Heg Sustainable

Heg is sustainable and high their authors misunderstand geopolitics no challengers. Kagan 12 [Robert, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe Brookings, New Year,
Old Foreign Policy Problems, http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2012/0105_international_relations_kagan]

the much-discussed rise of the rest has been overhyped. U.S. business leaders, and their pals in the punditocracy, have been mesmerized by these emerging markets. But emerging markets do not equate to emerging great powers. Russia is no longer rising. Brazils role in the world is underwhelming. Turkeys impact has yet to be demonstrated. India has not decided what it wants to be. Even China, though unquestionably a major player, has not yet taken on a great powers role. For
Meanwhile, the United States, Europe remains the key ally in shoring up the norms and principles of a liberal world order. Should

Reports of U.S. decline are extraordinarily premature. The country remains the central player in all regions of the world. Washington may not be able to have its way on all issues or provide solutions for all the worlds problems. But, then, it never could. Many today have nostalgia for an era of U.S. predominance that never existed. But in the coming months, whether the issue is Iran, Syria or Asian security, regional players will continue to look to the United States. No other nation or group of nations comes close to enjoying Americas global web of alliances. None wields more political influence in international forums. And unless and until the United States renders itself weak by unnecessary defense budget cuts, there will be no substitute for it as a provider of security and defender of an open political and economic order. Perhaps 2012 will be the year Americans gain a renewed understanding of that enduring
Europe fall, the blow to U.S. interests would be staggering. America matters: reality.

No challengers to U.S. hegemony. Drum 12 [Kevin, political blogger -- Mother Jones, America in the 21st Century, http://motherjones.com/kevindrum/2012/01/america-21st-century]

Are we doomed to a future in which we are mere vassals to a burgeoning and aggressive Chinese hegemony? If you vote for Barack Obama, yes! In fact, according to Mitt Romney, he's actively working toward such a future. But seriously. Are we? I don't think so. Sure, China is going to grow and there will inevitably be some shifts in influence as that happens, but if I had to make a 50-year bet on any region of the world, I'd pick the United States. Europe has demographic and growth problems; Russia is doomed once their energy resources run out; Africa will remain a basket case for the foreseeable future; India is starting from a poor base and I'm not convinced they have the governance or institutions to maintain rapid growth over the long term; and China well, China has its problems, as I've noted multiple times in this space.1 I don't think they're going to collapse or anything like that, but I do think their growth will inevitably slow down long before their per-capita income is anywhere close to ours. It will likely take them at least a century to catch up. Meanwhile, the United States is really in pretty good shape if we can just get our political affairs in orders.2 Compared to the rest of the world, our

economy is pretty solid, our demographics look good, and we have more energy resources than most other rich countries. Dan Drezner has more here. It's worth a
read if you want to see the optimistic case for American influence and wealth in the 21st century.

Hard and soft power sustain unipolarity. Cohen 12 [Roger, op-ed columnist with the New York Times and former Fisher Family Fellow with the Future of
Diplomacy Project America Abroad, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/21690/america_abroad.html]

The conspicuous failure of American hard power in Iraq and Afghanistan has tended to obscure the way American soft power has flourished over the past decade. For a while soft power was undercut because the U.S. reputation was tarnished, but the Arab awakening has demonstrated how powerful American-driven social media are in opening up closed societies.
Facebook and Twitter have been conspicuous. But when I.B.M. invests massively in Africa which it has identified as the next major emerging growth market it is also investing in an openness that advances U.S. interests. When I was at

Nye, the professor and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government, made an interesting point. He noted that a rising China has 1.3 billion citizens. But America at its best has 7 billion in that it draws on the worlds talents, as its corporations and colleges demonstrate. Nye in general is skeptical of the declinists. I agree. Thats not because another American century is dawning its not;
Harvard recently, Joseph nor because the power shift to Asia is illusory; nor because U.S. problems of paralyzed government, high deficits and inadequate schools are negligible. No, its because

the defeat of American hard power has been overdrawn and the magnetism of American soft power underestimated. And
we are going into a world where, as Nye has written, War remains possible, but it is much less acceptable now than it was

The United States is adaptable. The mistakes of the past decade are being corrected through more effective counterterrorism, withdrawal from the major wars, and a slimmed down military budget. Some event, or political lurch, could blow these moves off course, but I dont think its a coincidence that consumer confidence is improving as America overcomes its great post-9/11 disorientation.
a century or even a half-century ago.

AT: Kills Economy

The turn is empirically denied Kagan 12 [Robert, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe , Brookings Institution,
Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline, http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2012/0117_us_power_kagan]

Americans doubt that it can. Indeed, they doubt whether the United States can afford to continue playing in any part of the world the predominant role that it has played in the past. Some argue that while Paul Kennedys warning of imperial overstretch may not have been correct in 1987, it accurately describes Americas current predicament. The fiscal crisis, the deadlocked political system, the various maladies of American society (including wage stagnation and income inequality), the weaknesses of the educational system, the deteriorating infrastructureall of these are cited these days as reasons why the United States needs to retrench internationally, to pull back from some overseas commitments, to
Can the United States do that? In their pessimistic mood today, some focus on nation building at home rather than try to keep shaping the world as it has in the past. Again, these common

how overstretched is the United States? The answer, in historical terms, is not nearly as much as people imagine. Consider the straightforward matter of the number of troops that the United States deploys overseas. To listen to the debate today, one might imagine there were more American troops committed abroad than ever before. But that is not remotely the case. In 1953, the United States had almost one million troops deployed overseas325,000 in combat in Korea and
assumptions require some examination. For one thing, more than 600,000 stationed in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. In 1968, it had over one million troops on foreign soil

By contrast, in the summer of 2011, at the height of Americas deployments in its two wars, there were about 200,000 troops deployed
537,000 in Vietnam and another half million stationed elsewhere. in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, and another roughly 160,000 troops stationed in Europe and East Asia.

there were about 500,000 troops deployed overseas. This was lower even than the peacetime deployments of the Cold War. In 1957, for instance, there were over 750,000 troops deployed overseas. Only in the decade
Altogether, and including other forces stationed around the world, between the breakup of the Soviet empire and the attacks of September 11 was the number of deployed forces overseas

The comparison is even more striking if one takes into account the growth of the American population. When the United States had one million troops deployed overseas in 1953, the total American population was only 160 million. Today, when there are half a million troops deployed overseas, the
lower than it is today. American population is 313 million. The country is twice as large, with half as many troops deployed as fifty years ago. What about the financial expense? Many seem to believe that the cost of these deployments, and of the armed forces generally, is a major contributor to the soaring fiscal deficits that threaten the solvency of the national economy. But this is not the case, either. As the former budget czar Alice Rivlin has observed, the scary projections of future deficits are not

. The runaway deficits projected for the coming years are mostly the result of ballooning entitlement spending. Even the most draconian cuts in the defense budget would produce annual savings of only $50 billion to $100 billion, a small fractionbetween 4 and 8 percentof the $1.5 trillion in annual deficits the United States is facing. In 2002, when Paul Kennedy was marveling at Americas ability to remain the worlds single superpower on the cheap, the United
caused by rising defense spending, much less by spending on foreign assistance

States was spending about 3.4 percent of GDP on defense. Today it is spending a little under 4 percent, and in years to come, that is likely to head lower againstill cheap by historical standards. The cost of remaining the worlds predominant power is not prohibitive. Decline kills the economy not the other way around Kagan 12 [Robert, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe -- Brookings Institution,
Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline, http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2012/0117_us_power_kagan]

the costs of maintaining this position cannot be measured without considering the costs of losing it. Some of the costs of reducing the American role in the world are, of course, unquantifiable. What is it worth to Americans to live in a world dominated by democracies rather than by autocracies? But some of the potential costs could be measured, if anyone cared to try. If the decline of American military power produced an unraveling of the international economic order that American power has helped sustain; if trade routes and waterways ceased to be as secure, because the U.S. Navy was no longer able to defend them; if regional wars broke out among great powers because they were no longer constrained by the American superpower; if American allies were attacked because the United States appeared unable to
If we are serious about this exercise in accounting, moreover, come to their defense; if the generally free and open nature of the international system became less soif all this came to pass,

there would be measurable costs. And it is not too far-fetched to imagine that these costs would be far greater than the savings gained by cutting the defense and foreign aid budgets by $100 billion a year. You can save money by buying a used car without a warranty and without certain safety features, but what happens when you get into an accident? American military strength reduces the risk of accidents by deterring conflict, and lowers the price of the accidents that occur by reducing the chance of losing. These savings need to be part of the calculation, too. As a simple matter of dollars and cents, it may be a lot cheaper to preserve the current level of American involvement in the world than to reduce it.

AT: Retrenchment
No retrenchment Gray 09 (Jan. 2009, Colin S. Gray, PhD, Professor of IR and strategic studies, University of Reading, England,
After Iraq: The Search for a Sustainable National Security Strategy, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=902)

The lone wolf America that elects to withdraw from active global security engagement would discover that its attempt to be disinterested in the extra-American world was damaging to the countrys interests. Also, such an American policy could not long endure because it would be rejected culturally by many Americans. Although American culture favors limited liability abroad, it still demands to be spread so as to colonize a world that stubbornly remains backward. Almost regardless of material considerations, too many Americans want to improve the outside world for wholehearted security withdrawal to be sustainable.

AT: Poverty Tradeoff DA

Quantitative studies conclude affviolence is declining because of everything consistent with the aff heg, democracy, liberal trade, the state Pinker 11 (Steven Pinker is Professor of psychology at Harvard University "Violence Vanquished" Sept
24 online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180.html) On the day this article appears, you will read about a shocking act of violence. Somewhere in the world there will be a terrorist bombing, a senseless murder, a bloody insurrection. It's impossible to learn about these catastrophes without thinking, "What is the world coming to?" But a better question may be, "How bad was the world in the past?" Believe it or

the world of the past was much worse. Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth. It has not brought violence down to zero, and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children. This claim, I know, invites skepticism, incredulity, and sometimes anger. We tend to
not, estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which we can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. There will always be enough violent deaths to fill the evening news, so people's impressions of violence will be disconnected from its actual likelihood. Evidence of our bloody history is not hard to find. Consider the genocides in the Old Testament and the crucifixions in the New, the gory mutilations in Shakespeare's tragedies and Grimm's fairy tales, the British monarchs who beheaded their relatives and the American founders who dueled with their rivals. Today the decline in these brutal

A look at the numbers shows that over the course of our history, humankind has been blessed with six major declines of violence. The first was a process of pacification: the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering and horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations, with cities and governments, starting about 5,000 years ago. For centuries, social
practices can be quantified. theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau speculated from their armchairs about what life was like in a "state of nature."

Forensic archeologya kind of "CSI: Paleolithic"can estimate rates of violence from the proportion of skeletons in ancient sites with bashed-in skulls, decapitations or arrowheads
Nowadays we can do better. embedded in bones. And ethnographers can tally the causes of death in tribal peoples that have recently lived outside of state control. These investigations show that, on average, about

15% of people in prestate eras died

violently, compared to about 3% of the citizens of the earliest states. Tribal violence commonly subsides when a state
or empire imposes control over a territory, leading to the various "paxes" (Romana, Islamica, Brittanica and so on) that are familiar to readers of history. It's not that the first kings had a benevolent interest in the welfare of their citizens. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his livestock from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding. From his point of view, such squabbling is a dead lossforgone opportunities to extract taxes, tributes, soldiers and slaves. The second decline of violence was a civilizing process that is best documented in Europe.

between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a 10- to 50-fold decline in their rates of homicide.
Historical records show that The numbers are consistent with narrative histories of the brutality of life in the Middle Ages, when highwaymen made travel a risk to life and limb and dinners were commonly enlivened by dagger attacks. So many people had their noses cut

Historians attribute this decline to the consolidation of a patchwork of feudal territories into large kingdoms with centralized authority and an infrastructure of commerce. Criminal justice was nationalized, and zero-sum plunder gave way to positivesum trade. People increasingly controlled their impulses and sought to cooperate with their neighbors. The third
off that medieval medical textbooks speculated about techniques for growing them back. transition, sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, took off with the Enlightenment. Governments and churches had long maintained order by punishing nonconformists with mutilation, torture and gruesome forms of execution, such as burning, breaking, disembowelment, impalement and sawing in half. The 18th century saw the widespread abolition of judicial torture, including the famous prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment" in the eighth amendment of the U.S. Constitution. At the same time, many nations began to whittle down their list of capital crimes from the hundreds (including poaching, sodomy, witchcraft and counterfeiting) to just murder and treason. And a growing wave of countries

The fourth major transition is the respite from major interstate war that we have seen since the end of World War II. Historians sometimes refer to it as the Long Peace. Today we take it for granted that Italy and Austria will not come to blows, nor will Britain and Russia. But centuries ago, the great powers were almost always at war,
abolished blood sports, dueling, witchhunts, religious persecution, absolute despotism and slavery. and until quite recently, Western European countries tended to initiate two or three new wars every year. The clich that the 20th century was "the most violent in history" ignores the second half of the century (and may not even be true of the first half, if one calculates violent deaths as a proportion of the world's population). Though it's tempting to attribute the

. Political scientists point instead to the growth of democracy, trade and international organizationsall of which, the statistical evidence shows, reduce the likelihood of conflict. They also credit the rising valuation of human life over national grandeura hard-won
Long Peace to nuclear deterrence, non-nuclear developed states have stopped fighting each other as well lesson of two world wars. The fifth trend, which I call the New Peace, involves war in the world as a whole, including

Since 1946, several organizations have tracked the number of armed conflicts and their human toll world-wide. The bad news is that for several decades,
developing nations. the decline of interstate wars was accompanied by a bulge of civil wars, as newly independent countries were led by inept governments, challenged by insurgencies and armed by the cold war superpowers. The less bad news is that civil wars tend

since the peak of the cold war in the 1970s and '80s, organized conflicts of all kindscivil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, terrorist attackshave declined throughout the world, and their death tolls have declined even more precipitously. The rate of documented direct deaths from political violence (war, terrorism, genocide and warlord militias) in the past decade is an unprecedented few hundredths of a percentage point. Even if we multiplied that
to kill far fewer people than wars between states. And the best news is that, rate to account for unrecorded deaths and the victims of war-caused disease and famine, it would not exceed 1%. The most immediate cause of this New Peace was

the demise of communism, which ended the proxy

wars in the developing world stoked by the superpowers and also discredited genocidal ideologies that had justified the
sacrifice of vast numbers of eggs to make a utopian omelet. Another contributor was the expansion of international peacekeeping forces, which really do keep the peacenot always, but far more often than when adversaries are left to fight to the bitter end. Finally, the postwar era has seen a cascade of "rights revolutions"a growing revulsion against

the civil rights movement obliterated lynchings and lethal pogroms, and the women's-rights movement has helped to shrink the incidence of rape and the beating and killing of wives and girlfriends. In recent decades, the movement for children's rights has significantly reduced rates of spanking, bullying, paddling in schools, and physical and sexual abuse. And the
aggression on smaller scales. In the developed world, campaign for gay rights has forced governments in the developed world to repeal laws criminalizing homosexuality and has had some success in reducing hate crimes against gay people. * * * * Why has violence declined so dramatically for so long? Is it because violence has literally been bred out of us, leaving us more peaceful by nature? This seems unlikely. Evolution has a speed limit measured in generations, and many of these declines have unfolded over decades or even years. Toddlers continue to kick, bite and hit; little boys continue to play-fight; people of all ages continue to snipe and bicker, and most of them continue to harbor violent fantasies and to enjoy violent entertainment. It's more likely that human nature has always comprised inclinations toward violence and inclinations that counteract them such as self-

Violence has declined because historical circumstances have increasingly favored our better angels. The most obvious of these pacifying forces has been the state, with its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. A disinterested judiciary and police can defuse the temptation of
control, empathy, fairness and reasonwhat Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge and circumvent the self-serving biases that make all parties to a dispute

We see evidence of the pacifying effects of government in the way that rates of killing declined following the expansion and
believe that they are on the side of the angels. consolidation of states in tribal societies and in medieval Europe. And we can watch the movie in reverse when violence erupts in zones of anarchy, such as the Wild West, failed states and neighborhoods controlled by mafias and street gangs,

who can't call 911 or file a lawsuit to resolve their disputes but have to administer their own rough justice. Another pacifying force has been commerce, a game in which everybody can win. As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism. For example, though the relationship today between America and China is far from warm, we are unlikely to declare war on them or vice versa. Morality aside, they make too much of our stuff, and we owe them too much money. A third peacemaker has been cosmopolitanismthe expansion of people's parochial little worlds through literacy, mobility, education, science, history, journalism and mass media. These forms of virtual reality can prompt people to take the perspective of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them. These technologies have also powered an expansion of rationality and objectivity in human affairs. People are now less likely to privilege their own interests over those of others. They reflect more on the way they live and consider how they could be better off. Violence is often reframed as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won. We devote ever more of our brainpower to guiding our better angels. It is probably no coincidence that the Humanitarian Revolution came on the heels of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, that the Long Peace and rights revolutions coincided with the electronic global village.

AT: Patriarchy
Heg decline turns the impact forces securitization and nationalism Brzezinski, 12 [Zbigniew, Robert E. Osgood Professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins
University's School of Advanced International Studies, scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, national security advisor under Jimmy Carter, After America: How does the world look in an age of U.S. decline? Dangerously unstable, Jan/Feb, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/03/after_america]

the security of a number of weaker states located geographically next to major regional powers also depends on the international status quo reinforced by America's global preeminence -- and would be made significantly more vulnerable in proportion to America's decline. The states in that exposed position -At the same time, including Georgia, Taiwan, South Korea, Belarus, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, and the greater Middle East --

Their fates are closely tied to the nature of the international environment left behind by a waning America, be it ordered and restrained or, much more likely, self-serving and
are today's geopolitical equivalents of nature's most endangered species. expansionist. A faltering United States could also find its strategic partnership with Mexico in jeopardy. America's economic resilience and political stability have so far mitigated many of the challenges posed by such sensitive

A decline in American power, however, would likely undermine the health and good judgment of the U.S. economic and political systems. A waning United States would likely be more nationalistic, more defensive about its national identity, more paranoid about its homeland security, and less willing to sacrifice resources for the sake of others' development. The worsening of relations between a declining America and an internally troubled Mexico could
neighborhood issues as economic dependence, immigration, and the narcotics trade. even give rise to a particularly ominous phenomenon: the emergence, as a major issue in nationalistically aroused Mexican politics, of territorial claims justified by history and ignited by cross-border incidents.