of globalization and the transfer of ideas and knowledge (that lead is harmful, for example). Itand#39;s also testament to the importance of trade in transferring technology from developed to developing countries—in this case, the technology needed to remove lead from gasoline. This hints at the answer to the question of why some parts of the world have been left behind while the rest of the world has thrived. Why have improvements in well-being stalled in areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world? The proximate cause of improvements in well-being is a “cycle of progress” composed of the mutually reinforcing forces of economic development and technological progress. But that cycle itself is propelled by a web of essential institutions, particularly property rights, free markets, and rule of law. Other important institutions would include science- and technology-based problem-solving founded on skepticism and experimentation; receptiveness to new technologies and ideas; and freer trade in goods, services—most importantly in knowledge and ideas. In short, free and open societies prosper. Isolation, intolerance, and hostility to the free exchange of knowledge, technology, people, and goods breed stagnation or regression. Despite all of this progress and good news, then, there is still much unfinished business. Millions of people die from hunger, malnutrition, and preventable disease such as malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. Over a billion people still live in absolute poverty, defined as less than a dollar per day. A third of the world’s eligible population is still not enrolled in secondary school. Barriers to globalization, economic development, and technological change—such as the use of DDT to eradicate malaria, genetic engineering, and biotechnology—are a big source of the problem. Moreover, the global population will grow 50 percent to 100 percent this century, and per capita consumption of energy and materials will likely increase with wealth. Merely preserving the status quo is not enough. We need to protect the important sustaining institutions responsible for all of this progress in the developed world, and we need to foster and nurture them in countries that are still developing. Man’s remarkable progress over the last 100 years is unprecedented in human history. It’s also one of the more neglected big-picture stories. Ensuring that our incredible progress continues will require not only recognizing and appreciating the progress itself, but also recognizing and preserving the important ideas and institutions that caused it, and ensuring that they endure.
We control studies Drezner, IR prof, 5—Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts U, BA from Williams, MA in Economics, PhD in Political Science from Stanford U (Daniel W., 25 May 2005, Gregg Easterbrook, war, and the dangers of extrapolation, http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002087.html, RBatra)
Daily explosions in Iraq, massacres in Sudan, the Koreas staring at each other through artillery barrels, a Hobbesian war of all against all in eastern Congo--combat plagues human society as it has, perhaps, since our distant forebears realized that a tree limb could be used as a club. But here is something you would never guess from watching the news: War has entered a cycle of decline. Combat in Iraq and in a few other places is an exception to a significant global trend that has gone nearly unnoticed--namely that, for about 15 years, there have been steadily fewer armed conflicts worldwide. In fact, it is possible that a personand#39;s chance of dying because of war has, in the last decade or more, become the lowest in human history. Is Easterbrook right? He has a few more paragraphs on the numbers: The University of Maryland studies find the number of wars and armed conflicts worldwide peaked in 1991 at 51, which may represent the most wars happening simultaneously at any point in history. Since 1991, the number has fallen steadily. There were 26 armed conflicts in 2000 and 25 in 2002, even after the Al Qaeda attack on the United States and the U.S. counterattack against Afghanistan. By 2004, Marshall and Gurrand#39;s latest study shows, the number of armed conflicts in the world had declined to 20, even after the invasion of Iraq. All told, there were less than half as many wars in 2004 as there were in 1991. Marshall and Gurr also have a second ranking, gauging the magnitude of fighting. This section of the report is more subjective. Everyone agrees that the worst moment for human conflict was World War II; but how to rank, say, the current separatist fighting in Indonesia versus, say, the Algerian war of independence is more speculative. Nevertheless, the Peace and Conflict studies name 1991 as the peak post-World War II year for totality of global fighting, giving that year a ranking of 179 on a scale that rates the extent and destructiveness of combat. By 2000, in spite of war in the Balkans and genocide in Rwanda, the number had fallen to 97; by 2002 to 81; and, at the end of 2004, it stood at 65. This suggests the extent and intensity of global combat is now less than half what it was 15 years ago. Easterbrook spends the rest of the essay postulating the causes of this -- the decline in great power war, the spread of democracies, the growth of economic interdependence, and even the peacekeeping capabilities of the United Nations. Easterbrook makes a lot of good points -- most people are genuinely shocked when they are told that even in a post-9/11 climate, there has been a steady and persistent decline in wars and deaths from wars. That said, what bothers me in the piece is what Easterbrook leaves out. First, he neglects to mention the biggest reason for why war is on the decline -- thereand#39;s a global hegemon called the United States right now. Easterbrook acknowledges that and#34;the most powerful factor must be the end of the cold warand#34; but he doesnand#39;t understand why itand#39;s the most powerful factor. Elsewhere in the piece he talks about the growing comity among the great powers, without discussing the elephant in the room: the reason the and#34;great powersand#34; get along is that the United States is much, much more powerful than anyone else. If you quantify power only by relative military capabilities, the U.S. is a great power, there are maybe ten or so middle powers, and then there are a lot of mosquitoes. If the U.S. is so powerful, why canand#39;t it subdue the Iraqi insurgency?--ed. Power is a relative measure -- the U.S. might be having difficulties, but no other country in the world would have fewer problems. Joshua Goldstein, who knows a thing or two about this phenomenon, made this clear in a Christian Science Monitor op-ed three years ago: We probably owe this lull to the end of the cold war, and to a unipolar world order with a single superpower to impose its will in places like Kuwait, Serbia, and Afghanistan. The emerging world order is not exactly benign – Sept. 11 comes to mind – and Pax Americana delivers neither justice nor harmony to the corners of the earth. But a unipolar world is inherently more peaceful than the bipolar one where two superpowers fueled rival armies around the world. The long-delayed and#34;peace dividendand#34; has arrived, like a tax refund check long lost in the mail. The difference in language between Goldstein and Easterbrook highlights my second problem with and#34;The End of War?and#34; Goldstein rightly refers to the past fifteen years as a and#34;lulland#34; -- a temporary reduction in war and war-related death. The flip side of U.S. hegemony being responsible for the reduction of armed conflict is what would happen if U.S. hegemony were to ever fade away. Easterbrook focuses on the trends that suggest an ever-decreasing amount of armed conflict -- and I hope heand#39;s right. But Iand#39;m enough of a realist to know that if the U.S. should find its primacy challenged by, say, a really populous non-democratic country on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, all best about the utility of economic interdependence, U.N. peacekeeping, and the+ spread of democracy are right out the window. UPDATE: To respond to a few thoughts posted by the commenters: 1) To spell things out a bit more clearly -- U.S. hegemony important to the reduction of conflict in two ways. First, U.S. power can act as a powerful if imperfect constraint on pairs of enduring rivals (Greece-Turkey, India-Pakistan) that contemplate war on a regular basis. It canand#39;t stop every conflict, but it can blunt a lot ofthem. Second, and more important to Easterbrookand#39;s thesis, U.S. supremacy in conventional military affairs prevents other middle-range states -- China, Russia, India, Great Britain, France, etc. -- from challenging the U.S. or each other in a war. It would be suicide for anyone to fight a war with the U.S., and if any of these countries waged a war with each other, the prospect of U.S. intervention would be equally daunting.