CASE

Warming isn’t past the point of no return yet

Doug Moss et al 15, Founder, Publisher and Executive Editor of E - The Environmental Magazine,
Roddy Scheer, Editor / Writer / Producer at Earth Action Network Inc., "Have We Passed the Point of No
Return on Climate Change?", EarthTalk, Scientific American, April 13 2015,
www.scientificamerican.com/article/have-we-passed-the-point-of-no-return-on-climate-change/

While we may not yet have reached the “point of no return”—when no amount of cutbacks on
greenhouse gas emissions will save us from potentially catastrophic global warming—climate scientists
warn we may be getting awfully close. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a century ago, the average
global temperature has risen some 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Most climatologists agree that , while the warming to
date is already causing environmental problems, another 0.4 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature, representing a
global average atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) of 450 parts per million (ppm ), could set
in motion unprecedented changes in global climate and a significant increase in the severity of natural disasters—and as such could
represent the dreaded point of no return. Currently the atmospheric concentration of CO2 (the leading
greenhouse gas) is approximately 398.55 parts per million (ppm). According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), the federal scientific agency tasked with monitoring the health of our oceans and atmosphere, the current
average annual rate of increase of 1.92 ppm means we could reach the point of no return by 2042.
Environmental leaders point out that this doesn’t give us much time to turn the tide. Greenpeace, a leading
environmental advocacy group, says we have until around 2020 to significantly cut back on greenhouse gas
output around the world—to the tune of a five percent annual reduction in emissions overall—if we are to avoid so-called
“runaway” climate change. “The world is fast approaching a 'point of no return' beyond which extremely dangerous climate change
impacts can become unavoidable,” reports the group. “Within this time period, we will have to radically change our approach to energy
production and consumption.”
inherency
Arms Sales Now
 Arms Sales Now – 2 Billion Dollar Deal
Recent sales increasingly concern china – threatens Taiwan strait and SCS
Stone 6-6 Mike Stone, 6-6-2019, Arms Industry Correspondent at Thomson Reuters, "Exclusive: U.S. pursues sale of over $2 billion in
weapons to Taiwan, sources say, angering China," U.S., https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taiwan-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-pursues-sale-of-
over-2-billion-in-weapons-to-taiwan-sources-say-angering-china-idUSKCN1T62CA) AD

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is pursuing the sale of more than $2 billion worth of
tanks and weapons to Taiwan, four people familiar with the negotiations said, sparking anger from Beijing which is already
involved in an escalating trade war with Washington. An informal notification of the proposed sale has been sent to the U.S.

Congress, the four sources said on condition of anonymity because they were not
authorized to speak about the possible deal. The potential sale included 108 General Dynamics
Corp M1A2 Abrams tanks worth around $2 billion as well as anti-tank and anti-aircraft
munitions, three of the sources said. Taiwan has been interested in refreshing its existing U.S.-made battle tank
inventory, which includes M60 Patton tanks. RELATED COVERAGE China says seriously concerned about U.S. arms

sales to Taiwan Factbox: U.S. arms sales to Taiwan in past decade The United States is the
main arms supplier to Taiwan, which China deems its own and has never renounced the
use of force to bring the self-ruled island under its control . Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said in March
Washington was responding positively to Taipei’s requests for new arms sales to bolster its defenses in the face of pressure from China. The
China and the
United States has no formal ties with Taiwan but is bound by law to help provide it with the means to defend itself.

United States are engaged in a fierce trade war, with clashes over Taiwan and the South
China Sea exacerbating tensions. ADVERTISEMENT A spokesman for the State Department, which oversees foreign military
sales, said the U.S. government does not comment on or confirm potential or pending arms sales or transfers before they have been formally
notified to Congress. The congressional notifications included a variety of anti-tank munitions, including 409 Raytheon Co and Lockheed Martin
Corp-made Javelin missiles worth as much as $129 million, two of the sources said. The notifications also included 1,240 TOW anti-tank missiles
worth as much as $299 million, one of the sources said. There were also 250 stinger missiles worth as much as $223 million in the notification,
the source said. Stingers are often used in portable anti-aircraft weapons systems. FILE PHOTO: U.S. M1A2 "Abrams" tank fires during U.S. led
joint military exercise "Noble Partner 2016" near Vaziani, Georgia, May 18, 2016. REUTERS/David Mdzinarishvili/File Photo Taiwan’s Defense
Ministry confirmed it had requested those weapons and that the request was proceeding normally. The U.S. commitment to providing Taiwan
with the weapons to defend itself helps Taiwan’s military to raise its combat abilities, consolidates the Taiwan-U.S. security partnership and
The Chinese government condemned the planned
ensures Taiwan’s security, the ministry said in a statement.

sale. “We are severely concerned about the U.S. move and are firmly against U.S. arms
sales to Taiwan,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a daily news briefing in
Beijing. ADVERTISEMENT China urges the United States to stop arms sales to Taiwan and
prudently deal with issues relating to Taiwan to prevent harm to bilateral relations and
peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, he added. CHINA HAWK U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration rolled
out a long-awaited overhaul of U.S. arms export policy in 2018 aimed at expanding sales to allies, saying it would bolster the American defense
industry and create jobs at home. Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro was one of the administration’s architects of that policy. Navarro, a
China hawk, wrote about the possible sale of tanks to Taiwan in a March opinion column in the New York Times ahead of a presidential trip to
the Lima, Ohio, plant where they are made. Slideshow (2 Images) At a low point, the U.S. Army had only one tank coming from the plant a
month, General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic said during an April conference call with investors, but said “we’ll be rolling out 30 tanks a
month by the end of this year,” partly because of international orders. The Pentagon announced last week it would sell 34 ScanEagle drones,
made by Boeing Co, to the governments of Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam for $47 million. The drones would afford greater
China claims almost all of the
intelligence-gathering capabilities, potentially curbing Chinese activity in the region.

strategic South China Sea and frequently lambastes the United States and its allies over
naval operations near Chinese-occupied islands. Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam
 China’s Defense Minister Wei Fenghe warned the United
all have competing claims. ADVERTISEMENT

States at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last weekend not to meddle in security
disputes over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told the meeting
that the United States would no longer “tiptoe” around China’s behavior in Asia. Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry, responding to the Reuters report of
planned the new arms sale, said Wei’s “threatening” comments and recent Chinese military drills near Taiwan showed the importance of its
need to strengthen its defensive abilities. “Going forward our government will continue to deepen the close security partnership between
Taiwan and the United States,” it said.
 Arms Sales Now – Normalized trade Relationship
Taiwan arms sales are set to be regularized
Tzu-ti 6/27
(Huang Tzu-ti, Taiwan News, Staff Writer, “Senior US official confirms arms sales to Taiwan will
normalize”, 6/27/19, accessed 6/27/19, https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3733172)//AM

A senior U.S. Pentagon official said on Wednesday (June 26) that Washington is moving toward a normalized
arms sales relationship with Taiwan, amid reports the Trump administration is holding back a weapons
deal until after the G20 summit. Randall Schriver, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, said he believes
the U.S. government’s stance on normalized arms deals with Taiwan remains unchanged, reported Liberty Times. He declined, though, to
provide further information on a proposed US$2 billion sale that is said to include M1A2 Abrams tanks. The remarks were made at a meeting on
U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy held by Washington-based think tank The Heritage Foundation. Refuting claims the deal is being
blocked to improve prospects of a trade deal with China at the G20 summit, Schriver reaffirmed the U.S.
government seeks to include Taiwan in the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, which allows for facilitated U.S. defense
equipment and services sales to foreign countries. Speaking of the role of Taiwan in the U.S.' Indo-Pacific plans, the official reiterated
its importance as a regional security partner and emphasized the contributions it can make to a free and open
Indo-Pacific order, wrote Liberty Times. Boosting its defense capabilities will demonstrate Taiwan’s support for the
U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, Schriver argued.
 Arms Sales Now – Abrams Tanks

US increases arm sales as a counterweight to Chinese influence

Wong and Edmondson 19 (Edward Wong and Catie Edmondson, 6/6/2019, Diplomatic and
International correspondents, “Trump Administration Plans to sell more than $2 billion of arms to
Taiwan”, “NYT”, [6/24/2019], https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/us/politics/trump-taiwan-arms-
sale.html) BDN
The Trump administration is proposing to sell more than $2 billion worth of tanks and other military equipment to Taiwan, American officials
said on Thursday. The sale would add to tensions between the U nited States and China, which are already clashing over
trade, communications technology and a military buildup in the Pacific region. The sale would be one of the largest to Taiwan in
recent years by the United States. The single costliest part of the package is 108 M1A2 Abrams tanks, the officials said, and
the deal would also resupply some weapons, including portable anti-tank missile systems. The United States does not give national
recognition to Taiwan, a de facto independent island off the southeast coast of China that the Chinese Communist Party intends to bring back
eventually under the control of Beijing, by force if necessary. But the
Taiwan Relations Act obligates the United States
government to help Taiwan maintain self-defense capabilities, and each administration has sold it arms
packages. The United States is Taiwan’s main arms supplier. The Taiwan defense ministry requested the weapons in
the latest package, which was first reported by Reuters on Wednesday. Congress would have to be notified of the deal before it could go
forward. Trump administration officials have become increasingly worried about the intentions of Chinese
leaders toward Taiwan, and they also regard Taiwan as an important counterweight to China in the region .
Though China’s military capabilities still lag far behind those of the United States, the People’s Liberation Army has worked on weapons
systems, including anti-ship ballistic missiles, that might prove effective against the United States Navy in the event of conflict in the Taiwan
Strait. In recent months, the Pentagon has ordered naval ships to sail through the Taiwan Strait with increasing frequency, in shows of strength
that officials call freedom of navigation exercises. The proposed purchase of tanks and missiles is consistent with
Taiwan’s deterrence strategy, said Bonnie S. Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“They would help prevent an invasion , making it difficult for an invading P.L.A. force to establish a beachhead in northern
Taiwan,” she said, referring to the People’s Liberation Army. “I expect the Trump administration to approve this package, as part of a policy of
bolstering Taiwan’s defenses.”
 Negotiations for Arms Sales Now
Negotiations between private companies and Taiwan now
Lawrence Chung 18 ( Lawrence Chung, 2/22/2018, Covers Major Taiwanese news for Rueters and the
South China Morning Post, “Organizers play down significance of US-Taiwan arms sale forum”, “South China
Morning Post”, [6/24/2019], https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-
defence/article/2134273/organisers-play-down-significance-us-taiwan-arms-sale) BDN

Wang Kung-yi, a political science professor at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, said the US-Taiwan
Business Council appeared to want to play down the significance of the planned event in Taiwan , probably
due to concerns about antagonizing China’s government . Beijing, which considers Taiwan a breakaway
Chinese province, has repeatedly warned the US and other countries against helping the island to arm
itself. “The Taiwan seminar is significant in the sense that it will not only facilitate exchanges between
prominent US arms suppliers and local manufacturers but will also serve as another important channel for
officials from the two sides to discuss the kinds of weapons Taiwan should buy or build to try to counter
the military balance now heavily tilting towards China,” he said. It is not known whether the US will send
senior defense or State Department officials to attend the Taiwan event, as it has done at previous meetings in
the US, but prominent US arms suppliers, including Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, are expected to send
representatives to Taiwan, according to Wang. Representatives of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and 10 other US
arms suppliers joined a delegation organized by the US-Taiwan Business Council to visit Taiwan last month
and met with President Tsai Ing-wen of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party. Senior
military officials and experts, including those from Taiwan’s Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology,
are also expected to attend the planned seminar , as they have at previous conferences held in the US.
 Ending Arms Sales Key to Peaceful Transition
US Arm Sales to Taiwan prevents peaceful negotiations
J. Michael Cole, 04/01/11, staff reporter at the Taipei Times, “US arms sales creating ‘vicious circle’”,
Taipei Times, 06/24/19,
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2011/04/01/2003499637/1, NN)
A report co-authored by a former commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Command is calling on Washington to re-examine its
relationship with Taiwan, especially on what it calls the “vicious circle” of arms sales. The product of a three-day roundtable at the
University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs in January, A Way Ahead with China: Steering the right course with the Middle
Kingdom explores how the US could improve relations with China and portrays Taiwan as the principal irritant in the evolving
bilateral relationship. “Today, the changing and evolving US/China relationship demands a practical strategy ,”
the introductory letter by center director Gerald Baliles says. “There must be careful consideration of what both nations seek to gain
Part of that practical
from this relationship, and of how the relationship itself affects the balance of nations worldwide.”
strategy, the report says, involves rethinking longstanding US security commitments to Taiwan under
the Taiwan Relations Act. “The United States takes a somewhat protectionist stance with Taiwan
historically,” the report says. “However, Taiwan is now an economically successful democratic institution that is slowly tending
towards greater alignment with the Mainland [China]. Our involvement with Taiwan is a frequent point of
contention with the Chinese, particularly in respect to arms sales , and one that should be re-examined .
The complex relationship is political and should be re-examined outside of a military context .” Among the
authors of the report are former commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Command Admiral Joseph Prueher, former ambassador to
the People’s Republic of China under former US presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and former commander-in-chief of the
US Pacific Command Admiral Timothy Keating, as well as James Shinn, National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the CIA. Two
specialists on China, Charles Freeman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and David Lampton of Johns Hopkins
In its recommendations, the report says
University, also took part, as did representatives from FedEx Express.
Washington and Beijing should engage in what it calls “protracted negotiation,” which involves
understanding each party’s respective “want-to-haves” and “need-to-haves.” One of Beijing’s “want-to-
haves” is -unification with Taiwan. “A peaceful resolution of the long standing [sic] Taiwan issue,
acceptable on both sides of the strait [,] would indeed be a boon to stability in East Asia, as well as to
US/China relations. It is also an issue where progress can be made ,” the report said. “Unfortunately, US arms
sales to Taiwan are part of a vicious circle, leading to the Taiwan issue that is clearly political, and
increasingly economic, being always discussed in military terms ,” the report said. As the “Taiwan issue” is not a
military one, the report says, talks should be “elevated from a mostly military to a politico-economic dialogue”
addressing the economy, politics and culture. Standing in the way of that resolution, however, are the
political considerations associated with arms sales, which the report says are compelling all three
governments to make counterproductive policy decisions . “Politically, the president of the Taiwan people, now the
extremely capable Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), in order to get elected, must satisfy a large segment of his Taiwanese constituency by
asking the US to approve annual arm sales to Taiwan,” it says, while “the US Administration, for domestic political reasons, must
offer arms to Taiwan … [and] Mainland Chinese [PRC] leaders, to reconcile increasingly pluralistic domestic pressures, are obliged
to protest the interferences of these arms sales in ‘internal Chinese affairs.’”
 relations
Chinese backlash over arms sales is growing and will determine the future of US/China
relations – reversing US policy is key to prevent conflict and spills over to other areas
Charles Glaser, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University,
Spring 15, International Security Vol. 39 No. 4,
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/isec_a_00199.pdf
A common counterpoint to the argument above is that China-Taiwan relations have improved dramatically since 2008, so the probability of war
is low.66 This, in turn, means the expected benefits offered by policies that would keep the United States out of a China-Taiwan conflict have
decreased. Although this argument has merit, itis hard to be confident that cross-strait relations will remain good.
Taiwan might again elect a more pro-independence government, or China might ramp up pressures for
unification. Jia Qingguo, a professor at Peking University, recently wrote: “[P]olitical pressures on the Chinese government
when it comes to Taiwan are tremendous and growing . In the past, the Chinese people knew that China
was weak and could not stop the U nited States from selling weapons to Taiwan. Now, many believe that
China should no longer tolerate such insulting behavior. Confronted with this mounting domestic
pressure, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] is finding it increasingly difficult to justify its weak responses .”67
More important, however, is that focusing on the quality of current cross-strait relations overlooks two other less direct, but potentially more
signiªcant, beneªts of U.S. accommodation on Taiwan. First, U.S. support for Taiwan is one of the most important, possibly the most important,
policy-driven sources of China’s suspicions about U.S. motives and intentions. Although the United States does not take a position on what the
ªnal outcome of the Taiwan issue should be, China considers U.S. support of Taiwan a key source of “strategic distrust.” A
recent study by
two leading authorities on U.S.-China relations concludes that Beijing views U.S. arms sales to Taiwan
“as confirming American arrogance and determination to interfere in China’s domestic affairs and to prevent
peaceful uniªcation from occurring, thereby harming a clearly-articulated Chinese core interest.” In a similar vein, their report
argues that “continuing to provide Taiwan with advanced weapons . . . is viewed as pernicious in Chinese eyes and has added to suspicion that
Washington will disregard Chinese interests and sentiments as long as China’s power position is secondary to America’s.”68 Nathan and Scobell
conclude that “most Chinese see strategic motives at the root of American behavior. They believe that keeping the Taiwan problem going helps
the U.S. tie China down.”69 Similarly, a prominent Chinese analyst argues: “The position the U.S. takes on the Taiwan issue
determines the essence of American strategy toward China, and thus determines the quality and status of U.S.-China relations.”70
Xu Hui, a professor at China’s National Defense University, holds that “U.S. policies toward Taiwan have been and are the
fundamental cause of some anti-American sentiment among the Chinese public ....I assure you that a posture
change of the U.S. policy on Taiwan will remove the major obstacle for our military-to-military relations and also
strengthen Sino-American cooperation by winning the hearts and minds of 1.3 billion Chinese people.”71 In short, ending the U.S. commitment
to Taiwan has the potential to dramatically improve U.S.-China relations, which in turn could increase the possibility of cooperation on
other issues and reduce the probability of competition and conflict.

That’s key to solve every global impact

Cohen 2009 - former U.S. secretary of defense [Maurice R. Greenberg is chairman and CEO of C.V. Starr & Co., Inc. “Smart Power in U.S.-
China Relations,” pg online @ http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/090309_mcgiffert_uschinasmartpower_web.pdf

The evolution of Sino-U.S. relations over the next months, years, and decades has the potential to have a
greater impact on global security and prosperity than any other bilateral or multilateral arrangement. In this sense, many
analysts consider the US.-China diplomatic relationship to be the most influential in the world. Without
question, strong and stable U.S. alliances provide the foundation for the protection and promotion of
U.S. and global interests. Yet within that broad framework, the trajectory of U.S. -China relations will
determine the success, or failure, of efforts to address the toughest global challenges: global financial
stability, energy security and climate change, nonproliferation, and terrorism, among other pressing
issues. Shepherding that trajectory in the most constructive direction possible must therefore be a priority for Washington and Beijing.
Virtually no major global challenge can be met without U.S.-China cooperation . The uncertainty of that future
trajectory and the "strategic mistrust" between leaders in Washington and Beijing necessarily concerns ‘'many experts and policymakers in
both countries. Although some U.S. analysts see China as a strategic competitor—deliberately vying with the United States for energy
resources, military superiority, and international political influence alike— analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
has generally found that China uses its soft power to pursue its own, largely economic, international agenda primarily to achieve its domestic
objectives of economic growth and social stability.1 Although Beijing certainly has an eye on Washington, not all of its actions are undertaken
as a counterpoint to the United States. In addition, CSIS research suggests that growing Chinese soft power in developing countries may have
influenced recent U.S. decisions to engage more actively and reinvest in soft-power tools that have atrophied during the past decade. To the
extent that there exists a competition between the United States and China, therefore, it may be mobilizing both countries to strengthen their
ability to solve global problems. To be sure, U.S. and Chinese policy decisions toward the respective other power will be determined in large
part by the choices that leaders make about their own nations interests at home and overseas, which in turn are shaped by their respective
domestic contexts. Both parties must recognize—and accept—that the other will pursue a foreign policy approach that is in its own national
interest. Yet, in a globalized world, challenges are increasingly transnational, and so too must be their solutions. As demonstrated by the rapid
spread of SARS from China in 2003, pandemic flu can be spread rapidly through air and via international travel. Dust
particulates from Asia settle in Lake Tahoe. An economic downturn in one country can and does trigger an economic slowdown in another.
These challenges can no longer be addressed by either containment or isolation. What constitutes the national interest
today necessarily encompasses a broader and more complex set of considerations than it did in the past As a general principle, the United
States seeks to promote its national interest while it simultaneously pursues what the CSIS Commission on Smart Power called in its November
2007 report the "global good."3 This approach is not always practical or achievable, of course. But neither is it pure benevolence. Instead, a
strategic pursuit of the global good accrues concrete benefits for the United States (and others) in the form of building confidence, legitimacy,
and political influence in key countries and regions around the world in ways that enable the United States to better confront global and
transnational challenges. In short, the global good comprises those things that all people and governments want but have traditionally not been
able to attain in the absence of U.S. leadership. Despite historical, cultural, and political differences between the United States and China,
Beijing's newfound ability, owing to its recent economic successes, to contribute to the global good is a matter for common ground between
the two countries. Today there is increasing recognition that no major global challenge can be addressed effectively,
much less resolved, without the active engagement of—and cooperation between—the United States
and China. The United States and China—the worlds first- and third-largest economies—are inextricably
linked, a fact made ever more evident in the midst of the current global financial crisis. Weak demand in both the United States and China,
previously the twin engines of global growth, has contributed to the global economic downturn and threatens to ignite simmering trade
tensions between the two countries. Nowhere is the interconnectedness of the United States and China more clear than in international
finance. China has $2 trillion worth of largely U.S. dollar-denominated foreign exchange reserves and is the world's largest holder—by far—of
U.S. government debt. Former treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson and others have suggested that the structural imbalances created by this
dynamic fueled the current economic crisis. Yet. China will almost certainly be called on to purchase the lion's share of new U.S. debt
instruments issued in connection with the U.S. stimulus and recovery package. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's February 23.2009,
reassurance to Beijing that U.S. markets remain safe and her call for continued Chinese investment in the U.S. bond market as a means to help
both countries, and the world, emerge from global recession underscored the shared interest—and central role—that both countries have in
turning around the global economy quickly. Although China's considerable holdings of U.S. debt have been seen as a troubling problem, they
are now being perceived as a necessary part of a global solution. Similarly, as the worlds two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, China and
the United States share not only the collateral damage of energy-inefficient economic growth, but a primary responsibility to shape any
ultimate global solutions to climate change. To date, cooperation has been elusive, owing as much to Washington's reluctance as to Beijing's
intransigence. Painting China as the environmental bogeyman as an excuse for foot-dragging in policymaking is no longer an option; for its part,
China, as the world's top polluter, must cease playing the developing-economy card. Yet energy security and climate change remain an area of
genuine opportunity for joint achievement. Indeed, U.S.-China cooperation in this field is a sine qua non of any response to the energy and
climate challenges. The sheer size of the Chinese economy means that collaboration with the United States could set the de facto global
standards for etficiency and emissions in key economic sectors such as industry and transportation. Climate change also provides an area for
cooperation in previously uncharted policy waters, as in emerging Arctic navigational and energy exploration opportunities. Washington and
Beijing also share a deep and urgent interest in international peace and stability. The resumption of U.S.-China military contacts is a positive
development. As two nuclear powers with worldwide economic and strategic interests, both countries want to minimize instability and
enhance maritime security, as seen by parallel antipiracy missions in the waters otT Somalia. Joint efforts in support of United Nations
peacekeeping, nonproliferation, and counterterrorism offer critical areas for bilateral and multilateral cooperation. Certainly, regional and
global security institutions such as the Six-Party Talks concerning North Korea or the UN Security Council require the active engagement of both
Washington and Beijing. Even more broadly, crisis management in geographic regions of mutual strategic interest like the Korean peninsula,
Iran, or Burma require much more Sino-U.S. communication if the two countries are to avoid miscalculation and maximize opportunities to
minimize human sutfering. Increasing the number of mid-level military-to-military exchanges would help in this regard. The United States and
China could do more to cooperate on law enforcement to combat drug trafficking and organized crime in Western China. Afghanistan is
competing with Burma as the main provider of narcotics to China; Washington could use its influence with the International Security Assistance
Force in Kabul to develop a joint antinarcotics program. This could potentially build networks and joint capabilities that might be useful for U.S.-
China cooperation on the issue of Pakistan. In addition, Washington should also encourage NATO-China cooperation along the Afghan border.
Collaborating under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) might provide an additional framework for Beijing and
Washington to address Central Asian security issues in a cooperative manner. 1he SCO, which includes Pakistan as an observer and will convene
a multinational conference on Afghanistan in March 2009, has long made curbing narcoterrorism in Afghanistan a priority. In addition, the VS.
Drug Enforcement Agency and the Chinese Anti-Narcotics Bureau should expand cooperation on interdiction and prosecution of heroin and
meth traffickers. To be sure, there are a number of areas of serious divergence between Washington and Beijing. This should surprise no one.
The United States has disagreements with even its allies. Two large powers with vastly dilferent histories, cultures, and political systems are
bound to have challenges. History has shown, however, that the most effective way of addressing issues is for the U.S. and Chinese
governments to engage in quiet diplomacy rather than public recrimination. In the U.S.-China context, there is often little to be gained—and
much to be lost in terms of trust and respect—by a polarizing debate. Any differences, moreover, must not necessarily impede Sino-U.S.
cooperation when both sides share strong mutual interests. I;. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to
hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."3 Effective policy toward China by the United
States, and vice versa, will require this kind of dual-minded intelligence. Moreover, working together on areas of mutual and global interest will
help promote strategic trust between China and the United States, facilitating possible cooperation in other areas. Even limited cooperation on
specific areas will help construct additional mechanisms for bilateral communication on issues of irreconcilable disagreement. In fact, many of
the toughest challenges in U.S.-China relations in recent years have been the result of unforeseen events, such as the accidental bombing of the
Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999 and the EP-3 reconnaissance plane collision in April 2001. Building trust and finding workable
solutions to tough problems is the premise behind the Obama administrations foreign policy of smart power, as articulated by Secretary of
State Clinton. Smart power is based on, as Secretary Clinton outlined in her confirmation hearing, the fundamental belief that 'We must use...
the full range of tools at our disposal—diplomatic, economic, military, political and cultural—picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for
each situation."' As the CS1S Commission on Smart Power noted in November 2007, "Smart Power is neither hard nor soft—it is the skillful
combination of bothIt is an approach that underscores the necessity of a strong military, but also invests heavily in alliances, partnerships and
institutions at all levels... .°5 As such, smart power necessarily mandates a major investment in a U.S.-China partnership on key issues. 'The
concept enjoys broad support among the Chinese and American people and, by promoting the global good, it reaps concrete results around the
world. There should be no expectation that Washington and Beijing will or should agree on all, or even most, questions. But the American and
Chinese people should expect their leaders to
come together on those vital issues that require their cooperation.
U.S.-China partnership, though not inevitable, is indispensable .
 hurt relations – taiwan separation
US arms sales to Taiwan embolden separatists and significantly hurt US-China
relations
Bosu, Secretary of New Horizon Radio Listeners' Club, 2017
(Rabi Sankar, “Time to stop US arms sales to Taiwan,” China.org.cn, 7/26/19,
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/2017-07/26/content_41288212.htm accessed 7/9/19 GDI-JEM)

On June 29, the Trump administration notified Congress that it had approved sales of US$1.42 billion-
worth of advanced weaponry to Taiwan, despite the Chinese government's persistent opposition.

There's no doubt this will have an adverse impact on the prospects for cross-Straits peace, as well as the
Sino-U.S. ties.

American sales of weapons to Taiwan is not only dangerous but also an idiotic move on the part of
President Donald Trump for its corrosive effect on the Sino-U.S. relationship, for it sends "a wrong
signal" to those promoting separatist activities favoring "Taiwan independence," and will do great
harm to cross-Straits peace and stability.

The U.S. move runs counter to Chinese President Xi Jinping's trust in Trump, built up during their first
diplomatic encounter in Palm Beach, Florida on April 6-7, 2017. During the meeting, Trump promised
efforts to build "a very, very great relationship" between the two countries.

If President Trump wantonly sells weapons to Taiwan, violating the sacrosanct "One-China" principle,
China would have little encouragement to partner with the U.S. government on international issues
considered of vital importance in Washington.
 --1AR Turns Deterrence
Strong US/China relations enhance US deterrence and military presence in the rest of
the Asia Pacific
Charles Glaser, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University,
March/April 11, Will China's Rise Lead to War?, Foreign Affairs,
http://www.saintjoehigh.com/ourpages/auto/2012/11/20/56688567/11-0304%20Will%20China_s
%20Rise%20Lead%20to%20War_.pdf

Confidence in the U.S. deterrent is likely to be reinforced by relatively good relations between the United
States and China. Those who feared that the United States could not extend its deterrent to Western Europe believed that the Soviet Union
was a highly revisionist state bent on radically overturning the status quo and willing to run enormous risks in the process. There is virtually no
evidence suggesting that China has such ambitious goals, so extending the U.S. deterrent should be easier now than during the Cold War. And
even in the unlikely event that China evolved into such a dangerous state, deterrence would still be possible, albeit more difficult. Some realist
pessimists argue that in order to be highly secure, China will find itself compelled to pursue regional hegemony, fueling conflict along the way.
However, China'ssize, power, location, and nuclear arsenal will make it very challenging to attack
successfully. China will not need to push the U nited States out of its region in order to be secure, because a
forward U.S. presence will not undermine China's core deterrent capabilities. A major U.S. withdrawal, moreover,
would not automatically yield Chinese regional hegemony, because Japan and South Korea might then acquire stronger conventional military
capabilities and nuclear capabilities of their own, greatly reducing China's coercive potential. A Chinese drive for regional hegemony, therefore,
would be both unnecessary and infeasible. The United States' forward military presence does enhance its power-projection capabilities, which
threaten China's ability to protect its sea-lanes and coerce Taiwan. But the U.S. alliance with Japan also benefits China by enabling Japan to
spend far less on defense. Although the United States' power far exceeds Japan's, China has seen the alliance as adding to regional stability,
because it fears Japan more than the United States. As China grows more powerful, it may increasingly resent U.S. influence in Northeast Asia.
But unlessU.S.-Chinese relations become severely strained, China is likely to accept a continuing U.S.
presence in the region, given the alternatives.
Arms Sales / Relations
 Yes Arms Sales Key – Causes Mistrust
US and china on the road to escalation – ending arms sales to Taiwan key to
stabilization
Lopez 6-11-19, (Linette Lopez is the senior finance correspondent at Business Insider, most recently she's been focusing her reporting on Tesla and the
Chinese economy. She joined BI in the summer of 2011 after graduating from Columbia University's School of Journalism. There she concentrated her studies on
business and international journalism as well as audio production. She also holds a BA from Columbia University, where she finished her undergraduate education in
2008.” Forget the trade war — a bigger conflict between the US and China is playing out right under our noses”, June 11 th 2019, accessed: 6/25/19,
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-arms-sales-to-taiwan-bigger-threat-to-us-china-relations)

The world has its eye on the trade war between the US and China, but a more dangerous confrontation between the two nations
is playing out in the background: the worsening disagreement over the "One China" policy . Last week, Reuters reported that Washington was on its
way to approving $2 billion worth of arms sales to Taiwan. The move indicates the Trump administration isn't trying to create an atmosphere conducive to trade
negotiations and suggests that disputes between the US
and China are more likely headed toward escalation than
resolution. "Taiwan is the thing the Chinese care most about hands down ," said Susan Thornton, a former assistant US secretary
of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. "Anything where the US is interfering with Taiwan hits a national third rail." The One China policy — under which the US
acknowledges China's claim that Taiwan is not an independent nation but rather a part of China, without taking a side — was developed during the Nixon
administration to improve US-China relations. The idea is central to China's identity as a modern world power, and since President Donald Trump took office the US
has challenged that notion repeatedly. Despite protests from Beijing, Trump signed the Taiwan Travel Act, legislation permitting high-level talks between US and
Taiwanese officials, last year. In May, the US national security adviser, John Bolton, met with David Lee, one of Taiwan's top security officials. This meeting came just
after Taiwan renamed its unofficial embassy in Washington the Taiwan Council for US Affairs. The old name, the Coordination Council for North American Affairs,
neglected to mention Taiwan or the US. The Trump administration has also sold arms to Taiwan before, as have previous administrations, but this $2 billion arms
sale digs at a delicate wound during a delicate time. It's a big sale, even in a world where weapons are becoming more and more expensive. And though it does not
include the US's top fighter jets, it is sure to antagonize Beijing before the G20 meeting at the end of the month in Osaka, Japan, where US and Chinese heads of
state are expected to meet. On Thursday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry representative, Geng Shuang, responded to the news of the arms sale with a
warning, according to the Chinese state media outlet Xinhua. " We urge the US side to stop arms sales to Taiwan and sever their military
ties, prudently and properly handle Taiwan-related issues, to avoid serious damage to China-US relations as well as to the peace and

stability of the Taiwan Strait," Geng said. It's just imagination In January 2017, China — most likely aware that the incoming US president was

unfamiliar with the complexities of US-China relations — clarified its position on Taiwan in a rare US media interview by
the Chinese Foreign Ministry official Lu Kang. "Because this issue touches upon China's core interest, by no means is this

something that could be negotiated or used as a bargaining chip," he told NBC. " One China policy, 100%." The fight over Taiwan's status
started in 1949 after the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek left the mainland for the island when he was defeated by Mao Zedong's Communist forces. To the
Chinese, the island's independence is both a product and a reminder of China's century of humiliation, when China was carved up by foreign powers and then
thrown into decades of chaos and civil war after the end of the Qing dynasty. "It's the mythology they've told themselves for years," Thornton said. In that way the
One China policy and China's economic nationalism are tied together in the Chinese political imagination. That may seem foreign to the US, where one set of
technocrats handles economics and another handles national security, but the merging of the two interests are a response to the China's lost century. And both are
being tested by the Trump administration. While the US-China trade war producing a " tech Cold War" has grabbed headlines, less attention has been paid to
escalation in hostilities surrounding the One China policy. This despite the fact that the conflict has all the trappings of the Cold War era. China sees US interference
in Taiwan as an encroachment on its sphere of influence. And the US sees Chinese involvement in the Caribbean similarly. Back in February 2018 after a speech in
Texas, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned Latin American nations of China's "imperial" ambitions, invoking the Monroe Doctrine. "Latin America does not
need new imperial powers that seek only to benefit their own people," he said. "China's state-led model of development is reminiscent of the past. It doesn't have
to be this hemisphere's future." All of this matters for Taiwan because the
more involved a country is with China, the more
pressure China puts on it to wipe Taiwan off the map . Earlier this year the Dominican Republic dropped its recognition of Taiwan at
China's behest. El Salvador did it in 2018, and Panama in 2017. There may be a Cold War-reminiscent motivation behind this arms sale as well. Taiwan's anti-China
president, Tsai Ing-wen, faces an uphill battle for reelection next year. In Washington the sale may be seen as a way to bolster her chances of winning. "One thing
US administrations tend to think, which may or may not be true," Thornton said, "is that selling weapons to Taiwan helps political candidates show that they have
US support and can stand up to China." We — the US and China — may be slipping into a world where that theory has to be tested.

arms sales threaten China-US relations and is perceived to encroach on their sphere of
influence
Lopez 19
(Lopez, Linette is the senior finance correspondent at Business Insider, most recently she's been focusing
her reporting on Tesla and the Chinese economy. “Forget the trade war — a bigger conflict between the
US and China is playing out right under our noses,” Business Insider, 6/11/19. D.A. 6/25/19.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-arms-sales-to-taiwan-bigger-threat-to-us-china-relations)

The world has its eye on the trade war between the US and China, but a more dangerous confrontation
between the two nations is playing out in the background: the worsening disagreement over the "One
China" policy. Last week, Reuters reported that Washington was on its way to approving $2 billion worth of
arms sales to Taiwan. The move indicates the Trump administration isn't trying to create an atmosphere
conducive to trade negotiations and suggests that disputes between the US and China are more likely
headed toward escalation than resolution. "Taiwan is the thing the Chinese care most about hands
down," said Susan Thornton, a former assistant US secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
"Anything where the US is interfering with Taiwan hits a national third rail." The One China policy — under which
the US acknowledges China's claim that Taiwan is not an independent nation but rather a part of China,
without taking a side — was developed during the Nixon administration to improve US-China relations.
The idea is central to China's identity as a modern world power, and since President Donald Trump took
office the US has challenged that notion repeatedly. Despite protests from Beijing, Trump signed the Taiwan Travel Act, legislation
permitting high-level talks between US and Taiwanese officials, last year. In May, the US national security adviser, John Bolton, met with David Lee, one of Taiwan's
top security officials. This meeting came just after Taiwan renamed its unofficial embassy in Washington the Taiwan Council for US Affairs. The old name, the
The Trump administration has also sold arms to
Coordination Council for North American Affairs, neglected to mention Taiwan or the US.

Taiwan before, as have previous administrations, but this $2 billion arms sale digs at a delicate wound
during a delicate time. It's a big sale, even in a world where weapons are becoming more and more
expensive. And though it does not include the US's top fighter jets, it is sure to antagonize Beijing
before the G20 meeting at the end of the month in Osaka, Japan, where US and Chinese heads of state
are expected to meet. On Thursday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry representative, Geng Shuang, responded to
the news of the arms sale with a warning, according to the Chinese state media outlet Xinhua. "We urge
the US side to stop arms sales to Taiwan and sever their military ties, prudently and properly handle
Taiwan-related issues, to avoid serious damage to China-US relations as well as to the peace and
stability of the Taiwan Strait ," Geng said. It's just imagination In January 2017, China — most likely aware that the incoming US president was
unfamiliar with the complexities of US-China relations — clarified its position on Taiwan in a rare US media interview by the Chinese Foreign Ministry official Lu
Kang. "Because
this issue touches upon China's core interest, by no means is this something that could be
negotiated or used as a bargaining chip," he told NBC. " One China policy, 100%." The fight over Taiwan's status started in 1949 after the
Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek left the mainland for the island when he was defeated by Mao Zedong's Communist forces. To the Chinese, the island's
independence is both a product and a reminder of China's century of humiliation, when China was carved up by foreign powers and then thrown into decades of
In that way the One China
chaos and civil war after the end of the Qing dynasty. "It's the mythology they've told themselves for years," Thornton said.

policy and China's economic nationalism are tied together in the Chinese political imagination. That may
seem foreign to the US, where one set of technocrats handles economics and another handles national
security, but the merging of the two interests are a response to the China's lost century. And both are
being tested by the Trump administration. xi trump Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump at the Great Hall of the
People in Beijing in November 2017. Damir Sagolj/Reuters While the US-China trade war producing a " tech Cold War" has

grabbed headlines, less attention has been paid to escalation in hostilities surrounding the One China
policy. This despite the fact that the conflict has all the trappings of the Cold War era. China sees US interference in Taiwan as an
encroachment on its sphere of influence . And the US sees Chinese involvement in the Caribbean
similarly. Back in February 2018 after a speech in Texas, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned Latin American nations of China's "imperial" ambitions,
invoking the Monroe Doctrine. "Latin America does not need new imperial powers that seek only to benefit their own people," he said. " China's state-led

model of development is reminiscent of the past. It doesn't have to be this hemisphere's future. " All of
this matters for Taiwan because the more involved a country is with China, the more pressure China
puts on it to wipe Taiwan off the map. Earlier this year the Dominican Republic dropped its recognition of Taiwan at China's behest. El
Salvador did it in 2018, and Panama in 2017. There may be a Cold War-reminiscent motivation behind this arms sale as well. Taiwan's anti-China president, Tsai Ing-
wen, faces an uphill battle for reelection next year. In Washington the sale may be seen as a way to bolster her chances of winning. "One thing US administrations
tend to think, which may or may not be true," Thornton said, "is that selling weapons to Taiwan helps political candidates show that they have US support and can
stand up to China." We — the US and China — may be slipping into a world where that theory has to be tested. .
 Yes Arms Sales Key
Increase of arms sales to Taiwan strains U.S. – China relations
McBride 6-6
(Courtney, foreign policy and national security analyzer, "U.S. Plans More Than $2 Billion in Weapons Sales to Taiwan, Angering Beijing ," WSJ, ,
6-6-2019, 6-24-2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-plans-more-than-2-billion-in-weapons-sales-to-taiwan-angering-beijing-
11559870443)//MA

WASHINGTON—The U.S. is planning a new effort to help the Taiwanese government upgrade its military by
allowing Taipei to buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons systems, possibly including more than 100 tanks—a move that has already
drawn criticism from Beijing. Washington is legally obliged under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 to help
the self-ruled island access defensive weapons , but such transactions are bitterly opposed by Beijing, which considers
Taiwan a breakaway province. A new round of weapons sales to Taipei would also risk further inflaming tensions
between the U.S. and China as the two countries remain locked in a trade fight. Multiple people familiar with the
weapons-sales plan told The Wall Street Journal that members of Congress have been informally notified of the possible arms sale. Ultimately,
the Taiwanese government would have the option to buy some or all of the items included in the proposal, these people said. Reuters earlier
reported the potential
sale, which includes Abrams tanks, antitank missiles, medium-range tactical missiles
and portable Stinger air-defense missiles. The value could be in excess of $2 billion. A State Department official,
citing U.S. government policy on potential or pending arms sales, declined to comment on or confirm the terms before formal congressional
notification. A representative of the Taiwanese government declined to comment beyond a Ministry of National Defense statement confirming
its request for the weapon systems, in accordance with U.S. procedures for foreign military sales. In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry
spokesman Geng Shuang said “China firmly, consistently and unequivocally opposes U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.”
He said he urged Washington to recognize the sensitive nature of the matter, honor the One China policy
and halt any U.S. arms sales to or military relations with Taiwan. China and Taiwan have been governed separately since
1949, when China’s Nationalist government retreated to the island after it was ousted from the mainland by Communist Party forces. The U.S.
officially adheres to the One China policy, meaning Washington won’t establish formal diplomatic
relations with Taipei, but the U.S. and Taiwan view the sales as crucial for stability in the region. President
Trump approved a $1.42 billion arms sale in 2017, and the Obama administration approved a similar transfer in 2015. With Beijing and
Washington at a critical point in the high-stakes trade negotiations, new weapons sales could become a
complicating factor in the dispute. President Trump warned Beijing on Thursday about another potential tariff increase on Chinese
goods if negotiators fail to reach a deal. China’s Commerce Ministry reiterated that Beijing wouldn’t shy away from responding to any U.S.
escalation, though said it is not seeking a trade war.

Reducing arms sales to Taiwan strengthens U.S. – china relations

Chen, Kastner, and Reed 17
(Ping-Kuei, Scott, William, professor at National Chenguchi University, Professor of Government and Politics at University of Maryland,
Professor of government and politics department, “Taiwan and China: A farewell to Arms? US Security Relations with Taiwan and the Prospects
for Stability in the Taiwan Strait,” 2017, 6-26-2019, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1525/j.ctt1w76wpm.15.pdf?refreqid=excelsior
%3Ae4f949e51a53b201e5a1bbcdffac19d0)//MA

Given the tensions—and the anger in Beijing—that are generated by US arms sales to Taiwan, some in the United States
propose that Washington end (or at least scale back) weapons sales to the island. Doing so, proponents suggest,
would remove a major irritant in the US-China relationship and would increase trust and cooperation in
bilateral relations.6 More fundamentally, proponents of a reduced US commitment to Taiwan suggest that such a policy approach
would help lower the risk of armed conflict in East Asia . This argument is developed most fully by Charles Glaser,7 who
suggests that ending the US commitment to defend Taiwan would bring with it two significant benefits for the US-China relationship. First, it
could improve US-China relations because such a shift in US policy would remove a key source of
mistrust in Beijing concerning US motivations. Second, ending US support for Taiwan—by removing the key
potential source of military conflict between China and the United States—would reduce military
competition between Washington and Beijing. Glaser thus proposes a “grand bargain,” in which the United States
would end its commitment to Taiwan in return for Chinese willingness to “resolve its maritime disputes on
‘fair’ terms” and to accept a long-term US security presence in East Asia. Others argue that the US commitment to
Taiwan is increasingly untenable as China’s military power continues to grow. For instance, Chas Freeman warns that a continued US
commitment to Taiwan is incompatible with (a) waning US relative power in the region and (b) the importance that the PRC places on the issue.
A failure
to accommodate US policy to new geopolitical realities, in turn, risks future military conflict over an issue
about which China cares deeply.8 John Mearsheimer argues along similar lines that China’s rise as a great power, if it continues, will
mean that the current US security commitment to Taiwan will be increasingly unsustainable

Ending Arms Sales to Taiwan would foster peaceful relations b/w U.S. and China—
multiple warrants—FIRE!!!
Zurong 13 (Wu Zurong, April 02 2013, “Is it Time to Stop Arms Sales to Taiwan?”, Wu is a Research
Fellow at the China Foundation for International Studies, China US Focus,
https://www.chinausfocus.com/foreign-policy/is-it-time-to-stop-arms-sales-to-taiwan)

Since ancient times, Taiwan has been the territory of China. Oddly enough, Taiwan has always been an obstacle
to the stable development of Sino-US relations since the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in
October of 1949. The peaceful development of relations across the Taiwan Straits since 2008 is helping remove this

obstacle. It is high time now for the US to seize the opportunity and make up its mind to stop interfering in

China’s internal affairs, stop arms sales to Taiwan and stop overt and covert official contact with Taiwan. The

Taiwan issue is a remnant of history. For the last 60 years or more, it has been the single most important
and most sensitive issue at the heart of Sino-US relations. In a certain sense, the failure to seriously
discuss and resolve this issue has contributed to the 22 years of estrangement and hostility experienced between China and
the US. When President Nixon made his historic visit to China in 1972, Taiwan had been a central issue in
the negotiations for normalization of relations between China and the United States. On January 1, 1979,
China and the US established full diplomatic relations when the Carter Administration decided to sever diplomatic relations
with Taiwan, withdraw American troops and military installations from Taiwan, and to abrogate the treaties it had signed with
Taiwan. In a word, resolution of the Taiwan issue was key to normalization. Now,
with peaceful development
established in cross-Straits relations, assumed threats to Taiwan are diminishing and there
is no apparent danger to US interests. Therefore, the Taiwan Relations Act is now completely out of date. The
US has expressed support for the continued expansion of exchanges and cooperation between the two sides of the Taiwan
Straits as it is not only in the interests of the people of both sides of the Straits, but also helps maintain peace and stability in
the region. With the establishment of peace prevailing across the Taiwan Straits, US
arms sales to Taiwan have
not only become unreasonable but also unnecessary . Taiwan’s needs for weapons are on
the decline. The arms sold to Taiwan are used to protect Taiwan’s fishing boats in the Diaoyu
Islands’ territorial waters. It would be ridiculous if the US insists on arms sales to Taiwan when the US officially insists on the
the US decision to completely
peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue. Under the current situation,

terminate arms sales to Taiwan would be a wise choice. Stopping interference in

China’s internal affairs by terminating US arms sales to and official contact with Taiwan does not mean the
US is “giving up Taiwan.” It only means that the US has come to truly abide by the
principles and the spirit of the three joint communiqués , greatly helping to enhance
US credibility and strengthen mutual political trust between China and the US . At the
same time, it is believed that nonofficial contact and exchanges by the US with Taiwan , whether cultural,
economic or business, will
continue to flourish on a solid basis in the peaceful environment
across the Taiwan Straits. 
 Yes Arms Sales Key – Experts
Yes—ending US arms sales to Taiwan would better US-China Relations—many experts
agree--
Lin and Zhou 18 (Gang Lin, Wenxing Zhou, August 2018, “Does Taiwan matter to the United States?
Policy Debates on Taiwan Abandonment and Beyond”, China Review, Harvard University PhD student
and does research in China-US relations and Taiwan Studies,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26484537.pdf?refreqid=excelsior
%3Acc0fcadd4602ac8ce21dd0b3fa181dfd)

many Americans have begun to rethink the Taiwan

Although the status quo maintainers still belong to the mainstream in the United States,

issue in U.S.-China relations. Among them some experts argue for the policy of Taiwan abandonment
with various degrees, either for the sake of U.S.-China cooperation (e.g., Owens, Gilley, Kent, Freeman),
avoiding military conflict with China (Carpenter and Glaser), or acknowledgments of the greater trend of China’s eventual reunification (e.g.,
Shambaugh, Prueher, Swaine, Sutter, McDevitt, Brzezinski or Mearsheimer). Unlike Washington’s tacit acceptance of Taiwan’s unification with the mainland for working with the PRC to

counterbalance against the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s, the argument that Taiwan has to or should be abandoned
advocated openly in unofficial views in recent years have aroused more public attention and therefore more criticisms and
reactions from status quo maintainers and the “Cold War minders.” It remains empirically underexplored to what extent these debates over Taiwan abandonment will shape U.S. policy toward the Taiwan Strait . Drawing

on interactions among Beijing, Washington and Taipei over the past decades, the answer to the question
is often a big yes, evidenced by policy adjustments following policy debates and their impact on the future trend of U.S.-Taiwan relations. It is clear that arguments of Taiwan
abandonment between 2009 and 2014 are coincided with increasing U.S.- China cooperation and smoothly peaceful development of cross-Strait relations. The growing but limited tensions in
both U.S.-China relations and domestic politics of Taiwan in the late years of the Obama administration may have increased the incentive and faith for Taiwan watchers in the United States
who want to maintain the status quo and even play the Taiwan card. This may explain the decreasing voice of Taiwan abandonment in the last couple of years of the Obama administration.
 Yes Arms Sales Key - Relations
**** US-Taiwan arms sales kill US-Sino relations
Cheng 18 (Dean Cheng, Dean Cheng is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Asian
Studies Center, “Don’t listen to China: US arms sales to Taiwan are right thing to do, 10/2/2018,
[6/25/2019], https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/dont-listen-china-us-arms-sales-taiwan-are-right-
thing-do-32397) BDN

The United States on Sept. 24 announced a new set of arms sales to Taiwan. Valued at $330 million,
this sale comprises mainly spare parts and equipment to support Taiwan’s air force, including its F-
16s and C-130s. This marks the second major arms sale to Taiwan by the Trump administration,
following a $1.4 billion sale in June 2017 that included long-range missiles and heavy torpedoes. Not
surprisingly, Beijing promptly denounced the sale. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman declared
that “the U.S. arms sales to Taiwan severely violates the international law [and] the basic norms
governing international relations.” The Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman warned that the U.S.
move severely violated U.S.-China relations, “interfered with China’s domestic affairs and harmed
China’s sovereignty and security interests, and seriously damaged China-U.S. ties, relations between the
two militaries, as well as peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.” The arms sales announcement
came not only amid another round of tariffs in the slowly escalating trade clashes between the
United States and China, but also right after the U.S. imposed sanctions against the Chinese People’s
Liberation Army (PLA).

Arms sales heighten political climate

Xia 4-17-2019, Li Xia has a PhD from Tsinghua University, “Commentary: U.S. Arms Sales to Taiwan a
Dangerous Move to Aggravate Cross-Strait Situation”, article “Xinhua Net”, [6/26/2019],
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-04/17/c_137985601.htm

The U.S. arms sale plan unveiled Monday is a dangerous move that will only aggravate the already complex
and grim situation across the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. government has approved a possible 500-million-U.S.
dollar military sale to Taiwan, claiming that the move will help to improve the security and defensive capability of the recipient.
Subsequently, Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen expressed "gratitude," saying that the arms sale was "timely." The situation across the
Taiwan Strait, which is already complicated and grim, is worsening as the United States has been using Taiwan to
contain China while the Taiwan administration kept seeking foreign intervention. The Taiwan question concerns China's sovereignty
and territorial integrity and is the most important and sensitive issue in China-U.S. relations. The U.S. arms
sales to Taiwan constitutes a serious violation of international law, th e basic norms governing international
relations, the one-China principle and the three Sino-U.S. joint communiques and undermine China's
sovereignty and security interests. China's firm opposition to such arms sales is consistent and firm. Since
the current U.S. administration took office, it has constantly played the "Taiwan card" to contain China, especially in arms sales to Taiwan
and military exchanges between the United States and Taiwan. This has seriously damaged China-U.S. relations and
jeopardized peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwan question, which concerns China's core interests and
the national bond of the Chinese people, brooks no external interference. The U.S. administration has once again stirred up sensitive
nerves in the Taiwan Strait. Its gross interference in China's internal affairs has aroused the strong indignation of the
Chinese people on both sides of the Strait. Some Taiwan organizations and people protested outside the American Institute in
Taiwan (AIT) in Taipei, condemning U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and demanding "no war, only peace," and "Taiwan is not a pawn for the United
States." Therefore, we would like to advise
the U.S. side to clearly recognize the high sensitivity and serious harm
of arms sales to Taiwan, correct mistakes, honor its commitments and handle Taiwan-related issues in a prudent
and proper manner in accordance with the one-China principle and the provisions of the three Sino-U.S. joint communiques. Taiwan's current
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration, which is teetering on the brink of collapse, was overjoyed at the U.S. arms
sales as if it had been given a "straw to save its life ." Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP administration have escalated
provocations against the Chinese mainland, created disturbances recently and cooperated with the United States in vigorously
clamoring the so-called "military threat" from the mainland. In the face of next year's general election on the island, Tsai and the DPP will
not hesitate to let Taiwan serve as a pawn for forces of external interference in order to protect their power,
regardless of the safety and well-being of the Taiwanese people. This party has not only misjudged the situation but
also deviated from the people's heart. U.S. weapons cannot guarantee Taiwan's security . Tsai and the DPP cannot
secure their power and position by seeking foreign interference or threatening the people. Tsai, the DPP
and "Taiwan independence" separatist elements should not play with fire or even think about it. They are doomed to be
alone in the face of the pressure of their own actions. On April 17, 124 years ago, the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed, securing
foreigner's occupation of Taiwan for half a century . It left lasting, painful memories for all Chinese. Today's
China will never allow the historical tragedy of national division to repeat itself. No one and no force should underestimate the
determination and capability of the Chinese in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial
integrity.

Beijing opposes US arms sales – they jeopardize relations

Chung 4-24-2019, Lawrence Chung has a Masters degree, is a writer for SCMP over Taiwan related
issues, “Beijing says Washington’s US$500 million arms sale to Taiwan ‘damaged Sino-US relations’”,
article “South China Morning Post”, [6/26/2019],
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3007446/beijing-says-washingtons-us500-
million-arms-sale-taiwan

Beijing has accused Washington of violating the one-China principle with its recent sale of a US$500
million military package to Taiwan, saying the act seriously hurt relations between the two countries and
jeopardised stability in the Taiwan Strait. “The Chinese side resolutely opposes any countries selling weapons to
Taiwan,” the defence ministry said in a statement on Wednesday, while repeating its position that it regards the self-ruled island as an
inalienable part of the mainland and its need to uphold its territorial integrity. The latest deal with Taipei, which includes a pilot training
programme and maintenance/logistics support for F-16 aircraft in Arizona, is the third since US President Donald Trump approved arms sales to
the island in 2017. It was announced by the Defence Security Cooperation Agency, part of the US Department of Defence, on April 15. “What
the US side did not only strongly violated the one-China principle and the three communiques prescribing Sino-US relations,
but also interfered in China’s internal affairs and damaged the sovereignty and security of China ,” the
defence ministry statement said. The act also “poisoned bilateral military ties and seriously sabotaged cross-strait
relations and stability in the Taiwan Strait ”, it said. Beijing demanded that Washington uphold the one-China
principle and stop supplying arms to Taiwan and engaging in military contact with it.

New US-Taiwan conference arrangements aggravate China

Lawrence Chung 18 ( Lawrence Chung, 2/20/2018, Covers Major Taiwanese news for Reuters and the
South China Morning Post, “US Risks Retaliations with defense talks on Taiwan, Chinese Analysts warn”,
“South China Morning Post”, [6/24/2019], https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-
defence/article/2134019/us-risks-retaliation-defence-talks-taiwan-chinese) BDN

Another potential flashpoint for Sino-US relations is looming with plans for Taiwan to host a conference
with American defence industry representatives for the first time in 16 years, mainland Chinese analysts
have warned. The annual US-Taiwan defence industry conference has long been a platform for Taiwan and the
United States to discuss arms sales and has been held in the US for the last decade-and-a-half to avoid
provoking Beijing, which claims sovereignty over the island. But a Taiwanese military source confirmed to the
South China Morning Post on Tuesday that Taipei and Washington agreed last year that from 2018, they
would take turns to host the event and the conference would now take place twice a year. The move is set to
provoke Beijing and aggravate tensions in Sino-US ties brought on by US President Donald Trump’s
decision in December to sign the National Defence Authorisation Act strengthening military ties with Taipei.
In addition, the Taiwan Travel Act, which would allow US officials at all levels to travel to Taiwan to meet
their counterparts on the island, will soon be sent the floor of the Senate for passage after clearing the House of
Representatives. Hu Benliang, a Taiwan affairs specialist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the
US was “using Taiwan as a tool to contain China”. Hu said that if the travel act passed and the US sent senior
officials to the conference, it would risk “sending the wrong signals” to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen that
the US encouraged Taiwanese independence. He also said endorsement of the travel act would likely prompt
retaliation from Beijing, such as more frequent “island encirclement” patrols near Taiwan. Liu Guoshen, head
of Xiamen University’s Taiwan Research Institute, warned: “If this becomes the pretext for allowing formal
exchanges [between the US and Taiwan], it would seriously undermine the stability of Sino-US relations.”
The US-Taiwan Business Council, which has organised the conferences since 2002, said earlier this
month that it “looks forward to working with the TW-DIDA [Taiwan Defence Industry Development
Association] on a separate defence delegation and seminar in Taiwan this spring”. The Taiwanese
military source said the conference would be held in Taiwan “in the first half of this year”. But instead of
discussing Taipei’s weapons wish list, the Taiwan meeting would focus on technical exchanges between
defence manufacturers from the two sides. “The discussions on arms issues and defence industry
cooperation will be left to the conference to be held in the US in the second half of this year ,” the source
said. In Beijing, spokesmen for the foreign and defence ministries were not available for comment because of a
public holiday. But state-run mainland tabloid Global Times reported last month that Taiwan and the US
would pay the price for their high-level exchanges should the travel act become law. Wang Kung-yi, a
political-science professor at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, said that if the travel act became law
soon, it was very likely that the US would send senior officials to Taiwan with the arms sellers. Wang also said
that Taiwan’s hosting of the conference would be a boost to Tsai’s ambitions for the island to develop its own
defence industry. “Tsai is keen to develop shipbuilding, aerospace and information security in Taiwan. Having
major US arms suppliers at the conference would be a definite plus for her policy,” Wang said. Last year,
the US pledged to sell Taiwan US$1.42 billion in arms, the first such sale under Trump’s administration.
New US arms deal w/ Taiwan violates prior agreements w/ China
Delaney 17 (Robert Delaney, 6/30/17, US Bureau Chief and correspondent for Bloomberg, “US Decision
to Sell Arms to Taiwan ‘violated consensus’ reached by Xi, Trump in Florida”, “south China Morning
Post”, [6/24/2019}, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2100657/us-approves-
first-arms-sales-taiwan-under-trump-us14)BDN

The decision by the United States to sell arms to Taiwan was “wrong” and violated a consensus reached
when Chinese President Xi Jinping met US President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in April, Beijing told
Washington. The announcement of the US$1.4 billion deal comes a week ahead of Xi’s planned meeting with
Trump on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. China’s ambassador to Washington, Cui
Tanika, told reporters that China firmly opposed the deal . “We have expressed firm opposition to the US
and we will reserve our right to take further action,” Cui told reporters at an event in Washington to
commemorate the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China. A statement issued later by the
Chinese embassy in Washington DC criticized the move as a breach of the consensus reached between the
two leaders at their first ever meeting. “The wrong move of the US side runs counter to the consensus
reached by the two presidents in Mar-a-Lago and the positive development momentum of the China-US
relationship,” it’s said. The arms sales package was announced by a US State Department spokeswoman on
Thursday. It comprises seven items, including technical support for early warning radar, anti-radiation
missiles, torpedoes and components for SM-2 missiles, Associated Press reported.
 Yes Arms Sales Key – One China Policy
China hates US arms sales – one china policy
CBS 19 (CBS, news network for foreign and domestic affairs, “U.S. arms sales request from Taiwan
draws warning of ‘serious harm’ from china”, 6/6/2019, [6/25/2019],
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-arms-sale-to-taiwan-china-warns-serious-harm-request-m1a2-
abrams-tanks-2019-06-06/) BDN
Taipei, Taiwan — Taiwan confirmed Thursday it has asked to purchase more than 100 tanks from the U.S., along with air defense and anti-tank
missile systems in a major potential arms sale that drew immediate protest from China. A Defense Ministry statement said it has submitted
a letter of request for 108 cutting-edge M1A2 Abrams tanks, 1,240 TOW anti-armor missiles, 409 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 250 Stinger man-
portable air defense systems. The request is proceeding "as normal," it said. It wasn't clear when the official request had been issued, after
which the U.S. has 120 days to respond. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said that China
firmly opposes U.S. arms
sales to Taiwan. "This position is consistent and clear, " he said at the ministry's daily briefing. "We urge the U.S. to
fully understand the high sensitivity and serious harm of the issue of arms sales to Taiwan and abide by
the one-China principle." Officials at the Pentagon referred CBS News to the State Department for comment on the Taiwanese arms
request. A State Department official told CBS News the U.S. Government did not, "comment on or confirm potential or pending arms sales" as a
matter of policy, until Congress has been notified of an agreed sale. China considers
self-governing Taiwan part of its
territory, to be brought under its control by force if necessary. It says U.S. arms sales to the island
constitute both interference in its internal affairs and a betrayal of earlier commitments made by
Washington to Beijing.
 Arms Sales  Chinese Aggression
US-Taiwan sales are a trigger for Chinese aggression
Kastner 18 (Scott Kastner, professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of
Maryland, “China-U.S.-Taiwan relations are in choppy waters. Here’s what’s going on”, 4/30/2018,
[6/25/2019], https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/04/30/china-u-s-taiwan-
relations-are-in-choppy-waters-heres-whats-going-on/?utm_term=.d2772477f14e) BDN

The complicated relationship between the United States, the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan has been heating up. In recent months ,
China flexed some muscle by sending strategic bombers to circumnavigate Taiwan . In March, President Trump
signed the Taiwan Travel Act, which calls for higher-level visits between the United States and Taiwan. The United States has been considering
The possibility of closer U.S.-Taiwan ties, in turn,
naval port calls to Taiwan, something that hasn’t happened since the 1970s.
has led to strong criticism from the Chinese government. To make sense of these events, here’s what you need to know
about U.S.-China-Taiwan relations: 1) Taiwan’s sovereign status is the big issue — but the issue has evolved. In 1949, at the end of the Chinese
civil war, the losing Nationalists (and their government, the Republic of China) retreated to Taiwan. The victorious Communists established the
People’s Republic of China in Beijing. Each government viewed itself as the legitimate government of China, each viewed Taiwan as a part of
China, and each viewed national unification as an important goal. Beijing’s bottom line in 2018 remains unchanged: Taiwan is a part of China
and must be unified with the rest of the country. In Taiwan, reestablishing Republic of China authority over all of China long remained a
Nationalist goal and questioning this aspiration was strictly off-limits under the martial law in place until 1987. Today, however, the Republic of
China has evolved into a full-fledged democracy, and the idea that Taiwan is a part of China is openly contested on the island. Most residents
currently self-identify as Taiwanese rather than as Chinese. While the Nationalist Party still pays lip service (via the “1992 consensus”) to the
idea of Taiwan belonging to a greater “one China,” the ruling Democratic Progressive Party does not. 2) The United States does not recognize
the ROC government — but also doesn’t recognize Taiwan as a part of China. For decades after 1949, the United States recognized the Republic
of China, not the People’s Republic of China, as the government of China. This changed in 1979, when Washington and Beijing established
official diplomatic relations and the United States broke ties with the Republic of China. The United States today maintains extensive — but
unofficial — ties with Taiwan. Although the United States recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China,
Washington does not accept the view of the People’s Republic of China that Taiwan is a part of China. Rather, the United States merely
“acknowledges” the Chinese position on this issue. 3) Chinese leaders face difficult trade-offs in their Taiwan policy. The People’s Republic of
China uses both carrots and sticks to deal with Taiwan. Beijing sometimes uses threats and coercion to deter Taiwan independence and to
advance the goal of unification.
The recent strategic bomber missions, along with increased efforts toisolate
Taiwan internationally, are in part meant to punish Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen for not accepting
that Taiwan is a part of China. More generally, China doesn’t want Taiwan to feel comfortable with a status
quo where progress isn’t being made on unification. Beijing hopes to convince Taiwanese voters that they’d be better off
supporting the Nationalist Party, whose position on Taiwan’s status is more palatable to China. Tough actions also reassure nationalists in China
that their government remains resolute on the Taiwan issue.
 Ending Arms Sales Key to Relations
ending arms sales to Taiwan solves US-China relations and South China Sea tension
Reuters 19
(Reuters. “U.S. pursues sale of over $2 bln in weapons to Taiwan, sources say, angering China,” Nasdaq,
6/6/19. D.A. 6/25/19 https://www.nasdaq.com/article/us-pursues-sale-of-over-2-bln-in-weapons-to-
taiwan-sources-say-angering-china-20190606-00126)

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) - The United States is pursuing the sale of more than $2 billion worth of tanks and
weapons to Taiwan, four people familiar with the negotiations said, sparking anger from Beijing which is
already involved in an escalating trade war with Washington. An informal notification of the proposed sale has been sent to the
U.S. Congress, the four sources said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the possible deal. The United States is

the main arms supplier to Taiwan , which China deems its own and has never renounced the use of
force to bring the self-ruled island under its control. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said in March
Washington was responding positively to Taipei's requests for new arms sales to bolster its defenses in
the face of pressure from China. The United States has no formal ties with Taiwan but is bound by law to
help provide it with the means to defend itself. China and the United States are engaged in a fierce trade
war, with clashes over Taiwan and the South China Sea exacerbating tensions. A spokesman for the State
Department, which oversees foreign military sales, said the U.S. government does not comment on or confirm potential or pending arms sales or transfers before
they have been formally notified to Congress. The congressional notifications included a variety of anti-tank munitions, including 409 Raytheon Co and Lockheed
Martin Corp-made Javelin missiles worth as much as $129 million, two of the sources said. The notifications also included 1,240 TOW anti-tank missiles worth as
much as $299 million, one of the sources said. There were also 250 stinger missiles worth as much as $223 million in the notification, the source said. Stingers are
often used in portable anti-aircraft weapons systems. Taiwan's Defense Ministry confirmed it had requested those weapons and that the request was proceeding
The U.S. commitment to providing Taiwan with the weapons to defend itself helps Taiwan's
normally.

military to raise its combat abilities, consolidates the Taiwan-U.S. security partnership and ensures
Taiwan's security, the ministry said in a statement. The Chinese government condemned the planned sale. "We are
severely concerned about the U.S. move and are firmly against U.S. arms sales to Taiwan ," Foreign
Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a daily news briefing in Beijing. China urges the United States to
stop arms sales to Taiwan and prudently deal with issues relating to Taiwan to prevent harm to
bilateral relations and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, he added. CHINA HAWK U.S. President Donald Trump's
administration rolled out a long-awaited overhaul of U.S. arms export policy in 2018 aimed at expanding sales to allies, saying it would bolster the American defense
industry and create jobs at home. Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro was one of the administration's architects of that policy. Navarro, a China hawk, wrote about
the possible sale of tanks to Taiwan in a March opinion column in the New York Times ahead of a presidential trip to the Lima, Ohio, plant where they are made. At
a low point, the U.S. Army had only one tank coming from the plant a month, General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic said during an April conference call with
The Pentagon announced
investors, but said "we'll be rolling out 30 tanks a month by the end of this year," partly because of international orders.

last week it would sell 34 ScanEagle drones, made by Boeing Co , to the governments of Malaysia,
Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam for $47 million. The drones would afford greater intelligence-
gathering capabilities, potentially curbing Chinese activity in the region . China claims almost all of the
strategic South China Sea and frequently lambastes the United States and its allies over naval operations
near Chinese-occupied islands. Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam all
have competing claims. China's Defense Minister Wei Fenghe warned the United States at the Shangri-
La Dialogue in Singapore last weekend not to meddle in security disputes over Taiwan and the South
China Sea. Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told the meeting that the United States would no longer "tiptoe" around China's behavior in Asia.
Taiwan's Foreign Ministry, responding to the Reuters report of planned the new arms sale, said Wei's "threatening" comments and recent Chinese military drills
near Taiwan showed the importance of its need to strengthen its defensive abilities. "Going forward our government will continue to deepen the close security
partnership between Taiwan and the United States," it said.
 Ending sales is key to US-China Coop
Taiwan arms sales prevent US-China cooperation – problems within the squo prove
cooperation is key to deter rising tension
Liao 19
(Nien-chung Chang Liao is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies at the
National Chengchi University, Taiwan. “From Engagement to Competition? The Logicof the US China
Policy Debate,” Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica, Taipei, May 19. D.A. 6/25/19.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1758-5899.12667)

Engagement begins with the assumption that the United States has huge national interest in Sino-
American coopera-tion. Ever since President Richard Nixon opened up to China in 1972, supporters of
engagement, including policy makers, former presidents and prominent academics, have held sig-
nificant sway over US policy towards the PRC. At its core, engagement with China has two goals: to empower
eco-nomic internationalists in China and elicit more cooperation from Beijing, and to give China a bigger
stake in the liberal world order and broaden domestic support for political reforms . At the same time, there is always
the possibility of using force should engagement fail and China became a more threatening adversary. The United States should main-tain a

strong leadership and security alliances in East Asia to defend against illiberal challengers. As a result,
Washington hopes that constraining and even transformative effects may arise from continued contacts
with Beijing, even in times of tense relations between the two capitals (Sutter,2010). Adherents of
engagement start from the premise that Bei-jing’s intentions are defensive and US military power will
remain superior to that of the PRC. They assume that Chi-na’s ambitions are unlikely to go beyond
current claims to specific territories not under its control, primarily Taiwan(Gross, 2012). They see no reason
why China would over-throw the existing international order, one from which it has benefited for a
considerable amount of time (Ikenberry,2011a, 2011b; Steinfeld, 2010). Although they do not rule out the possibility of China attempting to offset
US military power in East Asia and elsewhere, they think that Beijing‘ currently seems to lack the capability and intention to do Table 1.Options of US China policy
US–China power gap Huge Narrow China’s intentions Status quo Continuing engagement Accommodation Revisionist Competition Containment Source: Author.
Global Policy(2019) 10:2©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The US China Policy Debate251 so’(Christensen, 2015, p. 65). For example,
according to Michael Swaine (2015, p. 147),‘ Beijing’s de facto attempts to limit or end US predominance along its
maritime periphery are motivated by uncertainty, insecurity, and opportunism rather than a grand
strategic vision of Chinese predomi-nance’ . Even if Beijing’s intentions were to change in the future, US
military dominance would be able to meet any challenge posed by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA )
(Swaine, 2011). In these observers’ eyes, given the vast power gap between the two countries, China’s rapid rise does not demand a

dramatic shift in US engagement policy anytime soon. Given the vast power gap between the two
countries, China’s rapid rise would not demand a dramatic shift in US engagement policy anytime soon.
Engagement is vulnerable to a range of criticisms, particu-larly in the face of China’s growing
assertiveness at home and abroad (Campbell and Ratner, 2018). For its defenders, however, more engagement,
rather than less, is needed in response to the intensifying security dilemma posed by Chi-na’s rapid
military build-up. China’s increasing military coer-cion is blamed on Washington’s failure to deepen its
engagement with the PLA. In order to enhance mutual trust and reduce uncertainty, Washington
should address Beijing’s concerns about US arms sales to Taiwan , surveillance patrols in Chinese
waters, and the US military posture in the Wes-tern Pacific, in return for China’s commitment to a
peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue and the territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas
(Swaine, 2011, 2015). The goal is to persuade Beijing to avoid the mistakes of Wil-helmine Germany in the run up to World War I. As a result, in the eyes of its
supporters, the preferred alternative to the current policy of engagement is not its replacement, but rather
its reinforcement. Some in the engagement camp propose a two-pronged approach. While engaging
Beijing, Washington should also deepen its engagement with its allies and other partners in the region
(Ratner, 2013). Others suggest that the United States should require more explicit quid pro quo on the part of the PRC. David Lampton (2016), for example, advises
Washington to ask Beijing to get tough on Pyongyang, open appropriate access for American journalists and respect US interests in freedom of navigation. If this
view prevails, an updated US engagement policy will become more condi-tional and demand more reciprocity in its deepened interde-pendence with China.
Nevertheless, others
have come to believe that the benefits to the United States of engage-ment with China,
no matter how it is adjusted, are likely to wane. As China grows stronger, they speculate, Washington
will have no choice but to accommodate Beijing’s interests
 Ending Arms Sales Key to US-Sino Relations
Ending arms sales solves US-China relations
Chen et al 2017, Ping-Kuei Chen has a PhD from the University of Maryland, a M.A. from Ohio
University, Scott Kastner has a PhD from UC San Diego, William Reed has a PhD from Florida State
University, “A Farewell to Arms? US Security Relations with Taiwan and the Prospects for Stability in the
Taiwan Strait”, book “University of California Press”, [6/24/2019],
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1525/j.ctt1w76wpm.15.pdf?refreqid=excelsior
%3A53dd7d6c7e105ad7b65f192f5d325967

Given the tensions—and the anger in Beijing—that are generated by US arms sales to Taiwan, some in the
United States propose that Washington end (or at least scale back) weapons sales to the island. Doing so,
proponents suggest, would remove a major irritant in the US-China relationship and would increase trust and
cooperation in bilateral relations.6 More fundamentally, proponents of a reduced US commitment to Taiwan suggest that such a
policy approach would help lower the risk of armed conflict in East Asia . This argument is developed most fully by
Charles Glaser,7 who suggests that ending the US commitment to defend Taiwan would bring with it two
significant benefits for the US-China relationship . First, it could improve US-China relations because such
a shift in US policy would remove a key source of mistrust in Beijing concerning US motivations. Second,
ending US support for Taiwan—by removing the key potential source of military conflict between China
and the United States—would reduce military competition between Washington and Beijing. Glaser thus
proposes a “grand bargain,” in which the United States would end its commitment to Taiwan in return for Chinese willingness to “resolve its
maritime disputes on ‘fair’ terms” and to accept a long-term US security presence in East Asia. Others argue that the US commitment to Taiwan
is increasingly untenable as China’s military power continues to grow. For instance, Chas Freeman warns that a continued US commitment to
Taiwan is incompatible with (a) waning US relative power in the region and (b) the importance that the PRC places on the issue. A failure to
accommodate US policy to new geopolitical realities, in turn, risks future military conflict over an issue about which China cares deeply.8 John
Mearsheimer argues along similar lines that China’s rise as a great power, if it continues, will mean that the current US security commitment to
Taiwan will be increasingly unsustainable. Taiwan will ultimately be forced to accommodate growing Chinese power.9 Proposals to scale back
US security ties to Taiwan are controversial, however, and several scholars have written thoughtful critiques of the idea. These critiques have
generally made a few key points. First, it is not self-evident that ending security ties with Taiwan would in fact transform the US-China
relationship: the interests of the two countries arguably clash on many other issues (North Korea, maritime disputes in East Asia, economic
issues), and it is unclear why Beijing would yield on these other issues if only the United States were to adopt a policy on arms sales that—from
Beijing’s vantage—the United States had already committed to follow in the 1982 joint communiqué. Second, the United States’ reputation in
the region could be at stake. Some worry that walking away from a commitment to Taiwan would send a troubling signal to other US allies in
East Asia. Beijing might likewise view US concessions on Taiwan as a sign of weakness and conclude that Washington was unlikely to challenge
the PRC on other issues in the region. Third, ending arms sales—because it would add to Taiwan’s sense of insecurity—could actually make
Taipei more hesitant about entering into sensitive political talks with the PRC; thus it isn’t clear that a reduced US commitment to Taiwan would
facilitate a peaceful resolution to the dispute. Finally, and relatedly, ending arms sales would likely undercut Taiwan’s deterrent capabilities,
which in turn could encourage a more coercive PRC approach to the island.10 While we find these counterarguments
plausible, we believe the logic underpinning them needs to be teased out at greater length. This is
especially so for claims about the prospects for stability in the Taiwan Strait . For instance, we believe it is likely that
an end to arms sales would indeed lead Taiwanese officials to feel less confident about their bargaining
power vis-à-vis the PRC. But it is not obvious why this should in itself make them less likely to negotiate
with Beijing: it is also plausible that , in such a scenario, Taiwan’s leaders would feel they had no other choice
but to negotiate with an increasingly powerful PRC. Similarly, while a shift in the cross-Strait balance of
power would indeed imply that Beijing could more easily utilize a military option, it isn’t obvious that
this would in turn make the relationship less stable: it is conceivable , for instance, that Taiwan would
respond with more accommodating policies that would remove Beijing’s incentives to consider military
force. In short, how a shifting cross-Strait military balance of power would affect stability in the Taiwan Strait is not straightforward; in the
following section, we consider the topic more systematically
Ending Arms Sales galvanizes improved relations between the US and China
Chen et al. 17 (Chen, Ping-Kuei, et al. “A Farewell to Arms?: US Security Relations with Taiwan and
the Prospects for Stability in the Taiwan Strait.” Taiwan and China: Fitful Embrace, edited by Lowell
Dittmer, 1st ed., University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2017, pp. 221–238. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1w76wpm.15.)

Given the tensions—and the anger in Beijing—that are generated by US arms sales to Taiwan , some in the United States propose
that Washington end (or at least scale back) weapons sales to the island . Doing so, proponents suggest, would
remove a major irritant in the US-China relationship and would increase trust and cooperation in
bilateral relations.6 More fundamentally, proponents of a reduced US commitment to Taiwan suggest that such a
policy approach would help lower the risk of armed conflict in East Asia . This argument is developed most fully by
Charles Glaser,7 who suggests that ending the US commitment to defend Taiwan would bring with it
two significant benefits for the US-China relationship. First, it could improve US-China relations
because such a shift in US policy would remove a key source of mistrust in Beijing concerning US
motivations. Second, ending US support for Taiwan—by removing the key potential source of military
conflict between China and the United States—would reduce military competition between
Washington and Beijing. Glaser thus proposes a “grand bargain,” in which the United States would end its
commitment to Taiwan in return for Chinese willingness to “resolve its maritime disputes on ‘fair’
terms” and to accept a long-term US security presence in East Asia . Others argue that the US commitment to Taiwan
is increasingly untenable as China’s military power continues to grow. For instance, Chas Freeman warns that a continued US
commitment to Taiwan is incompatible with (a) waning US relative power in the region and (b) the
importance that the PRC places on the issue. A failure to accommodate US policy to new geopolitical realities, in turn, risks
future military conflict over an issue about which China cares deeply.8 John Mearsheimer argues along similar lines that China’s rise as a great
power, if it continues, will mean that the
current US security commitment to Taiwan will be increasingly
unsustainable. Taiwan will ultimately be forced to accommodate growing Chinese power.
 Ending arms sales solves relations
Ending arms sales to Taiwan solves – Beijing’s views U.S. commitment as a strategy to
keep China as a secondary superpower
Glaser, 15
(Charles L., professor of political science and international affairs and director of the Elliott School's
Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, “A U.S. China Grand Bargain? A hard choice between military
competition and accommodation”, May 1, 2015, 06/24/2019,
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/isec_a_00199.pdf) sd
More important, however, is that focusing on the quality of current cross strait relations overlooks two other less direct, but potentially more
significant, benefits of U.S. accommodation on Taiwan. First, U.S. support for Taiwan is one of the most important, possibly the most important,
policy-driven sources of China’s suspicions about U.S. motives and intentions. Although the United International Security States does not take a
position on what the final outcome of the Taiwan issue should be, China
considers U.S. support of Taiwan a key source of
“strategic distrust.” A recent study by two leading authorities on U.S.-China relations concludes that
Beijing views U.S. arms sales to Taiwan “as confirming American arrogance and determination to
interfere in China’s domestic affairs and to prevent peaceful unification from occurring, thereby harming
a clearly-articulated Chinese core interest .” In a similar vein, their report argues that “continuing to provide Taiwan
with advanced weapons . . . is viewed as pernicious in Chinese eyes and has added to suspicion that
Washington will disregard Chinese interests and sentiments as long as China’s power position is
secondary to America’s.”68 Nathan and Scobell conclude that “most Chinese see strategic motives at the root of American behavior.
They believe that keeping the Taiwan problem going helps the U.S. tie China down .”69 Similarly, a prominent
Chinese analyst argues: “The position the U.S. takes on the Taiwan issue determines the essence of American
strategy toward China, and thus determines the quality and status of U.S.-China relations .”70 Xu Hui, a
professor at China’s National Defense University, holds that “U.S. policies toward Taiwan have been and are the fundamental cause of some
anti-American sentiment among the Chinese public.... I
assure you that a posture change of the U.S. policy on Taiwan
will remove the major obstacle for our military-to military relations and also strengthen Sino-
American cooperation by winning the hearts and minds of 1.3 billion Chinese people .”71 In short,
ending the U.S. commitment to Taiwan has the potential to dramatically improve U.S.-China relations,
which in turn could increase the possibility of cooperation on other issues and reduce the probability
of competition and conflict.
 AT Trade Wars More Important
Arms sales to Taiwan outweigh current trade war on US China relations
Kawase 2018
(Kenji, Nikkei Asian Review chief business news correspondent, “Taiwan issue a bigger concern than US-
China trade war”, October 26, 2018, date accessed 6/25/19, https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-
Picks/Interview/Taiwan-issue-a-bigger-concern-than-US-China-trade-war)//CS

TOKYO -- A
prominent Asia scholar does not consider the U.S.-China trade war the most worrisome
development in the region. Rather, what concerns Ezra Vogel, professor emeritus at Harvard University, is a dangerous shift
away from the delicate bilateral framework on Taiwan forged almost four decades ago. "I am not as
worried as others about the trade war," said Vogel, speaking to the Nikkei Asian Review in fluent Japanese during his recent visit
to Tokyo. To him, President Donald Trump is only "bargaining" for better business deals, and not only with China. Other targets include Mexico
and Canada as evidenced by the revamped North American Free Trade Agreement. Vogel expects trade tensions with China to
rise, but does not anticipate the situation "spiraling out of contro l," as he believes cooler heads on both sides will
prevail to protect the substantial human and economic ties that bind the two countries. His bigger concern is the Trump
administration's Taiwan policy. The Taiwan Travel Act that took effect in March allows mutual visits between U.S. and Taiwanese
officials. He also finds alarming Washington's approval of a $330 million arms sale to Taiwan in
September following a $1.4 billion deal made last year . Restricting official relationships and arms deals
with Taiwan were key to the U.S. and China establishing diplomatic links in 1979 . Hence, the recent moves
by the Trump administration are "dangerous" and "going too far." Vogel believes "the U.S. is not
abiding by its previous promises made on Taiwan." The U.S. agreed to switch diplomatic recognition
from Taipei to Beijing and confine exchanges with the island to "cultural, commercial and other unofficial relations." At the same time,
it only "acknowledged" Beijing's claim that Taiwan was part of China . In the 1982 communique that dealt specifically
with arms deals, the U.S. stated its intention to gradually reduce sales "to a final resolution," but did not
commit to any time frame. Before signing the agreement, however, Washington provided Taiwan with six
assurances, one of which was not setting a termination date for arms sales. This is the strategic
ambiguity that guides Washington's hand, one which Beijing plays as well. Vogel has authored a biography on Deng
Xiaoping and deeply understands the process and the spirit behind past agreements. "If the U.S. continues doing something
peculiar [like its current actions], China may respond in a peculiar way as well," he warned. Despite his
concern, America and Taiwan are set to further cement military cooperation at the U.S.-Taiwan
Defense Industry Conference starting on Sunday.
relations k2
 US-China Relations Key to Warming
US-China climate cooperation is key to global effectiveness
Li 14
(Xiaoyu MA in Global Studies @ U Denver, Int’l Affairs Coordinator @ UN “China-US Cooperation: Key to
the Global Future,” China Institute of International Studies, http://www.ciis.org.cn/english/2014-
01/13/content_6606656.htm)

• Cooperation on climate change mitigation, adaptation, and consequence management. China-US

cooperation will be increasingly critical to the global response to climate change. New scientific studies
warn that the worst-case scenarios for climate change impacts are the most likely outcomes. Scientific
assessments also maintain that anthropomorphic climate change is partly responsible for extreme
weather events that the world is already experiencing at an increasing rate, from the floods in Pakistan
and the heat wave in Russia to the melting glaciers and ice sheets and the “superstorm” Sandy that
inflicted unprecedented destruction on New York and New Jersey. It is highly likely that global climate
change will be a key issue in the coming two decades as the world faces increasing climate-induced
humanitarian disasters and infrastructure destruction requiring immediate and expensive relief as well
as costly, long-term adaptation. Climate change likely will increase social and political instability in many
areas of the world, including emerging economies and developed countries. It also will likely renew
political pressure for emissions reductions, especially by China and the United States, the world’s two
biggest emitters. China-US cooperation in all these areas will be critical to whether the world
cooperates and how effective any cooperation is in responding to the potentially existential threat
posed by global climate change. The two countries also can build on decades of bilateral cooperation on
energy and environment to seize opportunities for lucrative joint energy technology development that
would substantially benefit Chinese and US businesses as well as lower costs and widely disseminate
clean energy technologies.
 AT Coop Over Warming Inevitable
Mistrust tanks negotiations – reversing this trend is key
Goodell 14
(Jeff, “China, the Climate and the Fate of the Planet,” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/china-
the-climate-and-the-fate-of-the-planet-20140915)

For nearly a decade, the U.S. and China , the two most powerful nations on the planet, have met every year to talk about how to
run the world together. When the talks began in 2006, they focused on issues like currency-exchange rates, trade barriers and China's never-ending disputes with Taiwan. In 2009, shortly after Obama's
inauguration, the U.S. pushed to add climate change to the mix, hoping that a better understanding between

the U.S. and China would lead to a better deal at the Copenhagen climate summit that year. (It didn't help – mistrust between the
countries was a large part of the reason why the talks imploded.)∂ This year's U.S. delegation includes many of

the administration's most influential climate hawks – Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, top climate negotiator Todd Stern and John Podesta, counselor to Obama, who has
become the administration's de facto point man for climate policy. This is the diplomatic equivalent of a full-court press. In the past couple of years, Obama

has made some important moves, including investing billions in clean energy, jacking up vehicle-efficiency
standards and proposing rules to limit pollution from U.S. coal plants. But climate change is a global
issue. Unless the West can persuade other countries to take climate action seriously , nothing any single
nation does is going to matter much when it comes to solving the problem.∂ Except, that is, for China. The blunt truth is that what
China decides to do in the next decade will likely determine whether or not [hu]mankind can halt – or at least
ameliorate – global warming. The view among a number of prominent climate scientists is that if China's
emissions peak around 2025, we may – just barely – have a shot at stabilizing the climate before all hell
breaks loose. But the Chinese have resisted international pressure to curb their emissions . For years, they have used the
argument that they are poor, the West is rich, and that the high levels of carbon in the atmosphere were caused by America's and Europe's 200-year-long fossilfuel binge. Climate change is your problem, they argued – you deal

China is set to become the largest economy in the world this year, and in 2006, it passed the U.S. as the planet's
with it. But that logic doesn't hold anymore.

largest carbon polluter. China now dumps 10 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That number is

expected to grow to 15 billion tons by 2030, dwarfing the pollution of the rest of the world . If that happens, then the
chances that the world will cut carbon pollution quickly enough to avert dangerous climate change is ,
according to Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the U.K., " virtually zero."∂ SIDEBAR∂ reckoning illo Global Warming's Terrifying New Math »∂ John Kerry knows

this. He also knows that when the nations of the world gather in Paris next December to try to hammer out a global climate agreement, it may be the last best chance to address

this problem before the Years of Living Dangerously begin. Like other climate negotiations held under the banner of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris meeting is likely to be
warped by 25-year-old grudges and a profound sense of distrust. "But right now, Paris is the only game we have ," one member of the State Department's climate team told me. "If it fails,

there is no Plan B."∂ In Beijing, one of Kerry's goals will be to find out all he can about China's strategy for Paris – what kind of commitment the Chinese might make, how sincere they are, what tactics they will
use. But for Kerry, this is anything but a straightforward conversation, because it's twisted up in the shadow play of U.S.-China

relations, which are marked by suspicion, paranoia and saber rattling on both sides as the U.S. adjusts
to China's rising power in the world. "What we are living through now is the end of 500 years of Western predominance," historian Niall Ferguson has written. The issue is not whether China will
challenge America's dominance, but when and how.
 Warming = Conflict Multiplier
The impact is water wars, food riots, collapse of states and resource conflict produce a
crisis on par with terrorism, cyber-war and nuclear proliferation.
Michael Klare, 4-22-2013, "Will water supplies provoke World War III?," Salon,
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/22/could_water_supplies_provoke_world_war_iii_partner/
Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting
under you. Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity
has never before experienced. Two nightmare scenarios — a global scarcity of vital resources and the
onset of extreme climate change — are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are
likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition, and conflict . Just what this tsunami of disaster will
look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots
sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence), and the
breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and
other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time all regions of the planet will be affected . To appreciate the power of this
encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to produce this future cataclysm. Resource Shortages
and Resource Wars Start with one simple given: the prospect of future scarcities of vital natural resources, including energy, water,
land, food, and critical minerals. This in itself would guarantee social unrest, geopolitical friction, and war . It is important
to note that absolute scarcity doesn’t have to be on the horizon in any given resource category for this scenario to kick in. A lack of adequate
supplies to meet the needs of a growing, ever more urbanized and industrialized global population is enough. Given the wave of extinctions
that scientists are recording, some resources — particular species of fish, animals, and trees, for example — will become less abundant in the
decades to come, and may even disappear altogether. But key materials for modern civilization like oil, uranium, and copper will simply prove
harder and more costly to acquire, leading to supply bottlenecks and periodic shortages. Oil — the single most important commodity in the
international economy — provides an apt example. Although global oil supplies may actually grow in the coming decades, many experts doubt
that they can be expanded sufficiently to meet the needs of a rising global middle class that is, for instance, expected to buy millions of new
cars in the near future. In its 2011 World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency claimed that an anticipated global oil demand of 104
million barrels per day in 2035 will be satisfied. This, the report suggested, would be thanks in large part to additional supplies of
“unconventional oil” (Canadian tar sands, shale oil, and so on), as well as 55 million barrels of new oil from fields “yet to be found” and “yet to
be developed.” However, many analysts scoff at this optimistic assessment, arguing that rising production costs (for energy that will be ever
more difficult and costly to extract), environmental opposition, warfare, corruption, and other impediments will make it extremely difficult to
achieve increases of this magnitude. In other words, even if production manages for a time to top the 2010 level of 87 million barrels per day,
the goal of 104 million barrels will never be reached and the world’s major consumers will face virtual, if not absolute, scarcity. Water provides
another potent example. On an annual basis, the supply of drinking water provided by natural precipitation remains more or less constant:
about 40,000 cubic kilometers. But much of this precipitation lands on Greenland, Antarctica, Siberia, and inner Amazonia where there are very
few people, so the supply available to major concentrations of humanity is often surprisingly limited. In many regions with high population
levels, water supplies are already relatively sparse. This is especially true of North Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, where the demand
for water continues to grow as a result of rising populations, urbanization, and the emergence of new water-intensive industries. The result,
even when the supply remains constant, is an environment of increasing scarcity. Wherever you look, the picture is roughly the same: supplies
of critical resources may be rising or falling, but rarely do they appear to be outpacing demand, producing a sense of widespread and systemic
scarcity. However generated, a perception of scarcity — or imminent scarcity — regularly leads to anxiety, resentment, hostility, and
contentiousness. This pattern is very well understood, and has been evident throughout human history. In his book Constant Battles, for
example, Steven LeBlanc, director of collections for Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, notes that many ancient
civilizations experienced higher levels of warfare when faced with resource shortages brought about by population growth, crop failures, or
persistent drought. Jared Diamond, author of the bestsellerCollapse, has detected a similar pattern in Mayan civilization and the Anasazi culture
of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. More recently, concern
over adequate food for the home population was a
significant factor in Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and Germany’s invasions of Poland in 1939
and the Soviet Union in 1941, according to Lizzie Collingham, author of The Taste of War. Although the global supply of most basic
commodities has grown enormously since the end of World War II, analysts see the persistence of resource-related conflict in areas where
materials remain scarce or there is anxiety about the future reliability of supplies. Many experts believe, for example, that the fighting in Darfur
and other war-ravaged areas of North Africa has been driven, at least in part, by competition among desert tribes for access to scarce water
supplies, exacerbated in some cases by rising population levels. “In Darfur,” says a 2009 report from the U.N. Environment Programme on the
role of natural resources in the conflict, “recurrent drought, increasing demographic pressures, and political marginalization are among the
forces that have pushed the region into a spiral of lawlessness and violence that has led to 300,000 deaths and the displacement of more than
two million people since 2003.” Anxiety over future supplies is often also a factor in conflicts that break out over access to oil or control of
contested undersea reserves of oil and natural gas. In 1979, for instance, when the Islamic revolution in Iran overthrew the Shah and the
Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Washington began to fear that someday it might be denied access to Persian Gulf oil. At that point, President
Jimmy Carter promptly announced what came to be called the Carter Doctrine. In his 1980 State of the Union Address, Carter affirmed that any
move to impede the flow of oil from the Gulf would be viewed as a threat to America’s “vital interests” and would be repelled by “any means
necessary, including military force.” In 1990, this principle was invoked by President George H.W. Bush to justify intervention in the first Persian
Gulf War, just as his son would use it, in part, to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today, it remains the basis for U.S. plans to employ force to
stop the Iranians from closing the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean through which
about 35% of the world’s seaborne oil commerce passes. Recently, a
set of resource conflicts have been rising toward the
boiling point between China and its neighbors in Southeast Asia when it comes to control of offshore oil
and gas reserves in the South China Sea . Although the resulting naval clashes have yet to result in a loss
of life, a strong possibility of military escalation exists. A similar situation has also arisen in the East
China Sea, where China and Japan are jousting for control over similarly valuable undersea reserves.
Meanwhile, in the South Atlantic Ocean, Argentina and Britain are once again squabbling over the Falkland Islands (called Las Malvinas by the
Argentinians) because oil has been discovered in surrounding waters. By all accounts, resource-driven
potential conflicts like
these will only multiply in the years ahead as demand rises, supplies dwindle, and more of what remains
will be found in disputed areas. In a 2012 study titled Resources Futures, the respected British think-tank Chatham House expressed
particular concern about possible resource wars over water, especially in areas like the Nile and Jordan River basins where several groups or
countries must share the same river for the majority of their water supplies and few possess the wherewithal to develop alternatives. “Against
this backdrop of tight supplies and competition, issues related to water rights, prices, and pollution are becoming contentious,” the report
noted. “In areas with limited capacity to govern shared resources, balance competing demands, and mobilize new investments, tensions over
water may erupt into more open confrontations.” Heading for a Resource-Shock World Tensions like these would be destined to grow by
themselves because in so many areas supplies of key resources will not be able to keep up with demand. As it happens, though, they are not
“by themselves.” On this planet, a second major force has entered the equation in a significant way. With the growing reality of climate change,
everything becomes a lot more terrifying. Normally, when we consider the impact of climate change, we think primarily about the environment
— the melting Arctic ice cap or Greenland ice shield, rising global sea levels, intensifying storms, expanding deserts, and endangered or
disappearing species like the polar bear. But a growing number of experts are coming to realize that the
most potent effects of
climate change will be experienced by humans directly through the impairment or wholesale
destruction of habitats upon which we rely for food production, industrial activities, or simply to live.
Essentially, climate change will wreak its havoc on us by constraining our access to the basics of life: vital
resources that include food, water, land, and energy. This will be devastating to human life, even as it
significantly increases the danger of resource conflicts of all sorts erupting . We already know enough about the
future effects of climate change to predict the following with reasonable confidence: * Rising sea levels will in the next half-century erase many
coastal areas, destroying large cities, critical infrastructure (including roads, railroads, ports, airports, pipelines, refineries, and power plants),
and prime agricultural land. * Diminished rainfall and prolonged droughts will turn once-verdant croplands into dust bowls, reducing food
output and turning millions into “climate refugees.” * More severe storms and intense heat waves will kill crops, trigger forest fires, cause
floods, and destroy critical infrastructure. No one can predict how much food, land, water, and energy will be lost as a result of this onslaught
(and other climate-change effects that are harder to predict or even possibly imagine), but the cumulative effect will undoubtedly be
staggering. In Resources Futures, Chatham House offers a particularly dire warning when it comes to the threat of diminished precipitation to
rain-fed agriculture. “By 2020,” the report says, “yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%” in some areas. The highest
rates of loss are expected to be in Africa, where reliance on rain-fed farming is greatest, but agriculture in China, India, Pakistan, and Central
Asia is also likely to be severely affected. Heat
waves, droughts, and other effects of climate change will also reduce
the flow of many vital rivers, diminishing water supplies for irrigation, hydro-electricity power facilities,
and nuclear reactors (which need massive amounts of water for cooling purposes). The melting of glaciers, especially in the Andes in
Latin America and the Himalayas in South Asia, will also rob communities and cities of crucial water supplies. An expected increase in the
frequency of hurricanes and typhoons will pose a growing threat to offshore oil rigs, coastal refineries, transmission lines, and other
components of the global energy system. The melting of the Arctic ice cap will open that region to oil and gas exploration, but an increase in
iceberg activity will make all efforts to exploit that region’s energy supplies perilous and exceedingly costly. Longer growing seasons in the
north, especially Siberia and Canada’s northern provinces, might compensate to some degree for the desiccation of croplands in more southerly
latitudes. However, moving the global agricultural system (and the world’s farmers) northward from abandoned farmlands in the United States,
Mexico, Brazil, India, China, Argentina, and Australia would be a daunting prospect. It
is safe to assume that climate change,
especially when combined with growing supply shortages, will result in a significant reduction in the
planet’s vital resources, augmenting the kinds of pressures that have historically led to conflict, even under
better circumstances. In this way, according to the Chatham House report, climate
change is best understood as a “threat
multiplier… a key factor exacerbating existing resource vulnerability” in states already prone to such disorders. Like
other experts on the subject, Chatham House’s analysts claim, for example, that climate change will reduce crop output in many areas, sending
global food prices soaring and triggering unrest among those already pushed to the limit under existing conditions. “Increased frequency and
severity of extreme weather events, such as droughts, heat waves, and floods, will also result in much larger and frequent local harvest shocks
around the world… These shocks will affect global food prices whenever key centers of agricultural production area are hit — further amplifying
global food price volatility.” This, in turn, will increase the likelihood of civil unrest. When, for instance, a brutal heat wave decimated Russia’s
wheat crop during the summer of 2010, the global price of wheat (and so of that staple of life,bread) began an inexorable upward climb,
reaching particularly high levels in North Africa and the Middle East. With local governments unwilling or unable to help desperate populations,
anger over impossible-to-afford food merged with resentment toward autocratic regimes to trigger the massive popular outburst we know as
the Arab Spring. Many such explosions are likely in the future, Chatham House suggests, if current trends continue as climate change and
resource scarcity meld into a single reality in our world. A single provocative question from that group should haunt us all: “Are we on the cusp
of a new world order dominated by struggles over access to affordable resources?” For the U.S. intelligence community, which appears to have
been influenced by the report, the response was blunt. In March, for the first time, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper listed
“competition and scarcity involving natural resources” as a national security threat on a par with global
terrorism, cyberwar, and nuclear proliferation . “Many countries important to the United States are vulnerable to natural
resource shocks that degrade economic development, frustrate attempts to democratize, raise the risk of regime-threatening instability, and
aggravate regional tensions,” he wrote in his prepared statement for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “ Extreme
weather
events (floods, droughts, heat waves) will increasingly disrupt food and energy markets, exacerbating
state weakness, forcing human migrations, and triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism.” There was a new phrase embedded in
his comments: “resource shocks.” It catches something of the world we’re barreling toward, and the language is striking for an intelligence
community that, like the government it serves, has largely played down or ignored the dangers of climate change. For the first time, senior
government analysts may be coming to appreciate what energy experts, resource analysts, and scientists have long been warning about: the
unbridled consumption of the world’s natural resources, combined with the advent of extreme climate
change, could produce a global explosion of human chaos and conflict. We are now heading directly into
a resource-shock world.
 Warming  Extinction
Unmitigated warming causes extinction – no adaptation 
Klein 14 (Naomi, award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, former Miliband Fellow at the London School of
Economics, member of the board of directors of 350.org, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, 2014, pg.
12-14)

But the bigger problem—and the reason Copenhagen caused such great despair—is that because
governments did not agree to binding targets, they are free to pretty much ignore their commitments.
Which is precisely what is happening. Indeed, emissions are rising so rapidly that unless something
radical changes within our economic structure, 2 degrees now looks like a utopian dream. And it’s not
just environmentalists who are raising the alarm. The World Bank also warned when it released its
report that “we’re on track to a 4-C warmer world [by century’s end] marked by  extreme heat
waves ,  declining global foodstocks ,  loss of ecosystems  and biodiversity, and  life-threatening sea
level rise .” And the report cautioned that, “there isalso  no certainty that adaptation to a 4-C world is
possible .” Kevin Anderson, former director (now deputy director) of the Tyndall Centre for Climate
Change, which has quickly established itself as one of the U.K’s premier climate research institutions, is
even blunter; he says 4 degrees Celsius warming—7.2 degrees Fahrenheit—is “incompatible with an
organized, equitable, and civilized global community.”¶ We don’t know exactly what a 4 degree Celsius
world would look like, but even the best-case scenario is likely to be calamitous. Four degrees of
warming could raise global sea levels by 1 or possibly even 2 meters by 2100 (and would lock in at least
a few additional meters over future centuries). This would drown some island nations such as the
Maldives and Tuvalu, and inundate many coastal areas from Ecuador and Brazil to the Netherlands to
much of California and the northeastern United States as well as huge swaths of South and Southeast
Asia. Major cities likely in jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles, Vancouver, London,
Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.¶ Meanwhile, brutal heat waves that can kill tens of thousands of
people, even in wealthy countries, would become entirely unremarkable summer events on every
continent but Antarctica. The heat would also cause staple crops to suffer  dramatic yield losses across
the globe (it is possible that Indian wheat and U.S. could plummet by as much as 60 percent), this at a
time when demand will be surging due to population growth and a growing demand for meat. And since
crops will be facing not just heat stress but also extreme events such as wide-ranging droughts, flooding,
or pest outbreaks, the losses could easily turn out to be more severe than the models have
predicted. When you add ruinous hurricanes, raging wildfires, fisheries collapses,
widespread disruptions to water supplies, extinctions, and globe-trotting diseases to the mix, it indeed
becomes difficult to imagine that a peaceful, ordered society could be sustained (that is, where such a
thing exists in the first place).¶ And keep in mind that these are the optimistic scenarios in which
warming is more or less stabilized at 4 degrees Celsius and does not trigger tipping points beyond
which  runaway warming  would occur. Based on the latest modeling, it is becoming safer to assume
that 4 degrees could bring about a number of extremely dangerous feedback loops—an Arctic that is
regularly ice-free in September, for instance, or, according to one recent study, global vegetation that is
too saturated to act as a reliable “sink”, leading to more carbon being emitted rather than stored. Once
this happens, any hope of predicting impacts pretty much goes out the window. And this process may be
starting sooner than anyone predicted. In May 2014, NASA and the  U niversity of  C alifornia, Irvine
scientists revealed that glacier melt in a section of West Antarctica roughly the size of France now
“appears unstoppable.” This likely spells down for the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, which according
to lead study author Eric Rignot “comes with a sea level rise between three and five metres. Such an
event will displace millions of people worldwide.” The disintegration, however, could unfold over
centuries and there is  still time for emission reductions to slow down the process and prevent the
worst . ¶ Much more frightening than any of this is the fact that plenty of mainstream analysts think
that on our current emissions trajectory, we are headed for  even more than 4 degrees  of warming. In
2011, the usually staid International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a report predicting that we are actually
on track for 6 degrees Celsius—10.8 degrees Fahrenheit—of warming. And as the IEA’s chief economist
put it: “Everybody, even the school children, knows that this will have catastrophic implications for all of
us.” (The evidence indicates that 6 degrees of warming is likely to set in motion several major tipping
points—not only slower ones such as the aforementioned breakdown of the West Antarctic ice sheet,
but possibly more abrupt ones, like  massive releases of methane  from Arctic permafrost.) The
accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers as also published a report warning businesses that we are
headed for “4-C , or even 6-C” of warming.¶ These various projections are the equivalent of every alarm
in your house going off simultaneously. And then every alarm on your street going off as well, one by
one by one. They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an  existential crisis for the
human species . The only historical precedent for a crisis of this depth and scale was the Cold War fear
that we were headed toward nuclear holocaust, which would have made much of the planet
uninhabitable. But that was (and remains) a threat; a slim possibility, should geopolitics spiral out of
control. The vast majority of nuclear scientists never told us that we were almost certainly going to put
our civilization in peril if we kept going about our daily lives as usual, doing exactly what we were
already going, which is what climate scientists have been telling us for years. ¶ As the Ohio State
University climatologist Lonnie G. Thompson, a world-renowned specialist on glacier melt, explained in
2010, “Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical
rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in
the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional
committees. When then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The
answer is that virtually  all of us  are now convinced thatglobal warming poses a  clear and
present danger to civilization .”
 ! – Catch All
U.S. – China cooperation key to resolve every global issue
---lack of co-op on the global economy causes 2008

---US and China are the two largest ghg emitters

---climate change encourages co-op on arctic exploration

---lack of communication causes miscalc in Iran, Korea, and Myanmar

---U.S. uses influence in Kabul to stop narcotics traffickers

---anti-narcotics efforts spill over to solve Indo-Pak war

Cohen and Greenberg ‘09

William S., former sec. of defense, and Maurice R., CEO of one of the world’s largest financial firms, 03-
2009, "Smart Power in U.S.-China Relations" Center for Strategic and International Studies, https://csis-
prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-
public/legacy_files/files/media/csis/pubs/090309_mcgiffert_uschinasmartpower_web.pdf

The United States and China—the world's first- and third-largest economies—are inextricably linked, a fact made ever more evident in the midst of the current global
financial crisis. Weak demand in both the United States and China, previously the twin engines of global growth, has contributed to the global

economic downturn and threatens to ignite simmering trade tensions between the two countries. Nowhere is the interconnectedness of the United States and China more clear than in inter-national
finance. China has $2 trillion worth of largely U.S. dollar-denominated foreign exchange reserves and is the world's largest

holder—by far—of U.S. government debt. Former treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson and others have suggested that the structural imbalances created
by this dynamic fueled the current economic crisis. Yet, China will almost certainly be called on to purchase the lion's share of new U.S. debt instruments issued in
connection with the US. stimulus and recovery package. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's February 23, 2009, reassur-ance to Beijing that U.S. markets remain safe and her call for continued Chinese investment in the U.S.
bond market as a means to help both countries, and the world, emerge from global recession underscored the shared interest—and central role—that both countries have in turning around the global economy quickly. Although

China's considerable holdings of U.S. debt have been seen as a troubling problem, they are now being
perceived as a necessary part of a global solution. Similarly, as the world's two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, China and
the United States share not only the collateral damage of energy-inefficient economic growth, but a primary responsibility to shape any ultimate global
solutions to climate change. To date, cooperation has been elusive, owing as much to Washington's reluctance as to Beijing's intransigence.
Painting China as the environmental bogeyman as an excuse for foot-dragging in policymaking is no longer an option; for its part, China, as the world's top polluter, must cease playing the developing-economy card. Yet

energy security and climate change remain an area of genuine opportunity for joint achievement. Indeed, U.S.-China cooperation in this
field is a sine qua non of any response to the energy and climate challenges. The sheer size of the Chinese

economy means that collaboration with the United States could set the de facto global standards for efficiency and emissions
in key economic sectors such as industry and transportation. Climate change also provides an area for cooperation in previously uncharted policy waters, as in emerging

Arctic navigational and energy exploration opportunities. Washington and Beijing also share a deep and urgent interest in international peace and stabil-ity. The resumption of
U.S.-China military contacts is a positive development. As two nuclear powers with worldwide economic and strategic interests, both countries want to minimize

instability and enhance maritime security, as seen by parallel antipiracy missions in the waters off Somalia. Joint efforts in support of United Nations
peacekeeping, nonproliferation, and counterterrorism offer critical areas for bilateral and multilateral cooperation. Certainly, regional and global security
institutions such as the Six-Party Talks concerning North Korea or the UN Security Council require the active engagement of both Washington and
Beijing. Even more broadly, crisis manage-ment in geographic regions of mutual strategic interest like the Korean peninsula, Iran, or Burma require much
more Sino-U.S. communication if the two countries are to avoid miscalculation and maximize opportunities to minimize human suffering. Increasing the number of
mid-level military-to-military exchanges would help in this regard. The United States and China could do more to cooperate on law

enforcement to combat drug trafficking and organized crime in Western China. Afghanistan is competing with Burma as the main
provider of narcotics to China; Washington could use its influence with the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul to
develop a joint antinarcotics program. This could potentially build networks and joint capabilities that might be useful for U.S.-
China cooperation on the issue of Pakistan. In addition, Washington should also encourage NATO-China cooperation along the
Afghan border. Collaborating under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) might provide an
additional framework for Beijing and Washington to address Central Asian security issues in a cooperative manner. The SCO, which
includes Pakistan as an observer and will convene a multinational conference on Afghanistan in March 2009, has long made curbing narcoterrorism in Afghanistan a priority. In addition, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and the
Chinese Anti-Narcotics Bureau should expand cooperation on interdiction and prosecution of heroin and meth traffickers.
 ! – Climate Change, Global Econ, War
US – China cooperation key to solve climate change, economic crisis, and war
Fingar and Garrett 2013
(Thomas and Banning, Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International
Studies at Stanford University, Director of the Asia Program at the Atlantic Council of the United States,
“China-US Cooperation: Key to the Global Future”, September 2013, date accessed 6/26/19,
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/China-
US_Cooperation_Key_to_the_Global_Future_WEB.pdf)//CS
The global future is likely to be increasingly volatile and uncertain. The rate of change is increasing, driven by the accelerating pace of
technological development, unprecedented urbanization and growth of the global middle class, and a wide range of challenges beyond
the control of any one country but potentially affecting the prosperity and security of all countries.
Disruptive change in one geographic or functional area will spread quickly .. No country, and certainly not those with
the largest populations and largest economies, will be immune. Global challenges like climate change, food and water
shortages, and resource scarcities will shape the strategic context for all nations and require reconsideration of
traditional national concerns such as sovereignty and maximizing the ability of national leaders to control their country’s destiny. What
China and the United States do, individually and together, will have a major impact on the future of the
global system. As importantly, our individual fates will be inextricably linked to how that future plays out. The three illustrative scenarios
sketched out below underscore how critical the future of the US-China relationship is to each country and to the world. • Global Drift and
Erosion (the present world trajectory): In
a world in which nations fail to resolve global problems and strengthen
mechanisms of global cooperation, governments gradually turn inward. Each nation seeks to protect and advance
its own narrow national interests or to preserve an unsustainable status quo that is rapidly changing in ways that erode the international order.
The international community’s lack of ability to cooperate to meet global challenges leads to
international crises and instability. Zero-Sum World: Unsustainable drift leads to a world of predominantly zero-sum competition
and conflict in the face of severe resource constraints. The result is economic crises and internal instability as well as
interstate confrontation. There is risk of military conflict between major powers, which increases global
mistrust and uncertainty and fosters an “each nation for itself” mentality that further undermines the
ability of states to cooperate in the face of growing common challenges . • Global Revitalization and Cooperation: To
escape the perils of drift or zero-sum competition, leaders in countries with the most to lose work together to manage
and take advantage of global challenges and megatrends. Cooperation makes it possible to achieve win-
win outcomes that avoid or mitigate negative consequences of increased demand for resources and the
impact of climate change as well as to harness new technologies to improve living conditions through
sustainable development. Cooperation creates and utilizes new transnational institutions to prevent
conflict and enhance security for all. China and the United States become more prosperous as we work
together. 6 ATLANTIC COUNCIL China-US Cooperation: Key to the Global Future The possible futures sketched out above (and developed at
greater length below) are intended to stimulate thinking about how current trends and uncertainties could lead to very different global and
national outcomes. For many reasons, the
United States and China will have greater ability and incentives than
other countries to cooperate in determining and shaping developments over the next two decades.
Indeed, it is very difficult to imagine a pathway to “global revitalization and cooperation” in which China and the United States do not cooperate
and provide critical international leadership. Manyfactors will shape the future, some of which are beyond the
control of any nation state, but China and the United States—and the character of the US-China
relationship—will be critical. The mutual dependence on each other’s economic performance and the success of the global economy
as a whole was demonstrated during the 2008 financial crisis that began in the United States but quickly spread around the world. US and
Chinese leaders recognized that they were in the “ same boat” strategically and engaged in a closely
coordinated response to the crisis, which played a key—if not decisive—role in preventing the situation
from becoming much worse. The need for joint and coordinated responses to economic crises and to mounting economic challenges
and threats is certain to increase as globalization continues and interdependence deepens.
 ! – Sustainable Development
U.S. China cooperation is key to avoiding international crises, internal instability and
creates new tech for sustainable development
Kempe and Xing, 13
(Frederick, QU, President of Atlantic Council, President & CEO of China Institute of International Studies,
“China-US Cooperation: Key to a Global Future”, September 2013, 06/26/2019,
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/China-
US_Cooperation_Key_to_the_Global_Future_WEB.pdf) sd
What China and the United States do, individually and together, will have a major impact on the future of the global system. As importantly, our
individual fates will be inextricably linked to how that future plays out. The
three illustrative scenarios sketched out below
underscore how critical the future of the US-China relationship is to each country and to the world. •
Global Drift and Erosion (the present world trajectory): In a world in which nations fail to resolve global problems
and strengthen mechanisms of global cooperation , governments gradually turn inward. Each nation
seeks to protect and advance its own narrow national interests or to preserve an unsustainable status
quo that is rapidly changing in ways that erode the international order. The international community’s
lack of ability to cooperate to meet global challenges leads to international crises and instability . • Zero-
Sum World: Unsustainable drift leads to a world of predominantly zero-sum competition and conflict in
the face of severe resource constraints. The result is economic crises and internal instability as well as
interstate confrontation. There is risk of military conflict between major powers, which increases global
mistrust and uncertainty and fosters an “each nation for itself” mentality that further undermines the ability of states to cooperate in the
face of growing common challenges. • Global Revitalization and Cooperation: To escape the perils of drift or zero-sum competition, leaders in
countries with the most to lose work together to manage and take advantage of global challenges and megatrends. Cooperation
makes
it possible to achieve win-win outcomes that avoid or mitigate negative consequences of increased
demand for resources and the impact of climate change as well as to harness new technologies to
improve living conditions through sustainable development . Cooperation creates and utilizes new
transnational institutions to prevent conflict and enhance security for all . China and the United States become more
prosperous as we work together
 ! – Space coop
China-US space cooperation prevents conflict and miscalc
Yang 18 Adam Yang, The Diplomat, 3-17-2018, Adam Yang is a Major in the U.S. Marine Corp and a student at the Command and Staff
College, Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia "How Should the US Engage China in Space?," Diplomat,
https://thediplomat.com/2018/03/how-should-the-us-engage-china-in-space/) AD

The 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy categorized China as a revisionist power, and through this lens, it seems strategically sound for the
some NASA officials insist
United States to shield its precious technical advantages from a potential adversary. Nevertheless,

that the United States should still collaborate with China to capitalize on a revolutionary
period of high technical exchange between China and other space powers. Other
officials warn that if the U.S. and China do not find meaningful ways to cooperate in
space, relations could devolve into greater mistrust and lead to conflict. To guide strategic
thinking on U.S. space policy, this article submits that policymakers may gain strategic insights on how to address China’s growing influence in
the space domain by examining its actions in the maritime domain. Deriving Strategic Insights from Sea to Space Enjoying this article? Click here
to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month. To derive strategic insights from the maritime environment for the space domain, this article
surveys how China: 1) applies force, 2) manipulates laws, 3) shapes the environment, 4) cooperates internationally, and 5) conducts diplomacy.
First, China possesses three major maritime agencies that apply force in order to protect and pursue its interests: the People’s Liberation Army
Navy (PLAN), People’s Armed Police (PAP) and the Maritime Law Enforcement Forces that include the Coast Guard, and the Maritime Militia. As
Andrew Erickson notes, each agency represents the largest of its kind globally. The PLAN commands over 300 ships (whereas U.S. Navy has 277
as of 2017) and its Coast Guard has over 1,200 ships. In their research on territorial disputes in the South China Sea, scholars Christopher Yung
and Patrick McNulty find that China utilized its military and paramilitary forces 148 times from 1995 to 2013 – more than all other active
claimants (Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan) combined in the same period. Their research concluded that as China’s
capabilities increased, Beijing was more likely to use force to advance its interests and less likely to defer to legal or multilateral solutions. From
a space perspective, U.S. policymakers can surmise that if China had a comparable offensive capability in the space domain, it might also prefer
utilizing force to challenge rivals over other means. Though China currently does not have an offensive space capability on par with the scale of
its maritime forces, the U.S. Department of Defense 2017 Annual Report to Congress asserted that the PLA is aggressively
acquiring a range of counterspace capabilities. Given the fact that there are no international limitations on
developing ground-based counterspace weapons, China may pursue an equivalent path of developing a high quantity of systems to overwhelm
adversaries during conflict. Second, China could reinterpret laws as a pretext to apply force. In the maritime domain, China reinterprets the
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to challenge U.S. freedom of navigation patrols through the South China Sea. China
claims waters extending past 12 nautical miles and into the exclusive economic zone (EEZ), saying that foreign states must refrain from
threatening the “territorial integrity or political independence” of the owning state. Concurrently, in 1992, China promulgated domestic
maritime laws that extended its sovereign claims and deemed the commercial or research activities of other states illegal in contested waters.
The international community at large does not recognize this reimagining of the EEZ;
however, it does provide China some legal footing and domestic cover to deploy
maritime forces in this region. Similarly, the Central Military Commission is exploring the legalities for the use of force in
space. PLA doctrine proclaims the need to destroy, damage, or disrupt an adversary’s space capability to secure victory in the information
space. Nationally, China codified its security strategy of active defense – using defensive counterattacks in order to spoil the offensive actions of
an adversary – in its National Security Law of 2015. By watching the evolution of China’s space-related domestic laws or reinterpretations of
international laws, U.S. policymakers may find China strategically telegraphing its intentions through legal maneuvering. Third, when China feels
international laws are unfavorable, it may create an alternate framework that advances its own interests. Shortly after a tribunal at the
Permanent Court of Arbitration of The Hague ruled against China’s activities in the South China Sea in 2016, China announced that it would
create a “maritime judicial center” and a “maritime arbitration center” to promote its own vision for maritime law. China claimed that this
endeavor would advance the nation’s role as a maritime power and support the development of its Belt Road Initiative. Skeptics assert that
China initiated this endeavor to harden its claims on disputed territories and to divert cases away from UNCLOS courts. By doing so, China can
create legal precedents to interpret international maritime laws and begin to undermine the international maritime system framed around
UNCLOS. In the space arena, China is not anywhere close to rearranging an entire judicial system around its views; however, it actively
participates in international space organizations and introduces measures that could limit the ability for the United States to project force.
Through the United Nations, China and Russia have twice (2008 and 2014) proposed the legally binding Treaty of Prevention of the Placement
of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects (PPWT). The primary U.S. objections to the treaty
were that it did not include verification mechanisms, only applied to space-based weapons, and did not include ground based ASAT weapons –
a primary counterspace capability China is advancing. Fourth, policymakers could also examine China’s maritime
cooperation initiatives to envision potential space cooperation. China’s counterpiracy
operation in the Gulf of Aden has slowly emerged as a valuable mechanism to improve
U.S.-China cooperation as seen through the counterpiracy exercises of December 2014 .
On a grander scale in June 2017, China laid out an ambitious vision for cooperation in relation to the

“Maritime Silk Road” as part of its larger Belt and Road Initiative . This plan envisions the
establishment of cooperative principles, environmental norms, maritime security, and
“collaborative governance” to achieve mutual prosperity. If one believes in China’s
sincerity, working cooperatively across these lines could greatly reduce security
tensions and set conditions for long-term mutual gain. Subsequently, China is pursuing
international cooperation in space – not only for security and economic reasons, but
also to bolster the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party to domestic and
international audiences. The European Space Administration (ESA) has already expressed
desires to cooperate with China on human space flight and the use of its future space
station. China especially values its relationship with ESA due to the opportunities to trade and transfer technologies denied by the United
States. China and Russia have also agreed to cooperate on human space flight and deep space exploration. Though these initiatives are not on
they do offer U.S. policymakers opportunities to work with a rising
the scale of a Maritime Silk Road,

space power for positive ends. Finally, the United States should pay attention to China’s diplomatic and engagement efforts
with other nations. Contrary to the cooperative tenets for a Maritime Silk Road, in 2016, China convinced Cambodia to block an Association of
South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) joint statement that recognized The Hague’s arbitration ruling on the South China Sea dispute in favor of the
Philippines. In June 2017, Vietnam resisted China’s demands to vacate an oil venture within its EEZ, but eventually capitulated when China
threatened to use force. The most concerning aspect for Vietnam was an atypical silence from its neighbors – particularly from the Philippines,
Indonesia, and Singapore. Apparently, China’s political and economic leverage over these nations prevented them from publicly sympathizing
with Vietnam or rebuking China’s actions. Seemingly, when pressed, China uses soft and hard power tactics bilaterally to dislodge multilateral
initiatives that counter it interests. Could China disrupt the U.S.-European alliance as it did with ASEAN unity? At this stage, Chinese-European
cooperation in space seems well intentioned. Nevertheless, U.S. policymakers should consider whether China’s growing space relations with
Europe, Russia, or any other space power could complicate U.S. interests in other areas. As China strengthens its partnerships, its ability to
The United States sits at an
shape laws, institutions and the strategic preferences of others increase as well. Conclusion

important period to develop a comprehensive space strategy that addresses China’s

growing influence. U.S. cooperation with the Soviets in space during the Cold War was
not due to a desire for true cooperation, but a means to manage a potential crisis
related to the management of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons . The United States
could develop a similar mechanism for limited engagement with China to send positive
signals and reduce misperceptions. China’s activities in space have already intersected
with U.S. interests and will only increase in frequency and intensity over time . In the end, for
the United States to compete and lead in the space domain, it must engage new players and shape the

contours of the game. If Washington is worried about how China will play the game, it
can always look in the maritime arena for strategic clues.
 ! – Bioterror and Pandemics
co-op key to solve disease and bioterror – lack of co-op causes failure of aid and global
disease pandemics – extinction
Bouey and Feng ‘17
Jennifer, behavioral epidemiologist @georgetown, and Cheng, dir. of global health program @ research
center for public health, 05-08-17, "US-China Dialogue on Global Health Background Report,"
Georgetown Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues , https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IF10119.pdf

The health threat posed by migration has recently reared its head in China. An outbreak of yellow fever that
began in Angola in December 2015 spread to China three months later, marking the first case of yellow fever ever reported in all of Asia, followed by 10 more Chinese cases imported from
Angola by May. Yellow fever is a sometimes deadly disease caused by a mosquito-borne virus. While no cure exists, there is a

vaccine, but it is generally administered only to those living in or traveling to areas where the disease is endemic. As such,
China’s 1.4 billion citizens are almost universally unvaccinated. The Chinese cases came from Chinese workers returning home after having worked in Angola, where over
200,000 Chinese workers are employed on work visas for China’s aid and investment projects in the country.46 Chinese authorities do require travelers to Angola to be vaccinated for yellow fever, but there are fears that many of

The spread of yellow fever to China is particularly worrisome given the region’s massive
the Chinese workers there may not have abided by this rule.

population and the fact that the primary vector of transmission— the Aedes aegypti mosquito—is common across much of China and nearby
countries in South and Southeast Asia. Many epidemiologists have voiced concerns about how dangerous this confluence of factors could prove to be. So far, the United States and China have
each responded to Angola’s yellow fever epidemic separately. In addition to increasing domestic mosquito monitoring and control activities to boost its own preparedness, the

Chinese government provided Angola with half a million dollars in emergency assistance in February, before the outbreak had even spread to China.47
The CDC’s Mozambique Field Epidemiology Training Program graduates have collaborated with Angola’s Ministry of Health to track down suspected cases
of yellow fever and intervene accordingly.48 With so much recent discussion between U.S. and Chinese health authorities regarding cooperative health security efforts in Africa, the tragic yellow fever
outbreak offers the two countries an opportunity to achieve significant collaborative action on global health, if they choose to embrace it. The
recent concerns of yellow fever epidemic also brought attention to China’s vaccine production. The global vaccine industry has long

been dominated by a few multinational companies. In the past decade, vaccine manufacturers from China, India, and other emerging
economies entered the international market and helped to drive down the vaccine price. For Jiankang Zhang, representative for PATH’s China Programs,

the growth of China’s vaccine industry is “a very positive development for global health, as governments and international
procurement agencies will be able to afford more life-saving vaccines and thus protect more lives.” A Chinese vaccine manufacturer obtained the first WHO prequalification vaccine
(the Japanese encephalitis vaccine) in October 2013.49 Hope has been high that other vaccines manufactured from China will be qualified and enter the global market before the next pandemic. In the wake of the yellow fever

China’s
epidemic in 2016, China’s Sinovac Biotech pledged to provide sufficient yellow fever vaccine supply for all Chinese expatriate workers.50 As the world is wondering what the next global pandemic will be,

vaccine manufacturing capacity may soon become one of the keys to stemming a potential global crisis. A final global
health threat for the United States and China to consider as an area for greater cooperation is bioterrorism. Bilateral cooperation on counterterrorism is long established, but there is little evidence of

collaboration in combating bioterrorism. Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently brought this issue into sharp relief at the Munich Security Conference that was attended by 450 senior decision
makers from around the globe. Gates warned that “whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million

people in less than a year .”51 Among other recommendations, he advocated that countries need to prepare for pandemics in the same

manner that the military prepares for war— with “germ games” and other pandemic exercises. He concluded that bioterrorism now ranks with nuclear war and climate

change as one of three existential threats to humankind.

 ! – Africa Coop
China and Western co-operation key to solving environment crisis, energy,
infrastructure
Jianbo and Xiaomin 11 ( Dr. Luo and Dr. Zhang, Dr. Jianbo is an associate Professor and Deputy
Director of the Research Office of China’s Foreign Affairs, Institute for International Strategic Studies of
the party School of Central Committee of CPC and Dr. Xioamin is an associate Professor of the School of
International Studies and Diplomacy, Beijing Foreign Studies University), “Multilateral cooperation in
Africa between China and Western countries: from difference to consensus”, JSTOR, October 11, 27-06-
2019, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23025576?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents, NN)

The related parties should propel the cooperation in African pragmatically and gradually. At the first
stage, cooperation and coordination can be carried out in light of projects and specific problems . Priority
should be given to the following fields: (1) Field of environment which includes food crisis, natural disasters,
climate changes and water resources. Non-traditional issues in the field of Environment not only diminish what Africa has
achieved in economic development, but also constitute potential roots of political conflicts. For instance, the Darfur Crisis is directly due to the
contending for water and soil resources by related parties.55 ( 2)
Field of energy. It serves the common interests of every
party to ensure the rational development and effective supply of energy and to prevent the unreason
able rising of energy price which breaks with the balance between supply and demand . (3) Field of
infrastructure. Backwardness in infrastructure is the bottle neck restricting Africa's economic
development; therefore, the AU and the NEPAD place this field at top priority. Western countries'
capital and project management experience and China's engineering technology of low price and high
quality can complement each other and promote Africa's infrastructure construc tion . (4) Field of peace
and security. These are prerequisites for development . Therefore it is in the interest of Africa, the EU and China to
cooperate in order to promote stability and prosperity in African countries and to work together to assist with AU peace-keeping operations,
capacity building and training. (5)
Field of education and public health. China has gained abundant experience in
medical and educational aid work;56 while various Western charity institutions, churches and social groups have been engaging in
primary education and public health work at the grass roots of African countries . China and Western countries can strengthen
cooperation in respect of human resources development and combating diseases such as malaria , Aids and
tuberculosis. After gaining experience and mutual trust in the above fields, the parties concerned can carry out cooperation in political fields
such as governance of Africa, political ideas and development models and so on.
Through consultation and coordination, they
can reduce suspicion and enmity between each other and enhance mutual trust and understanding.
Anyhow, the fundamental way out for Africa is to find a development model of its own and a path to build self-esteem and dignity internally.

US should cooperate with China to attain regional security, foster economic

development and more
Birchmeier 10, Joseph F. Birchmeier (US Army colonel and contributor to the Strategy Research
Project), “China in Africa: Implications for The United States”, December 03, 2010, 06/27/19,
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?
q=cache:bswWArTwr08J:https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a521360.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct
=clnk&gl=us, NN)
Because Chinese activities in Africa are not an economic or military threat , at least to the point where they
should be considered threats to our national security, time is available to achieve cooperation with China without
compromising U.S. national security. The United States should use this available time to find ways to
cooperate with China along lines of mutual interest – specifically to avoid a Cold War, attain greater regional
stability, foster economic development on the continent, both to enlarge markets and facilitate
access to resources, and increase the level of responsive governments within the African states .
Creation of democracies should not be a focus of these discussions , but the creation of countries
that are more responsive to the needs of their people – a matter in which the Chinese understand due to their own
concerns about maintaining a hold on their government in China and the lessons they learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union. to
include Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. The
United States should also look to use the United
Nations as a neutral party between the United States and China. The Chinese seem willing to
support United Nations initiatives in Africa as shown through its participation in UN peacekeeping
missions and its support to NEPAD (which the United Nations supports). In fact, because China seems to
understand the importance of support to NEPAD to further their interests in Africa, the United
States should look for ways to support African development more through NEPAD than its
unilateral method of the MCC. Combining resources into one developmental program that Africans,
not China or the U.S. controls, 22 could only help to achieve cooperation between China and the
United States concerning Africa
 ! – North Korea 2AC
China wants to collaborate with U.S. to restore stability and denuclearization in the
Korean peninsula – Taiwanese arms sales are preventing negotiations
Liang, 19
(Lim Yan, political correspondent for the Strait Times, “China keen to play role in Korean
denuclearization”, June 21, 2019, 06/27/2019, https://search.proquest.com/docview/2244094032?
accountid=14556) sd

Chinese President Xi Jinping has backed efforts to ease tensions in the Korean peninsula , but also said that North
Korea's security concerns should be addressed. In his widely watched meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang yesterday,
President Xi also made it clear that China intended to be part of the equation in resolving issues in the
peninsula. Both countries have had run-ins with the United States this year - China over trade and North
Korea over stalled denuclearisation talks. Mr Xi's visit to Pyongyang - before he meets US President Donald Trump at the
Group of 20 Summit in Japan next week - served to underline Beijing's close ties with North Korea , observers said. Mr Xi
told Mr Kim that he hopes the issue of denuclearising the peninsula will be resolved through dialogue and
that Beijing wants to play a constructive role in the process. At the same time, he said, any resolution
should help North Korea meet its "reasonable security and development concerns", indicating that
Beijing wants the US to accept North Korean demands for a security guarantee while easing economic
sanctions. Mr Kim said North Korea had "taken multiple positive steps" over the past year to reduce tensions on the peninsula, but this "had
not elicited a positive response from relevant parties". Talks between Mr Trump and Mr Kim started promisingly in
Singapore last year but ended in mutual recriminations the last time the two men met in Hanoi to
discuss the mechanics of North Korea giving up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees
and an end to crippling economic sanctions . As Mr Xi arrived to a 21-gun salute, with 250,000 North Koreans lining the streets,
observers said there would have to be intense discussions behind the ebullient optics to break the deadlocked nuclear talks. Renmin
University's North Korea expert Cheng
Xiaohe said Mr Xi and Mr Kim would likely work to reach a joint position
on a provisional deal, which could then be presented to Mr Trump in Japan. "Whatever Xi brings to
Trump at the G-20, it would not just be North Korea's position, but would also include China's input."
South Korean experts were more sceptical of any breakthrough, with Dr Lee Seong-hyon of the Sejong Institute think-tank
noting that the visit could be seen as a diversionary tactic and leverage in the lead-up to Mr Xi's meeting
with Mr Trump. "And the visit was initiated by Xi, who has been hit due to the trade war, the Hong Kong
demonstrations and America's virtual 'recognition' of Taiwan as a state," he said
 US-Sino Relations Key to North Korea
U.S. China Relations means cooperation for denuclearizing North Korea – they share
similar goals and realize that regional conflict has increased in the past year
CPA, 18
(Center for Preventive Actions, CPA helps policymakers devise timely and practical strategies to
prevent and mitigate armed conflict around the world, especially in those places where U.S.
interests are most at risk, “China keen to play role in Korean denuclearization”, June 21, 2019,
06/27/2019, https://search.proquest.com/docview/2244094032?accountid=14556) sd

Participants agreed that stability in East Asia is a goal the United States and China both share . They
recognized North Korea as the most pressing challenge in the region, and noted that there is a mutual
interest in a denuclearized Korean Peninsula . Some participants claimed that the United States and China should at least
conduct joint contingency planning, as the threat of military clashes has grown in the past year . However, some
participants argued that the best avenue to sustain pressure on North Korea would be through U.S.-
Chinese cooperation. That could result in the start of a denuclearization process and a ban on long-range
missile testing, especially of missiles that can reach the United States . However, significant challenges to such a
process remain, including the verification and longevity of an international commitment in light of recent U.S. reversals on the Paris
climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal.
 ! – AI 2AC
cooperation key to safe AI development – the impact is miscalc and rogue tech –
escalation and paranoia should give you a low threshold for the impact
Hass and Balin 1-10
Ryan, fellow in foreign policy program @ brookings, and Zach, publications coordinator @ brookings, 1-
10-2019, "US-China relations in the age of artificial intelligence," Brookings,
https://www.brookings.edu/research/us-china-relations-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence

The military domain presents the greatest risk for miscalculation. It also is where the need is greatest for
ongoing, direct, authoritative bilateral communication to develop a better shared understanding of ethical boundaries
around AI, particularly given the potential implications for warfighting. The bilateral relationship already faces an acute security dilemma, where actions
on one side make the other feel less secure and push it to develop countermeasures. As AI technologies become
more integrated into weapons systems and those systems gain autonomous capabilities, this security dilemma could grow more pronounced,
causing each side to nationalize innovation streams and limit transparency in order to seek an edge over the other. In other words,
an existing security dilemma could quickly morph into an AI nightmare. The stakes are high. As others have pointed out, the United States and
China stand on the cusp of rapid change in the conduct of war, not unlike the employment of cavalry, the advent of the rifled musket, or the merging of fast armor
with air support to achieve a blitzkreig. Both countries are investing heavily to merge AI-enhanced capabilities and enable machine-based
[5]

decision processes with minimal human interaction. In the event of a confrontation between U.S. and Chinese forces (e.g., in the South China Sea), robotics and AI
could play a critical role. Rapid escalation is an acute risk, particularly if the pace of technological advancements in
capabilities exceeds the development of protocols for maintaining human agency in decision-making loops. The real possibility

of unintended and rapid escalation should provide incentive for both sides to begin developing boundaries around uses of AI in
warfighting. The normative development process around previous arms control treaties, including the Chemical Weapons Convention, could

offer applicable lessons that the United States and China could draw from.
 US-China Relations Key – AI Miscalc
US-China relations prevent AI miscalc
Hass & Balin 1-10-2019, Ryan Hass has a BA from Washington University, is a director for China,
Taiwan, Mongolia at National Security Staff, Zach Balin has a BA from Princeton University, “US-China
Relations in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”, article “Brookings Institute”, [6/27/2019],
https://www.brookings.edu/research/us-china-relations-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/

The military domain presents the greatest risk for miscalculation. It also is where the need is greatest for
ongoing, direct, authoritative bilateral communication to develop a better shared understanding of ethical
boundaries around AI, particularly given the potential implications for warfighting. The bilateral
relationship already faces an acute security dilemma, where actions on one side make the other feel less
secure and push it to develop countermeasures . As AI technologies become more integrated into weapons
systems and those systems gain autonomous capabilities, this security dilemma could grow more pronounced, causing each side to
nationalize innovation streams and limit transparency in order to seek an edge over the other. In other words, an existing security dilemma
could quickly morph into an AI nightmare. The stakes are high. As others have pointed out, the United States and
China stand on the cusp of rapid change in the conduct of war , not unlike the employment of cavalry, the advent of the
rifled musket, or the merging of fast armor with air support to achieve a blitzkreig.[5] Both countries are investing heavily to
merge AI-enhanced capabilities and enable machine-based decision processes with minimal human interaction. In the event of
a confrontation between U.S. and Chinese forces (e.g., in the South China Sea), robotics and AI could play a critical role. Rapid
escalation is an acute risk, particularly if the pace of technological advancements in capabilities exceeds the development of protocols
for maintaining human agency in decision-making loops. The real possibility of unintended and rapid escalation should
provide incentive for both sides to begin developing boundaries around uses of AI in warfighting . The
normative development process around previous arms control treaties, including the Chemical Weapons Convention, could offer applicable
lessons that the United States and China could draw from.
 US-China Relations Key – AI
U.S. - China relations key to AI
Lampton 19
(David M. Lampton, Professor and Director of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and
Chairman of The Asia Foundation. He was president of the National Committee on United States-China, April 2019, “Reconsidering U.S.-China
Relations: From Improbable Normalization to Precipitous Deterioration”, Asia Policy Volume 14, Number 2, April 2019,
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/724099#info_wrap, AD)

The 1970s was a period for foreign policy in which some very important stars came into alignment,
culminating in Sino-U.S. “normalization” 40 years ago. An improbable coincidence of perceptive leadership in both
countries—by Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong—saw the opportunities of realignment. Each built the domestic coalition
necessary to create a remarkably durable, four-decade-long period of peace, stability, and growing
prosperity for both countries, Asia, and the world . In the United States, eight administrations (Nixon, Ford, Carter,
Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama) maintained basic policy continuity , while four did so in China (Mao, Deng, Jiang, and Hu).
The underlying dynamic of this protracted improvement was that each country’s leadership came to see that the other
country could be useful in addressing domestic and international challenges of utmost concern to itself.
It was a very simple calculus—cooperation was more beneficial than contention. Initially, both nations
enhanced security cooperation with respect to a common foe, the Soviet Union. This allowed the United
States and the PRC to avoid further entrapment in wars on China’s periphery. Economically, China gained
capital, technology, and markets, and the United States gained gradually enlarging access to a rapidly
growing market. Culturally and intellectually, the United States tapped into new sources of brainpower, and
China made up time for a generation intellectually impoverished by the Cultural Revolution. The
progress China made is astounding, and the United States now has growing interests in aligning itself
with mounting Chinese intellectual capacity. Scholars Qingnan Xie and Richard Freeman find that “in 2016, 20 percent of the
authors [in Science and Nature, premier scientific journals] were Chinese—more than twice the share in 2000.”1 The next era’s gains in
artificial intelligence will go to the countries with big data—China has big data.2 I do not attribute gains
in each of these areas exclusively to engagement, but without those policies, these important advances
would have taken much longer to achieve. Small examples can reveal big things.
 Arms Sales K2 Relations
Arm sales increasing and harming relations
Stone 6/6 (Stone, Mike. “Exclusive: U.S. Pursues Sale of over $2 Billion in Weapons to...” Reuters,
Thomson Reuters, 6 June 2019, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taiwan-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-
preparing-to-sell-over-2-billion-in-weapons-to-taiwan-testing-china-sources-idUSKCN1T62CA.)

The United States is pursuing the sale of more than $2 billion worth of tanks and weapons to
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -

Taiwan, four people familiar with the negotiations said, sparking anger from Beijing which is already
involved in an escalating trade war with Washington. An informal notification of the proposed sale has been sent to the U.S. Congress, the four sources said on
condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the possible deal. The potential sale included 108 General Dynamics Corp M1A2 Abrams tanks worth around $2 billion as well as anti-tank and anti-aircraft

The United States is the main

munitions, three of the sources said. Taiwan has been interested in refreshing its existing U.S.-made battle tank inventory, which includes M60 Patton tanks.

arms supplier to Taiwan, which China deems its own and has never renounced the use of force to bring
the self-ruled island under its control. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said in March Washington was responding positively to Taipei’s requests for new arms sales to bolster its defenses
in the face of pressure from China. The United States has no formal ties with Taiwan but is bound by law to help provide it

with the means to defend itself. China and the United States are engaged in a fierce trade war, with
clashes over Taiwan and the South China Sea exacerbating tensions. A spokesman for the State Department, which oversees foreign military
sales, said the U.S. government does not comment on or confirm potential or pending arms sales or transfers before they have been formally notified to Congress. The congressional notifications included a variety of anti-tank
munitions, including 409 Raytheon Co and Lockheed Martin Corp-made Javelin missiles worth as much as $129 million, two of the sources said. The notifications also included 1,240 TOW anti-tank missiles worth as much as $299

Taiwan’s
million, one of the sources said. There were also 250 stinger missiles worth as much as $223 million in the notification, the source said. Stingers are often used in portable anti-aircraft weapons systems.

Defense Ministry confirmed it had requested those weapons and that the request was proceeding
normally. The U.S. commitment to providing Taiwan with the weapons to defend itself helps Taiwan’s military to raise its combat abilities, consolidates the Taiwan-U.S. security partnership and ensures Taiwan’s
security, the ministry said in a statement. The Chinese government condemned the planned sale. Slideshow (2 Images) “We are severely concerned about the U.S. move and are firmly against U.S. arms sales to Taiwan,” Foreign

China urges the United States to stop arms sales to Taiwan and
Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a daily news briefing in Beijing.

prudently deal with issues relating to Taiwan to prevent harm to bilateral relations and peace and
stability in the Taiwan Strait, he added. CHINA HAWK U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration rolled out a long-
awaited overhaul of U.S. arms export policy in 2018 aimed at expanding sales to allies, saying it would
bolster the American defense industry and create jobs at home. Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro was one of the administration’s architects of that
policy. Navarro, a China hawk, wrote about the possible sale of tanks to Taiwan in a March opinion column in the New York Times ahead of a presidential trip to the Lima, Ohio, plant where they are made. At a low point, the U.S.
Army had only one tank coming from the plant a month, General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic said during an April conference call with investors, but said “we’ll be rolling out 30 tanks a month by the end of this year,” partly
because of international orders. The Pentagon announced last week it would sell 34 ScanEagle drones, made by Boeing Co, to the governments of Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam for $47 million. The drones would
afford greater intelligence-gathering capabilities, potentially curbing Chinese activity in the region. China claims almost all of the strategic South China Sea and frequently lambastes the United States and its allies over naval
operations near Chinese-occupied islands. Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam all have competing claims. China’s Defense Minister Wei Fenghe warned the United States at the Shangri-La Dialogue in
Singapore last weekend not to meddle in security disputes over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told the meeting that the United States would no longer “tiptoe” around China’s
behavior in Asia. Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry, responding to the Reuters report of planned the new arms sale, said Wei’s “threatening” comments and recent Chinese military drills near Taiwan showed the importance of its need to
strengthen its defensive abilities. “Going forward our government will continue to deepen the close security partnership between Taiwan and the United States,” it said.

Arms Sales key to relations– no alt causes

Xia 19 (Xia, Li, editor for Xinhua. “Commentary: U.S. Arms Sales to Taiwan a Dangerous Move to
Aggravate Cross-Strait Situation.” Xinhua, 17 Apr. 2019, www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-
04/17/c_137985601.htm.)

The U.S. arms sale plan unveiled Monday is a dangerous move that will only aggravate the
BEIJING, April 17 (Xinhua) --

already complex and grim situation across the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. government has approved a
possible 500-million-U.S. dollar military sale to Taiwan , claiming that the move will help to improve the security and defensive capability of the recipient.
Subsequently, Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen expressed "gratitude," saying that the arms sale was "timely." The situation across the Taiwan Strait, which is already

complicated and grim, is worsening as the United States has been using Taiwan to contain China while the Taiwan
administration kept seeking foreign intervention. The Taiwan question concerns China's sovereignty and territorial integrity and is

the most important and sensitive issue in China-U.S. relations. The U.S. arms sales to Taiwan
constitutes a serious violation of international law, the basic norms governing international relations,
the one-China principle and the three Sino-U.S. joint communiques and undermine China's sovereignty
and security interests. China's firm opposition to such arms sales is consistent and firm. Since the current U.S. administration took office, it
has constantly played the "Taiwan card" to contain China, especially in arms sales to Taiwan and military
exchanges between the United States and Taiwan . This has seriously damaged China-U.S. relations and
jeopardized peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwan question, which concerns China's core interests and the national bond of the Chinese
people, brooks no external interference. The U.S. administration has once again stirred up sensitive nerves in the Taiwan Strait. Its gross interference in China's internal affairs

has aroused the strong indignation of the Chinese people on both sides of the Strait. Some Taiwan organizations and people
protested outside the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) in Taipei, condemning U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and demanding "no war, only

peace," and "Taiwan is not a pawn for the United States." Therefore, we would like to advise the U.S. side to clearly recognize the high sensitivity and serious
harm of arms sales to Taiwan, correct mistakes, honor its commitments and handle Taiwan-related issues in a prudent and proper manner in accordance with the one-China principle and the provisions of the three Sino-U.S. joint

communiques. Taiwan's current Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration, which is teetering on the
brink of collapse, was overjoyed at the U.S. arms sales as if it had been given a "straw to save its life." Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP
administration have escalated provocations against the Chinese mainland , created disturbances recently and cooperated with the United
States in vigorously clamoring the so-called "military threat" from the mainland. In the face of next year's general election on the island, Tsai and the DPP will not hesitate to let

Taiwan serve as a pawn for forces of external interference in order to protect their power , regardless of the safety and
well-being of the Taiwanese people. This party has not only misjudged the situation but also deviated from the people's heart. U.S. weapons cannot guarantee Taiwan's

security. Tsai and the DPP cannot secure their power and position by seeking foreign interference or threatening the people. Tsai, the DPP and "Taiwan independence"
separatist elements should not play with fire or even think about it. They are doomed to be alone in the
face of the pressure of their own actions. On April 17, 124 years ago, the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed, securing foreigner's occupation of Taiwan for half a century. It left
lasting, painful memories for all Chinese. Today's China will never allow the historical tragedy of national division to repeat itself. No one and no force should underestimate

the determination and capability of the Chinese in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial
integrity.
 Relations K2 Warming
US-China relations k2 warming and de-escalating tensions
Cheung and Elbaum 19 (Cheung, Calvin AND MAX ELBAUM. “Climate Change. War. Poverty. How
the U.S.-China Relationship Will Shape Humanity’s Path.” In These Times, 21 Mar. 2019,
inthesetimes.com/article/21799/china-united-states-trump-war-poverty-imperialism-climate-change-
diplomacy.)

More than any other bilateral relationship, what happens between the United States and China will
shape global politics and human civilization in the 21st century. The success of efforts to combat
climate change, avoid a humanity-threatening war and build democratic, working-class movements in
both countries largely hinges on how Beijing and Washington manage their differences amid big
changes in the map of global power.

Right now, things are not looking good . Donald Trump's bellicose anti-China rhetoric and trade war
threats are only the most headline-grabbing manifestations of a dangerous underlying trend . Observers across the
spectrum of mainstream politics note rising tensions: The Los Angeles Times reported in December that U .S. policy toward China has shifted “from

engagement to confrontation,” and The Diplomat noted in January that that Washington's “new consensus” is for “strategic competition” with Beijing. The opening sentence of the Worldwide
Threat Assessment issued by U.S. Intelligence Agencies January 29 names “China and Russia” (in that order) as the most

prominent source of “threats to U.S. national security.” Michael Klare, long-time left analyst of world affairs and professor emeritus of peace and world security
studies at Hampshire College, argued in February that “for all intents and purposes, the U.S. and China are already at war with one another.”

Why is this happening? And what can U.S. peace and justice activists do to push the U.S.-China relationship in a different direction? Below we explore these questions in hopes of sparking more debate within the left. We offer these thoughts not as “China experts,” which we are not, but
as anti-racist and anti-militarist activists who believe it is urgent to demand that diplomacy replace economic and military confrontation in U.S.-China relations, with the ultimate aim of forging the international partnership necessary to take effective action against catastrophic climate
change.

The first is China's dramatic economic growth and steadily heightened technological and military capacity since its turn toward “reform and modernization” in the post-Mao era. China is now the second largest economy in the world and, by some measures, is predicted to surpass the
United States as number one in 10 to 20 years.

The second is the determination by U.S. capital to maintain its global hegemony by any means necessary even as its relative weight in an increasingly multi-polar global economy declines. We saw this expressed in the “pivot to Asia” policy under President Barack Obama, in response to
China's rise as the most powerful “peer competitor” to the United States since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Beijing's struggle to control economic development

Back in the late 1970s, Washington took a positive stance toward China's new economic policies, and was thrilled that Beijing signed on to its Cold War crusade against the USSR. U.S. capitalists participated deeply in China's post-Mao economic reforms, particularly after the nature of
those reforms changed in the 1990s. As Carl Walter and Fraser Howie describe in Red Capitalism, the Chinese Communist Party sought in that decade to remake the state-owned enterprises that anchored China's non-rural economy. U.S. investment banks helped restructure those
enterprises so that they functioned more like corporations that could compete in international markets. China also rapidly developed export industries based largely in the “special economic zones” open to overseas investment beginning in the 1980s. Those industries found a market in
the United States, where neoliberal economic policy was—with a few years' exception—producing wage stagnation and a corresponding appetite for low-priced goods.

Not coincidentally, by the 1990s, U.S. elites largely supported the strategy of constructive engagement with China. In 2000, the Clinton administration gave China 'Most Favored Nation' status and supported its entry into the World Trade Organization. The then-dominant view within the
U.S. capitalist class was that China's moves toward economic liberalization would necessarily bring political liberalization and incorporation of China into a U.S.-led economic and geopolitical order.

Although U.S. capitalists unquestionably benefited from China's economic reforms—think, for instance, of the profits reaped by Apple—the Chinese government was able to set several conditions on overseas investment. The huge size of the Chinese market and the grip of the Communist
Party on economic policy gave China almost unique leverage in dealing with foreign capital. Writing for Foreign Policy in August 2018, Jake Werner pointed out that China's alleged “cheating” is more accurately characterized as using its considerable muscle in a U.S.-dominated global
economy that is at bottom a “rigged game”:

The huge and rapidly growing China market convinced major foreign corporations to invest on terms negotiated with the state rather than unilaterally imposing their own conditions, as they did with manufacturing in Latin America or extractive industries in Africa. Most prominently,
China required foreign corporations entering the domestic market to participate in joint ventures with Chinese companies, which allowed domestic firms to learn the managerial and technological practices of the developed world. China also established regulations that secure favorable
terms for Chinese enterprises licensing the technologies of foreign firms.

While the issues of trade balances and tariffs get media attention, U.S. elites' economic grievances against China are largely based on Beijing's continued restrictions on international capital, as highlighted by Werner. This has influenced the leadership of both Democratic and Republican
parties, who apparently are preparing to criticize an anticipated settlement of the trade war as too soft, because it does not eliminate Chinese regulations.

All of this comes on top of U.S. capitalists' unease about the possibility that Chinese companies will outpace the United States in technological innovation. Huawei has been in the spotlight recently because the United States pressed Canada to arrest one of its executives on charges that
the company deceived U.S. banks into violating sanctions on Iran. But this is largely a pretext. Huawei is mainly a source of concern because it has been at the forefront of 5G wireless communications, which is widely seen as crucial to the development of new artificial intelligence
technology and the military innovations that will depend on it.

China has indeed integrated into the global economy, but it has managed to do so on its own terms as much as those set by the United States Rather than becoming increasingly subordinate to Washington, Beijing has been able to maintain considerable independence and economic
initiative.

China flexes its geopolitical muscle

As China's economic clout has increased, its capacity to take political initiative and develop its military strength has grown as well. Over the last decade especially, Beijing has increasingly flexed its muscle on the regional and international stage.

In Southeast Asia, this has been clearest in the long-simmering tensions over the South China Sea, which some term the West Philippine Sea. Several countries, including the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, oppose China's claim of sovereignty over the
strategically crucial and oil-rich waterway. The Philippines brought its case before an international tribunal at the Hague and secured a favorable verdict, but China refused to participate in the proceedings and has rejected the ruling. In the meantime, China has upped its military presence
in the disputed area. It has constructed new airstrips and military installations, sometimes accomplishing this by enlarging the size of islands it controls and creating entirely new islands. The United States, for its part, has conducted provocative naval maneuvers both in the South China
Sea and in the Strait of Taiwan. Here, the postwar U.S. view of the Pacific as the American Lake collides with China's determination to control a location that could—if push comes to shove—serve as a strategic chokepoint for China's energy imports.

Globally, China has spearheaded the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive infrastructure development project encompassing 70 countries. The goal is to create six different “economic corridors” that would integrate economies across Europe, Africa, and Asia with each other and, of
course, with China. The scope of this initiative is so vast that some have compared it to the Marshall Plan, which funded the reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II, but on a global scale. The physical environment of the world will be utterly transformed, as the BRI finances
“bridges, railways, pipelines, hydroelectric dams, highways, power grids” on a massive scale. Crucially, the key financial drivers of the BRI are Chinese-led and multilateral banks that are not dominated by the United States, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS
New Development Bank. In Latin America, Chinese banks have provided $140 billion dollars in loans in the last decade. As the BRI looks to expand to Latin America, we can expect ever-deeper connection between the Latin American and Chinese economies.

Like any economic initiative on this scale, the BRI has big geopolitical implications. Presently, China's economy depends on the U.S. consumers. This is one reason some scholars feel China is ultimately hemmed into a U.S.-led economic and political order. The BRI will allow China to
dramatically reduce its dependence on the U.S. consumer market. Simultaneously, it gives other smaller and weaker countries more leverage in dealings with Western capital: They now have an alternative direction to turn for investment and trade, even as many grapple with concerns
about negative effects of a large Chinese presence in their economies. These two developments represent a growing threat to U.S. dominance: China not only weakens a main source of Washington's current leverage over its policies but gains the potential to anchor an alignment of many
countries in counter-balancing U.S. power.
Washington's goal of “overmatch”
During the post-9/11 years, Washington was preoccupied with the so-called “War on Terror” and its disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. When the U.S. foreign policy and military
establishment came up for air to take stock under Obama, their consensus was they were behind the curve in assessing where the most serious threat to U.S. global hegemony really lay. The
result was Washington's “pivot to Asia” and, more recently, the explicit turn in China policy from a engagement to confrontation. Michael Klare describes the result:

Even before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the U.S. military and other branches of government
were already gearing up for a long-term quasi-war, involving both growing economic and diplomatic
pressure on China and a buildup of military forces along that country’s periphery. Since his arrival, such
initiatives have escalated into Cold War-style combat by another name with his administration committed to defeating China in a struggle for global economic,
technological, and military supremacy.

As it wages this struggle, Washington has some powerful weapons to deploy. A key one is its economic ace card: the special status of the U.S. dollar in the world
economy. But this status is thoroughly interwoven with U.S. military might. The combination is aptly described by Ho-fung Hung in The China Boom:

Although the U.S. share of the global economy and its political influence around the world have been dwindling since the 1970s, its residual geopolitical dominance
has been sustained by the continuous hegemonic status of the U.S. dollar in the international monetary system. This continuing status enables the United States to
borrow internationally at low interest rates so that Americans are able not only to live but also to fight beyond their means. The perpetuation of the dollar's
hegemony since the abolition of the gold standard in 1971 has been supported by the U.S. military's global supremacy.

the Trump administration makes no secret of its fundamental goal . The first comprehensive statement of the
Concerning military supremacy,

“overmatch,” defined as overwhelming

administration's doctrine, the National Security Strategy document released in December 2017, gave it a catch-phrase title:

capabilities “in sufficient scale to prevent enemy success and to ensure America's sons and daughters
will never be in a fair fight.”

“Overmatch” is already more than words on paper. In January, the first in a new generation of U.S.
nuclear weapons rolled off the assembly line . As James Carroll wrote in February for The Nation, “Fulfilling the Trump administration’s quest for nuclear-
war-fighting 'flexibility,' it isn’t designed as a deterrent against another country launching its nukes; it’s designed to be used . This is the weapon that could make the

previously 'unthinkable' thinkable.” Washington is simultaneously upping its cyberwarfare capacitie s. Although the cyber-conflict with
Russia gets more headlines, it's noteworthy that Vice President Mike Pence declared last October, “What the Russians are doing pales in comparison to what China is doing.” In the proposed

budget Trump sent to Congress last week, he called for a 5 percent increase in military spending —even more than the
Pentagon had requested—while demanding big cuts in domestic programs like education and environmental protection.

Dangers and prospects

To say all this is dangerous is an understatement. The costs of a ramped-up trade war would fall hardest on the working classes in both U.S. and China—and if it leads to a global downturn, on workers
and the poor across the globe. Calls to “get tough on China” are, at bottom, ways of shifting blame for people's economic woes away from the U.S. corporate elite. As Tobita Chow explained in July for In These Times, they tap into and reinforce the anti-Chinese racism long present in U.S.

And the multi-front Cold War described by Michael Klare means

politics and marginalize even the idea of solidarity between workers in both countries.

constant tension, with the very real danger that an initially small flashpoint conflict could escalate into
full-scale, even nuclear, war Short of short open conflict, constant tension between Washington and
.

Beijing increases the influence of nationalism, militarism and authoritarianism in both countrie , which s

almost inevitably translates into increases in domestic repression of popular movements, as well as
austerity.
What does all this mean for the left? There are important debates on the nature of China's social system and the impact of its geopolitical and global economic strategies. But regardless of
one's position in those debates, the U.S. left has a critical role to play in galvanizing opposition to the growing clamor for confrontation in U.S.-China relations. We can do this. But we need a
vision and practice that speaks to both humanity's common interest in sheer survival and the global working class' interest in a just and non-exploitative society.

We should prioritize the fight for a 180-degree turnaround in the U.S. stance toward China, demanding
that diplomacy and negotiation replace trade wars and military encirclement We should call for a switch .

from the goal of “containing China” to the goal of forging a U.S. China partnership that would take
common action against climate change and support a global campaign to address extreme poverty
worldwide This China-focused effort would be one component of a campaign to de-escalate all global
.

conflicts, and turn to diplomacy over military force . Such a campaign should push the U.S. government to abandon pursuit of hegemony in favor or acceptance of the fact that we all live in a multi-
polar world where, as Martin Luther King declared in 1983, “We must learn to live together as brothers [sic] or perish together as fools.”

Making progress on this front will be a challenge , not least because of the barrage of punditry and dominant media framing about China, which focuses exclusively on
(often legitimate) grievances and problems—and presents a one-sided picture of a complex society. On top of this, the Trump-dominated GOP and anti-China Democrats are the ones with the most clout on U.S.-China relations.
Despite these obstacles, there is a basis for building a broad-front campaign to redirect U.S.-China
relations for the sake of the planet and its inhabitant s. Such a campaign's demands would be consistent with the principle of the Green New Deal
on a global scale, would recognize that the United States and China are the world's largest emitters of carbon dioxide—China due to the size of its population, the United States due to its per-

A successful international effort to avert catastrophic climate change depends on joint

capita pollution levels.

action by the two countries.

Within all working-class and social justice movements, it’s vital to bring internationalism and anti-racism to the fore and stress how a decrease in tensions between
states sets more favorable conditions for democratic rights struggles and working-class movements in all countries. An important part of this effort is forging direct
ties between workers in the United States and those in China, as well as other countries. The last few years have seen a crackdown on independent labor organizing
under Xi Jinping and fewer chances for international worker-to-worker interaction. But their common interests remain: Both U.S. and Chinese workers confront
many of the same transnationals. And because Beijing's crackdown is directly connected to greater tensions with Washington and fears that the United States will
try to take advantage of protests in China to undermine the Chinese government—as the United States has done in so many other countries—fighting to reduce
U.S.-China tensions will ultimately benefit Chinese workers.

Gaining ground here is obviously a difficult process. But in the context of a surging resistance to Trumpism that includes newly combative layers of workers and a
growing socialist contingent, possibilities exist that were unimaginable even five years ago.

We don't have time to waste. Towards the end of the U.S.-USSR Cold War, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called for “a new way of thinking” whereby all countries, despite major ideological
and political differences, would recognize that our collective security was imperiled by the threat of nuclear war, environmental devastation and violence produced by the extreme
impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people. Gorbachev's call for common action against those threats was overwhelmed by the failure of his attempt to restructure Soviet society, as

Indeed, we are 30 years further

well as by the wave of capitalist triumphalism and U.S. aggression following the Soviet collapse. But all those dangers remain.

down the road toward climate catastrophe, global inequality is greater than it was in the 1980s, and
Washington is now producing nuclear weapons that are more likely to be used than ever. And this time,
it is the U.S.-China relationship which will largely decide what path humanity takes.
 Warming Bad – AT: Irreversible
Warming isn’t past the point of no return yet
Doug Moss et al 15, Founder, Publisher and Executive Editor of E - The Environmental Magazine,
Roddy Scheer, Editor / Writer / Producer at Earth Action Network Inc., "Have We Passed the Point of No
Return on Climate Change?", EarthTalk, Scientific American, April 13 2015,
www.scientificamerican.com/article/have-we-passed-the-point-of-no-return-on-climate-change/

While we may not yet have reached the “point of no return”—when no amount of cutbacks on
greenhouse gas emissions will save us from potentially catastrophic global warming—climate scientists
warn we may be getting awfully close. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a century ago, the average
global temperature has risen some 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Most climatologists agree that , while the warming to
date is already causing environmental problems, another 0.4 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature, representing a
global average atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) of 450 parts per million (ppm ), could set
in motion unprecedented changes in global climate and a significant increase in the severity of natural disasters—and as such could
represent the dreaded point of no return. Currently the atmospheric concentration of CO2 (the leading
greenhouse gas) is approximately 398.55 parts per million (ppm). According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), the federal scientific agency tasked with monitoring the health of our oceans and atmosphere, the current
average annual rate of increase of 1.92 ppm means we could reach the point of no return by 2042.
Environmental leaders point out that this doesn’t give us much time to turn the tide. Greenpeace, a leading
environmental advocacy group, says we have until around 2020 to significantly cut back on greenhouse gas
output around the world—to the tune of a five percent annual reduction in emissions overall—if we are to avoid so-called
“runaway” climate change. “The world is fast approaching a 'point of no return' beyond which extremely dangerous climate change
impacts can become unavoidable,” reports the group. “Within this time period, we will have to radically change our approach to energy
production and consumption.”
 Warming Bad – AT: Permafrost
Permafrost feedback will be slow, non-catastrophic and adaptable
E.A.G. Schuur et al ’15, [1/2] E.A.G. Schuur and C. Schadel: Center for Ecosystem Science and Society
and Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University, [3] A.D. McGuire: US Geological
Survey, Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, University of Alaska Fairbanks, [4] G. Grosse:
Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, [5] J.W. Harden: US
Geological Survey, [6] D.J. Hayes: Climate Change Science Institute and Environmental Sciences Division,
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, [7/8] G. Hugelius and P. Kuhry; Department of Physical Geography,
Stockholm University, [9] C.D. Koven: Earth Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
[10] D.M. Lawrence: National Center for Atmospheric Research, [11] S.M. Natali: Woods Hole Research
Center, [12/13] D. Olefeldt and M.R. Turetsky: Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph,
*Olefeldt, Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta, [14] V.E. Romanovsky:
Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Tyumen State Oil and Gas University, [15] K.
Schaefer: National Snow and Ice Data Center, [16] C.C. Treat: Earth Systems Research Center, Institute
for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, University of New Hampshire, [17] J.E. Vonk: Department of
Earth Sciences, Utrecht University, “Climate change and the permafrost carbon feedback,” Nature, Vol.
520, 4/9/15, doi:10.1038/nature14338, pgs. 176-177, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Climate-
Change-and-the-Permafrost-Carbon-Feedback-Schuur-
Mcguire/7e5bb2ada771107313c7a56cdaed9c60e24a2fed/pdf
Carbon pools in permafrost regions represent a large reservoir vulnerable to change in a warming climate. While some of this carbon will
continue to persist in soils and sediments over the long term, our understanding that a substantial fraction of this pool is susceptible to
microbial breakdown once thawed has been verified at the landscape scale (Box 1 and the Box 1 Figure). The exponential nature of microbial
decomposition and CO2 and CH4 release over time means that the initial decades after thaw will be the most important for greenhouse gas
release from any particular unit of thawed soil. Our
expert judgement is that estimates made by independent
approaches, including laboratory incubations, dynamic models, and expert assessment, seem to be
converging on,5%–15% of the terrestrial permafrost carbon pool being vulnerable to release in the
form of greenhouse gases during this century under the current warming trajectory, with CO2-carbon
comprising the majority of the release. There is uncertainty, but the vulnerable fraction does not appear to be twice as high or
half as much as 5%–15%, based on this analysis. Ten per cent of the known terrestrial permafrost carbon pool is
equivalent to ,130–160 Pg carbon. That amount, if released primarily in the form of CO2 at a constant
rate over a century, would make it similar in magnitude to other historically important biospheric
sources, such as land use change (0.9 6 0.5 Pg carbon per year; 2003–2012 average), but far less than fossil-fuel emissions88
(9.7 6 0.5 Pg carbon per year in 2012). Considering CH4 as a fraction of permafrost carbon release would increase the warming impact of these
emissions. At these rates, the observed and projected emissions of CO2 and CH4 from thawing
permafrost are unlikely to occur at a speed that could cause abrupt climate change over a period of a few
years to a decade1,9. A large pulse release of permafrost carbon on this timescale c ould cause climate
change that would incur catastrophic costs to society8 , but there is little evidence from either current
observations or model projections to support such a large and rapid pulse. Instead, permafrost carbon
emissions are likely to occur over decades and centuries as the permafrost region warms, making climate
change happen even faster than we project on the basis of emissions from human activities alone. Because of momentum in the system and
the continued warming and thawing of permafrost, permafrost carbon emissions are likely not only during this century but also beyond.
Although never likely to overshadow emissions from fossil fuel, each additional ton of carbon released from the permafrost region to the
atmosphere will probably incur additional costs to society.
 Warming Bad – AT: Adaptation
Adaptation fails – only mitigation averts worst consequences and extinction
Hansen 16 (James, adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at
Columbia University, “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms,” March 22, Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss.,
15, 20059–20179, 2015, http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/15/20059/2015/acpd-15-20059-
2015.pdf)

Introduction Humanity is rapidly extracting and burning fossil fuels without full understanding of the
consequences. Current assessments place emphasis on practical effects such as increasing extremes of heat waves, droughts,
heavy rainfall, floods, and encroaching 5 seas (IPCC, 2014; USNCA, 2014). These assessments and our recent study (Hansen et al.,
2013a) conclude that there is an urgency to slow carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, because the longevity of the
carbon in the climate system (Archer, 2005) and persistence of the induced warming (Solomon et al., 2010) may
lock in unavoidable highly undesirable consequences. 10 Despite these warnings, global CO2 emissions continue to increase as
fossil fuels remain the primary energy source. The argument is made that it is economically and morally responsible to continue fossil
fuel use for the sake of raising living standards, with expectation that humanity can adapt to climate change and find ways to
minimize effects via advanced technologies. 15 We suggest that this viewpoint fails to appreciate the nature of the
threat posed by ice sheet instability and sea level rise. If the ocean continues to accumulate heat and increase melting of
marine-terminating ice shelves of Antarctica and Greenland, a point will be reached at which it is impossible to avoid
large scale ice sheet disintegration with sea level rise of at least several meters . The economic and social cost of
losing 20 functionality of all coastal cities is practically incalculable. We suggest that a strategic approach relying on adaptation
to such consequences is unacceptable to most of humanity, so it is important to understand this threat as soon as possible.
taiwan
 deter invasion – Chinese perception
Arms sales key to deter Chinese invasion – modifies perception of success
Bowman, senior director for the Center on Military and Political Power at the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Smits, research analyst for the Center on
Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 2019
(Bradley and Mikhael, “Trade deal with China or not, the US must bolster Taiwan’s defense,”
DefenseNews, 6/26/19, https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2019/06/26/trade-deal-
with-china-or-not-the-us-must-bolster-taiwans-defense/ accessed 7/9/19)

Admittedly, America’s arms sales to Taiwan are relatively modest compared to China’s military buildup.
However, the failure to provide Taiwan the required weapons exacerbated the shift toward Beijing in
the military balance. As a result, across most combat domains, Beijing has established both a
quantitative and qualitative advantage over Taiwan.

Consequently, there is a risk that Beijing planners and decision-makers might determine they could
launch a successful offensive against Taiwan. That perception in Beijing makes aggression in the strait
and a war with the United States more likely.

The bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission listed aggression against Taiwan as a top concern,
arguing that allowing China to absorb Taiwan by military force would constitute a “crushing blow to
America’s credibility and regional position.”

In addition to genuine hard-power concerns, there is also a matter of principle. When an authoritarian
power threatens and bullies a democratic people, America is not neutral.

Furthermore, providing Taiwan the means to defend itself is not just consistent with sound policy and
good principle — it is the law. The Taiwan Relations Act made clear that the establishment of diplomatic
relations with Beijing rested on the expectation that the future of Taiwan would be “determined by
peaceful means.” To make this a reality, the law says the U.S. will provide the weapons “necessary to
enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.”

Admittedly, successive U.S. administrations have interpreted and implemented this rather vague statute
differently. However, what seems clear is that Taiwan’s ability to defend itself against an increasingly
belligerent and capable military threat from the mainland is in doubt. That would suggest that the
current arms package under consideration is not only permissible and advisable under the law, but
essential.

The administration deserves credit for expanding freedom of navigation operations in the Taiwan Strait
and, at least initially, asking Congress to support new arms sales to Taiwan. Those are good first steps,
but they are not enough. In addition to providing these arms without delay and stopping the erosion of
U.S. military superiority vis-a-vis China, Washington should also provide Taiwan the fighter aircraft and
other weapons it needs to make Beijing think twice before undertaking aggression in the strait.

In its report this month, the Pentagon reiterated the U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s self-defense, invoking
the words of the Taiwan Relations Act.
Those are good words. But in any potential conversation with President Xi this week, President Trump
would do well to remember that it will take more than words to deter aggression from the bullies in
Beijing.
 emboldens taiwan
Pro-Taiwan action emboldens more provocative action from Tsai and the DDP – risks
cross-strait escalation
Zhenguang, professor at the Institute of Taiwan Studies, Beijing Union University,
2019
(Li, “By using Taiwan, US is playing with fire,” China Daily, 3/25/19,
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201903/25/WS5c981058a3104842260b23ba.html accessed 7/9/19
GDI-JEM)

Xi's speech was widely welcomed by people on both sides of the Straits, most of whom support the
peaceful reunification of Taiwan with the motherland. But the separatist forces on the island, who
represent a miniscule percentage of the island's population, and their representative, the ruling
Democratic Progressive Party, have devised a counter-plan against the peaceful reunification plan to
fulfill their own narrow political gains.

And at such a crucial moment, 10 US Congress members have made a 7-minute video to commemorate
the 40th anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act to openly show their support to Tsai and her "pro-
independence" supporters.

Although they comprise a small part of the Congress, they hold representative posts for example James
Inhofe is co-chairman of US Senate Committee on Armed Services and Congressional Taiwan Caucus,
and Eliot Engel is chairman of House Foreign Affairs Committee, who has said the US would provide
security support for Taiwan to jointly counter the mainland.

Conspiracy to contain Beijing won't work

The Congress members have also demanded that the US administration put into practice the Taiwan
Travel Act and the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act, both passed last year, to fulfill its promise to the Tsai
authorities. In their letter to US President Donald Trump, some Congress members have said the Taiwan
Relations Act will help maintain peace, security and stability in the Indo-Pacific region and suppress
Beijing's so-called aggression.

Moreover, to seek the US' protection and contain Beijing, the Tsai authorities have been hyping up the
island's strategic value for Washington. But the fact is, the empty promises given by the Congress
members cannot guarantee any safety to the Tsai authorities and, instead, could put them in danger.

Ahead of the 2020 elections on the island, some US Congress members are inciting the Tsai authorities
to provoke disputes with the mainland by supporting those seeking "Taiwan independence". But since
any attempt to split Taiwan from the motherland would lead to a conflict, it will be in the interest of
neither side of the Straits nor the US. Worse, such a conflict would destroy peace and stability in the
entire Asia-Pacific region.

US Congress must stop sending wrong signals

If the US Congress continues to send the wrong signals to the "pro-independence" DPP, it will embolden
the Tsai authorities to take more risky actions, and thus damage cross-Straits ties further, harming the
interests of Beijing and Washington both.

US Congress members are elected by American voters as their representatives and, therefore, they
should always put the interests of their people and country first. And instigating the Tsai authorities to
further damage cross-Straits ties certainly doesn't serve the interest of either American voters or the US
as a country.
 AT: Arms Sales minor
Arms sales aren’t a small incident—they can spark a major confrontation
Panda 2019 (Ankit Panda is an editor at The Diplomat. He writes on security, politics, economics, and
culture. “Are the US and China About to Face off Over American Fighter Sales to Taiwan?”,
https://thediplomat.com/2019/03/are-the-us-and-china-about-to-face-off-over-american-fighter-sales-
to-taiwan/ , March 25, 2019)

The United States and China appear to be heading toward a major confrontation over the possible sale
of American fighters to Taiwan. Last week, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen confirmed that the
country’s Ministry of Defense had submitted a formal request to Washington, D.C., to purchase F-16V
Viper fighters. Tsai said the decision to make the request was supported by a review of Taiwan’s defense
needs. Days later, Bloomberg News reported that the White House was poised to approve the
Taiwanese request. If that report is true, the United States would be turning course on what has been a
longstanding reluctance to sell fighters to Taiwan , even as it has authorized other arms sales in line with the 1979 Taiwan
Relations Act, which requires the U.S. government to support Taiwan “with arms of a defensive character.” Even as the Obama administration
and the Trump administration have approved weapons and spare parts for sale to Taiwan, fighters
have long been seen as a
bridge too far given Beijing serious reservations. The United States authorized the sale of 150 F-16 fighters to Taiwan in 1992.
The Obama administration, after receiving a request from Taipei, turned it down, initiating a set of upgrades instead to Taipei’s existing fleet.
The issue hasn’t gone unnoticed in China, where Taiwan is seen as an inherent part of the country.
Relations across the Taiwan Strait have been particularly strained since Tsai’s inauguration in 2016. The
Taiwanese president hails from the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), though she herself has not explicitly supported
independence — long a red-line for Beijing — Tsai, however, has refused to endorse the so-called “1992 consensus,” which her predecessor
had supported and which forms what Beijing sees as the baseline for cordial cross-strait relations. “China’s position to firmly oppose arms sales
to Taiwan is consistent and clear,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said during a press briefing on Friday. “We have made
stern representations to the U.S. We have urged the U.S. to fully recognize the sensitivity of this issue and the harm it will cause.” The
prospect of a fighter sale to Taiwan this time comes at a time of particularly heightened U.S.-China
tensions. The Trump administration has been known to seek leverage with Beijing across issues and it is possible that this may turn into the
latest case of Taiwan being used a possible bargaining chip as Trump seeks to clinch a favorable trade deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Trump, however, has been unconventional on Taiwan policy in the past. As president-elect, he broke expectations by receiving a telephone call
from Tsai. That call occurred at a time when Trump had yet to endorse the United States’ one-China policy as president — something that he
did for the first time in February 2017. Either
way, Tsai’s fighter request and the Trump administration’s reported
acceptance could set up another major area of turbulence between the United States and China.
 AT: Interdependence Checks
Interdependence doesn’t check war--
White 2015 (Hugh White is professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. His book The China Choice:
Why We Should Share Power was published in the US last year by Oxford University Press. “Would America Risk a Nuclear War with China over
Taiwan?” http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/would-america-risk-nuclear-war-china-over-taiwan-12808 May 5 2015)

After a decade of relative harmony, tensions between Beijing and Taipei are rising again . As Taiwan's leaders
and voters face big choices about their future relations with China, America must think carefully about its commitments to Taiwan. Would
America be willing go to war with China to prevent Taiwan being forcibly united with the mainland? J. Michael Cole, responding in The National
Interest to a recent op-ed of mine in Singapore's Straits Times, expresses a widely held assumption that it would, and should. To
many
people it seems self-evident that America would honor the commitments enshrined in the Taiwan
Relations Act. But the TRA was passed in 1979, when China's GDP was 1/20th the size of America's, its
place in the global economy was miniscule, its navy and air force were negligible, and its prospects for
progress depended completely on America's goodwill. (Recommended: 5 Chinese Weapons of War India Should Fear) So
back then a US-China conflict carried much bigger economic and military risks for China than for
America. That made the TRA's commitments both highly credible and very unlikely to be tested.
Washington could safely assume that Beijing would back off to avoid a conflict in which China had so much more to lose
than America. Things are different today. China's economy is now so big and so central to global trade and
capital flows that the consequences of any disruption would be just as serious for America as for China. Militarily, America can no
longer expect a swift and certain victory in a war over Taiwan. China's anti-access/area-denial capabilities
would preclude direct US intervention unless those capabilities had first been degraded by a sustained and wide-ranging strike
campaign against Chinese bases and forces. (Recommended: 4 Chinese Weapons of War Taiwan Should Fear) China would very likely
respond to such a campaign with attacks on US and allied bases throughout Asia. The US has no evident
means to cap the resulting escalation spiral , and no one could be sure it would stop below the nuclear threshold. The
possibility of nuclear attacks on US cities would have to be considered. These new realities of power mean
that today a US-China conflict would impose equal risks and costs on both sides. And where costs and
risks are equal, the advantage lies with those who have more at stake, and hence greater resolve.
China's leaders today seem to think they hold this advantage, and they are probably right. It is therefore a
big mistake to keep assuming, as many people seem to do, that China would be sure to back off before a crisis
over Taiwan became a conflict. (Recommended: 5 Chinese Weapons of War America Should Fear)

Nationalism outweighs interdependence

John Plender 13. Senior editorial writer and columnist at the Financial Times since 1981, an assignment
he combined until recently with current affairs broadcasting for the BBC and Channel Four. 04/29/2013.
“China and the Fallacy That Trade Will Always Lead to Peace.” FT.Com; London. ProQuest,
https://search-proquest-com/docview/1346848983/citation/A922ED556F674BD7PQ/1.

Any reassurance the world may have derived from Beijing's repeated emphasis on China's "peaceful rise"
has long since been swept away by increasingly threatening rhetoric, most notably towards Japan over
the disputed Senkaku-Diaoyu islands. Indeed, the Pacific region looks set to become the testing ground
for an old theory that has enjoyed a striking comeback thanks to globalisation: the notion that economic
interdependence is conducive to peace. Historically, the idea is associated with Montesquieu, the French Enlightenment thinker
who believed moralistic philosophy and religious precept had failed to restrain man's destructive passions, but that these passions could be
harnessed by the pursuit of material self-interest. In De l'esprit des lois, he declared that "the natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace". In
the 19th century, the economic liberal Richard Cobden extended the argument, saying that the principle of free trade would not only remove
the desire to build empires, armies and navies but lead to benign global government. Such thinking was dealt a devastating
blow by the outbreak of the first world war. The blow was not quite fatal. After 1945, the proposal by Robert Schuman for a
Franco-German coal and steel community, which later morphed into the EU, specifically aimed to bind France and Germany so close as, in the
statesman's words, to make war "not only unthinkable but materially impossible". Perhaps the most powerful recent statement of this liberal
internationalism comes from the Yale economist, Robert Shiller, who argues in his book, Finance and the Good Society, that financial
interconnectedness may help prevent war because it provides "a civilised stage for the playing out of aggressive impulses . . . Thus financial
development may lead to a kinder and gentler - if not altogether kind and gentle - society." If this argument has proved resilient, it might be
because there is something in it. Developed countries no longer engage in wars of plunder against each other, although the developing world is
another matter. It seems inconceivable, too, that German tanks will once again sweep into France, the Netherlands or Belgium. Yet whether
that is down to economic interdependence or to the complex EU political ecosystem is moot. Moreover, the cold war provided France and
Germany with a common enemy and a nuclear context that were conducive to a psychological shift away from militarism and nationalism.
China presents an overwhelming difficulty. It is highly interdependent. Between 2009 and 2011, trade accounted for
53 per cent of gross domestic product, compared with just 28 per cent for the US. Its pursuit of a mercantilist exchange rate policy has boosted
official reserves to more than $3tn, which are substantially invested in the IOUs of its strategic rival. It is a big recipient of direct investment
from the US, Japan and Europe. In a phrase used by Prof Shiller, its
"conflictual tendencies have space to roam" . Yet it is
far from clear that this has led to a kinder, gentler society in China . To the modest extent that the country has become
more liberal since 1978, interconnectedness has played a part. But this has stemmed more from the internet, which has
proved hard for Beijing to control, than from trade. More important, interdependence has done little to damp
the nationalist instincts that have driven China's new assertiveness and prompted nationalistic
responses in Japan and elsewhere. And that is the most powerful counter-argument to Montesquieu et
al. Modern wars are more often a product of tribalism and nationalism reinforced by deep insecurities
and arms races. There is also the risk that the ruling elite will, quite rationally, put its own interests
before those of the nation. Since its legitimacy derives primarily from high economic growth, its survival
in an economic crisis may depend on whipping up nationalist sentiment to the point of using force
against its neighbours. In that event, Japan's US security guarantee will matter far more than economic
links. John Maynard Keynes, against Montesquieu and Cobden, argued in 1933 that free trade combined with capital mobility
was likely to "set up strains and enmities" that were more likely to provoke war than inhibit
warmongers. In the course of this century, China may yet tilt the argument in Keynes's direction.
 AT: China Defense
Their defense is right about China war broadly—which takes out their prolif and
deterrence impacts—but Taiwan is the one exception where war is possible
Seligman 2019 (Lara Seligman is Foreign Policy’s Pentagon correspondent. Before joining FP, she
served as the Pentagon editor for Aviation Week and Space Technology. Seligman has also held positions
at Inside Defense, Defense News, National Journal, and The Hill. She is a graduate of the University of
Pennsylvania. “China’s Scare Tactics Prompt U.S. Fears of a Clash Over Taiwan”,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/25/chinas-scare-tactics-prompt-u-s-fears-of-a-clash-over-taiwan/ ,
MARCH 25, 2019)

JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii— U.S. military forces in the Pacific are alarmed by what they see as an
increasingly capable China using military intimidation and economic coercion to bully its smaller
neighbors. So far, these tactics fall short of actual armed conflict. But U.S. defense officials here and in
Washington, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic, say if the United States does not stay on alert in the
region, Beijing could use force to advance its interests— and Taiwan in particular is a major potential flash
point. Among the signs of Beijing’s increasing aggression, a Chinese warship came within 45 yards of the bow of a Navy destroyer in the
South China Sea late last year, a close encounter the service characterized as “unsafe and unprofessional.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy has
increased the frequency of movement through the strategically important Taiwan Strait, including most recently on March 24, after China
repeatedly sent military aircraft and ships to circle the island for drills. And in January, China’s President Xi Jinping warned that any efforts by
the contested island democracy to assert its full independence could be met by armed force, and he implicitly threatened the United States if it
tries to intervene. In what appears to be a signal to China, the
Trump administration has reportedly given tacit approval
to Taiwan’s request for 60 new F-16 fighter jets, prompting fresh protests from Beijing. Previous
administrations, including former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, rejected Taiwan’s
request to buy new F-16s, likely so as not to provoke China. But this time, while the formal process has not yet been
completed, officials and experts said it will likely go through given President Donald Trump’s administration’s more
hawkish attitude toward China. John Bolton, Trump’s national security advisor, is a proponent of the deal, said one former defense
official. “There is a consensus that’s almost bipartisan in Washington that it’s time to be a bit more assertive against China,” said Richard
Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group. “This is the part where fighters are geopolitics with wings.” The U.S. military’s increasing concern
over China’s actions in the Pacific come amid tense negotiations between the Trump administration and Beijing to end a tariff and trade rules
standoff that has roiled global markets. National and financial security are inexorably tangled in the region, as China uses not just military but
also economic tactics to coerce its vulnerable neighbors. “China represents our greatest long-term strategic threat to a free and open Indo-
Pacific, and to the United States,” Adm. Phil Davidson, the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, recently warned the Senate. Between the
Spratly and Paracel islands in the South China Sea, China has built roughly eight islands, populated with advanced surface-to-air missiles and
airfields that can support bombers and other aircraft, said one U.S. Air Force official here. At the same time, Beijing has employed dubious
maritime tactics in the South China Sea, such as using disguised military vessels, painted white to look like China Coast Guard ships, to
intimidate Vietnamese fishing boats. China also has between 100,000 and 150,000 fishing vessels that “at any point they could operationalize”
and use “to blockade, intimidate, or coerce other nations,” the official said. While
an all-out war between the United States
and China is unlikely, Taiwan is the one place where the two countries’ conflicting interests could lead
to a military confrontation, said one senior U.S. defense official. Beijing has opposed any attempt by the island nation
to declare independence since 1949, when the two split after Mao Zedong’s Communists won China’s civil war.
Extensions
 2AC War Now

US support for Taiwan ensures escalatory measures – that causes nuclear conflict
because the US gets drawn in
Carpenter 6/8 – a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at
the National Interest, is the author of twelve books and more than eight hundred articles on
international affairs. (Ted Galen, “Forget the U.S.-China Trade War: Is a Conflict Over Taiwan the Real
Threat?” National Interest, June 8, 2019, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/forget-us-china-trade-war-
conflict-over-taiwan-real-threat-61627)//RP

Tensions between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are surging to an alarming extent. The latest
indicator is the recent exchange of heated rhetoric between Gen. Wei Fenghe, China’s Minister of National
Defense, and Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council , the Taiwanese government’s chief policymaking body dealing with cross-strait relations. As Taiwan’s
self-proclaimed protector, Washington should be extremely worried about these developments. Speaking on June 1 at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual multilateral conference on Pacific

security issues,Wei warned against efforts either in Taiwan or foreign countries to thwart China’s goal of
reunification. Moreover, “any underestimation of the PLA’s resolve and will is extremely dangerous.” Wei added
ominously that, “If anyone dares to split Taiwan from China, th e Chinese military will have no choice but to

fight at all costs, at all costs, (sic.) for national unity. If the PLA cannot even safeguard the unity of our motherland, what do we need it for?”
The Mainland Affairs Council responded with equally harsh and uncompromising language. In a statement issued
the following day, the council reasserted that Taiwan has never been a part of the PRC and would never accept

Beijing’s control or threats. It accused China not only of “challenging international norms and order,” but added the gratuitous slap that Beijing’s claim to seek peaceful
development was “a lie of the ages.” Lest anyone not fully grasp the extent of Taipei’s hostility toward the PRC, the statement went on: “We need to remind the public that the Chinese
Communist Party is practicing anti-democracy, anti-peace between the two sides of the strait and further resorting to war. This is the main cause of the tension in the Taiwan Strait and the

The vitriolic exchange

region, and it is the source of danger and provocation against peace and stability.” Do You Know What Happened Today In History?

constituted a worrisome escalation of the animosity between Taipei and Beijing that has been roiling
for the past three years. The victory of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Taiwan’s 2016 elections
dashed any hopes Chinese leaders had that the burgeoning economic ties with the mainland would
translate gradually into increased Taiwanese popular support for political reunification. Anger at that
strategy’s failure led Beijing to revive a campaign to increase Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation by poaching
the few small nations that still maintain formal relations with Taipei. The PRC’s menacing military
activities also increased. Chinese war games in and around the Taiwan Strait have soared since 2016.
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s 2019 report to Congress also concludes that Beijing is building up
its ground, air, and naval forces to achieve a more robust capability to invade Taiwan. Anger at Beijing’s treatment of
Taiwan has led to congressional and executive branch measures to strengthen Washington’s backing for Taipei. A major step occurred in March 2018 when

President Trump signed into law the Taiwan Travel Act (TTA), which encouraged high-level U.S. officials to meet with

their Taiwan counterparts. That legislation, which passed both houses of Congress, ended Washington’s cautious practice under the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) of holding
meetings only with relatively low-level Taiwanese officials. It was especially noticeable that the TTA specifically promoted interaction by “cabinet-level national security officials.” That provision

Bolton’s
proved to be more than a symbolic gesture when National Security Adviser John Bolton met with Taiwan National Security Council Secretary-General David Lee in May.

intention to push for stronger security ties between the United States and Taiwan cannot be overstated.
Before his current stint in government service, he pushed for highly dangerous and provocative policies. He urged the United States to establish formal

diplomatic relations with Taiwan and even advocated moving U.S. military forces from Okinawa to Taiwan. Either measure would cross a
bright red line as far as Beijing is concerned and would likely trigger PRC military action to prevent
Taiwan’s permanent political separation from the mainland. Having someone with those views holding a crucial policy post and sitting just a
few doors down from the Oval Office greatly increases the likelihood of a further boost in U.S. support for Taiwan, despite the risk of war with China. There are multiple signs from various
sources of growing U.S. backing for Taiwan’s de facto independence. Congress certainly is stepping up its support. By a unanimous voice vote in early May, the House of Representatives passed
the Taiwan Assurance Act, which expresses firm support for Taiwan while urging Taipei to increase its own defense spending. The legislation also recommends that Washington continue
“regular sales of defense articles” to Taiwan and back Taipei’s participation in international organizations—something Beijing emphatically resists. The Trump administration doesn’t seem to
need much prodding. U.S. warships have transited the Taiwan Strait on several occasions over the past year to demonstrate military support for Taipei. At the Shangri-La Dialogue session,
Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan stated that the United States would no longer “tiptoe around” destabilizing Chinese behavior regarding Taiwan or the South China Sea. While

Americans are focused on the ongoing trade war between the United States and China, the danger is growing of an actual shooting war that could involve Taiwan. The rhetoric
coming out of both Beijing and Taipei is increasingly confrontational and shrill. Taiwan’s governing party
is firmly committed to resisting the PRC’s pressure for unification; indeed, incumbent president Tsai Ing-
wen is being challenged by an even more hardline, pro-independence faction within the DPP. At the
same time, Chinese leaders seem intent on pushing their reunification agenda with greater insistence
and urgency. Those are not comforting trends. Washington has a vague but very real commitment under the Taiwan
Relations Act to protect the island’s security . Both Congress and the Trump administration seem to be drifting toward boosting the traditional level of U.S.
support in response to Beijing’s escalating pressure on Taiwan. The danger is growing that the TRA’s paper security commitment may be put to a real-world test. U.S. leaders and

the American people need to ask themselves whether they are really willing to risk war with a
nuclear-armed power to protect Taiwan. The prudent answer clearly should be “no.”
 Uniq: China Mod = Risk War

China is quickly ramping up military capabilities – that’s increasing hostilities

Seligman 19 – is Foreign Policy’s Pentagon correspondent. Before joining FP, she served as the
Pentagon editor for Aviation Week and Space Technology. Seligman has also held positions at Inside
Defense, Defense News, National Journal, and The Hill. She is a graduate of the University of
Pennsylvania. (Lara, “U.S. Increasingly Concerned About a Chinese Attack on Taiwan” Foreign Policy,
January 16, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/16/u-s-increasingly-concerned-about-a-chinese-
attack-on-taiwan)//RP

The U.S. Defense Department is increasingly concerned that China’s growing military might could
embolden it to launch a full-out attack on Taiwan. A new assessment of China’s military power published by the department’s Defense Intelligence
Agency hints that Beijing is building up its military capabilities so that it will have a range of options to attack

Taiwan if it decides to—and potentially the U nited States if it intervenes militarily. The news comes amid
Washington’s renewed focus on Beijing’s mounting economic and military clout. The two countries are locked in a trade
war that has roiled global markets and dampened economic outlooks. Meanwhile, Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, in his first day on the job earlier this month, told his staff to

focus on “China, China, China.” As the assessment began to emerge in the U.S. news media, a senior Chinese military official warned the U.S .
Navy’s top officer on Tuesday in Beijing against any “interference” in support of Taiwan’s
independence. In a meeting with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, General Li Zuocheng, a member of the Central Military Commission, said Beijing
would defend its claim to Taiwan “at any cost. ” Beijing has signaled for years that it wants Taiwan to be
reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary . The two split after China’s 1949 civil war won by Mao Zedong’s communists. It has opposed any
attempt by the island nation to declare independence. This goal “has served as the primary driver for China’s military

modernization,” according to the report. The Pentagon is also concerned about China’s growing military presence far from its borders, including in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa,
where it has built a permanent base, a senior defense official told reporters Jan. 16. “We now have to be able to look for a Chinese military

that is active everywhere,” the official said. “I’m not saying that they are a threat or about to take military action everywhere, but they are present in a lot of places, and
we will have to interact with them, engage with them, deal with them, monitor them more broadly than we’ve ever had to before.” The Defense Department is

particularly worried that this increase in capability makes a regional conflict more likely , the official
said, with the most likely target being Taiwan. Leaders of the People’s Liberation Army might inform Chinese President Xi Jinping sometime soon that
they are confident in their capability to take on both Taiwan and the U.S. Navy, the official stressed. “As a lot of these technologies mature, as [China’s] reorganization of their military comes

our concern is they will reach a point where internally, within their
into effect, as they become more proficient with these capabilities,

decision-making, they will decide that using military force for a regional conflict is something that is
more eminent,” the official said. In recent months, U.S. Navy ships have repeatedly traversed through the Taiwan strait, which separates mainland China from the island nation.
Elbridge Colby, the director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, said the change in the Pentagon’s assessment of the risk to Taiwan is “very significant”—
particularly because for China, taking on Taiwan means taking on the U.S. Navy.
 Uniq: Risk of War High

The threat of confrontation between the US and China is at its peak – new arms sales
are the key fuel to Chinese aggression
Panda 3/25 – an editor at The Diplomat. He writes on security, politics, economics, and culture. (Ankit,
“Are the US and China About to Face off Over American Fighter Sales to Taiwan?” The Diplomat, March
25, 2019, https://thediplomat.com/2019/03/are-the-us-and-china-about-to-face-off-over-american-
fighter-sales-to-taiwan)//RP

The United States and China appear to be heading toward a major confrontation over the possible sale of
American fighters to Taiwan. Last week, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen confirmed that the country’s
Ministry of Defense had submitted a formal request to Washington, D.C., to purchase F-16V Viper fighters. Tsai
said the decision to make the request was supported by a review of Taiwan’s defense needs. Days later, Bloomberg News reported that the White House

was poised to approve the Taiwanese request. If that report is true, the United States would be turning course on
what has been a longstanding reluctance to sell fighters to Taiwan, even as it has authorized other arms sales in line with
the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which requires the U.S. government to support Taiwan “with arms of a defensive character.” Even as the Obama administration and
the Trump administration have approved weapons and spare parts for sale to Taiwan, fighters have long been seen as a bridge too far
given Beijing serious reservations. The United States authorized the sale of 150 F-16 fighters to Taiwan in 1992. The Obama administration,
after receiving a request from Taipei, turned it down, initiating a set of upgrades instead to Taipei’s existing fleet. The issue hasn’t gone

unnoticed in China, where Taiwan is seen as an inherent part of the country. Relations across the
Taiwan Strait have been particularly strained since Tsai’s inauguration in 2016. The Taiwanese president hails from the
independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), though she herself has not explicitly supported independence — long a red-line for Beijing — Tsai,
however, has refused to endorse the so-called “1992 consensus,” which her predecessor had supported and which forms what Beijing sees as the baseline for
cordial cross-strait relations. “China’s position to firmly oppose arms sales to Taiwan is consistent and clear ,” Chinese
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said during a press briefing on Friday. “We have made stern representations to the U.S. We have urged the U.S. to fully
recognize the sensitivity of this issue and the harm it will cause.” The
prospect of a fighter sale to Taiwan this time comes at a
time of particularly heightened U.S.-China tensions. The Trump administration has been known to seek leverage with Beijing across
issues and it is possible that this may turn into the latest case of Taiwan being used a possible bargaining chip as Trump seeks to clinch a favorable trade deal with
Chinese President Xi Jinping. Trump, however, has been unconventional on Taiwan policy in the past. As president-elect, he broke expectations by receiving a
telephone call from Tsai. That call occurred at a time when Trump had yet to endorse the United States’ one-China policy as president — something that he did for
the first time in February 2017. Either way, Tsai’s
fighter request and the Trump administration’s reported acceptance
could set up another major area of turbulence between the United States and China. Taiwan’s fleet of multi-role fighter
aircraft consists of three squadrons of Mirage 2000-5/E/D fighters, three squadrons of the F-5E/F Tiger Ii, six squadrons of the F-16A/B Fighting Falcon, and five
squadrons of the indigenously developed F-CK-1 Ching Kuo series of fighters. In an interview with CNN last month, Tsai assessed Taiwan’s defense readiness against
a possible invasion by China, noting that the island was “well prepared for an attack at any time — for any situation where we would need to fend China off for 24
hours.” She added that she “would hope that after withstanding any first wave of attacks ourselves, other countries throughout the world would stand up in unison
and put strong pressure upon China in response.”
 Uniq: Tensions high

Trump ties with Taiwan are increasing tensions – any push for independence prompts
quick Chinese invasion
Gries and Wang 19 – (*Peter Fries is Lee Kai Hung Chair and Director of the Manchester China
Institute and Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Manchester. **Tao Wang is a doctoral
candidate in East Asian politics at the University of Manchester. “Will China Seize Taiwan?” Foreign
Affairs, February 15, 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2019-02-15/will-china-seize-
taiwan)//RP

China must be, and will be reunified,” Chinese President Xi Jinping declared in a speech in January. Xi
spoke of “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan, but he warned, “We do not forsake the use of force.” Ever
since Hong Kong and Macau rejoined Mainland China in 1997 and 1999, respectively, Chinese expectations that Taiwan would follow suit have grown. When, a decade ago, the Beijing

Olympics and the global financial crisis boosted China’s confidence on the world stage, those expectations redoubled. But “peaceful reunification” has proved elusive. After Taiwan
elected Tsai Ing-wen, of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), to the presidency in
2016, many Mainland Chinese lost patience with the idea. Some Chinese nationalists now argue that
China has only a brief window of opportunity to seize Taiwan. Talk of “forceful reunification” is
ascendant. China has already begun to tighten the noose. It has forced Taiwan out of international bodies, such as the World Health
Organization; required airlines to replace “Taiwan” with descriptions such as “Taiwan, Province of China”; and induced five more countries to sever relations with Taipei. Beijing

seems to believe that the United States will sit by as it squeezes Taiwan. Taipei, meanwhile, has
convinced itself that China has no plans to invade. And U.S. President Donald Trump seems to think he
can rock the boat without consequence s. All are wrong—and their wishful thinking is raising the odds
of conflict. “CHINA DREAM” IN BEIJING Now that Xi has consolidated power, he seeks a legacy befitting the great
emperors of old: the reunification of the Middle Kingdom. “The only thing that will make him the greatest leader in the Chinese Communist
Party’s history is to take Taiwan back,” Shen Dingli, a foreign relations scholar at Fudan University, told Quartz in 2018. “If he were to achieve China’s reunification, who will say he is second to

Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping?" There are signs that Xi believes the world will sit by if China invades Taiwan. Xi, whose “China
Dream” promises to make China great again, likely agrees. “Fight a war, win a war,” is one of his signature slogans. In 2017, he presided over a military parade with a replica of Taiwan’s
presidential palace visible in the distance. Chinese soldiers had constructed it to train for an invasion of Taiwan. That same year, China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, circumnavigated

The PLA is likely preparing for a contingency to unify Taiwan with China by force ,” the U.S.
Taiwan twice. “

Defense Department told Congress in 2018. There are signs that Xi believes the world will sit by if China invades Taiwan. “Xi has told people that he was
impressed by Putin’s seizure of Crimea,” a Beijing insider told the reporter Evan Osnos in 2015. “[Putin] got a large piece of land and resources” and met little resistance from the West. Many
among China’s elite have embraced military action. “The possibility for peaceful reunification is gradually dissipating,” Wang Zaixi, a former deputy director of the PRC’s Taiwan Affairs Office,

Many ordinary Chinese

declared in 2017. “There will very likely be military conflict,” retired Chinese General Wang Hongguang told the People’s Daily in December.

agree. “If we want to take our island back, we have to use force. ” reads a Weibo post from last November. Both Chinese academics and
journalists argue that this sentiment is widespread. “Mainland Chinese public opinion became impatient with Taiwan a long

time ago,” former director of the Chinese Academy of Social Science’s Institute of Taiwan Studies Zhou Zhihuai
wrote in 2017. “Mainland Chinese will be very happy to see the PLA take action to punish a ‘pro-independence Taiwan’,” a Global Times editorial claimed in 2018. WISHFUL THINKING IN TAIPEI

Despite this increased militancy across the Strait, Taipei has convinced itself that China will not attack.
Many in the ruling Democratic Progressive Party have persuaded themselves that China is too sensible to take military action. “The mainland Chinese leader today is a rational decision maker,”

“China has too many

Tsai claimed in 2017: Xi would not provoke a war likely to drag in Japan and the United States. Others in the DPP depict China as too weak.

domestic problems” to capture Taiwan, professor Fan Shih-Ping wrote in 2017. Taiwan’s major opposition party, the
Kuomintang, takes a rosy view of Beijing that rejects the idea that China might invade. “There is no problem,” former president Ma Ying-jeou declared last year. “Nowadays Beijing’s top
strategy is peaceful rise,” the journalist Huang Nian wrote in April. “Forceful reunification would derail it.” This complacency has led Taiwan to neglect its armed forces. Taiwan’s military suffers
from a desperate shortage of officers—nearly half of all lieutenant positions are unfilled. In 2018, Taiwan made matters worse. Just as talk of “forceful reunification” was rising in Mainland
China, the government ended compulsory military enlistment—but allowed felons to serve. Morale has plummeted. The United States has recommended that Taiwan consider restoring
conscription. “The shift to a voluntary military was a mistake,” U.S. officials concluded. In an April 2018 poll, more than 40 percent of Taiwanese said they had “no confidence at all” that their
military could defend Taiwan; but 65 percent had convinced themselves that the PRC would not take military action against the island; and only six percent believed that an attack was “very
likely.” “AMERICA FIRST” IN WASHINGTON The withering of Taiwan’s armed forces has increased Taiwan’s military reliance on the United States—just when many in Beijing are questioning the
U.S. commitment to Taiwan. Trump’s “America first” doctrine has convinced many Chinese that the United States is now too isolationist to come to Taiwan’s defense. “America will absolutely
sacrifice Taiwan,” the Global Times insisted in 2017. “On the premise of America First … the United States is not likely to send troops to fight for Taiwan.” For decades, a U.S. policy of “dual

deterrence” has helped prevent conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Washington has warned Beijing not to attack Taiwan unprovoked, but
reassured Chinese leaders that the U nited States would not support Taiwanese independence. It has
told Taipei, in turn, that the United States would come to its defense—as long as it did not provoke
Beijing by declaring independence. Making the policy work has meant treading a fine line, but for
decades, dual deterrence has allowed Taiwan to enjoy de facto independence and helped prevent a war
with China. Trump has upset that delicate balance. In December 2016, Tsai called Trump to
congratulate him on his victory. The incoming Trump administration then began to talk of “revisiting”
the One China policy, under which the United States recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the
sole legal government of China, but maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan. Beijing was outraged. Xi
refused to talk to Trump until he recommitted the United States to the One China policy. In February, Trump capitulated. In a phone call with Xi, he affirmed that the United States would
continue to support the “One China” policy. “Trump lost his first fight with Xi,” the Beijing scholar Shi Yinhong bragged to the New York Times. “He will be looked at as a paper tiger.” Last year,

however, the pendulum swung back toward confrontation . In February, Congress passed the Taiwan Travel Act, encouraging (but not requiring) high-
level U.S. officials to visit Taiwan, and high-level Taiwanese officials to visit the United States. In the fall, Trump started a trade war with China, generating anxiety among Chinese

nationalists. They now believe Trump is using Taiwan as part of a new Cold War against China, creating a
sense of urgency for reunification. A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY China could well move to take
Taiwan before 2020, when some Chinese fear that Taiwan’s presidential election will close Beijing’s
window of opportunity for military action. Many Mainland Chinese nationalists were disappointed, rather than relieved, by the pro-independence DPP’s
poor showing in last November’s local Taiwanese elections. This counterintuitive reaction reveals an alarming calculus: should

a weakened Tsai and the DPP lose the presidency in 2020 to a more pro-China candidate, the
opportunity for “forceful reunification” would be lost . “What a pity,” one Weibo user from Beijing wrote about the DPP’s losses. “We could be
further away from the day of reunification.” It is the hated DPP that gives Chinese nationalists a pretext to take Taiwan back now. That disappointment has fed a

sense of urgency among many Chinese nationalists . “I request that Mainland China issue a timetable for reunification,” one outraged Weibo user
wrote in November. “Whether peaceful or forceful, please don’t drag this out again and again.” The 2020 U.S. presidential election also looms in the minds of Chinese nationalists. Trump looks
less likely to win reelection after Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms, and many Chinese worry that a Trump loss would make forceful reunification harder. Trump is seen as a
businessman and isolationist willing to bargain Taiwan away. “America will sell Taiwan out in the blink of an eye,” a People’s Daily editorial claimed last year. (Few Chinese recognize the
possibility that Trump might respond forcefully to an attack on Taiwan to rally support at home.) A Trump successor, “forceful reunification” advocates fear, may not be so willing to cut a deal.
Some in Beijing even think China can retake Taiwan without violence. China may “break the enemy’s resistance without fighting,” Wang Zaixi told the Global Times in 2017. Just as the
Communist Party seized Beijing in 1949 without shooting a single bullet, he argued, China could capture Taiwan peacefully by surrounding the island, imposing economic sanctions, and cutting

The idea that China can force reunification without fighting is delusional
off its oil supply. “No need to shed blood,” he concluded.

and dangerous. Tightening the military or economic noose around Taiwan would likely provoke a
reaction from the United States. Given popular nationalist pressures, Beijing would then feel compelled
to respond. Things could get out of control fast. All sides need to wake up to the dangers of backing
into a conflict that few want.
 Internals: A/S = Friction w/China

US arms sales cause friction with China

Eleanor Morgan Albert 6/27 is a PhD Student in Political Science at The George Washington
University, June 27th, 2019, “China-Taiwan Relations” from https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-
taiwan-relations, accessed 7/5/19 || OES-AT
Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China (ROC), is an island off the southern coast of China that has been governed independently from
mainland China since 1949. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) views the island as a province, while in Taiwan—a territory with its own
democratically elected government that is home to twenty-three million people—political leaders have differing views on the island’s status
and relations with the mainland. ¶ Despite the sovereignty dispute, the economic ties between the island and the mainland have thrived in
recent years. Yet political frictions still shadow the relationship, and China and Taiwan have experienced a renewal in tensions under new
leadership. ¶ ‘One China’ Principle ¶ Beijing and Taipei sharply disagree on the island’s status. The PRC asserts that there is only “one China”
and that Taiwan is an inalienable part of it. Beijing says Taiwan is bound by an understanding reached in 1992 between representatives of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT) political party then ruling Taiwan. Referred to as the 1992 Consensus, it states that
there is only “one China” but allows for differing interpretations, by which both Beijing and Taipei agree that Taiwan belongs to China, while the
two still disagree on which entity is China’s legitimate governing body. The tacit agreement underlying the 1992 Consensus is that Taiwan will
not seek independence. ¶ Taiwan’s KMT still accepts the consensus as a starting point for future negotiations with the CCP. However, the
island’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, leader of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has rejected the consensus. In a January 2019
speech, she declared the “one country, two systems” framework advanced by Beijing unacceptable. Her rejection of the consensus, along with
that of other leading voices in the governing DPP, leaves open the possibility of future Taiwanese independence. ¶ In 1979, the United States
established formal diplomatic relations with Beijing by concluding a joint communiqué [PDF] stating that “the United States of America
acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.” At that time, U.S. President Jimmy Carter
terminated diplomatic relations with the ROC government in Taiwan. But months after, the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act
(TRA), affirming important unofficial ties with the island. The legislation allows for arms sales to Taiwan for self-defense and does not rule out
the possibility of the United States defending Taiwan from Chinese attack—a policy known as strategic ambiguity. ¶ Since then, U.S.
arms
sales to Taiwan, totaling more than $25 billion [PDF] between 2007 and 2018, have led to U.S.-China friction and an
upsurge in bellicose rhetoric across the strait. Political transitions in the United States have also prompted tensions between
Beijing and Washington. Taiwan’s Tsai spoke with U.S. President Donald J. Trump by telephone ahead of his inauguration, the first such high-
level contact between the two sides since 1979. The Trump administration also seems to be deepening ties with
Taiwan over Chinese objections, proposing multiple arms deals and unveiling a new $250 million complex for its de facto embassy in
Taipei. ¶ Rise of an Island ¶ Ethnic Han Chinese settlers, primarily merchants, began to arrive in Taiwan in the seventeenth century. The island,
now inhabited by a Han Chinese majority, many of whom identify as distinctly Taiwanese, is also home to indigenous peoples who account for
around 2 percent of the population. “Taiwan has a messy history of invasion, occupation, colonization, refuge, and intermarriage,” writes
University of Sydney Professor Salvatore Babones. Annexed by the Qing dynasty in the late 1600s, Taiwan was later ceded to Japan in 1895 by
imperial China in accordance with a treaty that concluded the Sino-Japanese War. Japan governed it as a colony until 1945, when Japanese
forces on the island were required to surrender to Chiang Kai-shek’s ROC military forces. ¶ The ROC, which had governed China for decades,
fled to Taiwan after losing the civil war to the Communists in 1949. But Chiang and his political party, the KMT, insisted his government
continued to represent all Chinese people on both the island and the mainland. Washington and most Western powers affirmed the ROC’s
stance by long refusing to recognize the Communist government in Beijing, a position most countries later reversed. ¶ Washington’s position
began to shift under the Nixon administration. Back-channel diplomacy resulted in Washington’s formal recognition of the PRC in 1979. The
ROC lost its seat representing China at the United Nations in 1971 to Beijing. ¶ The KMT governed the island from 1949 to 1987 under martial
law. Political dissent was harshly repressed and Taiwanese who had long inhabited the island before 1945 faced discrimination. Taiwan held its
first free legislative elections in 1992 and presidential elections in 1996. ¶ The KMT and coalition partners have historically viewed Taiwan as a
part of “one China” and do not support the island’s independence. After 2000, the KMT often found itself in opposition to parties representing
Taiwanese who had been on the island before 1949 and their descendants. Although riven with its own factionalism, the KMT retains deep ties
to the island’s business leaders and consistently calls for closer ties with Beijing. The party lost its majority in Taiwan’s legislative body for the
first time in the 2016 elections. ¶ The KMT’s chief rival, the DPP, was founded in 1986 and became legal in 1989 after a ban on opposition
parties was dropped. The DPP has traditionally called for a de jure independent Taiwan as a separate political entity from China, and has
become an outlet for the expression of Taiwanese identity. Chen Shui-bian was the first non-KMT politician to serve as president (2000–2008)
and pushed for Taiwanese sovereignty. Shortly after his term, Chen was convicted and imprisoned on charges of embezzlement and accepting
bribes. (He was later sentenced to four months in prison for leaking classified information.) ¶ Beijing closely observes the island’s
elections. It has favored a steady deepening of ties with Taiwan, forging economic linkages that could ultimately become too costly for the
island to sever, thus nudging it closer to unification. However, since the PRC’s own leadership transition in 2012, President Xi Jinping has
embraced a tougher, nationalistic stance toward all of the special regions it claims, including Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan.
Taiwan’s election of Tsai in 2016 brought even closer scrutiny of cross-strait ties from Beijing, and Xi has
shown a willingness to use pressure to try to limit Tsai’s ability to reset the island’s relations with the
mainland. For example, Beijing suspended a cross-strait communication mechanism with the main Taiwan liaison office in June 2016
because of Tsai’s reluctance to adhere to the 1992 Consensus. Beijing has also restricted tourism to Taiwan, excluded the island from
international entities addressing civil aviation and global health issues, and pressured global corporations to list Taiwan as a Chinese province. ¶
Meanwhile, Taiwanese leaders consider formal diplomatic relations with major powers and international organizations essential if Taiwan is to
survive separately from the Communist mainland. However, only seventeen states maintain official diplomatic ties with the island. ¶ Military
Situation ¶ China, as part of its continued military expansion, has deployed missiles along the Taiwan Strait and periodically conducts drills near
the island. It has sent bombers, fighter jets, and its aircraft carrier over and around the strait as shows of force. According to a 2018 U.S.
Department of Defense report [PDF], China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, has “continued to develop and deploy increasingly
advanced military capabilities intended to coerce Taiwan, signal Chinese resolve, and gradually improve capabilities for an invasion.” ¶
Beijing has refused to renounce the use of force to resolve disputes over the island’s status. The PRC’s
introduction of the 2005 Anti-Secession Law, intended to strengthen Beijing’s approach to “peaceful national reunification,” included language
stating that in the event secessionist forces seek independence, Beijing would “employ non-peaceful means” to protect its national sovereignty.
In a 2019 speech, Xi reiterated this and added that Beijing would consider the use of force to prevent “intervention by external forces” on the
island. ¶ In
response, Taiwan continues to purchase weapons, primarily from the United States. Between
1979 and 2018, Taiwan ranked as the ninth largest recipient of arms globally. During the same period, the United States supplied
more than three-quarters of Taiwan’s imported weapons, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute’s arms transfers database. ¶ Taiwan’s strategic security rests heavily on guarantees offered by the United States under the Taiwan
Relations Act. Yet in recent years, security analysts have cited concern over the emerging military imbalance between Beijing and Taipei. “Given
the pace of PLA(N) [People’s Liberation Army Navy] modernization, the gap in military capability [PDF] between the mainland and Taiwan
will continue to widen in China’s favor over the coming years ,” writes the Congressional Research Services’ naval affairs
specialist Ronald O’Rourke. ¶ In 2019, Taiwan’s defense budget stood at $11.3 billion and accounted for 2.16 percent of its gross domestic
product (GDP). President Tsai and the DPP have emphasized plans to raise annual defense spending incrementally, with the aim of an increase
of 20 percent, or $2.1 billion, by 2025. Part of this expanded military budget will be dedicated to investment in advanced weapons systems,
training, and new equipment, including missiles, electronic warfare technology, and missile defense systems. ¶ Economic Rapprochement ¶
Taiwan began investing in China after reform policies were implemented by PRC leader Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. Despite intermittent
friction, the cross-strait economic relationship has blossomed. China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001 and, within a month,
Taiwan entered as “Chinese Taipei.” The island holds member, observer, or other status in more than fifty organizations [PDF], such as the
Asian Development Bank, APEC, OECD committees, and regional fishery organizations. ¶ China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner, accounting
for nearly 30 percent of the island’s total trade, and trade between the two reached $150.5 billion in 2018 (up from $35 billion in 1999). China
and Taiwan have also agreed to allow banks, insurers, and other financial service providers to work in both markets. In 2015, the number of
direct flights between them hit just under 900 per week, up from 270 in 2009. Nevertheless, the economic relationship has experienced some
hiccups in recent years. Taiwanese investment in the mainland declined for its fourth consecutive year in 2018, and mainland investment in
Taiwan has increased at a slower rate than before. ¶ Former President Ma Ying-jeou’s KMT government (2008–2016) signed more than twenty
pacts with the PRC, including the 2010 Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) [PDF], a cross-strait agreement to lift barriers to
trade. Large Taiwanese corporations reaped most of the benefits from stronger commercial ties with the mainland, while many residents’
concerns over economic security mounted. While Taiwan’s economy grew 2.6 percent in 2018, youth unemployment stands around 12 percent,
and the housing market remains weak. Many residents believed that Ma brought Taipei closer to Beijing without transparency and against the
will of the Taiwanese people. Ma attended a historic meeting with China’s Xi in November 2015, the first meeting between cross-strait political
leaders, but Ma’s approval ratings hovered near record lows in his last two years in power. KMT electoral losses in November 2014 and 2016
were widely interpreted as dissatisfaction with Ma’s China warming policies. ¶ In an effort to avoid outright economic dependence on the
mainland, Taiwan has sought to diversify its commercial partnerships. In addition to ECFA, Taiwan has signed a handful of other free-trade
pacts, including a deal with New Zealand in 2013—Taiwan’s first with a developed economy. The government in Taipei will likely expand other
economic partnerships: investments by Taiwanese firms in Southeast Asia’s six largest economies doubled between 2011 and 2015, reaching
more than $13 billion. ¶ Rise of Taiwanese Identity ¶ The backlash against the ruling KMT in exit polls after the 2016 elections raised further
questions about societal views over ties with Beijing. Scholars cite the 228 Incident, a Taiwanese uprising against the KMT-led ROC that was
violently suppressed in 1947, as the root of a strong ethnic Taiwanese identity that sowed the seeds for democratization. ¶ Generations of
democratic practices [PDF] seem to have bound together the Taiwanese people and polity. Though most people across the Taiwan Strait speak
Mandarin as their first language, more than a century of separation has led a growing number of Taiwanese to feel they deserve the right to
continue a separate existence. Almost 55 percent of the island’s residents regarded themselves as exclusively Taiwanese, according to a survey
conducted by National Chengchi University in 2018. By comparison, 38 percent identified as both Taiwanese and Chinese, down from 43
percent in 2008, while only about 4 percent considered themselves only Chinese, a figure that has dwindled since 1994. ¶ “The political
awakening of youth in Taiwan was driven as much by practical frustrations as by political ideals,” wrote freelance writer Anna Beth Keim in a
January 2016 post for the Asia Society. Frustrations over financial insecurity and economic inequality, as well as dissatisfaction with Taiwan’s
political factions, have given birth to a groundswell of domestic political activity—often referred to as Taiwan’s “third force.” ¶ Meanwhile,
China’s Xi has emphasized the need for Taiwan to adhere to the One China principle. He has said that Taiwan must be unified with the mainland
and that the island’s “different systems are not an obstacle to unification.” China-based experts say that the election of pro-independence
leaders in Taiwan may shift Beijing’s top security concern from territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas to defending territorial
integrity across the Taiwan Strait. ¶ Issues of
Taiwanese identity and independence will come to the fore when
the island holds a presidential election in early 2020. Voters will choose between Tsai and one of several
possible KMT candidates, who are more favorably disposed toward Beijing . “There’s no question that Beijing would
prefer to see any of the KMT candidates prevail,” writes Shelley Rigger for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, but, she warns, the election
could put the Taiwan Strait on a “plausible path to disaster.” ¶ Though Taiwan’s main political parties diverge on how best to manage the
island’s relationship with Beijing, experts caution that both Beijing and Taipei must take responsibility for avoiding a crisis. “The status quo is
admittedly imperfect,” writes CFR President Richard N. Haass, “but it is far less imperfect than what would follow unilateral actions and
attempts to resolve a situation that doesn’t lend itself to a neat solution.”

new arms sales to Taiwan will anger China

Rebecca Falconer 7/5 is a multimedia journalist for Axios, June 5 th, 2019, “U.S. preparing for $2B arms
sale to Taiwan: Reports” from https://www.axios.com/trump-administration-taiwan-arms-sale-plan-
83979790-cce1-489f-b39a-59f473e56464.html, accessed 7/5/19 || OES-AT

Congress has received notification of a potential $2 billion U.S. sale of tanks and other weapons to Taiwan , Reuters first
reported Wednesday, citing 4 sources who spoke on condition of remaining anonymous. Details: Bloomberg reports the Pentagon and State
Department outlined to Congress the deal would include a resupply
of anti-air and anti-armor weapons and the first-
time sale of the U.S. Army’s the M1A2 tank , described as the "backbone of the armored forces ." Why it matters:
Such a sale would likely anger China, which regards the self-ruled Taiwan as a breakaway province. Taiwan has become
one of several flashpoints in the U.S.-China relationship, as the trade war shows no signs of abating and
negotiations between the 2 countries continue to stall. The big picture: Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said on
Saturday the U.S. is prepared to invest billions of dollars in securing stability in the Indo-Pacific region.
 Internals: Taiwan =/= Deterrence

Depleted readiness means Taiwanese deterrence is a façade – US arms are ineffective

Minnick 19 (Wendell Minnick is an author, commentator, journalist and speaker who has spent two
decades covering military and security issues in Asia, including one book on intelligence and over 1,200
articles. From 2006–2016, Minnick served as the Asia Bureau Chief for Defense News, a Washington-
based defense weekly newspaper., 3-19-2019, "How to Save Taiwan from Itself," National
Interest, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-save-taiwan-itself-48122)SEM

Washington must concoct a way to convince Taiwan’s idealistic idle chattering political elites to stop
believing in the fantasy that American troops will swing-in like Tarzan and save them from the tiger—especially
with the current destabilization of American political culture. Taiwan’s military brass are very cognizant of the China threat; it is Taipei’s
political leadership that has forced the military to reduce military readiness over the past twenty years.
Public lethargy and a lack of confidence in the military has drained the armed forces of manpower and
morale. And it is this lethargy, along with the unwillingness of Taiwan’s political elites to communicate this imminent threat to the public,
that must be addressed. Taiwan’s military wants to procure big-ticket items from the United States , but at the
same time it has been forced to reduce conscription and training due to funding issues and an
apathetic civilian population. Taiwan’s Air Force just announced an official request from the United
States for sixty-six F-16V fighter aircraft ; the Army has secured the sale of M1 Abrams main battle tanks; and the Navy has gone
forward with the initial procurement of the Mark 41 Vertical Launch System (VLS) for its upcoming local-build corvettes. The VLS will be fitted
with the Tien Hai (Tien Kung variant) surface-to-air missile. Even
if Taiwan procures all of its dreams and desires from the
U.S. government, then the question becomes: who will fly them, drive them, sail them and fire them.
According to the Ministry of National Defense (MND), the current estimate of personnel officially stands at 215,000.
Many critics argue that this is the bare minimum needed to repel the first wave of a Chinese invasion.
Now remember, that is the minimum. The reduction to 215,000 was the result of the 2011–2014 Jing-cui streamlining program,
which was extended to 2015. Fortunately, the follow-up Yung-gu plan was canceled. It would have further reduced the number from 215,000 to
175,000 and eliminated conscription entirely, opting for an all-volunteer force. Now, recruiters face a real nightmare. Last year
the big brains in the presidential office cut pensions 30 percent, with plans to further reduce it 50
percent. Even though Yung-gu is temporarily on hold, the official current number, 215,000, is an outright lie. The
actual number of operational active duty personnel is devastating. There are actually only 188,000 in total and if you
exclude civilian employees, noncombat personnel, those on leave, and cadets, the actual number of
warfighters is 152,280; 81 percent of the authorized strength levels needed for fending off an invasion.
Part of the problem is conscription and a decline in patriotism. Those born before 1994 were required to serve one-
year conscription, but it dropped to four months in 2016 when that generation turned eighteen. Since the end of year-long
conscription service, the military has been relying on personnel from the four-month program to fill in at
least 10 percent of the frontline strength. Conscripts now receive five weeks of basic training and eleven
weeks of specialized training. This will average about five turnovers per year for individual field units. They are also counted as
active duty personnel, despite their lack of real contribution to the overall warfighting capabilities of the
island. Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs just announced a $100 million gift to Nicaragua; one of the numerous corrupt regimes with which
Taiwan trades diplomatic status and recognition for dollars. Yet, at the same time, it continues to cut the number of bullets, all manufactured
locally, to be used for infantry training. It’s worth noting that $100 million buys a lot of bullets. During annual exercises, individual
companies in the infantry, now down to skeleton crews, must borrow heavily from other companies to
fill gaps needed to carry out what have become dog-and-pony shows for the media. To handle anything beyond the first
wave of the invasion, the military reasons that it can dip into its 1.5 million reserves, but the
effectiveness of such mobilization relies largely on the backbone of a small but elite core of trained
personnel. Officially, reservists are required to spend only five days every two years for training , during which
time they typically perform simple chores and not weapons training. However, the MND might never contact an individual
reservist due to a variety of reasons, including critical missions, budgetary constraints, reservists refusing to
comply, failure to simply locate and notify reservists, etc . One MND source told the National Interest that the ill-
trained reserves were nothing more than “cannon fodder.” Requirements for weapons are driven by
outdated estimates going back ten to twenty years for a military that will fight a conventional war in the air, on land and at sea.
Requirements set by generals who have long since retired. After all, colonels do not become generals by pushing reforms and upgrade
programs—despite their cost-effectiveness. They score shiny, new stars for procuring bright shiny objects at several times greater cost. Today’s
matrix has changed. China
will destroy Taiwan’s air bases with its stockpile of 1,300 short-range ballistic
missiles, satellites with infrared will locate tanks for its fighter aircraft, and its vast array of hundreds of
anti-ship missiles and submarines (over sixty) will sink its warships. This will be in the first three or four
days, according to modeling. Anyone suggesting Taiwan’s ennui over a Chinese invasion is a new problem would demonstrate a lack
of institutional memory, if not idiocy. When Taiwan first procured 150 F-16A/Bs in the 1990s, it badgered, ranted and whined about
Washington’s refusal to release the AIM-120 AMRAAM’s for its F-16s, yet when they were released in 2004, the initial order was only for 200,
then cut to 120. Critics complained Taiwan’s military was the only one on the planet that would procure 120 bullets for 150 guns. The Air Force
procured more over the years, 218 in 2007, but its reputation was badly damaged. As a general rule, Taiwan has about one-third to
one-half of the munitions it needs for two-days of aerial combat ; it plans to place an emergency order with the United
States when a war is on the horizon. In 1996, during the height of the Taiwan Strait Missile Crisis, emergency orders were sent to Washington
for a wide array of missiles and bombs, but quickly canceled when the crisis ended.
 Internals: U.S. Support = War

US commitment to Taiwan ensures a spiral model of escalation – China believes

Taiwan is an inextricable part of its territory
Metz 2/8 – the author of “Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy.” In addition to having been on the
faculty of the Air War College, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and several universities, he has
been an adviser to political campaigns and elements of the intelligence community; served on national security
policy task forces; testified in both houses of Congress; and spoken on military and security issues around the
world. (Steven, “How Committed Is the U.S. to Fending Off a War Over Taiwan?” World Politics Review, February 8,
2019, https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/27395/how-committed-is-the-u-s-to-fending-off-a-war-over-
taiwan)//RP

China and Taiwan marked the Lunar New Year holiday this week with dueling propaganda videos
showcasing their respective military might, released on social media. It was the latest sign that North
Korea may no longer be the world’s most volatile hotspot, the nation most likely to unleash a major
crisis that could spiral out of control. Now that dubious distinction may be shifting to Taiwan. The root
of the problem is, of course, that China considers Taiwan an inextricable part of its territory ripped
away in 1949 when the government of the Republic of China, facing military defeat against communist
forces on the mainland, moved to the island. Beijing always saw this as temporary—something to be
rectified when it had the power to do so. Now that time is at hand. Massive economic growth has given
China a degree of influence and resilience that it never had before. Its military capabilities have grown
extensively. And while America has long been committed to Taiwan’s separation from China, the
willingness and ability of the United States to back Taipei with force seems shakier than ever. For
strategists in Beijing, imposing reunification on Taiwan probably appears more feasible than at any time
since 1949. What is making the situation particularly dangerous now is China’s mounting internal
problems, especially a slowing economy. Its short-term economic prospects, at least, are troubling. This
matters because the Chinese Communist Party sustains its rule in part by buying off internal
dissatisfaction. The Chinese people tolerate authoritarianism in exchange for stability and prosperity.
But if economic imbalances and problems mount, the Communist Party may have a harder time fending
off political opposition. As often happens in authoritarian political systems, economic frustration could
turn into dissent. Undoubtedly, this would lead the regime in Beijing to ramp up its system of internal
security, which is already the most effective on earth. Authoritarian regimes facing internal opposition
have always tried to ease political pressure through distraction, specifically by becoming more externally
aggressive or exaggerating security threats, whether foreign or internal. If China experiences a deep and
long-term economic slowdown, it is not hard to imagine the government taking a more bellicose
approach to Taiwan. There are already ominous signs of that. Last month , an editorial in China’s official
military newspaper stated that “war preparations” should be a top priority for the year. The next day,
President Xi Jinping reiterated China’s longstanding position that it reserves the right to use force
against Taiwan if it considers it necessary. This may foreshadow a coming crisis. What is not clear at this
point is how the United States would, or should, respond if China attempts to compel reunification with
Taiwan. President Donald Trump seems more committed to the defense of Taiwan than his
predecessors, having approved arms sales to Taipei at a much faster rate. And in December he signed
the pro-Taiwan Asia Reassurance Initiative Act into law, which aims to counter China’s military influence
in the region and boost U.S. support for allies like Taiwan, including arms sales. The key for the United
States is lowering the chances of China believing it can impose reunification by force. But would Trump
use military force to defend Taiwan? Even without large-scale U.S. involvement, China might not be
able to conquer Taiwan outright. Conventional military invasions across bodies of water are extremely
difficult. And time would not be on Beijing’s side since any invasion would be disruptive, even
catastrophic, for both the global economy and China, which depends on exports of manufactured goods
and imports of energy and raw materials to sustain its economy. The United States might respond to a
Chinese invasion of Taiwan with long-range military strikes plus standoff air defense, anti-ship, space
and cyber operations. But “might” is the operative word. U.S. involvement would entail massive risk.
There is the potential that Americans might simply accept the conquest of Taiwan.

US involvement in Taiwan difficult for Beijing to stick to peaceful means

Kristin Huang 7/4 is a senior China reporter, who focuses on diplomacy and defence. She joined the
Post in 2016 and previously reported for China Review News Agency. Kristin is interested in security in
northeast Asia and China's growing military might, July 4 th, 2019, “High-powered talks between US,
Taiwanese defence officials ‘could become the new normal’” from
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3017309/high-power-talks-between-us-
taiwanese-defence-officials-could, accessed 7/5/19 || OES-AT

High-level meetings between defence officials from the United States and Taiwan could become the
“new normal” as the Pentagon seeks to increase its involvement with the self-ruled island, but US President Donald Trump is
still seen as a “restraining force” on the issue, an American think tank has said . ¶ The National Committee on
American Foreign Policy, a non-profit organisation based in New York, made the claims in a report published on Tuesday, following its annual
conference in the city last month. The event was attended by academics and officials from mainland China and the United States. ¶ “ The
[US] defence department wants a more substantive role in arms sales ,” the report said. “Public high-level talks, such
as the ones between [Taiwan’s national security chief] David Lee and [White House national security adviser] John Bolton, could become the
new normal.” ¶ Lee met Bolton during a visit to the US in May. The meeting between senior US and Taiwanese security officials was the first of
its kind in more than four decades, and it infuriated Beijing. ¶ While
the United States does not formally recognise
Taiwan as an independent country, under the Taiwan Relations Act Washington is bound by law to
provide the island with the means to defend itself . ¶ The report said that as the negative sentiment towards mainland China
had grown in the US, so too had support for Taiwan. ¶ However, despite Trump’s often aggressive stance towards Beijing, “he has actually been
a restraining force on Taiwan, having stepped in a few times to rein in other members of his government who are inclined to go even further” in
their support, it said. ¶ A US delegate, who was not named, was quoted as saying that Trump’s reluctance might be more to do with economics
than politics. ¶ “President Trump is said not to have been impressed by the size of Taiwan’s market,” the person said. ¶ Whatever the opinions
of the delegates, Trump approved more arms deals with Taipei in his first two years in office than either of his predecessors, Barack Obama and
George W. Bush. ¶ Among the Chinese attendees at the conference, which was held on June 11-12, were officials from the Chinese central
government’s Taiwan Affairs Office, including its vice-minister Chen Yuanfeng, and various academics. ¶ They were joined by various US
scholars and officials, including Raymond Burghardt and Douglas Paal, both of whom served as director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the
United States’ de facto embassy on the island. ¶ Li Peng, director of the Graduate Institute for Taiwan Studies at Xiamen University in southeast
China’s Fujian province, said it was important for Beijing and Washington to keep communication channels open on Taiwan to ensure tensions
did not overheat. ¶ “Washington has deep-rooted perceptions about the Taiwan issue and is more influenced by Taiwan, so [mainland] China
and the US need to keep communication channels open and advance understanding,” he said. ¶ The conference itself could “help Beijing and
Washington understand each other better, especially at a time when bilateral relations are very complicated”, he said. ¶ The report quoted
another unnamed Chinese speaker as saying he was worried that the United States’ involvement in Taiwan could make it
difficult for Beijing to convince its own people of the need to stick to peaceful means to resolve cross-
strait tensions. ¶ Another delegate was quoted as saying that “outsiders” had no right to question Beijing’s actions or policies regarding
Taiwan, as it was an internal affair. ¶ On the subject of how Trump should handle Taiwan, Jia Qingguo, dean of the International Studies School
at Peking University in Beijing, said that while the US had a legal obligation to help defend the island, the president also had to consider his
relationship with Beijing. ¶ He said he hoped the president would maintain “a responsible attitude towards Taiwan issues, and not be
overwhelmed by the hawkish voices”.
 Internals: Sales = Indep/War

Taiwan is driving a wedge between the US and China – pro-independence pushes in

Taiwan guarantee Chinese aggression
Tay 6/11 – an intern for CNBC.com out of the Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore. (Shirley, “As US-
China relations sour, Taiwan’s value as a ‘chess piece’ may rise” CNBC, June 11, 2019,
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/11/as-us-china-relations-sour-taiwans-value-as-a-chess-piece-may-
rise.html)//RP

As the United States and China remain deadlocked in a deepening dispute over trade and technology,
some experts say Taiwan’s value as a bargaining chip has increased. The self-governed island — which
Beijing deems to be a renegade Chinese province — is one of many flashpoints in the rivalry between
the world’s two superpowers. Taiwan has always been a “chess piece” that Washington can play with in
U.S.-China relations, said Zhiqun Zhu, a professor of political science and international relations at
Bucknell University. “Taiwan’s value to the U.S. will only increase as tensions between the U.S. and
China escalate,” Zhu told CNBC. Under the Chinese Communist Party’s “One China” policy, the self-ruled
island is part of mainland China. Chinese President Xi Jinping has said before that China “must be and
will be” reunified with Taiwan — by force if necessary. However, recent military and diplomatic actions
from Washington have been seen by Beijing as U.S. support for Taiwan’s independence movement. At
the Shangri-la dialogue defense summit in Singapore last weekend, Chinese Lieutenant General Shao
Yuanming said Washington’s support for Taipei has sent “terribly wrong signals to Taiwan’s
independence forces, which could undermine regional peace and stability. ” “If anyone wants to
separate Taiwan from the country, the Chinese military will resolutely defend the unity of our
motherland at all costs,” Shao added. ‘Upgrade’ in US-Taiwan relations The U.S. using Taiwan as a card is
a new factor in the dynamic of the trilateral relationship that “really did not exist” before President
Donald Trump came into power, said Bonnie Glaser, senior advisor for Asia at Washington-based think
tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “Trump is a transactional president and he
often seems to be willing to put anything on the table,” she told CNBC. On the military front, the Trump
administration has ramped up arms sales to Taipei over the years, invoking the ire of Beijing.
Washington is reportedly preparing a sale of more than $2 billion worth of tanks and weapons to
Taiwan. Diplomatic issues have also come to the fore. In May, high-level security officials from the U.S.
and Taiwan met for the first time in nearly four decades, drawing an angry response from Beijing.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said Beijing is “strongly dissatisfied” with and “resolutely
opposed” to any official meetings between the U.S. and Taiwan. “I believe we’re inching closer & closer
to Beijing’s redline on US-Taiwan senior official mtgs--those that are publicized at least,” Derek
Grossman, a senior defense analyst at California-based think tank Rand Corporation, said on Twitter
after the U.S.-Taiwan meeting. Grossman told CNBC on email that his understanding is that such
meetings “have been ongoing for some time in private.” “My hunch is that it was publicized this time via
intentional leak from one or both sides to signal to China that the upgrade in U.S.-Taiwan relations is
here to stay,” he added. Taiwan’s next leader is key Taiwan is set to have its presidential elections in
January 2020 — and experts said the polls would likely determine the direction of cross-strait ties.
Grossman said that if the incumbent Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-Wen is re-elected, which is “likely,”
cross-strait tensions are likely to escalate further from 2020 to 2024. Glaser from CSIS echoed that
sentiment, adding that if a candidate from the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party was
elected, China would ratchet up military, diplomatic and economic pressure.
 Internals: Arms Sales = Trigger

China perceives arms sales to Taiwan as interference in regional spheres of influence

CBS News 6/6 – (“U.S. arms sale request from Taiwan draws warning of "serious harm" from China”
June 6, 2019, CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-arms-sale-to-taiwan-china-warns-serious-
harm-request-m1a2-abrams-tanks-2019-06-06)//RP

Taipei, Taiwan — Taiwan confirmed Thursday it has asked to purchase more than 100 tanks from the
U.S., along with air defense and anti-tank missile systems in a major potential arms sale that drew
immediate protest from China. A Defense Ministry statement said it has submitted a letter of request
for 108 cutting-edge M1A2 Abrams tanks, 1,240 TOW anti-armor missiles, 409 Javelin anti-tank missiles
and 250 Stinger man-portable air defense systems. The request is proceeding "as normal," it said. It
wasn't clear when the official request had been issued, after which the U.S. has 120 days to respond.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said that China firmly opposes U.S. arms sales to
Taiwan. "This position is consistent and clear," he said at the ministry's daily briefing. "We urge the U.S.
to fully understand the high sensitivity and serious harm of the issue of arms sales to Taiwan and abide
by the one-China principle." Officials at the Pentagon referred CBS News to the State Department for
comment on the Taiwanese arms request. A State Department official told CBS News the U.S.
Government did not, "comment on or confirm potential or pending arms sales" as a matter of policy,
until Congress has been notified of an agreed sale. China considers self-governing Taiwan part of its
territory, to be brought under its control by force if necessary. It says U.S. arms sales to the island
constitute both interference in its internal affairs and a betrayal of earlier commitments made by
Washington to Beijing. The U.S. is the main supplier of weapons to Taiwan, and earlier reports have said
Taiwan is also seeking 66 F-16 fighter jets in the most advanced "V'' configuration. President Tsai Ing-
wen said in March that Taiwan was seeking tanks and jet fighters, but didn't provide any details. At a
public appearance Thursday, she pledged continued support for a strengthened military and said the
island's efforts were winning it more international support. "We will keep on strengthening our self-
defense capabilities (and) will also keep on being a contributor to regional peace," Tsai said. The M1
Abrams would mark a significant upgrade from the aging tanks Taiwan's army now uses, while the TOW
and Javelin systems would upgrade Taiwan's ability to repulse an attempt by China to land tanks and
troops from across the 100 mile-wide Taiwan Strait. The Stingers meanwhile could help boost Taiwan's
defenses against China's more than 1,000 advanced fighter aircraft and 1,500 missiles pointing at the
island. Taiwan, which split from China amid civil war in 1949, has had no formal diplomatic ties with the
U.S. since Washington recognized Beijing in 1979. However, U.S. law requires it to take threats to the
island seriously and to "make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such
quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability." Tsai has
made beefing up Taiwan's armed forces a central task of her administration amid increasing Chinese
military threats and a campaign to increase Taiwan's diplomatic isolation and weaken its economy.
While China's military spending and numbers of ships, planes and missiles vastly outstrip those of
Taiwan, the island is basing its defense on geographical factors and asymmetrical warfare, in which a
weaker opponent can hold off a stronger one by pinpointing weaknesses and using specialized
weaponry and tactics. Tsai has also pushed to revamp the island's domestic arms industry and last
month inaugurated a shipyard to build at least eight diesel-electric submarines. Taiwan currently
operates just four aged submarines and pressure from China has prevented it from buying more abroad.

Taiwan is the biggest flashpoint between US and China – new sales ensure escalatory
measures
Lopez 6/11 – the senior finance correspondent at Business Insider, most recently she's been focusing
her reporting on Tesla and the Chinese economy. (Linette, “Forget the trade war — a bigger conflict
between the US and China is playing out right under our noses” Insider, June 11, 2019,
https://www.insider.com/us-arms-sales-to-taiwan-bigger-threat-to-us-china-relations)//RP

The world has its eye on the trade war between the US and China, but a more dangerous confrontation
between the two nations is playing out in the background: the worsening disagreement over the "One
China" policy. Last week, Reuters reported that Washington was on its way to approving $2 billion worth
of arms sales to Taiwan. The move indicates the Trump administration isn't trying to create an
atmosphere conducive to trade negotiations and suggests that disputes between the US and China are
more likely headed toward escalation than resolution. "Taiwan is the thing the Chinese care most
about hands down," said Susan Thornton, a former assistant US secretary of state for East Asian and
Pacific affairs. "Anything where the US is interfering with Taiwan hits a national third rail." The One
China policy — under which the US acknowledges China's claim that Taiwan is not an independent
nation but rather a part of China, without taking a side — was developed during the Nixon
administration to improve US-China relations. The idea is central to China's identity as a modern world
power, and since President Donald Trump took office the US has challenged that notion repeatedly.
Despite protests from Beijing, Trump signed the Taiwan Travel Act, legislation permitting high-level talks
between US and Taiwanese officials, last year. In May, the US national security adviser, John Bolton, met
with David Lee, one of Taiwan's top security officials. This meeting came just after Taiwan renamed its
unofficial embassy in Washington the Taiwan Council for US Affairs. The old name, the Coordination
Council for North American Affairs, neglected to mention Taiwan or the US. The Trump administration
has also sold arms to Taiwan before, as have previous administrations, but this $2 billion arms sale digs
at a delicate wound during a delicate time. It's a big sale, even in a world where weapons are becoming
more and more expensive. And though it does not include the US's top fighter jets, it is sure to
antagonize Beijing before the G20 meeting at the end of the month in Osaka, Japan, where US and
Chinese heads of state are expected to meet. On Thursday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry representative,
Geng Shuang, responded to the news of the arms sale with a warning, according to the Chinese state
media outlet Xinhua. "We urge the US side to stop arms sales to Taiwan and sever their military ties,
prudently and properly handle Taiwan-related issues, to avoid serious damage to China-US relations as
well as to the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait," Geng said. It's just imagination In January 2017,
China — most likely aware that the incoming US president was unfamiliar with the complexities of US-
China relations — clarified its position on Taiwan in a rare US media interview by the Chinese Foreign
Ministry official Lu Kang. "Because this issue touches upon China's core interest, by no means is this
something that could be negotiated or used as a bargaining chip," he told NBC. " One China policy,
100%." The fight over Taiwan's status started in 1949 after the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek left the
mainland for the island when he was defeated by Mao Zedong's Communist forces. To the Chinese, the
island's independence is both a product and a reminder of China's century of humiliation, when China
was carved up by foreign powers and then thrown into decades of chaos and civil war after the end of
the Qing dynasty. "It's the mythology they've told themselves for years," Thornton said. In that way the
One China policy and China's economic nationalism are tied together in the Chinese political
imagination. That may seem foreign to the US, where one set of technocrats handles economics and
another handles national security, but the merging of the two interests are a response to the China's lost
century. And both are being tested by the Trump administration. xi trump Chinese President Xi Jinping
and US President Donald Trump at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in November 2017. Damir
Sagolj/Reuters While the US-China trade war producing a " tech Cold War" has grabbed headlines, less
attention has been paid to escalation in hostilities surrounding the One China policy. This despite the
fact that the conflict has all the trappings of the Cold War era. China sees US interference in Taiwan as
an encroachment on its sphere of influence. And the US sees Chinese involvement in the Caribbean
similarly. Back in February 2018 after a speech in Texas, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned
Latin American nations of China's "imperial" ambitions, invoking the Monroe Doctrine. "Latin America
does not need new imperial powers that seek only to benefit their own people," he said. "China's state-
led model of development is reminiscent of the past. It doesn't have to be this hemisphere's future." All
of this matters for Taiwan because the more involved a country is with China, the more pressure China
puts on it to wipe Taiwan off the map. Earlier this year the Dominican Republic dropped its recognition
of Taiwan at China's behest. El Salvador did it in 2018, and Panama in 2017. There may be a Cold War-
reminiscent motivation behind this arms sale as well. Taiwan's anti-China president, Tsai Ing-wen, faces
an uphill battle for reelection next year. In Washington the sale may be seen as a way to bolster her
chances of winning. "One thing US administrations tend to think, which may or may not be true,"
Thornton said, "is that selling weapons to Taiwan helps political candidates show that they have US
support and can stand up to China." We — the US and China — may be slipping into a world where that
theory has to be tested.
 Internals: War Escalates

Taiwan is the most important issue to China – the fight for reunification won’t end,
making escalation likely
Huang 18 – a senior writer with the South China Morning Post, has been a China affairs columnist since
the 1990s. (Cary, “Taiwan’s cosying up to Trump could spark a China-US war” This Week in Asia, October
21, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2169432/taiwans-cosying-trump-could-
spark-china-us-war)//RP

As the confrontation between the United States and China escalates, Taiwan is being pushed back to
the top of the agenda in American foreign policy circles. And, for its part, Taipei seems keen to exploit
this rare opportunity to strengthen its ties with the US, its most important protector, to boost its
international standing, which has suffered major setbacks recently due to its diplomatic struggle with
Beijing. In his landmark speech that signalled a fundamental shift in US policy on China, at the Hudson
Institute on October 4, US Vice-President Mike Pence took a forceful line on Taiwan, as he criticised
efforts by Beijing to lure away the island’s diplomatic partners and force foreign companies to stop
referring to it as a country. Pence also praised Taiwan’s democratic development and criticised China’s
authoritarian rule. “Taiwan’s embrace of democracy shows a better path for all the Chinese people,” he
said. Days later, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen used a speech at the National Day celebrations in
Taipei to echo Pence’s rebuke to Beijing. Tsai said: “Our democratic transition lightens our dark past and
provides a ray of light in the dark night for all those seeking democracy.” Beijing is increasingly
squeezing Taiwan’s international space. The island republic has lost five diplomatic allies since Tsai
came to office in May 2016, and now has formal ties with only 17 small nations. But the more Beijing
squeezes, the more support grows in Washington for the democratic, self-ruled island. President Donald
Trump has signalled his determination to challenge Beijing’s cherished “one China” principle that
underpins stable US-China relations vis-à-vis Taiwan. As president-elect, Trump shocked the world by
having a phone conversation with Tsai. And now, as president, Trump has surrounded himself with a
team of pro-Taiwan advisers and aides in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon.
Among these are National Security Adviser John Bolton, who has suggested the US consider shifting
diplomatic recognition back from Beijing to Taipei. Pence’s remarks about Taiwan also challenged the
“one China” policy – a policy Washington has been committed to since it established diplomatic ties with
Beijing in 1979. As Beijing squeezes Taiwan, Trump’s US gives Tsai a warm embrace This year, Trump
signed into law two pieces of pro-Taiwan legislation, both of which received overwhelming support in
the Senate and House of Representatives. The National Defence Authorisation Act calls for the
upgrading of military support to Taiwan, while the Taiwan Travel Act encourages more mutual visits by
cabinet-level officials. Both pieces of legislation challenge the “one China” policy. Why a few American
marines in Taiwan pose so many problems Washington and Taipei have much in common in ideology,
values and beliefs as they are both free democracies, the most vibrant in the world and one of the most
vibrant in Asia. They also share grievances with Beijing. For instance, in their speeches, both Pence and
Tsai accused Beijing of interfering in elections. Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party is facing a tough
battle at the upcoming local elections in November, which coincide with US midterm elections.
Economically, Taiwan will be the loser as it will be caught in the crossfire of the escalating US-China
trade war and other conflicts between the world’s two largest economies – which also happen to be
Taiwan’s top trade partners and export markets. However, politically, diplomatically and strategically,
Tsai’s government might consider this a price worth paying in return for support in both the White
House and Congress, as this might help in balancing Beijing’s diplomatic pressure. This is not the first
time Taiwan has become a central issue in US-China relations. In the 1960 US presidential debate, John
Kennedy and Richard Nixon traded barbs over whether America should launch a nuclear war against
China to protect the tiny islands of Matsu and Quemoy, or Kinmen, in the event of a communist
invasion. Trump might now see Taiwan as an increasingly valuable point of leverage over China, but
Beijing will make no compromise on this politically most sensitive issue as it considers Taiwan a “core
interest”. As the US and China drift dangerously towards direct conflict, Taiwan should be cautious. The
narrow Taiwan Strait could be the flashpoint that sparks war between the world’s most powerful
nations.
 Internals: U.S. Involvement = China Invasion

US involvement in Taiwan difficult for Beijing to stick to peaceful means

Kristin Huang 7/4 is a senior China reporter, who focuses on diplomacy and defence. She joined the
Post in 2016 and previously reported for China Review News Agency. Kristin is interested in security in
northeast Asia and China's growing military might, July 4 th, 2019, “High-powered talks between US,
Taiwanese defence officials ‘could become the new normal’” from
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3017309/high-power-talks-between-us-
taiwanese-defence-officials-could, accessed 7/5/19 || OES-AT

High-level meetings between defence officials from the United States and Taiwan could become the
“new normal” as the Pentagon seeks to increase its involvement with the self-ruled island, but US President Donald Trump is
still seen as a “restraining force” on the issue, an American think tank has said . ¶ The National Committee on
American Foreign Policy, a non-profit organisation based in New York, made the claims in a report published on Tuesday, following its annual
conference in the city last month. The event was attended by academics and officials from mainland China and the United States. ¶ “ The
[US] defence department wants a more substantive role in arms sales ,” the report said. “Public high-level talks, such
as the ones between [Taiwan’s national security chief] David Lee and [White House national security adviser] John Bolton, could become the
new normal.” ¶ Lee met Bolton during a visit to the US in May. The meeting between senior US and Taiwanese security officials was the first of
its kind in more than four decades, and it infuriated Beijing. ¶ While
the United States does not formally recognise
Taiwan as an independent country, under the Taiwan Relations Act Washington is bound by law to
provide the island with the means to defend itself . ¶ The report said that as the negative sentiment towards mainland China
had grown in the US, so too had support for Taiwan. ¶ However, despite Trump’s often aggressive stance towards Beijing, “he has actually been
a restraining force on Taiwan, having stepped in a few times to rein in other members of his government who are inclined to go even further” in
their support, it said. ¶ A US delegate, who was not named, was quoted as saying that Trump’s reluctance might be more to do with economics
than politics. ¶ “President Trump is said not to have been impressed by the size of Taiwan’s market,” the person said. ¶ Whatever the opinions
of the delegates, Trump approved more arms deals with Taipei in his first two years in office than either of his predecessors, Barack Obama and
George W. Bush. ¶ Among the Chinese attendees at the conference, which was held on June 11-12, were officials from the Chinese central
government’s Taiwan Affairs Office, including its vice-minister Chen Yuanfeng, and various academics. ¶ They were joined by various US
scholars and officials, including Raymond Burghardt and Douglas Paal, both of whom served as director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the
United States’ de facto embassy on the island. ¶ Li Peng, director of the Graduate Institute for Taiwan Studies at Xiamen University in southeast
China’s Fujian province, said it was important for Beijing and Washington to keep communication channels open on Taiwan to ensure tensions
did not overheat. ¶ “Washington has deep-rooted perceptions about the Taiwan issue and is more influenced by Taiwan, so [mainland] China
and the US need to keep communication channels open and advance understanding,” he said. ¶ The conference itself could “help Beijing and
Washington understand each other better, especially at a time when bilateral relations are very complicated”, he said. ¶ The report quoted
another unnamed Chinese speaker as saying he was worried that the United States’ involvement in Taiwan could make it
difficult for Beijing to convince its own people of the need to stick to peaceful means to resolve cross-
strait tensions. ¶ Another delegate was quoted as saying that “outsiders” had no right to question Beijing’s actions or policies regarding
Taiwan, as it was an internal affair. ¶ On the subject of how Trump should handle Taiwan, Jia Qingguo, dean of the International Studies School
at Peking University in Beijing, said that while the US had a legal obligation to help defend the island, the president also had to consider his
relationship with Beijing. ¶ He said he hoped the president would maintain “a responsible attitude towards Taiwan issues, and not be
overwhelmed by the hawkish voices”.
 Impacts: U.S.-Taiwan War = N/W

a crisis over Taiwan will go nuclear – gradual easing of commitment solves

Wenzhao Tao ’17 is a senior research fellow at the Tsinghua Center for U.S.-China Relations. He was
Director of Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, July 13 th, 2017, “The
US Policy Making Process for Post Cold War China: The Role of US Think Tanks and Diplomacy” from
Google Books, pages 146-149 || OES-AT
2.6 Debates Among Think Tanks on U.S. Taiwan Policy in Recent Years With China's rapid rise and fast development of China-U.S. relations in
recent years, Beijing and Washington's mutual interests deepen increasingly. Some dis-tinguished persons and scholars have begun to rethink
the Taiwan issue, sparking a new debate on U.S. Taiwan policy. An influential figure that raised the question much earlier is Bill Owens, a retired
Admiral in U.S. Navy and the former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In an article in November 2009, Owens writes that the world
changes rapidly, and China's growth is four to five times faster than that of America and there will be two big equally-matched powers within
less than thirty years. He suggests that Washington “need to make a frank and pragmatic assessment" of U.S.-China relations. “ The
solution is to approach the US-China relationship not with hedging, competition or watchfulness, but
with cooperation openness and trust," and thus "America must start treating China as a friend.” The TRA is the
basis to sell arms to Taiwan, but this act "is not in our best interest.” "A thoughtful review of this outdated legislation
is warranted and would he viewed by China as a genuine attempt to set a new course" for China-U.S. relations. Besides, Owens pun forward
some concrete suggestions to enhance US-China relationship including military exchanges. Americans might not notice Admiral Owens' article
because it was published at British newspaper. Another two articles published at the US. authoritative maga-zine Foreign Affairs in 2010 arid
2011, comparatively, drew much more attention. At the first issue of Foreign Affairs in 2010, Bruce Gilley, associate professor at Portland State
University, published his article “Not So Dire Straits: How the Findlandization of Taiwan Benefits U.S. Security.” In the article, Gilley reviews
security interests for all parties involved because of Finland’s policy of neutrality on U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War. It is noted that, as
Gilley observes, “Taiwanshares many of the key features that characterized Finland in the late 1940s,” and
both of them are geographically close to rival powers. He then analyzes the importance of the Finlandization
of Taiwan to U.S. security interests. First, Taiwan issue remains the most explosive issue for Beijing and
Washington, Taiwan’s Finlandization could cut off the blasting fuse and consequently “mollify Beijing’s
fears about the island’s becoming an obstacle to China’s military and commercial ambitions in the
region.” Second, Taiwan has been serving U.S. strategic interests since 1949. “The tragic result of this policy, however, has been that it has
played into Beijing’s fears of encirclement and naval inferiority, which in turn has prompted China’s own
military buildup.” “Finlandization will allow Taiwan to break this cycle by taking itself out of the game and
moderating the security dilemma that haunts the Washington-Beijing relationship.” Third, concerns in
Washington have grown increasingly in recent years, doubting whether Taiwan is becoming American strategic burden. Taiwan’s
Findlandization, in this case, could remove people’s concerns and worries. Fourth, “even from a strictly realist perspective ,
there is no
need for the United States to keep Taiwan within its strategic orbit, given that U.S. military security can
be attained through other Asian bases and operations. ” To sum up, this policy shift “serves its own long-term strategic aims
in Asia and globally.” When talking about the possibilities of the Findlandization of Taiwan, Gilley argues that the Chinese mainland is
seeking for peaceful development with Taiwan, and there already developed an inclination in Taiwan to seek security through
integration rather than confrontation. Therefore, Taiwan’s Finlandization is realistically possible . This article has drawn
responses from a wide variety of scholars. Another two articles conveying different viewpoints are published at Foreign Affairs’ May/June issues
of the same year. Vance Chang, Director of the Information Division at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington.
D. C., rejects the theory of Finladization by emphasizing that "relations between Taiwan and mainland China … have represented the exact
opposite of the Finladizaion model” since 1949. "Taiwan's strong security partnership with the United States provides a foundation of support"
for various achievements that Taiwan has made, including the supportive foundation for economic cooperation with the mainland. Taiwan
should not weaken its relationship with the United States. Hans Mouritzen, a Danish scholar specializing on studies on Finlandization, too,
disagrees with Bruce Gilley's model of Taiwan's Findlandization. His main argument is that “unilateral dependency is not a desirable project for
any small power... no smell power today will voluntarily discard a reasonable alliance option and limit its room to maneuver in the way
Findlandization requires. More people vocalized diverse views on U.S. Taiwan policy in 2011. The monthly Foreign Affairs at its 2nd issue in 2011
publishes an article titled “Will China’s Rise Lead to War?” by Charles Glaser, professor of political science and International Relations at the
George Washington University. Glaser points out in his article, “the
rise of China will likely be the most important
international relations story of the twenty-first century , but it remains unclear whether that story will have a happy
ending.” The academia of international relations therefore has always been debating over China’s rise and China-U.S. conflicts. According to
Glaser, China’s
rise will not lead to war with the United States, and “the solution to the puzzle lies in the
concept of the security dilemma – a situation in which one state’s efforts to increase its own security reduce the security of others.”
He thinks that U.S. military superiority, particularly its nuclear advantage, and “separation by the Pacific Ocean,” as well as “political relations
that are currently relatively good” should enable China and the United States to “maintain high levels of security and avoid military policies that
severely strain their relationship.” “Because China places such high value on Taiwa n and because the United States and China …
have such different attitude regarding the legitimacy of the status quo, the issue poses special dangers and challenges for the U.S.-China
relationship,” he adds. “A
crisis over Taiwan could fairly easily escalate to nuclear war,” Glaser says. “given the
different interests and perceptions of the various parties and the limited control washington has over
Taipei’s behavior, a crisis could unfold in which the United states found itself following events rather than leading them.” Therefore, the
United States should consider backing away from its commitment to Taiwan, which “would remove the
most obvious and contentious flash point between the United States and China and smooth the way for
better relations between them in the decades to come.” Admittedly, it remains a “complex issue” for the United States
whether and how to reduce its commitment to Taiwan. As Glaser suggests, “a gradual easing of its commitment is likely
best, as opposed to a sharp, highly advertised break .” As cross-Strait relations have improved over the past several years,
“Washington will likely have both the time and the room to evaluate and adjust its policy.”
 Impacts: War Escalates

And, U.S.-China War over Taiwan escalates --- bigger risk than any other conflict

Swaine et al. ‘16

(Michael Swaine, Senior Associate in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Coordinator of the U.S.-China Crisis
Management Program co-sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment and the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies, Contributor
to China Leadership Monitor—a journal published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Senior Policy Analyst and RAND
Center for Asia-Pacific Policy Chair in Northeast Asian Security at the RAND Corporation, former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Chinese
Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, former Research Associate at Harvard University, holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard
University, with Wenyan Deng, former Junior Fellow in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Graduate Student
in International Relations and Security Studies at the University of Chicago, and Aube Rey Lescure, former Research Assistant in the Asia
Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016 “The Seven Components of a Stable Balance of Power,” Creating a Stable
Asia: An Agenda for a U.S.-China Balance of Power, Available Online at http://carnegieendowment.org/files/CEIP_Swaine_U.S.-Asia_Final.pdf)

A Largely Demilitarized Taiwan Strait Arguably, a

Sino-U.S. confrontation over Taiwan, more than any other hotspot in the
Western Pacific, has the potential to escalate to a direct military conflict of major proportions . Indeed, this

constitutes the most likely potential trigger for an outright war between the two powers. As countless experts
and pundits have observed, despite ever-closer cross-strait economic ties and people-to-people contacts and a long, recent period of positive cross-strait relations
under former Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou, the combination of growing sentiment on Taiwan against reunification (under
almost any conditions), continued U.S. political and military support for the island, and China’s growing military and
economic strength could significantly increase the potential for future crises. These could arise over
tension-producing political events on Taiwan or the mainland or as a result either of a much stronger China’s refusal to accept future

U.S. arms sales to the island or the emergence of a new pattern of Taiwan politics dominated by pro-independence elements. In fact, the recent
2016 election by a large margin of members of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party to both the Taiwan presidency and the Legislative Yuan
suggests that cross-strait relations might become more turbulent in the near future, as cross-strait
relations languish and especially if Beijing becomes significantly less confident in the prospects for
eventual reunification. And such increased turbulence is particularly likely to become a long-term problem if this election portends a fundamental long-
term weakening of the pro–One China Nationalist Party (Guomindang), as many observers believe.16

A crisis over Taiwan will escalate to nuclear war — risking extinction.

Bohl ‘16
(Ryan Bohl, Geopolitical Writer at Geopolitics Made Super, “Why Taiwan Could (Still) Start World War
III,” The Atlantic Sentinel, December 8th, Available Online at http://atlanticsentinel.com/2016/12/why-
taiwan-could-still-start-world-war-iii/)

if the PRC tries to bring Taiwan back into the fold by military force, the U nited States must retaliate.
So

Conventional battles turn to nuclear battles and then we all die in the irradiated glow of our own monstrous weapons. That much is
common knowledge, which is why even Donald Trump walked back from his inopportune phone call from the Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen. The diplomatic implications of the phone call

are better detailed elsewhere. What is not being detailed is why China could well end humanity over the island. This requires a deep dive into China’s
geopolitics and understanding why the communists, the latest Chinese dynasty, cannot afford to let Taiwan officially slip from their grasp. The nature of China: huge, isolated, powerful and
prone to corrective self-destruction China is a unique geopolitical entity. It is gigantic by both land and population: it is the largest by population and fourth largest by land. This gives it
tremendous power. Geography and demography, after all, are the pillars upon which power are made. Is also, however, uniquely isolated. That doesn’t seem the case by glancing at a political
map. It looks like its a big state in a crowded neighborhood. But to look at a map of Asia’s human distribution and you see the distinction. Virtually all of China’s population is crowded either
along the coast or near the interior province of Chengdu. The especially ultra-crowded Shanghai-Beijing corridor is historically where Chinese elites made their homes and the backbone of
Chinese society lay. What might seem like threatening states — Russia, India or Japan — are in fact isolated from the heart of Chinese power. India is barred by the impassable Himalayas and
the sparse Tibetan plateau. Russia’s Far East is nearly empty. Japan’s highly developed population is isolated by sea and completely dependent on outsiders to supply it. This affords it a level of
powerful isolation only equalled by the United States. Unlike the US, however, China has had huge problems managing change. The Mandate of Heaven: corruption, destruction, rebirth The US
was a do-over nation. It sought to improve on the political models of Europe, at the time mired in increasingly ineffective monarchies and empires. China is no do-over. It’s a first nation, with
all its original geopolitical sins still intact. Chief of these sins is the inability to modernize the state and society without mass violence. This isn’t a Chinese sin so much as first-nation sin: trying
to upend society anywhere is extraordinarily difficult and almost always comes with hefty doses of violence. Tribal chiefs resent being replaced by kings; kings despise being replaced by prime
ministers and presidents. The elites of one outdated era often fight against the winds of change. This is the stuff civil wars are made of. One part of the state and society recognizes things must
change to keep up with competitors and to rationalize the distribution of resources and power. Another part doesn’t want to rationalize anything, lest they lose privileges. As Oliver Wendell
Jones acutely observed, there is no remedy then but force. But China is unique in the way it fights these relatively normal civil wars. Many other states have collapsed or been conquered in the
course of such shifts: a wily adversary takes advantage of their weakness to bring them under their control. But China’s isolation has allowed it to corrupt, collapse and coalesce at least sixteen
times since the Zhou Dynasty three thousand years ago. That number may wobble depending on how you define a dynasty and collapse, but it is regardless extraordinary. How many other

The Chinese Politburo, the ruling

nation states exist today after more than a dozen huge civil wars over three thousand years? And the communists are all too aware of this

cadre of the Communist Party, knows their history. Their spasmodic anti-corruption drives are not merely for the betterment of Chinese

society, but to stave off what they see as the looming repetition of Chinese history . Each dynasty grows lax: it becomes corrupt,
losing the favor of its subjects. These subjects, and the elites they empower, revolt, overthrow the dynasty and start afresh. Worse, most Chinese elites know they are too big, too powerful
and too isolated to be conquered readily by some outside force taking advantage during this violence. The Japanese tried during the last great civil war and failed. This can breed a

the communists worry not about the

complacency toward stability: Chinese can think they can afford a violent uprising to better their lot. And so

extinction of China, which would be very difficult to achieve, but the dissolution of themselves. It is they, and not China as
a nation state, that fears the loss of Taiwan . To lose Taiwan to independence is to put the communists’
critical credibility on the line. When the communists under Mao first declared Taiwan would never be
abandoned, they believe[d] that Taiwan would soon collapse to communist forces as the rest of the
country had. As decades have gone on, it’s become addicting: it allowed the communists to whip up
anti-Yankee nationalists to crowd out dissidents in the public sphere. But it also has become a critical means test for their
rule. For Taiwan is not the only part of the old Qing Empire that has agitations to secede. There is , famously,
Tibet: the very frontier that protects China’s heartland from Indian influence and invasion. But there is also Muslim Uyghurstan, the huge, resource-rich
Xinjiang Province in the west once on the Silk Road and linked culturally more with Arabia than Beijing. There is also the less murderous but still worrisome Inner

Mongolia, as well as the distant possibility of an independent Manchuria . We’ve seen this happen
before. When the USSR began to lose credibility in the late 1980s — especially when it abandoned its Warsaw Pact allies to revolution in
1989 — various Soviet subject-elites took the opportunity to break away . China is not structured like the ex-USSR with ready-to-go

republics, but it doesn’t have to be for this disaster scenario to replay itself. If Taiwan declares formal independence and gets away with it,

it will prove China’s communists are, ironically, the real paper tiger. For secessionists, that time would be
perfect to launch full-scale uprisings and revolts. It’s not that China’s P eople’s Liberation Army couldn’t crush said
revolts; they probably could, since all the secessionists are coming from sparsely populated regions. It’s that they could inspire others in
the heart of China’s society. 1.1 billion people cannot uniformly do anything, let alone agree on leadership. There are millions of dissident
Chinese; within them are shadow societies with shadow elites who aim to empower themselves at the expense of the ruling communists. Just because we don’t see them in the public
light doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They may be small, but if the communists look anything less than dangerous, they could inspire

many millions. There are doubtless more dissidents than we realize because of the truth of life in an authoritarian state. They can do big things well, and quickly, but not much else.
Thus China can build massive, ultra-modern cities — but then can’t find ways to convince people to move into them. It can arm and corral some 1.8 million troops, but then makes a hash of a
small peacekeeping mission in a much weaker country. It can outperform many countries on standardized tests, but cannot prevent many of its students from cheating their way through
university. When focused, authoritarian states can get high-profile stuff done: The Soviet Union was especially proud of its annual steel output. But day-to-day life is often mired in corruption,
frustration and incompetence. It’s very normal for citizens to want their government to be better; in authoritarian states, that universal truth is denied and instead frustrations hide in plain

the masses merely need to see their leaders fail to

sight. And so for the highly populated coast, Shanghai-Beijing corridor and Chengdu province,

spark an uprising that could well repeat history . For the communist elite, this distant fear alone is worth
the threat of nuclear war. Another frozen conflict The communists benefit immensely from this frozen conflict.
They can rail against the Americans to the right sort while not actually having to do anything about it.
Mutually assured destruction is a completely rational reason not to invade Taiwan; even hardcore
communists, few as they are, can see that. They do not benefit in any change in status, unless that status is to
bring Taiwan into the mainland’s fold. If Taiwan acts like an independent nation, it reveals the
Politburo’s threats as just propaganda and undermines the whole regime . Calling Donald Trump was the act of a free nation; him
picking up implied he, or his advisors, believe so too. Thus to ensure credibility on the matter, the Chinese must retaliate. Right now, they seem
interested in brushing it off as the accident of yet another idiot American president. This suits their purposes nicely, slandering both the Americans and the democratic system that produced

perhaps Trump’s advisors wish to push the envelope

their inept leader. If that’s all that happens, little will change. But there is a sense that

further. Many of them are diehard anti-communists; an odd anachronism in the twenty-first century, yet one that would push a policy of using Taiwan as a wedge to undermine Chinese
 If their goal is to destabilize China as Ronald Reagan once destabilized the
power. If I can see the writing on China’s wall sans Taiwan, surely so can Trump’s people.

Soviet Union by supporting Poland’s Solidarity Movement and sending arms to the Afghan rebellion, their best point of attack is through Taiwan . Yet this

puts Beijing in a bind. To not respond at all is to threaten the existence of the communist regime; to
retaliate is to perhaps spiral toward Armageddon. How far will China’s leaders go, if Trump’s people push too far? The problem of remaining credible
China is at a disadvantage. It prefers to get Taiwan back, but can maintain the status quo. The Americans, on the other hand, can upset the applecart. China needs America more than the other
way around, at least for now: China holds much of America’s debt, yet if tensions rose such debt could be frozen, seized or outright cancelled by an aggressive White House. China also needs
the United States as an export market; without manufacturing, the Chinese miracle is dead on arrival. While Russia can supply China with all the energy and raw material it needs to support its
industrial base, it cannot replace the US or its allies as a consumer. If the US ratchets up tension, and if China appears the aggressor, Europe may also close its doors to Chinese goods. That
would leave only the developed world left for Chinese materials and many of them too would choose sides. It’s the USSR all over again: a closed system, sealed off by the Americans, with ever

China could flex its military muscles, especially its nuclear ones. To stop an aggressive
diminishing returns. So instead

White House might require Beijing to bring us all to the brink. And in that there lies the road for
miscalculation or, worse, outright nihilism, as bunkered elites in China decide their massive population can
afford a half million losses. This is not far from Mao’s own thinking. Surely in a Cuban Missile Crisis-style
confrontation, some generals would offer that . The terrible thing is that the U nited States doesn’t need to
rock the boat for anything but ideological reasons. To throw China into post-communist chaos is unlikely to repeat the clean dissolution of the
USSR, but rather to invite a dynastic civil war which will almost certainly hurt US interests. It’s high-risk and low-

reward: the Chinese communists have all the incentive in the world to slowly reform themselves out of
power, but will never do so if under threat. Yet that may not bother a post-truth Trump White House.
We may see nuclear sabers rattled yet.

The CCP’s primary objective is to preserve the regime – ensures escalation and mass
suffering – kills a ton of people

Lieber & Press ‘13

[Kier A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press 13, Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign
Service and the Department of Government at Georgetown, Associate Professor of Government at
Dartmouth, “Coercive Nuclear Campaigns in the 21st Century: Understanding Adversary Incentives and
Options for Nuclear Escalation,” January, Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts Report No. 2013]

A second key condition that may affect the propensity of leaders to escalate conventional wars – rather
than accept defeat – is their vulnerability to coups or revolutions.39 As we described above, losing power often results in
terrible outcomes for a country’s elite. To avoid losing power during a war, however, a country’s leaders
must do more than merely deter a wartime enemy from conquering them; they must also prevent the war from unleashing dynamics within

their own country that trigger a coup or revolution – during or after the conflict. Countries whose
governments face substantial domestic opposition will, therefore, face intense pressure to coerce an
end to hostilities rapidly, before regime opponents are emboldened or before too much damage is done
to the regime’s internal security forces. Wars tend to undermine governing regimes in a variety of ways. In many authoritarian
regimes, popular uprisings are prevented by “collective action” problems: if every regime opponent
rebelled at once, they could overwhelm the regime’s internal security forces, but no group wants to be
the first: it would be slaughtered, and there is no guarantee that other groups or individuals would
follow their lead. Oppressive governments exacerbate these collective action problems by using spies and informants to make coordination against the regime too dangerous.40
If a government suffers a major military defeat – even one with merely “limited objectives” – the
evidence of disarray among the leadership and regime security forces may embolden domestic
opponents to rebel. This dynamic was triggered in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf War: the signs of chaos within Saddam Hussein’s government, and the appearance that
his regime was on its last legs, emboldened Shi’ite groups, principally from Southern Iraq, to rebel against Saddam’s rule. In addition to emboldening regime

opponents, the conduct of the war might directly reduce the ability of the regime to defend itself
against its opponents. If the war involves attacks on internal security forces, leaders may become unable to defend themselves
against a popular uprising, or defend themselves against a military coup, or even against a coup attempt
by elements of those security forces. Oppressive governments typically put their most ‐trusted allies in
charge of leadership security forces. If those forces are being targeted and destroyed – and hence the
regime’s closest allies are being killed – the leadership may face intense pressure to compel a ceasefire
immediately. Finally, for many governments, the greatest threat to regime survival comes from the country’s own military. If a war results in the
devastation of a country’s military forces – and the humiliation of the military leadership – the risk of a
coup surges. As a result, leaders must compel a ceasefire long before enemy forces start to advance on their capital; they must create a ceasefire
before domestic opponents sense weakness , before regime security elements are too degraded, and
before its military becomes too demoralized and angry at the political leadership. The implication for
regimes that face considerable internal opposition is clear: if a war begins to go badly, find a way to
create a battlefield stalemate immediately – or face the prospects of a revolution or coup. The
implication for countries that might face weak regimes in war is equally important: adopting even a
“limited aims” war plan may not be sufficient to prevent escalation. Inflicting a major conventional
defeat on the enemy – like the one inflicted on Iraq in 1991, and the one the United States would seek to inflict in almost
any limited war – may cross the enemy’s escalatory red line. Blinding and Disarming Military Operations The third key factor
that may make leaders more inclined to employ nuclear weapons coercively stems from the style of war
waged by their opponents. If leaders are driven to escalate by fear of conquest or post-‐war regime change, then certain kinds of military
operations are likely to exacerbate that fear. Specifically, operations that aim to blind enemy command and
control, directly target political leaders and regime security elements, or degrade strategic deterrent forces will intensify adversary
incentives to escalate. Conventional war has changed dramatically over the past three decades as computers have become fully integrated into every facet of warfare. The
computerization of weapons and warfare has changed nearly every aspect of combat: e.g., command, communications, reconnaissance, navigation, and the precision with which weapons can
be delivered against targets. Increasingly, military forces derive combat effectiveness from their ability to integrate information from multiple sources, make effective decisions, and coordinate
the actions of widely dispersed units. Thus, the battlefield payoffs from disrupting an adversary’s command and control system – i.e., severing the links between sensors and commanders and

Not surprisingly, powerful states like the United States have made such
forces, and destroying command sites themselves – have become enormous.

operations the centerpiece of their way of war. The problem is that although this style of warfare can produce one-‐sided
battlefield outcomes, it is also highly escalatory. Over the past twenty years, every major U.S. military operation has begun with an intense effort to destroy the enemy’s
command and control. For example, the first five days of U.S. air operations in the 1991 Persian Gulf War focused on degrading the Iraqi military’s central nervous system, rather than hacking
off its limbs. More than a thousand airstrikes targeted Iraqi surface-‐to-‐air radars and missile systems (to allow the United States unfettered access to Iraqi airspace), command posts,
electricity, communications, and organs of government control – all aimed at denying the Iraqi leadership “situational awareness” and preventing it from coordinating military forces in the
field.41 Of these strikes, nearly two hundred were launched against Iraq’s leadership on the first night of the air war – representing an intense effort to kill the senior members in Saddam’s
government.42 The air war against Serbia (1999) and during the Iraq War (2003) followed a similar pattern.43 Even the wars against enemies with more rudimentary command and controls
systems – the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan (2001) and the brief campaign against Libya (2011) – began with attacks on the leadership and their ability to command and control their defense
forces. In addition to blinding adversaries, sophisticated militaries like that of the United States have a powerful proclivity to target the most lethal weapons systems of their enemies, including

weapons of mass destruction. From an operational standpoint, this makes good sense – during a war it seems logical
to degrade an enemy’s most lethal weapons. However, attacks on an adversary’s WMD sites and
delivery systems also inherently open the door for follow- ‐on operations to overthrow those regimes.
Stated differently, if an enemy’s weapons of mass destruction are the ultimate deterrent and guarantee of its regime survival, then efforts to destroy those

weapons will pose an existential threat – forcing it to escalate to coerce an end to those attacks. Attacking an
enemy’s strategic deterrent assets is, therefore, highly escalatory. In recent wars, the United States has often sought to destroy the enemy’s strategic assets. In 1991, the U.S. air campaign
included intense attacks on Iraqi WMD sites and suspected delivery systems. More than one hundred WMD-‐related targets were struck on the first night alone, and nearly six hundred WMD
targets were attacked during the first five days of the campaign – comprising 15% of all U.S. strikes.44 The United States prioritized potential WMD targets in the 2003 war against Iraq as well;

The effective – but

the air war plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom identified 1,840 targets associated with delivery systems for Iraq’s (essentially nonexistent) WMD program.45

potentially escalatory – style of conventional warfare is likely to remain central to U.S. war plans in the
coming decades, and it is unlikely to be simply shelved for conflict scenarios involving nuclear ‐armed
enemies. For example, the over‐arching U.S. concept for military operations against China in the coming
decades – “AirSea Battle” – calls for air and missile strikes against large numbers of radars, communications
nodes, and other command and control targets across the Chinese homeland. 46 Furthermore, recent U.S. conventional
operations and U.S. air war doctrine suggest that if war erupted in Korea, the U.S.-‐ROK Combined Forces Command would seek to rapidly degrade North Korean command and control and
strategic weapon systems. There is a powerful logic for attacking enemy command and control – such attacks are a key element of the one-‐sided conventional victories that the U.S. has
enjoyed for the past two decades. There is also a powerful logic for rapidly degrading those enemy weapon systems that could cause extreme damage to U.S. allies, forces, and the U.S.
homeland. But waging war in this fashion – blinding and disarming the enemy, while destroying his leadership sites – places great pressure on enemy leaders to escalate to force such attacks
 the United States will almost inevitably target weaker states’ command and control
to stop. In sum, strong states with sophisticated militaries like

systems, leadership, and strategic assets at the outset of a conventional conflict. This compounds the
adversary’s fear of not surviving the conflict, thus making nuclear escalation as a means of forestalling
defeat more likely. Escalation Risks in Potential Conventional Conflicts Table 1 summarizes these dangers in the context of several wars that could plausibly occur in the coming
years. The column on the far right aggregates the three worrisome conditions – conquest, regime

vulnerability, and the propensity of the combatants to wage conventional war by blinding and disarming
the enemy – and indicates the resulting escalatory risks if conventional war were to occur. The darker shade in that
far-‐right column indicates that all three worrisome conditions are present; the lighter shade means that one or two of the dangerous conditions would exist during a conventional war. Several
of the implications from Table 1 are striking. First, although it is widely appreciated within the U.S. national security community that a major war between India and Pakistan would entail
dangerous escalatory risks – a judgment we share – the logic developed in this paper and summarized in Table 1 suggests that several plausible U.S. regional wars are even more prone to
escalation. The likelihood of escalation seems greatest on the Korean Peninsula: the Pyongyang government has every reason to expect that a major military defeat equals regime change, with
calamitous consequences for the existing leadership. Regime change could occur as a result of intentional U.S. / ROK policy – i.e., if leaders in Washington and Seoul choose “regime change” as
the war’s desired endstate. But the Pyongyang government might fall even if the U.S. and ROK pursue limited objectives: the damage inflicted on the North Korean military and security
services may sufficiently weaken the regime and trigger a coup or revolution. Furthermore, CFC military operations will likely seek to blind the North Korean command and control, destroy

conventional
leadership sites, and perhaps degrade their strategic weapons. If war erupts on the Korean Peninsula, preventing escalation will be a very difficult challenge. Second, a

conflict in maritime East Asia between the United States and China may entail far greater nuclear
escalation risks than is commonly recognized. Because the conquest of China is not plausible, many
analysts assume that the escalation risks in a U.S. ‐China clash are substantially muted. But that
optimistic assumption overlooks two critical facts, which are highlighted in Table 1. Namely, China’s leadership may not
be able to survive the political repercussion of suffering a humiliating conventional military defeat at
the hands of the United States, and that the U.S. style of conventional operations – including large
numbers of strikes on the Chinese mainland to blind Chinese sensors and degrade military command
and control – may exacerbate these escalatory risks.
China Invades Debate
 PLA Cant Invade

PLA doesn’t have the capability to invade Taiwan

Ben Westcott ‘19 is a Digital News Producer based in Hong Kong, who joined CNN in 2016. He writes
about China, Australia and Indonesia, June 24 th, 2019, “A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a bloody,
logistical nightmare” from https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/23/asia/taiwan-china-invasion-intl-
hnk/index.html, accessed 7/5/19 || OES-AT
Roaring out of the sky, an F-16V fighter jet lands smoothly to rearm and refuel on an unremarkable freeway in rural Taiwan, surrounded by rice
paddies. ¶ In different circumstances, this could be alarming sight. Taiwan's fighter pilots are trained to land on freeways between sorties in
case all of the island's airports have been occupied or destroyed by an invasion. ¶ Luckily, this was a training exercise. ¶ There's
only
really one enemy that Taiwan's armed forces are preparing to resist -- China's People's Liberation Army
(PLA). And as China's reputation as an economic and military superpower has grown in recent years, so too has that threat of invasion,
according to security experts. ¶ Taiwan has been self-governed since separating from China at the end of a brutal civil war in 1949, but Beijing
has never given up hope of reuniting with what it considers a renegade province. ¶ At a regional security conference in June, Chinese Defense
Minister Wei Fenghe said: "If
anyone dares to split Taiwan from China, the Chinese military has no choice but to
fight at all costs for national unity." In some shops in mainland China, you can buy postcards and T-shirts emblazoned with
patriotic emblems promoting the retaking of Taiwan. ¶ But for seven decades, China has resisted attacking Taiwan partly for
political reasons, including the prospect of a US intervention and the potential heavy human toll. But the
practical realities of a full-blown invasion are also daunting for the PLA, according to experts . ¶ Ferrying
hundreds of thousands of troops across the narrow Taiwan Strait to a handful of reliable landing beaches, in the face of fierce resistance, is a
harrowing prospect. Troops would then have a long slog over Taiwan's western mudflats and mountains to
reach the capital, Taipei. ¶ Not only that, but China would face an opponent who has been preparing for war
for almost 70 years. ¶ At mass anti-invasion drills in May, Taiwan military spokesman Maj. Gen. Chen Chung-Chi said the island knew it
had to always be "combat-ready." ¶ "Of course, we don't want war, but only by gaining our own strength can we defend ourselves," he said. "If
China wants to take any action against us, it has to consider paying a painful price." ¶ Difficult and bloody ¶ It
could be easy to
assume that any invasion of Taiwan by Beijing would be brief and devastating for Taipei : a David and Goliath
fight between a tiny island and the mainland's military might, population and wealth. ¶ With nearly 1.4 billion people, the People's Republic of
China has the largest population in the world. Taiwan has fewer than 24 million people -- a similar number to Australia. China has the fifth
largest territory in the world, while Taiwan is the size of Denmark or the US state of Maryland. And Beijing runs an economy that is second only
to the United States, while Taiwan's doesn't rank in the world's top 20. ¶ But perhaps most pertinently, China has been building and
modernizing its military at an unprecedented rate, while Taiwan relies on moderate US arms sales. ¶ In sheer size, the PLA simply dwarfs
Taiwan's military. ¶ China has an estimated 1 million troops, almost 6,000 tanks, 1,500 fighter jets and 33 navy destroyers, according to the
latest US Defense Department report. Taiwan's ground force troops barely number 150,000 and are backed by 800 tanks and about 350 fighter
aircraft, the report found, while its navy fields only four destroyer-class ships. ¶ Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the PLA has rapidly
modernized, buoyed by rises in military spending and crackdowns on corruption in the army's leadership. ¶ "China's leaders hope that
possessing these military capabilities will deter pro-independence moves by Taiwan or, should deterrence fail, will permit a range of tailored
military options against Taiwan and potential third-party military intervention," according to a 2019 US Defense Intelligence Agency report on
China's military. ¶ Yet
while China hawks in the media might beat the drum of invasion, an internal China
military study, seen by CNN, revealed that the PLA considers an invasion of Taiwan to be extremely
difficult. ¶ "Taiwan has a professional military, with a strong core of American-trained experts," said Ian
Easton, author of "The Chinese Invasion Threat" and research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, as well as "highly defensible" terrain. ¶ In his
book he described an invasion by China as "the most difficult and bloody mission facing the Chinese military." ¶ The plan to take Taiwan ¶
China's Taiwan invasion plan, known internally as the "Joint Island Attack Campaign," would begin with a mass, coordinated bombing of
Taiwan's vital infrastructure -- ports and airfields -- to cripple the island's military ahead of an amphibious invasion, according to both Easton
and Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies. ¶ At the same time, the Chinese
air force would fly over the Taiwan Strait and try to dominate the island's air space. Once the PLA was satisfied it had suitably disabled Taiwan's
air and naval forces, Kaushal said soldiers would begin to invade on the west coast of the island. ¶ The island's rocky, mountainous east coast is
considered too inhospitable and far from mainland China. ¶ The amphibious invasion needed to put troops on Taiwan, however, could be the
biggest hurdle facing the PLA. ¶ In its 2019 report to Congress, the US Department of Defense said China -- which has one of the largest navies
in Asia -- had at its command 37 amphibious transport docks and 22 smaller landing ships, as well as any civilian vessels Beijing could enlist. ¶
That might be enough to occupy smaller islands, such as those in the South China Sea, but an amphibious assault on Taiwan
would likely require a bigger arsenal -- and there is "no indication China is significantly expanding its landing ship force," the report
said. ¶ That makes it vital for Beijing to neutralize Taiwan's navy and air force in the early stages of an attack, Kaushal said. ¶ "The Taiwanese air
force would have to sink around 40% of the amphibious landing forces of the PLA in order to render this sort of mission infeasible," he said. ¶
Essentially, that's only about 10 to 15 ships, he added. ¶ If they did make it across the strait, the
PLA would still need to find a
decent landing spot for its ships. ¶ China's military would be looking for a landing site both close to the mainland, and a strategic
city, such as Taipei, with nearby port and airport facilities. ¶ That leaves just 14 potential beaches, Easton said -- and it's not only the PLA that
knows it. Taiwanese engineers have spent decades digging tunnels and bunkers in potential landing zones along the coast. ¶ Furthermore, the
backbone of Taiwan's defense is a fleet of vessels capable of launching anti-ship cruise missiles, on top
of an array of ground-based missiles, and substantial mines and artillery on the coastline. ¶ "Taiwan's entire
national defense strategy, including its war plans, are specifically targeted at defeating a PLA invasion," Easton said. ¶ Chinese troops could be
dropped in from the air, but a lack of paratroopers in the PLA makes it unlikely. ¶ If
the PLA held a position on Taiwan, and
could reinforce with troops from the mainland to face off about 150,000 Taiwan troops, as well as more than
2.5 million reservists, it would have to push through the island's western mud flats and mountains, with only narrow roads to assist them,
towards Taipei. ¶ Finally, the mobilization of amphibious landing vessels, ballistic missile launchers, fighters and bombers, as well as hundreds
of thousands of troops, would give Taiwan plenty of advance warning of any attack, Kaushal said. ¶ "It's extremely unlikely that the invasion
could come as a bolt from the blue," Kaushal added. ¶ There is, of course, one final deterrent to any PLA invasion of Taiwan .
¶ It isn't clear whether or not such an attack by China would spark an intervention by the United States on Taipei's behalf. ¶ Washington has
been a longtime ally of the island, selling weapons to the Taiwan government and providing implicit military protection from Beijing. ¶ Easton
said that, at present, the US would likely intervene in Taiwan's favor, both to protect investment by US companies on the island and reassure
American allies in the region, who are also facing down a resurgent PLA in the East and South China seas. ¶ Collin Koh Swee Lean, research
fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies' Maritime Security Program in Singapore, said there would also be "immense
political consequences" from taking over Taiwan, in the event of a successful China invasion. ¶ "It will likely mean that China will be seen as the
bad guy in the neighborhood, who uses force," he said. "It will alienate some regional partners and the good will which China has been trying to
build over the years will evaporate. And it will set China on a collision course with the US." ¶ But Taipei isn't taking anything for granted. ¶ On
the sidelines of the massive Han Guang drills, Taiwan's Maj. Gen. Chen pointed out the hundreds of spectators who had come out to watch and
support the island's military. ¶ "These exercises let people know the national army of the Republic of China is ready," he said. ¶ Taiwan is taking
no chances.
 China Wont Invade

China wouldn’t invade Taiwan – Taiwan has the capacity to defend themselves
Mark Episkopos ’19 is a frequent contributor to The National Interest and serves as research assistant
at the Center for the National Interest. Mark is also a PhD student in History at American University,
June 1st, 2019, “Could Taiwan Halt an Invasion by China?” from
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/could-taiwan-halt-invasion-china-60617, accessed 7/5/19 || OES-
AT
The Taiwan question has long been in a thorn in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) side. In the decades following the Shanghai communiqué,
the CCP’s core strategic approach to Taiwan was to bide their time while building up national strength. As Deng Xiaoping famously proclaimed,
the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can wait 100 years to reunify with Taiwan (also known as Republic of China, or ROC) if necessary. ¶ Today’s
CCP appears to be operating within a much shorter time frame, however. With China’s rise to great power status, Beijing wields unprecedented
economic leverage over Taiwan and is increasingly comfortable with flexing its military muscle overseas. XI Jingping is “losing patience” with the
defiant island off his southeastern coast, which continues to rebuff Chinese reunification schemes premised on what Xi calls a “one country,
two systems” approach. ¶ It is unlikely that the CCP would seek an outright invasion and occupation of
Taiwan, given the drastic geopolitical risks that would entail. But as East Asia scholars have frequently cautioned, the
China-Taiwan relationship is fraught with potential escalatory spirals that can easily set the two sides on
a path to unavoidable military conflict . ¶ What are Taiwan’s military capabilities, and how would it defend itself against a Chinese
offensive? Here is what we found. ¶ Taiwan’s capacity to defend its airspace against the might of the Chinese
People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) is one of the foremost deciding factors in a prospective
military conflict. For most of the 20th century, Taiwan’s security establishment was confident that the superior training and equipment of
the ROC air force was enough to offset the PLAAF’s vast numerical advantage. In 2019, those calculations no longer apply. The PLAAF has
emerged from its 1980’s modernization program with one of the most technically advanced air force rosters in the world, supplementing a
growing domestic jet fighter industry with a total sum of just under one hundred modernized Russian Su-30MKK and Su-35 fighters. ¶
Meanwhile, the core of Taiwan’s fleet is still composed of US-made F-16A/B fighters that were procured
in the 1990’s. Since then, Taipei attempted several times to purchase upgraded F-16 C/D Block fighters. The Pentagon demurred until
2011, when it instead offered a minor retrofit package for Taiwan’s fleet of aging F-16A/B jets. Even this watered-down contract sputtered and
eventually ground to a halt amid cost concerns. Taipei then briefly turned its sights on procuring the F-35B, before concluding that the US
fighter was cost-inefficient and ill-suited for Taiwan’s defense needs. ¶ It
is only in the past year that Taipei found a
glimmer of hope on their decades-long quest to modernize the Taiwanese air force. As per a 330 million
dollar contract signed in late 2018 and reconfirmed last month, the preponderance of Taiwan’s F-16A/B
fleet will be retrofitted to become generation 4.5 F-16 Vipers . As opposed to the ill-fated F-16 C/D deal, the F-16V
upgrade promises to be a serious technical leap forward for Taiwan’s air force. The Viper boasts the best avionics package
ever seen on an F-16, while incorporating the expanded armament suites of more recent F-16 Block
revisions. ¶ For the first time in well over a decade, Taiwan’s air force would be in a military position to at least
contest Taiwanese airspace against the PLAAF’s J-10 and Su-30 fighters. There is, however, a large caveat: the F-16V
deal is not set in stone. Just as rapidly as Taiwan’s military fortunes are rising on the heels of a deteriorating US-China relationship, so too can
they suddenly collapse with a change in Washington’s geopolitical priorities.
 A2: No Chinese Hardliners
Nationalists in China are pushing a hardline stance on Taiwan
Eric Gomez, 9-28-2016, "A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense
Relationship," Cato Institute, https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-
options-future-us-taiwan-defense-relationship

Maintaining stability in the Taiwan Strait will become more complicated as a result of two trends in
cross-strait relations and one higher-level trend. First, a distinct identity is taking hold in Taiwan; the
people living there see themselves as Taiwanese instead of Chinese. Surveys conducted in 2014 showed
that “fewer than 4 percent of respondents [in Taiwan] self-identified as solely Chinese, with a clear
majority (60 percent) self-identifying solely as Taiwanese.”75 A unique Taiwanese identity is dangerous
to Beijing because it makes China’s ultimate goal of reunification more difficult, especially if the identity
issue leads to greater political support for independence. Thankfully, the Taiwanese people have been
very pragmatic and have not yet made a significant push for de jure independence.76 Second, if China’s
economy continues to slow down Beijing could become more aggressive toward Taiwan. A parade of
doom and gloom headlines reveal the weaknesses of China’s economic miracle. The Chinese stock
market experienced downturns in August 2015 and January 2016 that affected global financial
markets.77 China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based workers’ rights group, recorded more than 2,700
strikes and worker protests throughout China in 2015—more than double the 1,300 recorded the year
before.78 In February 2016, Reuters reported that 1.8 million workers in China’s state-owned coal and
steel companies will be laid off in the coming years.79 This is not to say that China’s economy is in
imminent danger of a catastrophic collapse. However, the political instability resulting from economic
troubles could create an incentive for Beijing to act aggressively to burnish the Chinese Communist
Party’s image at home.80 Exacerbating this risk is the rise of nationalist forces within Chinese society
that could push the government into a more aggressive cross-strait policy. Such forces played an
important role in the government’s heavy-handed response to 2014’s Occupy Central protests in Hong
Kong.81 Economic problems coupled with aggressive ideology could prompt China to back away from
any rapprochement with Taiwan. This could make the task of deterring a Chinese attack harder for the
United States.

Even if you win that Taiwanese hardliners don’t push for independence its not relevant
because amid a CCP legitimacy crisis Chinese hardliners will lash out and take Taiwan
Alagappa 17 (Muthiah Alagappa- Former Nonresident Senior Fellow @ the Carnegie Endowment,
“China’s Taiwan Dilemma Rethinking Ideas of Nation, State and Sovereignty,” Global Asia feature essay,
global asia Vol. 12, No. 4, Winter 2017)

All three key pillars of China’s Taiwan policy suffer shortcomings. Even when taken together, they cannot deliver
unification. At best, they can maintain the status quo . Beijing appears to have recognized this and has
soft pedaled the unification goal since the Hu era . Its primary concern since then has been to prevent
unilateral declaration of independence and to limit Taiwan’s international living space . For its part, the US,
especially after the Chen presidency, seems to have accepted that unilateral declaration of independence is not in line

with peaceful unification and has counseled Taipei accordingly. Its support for Taiwan has become more
circumscribed, but remains strong. And China appears to have accepted that the present status of Taiwan
(no unification, no independence ) can endure for a long time. H owever, the wild card is Beijing’s increased
reliance on nationalism as the basis for CCP legitimacy. Nationalism is likely to become even more
central as the Chinese economy slows. Growing nationalism is likely to focus attention on Taiwan
(unification of the motherland) to which the CCP would have to respond . Although Beijing may prefer the current situation, it may

be compelled to act in the interest of nationalism and its legitimacy, creating a dilemma for Beijing. Until
recently, it was common to posit that Taiwan is confronting a China dilemma. Taiwan’s economic

dependence on the PRC undermines its quest for independence and sovereignty . However, it appears that the worm
is about to turn Increasingly, it will be Beijing that confronts a Taiwan dilemma . Growing nationalism in the PRC

would make unification a high priority .

Independence Debate
 Independence Movements Growing – Tsai
Taiwan’s actively seeking to be recognized as independent – Tsai is rejecting 1992
consensus, shifting her tone to China, and seeking international support
Horton, 19
(Chris, journalist on Asia for New York Times, “Taiwan’s President, Defying Xi Jinping Calls Unification
Order ‘Impossible’”, January 5, 2019, 06/27/2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/world/asia/taiwan-xi-jinping-tsai-ing-wen.html) sd

TAIPEI, Taiwan — President

Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan called on Saturday for domestic and international support
of the island’s de facto independence, days after China’s leader, Xi Jinping, warned that unification with
China was inevitable. “It is impossible for me or, in my view, any responsible politician in Taiwan to accept President Xi Jinping’s recent
remarks without betraying the trust and the will of the people of Taiwan,” Ms. Tsai said in a briefing for foreign reporters in Taipei, Taiwan’s
capital. “We hope the international community will pay attention and combine efforts to speak out on our
behalf,” she said. Mr. Xi’s speech, his first major address on Taiwan, has given Ms. Tsai a chance to position herself as the
young democracy’s defender, both to the outside world and to voters who will decide next year whether
she stays in office. Her party was battered in local elections in November, but since Mr. Xi’s address
there has been a groundswell of support for her on Taiwan social media and even, to some degree, in publications
that tend to oppose her. Tensions between Taiwan and Beijing, which claims the self-governing island as part
of Chinese territory, have emerged as one of the region’s flash points. Mr. Xi, the most powerful Chinese
leader since Mao, reiterated in his speech that Beijing would use force if necessary to prevent Taiwan
from seeking formal independence. Mr. Xi has been ramping up  pressure on Ms. Tsai’s administration
over her refusal to accept the so-called 1992 consensus — a vague notion, accepted by Ms. Tsai’s predecessor, that
posits that Taiwan and China are part of the same country, with each side allowed its own interpretation
of what that China is. In his speech, Mr. Xi urged Taiwan to avoid a “dead end” and accept his offer of
the “one country, two systems” framework under which Hong Kong has operated since Britain returned it to Chinese rule in
1997. But many people in Hong Kong and elsewhere — not least in Taiwan, where the situation is closely watched — believe that Hong Kong’s
promised freedoms have been eroding under Mr. Xi’s rule.“I myself expect all of Taiwan’s political parties to clearly state, ‘ We
reject “one
country, two systems,’” Ms. Tsai said on Saturday. “And there’s no need to talk about the 1992
consensus anymore, because this term has already been defined by Beijing as ‘one country, two
systems.’” Analysts said that Ms. Tsai, both on Saturday and in a speech on Wednesday responding to
Mr. Xi, had taken an unusually firm, unequivocal posture, marking a shift away from the cautious
ambiguity she had previously deployed, apparently in hopes of avoiding unnecessary provocations.
“There is no doubt that Tsai has changed her tone,” said Austin Wang, an assistant professor of political science at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies Taiwan. “Tsai made a huge shift from not publicly accepting the 1992 consensus to directly
rejecting it. ”Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang
party, which once ruled China, moved its government to the island
in 1949, having lost the civil war to Mao’s Communists . Taiwan is still formally known as the Republic of China, the name
under which the Kuomintang governed the mainland. The Kuomintang said Thursday that it was opposed to Taiwan independence — a phrase
it takes to mean the removal of vestiges of the Republic of China in favor of a Republic of Taiwan. But
even the Kuomintang, which
favors closer relations with Beijing than does Ms. Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party, said after Mr. Xi’s
speech that a Hong Kong-style arrangement would not be supported by most Taiwanese . An opinion article
published on Saturday in the United Daily News, a Kuomintang-friendly news outlet, said that Ms. Tsai’s response to Mr. Xi this past
week, including several posts on her Facebook page, had reversed her fortunes with much of the
public. An essay that has circulated widely on Taiwanese social media portrays Ms. Tsai as a mother
vowing to defend her child from a bully.
 Independence Movements Growing – Public Support
Taiwanese support for independence
Morgan 1-21-2019, Scott Morgan is a reporter at Taiwan News, “Taiwan rejects ‘one-China principle'
as support for independence rises: poll”, article “Taiwan News”, [6/27/2019]
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3622244

The Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation (TPOF, 台灣民意基金會) released the results of their newest
survey today, revealing that only 25 percent of the Taiwanese public support the idea of “one country
two systems,” and 68 percent do not agree with China’s “one-China principle.” The poll also revealed
that 47.5 percent expect some kind of Taiwanese independence to take place in the future. The results
show a 12 percent increase in support for Taiwanese independence when compared to last month’s
results. TPOF suggested that recent threats by Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) had encouraged
people who previously supported the status quo to move towards supporting Taiwanese independence.
On Jan. 2, Xi threatened Taiwan to accept unification, and reserved the right to use force to this end. In
response, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said that “Taiwan will never accept a ‘one country,
two systems’ framework,” and called on the international community to support its democracy against
Chinese threats. The survey also showed that 68 percent of respondents do not agree that China and
Taiwan belong to “the same China.” TPOF suggested that as the survey showed 47.5 percent expect
Taiwan independence to take place in the future and only 22.7 percent expect unification, the idea that
the Taiwanese people want to maintain the status quo indefinitely is a myth.
 Internals: U.S. Actions Matter

U.S. Support = Escalation

Yin 16
(Yin Chengde, Research Fellow at the China Foundation for International Studies, 2016 “Time for US to
Change Its Taiwan Policy,” China-US Focus, June 8th, pg online @
http://www.chinausfocus.com/political-social-development/time-for-us-to-change-its-taiwan-policy/)

The pro-independence DPP has returned to power in Taiwan. Despite repeated warnings from Beijing, Tsai Ing-wen, leader of the DPP, stopped
short of recognizing the 1992 Consensus and the one-China principle in her inaugural speech, a signal that she may intend to lead
the island in pursuing “one China, one Taiwan” or “two Chinas”, i.e. Taiwan independence. Evidently, her stance has the backing
of the United States. On the eve of the election, Tsai took a trip to the US, which was apparently designed to seek advice from and compare notes with US policy
makers on her policy for cross-Strait relations. It must be during this trip that her pro-independence policy was given tacit approval .
She received further reassurance for her inclination toward independence when the US House of Representatives passed a resolution reaffirming support for Taipei just ahead of her

inauguration. The US has always been known to support Taiwan’s quiet moves toward independence to hold
back China’s reunification through its policy toward Taipei. Though the US pronounced its commitment to the one-
China principle and opposition to Taiwan independence , enshrined in its three joint communiques with China, its commitment
was never fully kept. The US public position never went further than saying that it does not support
Taiwan independence. What that means is , the US does not support anything radical that the DPP might
engage in such as de jure independence by changing Taiwan’s title, lest the US be dragged into a frontal clash with China. The US ,
however, does not prohibit the DPP from desinicization of the island and pursue disguised independence.

The Taiwan Relations Act, to start with, and the “six assurances” are nothing but deliberate steps to force China to
renounce the use of force and maintain the “status quo” indefinitely. Its consequence? Emboldened
separatists with less scruples as they seek to pull the island away from the Chinese mainland. Reunification would
remain a distant dream for China, and de facto independence might become the reality in Taiwan. Such a policy toward Taiwan is at odds with the

fundamental and core interests of China and , in the final analysis, the US’ own interests as well. It is a policy with multiple
strategic flaws. First, the US should stop using Taiwan as its “unsinkable aircraft carrier”. Deng Xiaoping made the observation that the US saw the strategic and military value in
Taiwan and wanted to keep it as its unsinkable aircraft carrier. It is quite true because though the US has professedly severed diplomatic ties,

withdrew troops from and ended mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, it continues to have semi-official political
and military ties with it. It has publicly assisted Taiwan’s defense through arms sales and covert military cooperation of various
kinds. The goal is to hold back China’s reunification and use Taiwan as an outpost to contain China. This

strategy is nothing but a vestige of the Cold War and will only slow down the growth of China-US
relations. As time advances and as China continues to rise, Taiwan won’t be the US’ “unsinkable aircraft
carrier” forever. Second, the US should stop going back on its commitments. The return of Taiwan to China
was written into the Cairo Declaration, an official international instrument formulated and signed by US
and other leaders. All three Sino-US joint communiques affirmed the one-China principle and opposition to

Taiwan independence. These are legally binding international documents and serve as the guide and
rulebook for China-US relations. Honoring such documents is the very foundation for a functioning
international system. But any US tacit support of the DPP’s attempts at de facto independence at the cost
of its credibility has hurt not just China, but also the authority of the declaration and the post-war order and can
only lead to myriad problems. Third, the US should stop supporting separatists. The DPP prospered through street politics,
manipulation of public opinion and populism. Those who won’t stop playing with fire will only destroy themselves. The DPP has gone so far as to take the 20-million-plus Taiwanese as hostage
 To demonstrate support to separatists like the
to fulfill its selfish objective of Taiwan independence. This is extremely irresponsible and egregious.

DPP through the Taiwan Relations Act and the “six assurances” is to openly undermine China’s sovereignty, disrespect the
basic norms governing international relations, reject the US’ moral responsibility and hurt its
international reputation. Fourth, the US should stop misplacing its stakes. The size, population and overall strength of Taiwan is nowhere near that of the Chinese
mainland. Neither is Taiwan’s importance to the US. Economically, the People’s Republic of China and the US are as interdependent as any two economies in the world can be; on major
international issues, the US needs China’s cooperation. In economic and strategic areas key to America’s future, Taiwan is of minimal consequence. Admittedly, the US has interests in Taiwan.
Its interests on the Chinese mainland, however, far outweigh those in Taiwan. Pitching itself against China, a fast-growing country with 1.3 billion people, by supporting separatists in Taiwan is

China will not allow Taiwan, which has historically been part of China, to break away. This is a
definitely not the wise thing to do.

permanent red line for China. The question of Taiwan is a core issue in China-US relations and must be
handled with extraordinary care. Some foresighted people in the US have called for adjusting the US’
Taiwan policy, abolish the Taiwan Relations Act and the “six assurances” to herald a fully normal and healthy
bilateral relationship with China. Apparently, this is the trend and we only hope that the US government would do it sooner
rather than later for the benefit of the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait and for the benefit of the US itself
too.
 Internals: Independence = War

if Taiwan declares independence the Chinese military will escalate

The Hilltop Monitor 6/7, June 7th, 2019, “Taiwan orders $2bn of USA weapons as tensions rise with
China” from http://hilltopmonitor.com/2019/06/taiwan-orders-2bn-of-usa-weapons-as-tensions-rise-
with-china/, accessed 6/5/19 || OES-AT

The US government is preparing a deal to sell $2 billion worth of military equipment to Taiwan and has
already informally notified the US Congress about the said deal, Reuters reported citing four anonymous sources. ¶ Taiwan confirmed
Thursday it has asked to purchase more than 100 tanks from the US, along with air defense and anti-
tank missile systems in a major potential arms sale that drew immediate protest from China. Taiwan's
Ministry of National Defense confirmed the request for the arms purchase on Thursday. ¶ Reports have also said Taiwan is seeking 66
additional F-16 fighter jets. ¶ It comes days after Chinese defence minister Wei Fenghe said: " If anyone
dares to split Taiwan from China, the Chinese military has no choice but to fight at all costs ". ¶ The move
also complies with Donald Trump's arms export strategy, in which he planned to expand weapons sales to allies to create jobs in the US. ¶ In
Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang urged Washington "to fully understand the sensitive and serious harm" that would come from
selling military hardware to Taiwan, and to "abide by the one China principle". ¶ This leaves Trevor Bauer , Shane Bieber , and rookie Zach
Plesac as the only healthy members of Cleveland's rotation. The right-hander is expected to rejoin the team later in the season, but a definitive
timeline is not now known. ¶ The M1 Abrams would mark a significant upgrade from the aging tanks currently used by Taiwan's army now uses,
while the TOW and Javelin systems would upgrade the island's ability to repulse an attempt by China to land tanks and troops from across the
160km-wide Taiwan Strait. ¶ The Stingers meanwhile could help boost Taiwan's defenses against China's more than 1,000 advanced fighter
aircraft and 1,500 missiles pointing at the island. ¶ As well as strengthening ties with Russia, Beijing has been involved in a trade war with the
U.S. as both sides ramp up billions worth in tariffs on one another. ¶ Fought between Mao Zedong's Communist Party and the Chinese
Nationalists - the Kuomintang - Mao ended up taking control of mainland China, while the Kuomintang held Taiwan. ¶ Last month, senior
national security officials from Taiwan and the U.S. held their first meeting in four decades with the aim of deepening cooperation, according to
Taipei. Taiwan now operates just four aged submarines and pressure from China has prevented it from buying more overseas.
 Internals: U.S. Axns Impact Independence

And, the plan’s action is a key signal to the Taiwanese independence movement

Wu 15 — Wu Zurong, Research Fellow at the China Foundation for International Studies, 2015 (“Deep
Involvement in Taiwan is Negative U.S. Assets,” China-US Focus, April 14th, Available Online at
http://www.chinausfocus.com/peace-security/deep-involvement-in-taiwan-is-negative-u-s-assets)

With the general trend of the peaceful development of the cross-Strait relations established, good
opportunities have arisen for China and the U.S. to work together to resolve the Taiwan issue
completely so as to avoid dangerous obstacles to the smooth, healthy development of the Sino-U.S.
relations. Continued expansion of exchanges and cooperation in various fields between the two sides of
the Taiwan Strait is not only in the interests of the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, but also
helps maintain peace and stability in the region. The U.S. has all along cared about the resolution of
their differences by the two sides of the Taiwan Strait by peaceful means. At this point, what the U.S.
needs to do is not to give any wrong signal to “Taiwan independence” advocators , who are trouble-
makers of the peace and stability in the region. Any idea to win them over or to work with them
smoothly by sheer good luck carry unbearable risks, for they have their own political goals and will not
give up for the interests of the U.S. Therefore, the U.S. has to oppose Taiwan independence through
concrete actions and not be deceived by seeing through their trouble-making nature of those political
leaders in Taiwan who refuse to recognize the “1992 Consensus,” otherwise the U.S. would have to
confront numerous troubles they would inevitably bring about.

China will rise peacefully unless the U.S. abandons its “One China” policy. U.S.
provocations increase the risk of conventional and nuclear war

Glaser ‘16
(Charles L. Glaser, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the
Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, Fellow in the Kissinger Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars, former Emmett Dedmon Professor of Public Policy and Acting Dean at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of
Chicago, former Strategic Analyst for the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, holds a Ph.D. and a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University, 2016 “China’s Rise Can Be Peaceful If the U.S. Doesn’t Provoke It,” Room For Debate—a New York Times
scholarly blog, December 16th, pg online @ http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/12/14/can-trump-get-tough-with-china/chinas-
rise-can-be-peaceful-if-the-us-doesnt-provoke-it)

China’s rise will continue to redefine international politics in East Asia. Contrary
to many pessimistic assessments, China can rise
peacefully. Its growing military and economic power pose major challenges to U.S. dominance in the
region, but need not lead to conflict. However, China’s peaceful rise is far from assured. Both ambition
and insecurity could lead China to challenge the status quo, generating an armed clas[h] with the U nited
States. U.S. strategy must therefore strike a careful balance: its policies must effectively deter attacks against
U.S. vital interests, while at the same time not posing a serious threat to China’s security . Even appearing
to be moving toward supporting Taiwan’s independence would be seen by China’s leaders as a highly
provocative act. China considers Taiwan to be part of its homeland and unification remains a key
political goal for Beijing. The growing centrality of nationalism to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party
makes Taiwan’s future essential to the regime’s survival. China has made clear that it will use force if
Taiwan declares independence. Consequently, president-elect Trump’s telephone call with the leader of Taiwan and his
seemingly cavalier attitude toward upending the United States’ long-standing Taiwan policy are deeply misguided . Shifts

in U.S. policy that encourage Taiwan to believe that the U nited States will support its moves toward
independence increase the probability of war. For example, the United States could change Taiwan’s expectations by revising the
conditions under which it will come to Taiwan’s aid. The United States currently tries to constrain Taiwan by making its defense

commitment conditional — the United States will respond only to unprovoked Chinese attacks; that is, it will
not come to Taiwan’s defense if a Chinese attack is provoked by Taiwan’s declaration of independence.
Eliminating or blurring this conditionality could embolden Taiwan. A variety of dangers could follow. If
Taiwan declares independence, war between China and Taiwan is the likely outcome. Even moving too
far in that direction could fuel a major crisis. And if the United States actually would come to Taiwan’s
defense, then conventional war between China and the U nited States also becomes more likely. Conventional
war between two nuclear powers increases the probability of nuclear war. Other paths to conflict could
also result. In response to a newly provocative policy toward Taiwan, China might adopt still more
assertive policies in the South China and East China Seas. The United States could then get drawn into conflict to
protect a friend or ally. China might accelerate its buildup of conventional forces to further improve its
ability to coerce Taiwan, which would intensify military competition with the United States and strain
political relations.
 Impacts: Independence = War

And, independence crosses a red-line – causes immediate war

Li-Luan 15
(Eric, “Cross-strait peace on the line,” pg online @
http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/12/eric-li-luan-chu-china-taiwan-
peace-on-the-line/ //ghs-ef)
For complicated historical reasons, China has an uncompromising position on Taiwan, that is, Taiwan is
an integral part of China. Any declaration by Taiwan to separate itself legally and permanently from
China will be viewed by China as a violation of Chinese territorial integrity, hence incurring war. On
the other hand, we people living in Taiwan would like to maintain our way of life, a democratic polity,
and individual freedoms. The United States is caught in between.
Negotiations/Solvency
 Solvency: China Wont Engulf

China isn’t looking for immediate unification — they hate U.S. Taiwan policy because
it is perceived as a symbol of subjugation

White 13 — Hugh White, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, former
Intelligence Analyst with Australia’s Office of National Assessments and Senior Official with Australia’s
Department of Defence, 2013 (“The Asian Setting,” The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power,
Published by Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780199684717, p. 94-96)

Taiwan remains the most difficult specific issue of all. Both sides have been willing to manage [end page 94]
Taiwan Finally, of course, there is Taiwan.

it remains the point on which American and Chinese views of their

this issue to avoid disruption to the wider relationship, but

positions and prerogatives in Asia are most clearly incompatible. That is because, over the past forty years, Taiwan’s status has been
veiled in a deeply destabilising ambiguity. It is acknowledged by every significant player to be part of China, but it is also accorded some of the most critical
qualities of an independent state. By proclaiming a One China policy, we all tell Beijing that we regard Taiwan as part of

China, but we deny China the right to treat it as such. This anomaly is not the product of high policy principles alone. It is as much the result of a
political fix to defuse and deflect awkward opposition in Washington to the development of relations with China after 1972. We live today with the legacy of that fix: an unresolved anomaly in

The reason this anomaly remains so dangerous is that both the U nited States and
the fabric of the international relations of Asia.

China have come to see the status of Taiwan — or rather, the actions of the other in relation to Taiwan — as
a critical index of their respective places in Asia’s power structure. For China the right to use force to
reclaim what it sees as a wayward province is potent proof of its return to great power status in Asia.
For America its ability to prevent that is equally potent proof of its continuing status as the primary
power in Asia and the arbiter of regional affairs . As long as the status quo can be sustained, these ambiguities can remain unresolved. Both Washington
and Beijing have been content to leave it that way. It has become easy to believe that the issue will somehow go away. Yet this

seems too optimistic. There are two ways in which the issue could come to a head . First, the status quo
depends on Taiwan’s politics. A future Taiwanese leader could quite easily trigger a US–China [end page 95]
confrontation by taking a step towards independence that to Beijing requires a forceful response . That risk has
seemed to fade with the swing from the more assertive polices of President Chen to the more accommodating President Ma, but it would be rash to assume the swing could not be reversed.

the temperature of the Taiwan issue between Washington and Beijing depends in part on the tone
Second,

of the broader relationship. If rivalry intensifies, Taiwan could easily become a strategic football again.
China-Taiwan War
 China-Taiwan War
Taiwan - China war bad
Westcott 2019
(Ben, Digital News Producer, “A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a bloody, logistical nightmare”,
June 24, 2019, date accessed 6/26/2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/23/asia/taiwan-china-
invasion-intl-hnk/index.html)//CS
Taiwan (CNN)Roaring out of the sky, an F-16V fighter jet lands smoothly to rearm and refuel on an unremarkable freeway in rural Taiwan,
surrounded by rice paddies. In different circumstances, this could be alarming sight. Taiwan's fighter pilots are trained to land on freeways
between sorties in case all of the island's airports have been occupied or destroyed by an invasion. Luckily, this was a training exercise.
There's only really one enemy that Taiwan's armed forces are preparing to resist -- China's People's
Liberation Army (PLA). And as China's reputation as an economic and military superpower has grown in
recent years, so too has that threat of invasion, according to security experts. Taiwan has been self-governed since
separating from China at the end of a brutal civil war in 1949, but Beijing has never given up hope of reuniting with what it
considers a renegade province. At a regional security conference in June, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe said: "If anyone
dares to split Taiwan from China, the Chinese military has no choice but to fight at all costs for national
unity." In some shops in mainland China, you can buy postcards and T-shirts emblazoned with patriotic
emblems promoting the retaking of Taiwan . But for seven decades, China has resisted attacking Taiwan partly
for political reasons, including the prospect of a US intervention and the potential heavy human toll. But
the practical realities of a full-blown invasion are also daunting for the PLA, according to experts. Ferrying hundreds
of thousands of troops across the narrow Taiwan Strait to a handful of reliable landing beaches, in the face of fierce resistance, is a harrowing
prospect. Troops would then have a long slog over Taiwan's western mudflats and mountains to reach the capital, Taipei. Not only that, but
China would face an opponent who has been preparing for war for almost 70 years . At mass anti-invasion drills
in May, Taiwan military spokesman Maj. Gen. Chen Chung-Chi said the island knew it had to always be "combat-ready." "Of course, we don't
want war, but only by gaining our own strength can we defend ourselves," he said. "If
China wants to take any action against
us, it has to consider paying a painful price." Difficult and bloody It could be easy to assume that any
invasion of Taiwan by Beijing would be brief and devastating for Taipei : a David and Goliath fight between a tiny
island and the mainland's military might, population and wealth. With nearly 1.4 billion people, the People's Republic of China has the largest
population in the world. Taiwan has fewer than 24 million people -- a similar number to Australia. China has the fifth largest
territory in the world, while Taiwan is the size of Denmark or the US state of Maryland. And Beijing runs an economy that is second only
to the United States, while Taiwan's doesn't rank in the world's top 20. But perhaps most pertinently, C hina has been building and
modernizing its military at an unprecedented rate, while Taiwan relies on moderate US arms sales. In sheer size, the PLA
simply dwarfs Taiwan's military. China has an estimated 1 million troops, almost 6,000 tanks, 1,500 fighter jets and 33 navy
destroyers, according to the latest US Defense Department report. Taiwan's ground force troops barely number 150,000 and are backed by 800
tanks and about 350 fighter aircraft, the report found, while its navy fields only four destroyer-class ships. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping,
the PLA has rapidly modernized, buoyed by rises in military spending and crackdowns on corruption in the army's leadership. "China's leaders
hope that possessingthese military capabilities will deter pro-independence moves by Taiwan or, should
deterrence fail, will permit a range of tailored military options against Taiwan and potential third-party
military intervention," according to a 2019 US Defense Intelligence Agency report on China's military. Yet while China hawks in the
media might beat the drum of invasion, an internal China military study, seen by CNN, revealed that the PLA considers an invasion of Taiwan to
be extremely difficult. "Taiwan has a professional military, with a strong core of American-trained experts," said
Ian Easton, author of "The Chinese Invasion Threat" and research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, as well as "highly defensible" terrain. In
his book he described an invasion by China as "the most difficult and bloody mission facing the Chinese
military."
 Chinese Invasion Inevitable
China beefing up for invasion – machinating surveillance, reconnaissance capabilities
and blockades
Yeo 5-3 Mike Yeo, 5-3-2019, Mike Yeo is a freelance aerospace/defense journalist/photographer from Singapore based in Melbourne
Australia specializing in Asian Air Power matters. "China is laying the groundwork for war with Taiwan," Defense News,
https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2019/05/03/china-is-laying-the-groundwork-for-war-with-taiwan/) AD

China is improving and increasing its options for a possible future

MELBOURNE, Australia –

invasion of Taiwan, with military reforms and investments in multi-domain military

capabilities offering a range of options to defeat the self-governing island, according to a
Pentagon report. These options range from an air and sea blockade of Taiwan to a full-
scale invasion, although the latter option would require a significant increase in the number of amphibious ships, according to the
latest annual China Military Power Report released Thursday by the Department of Defense. Taiwan official pledges boost in defense
capabilities won’t be deterred by Chinese ‘coercion’ Taiwan official pledges boost in defense capabilities won’t be deterred by Chinese
‘coercion’ Under pressure from China, Taiwan has had difficulty since the 1980s in buying weapons and
other defense equipment from anyone but the United States, and in upgrading its
existing arsenal. By: Martin Banks Nevertheless, the report cautioned that the People’s Liberation Army or PLA’s efforts to convert the
bulk of its maneuver units to combined arms brigades, “should eventually create more capable, modular brigades and battalions,” while

the “expansion of army aviation and the creation of two new air assault brigades also
provides more attack, air assault and close air support options for a Taiwan invasion.”
China’s PLA has also made efforts to improve its ability to insert forces by air, by
restructuring its airborne corps and establishing air assault units, which would be
charged with aerial insertion and seizing key terrain. This restructure saw it reorganizing its previous units into
airborne infantry brigades, a special operations brigade, an aviation brigade, and a support brigade, with the corps conducting training exercises
The service has also established
in 2018 that involved long-range raid and airborne operations based on actual war plans.

a joint logistics support force in late 2016, with the primary goal of supporting a
strategic campaign such as a Taiwan invasion. This would be accomplished through
command and control of joint logistics, delivering of materiel, and managing various
civil-military integration support mechanisms . It’s strategic support force would then be responsible for the use of
electronic warfare and cyber operations during a Taiwan contingency, by “seizing and maintaining battlefield information control in
The report added that the PLA is likely still exploring how to
contemporary informatized warfare.”

reform its joint command processes to integrate information operations and

intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities more fully at the theater-level,
but noted that the structural reforms have removed the biggest barriers to integrating
these strategic capabilities.
 Taiwan Strait Conflict Escalates
US arms sales to Taiwan escalates the Taiwan strait with China
Li Xia 4-17-19 (Li Xia is a writer and editor for Xinhua.com, “U.S. arms sales to Taiwan a dangerous move to aggravate cross-Strait situation”, April 17 th

2019, accessed:6-24-18, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-04/17/c_137985601.htm)

The U.S. arms sale plan unveiled Monday is a dangerous move that will only aggravate the already complex and grim situation
across the Taiwan Strait . The U.S. government has approved a possible 500-million-U.S. dollar military sale to Taiwan, claiming that the
move will help to improve the security and defensive capability of the recipient. Subsequently, Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen expressed
"gratitude," saying that the arms sale was "timely." The situation across the
Taiwan Strait, which is already complicated and grim, is
worsening as the United States has been using Taiwan to contain China while the Taiwan administration kept seeking
foreign intervention. The Taiwan question concerns China's sovereignty and territorial integrity and is the most
important and sensitive issue in China-U.S. relations. The U.S. arms sales to Taiwan constitutes a serious
violation of international law, the basic norms governing international relations, the one-China principle and the three Sino-U.S. joint
communiques and undermine China's sovereignty and security interests. China's firm opposition to such arms sales is consistent and firm. Since
the current U.S. administration took office, it has constantly played the "Taiwan card" to contain China , especially in
arms sales to Taiwan and military exchanges between the United States and Taiwan. This has seriously damaged China-U.S.
relations and jeopardized peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwan question, which concerns China's core
interests and the national bond of the Chinese people, brooks no external interference. The U.S. administration has once again stirred up
sensitive nerves in the Taiwan Strait. Its gross interference in China's internal affairs has aroused the strong indignation of the Chinese people
on both sides of the Strait. Some Taiwan organizations and people protested outside the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) in Taipei,
condemning U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and demanding "no war, only peace," and "Taiwan is not a pawn for the United States." Therefore, we
would like to advise the U.S. side to clearly recognize the high sensitivity and serious harm of arms sales to Taiwan, correct mistakes, honor its
commitments and handle Taiwan-related issues in a prudent and proper manner in accordance with the one-China principle and the provisions
of the three Sino-U.S. joint communiques. Taiwan's current Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration, which is teetering on the brink
of collapse, was overjoyed at the U.S. arms sales as if it had been given a "straw to save its life." Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP administration
have escalated provocations against the Chinese mainland , created disturbances recently and cooperated with the United
States in vigorously clamoring the so-called "military threat" from the mainland. In the face of next year's general election on the island, Tsai
and the DPP will not hesitate to let Taiwan serve as a pawn for forces of external interference in order to protect their power, regardless of the
safety and well-being of the Taiwanese people. This party has not only misjudged the situation but also deviated from the people's heart. U.S.
weapons cannot guarantee Taiwan's security. Tsai and the DPP cannot secure their power and position by seeking foreign
interference or threatening the people.Tsai, the DPP and "Taiwan independence" separatist elements should not play with fire or even think
about it. They are doomed to be alone in the face of the pressure of their own actions. On April 17, 124 years ago, the Treaty of Shimonoseki
was signed, securing foreigner's occupation of Taiwan for half a century. It left lasting, painful memories for all Chinese. Today's China will never
allow the historical tragedy of national division to repeat itself. No one and no
force should underestimate the determination
and capability of the Chinese in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity.
 Taiwan Strait = Hotspot
Militarizing Taiwan creates regional hotspot – U.S. endorsement challenges Xi’s
hardline stance
Hu, 18
(Weixing, Professor of Political Science at University of Hong Kong, “Trump’s China Policy and Its
Implications for the “Cold Peace” across the Taiwan Strait”, August 2018, 6/24/2019,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26484533.pdf?refreqid=excelsior
%3A6f6ca99c204be88116cfdfb1c95da19e) sd

Playing the Taiwan card could be dangerous for future U.S.-China relations. TheTrump administration is caught up in a
position between the mainstream approach and the ultra-right nationalist approach in dealing with
China. The mainstream approach supports a cooperative and stable bilateral relationship with China, a
position close in what Xi Jinping proposed a few years ago “a new model of major power relations .” In
opposite, the ultra-right nationalists in the Trump administration want to have a harder-edged policy
toward China. They want Trump to adopt a tough stance on all bilateral, global, and regional issues concerning China. In their views,
China is an aggressive strategic competitor that needs to be deterred with U.S. strength. The United
States needs to deploy missile defense close to Chinese borders and consolidate the American alliance
surrounding China. If this policy is adopted, Trump could play the Taiwan card in a fashion like what the United States did in the early
Cold War years, treating Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” In order to deter Beijing from taking any actions that
are harmful to Taiwan’s interest, Washington might help Taiwan build up military strength against
Beijing and expand its international space in the world. In so doing, Washington will “rediscover” the strategic value of
Taiwan as a card of balancing against China. If this happens, the Taiwan Strait would be back to the center of a
regional power struggle and flash point of regional conflict. That would certainly drive the U.S.-China
relationship into new confrontation.
 Causes miscalc
miscalc is probable with the perception that Taiwan may declare independence
Bush 19
(Bush, Richard Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for East Asia Policy Studies, John L. Thornton China
Center. “Danger ahead? Taiwan’s politics, China’s ambitions, and US policy,” Brookings Institution,
4/15/19. D.A. 6/25/19. https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-record/danger-ahead-taiwans-politics-
chinas-ambitions-and-us-policy/)

On March 31st, two PLA aircraft flew for about ten minutes on the Taiwan side of the so-called median
line that runs up and down the Taiwan Strait. They penetrated as much as 43 nautical miles across the
line. Taiwan air force planes scrambled to monitor the PLA planes. This was the first time in twenty years
that there had been a provocation of this sort by China, and it caused many people to worry about
heightened tensions or even conflict. I actually believe that the purpose of this action was to send a
political signal to the United States and Taiwan to express displeasure at a variety of recent
developments between them that suggested closer cooperation. But this does raise the broader
question of just how dangerous the interaction amongst Beijing, Taipei, and Washington is. Here, in conclusion,
are my best estimates: First, absent from a clear and strong provocation by Taiwan, such as a declaration of

independence, China will not initiate a full scale military campaign against campaign to achieve
unification. It has other ways of pursuing its goals, and it believes that over time it will become more
powerful. Also, the two sides have been careful in managing their interactions over the Taiwan Strait . But
if Beijing were to continue to engage in provocative actions as it did two weeks ago, it raises the
possibility of an accidental clash that could then escalate into a broader conflict. Second, the chances that Taiwan
will declare independence explicitly are close to zero. The population is opposed to that and is unlikely to elect a leader who might try it. However, if a pro-
independence president were elected, Beijing might interpret his or her actions as covert moves towards
independence and feel it has to take some sort of action. Miscalculation could be a problem. Third, one
danger for Taiwan is that Beijing will decide to expand its intimidation campaign – militarily, politically,
economically, and diplomatically – and then give Taiwan an ultimatum that it is time for Taiwan to
capitulate. A key variable here is the strength and unity of Taiwan’s society, and I worry about the polarization of Taiwan’s politics and
the inability of the political system to even try to reach a consensus on key issues, particularly on the
China issue. For Taiwan, although the United States has provided strong support over the years, and
although the implicit U.S. commitment to come to Taiwan’s defense has helped keep the peace, there
are a couple of dangers that come with that support. The first is that Taiwan will get entrapped in a larger
strategic rivalry between China and the United States. The second is that an American president who believes that protecting Taiwan
is not in the national interest of the United States will signal abandonment of Taiwan, which would weaken deterrence. In thinking about the China-

Taiwan dispute, from which we cannot exclude the possibility of war, there is a question that should be
asked but never is. That is, why does China continue to insist that its unification formula – one country,
two systems – is the only one available for resolving its fundamental dispute? Moreover, why should
Beijing be allowed to define the terms of the debate? One country, two systems was formulated almost forty years ago in very
different circumstances. It was a formula that may have been appropriate for those times. But a lot has changed since then. The world has changed. China has
changed. And, most importantly, Taiwan has changed. It became a democracy in which the people have made it very clear that unification on China’s terms is totally
unacceptable. Perhaps, in order to reduce the danger of the current situation, it’s time for China to change the terms on which to discuss a political solution to its
Taiwan problem.

Taiwan is important to china – and decrease of US commitment lowers risk of miscalc

Williams 19
(Williams, Trevor is the managing editor of Global Atlanta. “Chinese Ambassador: Stability of U.S.-China
Relations Hinges on Taiwan Issue,” Global Atlanta, 1/18/19. D.A. 6/25/19.
https://www.globalatlanta.com/chinese-ambassador-stability-of-u-s-china-relations-hinges-on-taiwan-
issue/)

How well the U.S. and China can work together into the future will depend largely on American posture
toward the most crucial of China’s long-standing political concerns: Taiwan, the Chinese ambassador to
the U.S. said in Atlanta Friday. Taiwan is still the “ most important and sensitive issue” in a globally vital
relationship that derives its political foundation from the U.S.’s one-China policy, Cui Tiankai said during
a wide-ranging speech at the Carter Center. China still considers Taiwan, a self-ruled island with a democratically elected president and
legislature, as a wayward province. The two sides split in 1949 after a civil war. Since early 2017, the Trump administration has

rankled China with a range of actions perceived as upsetting the status quo. Shortly after his
inauguration, President Trump famously broke precedent by taking a call from Taiwanese President Tsai
Ing-wen, then questioned whether the U.S. would remain committed to the one-China policy. He has
gone on to complete arms sales to Taiwan, allowed opening of a $200 million de facto embassy in Taipei
and signed a law making it easier for Taiwanese government officials to travel to the U.S. Mr. Cui suggested that
progress on talks to de-escalate the ongoing U.S.-China trade war could be threatened by further
moves in support of Taiwan. On New Year’s Day, Chinese President Xi Jinping made a widely publicized speech on
Taiwan, reiterating the long-held Chinese goal of reuniting with the island, by force if necessary, though he
set no timeline for action. Mr. Xi’s message was intended to convey “China’s determination to achieve national reunification and the opposition to any external
interference,” Mr. Cui said at the Carter Center. “ Future
stability of China-U.S. relations will no doubt hinge on how this
red line is upheld.” “Future stability of China-U.S. relations will no doubt hinge on how this red line is upheld.” A forceful response from President Tsai Ing-
wen of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan had a galvanizing effect at a time when she faces lukewarm support at home.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Defense reported this week its concern that China’s military buildup
is focused on retaking Taiwan and defending against potential U.S. intervention. President Jimmy Carter was a catalyst
in all this historical drama. After President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, Mr. Carter went ahead with the decision to switch diplomatic recognition from
Taiwan, a U.S. ally, to the People’s Republic of China in 1979. The 40-year anniversary of that move was the subject of the Carter Center symposium, which attracted
prominent China scholars to Atlanta to discuss how to build on the past four decades of collaboration. Mr. Carter’s move was bold at the time. Opposition to
abandoning Taiwan was strong and required both assurances of U.S. protection (see the Taiwan Relations Act) and an exercise in strategic ambiguity. Starting in the
Shanghai communique in 1972, the U.S. acknowledged that there was only one China and that both sides claim Taiwan as a part of it, but it has never held the policy
officially that Taiwan is a part of the People’s Republic of China. Mr. Carter, however, seemed to say that this distinction didn’t come into play until his Joint
Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping Dec. 15, 1978, which affirmed the Shanghai communique and added
this language: The Government of the United States of America acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China. In his
Friday speech following the Chinese ambassador, Mr. Carter said the “breakthrough” moment in his talks with Mr. Deng came when the two sides settled the
Taiwan issue: “For many years after [Nixon’s visit], under him and President Ford, we continued to recognized Taiwan as the only China, and I didn’t think that was
correct. I had visited China quite early in my life and had grown up with a very deep interest in China.” “We had a breakthrough when we finally resolved the very
difficult issue of Taiwan and China’s relationship with Taiwan. To make a very complicated issue real simple, we agreed that there was only one China and that
Taiwan is a part of China. But Deng Xiaoping agreed with me that any resolution of that altercation with Taiwan would be done in a peaceful way.” Mr. Xi’s new
year’s speech was meant to echo Mr. Deng’s message to Taiwan in 1979, which called for both sides to work toward peaceful reunification as China embarked on a
path of opening its economy to the outside world. Shelley Rigger, an expert on Taiwan at Davidson College who was attending the Carter Center forum, said the
former president’s statements weren’t wildly off base, but that they didn’t reflect the nuance of U.S. policy since 1972. “I think it was a kind of a shortcut. Under
different circumstances (the remarks) would not be a big deal. Under these circumstances, in this particular venue, they could be problematic in a potentially
China has taken a harder line on Taiwan since the DPP took power in 2016,
troubling way,” she told Global Atlanta.

poaching its dwindling number of allies and even going so far as to pressure global companies like
Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines to list Taiwan as a part of China on their websites. Dr. Rigger said China is also
more wary of Mr. Trump than previous presidents, given the moves he has already made and his general
unpredictability. “With this administration, you just don’t know what they might do. Any movement is a
little bit more worrisome for China,” Dr. Rigger said. Mr. Cui urged both sides to build trust, suggesting “unfounded worries” about China in the
U.S. are due to a lack of understanding about both China’s history and present-day goals of “peaceful development.” Collaboration through communication is key,
he said. “Whenthis is done, the possibilities of miscalculation will be greatly reduced. Of course, some
self-claimed strategists may still refuse to face the realities. They may still try to sell conspiracy theories
of various kinds to the world, perhaps because they themselves are true conspirators. We need to
promote cooperation so as to expand common interests and avoid vicious rivalry .” Vincent Liu, a diplomat
representing Taiwan at Atlanta’s Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, said during a discussion with Global Atlanta in September that Taiwan has always aimed to
maintain a steady foreign policy even when dealing with tumultuous periods. He didn’t comment directly on China’s more aggressive diplomatic posture toward
Taiwan, but he welcomed the Trump administration’s receptivity, shown by actions like the Taiwan Travel Act. “When the United States and Taiwan say we are
partners, we share common values, we mean it, and this is a good way to prove that,” Mr. Liu said of the law.
 Chinese Invasion  US Intervention
If China invades, could see US, Japan intervention- but US wants to avoid conflict
Roy 18 (Denny, Senior felloe at the East-West Center in Hawaii, “What would the US do if Beijing
decided to take Taiwan by force?”, South China Morning Post, 22 July, 2018, 06/25/19,
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2156237/what-would-us-do-if-beijing-decided-
take-taiwan-force, NN”

If the United States chose to intervene, US aircraft from bases in the region could begin flying missions
within hours. China might try to impede this by firing missiles to temporarily knock out runways used by
US aircraft, but this would reduce the number of missiles available to hit Taiwan, and also bring Japan’s
military forces fully into a war. Even if it won the military campaign, Beijing would face the daunting prospect of trying to rule a
society that was accustomed to democratic governance and would be inveterately hostile towards China for generations to come. Tibet would
appear quiescent by comparison. An important part of the calculation, of course, is the likely US reaction .
The US government still
has strong incentives to prevent China’s invasion of Taiwan . US President Donald Trump has made public
statements questioning the value of US alliances in Asia . During the summit with Kim Jong-un in Singapore, Trump
revealed a hope that US troops would eventually leave South Korea. But 18 months into his presidency, the administration
has not taken steps to disengage from US alliances or to reduce US military forward deployment.
Trump’s senior advisers seem committed not only to maintaining US strategic leadership in the western
Pacific Rim, but also taking a more confrontational posture with Chin a, as reflected in the recently published policies
on security and defence. These characterised China as more adversary than partner, a reverse of the Obama administration rhetoric. As a
concrete example, US “freedom of navigation operations” in the South China Sea have increased relative to the Obama administration. Polls
in the United States show only a minority of Americans would favour US military personnel fighting to
defend Taiwan. Members of Congress, however, are more supportive. They realise America’s leadership position in the region would be
severely if not fatally compromised if the United States stood aside while a large authoritarian state and opponent of the US-sponsored regional
order gobbled up a small democracy that has strong historical ties to America. They believe in the “democratic peace theory”: democracies
don’t fight against each other, so democratisation throughout the world increases the space within which no serious threats to US security will
arise. They understand that Taiwan is the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that anchors the first island chain, limiting the geostrategic platform from
which China might otherwise attempt to dominate eastern Asia. A decision by Washington not to intervene in a Taiwan
Strait conflict in which China appeared to be the aggressor would represent a dramatic shift in US
strategy. The overt attempts to politically distance the island from China while Chen Shui-bian was Taiwan’s president
from 2000 to 2008 prompted Washington to say it would not necessarily intervene if Taiwan seemed to
provoke an attack. US policymakers, however, do not see President Tsai Ing-wen as a provocateur . The
Communist Party’s recent position on Taiwan is counterproductive. Reunifying Taiwan is not necessary for China to be secure and prosperous,
as is manifestly obvious. Worse,
an obsession with the Taiwan issue could work against other important goals,
beginning with successfully managing the difficult but necessary project of economic restructuring.
Clearly, Beijing needs a better approach than threatening Taiwan with attack.
 AT US Wont Get Drawn In
The U.S. gets tied into a Taiwan-China war
Chung 2018
(Lawrence, Reporter on Taiwan, “United States won’t allow force against Taiwan, new US envoy says as
Beijing piles on pressure”, October 31, 2018, date accessed 6/27/19,
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2171037/united-states-wont-allow-force-
against-taiwan-new-us-envoy-says)//CS

The United States will not stand by to allow any non-peaceful attempt to unilaterally alter the status quo
of Taiwan, a senior US diplomat has said in an apparent warning against Beijing’s threats to retake the
self-ruled island, by force if necessary. Washington would also do all it could to help Taiwan rejoin some
international organisations such as Interpol, the official said, despite strong protests from Beijing, which considers Taiwan a wayward province.
In his debut press conference on the island on Wednesday, Brent
Christensen, the new director of the US de facto
embassy, the American Institute in Taiwan, signalled stronger US support for the island in the face of
persistent pressure from Beijing against Taipei. “I am here to tell you that US policy towards Taiwan has not
changed,” Christensen said. “Any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means
represents a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and is of grave concern to the
United States. “We are opposed to unilateral attempts to change the status quo .” Since Tsai Ing-wen, of the
independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, became the island’s president in 2016 and refused to accept the one-China principle,
Beijing has stepped up pressure against Taiwan, including staging war games around the island and
poaching five of Taipei’s allies. It has also demanded that international companies, including airlines,
change the title of Taiwan to either a Chinese province or “China, Taiwan” to indicate that the island is a
part of China. The principle is part of an understanding reached in 1992 between unofficial representatives of Beijing and Taipei that there
is only “one China”, but each side would have its own interpretation of what constitutes “China”. Christensen said that as the new US envoy
to Taiwan he would do all he could to promote security cooperation between Washington and Taipei,
saying “promoting security cooperation and improving Taiwan’s self-defence capability go hand in
hand”. He also said it was the US’ “obligation to support Taiwan in maintaining a sufficient self-defence
capability against coercion” and this policy was consistent for both the Democratic and Republican parties. He cited the Trump
administration’s approval of two arms sales, including the US$330 million deal for spare parts for the island’s F-16s
and other warplanes, as examples of that commitment. He said one of his four priorities as the institute’s director was to promote
Taiwan’s participation in the international community . “As we face a multitude of global challenges – the impacts of global
health pandemics; transnational terrorism and crime; and the insidious spread of disinformation, to name a few – we cannot afford to
exclude a society [Taiwan] with so much to offer the world ,” he said. ‘Prepare for war’, Xi Jinping tells
military region that monitors Taiwan He said the US had long been a vocal supporter of Taiwan’s
meaningful participation in international organisations . “We continue our informal consultations and engagement to allow
Taiwan to have a more substantive role in the international community,” he said, adding that the broader engagement would benefit the global
community. He said he expected high-level US officials would visit Taiwan in line with the newly enacted
Taiwan Travel Act, which allows exchanges of top-level officials between Taiwan and the United States. Christensen said the
institute would move to its US$255 million new compound at the end of this year and he hoped it would be a
good chance for a high-level US official to visit. Christensen’s comments are expected to again infuriate Beijing, which
has loudly protested against the US for supplying arms to Taiwan and allowing senior officials to visit the
island – acts the mainland says violates the one-China policy that Washington committed to observe after switching official recognition to
Beijing.
The US Will eventually lose control over arm sales situation, escalates to war
Glaser 11, (Charles Glaser, 4/06/2011, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and
Director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at
George Washington University, “Will China’s Rise Lead to War?”, “George Washington University”,
[6/24/2019], https://politics.virginia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Glaser-VISC.pdf ) BDN

As China grows more powerful, it may increasingly resent U.S. influence in Northeast Asia. But unless
U.S.-Chinese relations become severely strained, China is likely to accept a continuing U.S. presence in
the region, given the alternatives. ACCOMMODATION ON TAIWAN? THE PROSPECTS for avoiding intense
military competition and war may be good, but growth in China's power may nevertheless require some
changes in U.S. foreign policy that Washington will find disagreeable--particularly regarding Taiwan.
Although it lost control of Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War more than six decades ago, China still
considers Taiwan to be part of its homeland, and unification remains a key political goal for Beijing.
China has made clear that it will use force if Taiwan declares independence, and much of China's
conventional military buildup has been dedicated to increasing its ability to coerce Taiwan and reducing
the United States' ability to intervene. Because China places such high value on Taiwan and because the
United States and China--whatever they might formally agree to--have such different attitudes regarding
the legitimacy of the status quo, the issue poses special dangers and challenges for the U.S.-Chinese
relationship, placing it in a different category than Japan or South Korea. A crisis over Taiwan could fairly
easily escalate to nuclear war, because each step along the way might well seem rational to the actors
involved. Current U.S. policy is designed to reduce the probability that Taiwan will declare independence
and to make clear that the United States will not come to Taiwan's aid if it does. Nevertheless, the
United States would find itself under pressure to protect Taiwan against any sort of attack, no matter
how it originated. Given the different interests and perceptions of the various parties and the limited
control Washington has over Taipei's behavior, a crisis could unfold in which the United States found
itself following events rather than leading them. Such dangers have been around for decades, but
ongoing improvements in China's military capabilities may make Beijing more willing to escalate a
Taiwan crisis. In addition to its improved conventional capabilities, China is modernizing its nuclear
forces to increase their ability to survive and retaliate following a large-scale U.S. attack. Standard
deterrence theory holds that Washington's current ability to destroy most or all of China's nuclear force
enhances its bargaining position. China's nuclear modernization might remove that check on Chinese
action, leading Beijing to behave more boldly in future crises than it has in past ones. A U.S. attempt to
preserve its ability to defend Taiwan, meanwhile, could fuel a conventional and nuclear arms race.
Enhancements to U.S. offensive targeting capabilities and strategic ballistic missile defenses might be
interprete7c69e) Answering the question of what policy solutions can mitigate the problems caused by
U.S. arms sales to Taiwan is complex. The issue is not just one of differing political interpretations
between the 1982 U.S.-PRC Joint Communique and the TRA. These two documents are at loggerheads
where fundamental foreign policy differences between the U.S. and China collide. U.S. efforts to exert its
global and regional influence exacerbate long-held Chinese suspicions of U.S. aspirations to hegemony.
In turn, China's drive to modernize its military along with Beijing's domestic and international behavior
exacerbate equally long-held suspicions of China in the U.S. This has left Taiwan as the destination of
U.S. d by China as a signal of malign U.S. motives, leading to further Chinese military efforts and a
general poisoning of U.S.-Chinese relations. Given such risks, the United States should consider backing
away from its commitment to Taiwan. This would remove the most obvious and contentious flash point
between the United States and China and smooth the way for better relations between them in the
decades to come. Critics of such a move argue that it would result in not only direct costs for the United
States and Taiwan but indirect costs as well: Beijing would not be satisfied by such appeasement;
instead, it would find its appetite whetted and make even greater demands afterward--spurred by
Washington's lost credibility as a defender of its allies. The critics are wrong, however, because
territorial concessions are not always bound to fail. Not all adversaries are Hitler, and when they are not,
accommodation can be an effective policy tool.
 AT: No Conflict
Both sides emboldened to fight due to US – Taiwan involvement, including Taiwan
strive for independence
Xiangwei 18 Wang Xiangwei, april-28-2018, Wang Xiangwei is the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post. He is now
based in Beijing as editorial adviser to the paper "Are the US and China headed for war over Taiwan?," South China Morning Post,
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2142674/are-us-and-china-headed-war-over-taiwan) AD

Beijing was sending a loud and clear warning to Taipei and Washington
The state media said

amid heightened tensions caused by Taiwanese leaders’ open advocacy for

independence and increased American support for the Taiwanese government. Over the past
few weeks, Chinese officials and state media have ratcheted up the rhetoric against Taipei and Washington, the largest supplier of arms to the
Chinese
island. Trump’s trade war with China is just his opening gambit Referring to Thursday’s live-fire drills, Cui Tiankai, the

ambassador to US, warned in a lecture at Harvard University that China would try every
possible means to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Earlier this month, a
spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office, said any outside forces that attempted to “play
the Taiwan card” would find their efforts “futile” and would hurt themselves if they
went “over the line”, according to the official China Daily . Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen speaks on the
telephone to Donald Trump. Photo: EPA Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen speaks on the telephone to Donald Trump. Photo: EPA Share: The

remark was clearly aimed at US President Donald Trump and his administration which in
recent months has taken a number of significant steps to warm ties with Taipei. As Beijing and
Washington are currently positioning themselves for a possible trade war, Trump’s intention to play the Taiwan card

again is even more dangerous because this would further destabilise bilateral ties or
even worse, could lead to a real war. But it needn’t be terminal True to Trump’s unconventional and unpredictable
presidency, he first started to play the Taiwan card in the transition to the White House when he took a congratulatory call from the Taiwanese
At that time, Trump made
president Tsai Ing-wen, breaking a nearly 40-year-old diplomatic protocol governing China-US ties.

it clear his intention was to use Taiwan as a play to force more concessions on trade
from China. His suggestion then was overwhelmingly met with criticism and cynicism almost everywhere, even in Taiwan where it raised
concerns that the island could be used as a pawn and discarded easily. China sees Taiwan as a province and usually

reacts strongly to any foreign country having official contacts with the Taiwanese
government or sale of arms to the island, particularly from the United States. Now one year
later, Trump’s intention to play the Taiwan card again signals a much broader agenda

targeting China. Almost all the moderating voices in his administration have been forced out and replaced by more hawkish officials
including the soon-to-be secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the National Security Adviser John Bolton – both of whom are known for tough
stances against China and pro-Taiwan views. Tough on China: US national security adviser John Bolton. Photo: Reuters Tough on China: US
his administration has approved
national security adviser John Bolton. Photo: Reuters Share: In recent months,

licences for American firms to sell Taiwan technology to build submarines and signed
the Taiwan Travel Act to encourage visits between American and Taiwanese officials . All
these have invited protests from China. A major test will come in June when the American Institute in Taiwan, the US
de facto embassy, is slated to move into a new building. There has been growing speculation that Bolton or some other senior US official will
attend the ceremony. If that happens, Beijing will regard it as a major provocation. It is interesting to note that amid the war of words with
Washington over trade, some elements in Beijing’s propaganda machine have been using warlike language to give the impression that China
will not back down from the trade spat and will fight the US to the very end. That could well be a negotiation tactic, as trade issues are
But from the Chinese perspective, the Taiwan issue is absolutely non-
negotiable after all.

negotiable. It is a clearly marked red line. The Taiwanese leaders, encouraged by the
latest warming signs from Washington, have started to openly advocate
independence, which is a major taboo for Beijing and seen as breaking the status quo.
Over the past 40 years, Beijing and Taipei have tried to maintain the status quo in which both sides recognise the island as part of China, even
while neither government recognises the legitimacy of the other. Taiwan agrees not to broach independence, in return mainland China does
not use force to take over the island. Washington recognises this one-China principle but maintains close unofficial ties with Taiwan and
provides the island with arms under the Taiwan Relations Act – a constant source of friction with Beijing. Taiwanese Premier William Lai. Photo:
This month, the Taiwanese premier William Lai
EPA Taiwanese Premier William Lai. Photo: EPA Share:

publicly described himself as “a political worker for Taiwanese independence ”. Although this
was not the first time he has said this, Lai’s latest declaration caused serious worries in Beijing in the context of Washington’s warming ties with
Taipei.The heightened tensions over the Taiwan Strait have come as Xi embarks on his
second term as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong . Last month the national legislature
repealed the term limits on the presidency, enabling Xi to rule as long as he likes. With Xi trying to assert China’s power

on the international stage, flexing China’s military muscle in the Taiwan Strait in the
name of pushing back against the independence movement is likely to bolster Xi’s
support on the mainland. China’s official line has always been that it will seek peaceful reunification with Taiwan but not rule
out using force to take it over. In the past, officials and state media have tended to emphasise the peaceful reunification part – more recently
they have highlighted the bit about using force. Moreover, China has never publicly stated a timetable for reunification with Taiwan but some
mainland analysts have started to preach the idea that reunification could take place by 2035 or 2050. As China beats its war drum, who should
hear its call? These assumptions stemmed from Xi’s landmark report at the Communist Party’s 19th congress in October when he outlined a
clearly defined timetable to realise what he called the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation – China would basically become a modern
country by 2035 and a world power by 2050. For an ambitious leader like Xi, reunification with Taiwan has to be an integral part of the dream.
So will the US join the fray if push comes to shove? Many people have mistakenly assumed the Taiwan Relations Act requires the US to come to
Taiwan’s defence. In fact, the law contains no explicit guarantee. Besides, there is a big question over whether the US would risk waging a full-
blown war with China over Taiwan. In the short term, if the current trend continues with the US
determined to play the Taiwan card – which in turn helps embolden the pro-
independence movement in Taiwan – China will probably feel compelled to accelerate its military preparations and
increase the frequency of military shows of strength like the one last week. All this means that tensions over the

Taiwan Strait will get much worse unless Trump rethinks his plan to play the Taiwan
card.
 AT: Taiwan Will Win
The war will not be short – a China-Taiwan war would be long and drawn out
Westcott 2019
(Ben, Digital News Producer, “A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a bloody, logistical nightmare”,
June 24, 2019, date accessed 6/26/2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/23/asia/taiwan-china-
invasion-intl-hnk/index.html)//CS
Taiwan (CNN)Roaring out of the sky, an F-16V fighter jet lands smoothly to rearm and refuel on an unremarkable freeway in rural Taiwan,
surrounded by rice paddies. In different circumstances, this could be alarming sight. Taiwan's fighter pilots are trained to land on freeways
between sorties in case all of the island's airports have been occupied or destroyed by an invasion. Luckily, this was a training exercise.
There's only really one enemy that Taiwan's armed forces are preparing to resist -- China's People's
Liberation Army (PLA). And as China's reputation as an economic and military superpower has grown in
recent years, so too has that threat of invasion, according to security experts. Taiwan has been self-governed since
separating from China at the end of a brutal civil war in 1949, but Beijing has never given up hope of reuniting with what it
considers a renegade province. At a regional security conference in June, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe said: "If anyone
dares to split Taiwan from China, the Chinese military has no choice but to fight at all costs for national
unity." In some shops in mainland China, you can buy postcards and T-shirts emblazoned with patriotic
emblems promoting the retaking of Taiwan . But for seven decades, China has resisted attacking Taiwan partly
for political reasons, including the prospect of a US intervention and the potential heavy human toll. But
the practical realities of a full-blown invasion are also daunting for the PLA, according to experts. Ferrying hundreds
of thousands of troops across the narrow Taiwan Strait to a handful of reliable landing beaches, in the face of fierce resistance, is a harrowing
prospect. Troops would then have a long slog over Taiwan's western mudflats and mountains to reach the capital, Taipei. Not only that, but
China would face an opponent who has been preparing for war for almost 70 years . At mass anti-invasion drills
in May, Taiwan military spokesman Maj. Gen. Chen Chung-Chi said the island knew it had to always be "combat-ready." "Of course, we don't
want war, but only by gaining our own strength can we defend ourselves," he said. "If
China wants to take any action against
us, it has to consider paying a painful price." Difficult and bloody It could be easy to assume that any
invasion of Taiwan by Beijing would be brief and devastating for Taipei : a David and Goliath fight between a tiny
island and the mainland's military might, population and wealth. With nearly 1.4 billion people, the People's Republic of China has the largest
population in the world. Taiwan has fewer than 24 million people -- a similar number to Australia. China has the fifth largest
territory in the world, while Taiwan is the size of Denmark or the US state of Maryland. And Beijing runs an economy that is second only
to the United States, while Taiwan's doesn't rank in the world's top 20. But perhaps most pertinently, C hina has been building and
modernizing its military at an unprecedented rate, while Taiwan relies on moderate US arms sales. In sheer size, the PLA
simply dwarfs Taiwan's military. China has an estimated 1 million troops, almost 6,000 tanks, 1,500 fighter jets and 33 navy
destroyers, according to the latest US Defense Department report. Taiwan's ground force troops barely number 150,000 and are backed by 800
tanks and about 350 fighter aircraft, the report found, while its navy fields only four destroyer-class ships. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping,
the PLA has rapidly modernized, buoyed by rises in military spending and crackdowns on corruption in the army's leadership. "China's leaders
hope that possessingthese military capabilities will deter pro-independence moves by Taiwan or, should
deterrence fail, will permit a range of tailored military options against Taiwan and potential third-party
military intervention," according to a 2019 US Defense Intelligence Agency report on China's military. Yet while China hawks in the
media might beat the drum of invasion, an internal China military study, seen by CNN, revealed that the PLA considers an invasion of Taiwan to
be extremely difficult. "Taiwan has a professional military, with a strong core of American-trained experts," said
Ian Easton, author of "The Chinese Invasion Threat" and research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, as well as "highly defensible" terrain. In
his book he described an invasion by China as "the most difficult and bloody mission facing the Chinese
military."
And China thinks it can win – makes conflict likely
Cole 4-10 (J. Michael, senior fellow at the china policy institute university of Nottingham and a former analyst at the Canadian Security
Intelligence Service, "What Happens if China Tried to Invade Taiwan?," National Interest, 4-10-2019, 6-27-2019,
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/what-happens-if-china-tried-invade-taiwan-51852)//MA

In the end, absent a U.S. and Japanese commitment to intervene in the early stages of an attempted PLA
invasion of Taiwan, there is only a slim likelihood that the Taiwanese military would be able to “defeat” its
opponent in the conventional sense of the term. The force disparity between the two sides has simply become too wide. As such, under
prevailing circumstances, the only way that Taiwan can defeat China is to make sure that the PLA is never used to
attack Taiwan. Deterrence, therefore, is its most credible asset, and one which it can put to much better use.
 AT Taiwan Will Win – China Strategic Reform
Taiwan wont win – PLA strategic reforms account for Taiwan’s military capabilities
Mike Yeo, 05/03/19, writer for Defense News, “China is Laying the Groundwork for War with Taiwan,
06/24/19, https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2019/05/03/china-is-laying-the-
groundwork-for-war-with-taiwan/, NN

MELBOURNE, Australia – China

is improving and increasing its options for a possible future invasion of Taiwan ,
with military reforms and investments in multi-domain military capabilities offering a range of options to
defeat the self-governing island, according to a Pentagon report. These options range from an air and sea
blockade of Taiwan to a full-scale invasion, although the latter option would require a significant increase in the number of
amphibious ships, according to the latest annual China Military Power Report released Thursday by the Department of Defense. Nevertheless,
the report cautioned that the People’s Liberation Army or PLA’s efforts to convert the bulk of its
maneuver units to combined arms brigades, “should eventually create more capable, modular brigades and battalions,” while
the “expansion of army aviation and the creation of two new air assault brigades also provides more attack, air assault and close air support
options for a Taiwan invasion. China’s
PLA has also made efforts to improve its ability to insert forces by air, by
restructuring its airborne corps and establishing air assault units, which would be charged with aerial
insertion and seizing key terrain. This restructure saw it reorganizing its previous units into airborne infantry brigades, a special
operations brigade, an aviation brigade, and a support brigade, with the corps conducting training exercises in 2018 that involved long-range
raid and airborne operations based on actual war plans. The
service has also established a joint logistics support force in
late 2016, with the primary goal of supporting a strategic campaign such as a Taiwan invasion. This would be
accomplished through command and control of joint logistics, delivering of materiel, and managing various civil-military integration support
mechanisms. It’s strategic support force would then be responsible for the use of electronic warfare and
cyber operations during a Taiwan contingency , by “seizing and maintaining battlefield information control in contemporary
informatized warfare.” The report added that the PLA is likely still exploring how to reform its joint command
processes to integrate information operations and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance
capabilities more fully at the theater-level, but noted that the structural reforms have removed the
biggest barriers to integrating these strategic capabilities . Nonetheless, the report raises questions about China’s current
ability to conduct a full-scale invasion. Despite advances in the quality and quantity of its surface combatants and submarines, the PLA Navy has
in recent years only acquired a small number of landing platform docks “indicating a near term focus on smaller scale expeditionary missions
rather than a large number of [Landing Ship Tanks] and medium landing craft that would be necessary for a large-scale direct beach
assault.”The preparedness of the recently expanded PLA Marine Corps was also in doubt, with exercises rarely going beyond battalion level
events, and its newly raised brigades yet to receive “their full complement of required equipment and not fully mission capable.” As a
consequence, the
report noted that the scope of training for these units was “rudimentary and the new
brigades remain unequipped to perform amphibious assault operations," concluding that an invasion of
Taiwan, besides being fraught with significant political risk, “would likely strain China’s armed forces .”
 AT No Escalation
Yes escalation – arms sales to Taiwan makes escalation inevitable
Tanious 18
(Mina E. Tanious 07 July 2018, General Authority for Investment and Free Zones (GAFI), Giza, Egypt and Faculty of Economics and Political
Science, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt, “The impact of economic interdependence on the probability of conflict between states: The case of
“American–Chinese relationship on Taiwan since 1995”, REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE VOLUME 4, ISSUE 1, AD)

According to the 1982 USA–China Joint Declaration, WA committed to gradually reduce the supply of
arms to Taipei, In return, Beijing vowed to resolve the issue peacefully. However, In the 1990s, US arms
sales to Taiwan increased. In 1992, the Bush administration sold 150 F-16s to Taipei and between 1991
and 1998, the USA arms sales to Taiwan was totaled by $20bn. On the occasion of USA Vice President Al
Gore’s visit to Beijing in March 1997, Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao requested Washington to stop
arming Taiwan and stressed on the fact of continuing USA arming of Taiwan is one of the reasons for the
tension in bilateral relations. On January 29, 2010, the Defense Cooperation Agency of the US
Department of Defense announced its approval of the long-awaited arms deal valued about US$6.4bn.
This deal included advanced Patriot missiles, radar, Black Hawk helicopters and others of modern
weapons. China’s reaction to the arms deal between the USA and Taiwan: China has stopped exchanges
and military ties with the United States. China called-up the US ambassador to “Beijing” to make a
formal complaint showing rejection and resentment of the arms deal. The Chinese Government
expressed its dissatisfaction with the USAs’ support for Taiwan militarily and that this would
undoubtedly affect cooperation with the USA in other fields. China has taken a strong stance and
explicitly threatened punitive measures against US companies, such as US firm Boeing, which is involved
in arms sales to Taiwan. China suspended its cooperation with the USA in the framework of coordinating
the Copenhagen conference on climate change problems. It also announced at the same month that it
will be testing its missile defense recently. Because of the desire of the USA to maintain its relationship
with China in the framework of mutual economic cooperation between them, The Obama
administration regretted the deterioration of relations with China, and the reason for this is the
recognition by the American side of the existence of common interests between the two countries,
especially in the economic sphere, where the USA is well aware that the impact of relations between the
two countries would negatively affect USA economic interests. Adding that this would do harm to US
companies that benefit heavily from Chinese markets such as Boeing and other companies.
solvency
 AT Tariff Alt Cause
Trade conflict is inevitable without resolving arms sales to Taiwan
Lopez 6-11-19 – Linette Lopez is the senior finance correspondent at Business Insider (“Forget the trade
war — a bigger conflict between the US and China is playing out right under our noses,”
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-arms-sales-to-taiwan-bigger-threat-to-us-china-relations) bhb

The world has its eye on the trade war between the US and China, but a more dangerous confrontation
between the two nations is playing out in the background: the worsening disagreement over the "One China" policy.

Last week, Reuters reported that Washington was on its way to approving
$2 billion worth of arms sales to Taiwan . The
move indicates the Trump administration isn't trying to create an atmosphere conducive to trade negotiations
and suggests that disputes between the US and China are more likely headed toward escalation than
resolution.

"Taiwan is the thing the Chinese care most about hands down ," said Susan Thornton, a former assistant US secretary of
state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. "Anything
where the US is interfering with Taiwan hits a national third rail ."
The One China policy — which asserts that Taiwan is not an independent nation but rather part of China — was developed during the Nixon
administration to improve US-China relations. The idea is central to China's identity as a modern world power, and since President Donald
Trump took office the US has challenged that notion repeatedly.

Despite protests from Beijing, Trump signed the Taiwan Travel Act, legislation permitting high-level talks between US and Taiwanese officials,
last year. In May, the US national security adviser, John Bolton, met with David Lee, one of Taiwan's top security officials. This meeting came
just after Taiwan renamed its unofficial embassy in Washington the Taiwan Council for US Affairs. The old name, the Coordination Council for
North American Affairs, neglected to mention Taiwan or the US.

The Trump administration has also sold arms to Taiwan before, as have previous administrations, but this $2 billion arms sale digs at
a delicate wound during a delicate time. It's a big sale , even in a world where weapons are becoming more and more
expensive. And though it does not include the US's top fighter jets, it is sure to antagonize Beijing before the G20 meeting at the end
of the month in Osaka, Japan, where US and Chinese heads of state are expected to meet.

On Thursday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry representative, Geng Shuang, responded to the news of the arms sale with a
warning, according to the Chinese state media outlet Xinhua.

"We urge the US side to stop arms sales to Taiwan and sever their military ties, prudently and properly handle Taiwan-related
issues, to avoid serious damage to China-US relations as well as to the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait," Geng said.

New sales will derail the conclusion of trade negotiations

Rapoza 4-1-19 – Kenneth Rapoza is a senior contributor for Forbes (“Taiwan Just Became A Huge
Variable In The China Trade War,” https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2019/04/01/taiwan-just-
became-a-huge-variable-in-china-trade-war/#593c0ff45948) bhb

Potential sales of F-16 fighter jets and M-1 Abrams tanks to Taiwan is a sure fire way to tick off Xi Jinping, the
Chinese president with whom Donald Trump is trying to sign a “great trade deal” as early as this month. Following another
Steve Mnuchin/Robert Lighthizer lackluster showing in Beijing last week, all bets are off that China and the U.S. sign anything should the two
presidents meet later this month as discussed. Taiwan is a new sticking point.

The U.S. hasn’t sold fighter jets to Taiwan since 1992 in an effort to appease China , which sees Taiwan as a
breakaway province designed to sow political discord between Beijing and the West. Last week, the Trump administration responded to the
Taiwanese president’s request for some of the biggest weapons made in the U.S., saying he was fine with the order.

The formal request still needs congressional approval. Beijing will lobby hard against it before Trump and Xi meet. No meeting date has been set.
Taiwan’s request is an unwelcome risk for ongoing U.S. China talks, says Chris Rogers, a senior analyst for Panjiva, the
trade research division of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen seems willing to ruffle feathers and challenge
Trump, asking for the F-16 and the M-1 tank in order to “show the world the U.S. is committed to Taiwan’s defense,” Reuters reports.

“Should the U.S. approve the orders it would ... jeopardize relations between the U.S. and China just as
trade talks are due to reach a conclusion ,” Rogers says.
 war

The aff’s reduced security commitment would improve the US-China relationship.

Chen et al. 17 [Ping-Kuei, assistant professor at the Department of Diplomacy, National Chengchi
University, Taiwan, Scott L. Kastner, University of Maryland, College Park, Department of Government
and Politics, William L. Reed, University of Maryland, Department of Government and Politics, “A
Farewell to Arms? US Security Relations with Taiwan and the Prospects for Stability in the Taiwan Strait,
accessible online at
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1w76wpm.15#metadata_info_tab_contents, published 2017]
// BBM

Continued US security ties with Taiwan, and in particular US weapons sales to the island, have long been a
source of tension in the US-China relationship. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) found it unacceptable that
Washington insisted on selling weapons to Taiwan even after US-PRC normalization in 1979 ; the Taiwan
Relations Act, which contained explicit references to continued US arms sales to Taiwan, further angered Chinese leaders.
Washington agreed in a 1982 communiqué “to reduce gradually its sale of arms to Taiwan” and
promised that future arms sales to Taiwan “would not exceed, either in qualitative or quantitative terms,” those of
recent years, but the record of US arms sales since suggests that the communiqué has had little
constraining effect on US behavior. US arms sales to Taiwan, in turn, often provoke an angry Chinese
response, which typically includes tough rhetoric and symbolic retaliation, such as temporarily suspending US-
China military-to-military dialogues. US arms sales to Taiwan have continued to generate frictions in US-China
relations even though relations between Taipei and Beijing improved dramatically after the 2008 election of
Ma Ying-jeou as president in Taiwan. In early 2010, for instance, PRC officials were “strongly indignant” after an arms sale announcement,
calling the sale a “gross intervention in China’s internal affairs” that would have a “serious negative impact” on bilateral relations. As China’s
rapid rise as an economic and—increasingly—military power dramatically alters the security landscape in East
Asia, however, prominent voices in both Washington and Beijing have in recent years advocated a shift in their respective
countries’ approach to the US-Taiwan relationship . In the United States, several scholars and former officials have
called for a reduced US security commitment to Taiwan and in particular an end to arms sales to Taiwan.
Proponents of this view suggest that a scaled-back US commitment would pay dividends in terms of an
improved US-China relationship. In the PRC, meanwhile, a number of voices have called for a tougher Chinese response to US arms
sales—including the imposition of economic sanctions. Advocates of a tougher approach suggest that a willingness to retaliate more strongly
would force the United States to reconsider its commitment to Taiwan. This chapter critically evaluates both proposed policy shifts. In the
pages that follow, we present a simple framework for thinking through the broader implications of US arms sales for the cross-Strait
relationship. We use the framework, in turn, to shed light on how changes in US or PRC policy on the arms sales issue could affect the prospects
for stability in cross-Strait relations and the nature of bargaining between China and Taiwan. Our key conclusion is that both proposed policy
shifts—a reduction in US arms sales to Taiwan and a tougher PRC response to arms sales—carry with them significant risks (some
counterintuitive) for the country that would initiate the change.

The aff solves – scaling back sales resolves a major conflict flashpoint.

Chen et al. 17 [Ping-Kuei, assistant professor at the Department of Diplomacy, National Chengchi
University, Taiwan, Scott L. Kastner, University of Maryland, College Park, Department of Government
and Politics, William L. Reed, University of Maryland, Department of Government and Politics, “A
Farewell to Arms? US Security Relations with Taiwan and the Prospects for Stability in the Taiwan Strait,
accessible online at
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1w76wpm.15#metadata_info_tab_contents, published 2017]
// BBM

Given the tensions—and the anger in Beijing—that are generated by US arms sales to Taiwan , some in the United
States propose that Washington end (or at least scale back) weapons sales to the island. Doing so, proponents
suggest, would remove a major irritant in the US-China relationship and would increase trust and cooperation
in bilateral relations. More fundamentally, proponents of a reduced US commitment to Taiwan suggest that such
a policy approach would help lower the risk of armed conflict in East Asia. This argument is developed most fully by
Charles Glaser, who suggests that ending the US commitment to defend Taiwan would bring with it two significant benefits for the US-China
relationship. First, it
could improve US-China relations because such a shift in US policy would remove a key
source of mistrust in Beijing concerning US motivations. Second, ending US support for Taiwan—by removing the key
potential source of military conflict between China and the United States—would reduce military competition between Washington and Beijing.
Glaser thus proposes a “grand bargain,” in which the United States would end its commitment to Taiwan in return for Chinese willingness to
“resolve its maritime disputes on ‘fair’ terms” and to accept a long-term US security presence in East Asia. Others
argue that the US
commitment to Taiwan is increasingly untenable as China’s military power continues to grow . For instance, Chas
Freeman warns that a continued US commitment to Taiwan is incompatible with (a) waning US relative power
in the region and (b) the importance that the PRC places on the issue . A failure to accommodate US policy
to new geopolitical realities, in turn, risks future military conflict over an issue about which China cares deeply. John
Mearsheimer argues along similar lines that China’s rise as a great power , if it continues, will mean that the current US
security commitment to Taiwan will be increasingly unsustainable. Taiwan will ultimately be forced to accommodate
growing Chinese power.

The aff solves – defuses a conflict flash point and smooths the way for better U.S.-
China relations.

Hickey 13 [Dennis V., Distinguished Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Global Studies
in the Department of Political Science at Missouri State University, “Imbalance in the Taiwan Strait,”
accessible online at
https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/issues/Autumn_2013/4_Hickey.pdf, published
2013] // BBM

Some are calling on Washington to terminate security support for Taiwan. Admiral Bill Owens (ret.), former Vice-
Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has criticized arms sales to Taiwan as “not in our best interest” and
suggested that “a thoughtful review of this outdated legislation [the TRA] is warranted.”26 Ambassador Chas Freeman
(ret.) has argued that the TRA compels US decisionmakers to “confront the necessity to choose between
the self-imposed shackles of longstanding policy and the imperatives of our long-term strategic interests.”27
Others have suggested “the US should consider backing away from its commitments to Taiwan.”28
Admittedly, terminating arms sales and reducing America’s security commitment to Taiwan would benefit
US interests in some ways. The change in policy “would remove the most obvious and contentious flash point
between the US and China and smooth the way for better relations between them in the decades to
come.”29 The likelihood for US conflict with China would decrease, while possibly increasing the prospects
for cooperation in numerous fields—ranging from global warming to nuclear proliferation. Editorials in
the PRC press even laud the “increasing number of far sighted Americans calling for repeal of the TRA .”30
This option would also reduce the likelihood that sensitive US military technologies or weapons systems
might fall into the hands of the PRC . As some Pentagon officials admit, military exchanges with Taiwan are riskier
“in an environment of improving Taiwan-PRC ties .”31
 arms k2 relations

The aff solves U.S.-China relations – it’s the key issue.

Yin 16 [Chengde, Research Fellow at the China Foundation for International Studies, “Time for US to
Change Its Taiwan Policy,” accessible online at http://www.chinausfocus.com/political-social-
development/time-for-us-to-change-its-taiwan-policy/, published 06/08/16] // BBM

The pro-independence DPP has returned to power in Taiwan. Despite repeated warnings from Beijing, Tsai Ing-wen, leader of
the DPP, stopped short of recognizing the 1992 Consensus and the one-China principle in her inaugural speech, a signal that
she may intend to lead the island in pursuing “one China, one Taiwan” or “two Chinas”, i.e. Taiwan independence. Evidently, her stance
has the backing of the United States. On the eve of the election, Tsai took a trip to the US, which was apparently designed to seek
advice from and compare notes with US policy makers on her policy for cross-Strait relations. It must be during this trip that her pro-
independence policy was given tacit approval. She received further reassurance for her inclination toward independence when the US House of
Representatives passed a resolution reaffirming support for Taipei just ahead of her inauguration. The US has always been known to support
Taiwan’s quiet moves toward independence to hold back China’s reunification through its policy toward Taipei. Though
the US
pronounced its commitment to the one-China principle and opposition to Taiwan independence, enshrined in its three
joint communiques with China, its commitment was never fully kept . The US public position never went further than saying that it
does not support Taiwan independence. What that means is, the US does not support anything radical that the DPP might engage in such as de
jure independence by changing Taiwan’s title, lest the US be dragged into a frontal clash with China. The
US, however, does not
prohibit the DPP from desinicization of the island and pursue disguised independence . The Taiwan
Relations Act, to start with, and the “six assurances” are nothing but deliberate steps to force China to renounce
the use of force and maintain the “status quo” indefinitely. Its consequence? Emboldened separatists with less scruples as
they seek to pull the island away from the Chinese mainland. Reunification would remain a distant dream for China, and de facto independence
might become the reality in Taiwan. Such a policy toward Taiwan is at odds with the fundamental and core interests of
China and, in the final analysis, the US’ own interests as well. It is a policy with multiple strategic flaws. First, the
US should stop using Taiwan as its “unsinkable aircraft carrier”. Deng Xiaoping made the observation that the US saw the
strategic and military value in Taiwan and wanted to keep it as its unsinkable aircraft carrier. It is quite true because though the US has
professedly severed diplomatic ties, withdrew troops from and ended mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, it continues to have
semi-official political and military ties with it. It has publicly assisted Taiwan’s defense through arms sales and covert
military cooperation of various kinds. The goal is to hold back China’s reunification and use Taiwan as an outpost to contain
China. This strategy is nothing but a vestige of the Cold War and will only slow down the growth of China-US
relations. As time advances and as China continues to rise, Taiwan won’t be the US’ “unsinkable aircraft carrier”
forever. Second, the US should stop going back on its commitments . The return of Taiwan to China was written into the
Cairo Declaration, an official international instrument formulated and signed by US and other leaders. All three Sino-US joint
communiques affirmed the one-China principle and opposition to Taiwan independence. These are legally binding
international documents and serve as the guide and rulebook for China-US relations. Honoring such
documents is the very foundation for a functioning international system. But any US tacit support of the
DPP’s attempts at de facto independence at the cost of its credibility has hurt not just China, but also the authority of the
declaration and the post-war order and can only lead to myriad problems. Third, the US should stop supporting separatists. The
DPP prospered through street politics, manipulation of public opinion and populism. Those who won’t stop playing with fire will only destroy
themselves. The DPP has gone so far as to take the 20-million-plus Taiwanese as hostage to fulfill its selfish objective of Taiwan independence.
This is extremely irresponsible and egregious. To
demonstrate support to separatists like the DPP through the Taiwan
Relations Act and the “six assurances” is to openly undermine China’s sovereignty, disrespect the basic
norms governing international relations, reject the US’ moral responsibility and hurt its international
reputation. Fourth, the US should stop misplacing its stakes. The size, population and overall strength of Taiwan is
nowhere near that of the Chinese mainland . Neither is Taiwan’s importance to the US. Economically, the
People’s Republic of China and the US are as interdependent as any two economies in the world can be; on major
international issues, the US needs China’s cooperation. In economic and strategic areas key to America’s
future, Taiwan is of minimal consequence. Admittedly, the US has interests in Taiwan. Its interests on the Chinese
mainland, however, far outweigh those in Taiwan. Pitching itself against China, a fast-growing country with 1.3 billion
people, by supporting separatists in Taiwan is definitely not the wise thing to do. China will not allow Taiwan , which has
historically been part of China, to break away. This is a permanent red line for China. The question of Taiwan is a
core issue in China-US relations and must be handled with extraordinary care. Some foresighted people
in the US have called for adjusting the US’ Taiwan policy, abolish the Taiwan Relations Act and the “six assurances” to
herald a fully normal and healthy bilateral relationship with China. Apparently, this is the trend and we only hope that the US
government would do it sooner rather than later for the benefit of the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait and for the benefit of the US
itself too.
 end all - k2 peace
The US should end arms sales to Taiwan – key to Asia-Pacific peace
Bosu, Secretary of New Horizon Radio Listeners' Club, 2017
(Rabi Sankar, “Time to stop US arms sales to Taiwan,” China.org.cn, 7/26/19,
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/2017-07/26/content_41288212.htm accessed 7/9/19 GDI-JEM)

For the past 37 years, the U.S. has violated the basic principles enshrined in the three joint
communiqués covering relations with China. The Bush and Obama administrations each sold over $12
billion worth of military equipment to Taiwan. It is high time for such violations to come to an end, to
the benefit of both China and the United States.

The secessionists in Taiwan should recognize it is a delusion that the U.S. will spill blood coming to the
defense of Taiwan. The Trump administration is using Taiwan as "bargaining chip" to get other things
from China. Ultimately, the Taiwanese authorities may well regret being a pawn of Trump and his radical
policies.

Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen and her deluded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) followers had better
wake up, acknowledge their mistakes, and face the reality of the 1992 Consensus on cross-Straits
relations. There is no other alternative.

The U.S. administration has been talking about a strategic "rebalancing" in regard to Asia; however, the
most urgent rebalancing act is to stop selling weapons to Taiwan and to stop overt and covert official
contacts with Taiwan as in interests of Asia-Pacific peace and even that of the world at large.
 Reciprocity
Concessions on arms sales will induce a spiral of reciprocity with China
Gomez 2016 – Eric Gomez is a policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato
Institute. (“A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,”
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-defense-
relationship?
utm_content=buffer855fe&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer) bhb

America’s security commitment to Taiwan faces a significant test. China’s growing power presents a
challenge to U.S. military superiority, while Taiwan’s investment in its own defense has languished. Adding
to the challenge of keeping peace in the Taiwan Strait is the shifting political situation in Taiwan, exemplified by the January 2016 elections in
which voters rejected the cross-strait rapprochement policies of the Kuomintang (KMT) and turned over control of the presidency and legislature
to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The China-Taiwan relationship has remained relatively calm, but changes
in the U.S.-China
balance of power could make the Taiwan Strait a dangerous place once more if the implicit U.S. defense
commitment to Taiwan loses credibility.
This paper outlines three broad policy options for the United States: shoring up the defense commitment by restoring military superiority over
China; sustaining a minimum level of military advantage over China; or stepping down from the commitment to use military force to maintain
Taiwan’s de facto independence. It concludes that the United States should step down from the defense commitment eventually, ideally through
an incremental and reciprocal process with China that would draw concessions from Beijing. In the long term, the U.S. security commitment to
Taiwan is neither beneficial nor advantageous for the United States. Taiwan will have to take responsibility for its own defense.

Stepping down from the implicit commitment to come to Taiwan’s rescue with military force carries risks, but other
options leave the United States worse off in the long term. The likely damage to U.S.-Chinese relations
caused by pushing for military superiority in the region outweighs the benefits. Sustaining a minimum
level of military advantage is possible, but absent a long-term economic slowdown and/or political changes in China—both of
which are beyond U.S. control—maintaining such an advantage in perpetuity will be difficult. Stepping down from
the commitment through a long-term process would give Taiwan the time it needs to make necessary
changes in its defense technology and military strategy. Peace in the Taiwan Strait is an important American interest, but it
must be weighed against the difficulty of maintaining credibility and the growing costs of deterrence failure.
 Solvency: Gradual Reductions

Reduction in arms sales is key – U.S. cant keep up with China development and Taiwan
cant defend
Lin and Zhou 18 [Gang, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the School of International and
Public Affairs and Director of Center for Taiwan Studies, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and Senior
Fellow of the Collaborative Innovation Center for Peaceful Development of Across-Strait Relations,
Wenxing, PhD candidate at the School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
and Visiting Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, “Does Taiwan
Matter to the United States? Policy Debates on Taiwan Abandonment and Beyond,” accessible online at
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/702459, published August 2018] // BBM
In the wake of the 1995–1996 Strait crisis, three views appeared in the United States. The first view argues that the U.S. military should
intervene into military conflicts under any circumstances. This view carries a Cold War mind-set, being addicted to the Taiwan card, however
"wild" it is. The second view argues that Washington should make a conditional commitment to Taiwan's security, never fighting with the
mainland for the sake of Taiwanese independence. The third view argues that the United States should clearly stay outside of the mainland-
Taiwan conflict, as advocated by Cato Institute Vice Director Ted Galen Carpenter in 2006.19 As Cato embraces libertarianism and advocates
noninterventionism in foreign policy, Carpenter's argument was quite unique in Washington, DC. It has, however, prepared a basic tune for the
voice of "Taiwan abandonment" uttered between 2009 and 2014. Former Vice Chairman of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Bill Owens wrote an article
in Financial Times in November 2009, arguing that China
would become a great power equal to the United States
within 30 years. "The solution is to approach the US/China relationship not with hedging, competition or
watchfulness, but with co-operation, openness and trust." For him, Washington should have a thoughtful review of
the implementation of the TRA and other outdated legislation .20 Meanwhile, Peterson Institute of International
Economics Director Fred Bergsten used G-2 to describe the leadership of the two countries in overcoming the world economic crisis.21 While
both Taiwan abandonment and G-2 are beyond the mainstream in American academic circles, these arguments have illustrated an internal
tension between U.S.-China strategic cooperation in the world and Americans' commitment to Taiwan's security. Consequently, an
increasing number of American scholars and policy advisors have begun to accept the argument of "Taiwan
abandonment" or considered readjusting U.S. Taiwan policy, as a result of the reducing gap in national
strength between China and the U nited States as well as the growing prospects of their cooperation,
peaceful development of cross-Strait relations, and the declining capacities of Taiwan.22 In regard to Taiwan
abandonment, there are two groups of people. The first group argues that the United States should get out of Taiwan affairs .
For people in favor of this perspective, because of the narrowing gap between the United States and China
economically and militarily and the expanding gap between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan in both [End Page 184]
spheres, Taiwan should not remain as an unstable root of tensions between Washington and Beijing. If the United States
continues to support Taiwan in the last stage of the Chinese civil war, it will face a series of negative implications. As David Shambaugh has
argued, the game between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait is over . Since Taiwan cannot escape from the
mainland's control, Washington should abandon Taiwan as early as possible.23 Chas Freeman argues that the long friendship and
cooperation between the United States and the Chinese mainland are far more important than Americans' special
sentiments to Taiwan; the best policy therefore is to accept China's reunification.24 Former U.S. ambassador to China Joseph Prueher
argues that even if America continues to provide arms sales to Taiwan, the island cannot defend itself . Charles
Glaser considers Taiwan as a strategic liability of the United States. Because Taiwan's leader may bring America into a war with China, which has
developed its regular and strategic nuclear forces quickly, Washington
should gradually free itself from Taiwan affairs to
avoid falling into a longtime hostility with a rising China .25 Like Owens, both Prueher and Glaser agree that the United
States should review the TRA and the arms sales issues.26 According to Bruce Gilley, if Taiwan can maintain autonomy and
democracy, getting rid of its role as a strategic partner of the United States through Finlandization, it will be good news for the American
government who is increasingly seeking China's cooperation; Washington does not need to include Taiwan into its strategic orbit.27 More
bluntly, Paul Kane even suggests the Obama administration negotiate with the Chinese government behind doors to cancel American debt of
$1.14 trillion to China by ending arms sales and military assistance to Taiwan.28 From a realist perspective, John Mearsheimer argues that if
China continues to grow dramatically, Taiwan seems doomed to become part of China , and the United States has to
say goodbye to Taiwan. For Mearsheimer, "at some point in the next decade or so , it will become impossible for the
United States to help Taiwan defend itself against a Chinese attack." The price of close relations between the U nited
States and Taiwan will overtake the interest America can gain. It is doubtful how long Washington will consider Taiwan as
a strategic asset.29 For him, Taiwan abandonment is undesirable, but it may eventually become a reality that the United States has to accept.
As Michael Swaine argues, as the United States cannot maintain dominance in East Asia and commitment to
Taiwan's security in the long run, it should soon begin to consider negotiation with the Chinese mainland, reducing both parties' [End
Page 185] military projection in the Taiwan Strait and revising the Six Assurances so that the two sides of the strait can eventually move to
political dialogue.30 Another group of people tend to give a free hand to China's peaceful unification as U.S. officials did during the most part of
the 1970s and the early 1980s mentioned above. With the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations and strengthening of China-U.S.
strategic cooperation over the past years, a growing number of American experts have begun to explore the possibility of China's peaceful
unification as well as the specific formulas for it. According to former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, because
of the
decline of American national capacity and the growing need for U.S.-China strategic cooperation , arms
sales to Taiwan can only increase unnecessary hostility from the Chinese mainland . According to him, Taiwan
should accept a more flexible unification model like "one country, multiple systems" rather than "one country, two systems" and thus reduce its
reliance on the United States.31 Interestingly, his argument in 2012 was quite consistent with what he made in an official capacity three
decades earlier. Similarly, U.S. military expert Michael McDevitt pointed out that if China was reunified, it would be the "best outcome for
better Sino-U.S. relations" because it could "bring closure to U.S. involvement in the Chinese civil war."32 Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State Thomas Christensen's earlier argument—before he joined the government—is even stronger. For him, peaceful unification is in the U.S.
interest, because "the United States has long-term security and moral interests in the political liberalization of the mainland." However,
"Taiwan's status as a Chinese democracy—holding out the prospect of unification with the mainland under the right set of conditions—can be a
powerful force for liberalization on the mainland."33 These arguments explore the desirability of peaceful unification of the two sides from
different perspectives. Brzezinski and McDevitt approach the issue more from a realist perspective, that is, to gracefully resolve the structural
problem in China-U.S. relations and free Washington from the historical knot on the issue of Taiwan without sacrificing the latter's interest. By
contrast, Christensen makes his case more from a liberalist perspective, with a strong ideological flavor, considering Taiwan as a medium
promoting the mainland's political liberalization. It is interesting to observe that regardless of whether Taiwan is a historical burden or potential
asset for the United States, the major concern of Washington is ironically the mainland rather than Taiwan. In other words, Taiwan is less
important than the mainland in U.S. policy reckoning . This group of scholars and experts would not consider themselves as
supporters of Taiwan abandonment. After all, peaceful unification is inherent within the U.S. policy guideline of
peaceful resolution. However, they consider Taiwan more as a strategic liability than an asset of the United States and
disregard peaceful separation as a feasible option. They hope China's unification can occur with Taiwanese agreement so that the United States
can gracefully disentangle itself from the historical knot and resolve the structural problem between Washington and Beijing. For them, the
political dispute across the Taiwan Strait is the outcome of the Cold War, and the Taiwan issue can be resolved by itself as the two sides move
toward political integration through economic integration.
AT: circumvention
 trump
Trump will enforce the plan because he thinks he could make other deals with China—
he’s not tied down predictably
Lin and Zhou 2018 (Gang Lin is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the School of
International and Public Affairs and Director of Center for Taiwan Studies, Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
China, and Senior Fellow of the Collaborative Innovation Center for Peaceful Development of Across-
Strait Relations. Wenxing Zhou is a PhD candidate at the School of International and Public Affairs,
Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Visiting Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University. Does Taiwan Matter to the United States? Policy Debates on Taiwan Abandonment and
Beyond Author(s): Gang Lin and Wenxing Zhou Source: China Review , Vol. 18, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE:
Washington-Taipei Relations at a Crossroads (August 2018), pp. 177-206 Published by: Chinese
University Press)

Indeed, U.S.
policy to Taiwan has become less predictable since President Trump came to office. Many
uncertainties, such as the power struggle inside Trump’s policy-making circle between the nationalists
and internationalists and the policy debates between the hardline and moderate Republicans, have
resulted in the unpredictability of Trump’s policy to Beijing as well as Taipei. However, against the backdrop of the
ongoing wide-range U.S. debates over Washington’s China policy in academic and policy circles over the policy of engagement and hedging, one
cannot help but link the decisions on Taiwan with U.S. intentions to balance against a rising China. In other words, the
Taiwan card will
continue to be played by the Trump administration . Meanwhile, it is not unlikely that President Trump may
want to “make a deal” with Beijing over Taiwan in exchange of economic gains as well as the Korean Peninsula
issue about which he is more concerned. As Raymond Burghardt indicated, the U.S. Taiwan policy might be negotiable with
Beijing and used as strategic leverage for economic interests. 67 This worrisome speculation has increased Taiwanese
concern of being abandoned by Americans.

Durable fiat
 companies
Any arms sale MUST go through Congress which leaves no room for circumvention,
especially to a banned nation.
CRS, 4-1-2019, “Arms Sales: Congressional Review Process,” Congressional Research Service,
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL31675.pdf. ZKMSU

The Department of State (on behalf of the President) submits a preliminary or informal notification of a prospective
major arms sale 20 calendar days before the executive branch takes further formal action. This informal
notification is provided to the committees of primary jurisdiction for arms sales issues . In the Senate, this is the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee; in the House, it is the Foreign Affairs Committee. It has been the practice for such informal notifications to be made for arms sales cases that would have to be formally notified to Congress under the
provisions of Section 36(b) of the AECA. 2 The informal notification practice stemmed from a February 18, 1976, letter from the Department of Defense making a nonstatutory commitment to give Congress these preliminary

classified notifications.3 Beginning in 2012,the State Department implemented a new informal notification process, which the
department calls a “tiered review,” in which the relevant committees are notified between 20 and 40
calendar days before receiving formal notification , depending on the system and destination in question.4 During June 2017 testimony, Acting Assistant Secretary of State
Tina Kaidanow described this process as Congressional review period during which the Committees can ask questions or raise

concerns prior to the Department of State initiating formal notification. The purpose is to provide
Congress the opportunity to raise concerns , and have these concerns addressed, in a confidential process with the Administration, so
that our bilateral relationship with the country in question is protected during this process.5 If a committee “raises significant concerns about a sale or

[export] license,” the State Department “will typically extend the review period until we can resolve
those concerns,” Kaidanow explained. Under Section 36(b) of the AECA, Congress must be formally notified 30 calendar days before
the Administration can take the final steps to conclude a government-to-government foreign military
sale of major defense equipment valued at $14 million or more, defense articles or services valued at $50 million or more, or design and construction services valued at $200 million or
more.6 In the case of such sales to NATO member states, NATO, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Israel, or New Zealand, Congress must be formally notified 15 calendar days before the Administration can proceed with the sale.
However, the prior notice threshold values are higher for NATO members, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Israel, or New Zealand. These higher thresholds are $25 million for the sale, enhancement, or upgrading of major defense
equipment; $100 million for the sale, enhancement, or upgrading of defense articles and defense services; and $300 million for the sale, enhancement, or upgrading of design and construction services, so long as such sales to

Section 36(i) requires the President to notify both the Senate

these countries do not include or involve sales to a country outside of this group of states. 7

Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee at least 30 days in advance of a
pending shipment of defense articles subject to the 36(b) requirements if the chairman and ranking
member of either committee request such notification . Certain articles or services listed on the Missile Technology Control Regime are subject to a variety of
additional reporting requirements. Commercially licensed arms sales also must be formally notified to Congress 30

calendar days before the export license is issued if they involve the sale of major defense equipment valued at $14 million or more, or defense articles or services valued
at $50 million or more (Section 36(c) AECA).8
 black markets
Arms sales regulations further resolutions that would hinder the development of black
markets – the ATT proves.
Pablo Olabuenaga, 5-8-2019, “Why the Arms Trade Treaty Matters – and Why It Matters That the US
Is Walking Away,” Just Security, https://www.justsecurity.org/63968/why-the-arms-trade-treaty-
matters-and-why-it-matters-that-the-us-is-walking-away/. ZKMSU

I had the opportunity to serve in the Mexican delegation throughout the negotiation process through , starting with the negotiation and adoption of General Assembly resolution 64/48 in 2009, and the

adoption delegations come together on an issue that

of the treaty in 2013. I can attest to the hard work and effort that it took both Amb. García Moritán and Amb. Woolcott, as well as all , to

has an inherent trend to polarization and that touches upon very sensitive issues for States including
concerns about their own security and stability this is a particularly important legal . From the Mexican perspective,

instrument given the great challenges and threats posed by the illicit trade of arms that flows mostly
from the U.S. the negotiations coincided with the exposure of the highly
border into Mexico, fueling organized crime. To exemplify this,

controversial U.S. Fast and Furious operation allowed illegal gun , where the Phoenix Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF),

sales in an attempt to track the sellers and buyers , who were believed to be connected to Mexican drug cartels. As Roberto Dondisch, chief negotiator of the Mexican delegation, has written elsewhere

the U.S. and Mexico always kept a very close relationship

(‘El Tratado de Comercio de Armas, un éxito de la diplomacia mexicana’ in México y el Multilateralismo del Siglo XXI),

throughout the negotiations Despite having substantial differences in our approaches to certain aspects
.

of the treaty, we always maintained the utmost respect in our exchanges and we worked hand in hand
towards bridging those differences in favor of achieving a meaningful legal instrument . The fact that both teams — led by Dr. Dondisch

which
on the Mexican side, and by Amb. Thomas Countryman, who left the State Department in January 2017, on the U.S. side — overcame what initially were perceived as irreconcilable positions and ended up cosponsoring the draft resolution through the ATT was adopted by

proves that where there is a will, there is a way

the General Assembly, .
case turns
 AT: Deterrence
Arms aren’t key to US deterrence
Gomez 16 Eric Gomez is a policy analyst in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. A
Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship September 28,
2016 https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-
defense-relationship#full

Finally, stepping down from the commitment to defend Taiwan with military force does not remove
America’s interest in keeping the Taiwan Strait free of armed conflict. The United States would retain
the ability to punish China in other ways should it attack Taiwan. Diplomatic isolation and economic
sanctions may not inflict the same kinds of costs on Beijing as military force, but they are additional
costs that would have to be absorbed.104 Additionally, U.S. arms sales are separate from the implicit
commitment to defend Taiwan and could continue, albeit in some reduced or modified form.105
Continuing to sell arms to Taiwan while stepping down from the implicit commitment to use military
force to defend the island allows the United States to demonstrate support for Taiwan’s defense
without taking on the risks associated with direct intervention.106
 AT: Taiwan Lashout
Causality is wrong - Taiwan won’t attack – only increased Chinese aggression will
cause Taiwanese lashout
Grossman 18 Derek Grossman is a senior defense analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND
Corporation. He formerly served as the daily intelligence briefer to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Asian and Pacific Security Affairs at the Pentagon, 1-24-2018, "Why China Should (Still) Feel Good About
Taiwan… but Maybe Not for Long," RAND Corporation, https://www.rand.org/blog/2018/01/why-china-
should-still-feel-good-about-taiwan-but-maybe.html Lowell-SB

Upon the second anniversary of the election of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, it is worth taking stock of
whether the People's Republic of China's (PRC) initial fears of Tsai's political intentions have panned out.
As I observed at roughly the one-year mark, Chinese leaders have ample reason to feel good about
Taiwan, namely because Tsai had been focusing her energy on stabilizing cross-Strait relations based on
the status quo rather than moving toward independence. This trend has only continued, undermining
Beijing's rationale for ratcheting up pressure against the island nation. China, however, has ramped up
its coercive efforts, prompting questions about Beijing's intentions and the long-term stability of cross-
Strait relations. Beijing should recognize that Tsai is indeed a moderate, and China will be hard-
pressed to find a more reliable and stable Taiwanese leader in the future. And yet, Beijing is harming
relations with Taiwan under Tsai through its actions.

Over the past year, Tsai has proactively endeavored to negotiate a practical workaround to her
endorsement of the so-called “1992 Consensus”, a concept that acknowledges the existence of only
“one China,” but allows each side to interpret what that means. Tsai has recognized “the historical fact”
of the consensus, though not the agreement's exact wording, in order to preserve Taiwan's de facto
sovereignty. Tsai's decision has fueled Chinese suspicions of her. In the late 1990s, Tsai assisted then-
President Lee Teng-hui in crafting the “special state-to-state” formulation for cross-Strait ties. When Tsai
was running for the presidency in 2012, she explicitly rejected the “1992 Consensus”.

Nevertheless, the first two years of Tsai's presidency have demonstrated that she prioritizes caution,
pragmatism and, most importantly, transparency, in dealing with China. Most notably, Tsai has reached
out in a show of “goodwill” to engage Beijing on establishing a new model of cross-Strait relations. In a
speech in August, Tsai said that “we hope that both sides of the Taiwan Strait can work on a new model
for cross-Strait interactions that benefit the stability and prosperity of both sides and the region as a
whole.” Tsai's remark was immediately panned in Beijing, with China's Taiwan Affairs Office accusing the
Tsai administration of attempting to “de-Sinicize,” or eliminate Chinese influence over, Taiwan. One
mainland scholar added that the “1992 Consensus” already exists so “why bother to find a new model if
the existing one works fine?”

Prior to China's 19th Party Congress in early October, Tsai reiterated her administration's desire to
engage Beijing on cross-Strait stability. However, Chinese President Xi Jinping refused to give an inch
during his marathon speech at the congress, forcefully stating that “we have firm will, full confidence
and sufficient capability to defeat any form of Taiwan independence secession plot.” According to
Taiwan expert Richard C. Bush, Xi's language was the toughest observed yet of any Chinese leader when
dealing with the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Taiwan. This impasse may
have hurt Tsai politically. Polling analysis from October 2017 indicates the percentage of Taiwanese who
believe she is performing well on China policy dropped from about 50 percent in 2016 to about 35
percent in 2017. Tsai's falling approval rating on cross-Strait relations may be seen as a positive
development for Beijing since past polls have consistently shown that most Taiwanese do not seek
conflict with China.
 2AC---AT: Invasion Turn

Taiwan arms sales INCREASES risk of war

Xiangwei 18 (Xiangwei is the post-editor in chief for the South China Morning Post), “Are The US and China Headed For War Over
Taiwan”, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2142674/are-us-and-china-headed-war-over-taiwan

Are the Chinese mainland and Taiwan headed down an inevitable path to war – one that is likely to see the United States join the fray? This
slow-burning question came to the fore again last week when the mainland launched live-fire drills in the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday amid
fiery rhetoric from Chinese state media. On Thursday morning, Chinese state media started to post online videos of helicopters and warships
firing at targets at sea but Taiwan dismissed the exercises as “routine”. This came after President Xi Jinping had presided over a massive naval
parade off Hainan island a week earlier, one that involved 48 warships including China’s sole operating aircraft carrier and more than 10,000
servicemen – the largest such exercise since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. PLA submarines, naval vessels and fighter jets
accompany China’s aircraft carrier Liaoning on exercises in the South China Sea. Photo: Xinhua PLA submarines, naval vessels and fighter jets
accompany China’s aircraft carrier Liaoning on exercises in the South China Sea. Photo: Xinhua Share: The
state media said Beijing
was sending a loud and clear warning to Taipei and Washington amid heightened tensions caused by
Taiwanese leaders’ open advocacy for independence and increased American support for the
Taiwanese government. Over the past few weeks, Chinese officials and state media have ratcheted up
the rhetoric against Taipei and Washington, the largest supplier of arms to the island. Trump’s trade war
with China is just his opening gambit SUBSCRIBE TO THIS WEEK IN ASIA Get updates direct to your inbox SUBMIT By registering for these
newsletters you agree to our T&C and Privacy Policy Referring to Thursday’s live-fire drills, Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to US, warned
in a lecture at Harvard University that China would try every possible means to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Earlier this
month, a spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office, said any outside forces that attempted to “play the Taiwan card” would find their efforts
“futile” and would hurt themselves if they went “over the line”, according to the official China Daily. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen speaks
on the telephone to Donald Trump. Photo: EPA Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen speaks on the telephone to Donald Trump. Photo: EPA Share:
The remark was clearly aimed at US President Donald Trump and his administration which in recent months has taken a number of significant
steps to warm ties with Taipei. As
Beijing and Washington are currently positioning themselves for a possible
trade war, Trump’s intention to play the Taiwan card again is even more dangerous because this
would further destabilise bilateral ties or even worse, could lead to a real war. A nasty US-China fight is
inevitable. But it needn’t be terminal True to Trump’s unconventional and unpredictable presidency, he first started to play the Taiwan card in
the transition to the White House when he took a congratulatory call from the Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, breaking a nearly 40-year-old
diplomatic protocol governing China-US ties. At that time, Trump made it clear his intention was to use Taiwan as a play to force more
concessions on trade from China. His suggestion then was overwhelmingly met with criticism and cynicism almost everywhere, even in Taiwan
where it raised concerns that the island could be used as a pawn and discarded easily. China
sees Taiwan as a province and
usually reacts strongly to any foreign country having official contacts with the Taiwanese government
or sale of arms to the island, particularly from the United States. Now one year later, Trump’s intention to play the
Taiwan card again signals a much broader agenda targeting China. Almost all the moderating voices in his administration have been forced out
and replaced by more hawkish officials including the soon-to-be secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the National Security Adviser John Bolton
– both of whom are known for tough stances against China and pro-Taiwan views. Tough on China: US national security adviser John Bolton.
Photo: Reuters Tough on China: US national security adviser John Bolton. Photo: Reuters Share: In recent months, his administration has
approved licences for American firms to sell Taiwan technology to build submarines and signed the Taiwan Travel Act to encourage visits
between American and Taiwanese officials. All these have invited protests from China. A major test will come in June when the American
Institute in Taiwan, the US de facto embassy, is slated to move into a new building. There has been growing speculation that Bolton or some
other senior US official will attend the ceremony. If that happens, Beijing will regard it as a major provocation. It
is interesting to note
that amid the war of words with Washington over trade, some elements in Beijing’s propaganda
machine have been using warlike language to give the impression that China will not back down from
the trade spat and will fight the US to the very end. That could well be a negotiation tactic, as trade
issues are negotiable after all. But from the Chinese perspective, the Taiwan issue is absolutely non-
negotiable. It is a clearly marked red line. The Taiwanese leaders, encouraged by the latest warming signs from Washington,
have started to openly advocate independence, which is a major taboo for Beijing and seen as breaking the status quo. Over the past 40 years,
Beijing and Taipei have tried to maintain the status quo in which both sides recognise the island as part of China, even while neither
government recognises the legitimacy of the other. Taiwan agrees not to broach independence, in return mainland China does not use force to
take over the island. Washington recognises this one-China principle but maintains close unofficial ties with Taiwan and provides the island with
arms under the Taiwan Relations Act – a constant source of friction with Beijing. Taiwanese Premier William Lai. Photo: EPA Taiwanese Premier
William Lai. Photo: EPA Share: This month, the Taiwanese premier William Lai publicly described himself as “a political worker for Taiwanese
independence”. Although this was not the first time he has said this, Lai’s latest declaration caused serious worries in Beijing in the context of
Washington’s warming ties with Taipei. The heightened tensions over the Taiwan Strait have come as Xi embarks on his second term as China’s
most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. Last month the national legislature repealed the term limits on the presidency, enabling Xi to rule as
long as he likes. With Xi trying to assert China’s power on the international stage, flexing China’s military muscle in the Taiwan Strait in the
name of pushing back against the independence movement is likely to bolster Xi’s support on the mainland. Chinese President Xi Jinping has
been trying to assert China's power on the international stage. Photo: AFP Chinese President Xi Jinping has been trying to assert China's power
on the international stage. Photo: AFP Share: China’s official line has always been that it will seek peaceful reunification with Taiwan but not
rule out using force to take it over. In the past, officials and state media have tended to emphasise the peaceful reunification part – more
recently they have highlighted the bit about using force. Moreover, China has never publicly stated a timetable for reunification with Taiwan
but some mainland analysts have started to preach the idea that reunification could take place by 2035 or 2050. As China beats its war drum,
who should hear its call? These assumptions stemmed from Xi’s landmark report at the Communist Party’s 19th congress in October when he
outlined a clearly defined timetable to realise what he called the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation – China would basically become a
modern country by 2035 and a world power by 2050. For an ambitious leader like Xi, reunification with Taiwan has to be an integral part of the
dream. So will the US join the fray if push comes to shove? Many people have mistakenly assumed the Taiwan Relations Act requires the US to
come to Taiwan’s defence. In fact, the law contains no explicit guarantee. Besides, there is a big question over whether the US would risk
In the short term, if the current trend continues with the US
waging a full-blown war with China over Taiwan.
determined to play the Taiwan card – which in turn helps embolden the pro-independence movement
in Taiwan – China will probably feel compelled to accelerate its military preparations and increase the
frequency of military shows of strength like the one last week. All this means that tensions over the
Taiwan Strait will get much worse unless Trump rethinks his plan to play the Taiwan card.

Arms sales to Taiwan undermine Taiwan’s own defense industrial base

Grady 19 John Grady, a former managing editor of Navy Times, retired as director of communications for the Association of the United
States Army. His reporting on national defense and national security has appeared on Breaking Defense, GovExec.com, NextGov.com,
DefenseOne.com, Government Executive and USNI News, https://news.usni.org/2019/06/12/experts-say-arms-sale-to-taiwan-answer-defense-
needs-but-spur-new-questions, Experts Say New Arms Sales to Taiwan answer defense needs but spur new questions

A pending sale of F-16 fighters, Abrams tanks, anti-armor and anti-aircraft missiles, to Taiwan drew rebukes from Beijing but also set
off alarms on the island about its ability retain talent and develop home-made defenses, one of its
leading security experts said Wednesday. I-Chung Lai, president of the Taiwan-based Prospect Foundation, said the large arms,
aircraft and ship sales of the 1980s and again in the 1990s inadvertently set off “a brain drain” from the
island and threatened its defense industrial base . “Our capabilities and talents started to filter away” to Korea, he said while
speaking at the Heritage Foundation. Shipbuilders and engineers started working for businesses and industries in Korea that were direct
competitors with Taiwan but also “filtered into civilian industries,” especially in technology where the island’s expertise is well-respected. “How
can we avoid these things happening again,” Lai asked? Asidefrom considering what such sales do to the Taiwanese
industrial base, another question is whether these the right weapons Taipei needs to defend itself from
an aggressive Beijing. Scott Harald, from RAND’s Asia-Pacific policy center, said the danger is Taiwan’s believing it needs a “one to one”
match with China in weapons and systems. Instead, Harald suggested the island needs “dynamic, agile, survivable,
lethal” forces, not necessarily airfields and ports that would be subject to long-range Chinese missile or air
strikes, to deter or defend against an all-out assault . Taiwan should consider truck-based anti-ship missile systems, air-
launched cruise missiles, mines, helicopters armed with anti-armor missiles to attack landing craft, fast attack missile boats “over big shiny
thing” that costs billions, Harald said. Taiwan also needs to decide what type of submarine is necessary; one built domestically or bought
overseas. Meanwhile, Taiwan needs to assess the current and future levels of military threats. China already operates its navy east of Taiwan
and routinely flies strike aircraft around the island. Taiwan must understand whether China could mount a cross-strait invasion and
provocations and incidents similar to the late 1970s confrontations between China and Vietnam. Taiwan also needs to understand Beijing’s
short-term goals beyond Taiwan and determine President’s Xi Jin-ping’s timeline for achieving reunification with the mainland, Harald and Lai
said. “Is the fight primarily in the heads of people?” of Taiwanese citizens, leaders of foreign nations and international organizations, Harald
asked. Szu-chien Hsu, Taiwan’s deputy minister for foreign affairs, said Beijing’s military intent is clear and it is “breaking through the First Island
Chain,” closest to mainland China to achieve its “very evident … global strategic ambitions” of being the leading superpower.
A strong Taiwan defense industrial base solves deterrence better
Bandow 15 (Doug, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and the author of
several books, including Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire; “Arm Taiwan, America. But Don’t Defend
It.” http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/arm-taiwan-america-dont-defend-it-14695?page=2, 12/21/15)

Taiwan matters much

Indeed, the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity has become more dangerous as China’s power has increased.
more to the PRC than America. Thus, as a Chinese general not so subtly argued, the United States won’t risk Los
Angeles for Taipei. Indeed, it would be madness for America to do so. It might seem equally foolish for China to risk ,
say, Shanghai to regain Taiwan. But it is far more plausible that the PRC might do so. Enabling Taiwan to defend itself is
the best way out of this conundrum. So long as the residents of Zhongnanhai value prosperity and stability, they have reason to
avoid costly conflict. No arms sales would enable Taipei to defeat a determined PRC in war . The former’s objective,
however, should be deterrence, not victory. “The idea is to complicate China’s scenarios, to make them pause, to get them to think twice
before they attack,” explained Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council. The higher the price any PRC
government would pay for attempting to coerce Taipei, the less likely it would try to do so. Continued patience would remain good sense.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be costs to the U.S.-China relationship as a result, but they are worth bearing. There’s likely diplomatic
turbulence. In the past military meetings have been suspended, though only temporarily. There could be economic retaliation, though the
threat seems overblown: defense companies are barred from supplying the PRC and sanctions against civilian sales would hurt the PRC as well.

Arms sales don’t solve – they’re ineffective and don’t deter chinese aggression –
causes china lashout
Hua 15 (Zhang, assistant research fellow at the Institute of Taiwan Studies, Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, Arms sales to Taiwan do not help the US, Global Times,
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/959549.shtml)

Washington has to accept it is becoming far less capable of containing China's rise. It may upset the government of the
Chinese mainland by making a fuss with Taiwan, but it won't have a real effect. Washington's primary intent in forging a military

relationship with Taiwan is to maintain military balance across the Taiwan Strait . However, the strategy
is stretched too thin. Given the mainland's swift and prominent ramp-up in military spending, a military balance can no longer be
stricken between the mainland and Taiwan, no matter how many advanced weapons the US sells to
Taiwan. The possibility of using Taiwan to suppress the mainland's growing leverage in its periphery is
vanishing. The mainland's economic aggregate is more than 20 times larger than Taiwan's, so the latter
has no chance to engage in a military race with the former. Selling arms to Taiwan doesn't mean
Washington would hold on to its promise to "come and rescue" Taiwan when the island is in trouble
with the mainland. It is not even a commitment to include Taiwan in its umbrella of protection . Even some
Taiwanese strategists have pointed out that Taiwan is too obsessed with the delusion that Washington will come all the way to defend Taiwan. Washington

also cunningly argues that the weaponry deal will bolster Taiwan's confidence when it needs to negotiate with the mainland in other

respects. In fact, in such talks, it is always the mainland that makes more room for Taiwan's wellbeing, not because

Taiwan has a strong military capability that is feared by the mainland , but because the mainland
regards Taiwan as family. Although the US, especially its arms enterprises and political brokers, could reap fat profits from such practices, these
companies and individuals might risk losing the second biggest market. The pros and cons are not hard to weigh. In fact, some companies have started to reflect on
the deal. Washington
seems to have gone on the offensive in the arms deal, but Beijing can find
opportunities to strike back. From the Diaoyu Islands to the South China Sea disputes, the US keeps stirring troubles against China in recent years
during the implementation of its "rebalancing to Asia" strategy. China could have resorted to countermeasures but is too prudent to take real action. On the
occasion of this arms deal, for which the US has neither moral nor legal ground, Beijing should take the chance to carry out down-to-earth countermeasures, such as
halting bilateral communications over military matters and sanctioning relevant US enterprises. It becomes increasingly obvious that playing the Taiwan card
is no longer an effective approach to countering China's rise . On the contrary, it makes Washington take bigger risks to
jeopardize a relationship with the Chinese mainland, which is clearly more important. The US government must have realized that it is
necessary to reduce the harm caused by arms sales . During President Barack Obama's administration, the US government slowed
down the frequency of arms sales to Taiwan. The last four years has seen just two arms sales. Besides, Washington knows the mainland's red line, and decided not
to fulfill Taiwan's request for sensitive weaponry such as submarines and F-16 C/D fighters. Given that Taiwan's strategic significance is diminishing, to abandon it or
not has raised years of debates in the US. High-level military and government officials and well-known academic experts have also expressed their concerns that
arms sales to Taiwan are not helping the US gain a competitive edge. In the short term, the US won't stop selling arms to Taiwan, let alone abandon it. But the
mainland's rise will eventually make the US realize that arms sales to Taiwan are not helping Washington.

China is substantially stronger than Taiwan and no amount of arms sales is going to
change that
Jianing 15- Yao, writer, America's arms sale to Taiwan won't change cross-strait strength landscape,
(http://eng.mod.gov.cn/Opinion/2015-12/18/content_4633208.htm)

The U.S. will sell 10 types of military equipment worth 1.83-billion U.S. dollar in total to Taiwan, including the
Perry-class frigates, announced the U.S. on the early morning of December 17, 2015. Chinese defense ministry and foreign
ministry voiced strong opposition immediately , and vowed to sanction American enterprises that sell weaponry to Taiwan.
The new arms deal came four years after the U.S. sold weapon to Taiwan last time in 2011. The arms sale this
time isn't on a large scale compared with previous deals, but its nature is as bad as ever. The mainland's military strength has
long surpassed that of the Taiwan military by a landslide. No matter how much American weaponry
Taiwan buys, it won't change the disproportional strength landscape across the strait. Already out of service
in the U.S., the Perry-class frigate is "out-dated" maritime equipment, so the new arms deal is more a tribute paid by Taiwan to
the U.S. in exchange for the latter's commitment to "protecting Taiwan" than an arms contract in the real sense. On
the one hand, the U.S. makes money by selling arms to Taiwan. On the other hand, it uses the arms sale to encourage Taiwan to uphold the
idea of consolidating its security with armed forces, which will cement the military stalemate across the strait and suppress those in Taiwan
who believe in ensuring Taiwan's long-term security through peaceful communication with the mainland. The U.S. is paving the way for
"Chinese fighting Chinese". Given Taiwan's limited finance, it's impossible for it to independently launch a
military confrontation against the mainland. The possibility of the U.S. waging an all-round war against
the mainland in order to "protect Taiwan" is an ever shakier trump card for Taiwan's "national defense". As the
mainland's military strength has developed steadily, the price of the U.S. engaging in the cross-trait
conflict is rising every year. The American military is losing its "sure win" against the Chinese People's Liberation
Army (PLA) in case a conflict broke out across the Taiwan Strait, and the most symbolic aircraft carriers of the U.S. Navy cannot approach the
strait during a war as analysts said they have to stay 2,000 km away from the Chinese coastline to keep themselves safe. In the past,
Taiwan's military strength was only slightly weaker than the mainland's and the U.S. was able to deploy
much stronger forces in the West Pacific than China, but this "balance" has been disrupted.

US arms sales to Taiwan hurt the US and Taiwan is too far behind the Chinese military
to use arms sales to catch up
Hua 15- Zhang, professor and former research associate at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Arms sales
to Taiwan do not help the US, (http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/959549.shtml)

Washington formally announced a $1.83 billion arms sale package to Taiwan on Wednesday. China slammed the
sale for interfering in its internal affairs and vowed to impose sanctions on relevant American companies. Chinese pundits see this
as new proof of Washington's desire to contain China by roiling cross-Straits relations . In fact, arms sales
to Taiwan have already had a negative impact on the US. Washington has to accept it is becoming far
less capable of containing China's rise. It may upset the government of the Chinese mainland by making a fuss with Taiwan, but it
won't have a real effect. Washington's primary intent in forging a military relationship with Taiwan is to maintain military balance across the
Taiwan Strait. However, the strategy is stretched too thin. Given the mainland's swift and prominent ramp-up in
military spending, a military balance can no longer be stricken between the mainland and Taiwan, no
matter how many advanced weapons the US sells to Taiwan. The possibility of using Taiwan to
suppress the mainland's growing leverage in its periphery is vanishing. The mainland's economic aggregate is more
than 20 times larger than Taiwan's, so the latter has no chance to engage in a military race with the former. Selling arms to Taiwan doesn't
mean Washington would hold on to its promise to "come and rescue" Taiwan when the island is in trouble with the mainland. It is not even a
commitment to include Taiwan in its umbrella of protection. Even some Taiwanese strategists have pointed out that Taiwan is too obsessed
with the delusion that Washington will come all the way to defend Taiwan. Washington also cunningly argues that the weaponry deal will
bolster Taiwan's confidence when it needs to negotiate with the mainland in other respects. In fact, in such talks, it is always the mainland that
makes more room for Taiwan's wellbeing, not because Taiwan has a strong military capability that is feared by the mainland, but because the
mainland regards Taiwan as family. Although the US, especially its arms enterprises and political brokers, could reap fat profits from such
practices, these companies and individuals might risk losing the second biggest market. The pros
and cons are not hard to weigh.
In fact, some companies have started to reflect on the deal. Washington seems to have gone on the offensive in the
arms deal, but Beijing can find opportunities to strike back. From the Diaoyu Islands to the South China Sea disputes, the
US keeps stirring troubles against China in recent years during the implementation of its "rebalancing to Asia" strategy. China could have
resorted to countermeasures but is too prudent to take real action. On
the occasion of this arms deal, for which the US has
neither moral nor legal ground, Beijing should take the chance to carry out down-to-earth
countermeasures, such as halting bilateral communications over military matters and sanctioning relevant US enterprises. It
becomes increasingly obvious that playing the Taiwan card is no longer an effective approach to
countering China's rise. On the contrary, it makes Washington take bigger risks to jeopardize a relationship with the Chinese mainland,
which is clearly more important. The US government must have realized that it is necessary to reduce the harm caused by arms sales. During
President Barack Obama's administration, the US government slowed down the frequency of arms sales to Taiwan. The last four years has seen
just two arms sales. Besides, Washington knows the mainland's red line, and decided not to fulfill Taiwan's request for sensitive weaponry such
as submarines and F-16 C/D fighters.
 2AC---AT: Appeasement Turn

China doesn’t need Taiwan for power projection

Glaser 15 - Charles L Glaser is a professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the
Department of Political Science at George Washington University. He is also a fellow in the Kissinger
Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (“A U.S.-China Grand Bargain?”
International Security, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Spring 2015), pp. 49–90, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00199
Taiwan’s geographic location creates another possible military danger by giving China the opportunity to deploy its forces further forward.90
For example, Chinese control of Taiwan would provide China’s navy more direct access to the open Pacific, which might increase China’s power
project capabilities.91 Chinese analysts identify the importance of Taiwan for enabling China to “break through” the barrier created by Japan,
including the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, and the Philippines.92 In a similar vein, Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, of the U.S. Naval War College,
argue: “Control of Taiwan... would allow the PLA to erect its own Great Wall at sea, giving Beijing some say over the exercise of foreign naval
and military power in nearby seas and skies. . . . Analysts view Taiwan as the one geographic asset that can grant Chinese forces direct access to
the Pacific. If the island is a guard tower in an offshore Great Wall, then its offensive value is unmatched.”93 Dissecting the strategic value of
Taiwan requires assessing how Chinese control would influence China’s ability to perform specific military missions. Available
analyses
provide little reason to worry that possession of Taiwan would significantly increase China’s military
reach or its ability to project power.94 Control of Taiwan would, however, enhance China’s A2/AD capabilities by increasing its
ability to send submarines into the Philippine Sea. Owen Coté explains that Taiwan plays an important role in enabling the United States “to
form effective acoustic barriers through which Chinese [diesel attack submarines/guided missile diesel submarines] must pass in transiting”
from the shallow waters along China’s coast into the deep water of the Philippine Sea.95 This access is valuable because the United States plans
to operate carrier battle groups in the Philippine Sea and Chinese diesel submarines would make these operations more difficult and riskier.
The impact of losing this anti submarine warfare barrier might not be large, however, because China
increasingly has a variety of other ways to threaten U.S. carrier battle groups and undermine their
effectiveness, such as antiship cruise missiles that can be launched from a diverse array of platforms (including guided missile
diesel submarines), systems designed to counter U.S. space and cyber capabilities, and an emerging antiship
ballistic missile capability.96 Nevertheless, U.S. carrier battle groups would experience some reduction in effectiveness.

Plan reduces the motive for Chinese power projection and the US can still effectively
respond to it
Glaser 15 - Charles L Glaser is a professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the
Department of Political Science at George Washington University. He is also a fellow in the Kissinger
Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (“A U.S.-China Grand Bargain?”
International Security, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Spring 2015), pp. 49–90, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00199

A second potential threat to U.S. security is that territorial accommodation could reduce U.S. military capabilities .
Although numerous analysts suggest that China’s control of Taiwan would have this effect, little sustained analysis of this issue is publically
available. One possibility is that U.S. accommodation would free up military forces and investments that China now commits
to coercing and if necessary attacking Taiwan, which would in turn enable China to shift resource to better challenge the U.S. ability to protect
the East Asian SLOCs and possibly beyond.82 According to this argument, because the Taiwan mission has absorbed the vast majority of the
Chinese army’s force modernization and organizational training,83 the resources made available for other missions would be large.84 This
danger is smaller than critics suggest, however. If China decides to fully pursue more ambitious missions, it
would have to make large investments that would likely dwarf the amount it is spending on Taiwan-
specific missions. Consequently, whether China eventually gains control of Taiwan is unlikely to be decisive
in determining China’s ability to invest in efforts to control the South China and East China Sea SLOCs , and
beyond. Related, it is likely that Chinese capabilities dedicated to Taiwan will eventually become so effective that Beijing will be able to
reallocate some of its future military investment to other missions.85 Moreover, ending
the U.S. commitment to Taiwan could
reduce China’s determination to pursue more challenging distant naval missions because the U nited States
will not interrupt these SLOCs, except possibly during a severe crisis or major war. Eliminating the possibility of war
over Taiwan would therefore greatly reduce Beijing’s incentives to make investments in these missions .
China could, however, pursue greatly expanded power projection capabilities for a variety of other
reasons,86 including worst-case planning that imagines the U nited States will interrupt its SLOCs under even
the most unlikely conditions, a Mahanian view of naval power that connects “commercial health with naval primacy,”87 or the belief that
superpower status requires power projection capabilities.88 Finally, one should not exaggerate the security risks of being unable to fully control
these SLOCs. The United States does not need to control the Strait of Malacca and the East Asian SLOCs to enable shipping to reach Japan
during a war with China. Instead, bypass routes could allow shipping to reach oil ports on Japan’s east coast.89 Also, the ability to deny China
use of these SLOCs would be sufficient to preserve the U.S. ability to coerce China.

The US can beat the Chinese navy regardless

Tang 16 Professor of Contemporary Chinese studies and Director of the China Policy Institute at the
University of Nottingham, UK (Steve, "The U.S. Military and American Commitment to Taiwan’s
Security," Asian Survey, Vol. 52, No. 4, University of California Press, Jstor)\\BPS

The first and foremost of the long-standing key assets for area denial in the inventory of the PLA Navy
remains its modernizing fleet of 59 attack submarines , to which new boats are still being added. The submarines have
increasingly posed a grave potential threat to the safety of U.S. carrier strike groups . Since 1995 the Chinese
submarine fleet has been upgraded by 28 modern vessels, including 12 Russian-made Kilo-class boats.31 The quality and capabilities
of the more recent indigenous submarines, such as the Song- and Yuan-class boats, have also improved dramatically.32 Indeed, a Song
submarine surfaced within five miles of the USS Kitty Hawk, inside its screen of escorts, in October 2006.33 This put the carrier within range of
anti-ship missiles and torpedoes. However, whether Chinese submarines can breach the three-dimensional anti-
submarine surveillance of a fully alert carrier strike group in combat conditions remains uncertain .34 In any
event, the increasing threat from the improving Chinese submarines is one that the U.S. Navy has
regularly taken into account in its planning . Thus, at this point the growing potential threat still cannot deliver
the deterrence that the PLA High Command may wish to achieve. The most significant capability enhancement in area
denial that the Chinese have been developing is a new anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) system based on the DF-21D or
CSS-5 land-based mobile missile, with a range of over 1,500 km .35 It is equipped with maneuverable re-entry vehicles (MaRVs)
capable of hitting moving ships at sea and has reportedly reached the testing stage.36 No other state has developed such a
capability. If it proves effective, it will be extremely difficult to defend carriers within its range. The
deployment of such a weapon system may require the U.S. to devote significant resources to counter it.
However, the efficacy of an operational ASBM system in deterrence remains doubtful. The vulnerability of
carrier battle groups may lead Washington to “pre-emptively destroy or disable missiles or supporting
assets” such as the satellites that guide the missiles, instead .37 It is unlikely that the PLA will succeed in
deterring the U.S. through this new weapon system. For example, firing a missile that deliberately misses
hitting a carrier battle group will probably escalate, not deter . More likely, U.S. forces will attack and
eliminate such a threat, whether it scores or not . Even though an operational Chinese ASBM capability will be taken very
seriously, the U.S. Navy has never shied from putting its capital ships in harm’s way if necessary. Furthermore,
alternative platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles can be deployed to perform some of the
functions now commonly carried out by carrier-based strike aircraft, should the deployment of carriers
become restricted. In any event, how effective the Chinese ASBM system will be in knocking a carrier out of action remains to be seen.
Should the U.S. Navy find itself fighting a war with the PLA, the prospect that America could lose a carrier or more has been taken into account,
similarly with the possibility of a major battle with the Soviet Navy during the Cold War. Any
idea that China, by crippling a
carrier or demonstrating that it can, will deter the U.S. armed forces from fulfilling orders to go to
Taiwan’s defense is based on a misreading of the ethos of the U.S. military establishment. On the contrary,
if a U.S. carrier should become a “mission kill” or be rendered operationally ineffective (even if not sunk), this
would have a huge psychological, perhaps galvanizing, impact on the Americans . The U.S. Navy has not
suffered such a loss since the end of World War Two . Such a blow, particularly if it resulted from a stealthy, preemptive
strike, is likely to have a “Pearl Harbor” or “September 11” effect on U.S. forces, spurring them to fight
back. The assumption that they would withdraw, as after the 1993 “Black Hawk Down”38 incident in Somalia, defies U.S.
military tradition. Whether the general public, and in particular the political establishment, in the U.S. will react in line with the military
establishment in a crisis over Taiwan will depend on the political reality at the time and cannot be predicted. But in a real crisis, “rally
round the flag,” persevere, and expect to win in the end have long been part of the American ethos and national experience; these
are likely to be the default reaction.

China doesn’t want regional hegemony — U.S. military presence is better for Chinese
security. They’re satisfied post-plan.
Glaser 11 — Charles L. Glaser, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of
the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George
Washington University, former Emmett Dedmon Professor of Public Policy and Acting Dean at the Harris
School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, former Strategic Analyst for the Joint Staff in the
Pentagon, holds a Ph.D. and a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University, 2011 (“Will China's Rise Lead to War? Why Realism Does Not Mean Pessimism,”
Foreign Affairs, Volume 90, Number 2, March/April, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-
Nexis)

Some realist pessimists argue that in order to be highly secure, China will find itself compelled to pursue
regional hegemony, fueling conflict along the way. However, China's size, power, location, and nuclear
arsenal will make it very challenging to attack successfully. China will not need to push the United States
out of its region in order to be secure, because a forward U.S. presence will not undermine China's core
deterrent capabilities. A major U.S. withdrawal, moreover, would not automatically yield Chinese
regional hegemony, because Japan and South Korea might then acquire stronger conventional military
capabilities and nuclear capabilities of their own, greatly reducing China's coercive potential. A Chinese
drive for regional hegemony, therefore, would be both unnecessary and infeasible.

The United States' forward military presence does enhance its power-projection capabilities, which
threaten China's ability to protect its sea-lanes and coerce Taiwan. But the U.S. alliance with Japan also
benefits China by enabling Japan to spend far less on defense . Although the United States' power far
exceeds Japan's, China has seen the alliance as adding to regional stability, because it fears Japan more
than the United States. As China grows more powerful, it may increasingly resent U.S. influence in
Northeast Asia. But unless U.S.-Chinese relations become severely strained, China is likely to accept a
continuing U.S. presence in the region, given the alternatives.

Control of Taiwan doesn’t matter for China’s A2/AD strategy.

Glaser 15 — Charles L. Glaser, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of
the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George
Washington University, Fellow in the Kissinger Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, former Emmett Dedmon Professor of Public Policy and Acting Dean at the Harris School of
Public Policy at the University of Chicago, former Strategic Analyst for the Joint Staff in the Pentagon,
holds a Ph.D. and a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University, 2015 (“A U.S.-China Grand Bargain? The Hard Choice between Military Competition and
Accommodation,” International Security, Volume 39, Number 4, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing
Institutions via MIT Press Journals)
Taiwan's geographic location creates another possible military danger by giving China the opportunity to deploy its forces further forward.90
For example, Chinese control of Taiwan would provide China's navy more direct access to the open Pacific, which might increase China's power
project capabilities.91 Chinese analysts identify the importance of Taiwan for enabling China to “break through” the barrier created by Japan,
including the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, and the Philippines.92 In a similar vein, Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, of the U.S. Naval War College,
argue: “Control of Taiwan … would allow the PLA to erect its own Great Wall at sea, giving Beijing some say over the exercise of foreign naval
and military power in nearby seas and skies. … Analysts view Taiwan as the one geographic asset that can grant Chinese forces direct access to
the Pacific. If the island is a guard tower in an offshore Great Wall, then its offensive value is unmatched.”93 Dissecting the strategic value of
Taiwan requires assessing how Chinese control would influence China's ability to perform specific military missions. Available analyses
provide little reason to worry that possession of Taiwan would significantly increase China's military
reach or its ability to project power.94 Control of Taiwan would, however, enhance China's A2/AD capabilities by increasing its
ability to send submarines into the Philippine Sea. Owen Coté explains that Taiwan plays an important role in enabling the
United States “to form effective acoustic barriers through which Chinese [diesel attack submarines/guided missile diesel
submarines] must pass in transiting” from the shallow waters along China's coast into the deep water of the Philippine
Sea.95 This access is valuable because the United States plans to operate carrier battle groups in the Philippine Sea and Chinese diesel
submarines would make these operations more difficult and riskier. The impact of losing this anti-submarine warfare
barrier might not be large, however, because China increasingly has a variety of other ways to threaten
U.S. carrier battle groups and undermine their effectiveness, such as antiship cruise missiles that can be
launched from a diverse array of platforms (including guided missile diesel submarines), systems designed to counter
U.S. space and cyber capabilities, and an emerging antiship ballistic missile capability.96 Nevertheless, U.S.
carrier battle groups would experience some reduction in effectiveness.

China is not a revisionist power

Carpenter 13 (Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies and former
Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, holds a Ph.D. in U.S. Diplomatic History from the
University of Texas, 2013 (“China as a Prickly, But Pragmatic, Revisionist Power,” Aspenia, January 17th,
Available Online at http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/china-prickly-pragmatic-revisionist-
power)
Greater assertiveness on the part of a rising power, combined with growing suspicions by the leaders of that country about the intentions of
the incumbent dominant power, is potentially an explosive mixture. But it is important for US and East Asian leaders to view China’s ambitions
and behavior in their appropriate context and respond accordingly. China
is not an aggressively revisionist power the way
that Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or even Imperial Japan were. Beijing’s goal is not to violently
overthrow the status quo and create a new international — or even regional — order in which it is the
undisputed hegemon. For one thing, China benefits far too much from the current, relatively peaceful
international system that has created unprecedented prosperity for the country. Chinese leaders do not
want to overturn the status quo; they merely seek to adjust some provisions to China’s advantage. In
that crucial sense, China is a pragmatic, not an aggressive or revolutionary, revisionist power. As a rising
great power, today’s China most closely resembles Wilhelmine Germany (or the United States) in the late
1800s and early 1900s. But the experience with Germany should offer cautionary lessons for both China and the countries that worry
about Beijing’s behavior. Britain, France and Europe’s other leading powers handled Germany’s rise about as
badly as could be imagined, culminating in the tragedy of World War I. But Germany was also to blame for
that outcome. Even when the substance of Berlin’s position on a particular issue was reasonable, the
way German leaders asserted that position was sometimes so prickly and abrasive , even threatening, that it
alarmed Germany’s neighbors. In dealing with China’s assertiveness, the U nited States and the governments of East
Asia must be sufficiently accommodating so that they do not foster a siege mentality in Beijing. The Xinhua
article is one indicator among many that such paranoia lurks not far beneath the surface . At the same time, Beijing must
exercise far greater patience and diplomatic finesse in pressing its territorial claims. And, especially in the case of the South China Sea, it must
scale back those claims to more reasonable levels. Dealing
with China’s geostrategic rise does not have to produce the
same kind of tragedy as did the rise of Imperial Germany. But avoiding that outcome will require mutual
restraint and a willingness by all parties involved to compromise.

Attempting to contain China is a greater risk of conflict – Taiwan’s the key point of
containment
Glaser 11 Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of the Institute for
Security and Conflict Studies at the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University
(Charles L., "Disengaging from Taiwan," Foreign Affairs, July/August 2011,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/east-asia/2011-07-01/disengaging-taiwan)\\BPS
Shyu-tu Lee's argument hinges on two key claims: that China does not feel threatened by the United States and that China has essentially
unlimited geopolitical aims. Both are quite unlikely. First, major
powers tend to see the military capabilities of their
peers as threatening, unless they share excellent political relations. Although China and the United States are not enemies,
they do not have confidence that each other's motives are benign. This is reflected in China's concern
about U.S. ballistic missile defense systems, the survivability of its nuclear force in the event of a war,
and the threat posed to its sea-based commerce and energy imports by U.S. naval forces -- which could
sever China's access to critical resources and render the country vulnerable to coercion during a crisis
over Taiwan. Second, although experts disagree on China's motives, the most common assessment is that China places
great value on Taiwan, some value on its ability to prevail in regional maritime disputes in the East China
and South China seas, and little value on gaining other territory. Given these judgments, U.S. policies that
simply seek to increase its ability to project power in the Pacific could needlessly spark tensions with
China, heightening the possibility of conflict . Of course, this forecast of China's goals could prove wrong. Consequently, the
United States must implement political concessions and military restraint with caution, maintaining its alliances with Japan and South Korea to
provide a successful counterbalance. Lastly, Lee's
argument about the increasing danger posed by China implies that
maintaining the U.S. commitment to Taiwan will be ever more costly and perilous. This bolsters the case
for a U.S. pullback.

US-China Relations are vital to deterrence credibility

Glaser 11 - Charles L Glaser is a professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the
Department of Political Science at George Washington University. He is also a fellow in the Kissinger
Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (“Will China's Rise Lead to War?”
Foreign Affairs, March/April, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2011-03-01/will-chinas-rise-
lead-war

Confidence in the U.S. deterrent is likely to be reinforced by relatively good relations between the United
States and China. Those who feared that the United States could not extend its deterrent to Western Europe believed that the Soviet Union
was a highly revisionist state bent on radically overturning the status quo and willing to run enormous risks in the process. There is virtually no
evidence suggesting that China has such ambitious goals, so extending the U.S. deterrent should be easier now than during the Cold War. And
even in the unlikely event that China evolved into such a dangerous state, deterrence would still be
possible, albeit more difficult. Some realist pessimists argue that in order to be highly secure, China will find itself compelled to pursue
regional hegemony, fueling conflict along the way. However, China's size, power, location, and nuclear arsenal will make it very challenging to
attack successfully. China will not need to push the United States out of its region in order to be secure, because a forward U.S. presence will
not undermine China's core deterrent capabilities. A major U.S. withdrawal, moreover, would not automatically yield Chinese regional
hegemony, because Japan and South Korea might then acquire stronger conventional military capabilities and nuclear capabilities of their own,
greatly reducing China's coercive potential. A Chinese drive for regional hegemony, therefore, would be both unnecessary and infeasible. The
United States' forward military presence does enhance its power-projection capabilities, which threaten China's ability to protect its sea-lanes
and coerce Taiwan. But the U.S. alliance with Japan also benefits China by enabling Japan to spend far less on
defense. Although the United States' power far exceeds Japan's, China has seen the alliance as adding to regional
stability, because it fears Japan more than the U nited States. As China grows more powerful, it may increasingly resent U.S.
influence in Northeast Asia. But unless U.S.-Chinese relations become severely strained, China is likely to accept a
continuing U.S. presence in the region, given the alternatives.
add-on
 2AC Securities Add-on

Directly defying Chinese demands on arms sales allows them to sabotage US interest
rates and economic growth

Friedberg 12 (Aaron Friedberg - Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs at Princeton University. <MKIM> “Bucking Beijing”. September/October 2012. DOA: 7/5/19.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2012-08-18/bucking-beijing)

China's massive bilateral trade surplus with the United States and Beijing's accumulation of dollar-
denominated assets are thus worrisome for reasons that transcend economics. In recent years, Chinese analysts and officials
have suggested that if Washington defied Beijing's wishes on various issues, including arms sales to Taiwan and
presidential visits with the Dalai Lama, China might begin selling off those assets, driving up U.S. interest rates and
slowing U.S. growth. The fact that such an action would probably do at least as much damage to the Chinese
economy does not guarantee that in the heat of a crisis, Beijing would never attempt it. There is also
no assurance that U.S. policymakers won't be swayed by Chinese threats , backing down when they should remain
firm. The bottom line is simple: if Washington wants to retain the greatest possible freedom of action, it cannot stay so deeply indebted to its
main geopolitical rival.

Arms sales encourage China to use debt holdings as financial weapons that inflate US
interest rates

Pentland 11 (William Pentland - Vice President for Regulatory Strategy and Special Projects at Genbright LLC. <MKIM> “China's Not-So-
Veiled Threats to Exploit U.S. Debt”. 8/16/11. DOA: 7/5/19. https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/08/16/chinas-not-so-veiled-
threats-to-exploit-u-s-debt/#61f57e086ef7)

Now is the time for China to use its "financial weapon" to teach the United States a lesson if it moves
forward with a plan to sale arms to Taiwan . In fact, China has never wanted to use its holdings of U.S. debt as a weapon. It is
the United States that is forcing it to do so . . . The U.S. Senate passed the debt ceiling bill on Aug. 2, and Obama signed it into
law. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Treasury obtained the authorization to issue 400 billion U.S. dollars in new
debt. Will China become the largest buyer of U.S. debt again? Despite knowing that major creditor countries, especially China, would
be the main buyers of its new debt, certain arrogant and disrespectful U.S. Congress members have totally ignored
China's core interests by pressuring the president to sell advanced jets and even an arms upgrade package to
Taiwan. U.S. treasuries will lose value if China stops or reduces its purchases of them on a large scale ,
which will also affect the value of China's U.S. treasury holdings. However, as the situation has gotten out of hand, allowing Washington
politicians to continue their game might lead to more losses . . . Stopping or massively reducing U.S. Treasury bond purchases will certainly
bring losses to China to a certain degree. China must try to reduce the loss and transfer the passive situation to an active one. China should
consider how to build a direct link between the U.S. Treasury bond purchase and U.S. domestic politics while adopting measures to gradually
adjust the structure of China's foreign exchange reserves. For example, China
can directly link the amount of U.S. treasury
holdings with U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and require international credit rating agencies to demote U.S.
treasuries to force the United States to raise interest rates . China can also launch limited trade sanctions
to the states of those U.S. Congress members who vigorously advocated arms sales to Taiwan to affect their
employment.
 2AC LIO Add-on

The extent to which China’s rise undermines the liberal order is not yet determined---
incentivizing peaceful participation upholds multilateral cooperation and stops the
spread of authoritarianism
Timothy Heath 18, Senior defense and international research analyst with the nonprofit, nonpartisan
RAND Corporation, 6/20/18, “Without Reform and Cooperation with China, the International System
Cannot Hold,” https://nationalinterest.org/feature/without-reform-cooperation-china-the-international-
system-26350?page=0%2C1

China’s belligerence in the South and East China Seas and its state-supported industrial policies and theft
of intellectual property are well cataloged. Increasingly, however, China’s challenge to the existing order is also
apparent in its efforts to shut down discussion of issues like Taiwan and Tibet —and to punish journalists, scholars,
or officials who violate these demands—around the world. Resisting the forcible extension of democracy is one thing.
Actively undermining free societies from the outside is a very different proposition—and one that could
place China far more at odds with the prevailing order than has previously been the case.

Given that the United States remains the essential leader of the international system, growing
Chinese willingness to contest
aspects of that order unavoidably weaken U.S. influence and exacerbate instability. If left unchecked,
China’s challenge could also result in the export of increasingly authoritarian values and shape an
international order in which Beijing sets the terms of every deal , takes whatever intellectual property or resources it
wants, and threatens those who resist with economic ruin and military force.

A revitalized international order thus requires the United States to compete more effectively with China to defend fundamental values and
norms—and a vibrant multilateral order can help in that process. The United States could strengthen its engagement with international
institutions and take action to protect its interests and those of its allies. The United States could continue to muster international backing for
the widely-supported norm of the peaceful resolution of disputes. America could also continue to press China to cease predatory economic
policies such as intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer.

But unavoidable U.S.-China competition for influence does not invalidate the possibility, and potential
value, of collaborating with Beijing on a shared international order. The global system is already
experiencing considerable stress, and finding ways to cooperate with China on shared concerns is
essential if the situation is not to worsen further. Working with China, the United States and its allies and partners
could help fashion a multilateral system that ultimately provides the United States with greater influence
and sets norms to which all countries could be judged , including China. Strong U.S. leadership, backed by military
strength and cooperation with its network of allies and partners, will remain essential to deterring China from considering dangerous acts of
aggression against its neighbors. But a resilient and responsive multilateral order can incentivize China to operate primarily within, as opposed
to outside, international institutions.

In the process, the United States could seek opportunities to involve itself in Chinese-led institutions and show flexibility in expanding China’s
role in institutions led by the United States and its allies. Chinese initiatives, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and
Road Initiative, could be viewed as opportunities for the United States to get involved and shape the evolution of related norms and
institutions. Similarly, Washington could seek ways to ensure China’s voice is fairly represented in relevant institutions founded by western
countries, such as the International Monetary Fund.

The simple fact is that without

at least tacit Chinese support, no rule-based international order can survive. It
is inevitable that there will have to be reforms to address Beijing’s concerns and to provide it with a
continued stake in the international order. The trick is to decide where compromise is acceptable for
U.S. interests and to draw clear lines around principles where it is not.
That prevents extinction from nuclear war, warming, and rogue tech development
Yuval Noah Harari 18, Professor of History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 9/26/18, “We need a
post-liberal order now,” The Economist, https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/09/26/we-
need-a-post-liberal-order-now

For several generations, the

world has been governed by what today we call “the global liberal order”. Behind these lofty words is
the idea that all humans share some core experiences, values and interests, and that no human group is
inherently superior to all others. Cooperation is therefore more sensible than conflict . All humans should work together to
protect their common values and advance their common interests. And the best way to foster such cooperation is to ease the movement of ideas, goods, money
and people across the globe.

Though the global liberal order has many faults and problems, it has proved superior to all alternatives . The liberal world of the
early 21st century is more prosperous, healthy and peaceful than ever before. For the first time in human history, starvation kills fewer people than obesity; plagues
kill fewer people than old age; and violence kills fewer people than accidents. When I was six months old I didn’t die in an epidemic, thanks to medicines discovered
by foreign scientists in distant lands. When I was three I didn’t starve to death, thanks to wheat grown by foreign farmers thousands of kilometers away. And when I
was eleven I wasn’t obliterated in a nuclear war, thanks to agreements signed by foreign leaders on the other side of the planet. If you think we should go back to
some pre-liberal golden age, please name the year in which humankind was in better shape than in the early 21st century. Was it 1918? 1718? 1218?

Nevertheless, people all over the world are now losing faith in the liberal order. Nationalist and religious
views that privilege one human group over all others are back in vogue. Governments are increasingly restricting the flow of ideas, goods, money and
people. Walls are popping up everywhere, both on the ground and in cyberspace. Immigration is out, tariffs are in.

If the liberal order is collapsing, what new kind of global order might replace it? So far, those who
challenge the liberal order do so mainly on a national level. They have many ideas about how to advance the interests of their particular country, but
they don’t have a viable vision for how the world as a whole should function . For example, Russian nationalism can be a
reasonable guide for running the affairs of Russia, but Russian nationalism has no plan for the rest of humanity. Unless, of course, nationalism morphs into
imperialism, and calls for one nation to conquer and rule the entire world. A century ago, several nationalist movements indeed harboured such imperialist
fantasies. Today’s nationalists, whether in Russia, Turkey, Italy or China, so far refrain from advocating global conquest.

In place of violently establishing a global empire, some nationalists such as Steve Bannon, Viktor Orban, the Northern League in Italy and the British
Brexiteers dream about a peaceful “Nationalist International”. They argue that all nations today face the same enemies. The bogeymen of globalism,
multiculturalism and immigration are threatening to destroy the traditions and identities of all nations. Therefore nationalists across the world should make
common cause in opposing these global forces. Hungarians, Italians, Turks and Israelis should build walls, erect fences and slow down the movement of people,
goods, money and ideas.

The world will then be divided into distinct nation-states, each with its own sacred identity and traditions. Based on mutual respect for
these differing identities, all nation-states could cooperate and trade peacefully with one another. Hungary will be Hungarian, Turkey will be Turkish, Israel will be
Israeli, and everyone will know who they are and what is their proper place in the world. It will be a world without immigration, without universal values, without
multiculturalism, and without a global elite—but with peaceful international relations and some trade. In a word, the “Nationalist International”
envisions the world as a network of walled-but-friendly fortresses .
Many people would think this is quite a reasonable vision. Why isn’t it a viable alternative to the liberal order? Two things should be noted about it. First, it is still a
comparatively liberal vision. It assumes that no human group is superior to all others, that no nation should dominate its peers, and that international cooperation is
better than conflict. In fact, liberalism and nationalism were originally closely aligned with one another. The 19th century liberal nationalists, such as Giuseppe
Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini in Italy, and Adam Mickiewicz in Poland, dreamt about precisely such an international liberal order of peacefully-coexisting nations.

The second thing to note about this

vision of friendly fortresses is that it has been tried—and it failed spectacularly. All
attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have so far resulted in war and genocide. When the heirs of
Garibaldi, Mazzini and Mickiewicz managed to overthrow the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, it proved impossible to find a clear line dividing Italians from Slovenes
or Poles from Ukrainians.

This had set the stage for the second world war. The key problem with the network of fortresses is that each national fortress wants a bit more land, security and
prosperity for itself at the expense of the neighbors, and without the help of universal values and global organisations, rival fortresses cannot agree on any common
rules. Walled fortresses are seldom friendly.
But if you happen to live inside a particularly strong fortress, such as America or Russia, why should you care? Some nationalists indeed adopt a more extreme
isolationist position. They don’t believe in either a global empire or in a global network of fortresses. Instead, they
deny the necessity of any
global order whatsoever. “Our fortress should just raise the drawbridges,” they say, “and the rest of the world can go to hell. We should refuse entry
to foreign people, foreign ideas and foreign goods, and as long as our walls are stout and the guards are loyal, who cares what happens to the foreigners?”

Such extreme isolationism, however, is completely divorced from economic realities. Without a global trade network, all existing national economies will collapse—
including that of North Korea. Many countries will not be able even to feed themselves without imports, and prices of almost all products will skyrocket. The made-
in-China shirt I am wearing cost me about $5. If it had been produced by Israeli workers from Israeli-grown cotton using Israeli-made machines powered by non-
existing Israeli oil, it may well have cost ten times as much. Nationalist leaders from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin may therefore heap abuse on the global trade
network, but none thinks seriously of taking their country completely out of that network. And we cannot have a global trade network without some global order
that sets the rules of the game.

Even more importantly, whether people like it or not, humankind today faces three common
problems that make a mockery of
all national borders, and that can only be solved through global cooperation. These are nuclear war,
climate change and technological disruption. You cannot build a wall against nuclear winter or against
global warming, and no nation can regulate artificial intelligence (AI) or bioengineering single-handedly. It won’t be
enough if only the European Union forbids producing killer robots or only America bans genetically-engineering human babies. Due to the immense potential of
such disruptive technologies, if even one country decides to pursue these high-risk high-gain paths, other countries will be forced to follow its dangerous lead for
fear of being left behind.

An AI arms race or a biotechnological arms race almost guarantees the worst outcome. Whoever wins the
arms race, the loser will likely be humanity itself . For in an arms race, all regulations will collapse. Consider, for example,
conducting genetic-engineering experiments on human babies. Every country will say: “We don’t want to conduct such experiments—we are the good guys. But
how do we know our rivals are not doing it? We cannot afford to remain behind. So we must do it before them.”

Similarly, consider
developing autonomous-weapon systems, that can decide for themselves whether to shoot and kill people. Again,
every country will say: “This is a very dangerous technology, and it should be regulated carefully. But we don’t trust our
rivals to regulate it, so we must develop it first ”.

The only thing that can prevent such destructive arms races is greater trust between countries. This is not
an impossible mission. If today the Germans promise the French: “Trust us, we aren’t developing killer robots in a secret laboratory under the Bavarian
Alps,” the French are likely to believe the Germans, despite the terrible history of these two countries. We need to build such trust globally . We
need to reach a point when Americans and Chinese can trust one another like the French and Germans.

Similarly, we need to create a global safety-net to protect humans against the economic shocks that AI is likely to cause. Automation will create immense new
wealth in high-tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, while the worst effects will be felt in developing countries whose economies depend on cheap manual labor. There
will be more jobs to software engineers in California, but fewer jobs to Mexican factory workers and truck drivers. We now have a global economy, but politics is still
very national. Unless
we find solutions on a global level to the disruptions caused by AI, entire countries
might collapse, and the resulting chaos, violence and waves of immigration will destabilise the entire world.
This is the proper perspective to look at recent developments such as Brexit. In itself, Brexit isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But is this what Britain and the EU should be
dealing with right now? How does Brexit help prevent nuclear war? How does Brexit help prevent climate change? How does Brexit help regulate artificial
intelligence and bioengineering? Instead of helping, Brexit makes it harder to solve all of these problems. Every minute that Britain and the EU spend on Brexit is
one less minute they spend on preventing climate change and on regulating AI.

In order to survive and flourish in the 21st century, humankind needs effective global cooperation, and so far the
only viable blueprint for such cooperation is offered by liberalism. Nevertheless, governments all over
the world are undermining the foundations of the liberal order , and the world is turning into a network of fortresses. The
first to feel the impact are the weakest members of humanity , who find themselves without any fortress willing to protect them:
refugees, illegal migrants, persecuted minorities. But if the walls keep rising , eventually the whole of humankind will feel the

squeeze.
Global spread of authoritarian nationalism causes nuclear war
Eric Orts 18, the Guardsmark Professor at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 6/27/18,
“Foreign Affairs: Six Future Scenarios (and a Seventh),” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/foreign-affairs-
six-future-scenarios-seventh-eric-orts

7. Fascist Nationalism. There

is another possible future that the Foreign Affairs scenarios do not contemplate, and it’s a dark world
in which Trump, Putin, Xi, Erdogan, and others construct regimes that are authoritarian and nationalist.
Fascism is possible in the United States and elsewhere if big business can be seduced by promises of riches in return for the institutional keys to
democracy. Perhaps Foreign Affairs editors are right to leave this dark world out, for it would
be very dark: nationalist wars
with risks of escalation into global nuclear conflict, further digital militarization (even Terminator-style
scenarios of smart military robots), and unchecked climate disasters .

The global challenges are quite large – and the six pieces do an outstanding job of presenting them. One must remain
optimistic and engaged, hopeful that we can overcome the serious dangers of tribalism, nationalism, and new
fascism. These "isms” of our time stand in the way of solving some of our biggest global problems, such as the
risks of thermonuclear war and global climate catastrophe.
 2AC – Trade War
Trade deal is impossible without concessions on Taiwan – it’s a key territorial issue
Kucik 18 Jeffrey Kucik, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Arizona US-China trade war
truce: 2 reasons why it’s unlikely to last December 3, 2018 6.34am EST https://theconversation.com/us-
china-trade-war-truce-2-reasons-why-its-unlikely-to-last-108040

Ultimately, a meaningful, lasting deal is unlikely in the 90-day window. Quite apart from trade deficits or
jobs, the trade war has grown to represent a deeper geopolitical rivalry . If Trump wants a win from this
battle, he’ll need to understand that Xi won’t give in easily. And China’s leader will likely expect
compromise on complex territorial issues like Taiwan or the South China Sea before the
ceasefire will begin to look like a full-fledged peace accord.

With the two leaders’ approach to the world looking increasingly different, it’s likely that the G-20 truce
will merely have paused the trade war – not stopped it.

Taiwan is the root cause of US-Sino trade tensions

Al Jazeera 7/13 Al Jazeera, 7-13-2019, "China vows sanctions on US firms over Taiwan arms sale,",
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/china-vows-sanctions-firms-taiwan-arms-sale-
190712133310269.html Lowell-SB

US companies involved in a potential arms sale worth $2.2bn to self-ruled Taiwan will face sanctions,
China said, warning Washington "not to play with fire".
Taiwan on Saturday defended the weapons purchase saying it will strengthen Taiwan's self-defence in the face of a growing military threat from
China.

"The national army will continue to strengthen its key defence forces, ensure national security, protect its homeland, and ensure that the fruits
of freedom and democracy won't be attacked," the defence ministry said in a statement.

The planned weapons sale, the first transfer of big-ticket US military gear to democratically governed Taiwan in decades, came as ties between
Washington and Beijing are already strained by a trade war.

"The US arms sale to Taiwan has severely violated the basic norms of international law and
international relations," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said in a statement on
Friday.

"In order to safeguard national interests, China will impose sanctions on US enterprises participating
in this sale of weapons to Taiwan," he said.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi, during a visit to Hungary, asked the US to "recognise the gravity of the Taiwan question".

China, which views Taiwan as part of its territory and has vowed to one day seize it, bristles at any
country that lends the island state any diplomatic support or legitimacy.

Even though Taiwan, which split from China following a civil war in 1949, doesn't have diplomatic ties
with the US, Washington provides Taipei with military and other support. Beijing regards this as
interference in its internal affairs.
Trade war collapses the global economy
Jones 19 Marc Jones, 5-20-2019, "Full-blown trade war will push world toward recession," U.S.,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-recession/full-blown-trade-war-will-push-world-
toward-recession-morgan-stanley-idUSKCN1SQ1R4 Lowell-SB
LONDON (Reuters) - A collapse of U.S.-China trade talks and hike in tariffs on Chinese goods would push the world economy toward recession
and see the Federal Reserve cut U.S. interest rates back to zero within a year, analysts at Morgan Stanley said on Monday.

A worker cycles past containers outside a logistics center near Tianjin Port, in northern China, May 16, 2019. REUTERS/Jason Lee

While a temporary escalation of trade tensions could be navigated without much damage at all, a lasting breakdown would inflict serious pain.

“If talks stall, no deal is agreed upon and the U.S. imposes 25% tariffs on the remaining circa $300 billion
of imports from China, we see the global economy heading towards recession,” the bank’s analysts said
in a note.

In response, the Fed would cut rates all the way back to zero by spring 2020 while China would scale up
its fiscal stimulus to 3.5% of GDP (equivalent to around $500 billion) and its broad credit growth target
to 14-15% a year, they added.
“But, a reactive policy response and the usual lags of policy transmission would mean that we might not be able to avert the tightening of
financial conditions and a full-blown global recession.”

A global recession is defined by growth dipping below the 2.5% a year threshold.

In a middle scenario where 25% tariffs on $200 billion of U.S. imports from China stay in place for 3-4
months, global growth could slow around 50 basis points to 2.7% a year.
They predicted the Fed would cut rates by 50 basis points to cushion the blow while Beijing would up its total fiscal expansion to 2.25% of GDP,
or about $320 billion.

Morgan Stanley’s analyst also warned investors could be underestimating the impact of trade tensions in a number of ways.

Firstly, the impact on the U.S. corporate sector would be more widespread as China could put up non-tariff barriers such as restriction of
purchases.

Given the global growth slowdown that would follow, profits from firms’ international operations would
be hit and companies would not be able to fully pass through the tariff increases to consumers.

The indirect impact would be “non-linear” too, with a sharp tightening of financial conditions and policy
uncertainty hitting firms’ confidence to the extent that they freeze or cutback on capital expenditure.
“Our base case is that the escalation is temporary, but we would readily admit that the uncertainty is high with regard to how trade talks could
evolve.”

“The impact on global growth is non-linear – the risks are firmly skewed to the downside and the window for resolution is narrowing.”

Econ decline causes global wars

Liu 18 Qian Liu, China-based economist. “From economic crisis to World War III.” Project Syndicate.
11/8/2018. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-crisis-military-conflict-or-
structural-reform-by-qian-liu-2018-11

The next economic crisis is closer than you think. But what you should really worry about is what comes
after: in the current social, political, and technological landscape , a prolonged economic crisis, combined
with rising income inequality, could well escalate into a major global military conflict.
The 2008-09 global financial crisis almost bankrupted governments and caused systemic collapse.
Policymakers managed to pull the global economy back from the brink, using massive monetary
stimulus, including quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates.
But monetary stimulus is like an adrenaline shot to jump-start an arrested heart; it can revive the patient, but it does nothing to cure the disease. Treating a sick economy requires structural reforms, which can cover everything
from financial and labour markets to tax systems, fertility patterns, and education policies.

Policymakers have utterly failed to pursue such reforms, despite promising to do so. Instead, they have remained preoccupied with politics. From Italy to Germany, forming and sustaining governments now seems to take more
time than actual governing. Greece, for example, has relied on money from international creditors to keep its head (barely) above water, rather than genuinely reforming its pension system or improving its business environment.

The lack of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented excess liquidity that central banks injected into their economies was not allocated to its most efficient uses. Instead, it raised global asset prices to levels even higher
than those prevailing before 2008.

In the United States, housing prices are now 8% higher than they were at the peak of the property bubble in 2006, according to the property website Zillow. The price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which measures whether stock-
market prices are within a reasonable range, is now higher than it was both in 2008 and at the start of the Great Depression in 1929.

As monetary tightening reveals the vulnerabilities in the real economy, the collapse of asset-price bubbles will trigger another economic crisis – one that could be even more severe than the last, because we have built up a
tolerance to our strongest macroeconomic medications. A decade of regular adrenaline shots, in the form of ultra-low interest rates and unconventional monetary policies, has severely depleted their power to stabilise and
stimulate the economy.

If history is any guide, the consequences of this mistake could extend far beyond the economy.
According to Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman, prolonged periods of economic distress have been
characterised also by public antipathy toward minority groups or foreign countries –
attitudes that can help to fuel unrest, terrorism, or even war.

For example, during the Great Depression, US President Herbert Hoover signed the 1930 Smoot-Hawley
Tariff Act, intended to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition. In the
subsequent five years, global trade shrank by two-thirds. Within a decade, World War II had begun.

To be sure, WWII, like World War I, was caused by a multitude of factors; there is no standard path to
war. But there is reason to believe that high levels of inequality can play a significant role in stoking
conflict.

According to research by the economist Thomas Piketty, a spike in income inequality is often followed
by a great crisis. Income inequality then declines for a while, before rising again, until a new peak – and
a new disaster. Though causality has yet to be proven, given the limited number of data points, this
correlation should not be taken lightly, especially with wealth and income inequality at historically high
levels.

This is all the more worrying in view of the numerous other factors stoking social unrest and diplomatic
tension, including technological disruption, a record-breaking migration crisis, anxiety over globalisation,
political polarisation, and rising nationalism. All are symptoms of failed policies that could turn out to be
trigger points for a future crisis.

Voters have good reason to be frustrated, but the emotionally appealing populists to whom they are
increasingly giving their support are offering ill-advised solutions that will only make matters worse. For
example, despite the world’s unprecedented interconnectedness, multilateralism is increasingly being
eschewed, as countries – most notably, Donald J. Trump’s US – pursue unilateral, isolationist policies.
Meanwhile, proxy wars are raging in Syria and Yemen.

Against this background, we must take seriously the possibility that the next economic crisis could lead
to a large-scale military confrontation. By the logic of the political scientist Samuel
Huntington, considering such a scenario could help us avoid it because it would force us to take action.
In this case, the key will be for policymakers to pursue the structural reforms that they have long
promised while replacing finger-pointing and antagonism with a sensible and respectful global dialogue.
The alternative may well be global conflagration.
 2AC – AI
Preventing an arms race is contingent on US-China relations – Taiwan concession locks
in relations
Thompson and Bremmer 18 NICHOLAS THOMPSON AND IAN BREMMER, Wired, 10-23-2018 “The
AI Cold War that Threatens us All”, https://www.wired.com/story/ai-cold-war-china-could-doom-us-all/
Lowell-SB
In the original Cold War, two ideological foes created rival geopolitical blocs that were effectively non-interoperable. The US was boxed out of
the Soviet bloc, and vice versa. The same could easily happen again, to disastrous effect. A new cold war that gradually isolates the Chinese and
American tech sectors from each other would starve the US of much of the fuel it now relies on for innovation: American companies depend
heavily on the Chinese market for their profits and for engineering and software talent. At the same time, it could actually create the kinds of
dangers that hawks warn about now: It would increase the risk that one side could surprise the other with a decisive strategic breakthrough in
AI or quantum computing.

Right now, maintaining a degree of openness with China is the best defense against the growth of a
techno-authoritarian bloc. That’s not the way American leaders are headed, though.
A little over six months after Donald Trump’s inauguration—and his invocation of “American carnage”—the administration launched a sweeping
investigation into China’s trade practices and alleged theft of US technology via cyberspace. That investigation has mushroomed into a steadily
escalating trade war, with the US launching tariffs on billions of dollars of Chinese goods and new investment and export restrictions on
technologies that China considers key to AI and to its advanced manufacturing ambitions.

For US security hawks, the prospect that China might dominate both 5G and AI is a nightmare
scenario.

The confrontation is about much more than trade. The Trump administration has made it official US
policy to protect the “national security innovation base”—White House shorthand for America’s
leading technology and talent—from China and other foreign economic predators. In January, Axios
published a leaked White House presentation that recommended the US work with its allies to build a
5G network that excludes China, to prevent Beijing from grabbing “the commanding heights of the
information domain.” The presentation likened the 21st-century struggle for data dominance to the
WWII-era race to construct an atom bomb. Then in April, the US Commerce Department hit ZTE, a
leading Chinese telecommunications equipment firm that was gearing up to work on China’s 5G
network, with a seven-year ban on doing business with US suppliers; the department said ZTE had
violated the terms of a sanctions settlement. (The US later lifted the ban.)

For US security hawks, the prospect that China might dominate both 5G and AI is a nightmare scenario.
At the same time, Washington’s escalating pushback against China’s tech ambitions has made Xi even
more determined to wean his country off Western technology.

This is a very different philosophy from the one that has guided the technology sector for 30 years,
which has favored deeply enmeshed hardware and software supply chains. Shortly before Trump’s
inauguration, Jack Ma, the chair of Alibaba, pledged to create a million jobs in the United States. By
September 2018, he was forced to admit that the offer was off the table, another casualty in the
growing list of companies and projects that are now unthinkable.

Global work in AI has long taken place in three spheres: research departments, corporations, and the
military. The first sphere has always been marked by openness and cooperation; to a lesser extent, so
has the second. Academics freely share their work. Microsoft has trained many of China’s best AI researchers and helped
nurture many promising AI startups, and Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent employ US engineers at their research hubs in Silicon Valley and Seattle.
An AI-driven breakthrough in Shanghai—say, in diagnosing disease through more accurate scans of medical images—can save lives in Shawnee.
But national security concerns have a way of overriding commercial considerations. For now, the political momentum appears to be driving the
two countries’ tech sectors apart to such a degree that even collaboration between researchers and corporations could be stifled. The schism
could well define how the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism plays out.

IMAGINE IT’S 2022: America’s confrontational economic policies have continued, and China has refused
to yield. Huawei and ZTE have been banned from the networks of the US and key Western allies.
Through investment and theft, Beijing has reduced its reliance on US semiconductors. Rival tech
superpowers have failed to develop common standards. US and Chinese academics increasingly deposit
their cutting-edge AI research in government safes instead of sharing it at international conferences.
Other countries—like France and Russia—have tried to build homegrown technology industries
centered on AI, but they lag far behind.

The world’s nations can commit to American technology: buying Apple phones, using Google search,
driving Teslas, and managing a fleet of personal robots made by a startup in Seattle. Or they can commit
to China: using the equivalents built by Alibaba and Tencent, connecting through the 5G network
constructed by Huawei and ZTE, and driving autonomous cars built by Baidu. The choice is a fraught one.
If you are a poor country that lacks the capacity to build your own data network, you’re going to feel
loyalty to whoever helps lay the pipes at low cost. It will all seem uncomfortably close to the arms and
security pacts that defined the Cold War.
And we may be seeing the first evidence of this. In May 2018, about six months after Zimbabwe finally got rid of the despot Robert Mugabe, the
new government announced that it was partnering with a Chinese company called CloudWalk to build an AI and facial-recognition system.
Zimbabwe gets to expand its surveillance state. China gets money, influence, and data. In July, nearly 700 dignitaries from China and Pakistan
gathered in Islamabad to celebrate the completion of the Pak-China Optical Fibre Cable, a 500-mile-long data line connecting the two countries
through the Karakoram Mountains, built by Huawei and financed with a loan from China’s Export-Import Bank. Documents obtained by
Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper revealed a future plan for high-speed fiber to help wire up cities across Pakistan with surveillance cameras and
vehicle-monitoring systems, part of a “Safe Cities” initiative launched in 2016 with help from Huawei and other Chinese firms. China has
effectively constructed its own Marshall Plan, one that may, in some cases, build surveillance states instead of democracies.

It’s not hard to see the appeal for much of the world of hitching their future to China. Today, as the West grapples with stagnant wage growth
and declining trust in core institutions, more Chinese people live in cities, work in middle-class jobs, drive cars, and take vacations than ever
before. China’s plans for a tech-driven, privacy-invading social credit system may sound dystopian to Western ears, but it hasn’t raised much
protest there. In a recent survey by the public relations consultancy Edelman, 84 percent of Chinese respondents said they had trust in their
government. In the US, only a third of people felt that way.

For the past century, democracies have proven more resilient and successful than dictatorships, even if democracies have made stupid
decisions along the way.

No one can be certain what happens next. In the US, in the wake of controversies surrounding the 2016 election and user privacy, a growing
number of Republicans and Democrats want to regulate America’s tech giants and rein them in. At the same time, China has stiffened its
resolve to become an AI superpower and export its techno-authoritarian revolution—which means the US has a vital national interest in
ensuring that its tech firms remain world leaders. For now, there is nothing close to a serious debate about how to address this dilemma.

As for China, it remains unclear how much digital intrusion people there will tolerate in the name of efficiency and social cohesion—to say
nothing of people in other countries that are tempted by Beijing’s model. Regimes that ask people to trade freedom for stability tend to invite
dissent. And Chinese growth is slowing. For the past century, democracies have proven more resilient and successful than dictatorships, even if
democracies, particularly in an age of algorithms, have made some stupid decisions along the way.

It is at least conceivable that Trump’s aggressive policies could, counterintuitively, lead to a rapprochement with Beijing. If Trump threatens to
take something off the table that China truly cannot afford to lose, that could pressure Beijing to dial back its global tech ambitions and open its
domestic market to US firms. But there is another way to influence China, one more likely to succeed: The US could try to wrap Beijing in a
technology embrace. Work with China to develop rules and norms for the development of AI. Establish international standards to ensure that
the algorithms governing people’s lives and livelihoods are transparent and accountable. Both countries could, as Tim Hwang suggests, commit
to developing more shared, open databases for researchers.
But for now, at least, conflicting goals, mutual suspicion, and a growing conviction that AI and other
advanced technologies are a winner-take-all game are pushing the two countries’ tech sectors further
apart. A permanent cleavage will come at a steep cost and will only give techno-authoritarianism more
room to grow.

Relations key to prevent AI prolif – otherwise causes extinction

Docherty 16 Bonnie Docherty senior researcher in the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch and
senior clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), 12-9-2016,
"Making the Case," Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/12/09/making-
case/dangers-killer-robots-and-need-preemptive-ban Lowell-SB

Critics of a new treaty on fully autonomous weapons often assert that “existing principles of
international law are sufficient to circumscribe the use of these weapons.”[114] They argue that any
problematic use of fully autonomous weapons would already be unlawful because it would violate
current international humanitarian law. According to two authors, “The question for the legal
community [would be] whether autonomous weapon systems comply with the legal norms that States
have put in place.”[115] Recognizing that the weapons raise new concerns, another author notes that
“as cases and mistakes arise, the lawyers and injured parties will have to creatively navigate the network
of legal mechanisms [available in international law],” but he too concludes that a new legal instrument
would be unnecessary.[116] Existing international humanitarian law, however, was not intended to
and cannot adequately address the issues raised by this revolutionary type of weapon. Therefore, it
should be supplemented with a new treaty establishing a ban.

A new international treaty would clarify states’ obligations and make explicit the requirements for
compliance. It would minimize questions about legality by standardizing rules across countries and
reducing the need for case-by-case determinations. Greater legal clarity would lead to more effective
enforcement because countries would better understand the rules. A ban convention would make the
illegality of fully autonomous weapons clear even for countries that do not conduct legal reviews of new
or modified weapons (see Contention #10). Finally, many states that did not join the new treaty would
still be apt to abide by its ban because of the stigma associated with the weapons.

A treaty dedicated to fully autonomous weapons could also address aspects of proliferation not covered
under traditional international humanitarian law, which focuses on the use of weapons in war. In
particular, such an instrument could prohibit development and production. Eliminating these activities
would prevent the spread of fully autonomous weapons, including to states or non-state actors with
little regard for international humanitarian law or limited ability to enforce compliance. In addition, it
would help avert an arms race by stopping development before it went too far (see Contention #8).

Finally, new law could address concerns about an accountability gap (see Contention #3). A treaty that
banned fully autonomous weapons under any circumstances could require that anyone violating that
rule be held responsible for the weapon’s actions.

While international humanitarian law already sets limits on problematic weapons and their use,
responsible governments have in the past found it necessary to supplement existing legal frameworks
for weapons that by their nature pose significant humanitarian threats. Treaties dedicated to specific
weapons types exist for cluster munitions, antipersonnel mines, blinding lasers, chemical weapons, and
biological weapons. Fully autonomous weapons have the potential to raise a comparable or even higher
level of humanitarian concern and thus should be the subject of similar supplementary international
law.
 *Manufacturing Turn
China is going to sanction manufacturers over Taiwan
Chesson 10 Roy David Chesson, Postgraduate School Thesis for the Naal Postgraduate School. How
China could affect the future of U.S. defense corporations December 2010 Thesis Co-Advisors: Alice L.
Miller & Robert Looney https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a536529.pdf

While opportunities do exist from internationalization, so does risk. The continued operations in foreign
countries create new pressures and difficulties for these corporations.93 It is not that they are just
American companies, but that their operations are tied to the political ramifications of being a defense
corporation and a national asset to their host nation. Therefore, the continual operation of these
corporations in multiple nations raises the likelihood that political
confrontation between the
foreign nations and the corporation may occur.94 The response from the PRC over the
sales to Taiwan highlights that exact problem.
Considering that all the defense corporations from the Taiwan arms sale are multinational in their
operations and have civilian sectors that extend the globe, China has an ability to sanction
portions of the exposed civilian sectors of the defense corporations.95 Unlike the defense
sectors, civilian sectors look at foreign areas as a new market in which to gain new customers.96
Therefore, to be able to understand the effectiveness of sanctions against the civilian sectors, it is
important to register how much these defense corporations rely on their civilian sectors and how much
of a role China plays in the calculus of their future prospect.

In analyzing Table 2, one can see that both Boeing and UTC show a large reliance on their civilian sector.
According to their financial data, both companies rely heavily upon their civilian sectors’ total revenue to
maintain operations. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon have a significant amount of
civilian revenue; however, their business structure does not rely as heavily on civilian revenue and
would therefore not be in as much jeopardy if sanctions were imposed on their civilian sectors. For
Boeing and UTC, 49% and 83% are sufficiently significant that they require their civilian sectors’ revenue
and would, therefore, be extremely vulnerable to the Chinese sanctions.

Boeing sells commercial aircraft to the Chinese Airlines and UTC sells Otis elevators and Carrier brand
heating and air-conditioning in China.98 For Boeing, a complication in the Chinese market would
severely hurt their civilian revenue. Over the next two decades, Boeing expects China to spend $400
billion to purchase around 3,770 planes from certain manufacturers, therefore making China the second
largest commercial aircraft market in the world.99 According to UTC’s CEO, Louis Chenevert, “[China’s
market] feels really good right now,” adding that he sees no evidence of China’s market slowing down
and noted that the company’s Otis elevators were up by double digits, and orders for its Carrier air
conditioning systems were “starting to come up.” For UTC, the revenue from Otis Corporation
accounted for the bulk of the $3.1 billion in sales in China last year, and it is estimated that China’s
economy will grow 9.9 percent this year.100 With results and high expectations for both companies, and
a large reliance on their civilian sector’s total revenue to maintain operations, it appears as though these
two defense corporations have a large reliance on the civilian Chinese market and would, therefore, be
highly vulnerable to Chinese sanctions.
This is not to say that effective sanctions on the civilian sectors of Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin would not have a profound affect on these corporations. Referring back to the findings of Jonathan Galloway,
these corporations regardless of percentage, will take the necessary actions to rebalance the equilibrium between the three markets: Governmental, Domestic Civilian, and Foreign.101 It is hard to fathom any corporation willingly
taking hits on their overall revenue. While Raytheon only receives 7% of their total revenue from their civilian sector, this still amounts to $1.6 billion, which is no small amount.

While civilian revenue for these three corporations is significant, their overall civilian operations in China are minimal as compared to UTC and Boeing. In this case, both UTC and Boeing depend on the Chinese market to make sales
and purchases. Their dependence on the Chinese economy goes beyond that of supply chains and logistics, but also depends on consumer buying and open markets. This dependence separates them from the others in that they
have become more vulnerable to the PRC.

If China does impose the threatened sanctions against these DMNCs it could prove to be detrimental to
their international operations. While the military sectors of these defense corporations would not be
affected by sanctions from China, considering that China does not buy U.S. weapons, the civilian sectors
are left relatively unprotected. The combined dynamics of a large reliance on civilian revenue and
pressure from a government that has a lucrative market for their civilian sectors to operate in, only
demonstrates a larger possibility that certain defense corporations will be more likely to adhere to the
foreign government’s will over that of their host national government’s desires.

2. Exploitation by Use of Foreign Competitors

Another way in which China can exploit a major weakness in certain civilian sectors of the defense
corporations is through pre-existing competitive rivalries. In most cases, Lockheed Martin, Boeing,
Raytheon, UTC, Northrop Grumman and other defense corporations are in tight contention for defense
contracts relating in their respective fields, however, as was discussed, China does not have an ability to
affect this. There are pre-existing rivalries in the civilian sectors that can be exploited to create even
more pressure on the defense corporations involved in the Taiwan arms sale.

The targeting of corporations with strong rivals can serve two purposes: it can cause civilian revenue of
the defense corporations to decrease, and increase the competitive gain of their key competitor. Not
only do they lose that part of the market, but their competitor also ends up gaining from it, therefore
delivering a double blow to the defense corporation under fire. In tight competition for new markets like
China, this sort of altercation can result in a major setback to the defense corporation’s civilian revenue
and could become a crippling long-term effect. Not only does the rival gain from a sanction in China, but
also, due to the increased capital, the rival will have the ability to use this gain in other competitive
areas to help increase funding in their global market.
There are many different types of rivalries that exist in the market. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman mainly compete with each other for defense contracts and their civilian revenue is relatively low as
compared to others. This, therefore, indicates that they are somewhat protected from a Chinese exploitation of the key rivalries between them.

Conglomerate corporations might have several different rivals by the existence of multiple sectors and markets under which they operate. Therefore no one company is completely identical to that of another conglomerate
corporation and the existence of a specific rivalry is rare. UTC is a conglomerate that has different civilian sectors like Otis elevators and Carrier air-conditioners.102 The sanctions against UTC would result in fewer Otis elevators
and Carrier products; however, there are many different elevator and air-conditioner companies operating in China and, therefore, no specific competitor would gain from such sanctions. This therefore does not affect the global
competitiveness of the civilian sector of UTC but only local competitiveness in the Chinese market. Therefore, the sanctions will not make UTC as vulnerable.

Boeing on the other hand has one major rival, Airbus. As most would claim, the rivalry between Boeing and Airbus is the largest international rivalry in the world.103 Both companies are identical in that their civilian sectors
develop comparable commercial aircrafts that are competitive on the global market. Foreign corporations that choose to buy a commercial jet are usually considering whether or not they choose Airbus or Boeing and at times will
use the two corporations to play off each other in a bidding war. The stakes are extremely high for each corporation being that a single deal with an airline could be a deciding factor between success and failure over a
multibilliondollar investment.104 Therefore, one of the best strategies for both Boeing and Airbus is that of persuading prospective buyers such as nationally owned airlines (as is the case in China), to purchase their planes over the
others.105

a. Boeing Versus Airbus in China

The competition between Boeing and Airbus has been extremely tight over the years. Neither company has been able to pull away from the other, so the slightest change in their global market share gives each company a
comparable advantage over the other. For such a close race, it can be seen how important the Chinese market is to both companies. According to China’s own projections, they believe they will quadruple their aircraft fleet to
3,900 by 2025, which will create a large amount of potential revenue for either Boeing or Airbus.106 To further this, Boeing expects China to spend over $400 billion to purchase planes over the next couple of years, thus making
China the second largest aeronautics market in the world.107 China “probably has the most potential of any significant market in the world,” said the Airbus China President Laurence Barron.108

However, with such a tight contention, is Boeing at a point that they can handle a head-to-head challenge with Airbus in China, especially if sanctions are involved? With airlines in other markets struggling, and Boeing itself still
trying to recover from its much-delayed Dreamliner 787 project, Boeing seems to be on shaky ground and stands to lose more than Airbus.109 Along with this, before the arms sales to Taiwan, Airbus was already winning more
orders from China than Boeing.110

While Boeing currently has 736 Boeing planes operating in China (and another 30 from McDonnell-Douglas, which Boeing-acquired in 1997), Airbus only has 547. However, over the past couple of years, Airbus’s orders from China
have dramatically shifted to give Airbus the advantage. As of February 2010, Chinese airlines have placed orders for 358 Airbus planes and have options for another 14, while they have only ordered 244 new planes from Boeing and
have placed no options for further units. Airbus has also acquired letters of intent towards future sales of 60 planes, compared to 40 for Boeing.111

Because the three largest airline companies (China Southern, China Eastern, and Air China) are still controlled by the Chinese government, the purchasing of commercial airliners is highly politicized where government officials have
the ability to reward foreign governments with airplane sales that meet the interests of China.112 In response to such a system, Airbus, in June 2008, built an assembly base in Tianjin.113 By developing an assembly factory in
Tianjin, Airbus is hoping that building aircraft in China (and the corresponding transfer of technology) will strengthen its position with the Chinese government to a better one than that of Boeing. To further this, Airbus has also
developed an engineering center in Beijing that will train up to 200 local engineers to assist in the plant operations in Tianjin.114 In China, “if you allow for more local production and information-sharing, the purchaser is going to
be a lot more willing to accept your aircraft,” says Peter Harbison, executive chairman of the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation in Sydney.115
Boeing on the other hand is at a disadvantage. Hindered by unions and concerns of the company shifting jobs overseas, Boeing has had to maintain production in the United States. However, Boeing has argued that their presence
in China is significant because Boeing buys parts from seven local manufacturers in China. Boeing spokesman, Yukui Wang, stated that Boeing is the Chinese aviation industry’s largest foreign customer. He stresses that Boeing, over
the years, has bought $1.5 billion in aircraft parts and services from China and that this figure “will double in the next few years… Chinese suppliers now have a role in all of Boeing airplanes.”116 To emphasize their commitment to
China, Boeing ramped up its efforts and sent a sales director to Beijing to become the company’s first China-based sales executive—which is something that is not normally practiced by Boeing.117

Even with the past level of competition between Boeing and Airbus, Boeing is now at a large
disadvantage because of their defense sector’s sales of the Harpoon missiles to Taiwan. If China enacts
the sanctions against Boeing, Boeing will have to face a strong rival who just became stronger, while
they lost major ground in the battle over the Chinese market. Even if China does not impose the
sanctions, the Chinese government will probably be more likely to purchase planes from, and therefore
support a company that does not sell weapons to areas of concern and complies with their national
interests.
The defense corporations that are more reliant on their defense sales and, therefore, are not as competitive in the civilian sectors, such as Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, are not under the same kind of
pressure to expand their international production base and depend on foreign markets as is Boeing (due to their competitive nature with Airbus). If China were to take sanctions against Boeing, they would be able to meet their
aeronautical needs by buying planes from Airbus, who is Boeing’s tight competitor. Therefore not only is Boeing losing the revenue, but their main competitor is gaining from the sanctions. This double-edged sword would increase
pressure on Boeing to try and mitigate the sanctions and adhere to the Chinese request, thereby restoring their share of the world market and their political favor in the eyes of the Chinese government.

C. CONCLUDING ANALYSIS

In this section, we have explored the possible vulnerabilities due to foreign subcontracting, and civilian
operations internationally. It was shown that foreign subcontracting is not only prevalent in defense
operations but that there is no clear way of demarking and tracking exactly where all parts and pieces
are made and assembled. This is alarming in that it opens opportunities for foreign meddling and
highlights a lack of understand on how truly the defense sector depends on foreign supplies and
assistance. It is only clear that levels of dependency do exist and that the controls in place are
inadequate to exactly track such vulnerabilities.

Only aff protects manufacturing – solves DIB

Hudson and Gerard 13 Linda P. Hudson is president and CEO of BAE Systems Inc. Leo W. Gerard is
international president of United Steelworkers. Keep BAE's Bradley program rolling in York (column)
Linda P. Hudson and Leo W. Gerard UPDATED: 10/09/2013 11:50:47 AM EDT

As the past decade has shown, the United States can be quickly drawn into conflicts around the world .
To be prepared, our country must maintain a strong and skilled defense manufacturing industry to
support the production of the equipment our troops need. But this defense base and the skilled jobs it
provides are in grave danger.

Between 1998 and 2010, the country lost 57,000 manufacturing facilities and 6 million manufacturing
jobs. If this trend continues, there is a very real risk that we will permanently lose the skills required to
make much-needed equipment for the U.S. military and will need to look overseas for suppliers.

As former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned earlier this year, "The last damn thing we need if we
face a crisis is to somehow contract out that responsibility to another country. So we have to maintain
the core industrial base that we need. The skills are essential to our ability to maintain a strong
national defense."

A prime example of this danger to both our economy and national security is the threatened shutdown
of the Bradley Industrial Base, consisting of the York, Pa., facility where BAE Systems manufactures the
Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the suppliers that support the program.

Built to protect and transport troops, the armored vehicle is the workhorse of the U.S. Army and the
embodiment of American defense industrial base know-how and engineering: The vehicle's advanced
aluminium armor and weapons systems are produced by 7,000 skilled workers in 586 businesses across
44 states.

Now, in an attempt to modernize the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and lasting at least three years. With
production halted, the businesses that make up the Bradley Industrial Base will be unable to employ the
highly skilled workers who produce the specialized parts that keep these vehicles running. Thousands of
workers will lose their jobs, and some will move on to other fields, while their skills - unique to building
combat vehicles - will become lost or obsolete. As a result, our armed forces may end up going into
harm's way without equipment manufactured in America and ready for today's battlefield.

Since World War II, our military - and all Americans - have relied on a highly skilled, dedicated and
engaged civilian defense labor force of engineers, designers, welders, electricians, machinists and pipe
fitters. Like a well-prepared combat team, this labor force - nearly 625,000 people - is continuously
training in order to maintain their technological superiority. As new technologies are developed to
address the ever-changing threats from our enemy, this labor force acquires new skills to keep pace and
meet the military's needs.

Now these workers, the products they make, the incomes their families and communities depend on
and America's ability to defend itself are all at risk.

As a nation, we must make it a priority to ensure the strength of the Army's combat vehicle program and
the skilled defense industrial base jobs that support this crucial capability. The Army can help the
Bradley Industrial Base in the near term simply by spending the $288 million provided last year to allow
industry to perform its requirements, which ensure that older vehicles are upgraded with the latest
technology our troops need.

In the longer term, the Army should work with industry to ensure that our troops can meet the missions
they might face, while providing industry with the stability to sustain the skilled jobs needed to respond
to future.

Dwindling budgets and the desire for short-term financial gains are threatening America's "arsenal of
democracy" and with it our economy. The skilled men and women of the defense manufacturing
industry do work that allows us to fly the red, white and blue, and they must not be pink-slipped.
Equipping our military is too important to outsource - our economy, our national security and our fellow
Americans count on it.
 *Rare Earths Turn
Trade war over Taiwan means China is starting to restrict access to rare earth minerals
Li 19 Yun Li, 5-30-2019, "Why China's threat to restrict rare earth minerals is so serious," MSN,
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-chinas-threat-to-restrict-rare-earth-minerals-is-so-
serious/ar-AAC9sdJ Lowell-SB

China's threat to curb exports of rare earth minerals to the United States could move the needle in an
escalating trade war as the world's two largest economies continue to jockey for leverage. The official
newspaper of the Communist Party of China explicitly warned the U.S. on Wednesday that China would cut off rare earth
minerals as a countermeasure in the escalated trade battle. Rare earth minerals are a suite of 17
elements mineable in the earth's crust, with names such as cerium, europium and lutetium. They are
commonly used in everything from car motors and electronics to oil refining and clean diesel to many
major weapons systems the U.S. relies on for national security, including lasers and radar. About 35% of rare
earth global reserves are in China, the most in the world, and the country is a mining machine, producing 120,000 metric tons or 70% of total
rare earths in 2018, according to the United States Geological Survey. The
U.S. pales in comparison as it mined 15,000
metric tons of rare earths in 2018 and has a total of 1.4 million metric tons of reserves, versus China's 44
million. U.S. consumption of rare earth compounds and metals relies heavily on imports, which rose to
$160 million in 2018, according to USGS. Eighty percent were from China . To make it worse, although other
countries supply to the U.S. including Estonia (6%), France (3%) and Japan (3%), much of their materials were derived from mineral
concentrates and chemical substances produced in China, according to Hui Shan, commodities analyst at Goldman Sachs. "The U.S.' reliance on
Chinese supply may be higher than the import breakdown data suggest on the surface," Shan said in a note on Wednesday. Given
U.S.
dependence on Chinese supply, the threat of a restriction could hurt many industries including high-
tech devices, automotives, clean energy, and defense. An example is the element lanthanum. "The glass
industry is the largest consumer of rare earths. For example, lanthanum makes up as much as 50% of digital camera lenses, including cell phone
cameras. Hybrid electric cars use significant amounts of lanthanum in its batteries – 10-15 kilograms per vehicle," said Michael Widmer, metals
strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, in a note. Dangerous interaction Rare
earth materials are also crucial to the U.S.
defense systems because of their usage in lasers, radar, sonar, night vision systems, missile guidance,
jet engines, and even alloys for armored vehicles, all of which the U.S. relies upon for national
security. The Pentagon on Wednesday presented a report to Congress on rare earth minerals in an effort to reduce reliance on China. The
move came after the Chinese newspaper People's Daily warned it would cut off the rare earth supply, saying "don't say we didn't warn you." In
a 2018 report by the Department of Defense, China's domination of rare earth elements was highlighted as it shows "the potentially dangerous
interaction between Chinese economic aggression guided by its strategic industrial policies and vulnerabilities and gaps in America's
manufacturing and defense industrial base." "China
has strategically flooded the global market with rare earths at
subsidized prices, driven out competitors, and deterred new market entrants," the report said. Non-
Chinese suppliers While China remains a dominant player in the rare earth market, production outside of the country is also growing, which
could provide the U.S. with some alternatives, according to Credit Suisse. Non-Chinese production has grown to about 29% of the global
production from just 3% in 2009, said Manish Nigam, Credit Suisse's equity analyst said in a note on Thursday. "A U.S. facility is under a revival
plan since last year, and the fully operational Australian/ Malaysian venture (Lynas) has a production capacity that is more than the entire
demand of the U.S., though processing of some oxides still gets done in China," Nigam said. The impact of an export ban would be somewhat
diffused across different U.S. sectors and countries, Nigam said, noting that electric vehicles and clean energy would be impacted the most.
Nonetheless, any escalation at this point poses a threat to the market as stocks continue to suffer amid the tit-for-tat strategies in the trade
war. The S&P 500 is down 5.4% in May, on track to post its first negative month of the year. "The
effect of China restricting its
rare earth exports to the US could have a much larger impact on the broader market this time around
because of the ongoing US-China trade war," said Goldman's Shan. "Investors probably would expect further retaliations from
the US and risk assets such as copper could face even more headwinds than it is currently under."
China will withhold rare earths to piss off US – causes DIB collapse
Adams 18 Retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. John Adams served more than 30 years in command and staff
assignments as an Army aviator, military intelligence officer and foreign area officer in Europe, Asia, the
Middle East and Africa. He is president of Guardian Six Consulting, 7-9-2018, "Rebuild the US minerals
supply chain before it’s too late," Defense News,
https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2018/07/09/rebuild-the-us-minerals-supply-chain-before-its-
too-late/ Lowell-SB

As the possibility of a full-blown trade war with China looms over the economy, it’s important to
understand the pressure points that Beijing could push to exert leverage against the U.S. And the
nation’s Achilles’ heel could very well be a complete dependence on China for a growing number of
key minerals and metals. If tit-for-tat tariffs don’t result in detente, Beijing could cripple America’s
industrial supply chain by placing an embargo on minerals and metals exports, particularly rare earth
minerals. It’s Beijing’s ace up the sleeve, and we gave it to them. Despite an abundance of minerals
reserves, America has become increasingly dependent on imports to meet demand. The U.S. Geological
Survey reports that America is now 100 percent import-reliant for 21 minerals, and at least 50 percent
import-reliant for another 29. Most troubling is that the U.S. is now 100 percent import-dependent for
all of the 17 minerals that constitute the rare-earth minerals group. And China, which controls more
than 95 percent of global rare-earth minerals production, has a monopoly. Whether it’s cellphones,
electric motors, batteries, aircraft, wind turbines or MRI machines, rare earths play an essential role.
But it’s not just commercial manufacturing assembly lines that are vulnerable to an embargo; it’s also
military hardware. Whether it’s the advanced electronics and control systems in F-22 and F-35 aircraft,
night vision devices, guidance, targeting systems, or dozens of other critical defense technologies,
they’re all built with rare earth components. While the U.S. has a small strategic reserve of some of
these minerals — to provide a short-term supply for our military supply chain — we have allowed
ourselves to become unnervingly comfortable in China’s vise.

Only aff solves – promotes international cooperation that allows free trade of REs
Reichman 19 Kelsey Reichmann, 6-5-2019, "US Commerce Department offers solution for obtaining
minerals critical to the military," Defense News, https://www.defensenews.com/global/the-
americas/2019/06/05/us-commerce-department-offers-solution-for-obtaining-minerals-critical-to-the-
military/ Lowell-SB

A report by the U.S. Commerce Department recommends the government strengthen relations with
foreign companies that provide minerals critical to military development . The report was released
Tuesday amid a trade war between the United States and China. “The United States is heavily
dependent on critical mineral imports. If China or Russia were to stop exports to the United States and
its allies for a prolonged period — similar to China’s rare earths embargo in 2010 — an extended supply
disruption could cause significant shocks throughout U.S. and foreign critical mineral supply chains,” the
report states. The report also notes that the U.S. is import-reliant on 31 of the 35 minerals designated as
critical by the Department of the Interior. Furthermore, the U.S. completely relies on imports for 14 of
these minerals. The report also says the country’s imports of “critical mineral commodities” exceed 50
percent of its annual consumption. These rare earth minerals are often used in the production of
aircraft, computers and GPS systems. Last year China produced 78 percent of the world’s rare earth
minerals, according to researchers at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “These critical minerals are often
overlooked

but modern life without them would be impossible,” Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said in a news
release. “Through the recommendations detailed in this report, the Federal government will take
unprecedented action to ensure that the United States will not be cut off from these vital minerals.”
One solution to this problem is to enhance international trade and cooperation in relation to rare
earth minerals, according to the report.
T
 T-Pearson
C/I: Reduce means to reduce in size, amount, or intensity
Walker ‘4
“Reduce” means to reduce in size, amount, or intensity. Allen Walker Read, (Prof., English, Columbia
U.), THE NEW INTERNATIONAL WEBSTER’S COMPREHENSIVE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH
LANGUAGE, 2004, 1058.

Reduce: To make less in size, amount, number, intensity, etc.; diminish.

“Reduce” is to decrease overall - prefer our evidence because its in the context of US
government negotiations over Taiwan, core of the topic – defense to their context
claims
Thornton 5
(Richard Thornton, professor of history and International Affairs at George Washington University
in Washington, D.C., The Reagan Revolution II: Rebuilding the Western Alliance, pgs. 311-313)

The Chinese delayed final agreement to almost the last minute because of their refusal to drop their demand for a date certain for termination of arms sales and to accept
an explicit linkage of the two conditions which the United States had insisted upon since 1978—Chinese commitment to the peaceful settlement of the dispute with Taiwan and
agreement to permit the United States to continue to sell arms to the island. However, when the State Department cabled the administration’s “final draft” to the Chinese on August 15,
they accepted within twenty-four hours.

Last-minute creative drafting brought the Chinese to final agreement on the 17 th. The crux of the nine-paragraph communiqué was a quid pro quo found in paragraphs 4,
5, and 6. In paragraph 4, the Chinese government declared its “fundamental policy to strive for a peaceful solution to the Taiwan question.” The “Message to Compatriots in Taiwan,” of
January 1, 1979 promulgated the policy of “striving for peaceful reunification of the motherland,” and the nine-point proposal of September 30, 1981 reaffirmed it.

Paragraph 5 contained the diluted connection to the quid pro quo. It stated that the United States government “understands and appreciates the Chinese policy of
striving for a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question.” (The Chinese refused to accept the U.S. term “peaceful settlement,” insisting upon “peaceful resolution,” instead.) Then,

United States Government states that it does

paragraph 6 completed the “if-then” relationship. “Having in mind the foregoing statements…the

not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan.”

Its arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed, either in qualitative or quantitative terms, the level
of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between
the United States and China, and that it intends to reduce gradually its sales of arms to
Taiwan, leading over a period of time to a final resolution.
The implicit quid pro quo was that as long as the Chinese pursued a policy of peaceful settlement the United States would gradually reduce sales of arms to Taiwan. In testimony
before Congress the next day, Holdridge made explicit that China’s failure to adhere to its commitment would absolve the United States from its side of the bargain. Brandishing a
figurative sword of Damocles over Beijing’s head, he said: “the administration would reconsider its refusal to sell advanced F-16 jets to Taipei if China goes back on its ‘fundamental
policy’ of dealing peacefully with Taiwan.”

Finally, U.S. negotiators qualified all of the concessions Haig had unilaterally extended to China. While the United States agreed to

reduce arms sales it did not stipulate a time frame, nor a terminal date, as Haig had urged and
the Chinese demanded. Negotiators also made clear that the term “reduce gradually” did not bind
the United States to a year-after-year reduction, but only to gradual reduction over time,
which could mean an increase in any one year over the previous year. The Chinese had wanted
the term “progressive reduction.”
 The quantity/quality limitation Haig had extended was also reinterpreted to mean that the
United States would replace obsolete equipment and technology with its nearest equivalent ,
modern replacements, effectively eliminating any advantage the Chinese might obtain through obsolescence. Finally, the highest level of the Carter administration’s sales to Taiwan
had been $835 million in 1982 dollars, which established a reasonably high starting point from which to calculate “reductions.”
DAs
 Assurances
Case solves: Plan increases assurance – produces joint missions with regional allies
Glaser 15 Charles L. Glaser, professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Department
of Political Science at George Washington University, Time for a U.S.-China Grand Bargain
https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/publication/glaser-us-china-jul15-final.pdf

REASSURING U.S. ALLIES

Possibly the most frequently raised objection to the United States ending its commitment to Taiwan is
that it would undermine the credibility of U.S. defense commitments to its East Asia allies. This
concern is overstated. U.S. entry into a grand bargain with China would undoubtedly send
political shockwaves throughout the Asia Pacific, but the United States could take a variety of actions to
demonstrate the strength of its continuing commitments. For example, it could increase
the
capability of the forces it commits to the region and further deepen joint
U.S.- Japan military planning and high-level discussions on the requirements for extended
deterrence. In fact, the United States has already begun taking some of these measures.

U.S. alliances are likely to endure because its allies do not have options that are more appealing.
Meanwhile, their need for security is likely to continue to grow as China rises. Any doubts about U.S.
reliability are likely to convince them to work harder to strengthen their alliances with
the United States, not to abandon it or to bandwagon with China.

Non uq: US-Taiwan security alliance shaky now—they aren’t sure if US will defend
them
Metz 19 (Steven Metz, aculty of the Air War College, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff
College, and several universities, he has been an adviser to political campaigns and elements of the
intelligence community; served on national security policy task forces; testified in both houses of
Congress; and spoken on military and security issues around the world, “How Committed Is the U.S. to
Fending Off a War Over Taiwan?”, 2/8/19, https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/27395/how-
committed-is-the-u-s-to-fending-off-a-war-over-taiwan, RKK)
China and Taiwan marked the Lunar New Year holiday this week with dueling propaganda videos showcasing their respective military might,
released on social media. It was the latest sign that North Korea may no longer be the world’s most volatile hotspot, the nation most likely to
unleash a major crisis that could spiral out of control. Now that dubious distinction may be shifting to Taiwan. The root of the problem is, of
course, that China considers Taiwan an inextricable part of its territory ripped away in 1949 when the government of the Republic of China,
facing military defeat against communist forces on the mainland, moved to the island. Beijing always saw this as temporary—something to be
rectified when it had the power to do so. Now that time is at hand. Massive economic growth has given China a degree of influence and
resilience that it never had before. Its military capabilities have grown extensively. And
while America has long been
committed to Taiwan’s separation from China, the willingness and ability of the United States to back
Taipei with force seems shakier than ever. For strategists in Beijing, imposing reunification on Taiwan
probably appears more feasible than at any time since 1949. What is making the situation particularly dangerous now
is China’s mounting internal problems, especially a slowing economy. Its short-term economic prospects, at least, are troubling. This matters
because the Chinese Communist Party sustains its rule in part by buying off internal dissatisfaction. The Chinese people tolerate
authoritarianism in exchange for stability and prosperity. But if economic imbalances and problems mount, the Communist Party may have a
harder time fending off political opposition. As often happens in authoritarian political systems, economic frustration could turn into dissent.
Undoubtedly, this would lead the regime in Beijing to ramp up its system of internal security, which is already the most effective on earth.
Authoritarian regimes facing internal opposition have always tried to ease political pressure through distraction, specifically by becoming more
externally aggressive or exaggerating security threats, whether foreign or internal. If China experiences a deep and long-term economic
slowdown, it is not hard to imagine the government taking a more bellicose approach to Taiwan. There are already ominous signs of that. Last
month, an editorial in China’s official military newspaper stated that “war preparations” should be a top priority for the year. The next day,
President Xi Jinping reiterated China’s longstanding position that it reserves the right to use force against Taiwan if it considers it necessary. This
may foreshadow a coming crisis. What
is not clear at this point is how the United States would, or should,
respond if China attempts to compel reunification with Taiwan . President Donald Trump seems more committed to
the defense of Taiwan than his predecessors, having approved arms sales to Taipei at a much faster rate. And in December he signed the pro-
Taiwan Asia Reassurance Initiative Act into law, which aims to counter China’s military influence in the region and boost U.S. support for allies
like Taiwan, including arms sales. The key for the United States is lowering the chances of China believing it can impose reunification by force.
But would Trump use military force to defend Taiwan? Even without large-scale U.S. involvement, China might not be able
to conquer Taiwan outright. Conventional military invasions across bodies of water are extremely difficult. And time would not be on Beijing’s
side since any invasion would be disruptive, even catastrophic, for both the global economy and China, which depends on exports of
manufactured goods and imports of energy and raw materials to sustain its economy. The United States might respond to a Chinese invasion of
Taiwan with long-range military strikes plus standoff air defense, anti-ship, space and cyber operations. But “ might”
is the operative
word. U.S. involvement would entail massive risk. There is the potential that Americans might simply
accept the conquest of Taiwan. Things would be even more difficult for Washington if China opted for
the sort of “gray zone” aggression that Russia has used to weaken Ukraine—avoiding an outright
military invasion and relying on other destabilizing methods that combine political, economic, military
and technological interference to avoid provoking a devastating response from the United States. This
would be particularly tricky for Washington if China were able to replicate what Russia did in Ukraine and find local allies or proxies. The key for
the United States, then, is lowering the chances of China believing it can impose reunification by force. Since the 1970s, U.S. policy toward
Taiwan has been based on a deliberate strategic ambiguity as part of the so-called One China policy. Washington opposed reunification by force
but did not treat Taiwan as a sovereign, independent nation. It indicated that it would oppose a Chinese invasion of Taiwan but never made
clear precisely what it would do in response to one. The idea was to complicate Beijing’s strategic calculation by making it guess what the
United States would do. Ambiguity made sense when China was economically and militarily weak, but now that is increasingly dangerous. To
minimize the chances of miscalculation, Beijing must understand the military, economic and political costs of aggression against Taiwan,
including the possibility that the United States might strike China indirectly or asymmetrically. To make that happen, the Trump administration
should work closely with Congress to reinforce America’s support for Taiwan’s continued autonomy. Trump should specify what Chinese actions
against Taiwan the United States considers unacceptable, and what it would do in response to them. There is no guarantee this will work. There
may be a crisis or conflict over Taiwan no matter what the United States does. But it is incumbent on American leaders to diminish the chances
of miscalculation. This requires firming up the U.S. commitment to Taiwan, in order to transform strategic ambiguity into clarity.

US influence and nuclear deterrence checks assurance - 7th fleet deters aggression
Ziezulewicz 17 Geoff Ziezulewicz, 10-25-2017, "Navy puts three carrier strike groups in 7th Fleet
waters," Navy Times, https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/10/25/navy-puts-three-
carrier-strike-groups-in-7th-fleet-waters/ Lowell-SB

The Navy now has three aircraft carriers and their attendant aircraft and ships in the waters of 7th Fleet,
the U.S. military’s front line in the tensions between the United States and North Korea. Navy officials
said three carriers operating in the Japan-based command is a regularly scheduled part of a planned
deployment cycle. “It is not uncommon for incoming and outgoing carrier strike group transit timing to overlap as one begins a
deployment and the other concludes,” according to a Navy statement. Still, the carriers Nimitz and Theodore Roosevelt entered 7th Fleet
waters this week. Navy releases for both arrivals state the carriers and their respective strike groups are scheduled for port visits and other
operations, suggesting that neither is immediately on its way out of the region. While Navy officials stress that having three carriers under the
same forward command is business as usual, it comes at a time of heightened tension between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim
Jong Un. Seventh Fleet’s lone permanently stationed carrier, the Ronald Reagan, and its strike group arrived in the South Korean port city of
Busan last week after naval exercises with South Korea aimed at increasing readiness against North Korea and maintaining stability. The Nimitz,
its strike group, air wing and destroyer squadron entered the sprawling 7th Fleet area of operations on Wednesday after concluding operations
with the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet. Nimitz and its group are scheduled for a port visit and will be ready to support operations in the region before
heading home, according to a Navy release. Nimitz deployed in June from its home port of Bremerton, Washington. The Theodore Roosevelt
and its strike group entered 7th Fleet waters Monday after leaving its San Diego home on Oct. 6. Her deployment is scheduled to include
operations in 5th Fleet waters as well. “USS Theodore Roosevelt is prepared to carry out the full spectrum of possible mission, from
humanitarian relief to combat operations,” the carrier’s CO, Capt. Carlos Sardiello, said in a Navy release. “When a carrier leaves on
deployment, we have to be ready for anything.” Seventh
Fleet is the largest, and arguably busiest, of the Navy’s
forward-deployed commands. In addition to deterring North Korea and countering the presence of
ascendant Chinese and Russian navies, 7th Fleet spans more than seven million square miles , from the
India-Pakistan border east to the international date line, and from the Antarctic up to the Kuril Islands
northeast of Japan.

No link – Taiwan doesn’t have a formal alliance OR troop presence, no spillover

Gomez 15 Eric Gomez, writing @ CATO, independent analyst and recent Master’s graduate of the
Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University NOVEMBER 30, 2015 4:25PM
The U.S.-Taiwan Relationship Needs a Change https://www.cato.org/blog/us-taiwan-relationship-needs-
change

The arms sales and vague security pledge have contributed to peace in the Taiwan Strait, but the status
quo may not last much longer. A recent RAND report concluded that China is catching up to the United
States’ military capabilities to defend Taiwan. America could absorb the rising cost of defending Taiwan,
but the reunification of Taiwan and mainland China is a core interest of the Chinese government. Since
China has more at stake, it has an incentive to keep raising the costs of confrontation until the United
States is no longer willing to absorb them.

This argues for dropping Washington’s pledge to come to Taiwan’s aid. Supporters of the pledge worry
about the message that a reduced commitment would send to allies in East Asia. But there is a
significant difference between a formal security commitment defined in a
treaty, and an informal one like America’s to Taiwan.
Washington’s formal treaty commitments in East Asia (Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines) are
more clearly stated and some are supported by forward-deployed U.S. forces. Failing to come to the aid
of a formal treaty ally would be a significant blow to U.S. credibility, but Taiwan does not enjoy
such status.
No Japan Proliferation
Mehta 16 [Rupal N. Mehta, 6-9-2016, "Is a Nuclear-Armed Japan Inconceivable?," War on the Rocks,
https://warontherocks.com/2016/06/is-a-nuclear-armed-japan-inconceivable/]

In Japan, the reply has been a firm no. In response to Trump’s comments, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida stated, “it is
impossible that Japan will arm itself with nuclear weapons.” In unpacking this statement, we are provided with half of
the answer to these questions. As the only country that has had nuclear weapons used against it, Japan has generally foregone
overt militarization and has focused on providing national security, overseas peace-keeping operations,
and disaster relief. In my recent discussions with Japanese officials, military officers, and civilians it is clear that Japan, unlike some of
its counterparts in East Asia, view the acquisition of nuclear weapons extremely unfavorably. This was highlighted
during President Obama’s recent visit to Hiroshima where Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated, “this tragedy must not be allowed to
occur again. We are determined to realize a world free of nuclear weapons.”

The distaste for having their own nuclear deterrent coupled with being in a dangerous neighborhood
has required that Japan turn to other countries, like the U nited States, for security.   It is here, in the U.S.-Japanese
alliance, “the cornerstone of Japan’s diplomacy”, according to Shinzo Abe, that we find the rest of the explanation.
For the past 70 years, since the introduction of nuclear weapons, it is the policy of the United States to counter proliferation and curb the
expansion of the nuclear club. The United States has been very successful in providing hefty incentives to states that stop their exploration or
pursuit of nuclear weapons. One
of these inducements, an extended nuclear deterrent, obliges the United States to
provide defense and security to allies in the event of an attack or conflict. Rather than disregarding
domestic public opinion and risking punishment in the international community, Japan can rely on
America’s nuclear arsenal.

This is how the United States has been able to use its protection to constrain risky behavior among its
allies. Research in political science would suggest that these types of alliances may entrap and force the United States to get involved when
allies take unnecessary risks to get their way. Neil Narang and I show in a recent working paper, however, that nuclear umbrellas can positively
shape ally behavior. We
find that protected allies, like Japan, are not any more likely to engage in risky
business and instead use the alliance to reap political and economic gains.

This is not to say that Japan has no bargaining power of its own . Japan maintains one of the highest latent nuclear
capacities in the world. Experts argue that if Japan were to desire nuclear weapons its “break out” time would be short. But it’s this capability
that provides Japan with leverage. In a new working paper, Gene Gerzhoy, Rachel Whitlark, and I find that this capability doesn’t necessarily
embolden countries. Instead, they use it, short of opting to get nuclear weapons, to settle disputes, gain concessions, and side-step external
aggression.

These factors, coupled with Japan’s own distaste for nuclear weapons , suggest that despite Donald Trump’s
perspective and potential policy, if elected to the presidency, a nuclear-armed Japan is virtually unthinkable and highly
undesirable.

Turn - Plan increases assurance – produces joint missions with regional allies
Glaser 15 Charles L. Glaser, professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Department
of Political Science at George Washington University, Time for a U.S.-China Grand Bargain
https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/publication/glaser-us-china-jul15-final.pdf

REASSURING U.S. ALLIES

Possibly the most frequently raised objection to the United States ending its commitment to Taiwan is
that it would undermine the credibility of U.S. defense commitments to its East Asia allies. This
concern is overstated. U.S. entry into a grand bargain with China would undoubtedly send
political shockwaves throughout the Asia Pacific, but the United States could take a variety of actions to
demonstrate the strength of its continuing commitments. For example, it could increase
the
capability of the forces it commits to the region and further deepen joint
U.S.- Japan military planning and high-level discussions on the requirements for extended
deterrence. In fact, the United States has already begun taking some of these measures.

U.S. alliances are likely to endure because its allies do not have options that are more appealing.
Meanwhile, their need for security is likely to continue to grow as China rises. Any doubts about U.S.
reliability are likely to convince them to work harder to strengthen their alliances with
the United States, not to abandon it or to bandwagon with China .
Allies DA
 No I/L: Cred = Myth

Credibility is a myth created by the MIC—and even if it exists, it’s resilient from
individual shocks
Larison 7/3/19 (Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, 7-3-2019, "‘Credibility’ Is Just an Excuse to
Launch Attacks," American Conservative, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/credibility-
is-just-an-excuse-to-launch-attacks/)SEM

Andrew Bacevich takes aim at the bogus hawkish “credibility” argument: But does
making threats and then dropping bombs
enhance credibility? If so, notwithstanding Obama’s and Trump’s own occasional qualms, the United States would have
amassed vast stores of the stuff over the past 30 years or so. Presidents since Ronald Reagan, including Obama and Trump,
have followed up threats with bombs on myriad occasions. Targeted nations have included Libya, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Serbia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen, with the punitive action episodic in some cases and sustained in others. No
nation
in recent memory has dropped more pieces of ordnance on more countries than has the United States .
Indeed, no other nation comes close. Over those same 30 years, however, America’s standing as a global leader
has declined. It turns out in practice that credibility is less a function of using force than of
demonstrating prudence. Yet somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, those charged with
formulating U.S. policy decided that the dictates of prudence need not apply to the actions of the world’s
one and only indispensable nation. In recent decades, the abiding feature of American statecraft has been
grandiosity, with military activism camouflaging a loss of strategic realism. Resorting to force frequently over
the last several decades has not made the U.S. more respected, trusted, or reliable in its commitments. When
hawks warn that a “failure” to strike this or that country could undermine our “credibility,” they want us
to believe that hostile states will think they can get away with attacking our allies and that our allies will fear that our
government won’t come to their assistance. They continually confuse decisions about whether to
initiate hostilities against other states with decisions about whether to respond to aggression in defense
of allies, but this just calls attention to the fact that the military intervention they want has nothing to
do with our security or the security of our allies. “Failing” to bomb Syria in 2013 did not put any of our
allies in greater danger, and I suspect more than a few of our allies were glad that our government refrained from committing more
illegal acts of war. Backing off from an illegal attack on Iran has not encouraged rivals to be more aggressive,
but the possibility of starting a war over a drone alarmed our allies that our government was once again
prepared to plunge into an unnecessary war because of a crisis of Trump’s own making . Other states do
not believe our government to be unwilling to back up threats , especially when it concerns something
that genuinely affects the U.S. and our allies, but many of them do worry that our government is
overeager to pick fights and look for reasons to use force when alternatives are available. Like a trigger-happy vigilante,
our government uses force all the time for any reason and frequently for no good reason at all.
“Credibility” is just the most convenient excuse. It is significant that the “credibility”-worshipers that complain
when the U.S. doesn’t attack another country have little or nothing to say about the effect on our reputation when
the president reneges on international agreements negotiated in good faith. “Credibility” fans don’t particularly care if other
states don’t trust our promises when it relates to anything else, but they are livid when a president doesn’t seize every opportunity to rain
down death and destruction on other countries. I submit that no one
making “credibility” arguments really believes
them, but they use these arguments to stoke fear that “inaction” (i.e., not killing people) might be more
dangerous than “action” (i.e., killing those people). “Failing” to bomb another country doesn’t have negative consequences
for the U.S. (how could it?), but reneging on diplomatic commitments is likely to make other governments less likely to trust our promises and
less likely to enter into agreements with our government in the future. Hawks don’t have much of a problem with the latter because they aren’t
interested in making diplomatic agreements, but they are very worried that the U.S. “misses” the chance to launch an attack because they want
to get the U.S. embroiled in new conflicts. “Credibility” is the ready-made excuse to launch attacks when no U.S.
interests are at stake, and it can be reused over and over to sell gullible people on wars we don’t need. The price of those wars is then
paid by the people in the affected countries and our military. It’s time to stop buying into the incredible “credibility”
argument.
 N/U: Mutual Vulnerability kills Alliances

Current refusal to acknowledge mutual vulnerability destroys the credibility of alliance

commitments and emboldens Chinese assertiveness
Hugh White 18, professor of Strategic Studies at Australian National University in Canberra, 6/8/18,
“TO REASSURE U.S. ALLIES IN ASIA, ADMIT MUTUAL VULNERABILITY WITH CHINA,”
https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/to-reassure-u-s-allies-in-asia-admit-mutual-vulnerability-with-
china/

America does not admit that it is vulnerable to China’s strategic nuclear forces. That’s the clear message
of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. While the review was the subject of a voluminous body of commentary and analysis, little of it focused
on this particular aspect. Perhaps no one was surprised because it was not new — after all, no previous U.S. strategy document has
acknowledged mutual vulnerability with China. But what is new in this Nuclear Posture Review, and in the National Security Strategy and
National Defense Strategy documents that preceded it, is the forthright identification of China as a major strategic rival
and military threat. While questions have been raised before about the failure to acknowledge mutual nuclear vulnerability, this new
context makes the issue much more important. The omission raises questions that go right to the heart of America’s strategic contest with
China in Asia and risks fatally undermining the credibility of U.S. strategic commitments there. Cold War Lessons
The only other time America and another country have been mutually vulnerable to one another’s nuclear forces
was during the Cold War. Once the United States and the Soviet Union could target one another’s cities , the
mutual acknowledgment, acceptance, and maintenance of their shared vulnerability came to be seen as
important — even essential — to maintaining strategic stability between the two superpowers. Mutual vulnerability
makes each side more confident that the other will not start a war , because both acknowledge that the costs
of such a war to their own side would be devastating. Of course, both sides did what they could to limit their vulnerability by minimizing
the damage they would suffer in an all-out nuclear exchange, including through counterforce targeting and damage limitation measures. But
they both clearly understood that trying to limit their vulnerability was very different from trying to eliminate it, and they accepted they still
faced an inescapable risk of catastrophic damage on an unprecedented scale. This is still true in relation to Russia, as the new Nuclear Posture
Review makes clear, though the document is less clear on mutual vulnerability with Russia than past reviews. This is why Moscow’s talk of
“escalate to de-escalate” needn’t be taken too seriously, except as a way of reminding Washington of the risk that any conventional war could
turn into a nuclear one. Importantly, however, acknowledging
mutual vulnerability did not prevent Moscow and
Washington from convincing one another that they were resolved to fight a nuclear war if necessary to
defend their vital interests. The Cold War stayed cold in large part because both sides were convinced that the
other side would fight a nuclear war to preserve the status quo between them, regardless of the cost. The
simultaneous acknowledgment of vulnerability and willingness to fight a nuclear war was essential to
reassuring allies that they could depend on Washington. Allies knew America could not defend them from the Soviets
without running a very high risk of a nuclear war that could devastate U.S. cities. They had to be convinced that America would indeed be
willing to accept that risk on their behalf. This could never be taken for granted, of course, but in the end, and for many decades, they were
convinced of America’s commitment. America’s
success in convincing both the Soviets and its allies alike that, despite
the awfulimplications of mutual vulnerability, it was willing to fight a nuclear war, was central to keeping
the peace, sustaining its alliances, and deterring any serious Soviet challenge to the status quo. And central to
that was Washington’s frank and open avowal of the costs it would face if war came. By acknowledging mutual
vulnerability, America showed explicitly that it recognized the immense risks of defending its allies and was
willing to accept them. Asian Implications What does this mean for the Nuclear Posture Review and China? It is important first to establish that
America and China are indeed mutually vulnerable to one another’s strategic nuclear forces. Both can inflict
immense, unprecedented damage on the other. This has not always been accepted on the American side. This is partly because
their nuclear arsenals are so different. China’s is far smaller, of course. But, more importantly perhaps, it was not designed for the nuclear
warfighting campaigns that drove the development of Soviet and U.S. forces in the Cold War, but rather simply as a minimum deterrent. This
may have made it hard to take China seriously as a nuclear adversary. For that reason, a strand of thinking in U.S. nuclear
strategy circles has long held that America could and should seek nuclear primacy over China. The idea is
that America could convince China that its nuclear arsenal could be effectively disarmed through U.S. conventional
or nuclear preemptive strikes, along with missile defenses to deal with any Chinese missiles that survived those strikes. But this scenario
seems very unlikely indeed. U.S. decision makers could not be sufficiently confident that enough of China’s
capacity to hit American targets would be eliminated . That is especially true because it would seem relatively easy
for China to counter improvements in U.S. offensive and defensive capability by expanding and improving its own
offensive forces — as it would surely have both the means and the resolve to do. The most optimistic assessment
would give America a decent chance of eliminating China’s offensive forces , and that is unlikely to be good
enough. The residual threat of successful Chinese nuclear attacks even on just one or two cities would be
unacceptable in any but the most extreme circumstances. Asymmetries While debates about the possibility of disarming China will no
doubt continue, it seems quixotic to imagine that this option provides a credible basis for U.S. policy towards
Beijing. Nor does it seem credible that key audiences outside America — in particular its rivals and allies
in Asia — would be convinced otherwise. Hence for all practical purposes we should conclude that that the two rivals
are mutually vulnerable and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Of course, they are not equally vulnerable.
America’s strategic nuclear forces are far bigger than China’s and could do a lot more damage to China than the other way around. But does it
make much difference if China, with its modest forces, can nonetheless inflict unprecedented destruction and disruption on the United States?
The question facing American decision-makers in a crisis with China would be whether the U.S. interests at stake
were important enough to justify risking the devastation that America would suffer in a nuclear war. That decision
is not much affected by whether China would suffer far worse . For example, any president facing a decision about whether
to start a war with China over Taiwan — which could clearly go nuclear — would need to ask whether the U.S. interests involved justified a
significant risk that, say, half a million Americans might die. The fact that ten times that many Chinese could die would not detract from the cost
that America would bear if the worst happened. Mutual vulnerability, however unequal, still plays a role in deterring
a nuclear war. Of course, the asymmetry in vulnerability could significantly affect how a crisis unfolded, and the probability that
it would end in a nuclear exchange, because it could tip the balance of resolve in Washington’s favor . Thus, China might be
less willing to accept the danger of nuclear war, and thus more likely to back off from a confrontation, because it risks greater losses. That
would give Washington a vital edge in crisis-management gamesmanship, making an armed clash and subsequent escalation to nuclear war less
likely. But that analysis assumes the two sides are equally committed to prevailing , and hence equally
ready to accept the costs and risks of doing so. This is almost certainly not the case in the contest between
America and China over strategic primacy in East Asia . Intuitively, for reasons of sheer geography, China cares more
about East Asia than America does, and might well be more willing to accept 5 million dead than America
would be to accept one-tenth that number. The Art of Commitment Failing to acknowledge the reality of U.S.
vulnerability undermines the credibility of America’s commitment to supporting its East Asian allies,
and more broadly, to maintaining America’s strategic position in Asia. It deprives Washington of the
opportunity to argue that it is committed to defending its allies and to its role in Asia even if this means incurring
the risk of nuclear attack on America itself. That is a major mistake. China’s strategic nuclear forces means that U.S.
commitments vis-a-vis China can only be credible if adversaries and allies alike believe that America is
willing to fight a nuclear war to fulfill them. Like in the Cold War, mutual vulnerability means that only commitments that pass
this test can reassure allies and deter adversaries. To sustain its place in Asia, America must convince both audiences
that it is willing to endure attacks on its homeland . It appears the authors of the Nuclear Posture Review may have turned
this argument on its head. They perhaps thought that acknowledging U.S. vulnerability to Chinese nuclear attack would
undermine the credibility of its commitments in Asia because allies like Japan and South Korea would not believe America was willing
to defend them at risk of direct nuclear attack on itself. Per this logic, acknowledging the risk of such an attack would
undermine the allies’ confidence in guarantees. Certainly, that’s a widespread view from the Asian side of the Pacific, and it would
not be surprising if allies like Japan for that reason eagerly urged the drafters of the review not to acknowledge mutual vulnerability. But that
is just whistling past the graveyard when mutual vulnerability is so evidently a reality. In the face of that
reality, American commitments can only be made credible to rivals and allies alike with clear and compelling
arguments that the United States will uphold these commitments despite the risk of nuclear attack. Those
arguments cannot be presented when Washington refuses to acknowledge that risk . On the contrary, by
refusing to acknowledge its vulnerability, the United States reinforces the impression that it is not willing to
accept these risks. That undermines America’s alliances. Even more importantly, it emboldens its adversaries. This
matters enormously to the future of America’s strategic engagement in Asia . Recent U.S. strategy documents and
polices — including President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia — have increasingly identified China as a strategic competitor. But the Trump
administration has broken new ground in acknowledging China as a classic great power rival. The scale
and intensity of the
strategic contest, and the significance of nuclear threats to that contest, have only now become apparent.
The clear identification of China as a strategic rival and military threat is an important if long overdue step. But the Nuclear Posture Review’s
failure to acknowledge American vulnerability to China’s nuclear forces raises real doubts about
America’s resolve in confronting China’s ambitions in Asia. And that matters because, as I have argued elsewhere,
the question of U.S. resolve has become the key issue in its contest with China. Moreover, this failure is
destabilizing, because it will only encourage those in Beijing who would argue that China’s capacity to hit
the United States means Washington can be deterred from resisting Chinese assertiveness or aggression in
Asia. China poses a very serious challenge indeed to American leadership in Asia today. To respond effectively, Washington must do
more than identify the problem. It must produce a credible plan to respond to China, with a realistic assessment of
the costs and risks involved and clear evidence that those costs and risks are understood and accepted by U.S.
political leaders and by the electorate. This must include a frank assessment of the nuclear risks , which is why the
Nuclear Posture Review was a big missed opportunity. And time is not on America’s side.
 N/U: Oppose Other U.S. Actions

Allies oppose US intervention in other conflicts – it triggers doubts over commitments

Krebs & Spindel 18 (Ronald R. Krebs is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science
at the University of Minnesota. Jennifer Spindel is Assistant Professor of International Security in the
Department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma, 7-9-2018, "Divided
Priorities: Why and When Allies Differ Over Military Intervention," Taylor & Francis, https://www-
tandfonline-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/full/10.1080/09636412.2018.1483609)SEM

As the Syria red line case suggests, reputation still shapes debates over foreign policy and military intervention .
Many journalists, scholars, and decision makers continue to believe that a consistent hard line can fortify a nation’s general reputation for
resolve and thereby bring adversaries to heel, and that displays of apparent weakness have the opposite effect, inviting adversaries to
challenge. This case further reminds us that efforts to strengthen reputation may be directed equally at allies . During
the Cold War, the domino theory called on the United States to protect vulnerable noncommunist governments against internal subversion and
external attack. The hope was that the dominoes would then not fall in part because reassured allies would beat back subversive forces
themselves and toe the American line: they would neither sue for a separate peace nor undertake unwelcome risky behavior. The Syria red line
similarly sought to shore up America’s Mideast allies’ trust and thereby persuade them to coordinate their security policies and refrain from
undesired steps. The underlying theoretical logic suggests that, insofar as allies outside the region also profit from gains to America’s
reputation, they should approve of such shows of force. Whether intervention bolsters a reputation for resolve with adversaries has been the
subject of vigorous critique.5 However, how allies actually respond to faraway interventions is unknown, as the
theoretical and empirical literature on allies is less developed than that on the deterrence and
reassurance of adversaries.6 We argue that hard-line policies, notably military intervention, do not reassure
allies—just the opposite. Allies ultimately oppose powerful partners’ hawkish postures in distant
conflicts, because they fear that a costly military campaign will leave the intervener unable or unwilling
to uphold core alliance commitments in the short and even the long run. We thus expect allies will not offer
substantial political or material support for such interventions , nor will they tightly coordinate their policies with the
intervener. Rather, we expect that they will offer at most limited support and, if the intervention proves
sufficiently protracted, explore routes to security beyond the alliance. There is one important exception: allies with
direct—as opposed to merely reputational—interests at stake will support an intervention that promises to further those interests. Highlighting
overlooked trade-offs that follow from military intervention, this article amends and refines deterrence theory, complementing existing
critiques of intervention for reputation.
 N/U: Phil Alliance Down

Philippines are not reassured

Zack Cooper ’19 is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies US defense
strategy in Asia, US alliances and partnerships in Asia, US-China strategic competition, and Chinese
economic statecraft and coercion, March 19 th, 2019, “The US quietly made a big splash about the South
China Sea” from http://www.aei.org/publication/the-u-s-quietly-made-a-big-splash-about-the-south-
china-sea/, accessed 6/7/19 || OES-AT

Manila faces abandonment fears ¶ As

China grew more assertive in the South China Sea, the Philippines looked to
the United States for support. In 2012, China effectively seized control of Scarborough Shoal after reportedly breaking a U.S.-
negotiated agreement. Then in 2013, China began to reclaim and militarize seven disputed features in the Spratly Islands. ¶ Philippine officials
struggled to respond. They asked the Obama administration to clarify the treaty commitment, but Washington would only say that the U.S.
commitment was “ironclad.” Meanwhile, in response to growing tensions in the East China Sea, President Barack Obama explicitly stated the
U.S.-Japan Security Treaty applied to the Senkaku Islands. ¶ The language in the U.S. treaties with Japan and the Philippines is different, but
some in Manila viewed these differentiated approaches as a sign that the United States had effectively
abandoned the Philippines. ¶ Rodrigo Duterte brought these concerns to the fore when he came to power in 2016. Duterte began to
openly question the value of the alliance. His foreign secretary noted, “America has failed us.” Duterte remarked of U.S. troops, “I want them
out.” ¶ Washington doubles down on the alliance ¶ When the Trump administration came into office, U.S.
leaders were worried
that the Philippines might abandon the U.S. alliance. Duterte repeatedly sided with China and said he supported a
“separation from the United States.” In December 2018, Philippine Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana suggested the time had come to
“maintain it, strengthen it, or scrap” the alliance. ¶ The
dilemma now is that the U.S. recommitment to the alliance
also increases the risk of entrapment in an unwanted conflict. China might test the new U.S. “red line.”
Or the U.S. support could create a moral hazard, spurring the Philippines to take more risky actions
because the United States has clearly committed to come to its aid. ¶ Despite these risks, the Trump administration
chose to double down on the alliance. In an important symbolic move in December, leaders in Washington secured the return of the Balangiga
church bells, which U.S. soldiers had taken from the Philippines in 1901. Then Pompeo clarified the treaty’s applicability. ¶ Nevertheless,
Philippine leaders do not appear reassured. Nor have they publicly promised to support initiatives to
bolster the alliance. ¶ Was this a missed opportunity? ¶ Many experts pushed for a clarification of the U.S. treaty commitment — myself
included. But analysts expected to see the Philippines recommit itself to the alliance by fully implementing the 2014 Enhanced Defense
Cooperation Agreement or engaging in deeper alliance coordination. Both steps would help the allies maintain a credible deterrent and power
projection capability. ¶ Instead, Philippine leaders this month criticized the U.S. commitment they long sought. Lorenzana stated, “It is not the
lack of reassurance that worries me. It is being involved in a war that we do not seek and do not want.” Thus, the U.S. action appears to have
increased entrapment concerns, without substantially attenuating fears of abandonment or bolstering allied cooperation. ¶ The Trump
administration’s critics have charged that Washington has been overly transactional in its relations with allies. But the administration appears to
have clarified the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty without getting anything substantial in return. The pressure will now be on both
Washington and Manila to show that the alliance’s capabilities can match its rhetoric.
 No Link: Cred Theory Wrong

And, their credibility arguments are wrong and based on flawed readings of IR ---
states WONT overreact

Gomez ‘16
(Eric, He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from the State University of New
York-College at Geneseo, and a Masters of Arts in International Affairs from the Bush School of
Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, policy analyst in defense and foreign policy studies at the
Cato Institute, “A Costly Commitment Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,”
CATO Institute Policy Analysis September 28, 2016, Number 800 //um-ef)

Stepping Down from the Commitment The

two most important potential negative consequences of stepping down
from the defense commitment to Taiwan are the reputational and credibility costs to the United States and
the worsening of America’s military position in the region. Advocates of maintaining the U.S. commitment also contend that Chinese control over Taiwan would lead
to a substantial PLA presence, which would pose a serious threat to American and allied interests. The military dominance that the United States has enjoyed since
the end of World War II would be called into question. Advocates of U.S. primacy in East Asia consider such an outcome dangerous and unacceptable.83
Opponents of stepping down from the commitment argue that both China and the United States’ Asian
allies will view such a change as a sign of American weakness and unwillingness to live up to other
commitments.84 If the United States does not show strong resolve as China grows more powerful, Beijing would
take advantage of American weakness to more forcefully pursue objectives that are detrimental to U.S. allies and partners.85 The Brookings
Institution’s Richard Bush argues that “[the United States] cannot withdraw from the cross-Strait contest altogether because U.S. allies and

partners would likely read withdrawal as a sign that the U.S. security commitments to them are no
longer dependable.”86 Stepping down from the commitment to Taiwan would have two mutually reinforcing harmful effects: China would grow bolder
in threatening U.S. allies and the allies would presume that the United States would not fulfill its commitments as the

threat from China grows. Fears over these negative consequences stem from a popular misconception
of credibility in which the past actions of a state are considered indicative of how the state will behave
in the future. As noted earlier, academic research indicates that states take other factors into account when
making judgements of credibility, but the dogmatic adherence to this misconception among the
American policymaking elite makes stepping down from the commitment an uphill battle .87 Formal
treaty commitments to states such as Japan and South Korea carry more weight than America’s vague
commitment to Taiwan, but fears of abandonment will likely weigh heavily on the minds of policymakers in Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington.88
Overturning the assumptions that credibility is bound up in upholding past promises will take a great deal of time and effort.
 No Link: No Perception of Lost Credibility

Allies don’t perceive lost credibility in Taiwan – research proves they prefer the US not
to intervene in other affairs
Fisher 16 (Max Fisher is a columnist and writer for The Interpreter, 4-29-2016, "The credibility trap:
why does a long-debunked theory keep leading the US into war?," Vox,
https://www.vox.com/2016/4/29/11431808/credibility-foreign-policy-war)SEM

If you have experienced even a few minutes of cable news coverage or handful of newspaper op-eds on American foreign policy, there is a word you
will have encountered over and over again: credibility. The United States, according to this theory, has
to follow through on every threat and confront every adversary in order to maintain America's global
credibility. If it fails to stand up to challengers in one place, then they will rise up everywhere, and America will see its global standing, and thus its power in
the world, crumble. This argument has dominated Washington especially in the three years since President Barack Obama declined to bomb Syrian leader Bashar al-
Assad as punishment for using chemical weapons. Proponents of "credibility" say this matters for more than just Syria. American allies came to distrust and drift
away from US leadership, they argued. And American adversaries grew emboldened — including Russia's Vladimir Putin, whose subsequent invasion of Ukraine was
said to be a direct result of weakened American credibility. "Putin believes Obama does not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to him in Ukraine. He thinks
Obama will talk tough and then look for a way out — just like he did with Assad," wrote Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen. "Syria has become the graveyard
of U.S. credibility," columnist Michael Gerson wrote in the same paper. This
theory is not exclusive to overheated op-eds. It is pervasive, almost
to the point of consensus, in much of Washington's foreign policy community , including among many policy-makers —
and has been that way longer than perhaps even proponents realize. In 1950, as the United States considered whether or not to intervene in the Korean War, a CIA
report urged the US to intervene so as to uphold its credibility far away in Europe: A failure to draw the line would have seriously discredited the whole US policy of
containment, gravely handicapping US efforts to maintain alliances and build political influence with the Western European powers and with other nations closely
aligned with the US. Secretary of State Dean Acheson agreed, fearing that European leaders would be in a "near-panic, as they watched to see whether the United
States would act." If the US did not invade Korea, Acheson worried, Europe's frail post-war order could be at risk. And this is not just an American belief. As former
National Security Council official Philip Gordon recounted recently, France kept fighting in Algeria, long after the costly war appeared lost, partly out of fear of losing
credibility. "The credibility issue—if you pull out of Algeria, boy, you lose face, right? And so the argument was, stay in and keep a lid on it," Gordon told the

Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg. But

there is a problem with this theory of credibility: It does not appear to be real .
Political scientists have investigated this theory over and over, and have repeatedly disproven it. Yet the
belief in credibility persists, dominating America's foreign policy debate, steering the United States toward military action abroad in pursuit of a strategic asset —
the credibility of America's reputation — that turns out not to exist. How did this idea become so entrenched in Washington, and why does it persist despite being
repeatedly debunked? What does it mean to have so many of America's foreign policy discussions turn around an idea that is demonstrably false — and what can
this tell us about how and why America intervenes abroad? The credibility myth When
Americans talk about "credibility" in foreign
policy, what they are usually describing is something that political scientists instead call reputational or
reputation-based credibility. In political science, "credibility" usually refers to specific promises or
threats, and in this case the research does say that credibility is rea l. For example, if the US pledges to defend South Korea
from a North Korean invasion, then it matters that the US convince both Koreas that this pledge is credible, for example by stationing US troops in South Korea. That
is the formal definition of credibility in foreign policy, it's real, and it matters. But when
"credibility" is used colloquially, it typically
refers to a very different kind of credibility, one based entirely in a country's or leader's reputation from
its actions in other disputes or conflicts. (This article uses the colloquial definition of credibility, except where noted otherwise.) Under this
line of thinking, if the US fails to follow through on a threat or stand up to a challenger in one part of the world, then its allies and enemies globally will be more
It's easy
likely to conclude that all American threats are empty, and that America can be pushed around. If the US backed down once, it will back down again.

to see how people could be attracted to this idea, which puts complicated geo-politics in simple and
familiar human terms. It encourages us to think of states as just like people. But states are not people,
and this theory, for all its appealing simplicity, is not correct. There is no evidence that America's allies
or enemies change their behavior based on conclusions about America's reputation for credibility, or
that such a form of reputation even exists in foreign policy. "Do leaders assume that other leaders who
have been irresolute in the past will be irresolute in the future and that, therefore, their threats are not
credible?" the University of Washington's Jonathan Mercer wrote, in introducing his research on this question. "No; broad and deep
evidence dispels that notion," Mercer concluded. "As the record shows, reputations do not matter." A 1984 Yale
University study, for example, examined dozens of cases from 1900 to 1980 to look for signs that, if a country stood down in one confrontation, it would face more
challengers elsewhere. The answer was no: "deterrence success is not systematically associated … with the defender's
firmness or lack of it in previous crises." Historians have also looked at specific incidents where the US
thought its credibility was on the line and determined that we were simply mistaken. Acheson's warning
that the US had to invade Korea to reassure its European allies, for example, turned out to be wrong:
British and French officials in fact worried the Americans were going to pull them into a far-away war.
During the Vietnam War, American officials could see that they were losing, but for years worried that withdrawing
would communicate weakness to the Soviet Union, emboldening Moscow to test American commitments elsewhere. Even if Vietnam
was lost, American credibility had to be defended. As historian Ted Hopf has shown, the Americans could not have had it more wrong:

Soviet leaders never reached any such conclusion, and in fact were puzzled as to why the US sacrificed
so many lives for a war that was clearly lost. If that's not enough evidence for you, try considering reputational credibility from the
opposite point of view, and it starts to look more obviously ridiculous. Dartmouth's Daryl Press once pointed out to my colleague Dylan Matthews that Soviet
premier Nikita Khrushchev repeatedly threatened to eject the American-led forces occupying West Berlin, but he backed down. The US didn't consider him one iota
less "credible" for this, and during the following year's Cuban Missile Crisis took his threats very seriously. The
idea of reputational credibility
has also been debunked in the most well-known recent case: the notion that America's failure to bomb
Syria in 2013 emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin. Proponents of reputational credibility took Putin's 2014 Ukraine
invasions as vindication. Surely Putin only invaded because America had damaged its credibility in Syria, they argued. In their view, it showed why it is so crucial for
the US to maintain its reputational credibility by never backing down from military interventions. Julia Ioffe recently investigated this theory for the Atlantic, asking
foreign policy officials and experts in Moscow whether there was merit to it. She seemed to reach the same conclusion as have many Russia analysts: that Putin

invaded Ukraine for reasons specific to Ukraine. America's supposed reputation loss in Syria appeared to
play no role. Some of Ioffe's sources seemed to not even understand the argument of how Syria and Ukraine would connect. The credibility trap You will
notice something these incidents have in common. In every case, a belief in "credibility" pulls the U nited States toward fighting

a war for the wrong reasons, or toward staying in a war longer than is worthwhile. This mistaken belief has
repeatedly helped to drive American military action abroad, Dartmouth's Jennifer Lind demonstrates in a new article in International Security Studies Forum.
"Indeed, from Korea, to Vietnam, to Bosnia, to Libya, to President Barack Obama’s 'red line’ in Syria, debates about U.S. intervention are thick with admonitions that
‘Our Credibility Is On The Line,'" Lind writes. The logic of reputational credibility can only ever lead to the same conclusion: toward the use of American military
force abroad, even in cases where there is no clear reason to intervene and where the downsides of intervention would seem to outweigh the upsides. It is a
compass that only points in one direction. In
this theory, the use of force is inherently good, regardless of how or where
the bombs fall, because it strengthens American leadership globally. And an absence of American military action is almost
always bad, because it is said to invite new problems and greater threats. "Every time analysts and leaders call for war, they warn that inaction will jeopardize
America’s credibility," Lind and Press, her husband, have previously written in Foreign Policy. Alarmingly, despite the mounting evidence against reputation theory,
it continues to drive US foreign policy discourse — and has recently even been integrated into the formal legal basis of American foreign policy. "Credibility has
migrated from foreign policy into the constitutional law of war powers," Vanderbilt's Ganesh Sitaraman found in a 2014 Harvard Law Review article: In a series of
opinions, including on Somalia (1992), Haiti (2004), and Libya (2011), the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has argued that the credibility of the
United Nations Security Council is a "national interest" that can justify presidential authority to use military force without prior congressional authorization. The
2011 case is particularly striking, given that it occurred under President Obama, who has personally denounced reputational credibility as "so easily disposed of that
I’m always puzzled by how people make the argument." Yet reputation theory is so prevalent in American thinking that even a president who specifically opposes
that theory — and is himself a constitutional lawyer — has allowed it to be formally integrating into his government's legal case for war. If reputational credibility
has been so repeatedly debunked, both in specific instances and as a theory, why does it continue to loom so large in America's foreign policy discourse? Tufts
University's Michael Beckley
hinted at one possible explanation in a much-discussed article last year in
International Security: Could it have something to do with America's uniquely broad network of
alliances? Beckley's article was actually asking a different question — whether those alliances lead the US to war,
by allowing allies to "entangle" it in foreign conflict . (Beckley concludes the answer is no; other scholars have disputed his findings.)
But, in reviewing so-called "entanglement theory," Beckley points out that reputational credibility, even if it doesn't exist in the world, is something that definitely
exists in the minds of foreign leaders and foreign policy decision-makers. "The alliance comes to be perceived as an end in itself, transcending the more concrete
national security interests for which it was initially conceived," political scientist Jack Levy wrote in a well-known 1981 paper (which Beckley cites). Here's the key
quote: Political decision makers come to believe that support for one's allies, regardless of its
consequences, is essential for their national prestige, and that the failure to provide support would
ultimately result in their diplomatic isolation in a hostile and threatening world. So it's not that reputation is a real
thing that compels states to act in a certain way, but rather that individual decision-makers are driven by their own mistaken

belief in reputation. As a result, Beckley writes, "reputational concerns can drive states into wars over trivial
interests in peripheral places." Some scholars, including Levy, argue that America's allies promote the idea of reputation, as a means to convince
the United States to commit more resources to serve their own interests. Foreign leaders do seem to become awfully preoccupied with American credibility when
they want the US to take military action on their behalf. When the US failed to bomb Syria in 2013, for example, Syria's enemies in the region — Arab leaders who
are also allied with the US — declared that American credibility was at stake. "I think I believe in American power more than Obama does," Jordan's King Abdullah II
said of Obama's decision to not bomb Syria. This comes at a time when the US has grown unusually indulgent of its allies ,
as Jeremy Shapiro and Richard Sokolsky argue in a recent article. This has made American policymakers more likely to heed allies' demands and take their claims at
face value. But Dartmouth's Jennifer Lind finds evidence that allies make this argument only opportunistically , and almost
always about conflicts in which they are directly involved. They might speak in the language of
reputation theory, but their behavior suggests that they do not really believe in it . Reputation theory,
after all, says that America's allies would want the US to intervene as much as possible in other conflicts,
when in fact the opposite is usually true. In fact, so-called reputation is actually driven almost entirely by internal American dynamics.
Consider America's belief that it had to intervene in Korea to reassure European allies, who in fact wanted no such thing. Lind makes this point well

by citing America's pledge to defend Taiwan from a possible Chinese invasion. According to reputation
theory, Asian leaders who also fear Chinese aggression would want the US to make and uphold this
pledge. American policymakers indeed believe this , and it is one reason (albeit far from the only reason) why the US has pledged to
fight in such a war. "Many U.S. leaders and foreign policy elites today argue that, in the event of a war in the Taiwan strait, the United States must defend Taiwan or
see its credibility collapse," Lind writes. In
reality, the opposite is true. American allies in Asia, Lind writes, "make it clear
that they under no circumstances want war in the Taiwan strait , and fear that the Americans will
someday fight one with China." The Taiwan example is instructive, if alarming: America's foreign policy
community believes something that is flatly untrue . And while a Sino-American war over Taiwan is extremely unlikely, it looked
substantially less unlikely in the 1990s. It is concerning that American policymakers were committing the US to fight such a war in part because they believed
something that was 180-degrees the opposite of reality. The
point is not just that America's mistaken belief in credibility is
dangerous, but also that it does not come from allies. It comes from us.
 Link Turn: Solve SCS k Allies/Cred

halting Chinese aggression in the SCS restores credibility among US allies

Hal Brands & Zack Cooper ’19 is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at
the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic
and Budgetary Assessments, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His most recent books are American
Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump and The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order (co-
authored with Charles Edel) & is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, an associate at
Armitage International, and an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University. He is writing a
book on strategic competition that explains how militaries adapt during periods of rise and decline,
February 2019, “After the Responsible Stakeholder, What? Debating America’s China Strategy” from
https://tnsr.org/2019/02/after-the-responsible-stakeholder-what-debating-americas-china-strategy-2/,
accessed 7/6/19 || OES-AT
Accordingly, the center of gravity for a strategy of collective balancing is the alignment decisions of states in the Indo-Pacific region. If Indo-
Pacific countries align with the United States in a firm balancing coalition, then Washington would have the political, economic, and military
power to resist Chinese efforts to alter the status quo in destabilizing ways. And if China cannot dominate the Indo-Pacific, it would not be able
to mount a serious hegemonic challenge to the United States. Beijing would not be able to dictate the terms of trade in the region in a way that
gives it decisive economic advantages over the United States; it would not have the regional springboard necessary to project significant
military power on a truly international scale. In other words, by keeping China constrained and off-balance within
the Indo-Pacific, collective balancing prevents China from reshaping the world beyond the Indo-Pacific .17
¶ As the logic of collective balancing would predict, Beijing’s coercive actions already appear to be facilitating greater
cooperation among some regional states, such as Japan, India, and Australia, while also causing those
and other countries to seek closer security relationships with the United States. Time is therefore on America’s
side, advocates of collective balancing argue, so long as the United States adequately supports and encourages the
resistance that Chinese assertiveness provokes. And if the United States and its allies and partners hold the
line and show that China cannot overturn the regional and international order, Beijing may eventually adopt more acceptable
policies ¶ Collective balancing, then, would hinge on America’s ability to maintain a coalition of countries sufficient to deter or counteract
Chinese revisionism. Doing so would require undertaking an array of enhanced measures to demonstrate that Washington can prevent Beijing
from dominating the region politically, economically, and militarily, and to assure regional states that the United States will reliably back
countries that stand up to Beijing. ¶ In practice, this would necessitate significant investments in new U.S. military capabilities to reverse the
deteriorating regional balance of power. The
United States would also support countries from Japan to Vietnam as
they develop their own anti-access/area denial capabilities to keep China at bay . Washington would use military
sales, training, exercises, and other tools to bolster countries confronting Chinese coercion. U.S. leaders would simultaneously intensify efforts
to provide Indo-Pacific states with alternatives to deepening economic dependence on China by rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (or a
similar replacement) and working with key allies and partners to offer loans and capital to vulnerable countries. Good first steps include the
recently passed BUILD Act, which will substantially increase U.S. development financing in the Indo-Pacific, and the U.S.-Australia-Japan
Trilateral Partnership for infrastructure development.18 ¶ Collective balancing would also feature stronger efforts to delineate acceptable
Chinese behavior from unacceptable activity, and to inflict harsher penalties on Beijing when lines are crossed. To date, many U.S. positions
regarding China have been murky, such as Washington’s ambiguous approach to application of the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty.19
China has often challenged these commitments using “gray zone” coercion — incremental expansion
designed to probe when and where Washington is willing to stand by its commitments . Instances of the
United States failing to help its friends beat back gray-zone coercion — such as the Scarborough Shoal
incident in 2012 — have undermined perceptions of U.S. reliability in the region and discouraged allies
and partners from taking a harder line toward Beijing.20 Conversely, since President Barack Obama stated that the
Senkaku Islands fell within Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 2014, Beijing has avoided a major confrontation.21 ¶ Collective
cooperation with allies and partners to determine and demonstrate the extent of
balancing thus requires closer
U.S. commitments. Lingering questions about U.S. alliance guarantees — namely, whether the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty
covers the islands and reefs that Manila controls in the South China Sea — would be clarified, with the understanding that the risk of giving
America’s friends license to engage in irresponsible behavior is dramatically outweighed by the danger that unchecked Chinese salami-slicing
would hollow out America’s alliances on the installment plan. Any Chinese efforts to acquire control of new or disputed territory, or to restrict
freedom of navigation or overflight, would need to be met with a forceful response. Diplomatic or economic costs would also have to be
imposed for other destabilizing actions, such as deploying additional military capabilities to man-made Chinese islands or declaring an Air
Defense Identification Zone covering the South China Sea. By showing that Washington is fully committed to sharper competition with China,
advocates of collective balancing argue, this strategy would rally the region and ensure that Beijing faces a multilateral coalition it cannot
overwhelm.
 Link Turn: SCS Pressure k Allies/Cred

Southeast Asian countries want the US to curb Chinese aggression in the SCS
Premesha Saha ‘19 is an Associate Fellow with ORF’s Strategic Studies Programme. Her research
focuses on Southeast Asia, East Asia and the South Pacific — spanning the Eastern Indian Ocean.
Premesha’s other research interests include: Indonesia’s maritime strategy, the emerging dynamics of
the Indo-Pacific region, India and Southeast Asia, India’s Act East Policy, Asia-Pacific multilateralism.
Premesha has also published a chapter titled ‘The Genesis of the Scarborough Shoal Dispute between
the Philippines and China’ in Prof. Manmohini Kaul and Dr. Anushree Chakraborty (edited) India’s Look
East to Act East Policy: Re-examining the emerging issues and partnerships in Indo-Pacific; New Delhi:
Pentagon Press. Her PhD thesis is titled, ‘Indonesia’s Maritime strategy in the Indian Ocean.’ She has
published extensively in peer reviewed journals as well as newspapers like Maritime Affairs, The
Indonesia Quarterly and The Jakarta Post, February 27 th, 2019, “Is the South China Sea issue flaring up
again?” from https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/is-south-china-sea-issue-flaring-up-again-48584/,
accessed 7/6/19 || OES-AT
The United States has stepped up its Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs) in the South China Sea as a response to China’s efforts to
further enforce its claims in the disputed sea. The US has already conducted two FONOPs this year. The USS McCampbell sailed near the Paracel
Islands in January, the USS Spruance and the USS Preble sailed near Mischief Reef in the Spratlys on 11 February. According to a Defence
Report, Washington conducted five FONOPs last year and four in 2017. ¶ In a recent statement for the US Naval Institute News, Naval
Commander of the US INDOPACOM, Admiral Phil Davidson was quoted as saying, “the U.S. will maintain the recent pace of freedom of
navigation operations in the South China Sea aimed at challenging China’s territorial claims. China’s
effort to extend its territorial
and economic influence was a bigger long-term threat to the free movement of trade and people in the
region than North Korea.”. Besides the US, countries like Britain is also deploying HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier to the heavily
disputed South China Sea in a joint mission with the US. UK had also sailed the HMS Albion Royal Navy warship through the disputed Paracel
islands in the South China Sea on route to Vietnam in 2018. For the second time on February 18, 2019 the US and UK navies conducted
maritime security exercises drills in the South China Sea. The first joint drill was held in January this year involving the US Navy’s guided missile
destroyer USS McCampbell and Royal Navy’s frigate HMS Argyll. Other countries like Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and France, are
also beefing up their South China Sea operations in cooperation with the US. These operations are undoubtedly irking Chinese sentiments.
Though the potential for a direct conflict between the US and China in the South China Sea is limited, but according to Yue Gang, a retired
People’s Liberation Army Colonel at the Munich Security Conference 2019, “China was facing growing pressure from freedom of navigation
operations and would send more vessels, including coastguard ships, to the South China Sea.” ¶ Meanwhile,
the Southeast Asian
countries have been engaging in confidence building and trust building exercises with China like the
Framework for the Code of Conduct (COC) was adopted in 2017 and the ASEAN-China Maritime Exercise was inaugurated in 2018. ¶ Though
Southeast Asian countries have traditionally not been in favor of entering into bilateral negotiations with
China with regard to the dispute , but in recent times, Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte agreed to solve the dispute with China
through bilateral talks. Similarly, the Vietnamese government had too said in April 2018 that “it would be willing
to hold talks with China to resolve disputes in the area in accordance with international law.” China and
Thailand have also been having discussions on the South China Sea issue. Both the Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and
the Thai Foreign Minister Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai had agreed during their strategic consultations that the “South China Sea situation
is becoming stable and the momentum has been strengthened in boosting dialogue, managing differences and deepening cooperation.”
Countries like Singapore, Thailand have expressed their appreciation over the statements by both the Chinese President Xi Jinping and PM Li
Keqiang in Singapore in November 2018, that the COC talks should be completed within the next three years. Therefore a stark change in the
approach of many of the Southeast countries can be seen. They had mostly demanded an immediate conclusion of the COC as ASEAN and China
have been engaged in discussions on a potential COC for nearly two decades. But presently a three year timeline proposed by China has
become acceptable. Hence, if
the FONOPs being conducted by the US and its allies and partners in the South
China Sea is being taken positively by the regional countries is a question that needs to be asked . ¶ The
negotiations for a COC on the South China Sea will take place at the platform of the ASEAN in the latter half of February this year. In view of this
and the background provided above, two issues need to be analysed. First, what impact will these growing number of FONOPs have on the
upcoming COC deliberations? Second, why has there been a shift in the approach of the Southeast Asian countries towards FONOPs and China’s
actions as well as statements with regard to the South China Sea issue? ¶ According to recent reports, Vietnamese
population,
intellectuals are appealing to the US for helping thwart China’s ambitions in the South China Sea . There
are statements from the Philippines, where acceptance and appreciation has been expressed if countries like the
US, UK, Japan, France, Australia, New Zealand and even India would want to patrol the South China Sea
with the intention of upholding the FON rights . But, additionally it has been pointed out by the Philippines that if during the
course of the patrols the contested areas are approached then the dispute would only spark. Even scholars like Collin Coh of RSIS Singapore and
Rajeev Ranjan Chaturvedy of the Nanyang Technological University have expressed that the FONOPs will not be enough to restrain China’s
ambitions in the region and in the South China Sea. With more countries getting involved in the dispute, it can escalate the tension and increase
the possibility of minor skirmishes. ¶ For the US these FONOPS can be due to show its influence and dominance in the Pacific, but for the
Southeast Asian countries the need now is to maintain calm, peace, unfettered access and FON in their regional waters. ¶ A minimization in the
number of FONOPs at least till the deliberations of the COC continue will therefore be a welcome move. The change in attitude of the Southeast
countries can be due to the Trump administration’s ‘unpredictable Asia Policy’. ¶ US’ pulling out of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and his
absence from two key Asia Pacific summit meetings last year was not received well by the regional countries. Then the end of 2018 also
witnessed the signing of the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act (ARIA). The ARIA not only talks of the US’ relations with China, India, the ten
member states of the ASEAN, and Northeast Asian allies Japan and South Korea, but also draws attention to the South China Sea issue. Another
reason can be to keep China engaged in discussions in the ASEAN on the South China Sea issue. China has for long tried to keep away the South
China Sea issue from being brought up at the platform of the ASEAN. ¶ The ASEAN countries are aware that keeping China involved in political
and diplomatic deliberations is the best available option for them. ¶ The road to the conclusion of the COC will not be an easy one. According to
a Report by an Expert Working Group of the CSIS entitled, “Defusing the South China Sea Disputes: A Regional Blueprint”, it was mentioned that
in the single draft negotiating text that was agreed to by the ASEAN countries in 2018 important hurdles can be noticed like “geographic scope,
potential dispute settlement mechanisms, and details of resource exploration and development ”.
The viable option will be to
persuade China to abide by agreements on areas like ensuring of fishing rights and territories; fisheries
management and environmental cooperation in the South China Sea; joint marine research; resource
management (cooperation on oil and gas production in the South China Sea). ¶ Most importantly there
should be agreement on avoiding clashes with both regional and extra-regional countries in the disputed
waters; maintenance of freedom of navigation and overflight; resolving disputes through peaceful means; and refraining from occupying,
inhabiting or constructing facilities on uninhabited features. The COC should currently be looking into dealing with the immediate triggers for
conflict. The ASEAN countries are willing to take small steps at a time. They are aware that coming to an agreement that would be acceptable to
both sides will require many rounds of negotiations. It will be a time consuming process and thus the timeline of three years proposed by China
might be an acceptable proposition at the moment.

Japan wants a solution in the SCS

Yoichiro Sato ’18 is a professor at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, October 3 rd, 2018, “Japan versus
China in the South China Sea” from https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Japan-versus-China-in-the-South-
China-Sea, accessed 7/6/19 || OES-AT
Japan has sent a submarine to the South China Sea for the first time since the Second World War, to participate in military exercises. ¶ The
Kuroshio last month joined the country's newest helicopter-carrying destroyer, Kaga, in combined anti-submarine warfare operations with the
U.S. Navy. ¶ For other big industrial nations with global security interests, it would barely have been worth a mention. But for Japan it was
another important -- and welcome -- move in its tiptoe advance to the wider defense role that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is resolutely pursuing.
¶ Even as Abe, who was re-elected president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in September, is preparing to revise Japan's pacifist
constitution, he is rightly making full use of the existing laws to defend Tokyo's interests. ¶ Japan is extending its reach from home waters to
the South China Sea, where the shipping lines are nothing less than Tokyo's energy and economic lifelines. Moreover, it is precisely where
China, Japan's most significant strategic challenger, is expanding its military presence and reinforcing
claims to disputed islands and maritime territory. In the latest sign of the growing tensions , Chinese and US
warships almost collided on Sept. 30 in an incident in the disputed waters. ¶ Japan is equally right to link its expanding role
closely with that of the U.S., as it can only supplement the much larger and more assertive American naval forces. ¶ Japan's
increasing naval activities reflect the two allies' push for a "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" -- a political strategy that also includes India and
Australia aimed at containing Chinese expansion. ¶ The South China Sea (SCS) is an arena of growing clashes between
U.S. and Chinese nuclear strategies. As the first step to improve its retaliatory nuclear strike capability against the huge American
atomic arsenal, China has deployed strategic submarines in the SCS, operating from a base on Hainan Island. Maintaining anti-submarine
warfare capability in the SCS to match the Chinese efforts is a key U.S. naval strategy, in which Japan plays an increasingly useful role. ¶ China's
recent challenges against U.S. and Australian naval vessels on freedom-of-navigation voyages in the SCS have lend more credibility to Japan's
assessment that Beijing represents a growing strategic threat. ¶ Japan is increasingly convinced that China treats the SCS
as its territorial waters. In territorial waters , passage of even commercial vessels can be regulated during international conflicts.
Even during peace time, foreign military vessels cannot freely transit such waters or conduct exercises or intelligence-gathering activities. ¶
While China's naval expansion poses a growing military challenge to the U.S., in the first instance, it also attempts to coerce Southeast Asian
states into acquiescing to Beijing's legal claims to disputed territory, for example around the Spratly Islands. ¶ Japan
has responded
both diplomatically and militarily to counter the growing Chinese naval presence in the SCS. Since 2010,
Tokyo has openly criticized China over the SCS dispute and called for a negotiated solution among the
disputants, which include Vietnam and the Philippines . ¶ Japan has worked with the U.S. and some
Southeast Asian countries to have this issue addressed in various regional forums such as the annual East Asia Summit. ¶
Japan has also cooperated with the littoral states of the Malacca Straits, a key maritime choke point, to ensure safe passage of commercial
vessels. ¶ Tokyo has contributed to anti-piracy activities in the region and helped develop a coast guard network that has recently expanded to
Indian Ocean littoral states. Japan has provided patrol boats to Vietnam and the Philippines since 2015, though it declined a request from
Manila for high-tech P3-C surveillance/anti-submarine warfare planes. ¶ On a bigger scale, Kaga's sister ship Izumo took part in a trilateral
"Malabar" naval exercise in the SCS with the U.S. and India in 2017, drilling anti-submarine warfare. ¶ But
it is worth remembering
that the limited air-defense capability of the Japanese helicopter-carrying destroyers would not allow
unilateral operations in the SCS in a real conflict. Even the hypothetical deployment of new F35 fighter planes on board Kaga
-- currently under discussion in Tokyo -- could bring only limited gains, as China's military capacity grows with base construction in progress on
disputed SCS reefs. ¶ U.S. operations in the region -- and Japan's involvement in them -- have not deterred Beijing from preparing for deploying
fighter and bomber planes. China has repeatedly protested at Japanese naval activities in the SCS. ¶ Japan's new security activism has taken
place under its pacifist constitution. A reinterpretation of Article 9 -- the key anti-militarist clause -- in 2014 to allow collective defense
smoothened the way for a closer wartime cooperation with the U.S., and American allies like Australia. ¶ Under the new interpretation, the
guideline for bilateral defense cooperation with the U.S. explicitly expands the geographical scope of cooperation "beyond Asia-Pacific" and the
mission scope of the Self Defense Force beyond "rear support." ¶ While Abe is expected to present proposals to amend the constitution during
his new three-year term as party president, the Kaga and Kuroshio have demonstrated that even without an amendment, Japan can increase its
contribution to collective security, even far away from the home islands. ¶ Japan is correct to increase its involvement in the SCS, as the U.S.
Navy, which has for decades surrounded Japan with a sense of comfort, no longer enjoys overwhelming dominance in the light of China's naval
advance. ¶ Tokyo is supplementing both a shortage of U.S. capabilities and of credibility in the region, with
increasing doubts about U.S. President Donald Trump's commitment to Asia. ¶ Japan is also right to be cautious about cooperating with
Southeast Asian states. Japan has refrained from providing sophisticated offensive military hardware, which carries multiple risks. Arms
transfers may drive unintended wedges between Southeast Asian nations when their unity is essential in countering China. ¶ There is also the
risk of a country switching to China's side -- something which already appears a serious danger in the Philippines under President Rodrigo
Duterte. ¶ Japan must strike the right balance. It can seemingly expand its SCS role without the domestic political controversy involved in
constitutional revision. ¶ As long as Tokyo sticks to supplementing and anchoring the U.S. commitment to maritime security in the Indo-Pacific
it will not go far wrong. Unilateral networking with local would-be partners in the SCS must proceed with caution, especially when it comes to
supplying sophisticated weapons. ¶ In this sense, the current constitution works both ways -- it allows for strengthening cooperation with the
U.S. and its allies, whilst preventing Tokyo from seeking risky casual tie-ups with potentially unpredictable local partners.
 No Impact: Subs/BMD Solves

Official posture doesn’t change and subs and BMD solve

Margaret Williams 18, MA Candidate at Stanford University’s International Policy Studies program,
citing Japanese and South Korean statements about the NPT, 6/13/18, “The 2018 Nuclear Posture
Review: Reception by U.S. Allies in the Asia-Pacific,” https://nuclearnetwork.csis.org/2018-nuclear-
posture-review-reception-u-s-allies-asia-pacific/

In February 2018, the Department of Defense released the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). This document outlines U.S. policy
regarding the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy and the capabilities needed to
meet those requirements, among other topics. The NPR also serves as a valuable signaling tool for U.S. allies, partners, and adversaries around the globe. Given
advancements in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, the NPR indicates that two central U.S. goals are deterring North Korean aggression and assuring South

Korea and Japan of the strength of the U.S. nuclear umbrella . To counter North Korean aggression, the
NPR offers a tailored deterrence strategy. This includes 1) calling for “a complete, verifiable, and irreversible nuclear freeze;” 2) clearly communicating to
North Korea that any use of a nuclear weapon against the U.S. or it allies “will result in the end of [the Kim] regime;” 3) the deployment of early warning and

missile defense systems “to degrade strikes left of launch”; and 4) retaining a variety of nuclear and conventional capabilities in the region to
hold North Korean nuclear targets at risk.1 The choice of words regarding the third element is particularly revealing. “Left of launch” is generally understood to indicate a preventive or
preemptive strike. Additionally, use of the word “degrade” acknowledges such an endeavor would not likely be one-hundred percent effective at eliminating North Korea’s nuclear capability.
North Korea’s response to the 2018 NPR was immediate and overwhelmingly negative. According to media reports, North Korean officials condemned the document as tantamount to “a
declaration of war against the whole world.”2 As fears grew that this war of words would lead to a kinetic conflict, a window of opportunity to de-escalate the situation presented itself in
conjunction with the Winter Olympics.3 In the wake of this détente, it is worth examining whether the 2018 NPR is achieving one of its intended purposes—assuring allies in East Asia. South
Korea Nowhere is the North Korean nuclear and missile threat more palpable than in South Korea. According to the Congressional Research Service, even without using a nuclear weapon, a
North Korean attack against Seoul could result in hundreds of thousands of casualties in the first few hours.4 If the conflict involved nuclear weapons, those numbers could climb to the tens of
millions including not only South Korean deaths but also American and Japanese fatalities. Since 1954, the United States and South Korea have maintained a mutual security agreement that
has focused on defending the South from attacks by North Korea. The treaty has also served as a non-proliferation tool by bringing South Korea under the U.S. nuclear umbrella thus obviating
the need for South Korea to develop its own nuclear weapons capacity. As North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs have advanced, the South Korean public has become more embracing of
a more assertive nuclear posture. Polls indicate that 60% of the public supports a South Korean nuclear weapons program and 68% of the public supports redeployment of U.S. tactical nuclear
weapons (TNWs).5 This sentiment has been echoed by leaders of the South Korean opposition party as well as in the United States.6 President Moon has remained firmly against such a move.

the 2018 NPR, the document seeks to demonstrate the resolve of U.S.
While the decision to redeploy TNWs in South Korean is outside the purview of

extended deterrence and thereby counteract incentives for South Korea to pursue its own nuclear
capabilities. This is partially achieved by calling for the development of submarine launched cruise missile (SLCM) as well as low-yield sea
launched ballistic missile to provide a more flexible deterrent. Although the NPR does not explicitly link these capabilities to the
North Korean threat, it implies they would play a key role assuring allies in Asia: In the 2010 NPR, the United States
announced the retirement of its previous nuclear-armed SLCM, which for decades had contributed to deterrence and the assurance of allies, particularly in Asia. Given the increasing need for
flexible and low-yield options to strengthen deterrence and assurance, we will immediately begin efforts to restore this capability by initiating a capabilities study leading to an Analysis of

Alternatives (AoA) for the rapid development of a modern SLCM.7 The South Korean response to the 2018 NPR has been positive .
Speaking on the condition of anonymity one foreign ministry official was quoted saying, “Our government evaluates that the review has reaffirmed (Washington’s) pledge to provide extended
deterrence to South Korea and other allies. South Korea and the U.S. will continue to cooperate in enhancing the promised extended deterrence.”8 It is possible the assurances offered by the
2018 NPR helped create the necessary conditions for the April 27 summit between Kim and Moon. In this regard the NPR may have served as a confidence building measure for the ROK
government and Korean public by demonstrating the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence. By all accounts, the initial summit meeting between the two leaders appears to have gone well
and laid the foundation for a subsequent meeting between Kim and President Trump. Kim Jong-Un has indicated a willingness to denuclearize for an end to the Korean War and promises by
the U.S. not to seek regime change in North Korea.9 However, it is important to note that the term “denuclearize” is undefined and holds different meanings for both North Korea and the
United States that could prove an impediment to future negotiations.10 Indeed, a lack of alignment in this area is likely fueling the current wave of virulence. The meeting between Kim and
Trump is scheduled for June 12th. Although history is ripe with examples of how mismatched expectations and underlying mistrust can quickly derail diplomacy, the current easing of tensions
on the Peninsula should be met with cautious optimism. It is a welcome change to a situation that was seemingly on a nuclear collision course. Japan Since the end of World War II, Japan’s
constitution has retained a unique feature known as the pacifist clause, or Article 9. The clause rejects the use of force to settle international disputes and prohibits a standing military,
although Japan does maintain a Self Defense Force. This defense posture is enabled by the U.S. – Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security which permits the U.S. to base forces in
Japan in exchange for promises to defend Japan in the event of an attack. However, the strengthen of this alliance and future viability of Japan’s pacifist character has been tested by the
growing North Korean nuclear threat and skepticism about U.S. commitment to extended deterrence. For example, after two of North Korea’s missile tests in 2017 flew over Japan, Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe declared it was time to amend Japan’s constitution to allow a permanent military with expanded mandate. Critically, Japan has significant latent nuclear weapons
capabilities due to it civilian nuclear power industry. While a signatory to the NPT, most analysts believe that should Japan decide to sprint for the bomb, it could do so in a relatively short
timeframe.11 That said, nuclear acquisition in Japan remains highly unpopular. A recent survey found that even if North Korea does not give up its weapons, 69% of Japanese oppose
developing a deterrent of their own.12 Nonetheless the credibility of the U.S. security guarantee plays an important non-proliferation role, especially dissuading the political leadership of the

The
utility of acquiring nuclear weapons. To that end, the 2018 NPR sought not only to deter North Korean aggression against Japan, but also to assure Japan such actions are unnecessary.

response from the Japanese government indicted strong support for the Trump administration’s NPR :
Japan highly appreciates the latest NPR which clearly articulates the U.S. resolve to ensure the effectiveness of its deterrence and its commitment to providing extended deterrence to its allies
including Japan, in light of the international security environment which has been rapidly worsened since the release of the previous 2010 NPR.13
 No Impact: SoKo Prolif
No South Korean prolif
Troy Stangarone 16, the Senior Director for Congressional Affairs and Trade at the Korea Economic
Institute of America, 2/29/16, “Going Nuclear Wouldn’t Be Easy for South Korea”,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/going-nuclear-wouldnt-be-easy-south-korea-15345?page=0%2C1

However, SouthKoreans are rarely asked if they would be willing to bear the costs of a domestic nuclear
weapon. Those cost would likely come in the form of diminished international standing, economic
hardship, and uncertain strategic benefits. For South Korea to develop its own nuclear weapons program it would have
to join North Korea as the only country to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an ignominious
club for sure. Withdrawal would dent Seoul’s growing international standing and make it the only member of MIKTA, an emerging club of
middle powers, to have a nuclear weapon, something which would not enhance South Korea’s middle power prestige. While a loss of
international stature to ensure domestic security might be an acceptable trade off, there
would likely be economic costs as well.
Developing a nuclear weapon would have consequences for South Korea’s own nuclear industry.
Nuclear power provides a third of South Korea’s electricity and represents 13 percent of its primary
energy consumption. Lacking adequate domestic reserves of nuclear fuel, South Korea is dependent
upon members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group which conditions supply on the non-proliferation of
nuclear weapons. Pursuing a nuclear option would put the fuel supply for South Korea’s domestic
reactors at risk . South Korea also has designs on becoming a major exporter of nuclear power plants . In
2009, it won a $40 billion contract to construct and manage four nuclear power plants in the UAE and in 2013 a bid for a research reactor in
Jordan. Thosedeals and any future potential exports would be put risk. South Korea would also face
potential economic sanctions. Iran and North Korea have both faced significant financial and economic sanctions for their pursuit of
nuclear weapons, while India and Pakistan faced sanctions as well. Because South Korea is perhaps one of the world’s
most trade dependent nations it would be especially vulnerable to external economic pressure. Given the
clear and present danger that North Korea’s nuclear program presents to South Korea, it is hard to know what the consequences might be if
Seoul chose the nuclear option. Perhaps the international community would look upon South Korea’s choice with a greater degree of
understanding and acceptance than other nations, limiting any economic consequences. However, there are no assurances that will be the
case. From
a strategic perspective the decision to go nuclear could focus minds in Beijing, but in ways that
Seoul might not want. China has been vigorous in its objections to South Korean consideration of
deploying the THAAD missile defense system. Beijing would likely object even more strenuously to a South Korean nuclear
weapons program, especially if it opened the door to a Japanese nuclear weapon.
 No Impact: Japan Prolif
No Japanese Prolif

Mike Mochizuki 17 holds the Japan-U.S. Relations Chair in Memory of Gaston Sigur at the Elliott
School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He is co-editor of “Nuclear Debates in
Asia: The Role of Geopolitics and Domestic Processes.”, 11/6/17, “Three reasons why Japan will likely
continue to reject nuclear weapons”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2017/11/06/japan-is-likely-to-retain-its-non-nuclear-principles-heres-why/?
utm_term=.7891237c8ec1

Although Japan has long had the technical ability to develop nuclear weapons — its “nuclear hedge” — it has refrained from doing so.
Japan instead remains firmly committed to its 1967 Three Non-Nuclear Principles of not developing, not
possessing and not introducing nuclear weapons. This is not the first time that Japan has reexamined those principles. Similar debates transpired
after China’s hydrogen bomb test in 1967, the Soviet Union’s deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles in Siberia during the 1980s and North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006. Is this time
different? Reacting to North Korea’s threatening behavior, former Japanese defense minister Shigeru Ishiba stated in September that Japan should at least debate the decision not to permit

This latest
the introduction of nuclear weapons on Japanese territory. Ishiba implied that Tokyo should consider asking Washington to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Japan.

debate is likely to end in the same way as previous debates , however. Japan will continue to adhere to its
Three Non-Nuclear Principles and forswear nuclear weapons . Here are three reasons for that: 1)
Staying non-nuclear is part of Japan’s national identity The Three Non-Nuclear Principles are a clear part
of Japan’s national identity, not simply a policy preference. Repeated polls indicate overwhelming
popular support for the three principles in Japan. A 2014 Asahi newspaper poll revealed that support for the principles
had risen to 82 percent, compared with 78 percent in a 1988 poll. Despite growing concerns about North Korea’s
nuclear program and China’s military power during this period, Japanese support for remaining non-nuclear
actually increased.Even after the provocative North Korean missile launches over Japan in August and September, a
Fuji News Network poll showed that nearly 80 percent of the Japanese population remained opposed to
Japan becoming a nuclear weapons state . And nearly 69 percent opposed having the United States bring
nuclear weapons into Japan. The legacy of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings leave many Japanese
convinced that their country has a moral responsibility to promote global nuclear disarmament — as well
as to forgo nuclear weapons of its own. The 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster has reinforced this view. In
fact, increasing numbers of Japanese believe that the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” is unnecessary for Japanese security. A June 2010 NHK survey
revealed that 20.8 percent felt that U.S. nuclear deterrence is necessary for Japan’s security in both the present and future, while 34.8 percent
believed it unnecessary. The June 2015 NHK poll showed that only 10.3 percent thought the U.S. nuclear umbrella is necessary for both the
present and the future — 48.9 percent responded that it is unnecessary now and later. 2) Powerful
players in Japanese politics
can block nuclear acquisition In addition to public opposition to nuclear weapons, Japan has significant “veto players”
— crucial political or economic actors that are likely to block efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Japan has a
robust nuclear energy industry. But public acceptance of nuclear energy in the 1950s resulted from a fundamental political bargain: nuclear
energy, but no nuclear weapons.
 No Impact: Japan Alliance Resilient

Japan alliance is resilient

Schoff 18 (James Schoff is a senior fellow in the Carnegie Asia Program. His research focuses on U.S.-
Japan relations and regional engagement, Japanese technology innovation, and regional trade and
security dynamics., 12-13-2018, "Political Change in America and Implications for the US-Japan Alliance,"
Taylor & Francis, https://www-tandfonline-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/full/10.1080/13439006.2018.1545489)SEM
Implications for Japan and the US-Japan alliance There are no easy solutions for Japanese policy makers as they consider how best to craft their
own nation’s strategy amid this political turmoil in America. Much depends on the choices made by US leaders and voters. Japan’s main
objectives are to maintain a strong US security commitment and sustain active US cooperation in
support of a rules-based international order that maximizes economic openness and global stability . There
is no equal substitute to the United States for Japan in pursuit of these objectives, so Tokyo is incentivized to help preserve the
alliance over the long term. The situation calls for vigilance by Japanese policy makers, but so far it does
not require a radical departure in strategy. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s proactive and personal embrace of Trump was an
effective initial approach that ameliorated the worst of Trump’s tendencies vis-à-vis Japan and its interests at the outset. By acting as an early
mentor for Trump, Abe provided something of value that Trump appreciated, and it bought Tokyo some time before the new US president
began acting more independently and his policies began to have a negative impact. Minimizing the extent of this impact in the short and
medium term is another priority for Japan. During the presidential campaign Trump frequently criticized Japanese trade practices and America’s
persistent bilateral trade deficit, portending a push for market access agreements with Tokyo and US import restrictions. He also vowed to
press for larger host nation support payments from Japan for US military deployments in the region. While a few of Trump’s promises have
been realized, the impact has not been as bad as first feared and overall the alliance has been marked more by continuity than change. This is
particularly true for the alliance’s security role, and Tokyo’s
growing defense spending, purchases of high-end US
defense systems, and closer cooperation in new domains will continue to support an effective security
alliance. The Trump administration’s tougher China policy has also pleased Japan’s defense planners at
times. Still, Trump’s quick withdrawal from international agreements, imposition of tariffs, softening of North Korea policy, and other moves
forced the Abe administration to consider mitigating tactics.
 No Impact: Alliances Inevitable

US alliances will endure – they’re more likely to strengthen

Charles L Glaser ’15 is a professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Department of
Political Science at George Washington University, July 2015, “Time for a U.S.-China Grand Bargain” from
https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/time-us-china-grand-bargain, accessed 7/6/19 || OES-AT
Understanding the Benefits of Accomodation ¶ Territorial accommodation is frequently viewed as a deeply flawed strategy, but it can be a
state's best option for protecting vital interests. First, accommodation can satisfy or partially satisfy an adversary that wants to change the
status quo, thereby reducing the costs the adversary is willing to pay to further change the status quo, which in turn reduces the probability of
war. Second, accommodation can enhance an adversary's security by shrinking the military threat the state poses or by signaling the state's
benign motives, or both—which in turns increases the state's own security. Third, accommodation can reduce military competition between
the state and its adversary, which under a range of conditions can improve both states' security. ¶ There are, however, costs and risks
associated with territorial accommodation. First, the state loses the economic, security, political, and status value of possessing or defending
the territory in question. Second, territorial accommodation could embolden the state's adversary, encouraging the adversary to pursue
additional concessions. Whether this occurs depends on the adversary's motives—an adversary with limited aims could be satisfied with the
initial round of concessions, whereas one with unlimited aims could be encouraged to expand further because it now doubts the state's resolve
or because the concessions increased its power. ¶ Third, concessions
could lead allies to question the state's willingness
to come to their defense in a crisis. ¶ Reevaluating the U.S. Commitment to Taiwan ¶ China's rise poses difficult challenges for the
United States. If military competition and political frictions continue to intensify, the United States could find itself engaged in a new cold war.
China has long made clear that unification with Taiwan is a paramount political and security goal. The
United States is currently committed to defending Taiwan if China launches an unprovoked attack. This commitment is a deep source of Chinese
distrust of, and tension with, the United States. Consequently, the United States should consider ending this
commitment. Doing so would have both benefits and costs . ¶ Benefits. Eliminating the U.S. commitment to Taiwan would
have three main benefits. First, it would reduce the probability of war between the United States and China
over Taiwan. China's improved military capabilities are reducing the United States' ability to come to Taiwan's aid in the event of a
challenge from Beijing. These capabilities, combined with China's expectation of growing regional influence, may lead China to decide to seek
reunification with Taiwan through military means. Second, U.S.support for Taiwan may be the most important policy-
driven source of China's suspicions about U.S. motives and intentions in East Asia . Consequently, ending the U.S.
commitment to Taiwan has the potential to dramatically improve U.S.-China relations. Third, terminating this commitment could also greatly
moderate the intensifying military competition between the United States and China . Much of China's military
modernization, including its growing capability to control the sea lines of communication (SLOCs) in the South China and East China Seas, is
dedicated to defending Taiwan. The United States has devised a concept, widely known as AirSea Battle, to counter China's increasing
capabilities and maintain dominance of these SLOCs. Ending
the U.S. commitment to Taiwan would eliminate the
scenario most likely to draw the United States into a large war with China, thus reducing the importance that China
places on controlling these SLOCs and helping to significantly moderate U.S.-China competition. ¶ Costs. Ending the U.S. commitment to Taiwan
would put important U.S. political and ideological values at risk. Taiwan is a multiparty democracy with a population of 23 million. If China were
to gain control of Taiwan, its authoritarian government would likely be unwilling to fully accept the political institutions and personal freedoms
that Taiwan’s people currently enjoy. Additionally, U.S. accommodation on Taiwan could lead China to doubt U.S. resolve and embolden it to
pursue more assertive policies in East Asia. ¶ Requiring
Chinese Concessions ¶ To reduce the potential risk to Taiwan, the
United States should make ending its commitment to Taiwan contingent of two Chinese concessions.
First, China must resolve its disputes in the South China and East China Seas on fair terms. This could include
placing the disputed territories, some of which have valuable gas and oil reserves, under international control. Such action would not only
eliminate dangerous flash points, but also
provide evidence of China's limited aims. ¶ Second, China would officially accept
the United States' long-term security role in East Asia, including its alliances and forward-deployed forces. This would
reflect the Chinese leadership's willingness to incur the domestic political costs of confronting influential hard-liners who favor more ambitious
Chinese policies in East Asia. ¶ A grand bargain would not constitute the entirety of U.S. policy toward China. Unilateral measures and alliances
would remain essential components of U.S. policy. When uncertain about a state's motives and goals, a state should pursue a mix of
cooperative and competitive policies. In response to improvements in China's forces, the United States should invest in maintaining the military
capabilities necessary to protect its allies, to preserve those allies' confidence in U.S. commitments, to deter crises and war, and to fight
effectively if deterrence fails. ¶ Reassuring U.S. Allies ¶ Possibly the most frequently raised objection to the United
States ending its commitment to Taiwan is that it would undermine the credibility of U.S. defense
commitments to its East Asia allies. This concern is overstated. U.S. entry into a grand bargain with China would
undoubtedly send political shockwaves throughout the Asia Pacific, but the United States could take a variety of actions to
demonstrate the strength of its continuing commitments. For example, it could increase the capability of
the forces it commits to the region and further deepen joint U.S.- Japan military planning and high-level
discussions on the requirements for extended deterrence. In fact, the United States has already begun taking some of these measures. ¶
U.S. alliances are likely to endure because its allies do not have options that are more appealing.
Meanwhile, their need for security is likely to continue to grow as China rises. Any doubts about U.S. reliability are likely to
convince them to work harder to strengthen their alliances with the United States, not to abandon it or
to bandwagon with China.
 Entrapment Turn

Taiwanese commitment causes entrapment – but allies oppose security guarantees

Lind 16 (Jennifer Lind is an Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth, "Article Review 52 on
“The Myth of Entangling Alliances.” International Security 39:4," H-Diplo | ISSF,
https://issforum.org/articlereviews/52-entangling-alliances#_ftn15)SEM

Entanglement can be conceptualized as the pressure that a country feels to engage in a conflict because
of an alliance—pressure it would not feel if the alliance did not exist . Beckley usefully discusses the methodological
challenges of how to recognize a case of entanglement, warning against coding “cases in which the United States backed allies for self-
interested reasons as cases of entanglement” (10-11). He argues that entanglement occurs when “an alliance drags a state into a military
conflict against its national interest” (13). A problem with this measurement is that its overly narrow definition of entanglement may overlook
cases of the phenomenon in the empirical record. Beckley searches for cases of MIDs “in which alliances caused U.S. leaders to deviate from
the strict pursuit” of national interests (24). But what if, as Beckley hypothesizes in his theory development (14-15), alliances entangle because
they begin to be seen as ends in themselves; alliance preservation itself, and thus a reputation for keeping commitments, becomes seen as a
vital national interest. Beckley finds, yet dismisses, evidence of this phenomenon. In the context of discussing the Vietnam War, Beckley reports
that U.S. planners made arguments that the United States had to intervene (and later, could not withdraw) in order to uphold its credibility in
the eyes of Japan and NATO. (32-35) But Beckley dismisses these views as illogical—correctly pointing out that though American officials said
that NATO allies would be dismayed by U.S. non-intervention, U.S.
non-intervention was in fact the exact policy that
American allies sought. Beckley thus characterizes this evidence not as entanglement but as a sort of
misguided “self-entrapment.” (47) But what if the two are the same? ‘Self-entrapment,’ after all, is not some strange cousin of
entanglement; it is entanglement – it is one hypothesized process that draws countries into war, examined by IR theorists in the alliance
literature, and warned about by offshore balancers in grand strategy debates. Indeed, from Korea, to Vietnam, to Bosnia, to Libya, to President
Barack Obama’s ‘red line’ in Syria, debates about U.S. intervention are thick with admonitions that ‘Our Credibility Is On The Line.’[10] In this
familiar pattern, many
U.S. leaders and foreign policy elites today argue that, in the event of a war in the
Taiwan strait, the United States must defend Taiwan or see its credibility collapse .[11] Yet all the while, U.S.
allies in Asia make it clear that they under no circumstances want war in the Taiwan strait , and fear
that the Americans will someday fight one with China. What Beckley would diagnose as illogical self-
entrapment is precisely entanglement: calls for intervention in a conflict (involving a non-ally, no less)
because the existence of other alliances (and concerns about their credibility) have led foreign policy elites to redefine the U.S.
national interest.
 Japan Alliance Doubts Good

Japanese doubts are good – they encourage an end to free-riding and defense self-
sufficiency
Carpenter & Gomez 16 (Ted Galen Carpenter is senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies
at the Cato Institute. Eric Gomez is a policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato
Institute, 8-10-2016, "East Asia and a Strategy of Restraint," Cato Institute,
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/east-asia-strategy-restraint)SEM

The Obama administration’s response to these challenges has been the “pivot” or rebalance to Asia. This is an attempt to shift security
and diplomatic resources from a Middle East-centric policy toward Asia with the aim of preserving Washington’s traditional regional
dominance. However, placing more military assets in the region and increasing American participation in regional institutions served to
increase Chinese perceptions that the United States was seeking to contain China’s growing power.
Beijing has pushed back against this perceived containment effort by increasing its own military power, which
encourages Washington to demonstrate its resolve in turn, creating a dangerous spiral of tension. Instead
of continuing the “pivot” or “rebalance” and bolstering American primacy, U.S. policymakers should focus on deterring armed conflict
with China, encourage burden shifting and greater initiative by U.S. allies, and reform those alliances to
keep pace with the changing security environment. There are a variety of potential flashpoints for
conflict in the western Pacific that could bring China and the United States into military conflict. They include Taiwan, as well as
territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas . The Chinese military has fielded increasingly capable weapons systems
designed to prevent U.S. forces from operating in these disputed areas, posing a major challenge to the dominant position of the U.S. military in
the region. At the same time, the Chinese approach to these territorial
disputes, particularly its island building in the South China Sea,
has antagonized many Asian states, including nominally unaligned states like Vietnam as well as the Philippines and Japan,
both of which are U.S. treaty allies. These disputes thus raise the potential for U.S. entanglement in
military conflict with a well-armed and highly motivated adversary . Demonstrations of American resolve, such as the
U.S. Navy’s freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) in the South China Sea, have not caused China to cease its confrontational activities.
States in the region have taken some unilateral steps to improve their positions vis-à-vis China . Last month,
a tribunal convened at the Permanent Court of Arbitration issued a ruling in a case brought against China by the Philippines. The ruling was
overwhelmingly positive for the Philippines. The tribunal declared China’s claims to sovereignty and historic rights within its infamous “nine-
dash line” (which would encompass some 85 percent of the South China Sea) to be unlawful and admonished China for the ecological damage
caused by its island building campaign. Beijing has repeatedly declared the ruling illegitimate and refuses to abide by it. The Philippine
government has invited American warships back to Subic Bay, formerly the site of a large U.S. naval base, and American military aircraft have a
rotational presence at several Philippine air bases. Vietnam purchased six Kilo-class submarines from Russia in 2009 and has expanded its coast
guard with indigenously-built vessels. The Obama administration’s decision to lift the U.S. arms embargo on Vietnam puts Hanoi in a position to
further strengthen its military capabilities. Yet U.S. allies
have little incentive to continue more assertive policies if the
United States increases its security commitments to the region. American policymakers should not
continue increasing America’s military presence in East Asia . Rather, they should begin planning for long-term
reductions in forward-deployed forces. This will provide allies with the necessary time to expand their
defenses to provide a more sustainable deterrent . This restrained posture will be less costly and less dangerous than
attempting to maintain U.S. military dominance in the region indefinitely. The risk of conflict with China over territories in the South and East
China Seas should not be taken lightly. China’s
growing military power has significantly increased the potential
costs of such conflict for the United States. The risk of conflict is compounded by China’s slowing economy, which could tempt
Beijing into demonstrations of national strength to distract the public from economic woes. U.S. policymakers might provide material and
financial assistance to states like Vietnam and the Philippines to improve their self-defense capabilities, as well as encourage increased regional
cooperation with nations like Japan and India. Moreover, Washington should critically evaluate the effectiveness of FONOPs before these
continue given China’s penchant for using the operations as a rationale for increasing its military presence in the South China Sea. This does not
mean FONOPs should completely cease, as they are useful for demonstrating U.S. interests in the rule of law and the intrinsic importance of
keeping the sea lanes open but regular FONOPs would likely encourage a dangerous escalation of tensions. America’s
presence in
East Asia encourages its allies to cheap-ride on the United States, spending relatively little for their own
defense and relying on the American military to make up the difference. Japan and Taiwan are two
notable examples of wealthy states that cheap-ride off American security commitments. Both spend very little on defense
given the size of their economies. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2015, Japan, the
third-largest economy in the world, spent only 1 percent of its GDP on defense. Taiwan’s figure for the same year was 2 percent of GDP. Japan
hosts just over 52,000 military personnel, more than any other ally in the world. The United States also sells some of its best
equipment to the Japan Self-Defense Forces , such as the F-35 fighter aircraft. Yet Japan may be the East Asian ally most
capable of defending itself without U.S. assistance, given its large economy and well-developed defense industry. There are two major sources
of Japan’s cheap-riding: strong domestic political and legal barriers to increasing the size and role of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, and U.S.
willingness to increase its level of support as Japan’s security environment becomes more dangerous. Recent
events show that
Tokyo can overcome domestic opposition to expanding its military forces under certain conditions.
Defense reforms championed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were driven in part by a fear that the United States was unwilling to respond to
aggressive Chinese behavior in the East China Sea. In a recent Cato Policy Analysis, Jennifer Lind of Dartmouth writes: Despite [U.S.] assurances
[to protect the Senkakus], many in Japan question whether the United States would risk an unwanted and potentially devastating war with
China…over an issue in which the United States has no direct interest. When Japan has to do more for its own defense, it does. Examples
include passing legislation permitting Japan’s defense forces to come to the aid of allies under attack, slow but steady increases in defense
spending, and expanding cooperation with other Asian states. U.S.
policymakers should encourage Japan’s continued
defense transformation. The best way to encourage meaningful reforms and greater burden sharing is
to slowly reduce the U.S. military presence in Japan, place greater emphasis on naval and air power, and
transfer primary responsibility for Japan’s defense to its own forces.
Allied Prolif
 2AC Allied Prolif

Trump abandoning allies now

Zack Beauchamp 18. Beauchamp is a senior reporter at Vox, where he covers global politics and
ideology, and a host of Worldly, Vox's podcast on covering foreign policy and international relations. 06-
12-18. “How Trump is killing America’s alliances.” Vox.
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/6/12/17448866/trump-south-korea-alliance-trudeau-g7

The story of the past few days in news has become clear: It was America versus its allies. After President
Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un, Trump announced that he would be suspending joint military exercises — “the war
games,” as he put it — with South Korea, as a gesture of goodwill toward the North. This seems to have
come as a shock to America’s allies in Seoul: South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s office released a statement saying “we
need to find out the precise meaning or intentions of President Trump’s remarks,” implying they had no idea this was coming.
The weekend before, at the G7 summit, a confab for leaders of seven wealthy democracies, Trump got into a fight with
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over trade. When Trudeau criticized Trump’s imposition of new tariffs on
steel and aluminum imports — saying “Canadians did not take it lightly” — Trump called him “very
dishonest and weak” on Twitter. Peter Navarro, one of his top trade advisers, said on Fox News that there was “a special
place in hell” for Trudeau. These two incidents aren’t the only times Trump has infuriated American
allies in the past year. Just last month, he pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal — a painstakingly
negotiated agreement involving several of America’s top European allies. Last June, he withdrew from the Paris climate
agreement. And this all came amid constant carping about how America’s NATO allies needed to pay their
“fair share,” and after Trump’s past musings about how he might not defend allies if they didn’t. Trump’s
betrayal of South Korea and eruption at Trudeau are not one-offs, or events you can write off as simple quirks of the president’s
personality. It is part of a broader slate of Trump policies and diplomatic efforts that have, put together,
fundamentally weakened America’s ties with its traditional allies — in ways that could have potentially disastrous
consequences for the world. America’s alliances depend on the US’s reputation for upholding its agreements and treating its allies fairly.
Trump’s blithe disregard for diplomacy and international agreements has damaged the US’s reputation in a way that some scholars worry may
be irreparable. And a deep body of research on international relations suggests that the strength of America’s alliances in Europe and East Asia
have played a pivotal role in preventing another world war. The more Trump mucks around with American alliances, the more unstable the
world becomes — making a large military conflict more imaginable. Such a disaster hopefully will never happen. Indeed, it’s nearly impossible
for most of us to imagine one happening now: We live in one of the most peaceful times in human history, with some of the lowest rates of
deaths in conflict ever recorded. But that’s precisely the point: Our age is such an anomaly when it comes to conflict that we aren’t entirely sure
what could trigger a return to the violent historical norm. Serious, lasting damage to the American-led alliance system might do the trick. And
President Trump’s foreign policy could well be doing such damage. His approach
is so erratic, so contemptuous of
America’s traditional way of doing business, that US allies are openly worrying in a way that we haven’t
seen in modern history. This affects world politics at their most fundamental level , undermining an
otherwise stable global system in ways that we are only dimly capable of perceiving. The past week’s
news was a particularly naked demonstration of what had been, to date, one of the most subtle and
insidious effects of the Trump presidency: an erosion of the foundations of the political system that
defines — and protects — the modern world. Trump is attacking the heart of American alliances: trust In
1956, a leaked Defense Department memo proposing the withdrawal of US troops from Europe terrified European allies; German Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer declared privately that “NATO is finished.” The Nixon administration’s diplomatic outreach to China in 1972 led both Japanese
and South Korean policymakers to fear that the US would cut ties to curry favor with Beijing. Seoul even began a covert nuclear weapons
program to defend itself in the event of American abandonment. These examples illustrate a common historical pattern: Alliances between a
stronger state and weaker partners become at risk of collapse when the weaker state no longer feels like it can trust the stronger state. “An
alliance may dissolve if its members begin to question whether their partners are genuinely committed to providing assistance,” Harvard
scholar Stephen Walt writes in a 1997 survey of the historical record. “This problem will be more severe when ... there is a large asymmetry of
power among the member-states.” The US has prevented allies from truly losing faith in the past basically by reassuring them. Presidents
promise allies that they’d never abandon them, and provide them tangible goods — like US troop deployments to their country, military
assistance, or even trade agreements — to demonstrate America’s continuing commitment. America’s history of managing allies speaks to a
fundamental truth about these agreements: They are grounded entirely in trust. Ultimately, an alliance is nothing but a promise: that the
United States will defend its allies, either in Europe or East Asia, in the event of an unspecified future attack. There’s nothing an ally can do to
force the United States into defending them; they just have to take America’s word for it. As a result, a country’s reputation for treating its
allies well is crucially important to determining whether its alliances can work. A 2008 paper by Douglas Gibler, a professor at the University of
Alabama, found that states that did not honor their commitment to allies in the past were considerably less likely to forge new alliances in the
future. Trade pacts, environmental agreements, and the Iran nuclear deal don’t touch the core US promise in US military alliances — to defend
allies in the event of an attack. But backing out of such accords does serious damage to Trump’s reputation as a trustworthy ally. Withdrawing
the United States from major agreements and imposing tariffs on allies, all while cozying up to Vladimir Putin and sitting down with Kim Jong
Un, tells US allies that Trump doesn’t feel particularly bound by formal agreements or the traditional thrust of US foreign policy. If he decides
that an agreement doesn’t put “America First,” he’s perfectly willing to kick it to the curb. Trump has openly said this in the past. In July
2016, he told the New York Times that he would be willing to disregard Article 5, the provision of NATO’s founding treaty committing
allies to defending each other in the event of the attack. “If we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of
protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth … then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, ‘Congratulations,
you will be defending yourself,’” Trump told the Times. Trump has tried to walk
back that kind of rhetoric as president. But his
actions in the past year — especially the snap cancellation of longstanding military exercises with South Korea
— make the threat of abandonment seem all too credible to allies. When NPR asked Tomas Valasek, the recently
retired Slovak ambassador to NATO, if Trump would defend his country or another ally in the event of an attack, he couldn’t bring himself to say
yes. “The honest answer is none of us quite knows,” Valasek said. “His heart is not into alliance. He has a zero-sum view of the world. He
believes in no permanent friendships, no permanent allies. You know, that’s not the sort of mindset that prepares him well for sort of standing
by the side of an ally in case of a crisis.” The
result of Trump’s reputation for unreliability, then, is a weakening of
American alliances. Allies will trust the United States less, and may start looking for alternatives to
depending so heavily on the United States. Enemies will see cracks in US alliances and may attempt to exploit them. “The liberal international
order depends on us believing that agreements like treaties [and] international organizations have long-term staying power beyond leadership
change,” Brett Ashley Leeds, a scholar of US alliances at Rice University, tells me. “The scariest part is the fact that [Trump] is creating so much
uncertainty about what US policy is going to be.”

Their internal link is a lie—shifting posture is best for alliance commitments

Goldstein 15—Associate progessor at the Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute (Lyle,
"Meeting China Halfway." Georgetown University Press. 7/7/15. https://muse-jhu-
edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/books/9781626161627/9781626161627-11.pdf)

A final deleterious myth propagated by various “hawks” is the notion that¶ any reforms to American strategy and related
commitments will inevitably¶ collapse the entire structure of East Asia and even global security . This notion¶
is patently false, and the US strategic position has inevitably been strengthened¶ by various adjustments,
whether undertaken during the Cold War, such¶ as the withdrawal of US bases from Taiwan, and even more obviously the¶ total
US pullout from Vietnam , or after the Cold War, such as the 40 percent¶ drawdown in US troops from the Korean
Peninsula undertaken by George¶ W. Bush.56 In actuality, alliances and security arrangements are strengthened¶ by
reforms that bring their means and goals in conformity with global and¶ regional power and political realities. Such
reforms would actually help the¶ “credibility” of American commitments . However, the United States should¶
only undertake the resort to arms when actual national interests are at stake¶ and not for the sake of credibility alone. In fact, a recent
reexamination of the¶ role of credibility concerns among US decision makers in the Cuban Missile ¶ Crisis concludes: “This approach to foreign
policy was guided—and remains¶ guided—by a . . . school-playground view of world politics rather than the¶ cool appraisal of strategic realities.
It put—and still puts—America in the¶ curious position of having to go to war to uphold the very credibility that ¶ is supposed to obviate war in
the first place.”57 As Steinberg and O’Hanlon¶ conclude: “ The abstract fear of dominoes falling does not require that
every¶ perceived provocation be fully rebuffed by force .”58

Overcommitment wrecks security assurances – the aff assures allies

Goldstein 15 (Lyle J Goldstein is visiting fellow of the Watson Institute of International Studies at Brown
University and an associate professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI), 7/7/15, Meeting
China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry, Georgetown University Press, MUSE,
https://muse.jhu.edu/books/9781626161627/9781626161627-6.pdf) PA

A related argument concerning the fate of US alliances in the Asia-Pacific region is made that any kind of reunification between
the Mainland and Taiwan would signal a “death blow” to the US-Japan Alliance, and other allies would also be
dubious of the US commitment to the region’s security. However, both arguments turn out to be specious—having been built on crude and
simplistic assumptions. A clear view of history shows plainly that Beijing approaches the Taiwan issue quite
differently than other issues, and so the expectation that China, following unification, would immediately seek to apply its hubris to
other issues only stretches the imagination. The “Munich” appeasement argument also seems to be ignorant of
geography, neglecting the fact that Taiwan’s defense is not feasible over the long term . White quite correctly
concludes: “America can no longer defend Taiwan from China , and a policy towards Taiwan that presumes that it can is
unsustainable.”68 Even putting military capabilities aside, as Nathan and Scobell relate, “Beijing is convinced that it
enjoys an asymmetry of motivation over the United States with respect to Taiwan. ”69 Moreover, a Washington
policy premised on Munich-type fears also ignores the fact that Mainland China has reasonable expectations for its security. As for the US
alliance structure, this book is advocating major changes in that structure, in the hope that it would evolve toward something lighter and
more defensive. Credibility is logically questioned when commitments exceed genuine US national interests .
If US commitments in the Asia-Pacific region are constrained to cover only the clearest threats to US
national security (thus excluding Taiwan , in addition to various rocks and reefs along China’s maritime periphery), those
alliance relationships will actually be strengthened . Thus, it is well known that many South Koreans,
Japanese, and others in the region have been reasonably concerned that their states, quite against their
will, might be pulled by treaty commitments into the vortex of a Taiwan scenario. Having alleviated such
alliance strains, chiefly caused by unreasonable war-fighting requirements, these alliances will actually benefit from
enhanced and increasingly stable Taiwan–Mainland integration.

No Japan prolif
Terence Roehrig 17. Professor of National Security Affairs and the Director of the Asia-Pacific Studies
Group @ the U.S. Naval War College. 2017. “Japan, South Korea, and the United States Nuclear
Umbrella; Deterrence After the Cold War.” Columbia University Press.

WOULD JAPAN EVER DEVELOP ITS OWN NUCLEAR WEAPONS? The short answer to this question is “not likely,”
though scholars disagree over the reasons.99 For years, analysts have spoken of a “nuclear allergy” in Japan resulting from
World War II that prevented Japanese leaders from discussing nuclear weapons, much less consider acquiring them. Though constrained from
discussing the issue publicly, Japan’s conservative leaders often discussed the issue privately, believing Japan must keep the option open.100
Yet for
Japan to make the decision to go nuclear would require a drastic deterioration of its security
environment accompanied by a collapse of the Japan-U.S. alliance. In many respects, a Japanese decision to head in this
direction is what Campbell and Sunohara call “the ultimate contradiction.” Japan’s “standing as a non-nuclear nation is a virtual bedrock of the
nonproliferation regime” yet “at the same time, suspicion and speculation have persisted that, given the right set (really the wrong set) of
international and domestic conditions, Japan might seriously consider the nuclear option.”101 Japan clearly possesses the technology and
infrastructure for a breakout through its extensive civil nuclear energy program should it desire to do so.102 Estimates of Japan’s necessary
breakout time range from a few months to a year or two. The disaster that followed the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear catastrophe at
Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant raised the possibility that Japan might permanently shut down its nuclear reactors and scrap its nuclear
energy industry entirely, removing its breakout capability. Yet in the end, Japan remains committed to its nuclear energy program and in August
2015 restarted its first nuclear power plant since shutting them all down in 2011. A few months after the disaster, former Defense Minister
Shigeru Ishiba stated, “I don’t think Japan needs to possess nuclear weapons, but it’s important to maintain our commercial reactors because it
would allow us to produce a nuclear warhead in a short amount of time. It’s a tacit nuclear deterrent.”103 Maintaining a civilian nuclear
program even after the tragedy at Fukushima has a clear connection to maintaining some level of nuclear breakout capability and nuclear
deterrent. Referring to the LDP’s determination to maintain a nuclear energy program, Narushige Michishita argued, “What they are saying in a
tacit manner is that 98 percent of our program is peaceful, but we have the potential for something else.”104 Japan
would face some
serious operational and political obstacles should it seek nuclear weapons. Japan’s people are
concentrated in several densely populated urban areas that makes them very vulnerable to a nuclear
exchange. To have an effective deterrent, Japan would need many weapons, and given Japan’s lack of
geographical depth, there are few places to deploy these systems, making them vulnerable to a first
strike. Acquisition of the necessary weapons systems, especially strategic bombers and ballistic missiles,
would violate the constitution and the EDOP.105 Some disagree that nuclear weapons are acceptable as a defensive system
used only for retaliation, and there would likely be a highly divisive debate in Japan should any government head in this direction
under any but the most dire circumstances. Even in the wake of what many would argue is an increasingly aggressive China ,
Prime Minister Abe had a difficult time obtaining public support for a constitutional reinterpretation of
collective self-defense. Finally, “going nuclear” would also entail leaving the NPT and damaging Tokyo’s
reputation as a nonproliferation stalwart. Economic sanctions would likely follow, as well as restrictions on Japan’s
nuclear industry.106 For all these reasons, Japan would incur a heavy cost, domestically and internationally, should it
move to acquire nuclear weapons. Every time Japanese leaders have examined this possibility, they have
acknowledged this reality and chosen instead to rely on the U.S. defense commitment. As one study notes, “In
the context of the gulf between Japanese public opinion, which is largely ill-disposed toward nuclear weapons and security hawks at the elite
level eager to push back against this ‘nuclear allergy,’ the END [extended nuclear deterrent] offered and continues to offer a neat and practical
solution.”107 Thus,
Japan will continue to rely on the U.S. alliance and the nuclear umbrella while also
slowly increasing its own conventional capabilities and leaving the door open for nuclear acquisition. In the end, Samuels and
Schoff provide the most pointed analysis: “Although Japan’s nuclear hedging strategy is likely to continue in the near future, U.S. policy makers
(and those throughout the region) should not be sanguine about this strategy continuing indefinitely. Japan’s choices will be determined
ultimately by how well potential threats can be managed and by the strength of the U.S. commitment to extended deterrence.”108

No impact to allied prolif

Harvey M. Sapolsky & Christine M. Leah 14. Professor Emeritus and the Former Director of The MIT
Security Studies Program. Christine M. Leah is a Stanton Fellow at the MIT Security Studies Program. 4-
14-2014 http://nationalinterest.org/feature/let-asia-go-nuclear-10259

Tailored proliferation would not likely be destabilizing. Asia is not the Middle East. Japan, South Korea,
Australia, and even Taiwan are strong democracies. They have stable political regimes. Government
leaders are accountable to democratic institutions . Civilian control of the military is strong . And they
don’t have a history of lobbing missiles at each other —they are much more risk-averse than Egypt, Syria or Iran.
America’s allies would be responsible nuclear weapon states. A number of Asian nations have at one time or another
considered going nuclear, Australia for example, with tacit U.S. Defense Department encouragement in the 1960s. They chose what for them
was the cheaper alternative of living under the US nuclear umbrella. Free nuclear guarantees provided by the United States, coupled with the
US Navy patrolling offshore, have allowed our allies to grow prosperous without having to invest much in their own defense. Confident that the
United States protects them, our allies have even begun to squabble with China over strings of uninhabited islands in the hope that there is oil
out there. It is time to give them a dose of fiscal and military reality. And the way to do that is to stop standing between them and their nuclear-
armed neighbors. It will not be long before they realize the value of having their own nuclear weapons. The waters of the Pacific
under those arrangements will stay calm , and we will save a fortune.
 1AR UQ

Japan is doubting Trump now—Japan and Korea are infighting now

Crowley 5/24 (Michael Crowley is White House and national security editor for Politico. Previously he
was senior foreign affairs correspondent, reporting on foreign policy and national security from
Washington. Crowley joined Politico in October 2014 after working at Time, The New Republic, the
Boston Globe and writing for publications including the New York Times Magazine, New York, Slate, and
GQ. He is a 1994 graduate of Yale University. ‘Absolutely Unprecedented’: Why Japan’s Leader Tries So
Hard to Court Trump”, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/24/shinzo-abe-trump-japan-
226985 , May 24, 2019)

Trump has only made this situation more precarious for Abe and his compatriots. With its pacifist
constitution and a military far smaller than its status as the world’s third-largest economy would imply,
Japan needs America’s protection—and finds itself staring across the Pacific at an erratic partner easily
dismissive of longtime global commitments. The fear that the U.S.-Japan alliance could be in jeopardy
was one I heard from numerous government officials and academics I met during a weeklong visit to
Japan earlier this year. And, they say, Abe will do what he must to maintain it, whatever the cost to his
personal pride. “People in Japan understand that Mr. Trump is quite unpredictable, and that we need to treat him in a different way,”
said Murata. “They need the relationship for their own protection,” adds Jeffrey Prescott, a former Obama White House national security
council aide who served as senior Asia adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden. “They’re worried about being caught out in the cold.” ***
When Abe visited the U.S. last year, Trump startled him with a blunt historical reference: “I remember Pearl Harbor,” Trump cracked,
reportedly launching into a complaint about Japan’s economic policies. However impolitic his remark may have been, Trump is right to think
that World War II continues to rule America’s relationship with Japan. But a more defining moment than the 1941 surprise attack on America’s
Pacific fleet is what happened four years later in Hiroshima, when the U.S. punctuated the final days of the war by dropping an atomic bomb on
the city, raising ground temperatures nearby to 5,000 degrees and instantly killing up to 80,000 people. Today, the modest port city, also
known for baseball and its symphony orchestra, has become a living monument to the horror of war, and also a place to contemplate the
oddity of Japan’s continued dependency on the country that crushed it in anger nearly 75 years ago. Nine days after the blast, and after the U.S.
dropped another atomic bomb, this time on Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito—whose grandson, Naruhito, Trump will visit in Tokyo on Monday—
announced his country’s unconditional surrender to America. Thus began a long and fraught dependency that continues to this day. It was an
incredible twist of history when the conquered nation, emerging from a fascist nightmare, actually welcomed its new occupiers after the war.
“The Americans arrived anticipating, many of them, a traumatic confrontation with fanatical emperor worshippers. They were accosted instead
by women who called ‘yoo hoo’ to the first troops landing on the beaches in full battle gear, and men who bowed and asked what their
conquerors wished,” writes John W. Dower in his Pulitzer Prize-wining history of postwar Japan, Embracing Defeat. William Manchester’s epic
biography of Douglas MacArthur recounts the moment one of the general’s aides first stepped off a plane in a freshly-defeated Japan, which
MacArther was tasked with running and rebuilding after the war: “Instantly, a mob of howling Japanese headed for him. He was reaching for his
weapon when they braked to a halt, bowed, smiled, and offered him a cup of orangeade.” Those events occurred a few months before Trump
was born, so he does not actually “remember” any of them. But even though Japan has been remade since, it remains conspicuously eager to
please American leaders. In large measure that is because Japan cannot properly defend itself. After World War II, Japan was demilitarized to
prevent a repeat of the fascist militarism that led to its brutal conquest of much of East Asia. The U.S. oversaw the adoption of a peace
constitution prohibiting a standing military—Japan technically maintains modest “self-defense forces”—and declaring that its people “forever
renounce war” and “the threat or use of force as a means of settling disputes.” And in the only country to experience an atomic attack, nuclear
weapons have been out of the question. Conveniently, the U.S. was happy to station troops in the country as a way of projecting power into the
Asia-Pacific region, first as a check against the Soviet Union and more recently against China. America has also explicitly covered Japan with its
“nuclear umbrella,” shielding it from attack with the ultimate form of deterrence. For several decades, the arrangement made sense for a Japan
that faced few credible military threats. But the 21st century has changed past assumptions with startling speed. China’s explosion of growth
has led to alarming new territorial claims; Tokyo’s historic rival, which Japan raped and pillaged in the 1930s and 1940s, now has a defense
budget about 10 times larger than Japan’s. Meanwhile, North Korea, whose state media has branded Abe an “Asian Hitler” has developed a
large nuclear arsenal and ever-more sophisticated missiles, which it sometimes fires over Japan’s territory. Japan’s
relations with
South Korea, an important political and economic power, are also at what regional experts call a 50-year
low, poisoned by an ongoing dispute over what Japan owes to forced laborers and so-called “comfort
women” during its wartime occupation of the Korean peninsula. J apan was scandalized in February when a South
Korean legislator referred to Japan’s then-emperor, since succeeded by Naruhito, as the son of a war criminal. (One long-term nightmare here:
a unified, hostile Korea.) Even relations with Russia are tense, also thanks to the legacy of World War II, in the form of a territorial dispute over
remote islands most of the world has never heard of; a Japanese legislator was recently expelled from the country’s Diet after suggesting (albeit
drunkenly) that war with Russia might be necessary to reclaim them. In sum, Japan looks around and sees enemies and rivals that recall brutal
Japanese occupation, and too few close friends. That leaves it as dependent on the U.S. as it has been in years. At the same time, it is as worried
as it’s ever been about whether America can be relied upon. In the Trump era, the U.S. has become inscrutable, unpredictable and potentially
unreliable. People
here are keenly aware of Trump’s complaints about the cost of American bases overseas
and his questions about long-standing alliances. “We’re basically protecting Japan,” Trump said as a
candidate. “If we’re attacked, they do not have to come to our defense. If they’re attacked, we have to
come totally to their defense. And … that’s a real problem.” Trump hasn’t spoken that way in a while,
but Japanese officials have watched his continued skepticism about the costs and mission of the NATO
alliance, and ongoing complaints about the expense of maintaining U.S. troops in South Korea, with
great unease. In meetings with diplomats and military strategists, most of whom would only speak off
the record, I was told repeatedly that a scaled back U.S. presence in Asia, perhaps as a concession in a
nuclear deal with North Korea, would be a “disaster” or “nightmare.” Never mind the 50,000 troops now
stationed in Japan itself. Japan isn’t totally defenseless without its American military bodyguard. Thanks to China’s muscle-flexing, the
passage of time and Abe’s nationalistic leadership, Japan in recent years has gradually been expanding its military’s size and legal capabilities.
Trump officials, more than Obama ones before them, have wholeheartedly embraced the shift, which Trump will implicitly endorse this
weekend when he visits a Japanese navy helicopter carrier set for an upgrade that will allow it to carry advanced American-made F-35B fighter
jets. But Japan
also needs American in other ways. Its diplomats have urged the U.S. to help mediate its
dispute with South Korea—though to little avail . (“In somewhat more normal times,” says Mike Green, a former top Asia
official in the George W. Bush White House now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a big question around Trump’s trip would
be, “What is the administration doing to patch up ties between our two closest allies, whose fight is weakening our position in Asia?”)
Meanwhile Japan’s huge but deeply troubled economy, which struggles with slow growth and an aging population, is highly vulnerable to
Trump’s whims on tariffs. That’s why it’s a coup for Abe and Japan that Trump, who does not love long trips, has made the 14-hour flight to
become the first foreign leader to meet the country’s newly-enthroned emperor. In recent public remarks, Trump has demonstrated only a
vague understanding of the honor, while boasting that Abe has assured him it will be “100 times bigger” than the Super Bowl. While there,
Trump will award a specially-made trophy to the winner of a national sumo wrestling championship, for which he will be given a special chair in
an area where even dignitaries typically sit on the floor, cross-legged, reportedly to the annoyance of some of the sport’s diehards. In a signal of
U.S. military support, Trump will also deliver a speech at the U.S. Navy base at Yokosuka, in southern Japan. Abe’s flatter-Trump campaign is
more than a personal whim, it is the result of extensive analysis. “The Japanese have studied Trump as thoroughly as any government, probably
in the world, to try to understand him, because the U.S.-Japan alliance is so critical,” says Green. But it has involved some cost at home. During
my visit, the lead headline in the Japan Times described a “grilling” the prime minister had received in the Diet over Trump’s public claim a few
days earlier that Abe had written “the most beautiful five-page letter” nominating him to the Nobel Prize committee for his nuclear diplomacy
with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Abe couldn’t quite bring himself to confirm the notion, which seemed strange given that the talks had
made little real progress, and that Abe had been a past skeptic of talking to Kim. “I’m not saying it’s untrue,” was all he would allow. According
to the Washington Post, Abe has more than once been referred to as “poochi” in the country’s left-leaning Asahi Shimbun newspaper. Many
Japanese officials argue, though, that Abe has made the best of an awkward situation. Trump has stopped complaining about America’s security
agreement with Tokyo and—unlike the case of South Korea—hasn’t made references lately to the cost of stationing troops and equipment in
Japan. Abe has helped explain to Trump how important American assets in Japan are to containing China; U.S. Navy patrols into the contested
South China Sea often originate from the Japan’s Yokosuka base. Although Abe wasn’t able to prevent Trump from slapping tariffs on Japanese
steel and aluminum exports, he has helped to delay potential U.S. tariffs on automobiles that Japanese officials say would create a crisis in their
relationship with Washington. Still,
there is a sense of real disquiet here about what may lie ahead. One
Japanese official told me that Trump is an effect, not a cause, of eroding American public support for
overseas alliances and adventurism. Moreover, some Japanese worry that the character of the U.S.
might be changing. Japan is coming to see America “rather differently,” said Ichiro Fujisaki, a former
Japanese ambassador to Washington who now chairs the America-Japan Society in Tokyo. “The
popularity of the U.S. is decreasing,” he said, as Japanese people see an erosion of “values, respect for
international institutions, and commitment to allies.”
 1AR No Japan Prolif
Japan won’t prolif
Mike Mochizuki 17 holds the Japan-U.S. Relations Chair in Memory of Gaston Sigur at the Elliott
School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He is co-editor of “Nuclear Debates in
Asia: The Role of Geopolitics and Domestic Processes.”, 11/6/17, “Three reasons why Japan will likely
continue to reject nuclear weapons”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2017/11/06/japan-is-likely-to-retain-its-non-nuclear-principles-heres-why/?
utm_term=.7891237c8ec1

Although Japan has long had the technical ability to develop nuclear weapons — its “nuclear hedge” — it has refrained from doing so.
Japan instead remains firmly committed to its 1967 Three Non-Nuclear Principles of not developing, not
possessing and not introducing nuclear weapons.
This is not the first time that Japan has reexamined those principles. Similar debates transpired after China’s hydrogen bomb test in 1967, the Soviet Union’s deployment of medium-range
nuclear missiles in Siberia during the 1980s and North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006.

Is this time different? Reacting to North Korea’s threatening behavior, former Japanese defense minister Shigeru Ishiba stated in September that Japan should at least debate the decision not
to permit the introduction of nuclear weapons on Japanese territory. Ishiba implied that Tokyo should consider asking Washington to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Japan.

This latest debate is likely to end in the same way as previous debates , however. Japan will continue to
adhere to its Three Non-Nuclear Principles and forswear nuclear weapons . Here are three reasons for
that:

1) Staying non-nuclear is part of Japan’s national identity

The Three Non-Nuclear Principles are a clear part of Japan’s national identity, not simply a policy
preference. Repeated polls indicate overwhelming popular support for the three principles in Japan. A 2014
Asahi newspaper poll revealed that support for the principles had risen to 82 percent, compared with 78 percent in a 1988
poll. Despite growing concerns about North Korea’s nuclear program and China’s military power during this
period, Japanese support for remaining non-nuclear actually increased.Even after the provocative North
Korean missile launches over Japan in August and September, a Fuji News Network poll showed that nearly 80
percent of the Japanese population remained opposed to Japan becoming a nuclear weapons state . And
nearly 69 percent opposed having the United States bring nuclear weapons into Japan.

The legacy of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings leave many Japanese convinced that their country
has a moral responsibility to promote global nuclear disarmament — as well as to forgo nuclear
weapons of its own. The 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster has reinforced this view.
In fact, increasing numbers of Japanese believe that the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” is unnecessary for Japanese security. A June 2010 NHK survey
revealed that 20.8 percent felt that U.S. nuclear deterrence is necessary for Japan’s security in both the present and future, while 34.8 percent
believed it unnecessary. The June 2015 NHK poll showed that only 10.3 percent thought the U.S. nuclear umbrella is necessary for both the
present and the future — 48.9 percent responded that it is unnecessary now and later.

2) Powerful players in Japanese politics can block nuclear acquisition

In addition to public opposition to nuclear weapons, Japan

has significant “veto players” — crucial political or economic
actors that are likely to block efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
Japan has a robust nuclear energy industry. But public acceptance of nuclear energy in the 1950s resulted from a fundamental political bargain:
nuclear energy, but no nuclear weapons.
 1AR No Korea Prolif

South Korea won’t get nukes

Troy Stangarone 16, the Senior Director for Congressional Affairs and Trade at the Korea Economic
Institute of America, 2/29/16, “Going Nuclear Wouldn’t Be Easy for South Korea”,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/going-nuclear-wouldnt-be-easy-south-korea-15345?page=0%2C1

However, SouthKoreans are rarely asked if they would be willing to bear the costs of a domestic nuclear
weapon. Those cost would likely come in the form of diminished international standing, economic
hardship, and uncertain strategic benefits.

For South Korea to develop its own nuclear weapons program it

would have to join North Korea as the only country to
withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an ignominious club for sure. Withdrawal would dent Seoul’s growing
international standing and make it the only member of MIKTA, an emerging club of middle powers, to have a nuclear weapon, something which
would not enhance South Korea’s middle power prestige.

While a loss of international stature to ensure domestic security might be an acceptable trade off, there
would likely be economic
costs as well. Developing a nuclear weapon would have consequences for South Korea’s own nuclear
industry. Nuclear power provides a third of South Korea’s electricity and represents 13 percent of its
primary energy consumption. Lacking adequate domestic reserves of nuclear fuel, South Korea is
dependent upon members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group which conditions supply on the non-
proliferation of nuclear weapons. Pursuing a nuclear option would put the fuel supply for South Korea’s
domestic reactors at risk .

South Korea also has designs on becoming a major exporter of nuclear power plants . In 2009, it won a $40
billion contract to construct and manage four nuclear power plants in the UAE and in 2013 a bid for a research reactor in Jordan. Those deals
and any future potential exports would be put risk.

South Korea would also face potential economic sanctions. Iran and North Korea have both faced significant financial and
economic sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear weapons, while India and Pakistan faced sanctions as well. Because South Korea is
perhaps one of the world’s most trade dependent nations it would be especially vulnerable to external
economic pressure.
Given the clear and present danger that North Korea’s nuclear program presents to South Korea, it is hard to know what the consequences
might be if Seoul chose the nuclear option. Perhaps the international community would look upon South Korea’s choice with a greater degree
of understanding and acceptance than other nations, limiting any economic consequences. However, there are no assurances that will be the
case.

From a strategic perspective the decision to go nuclear could focus minds in Beijing, but in ways that
Seoul might not want. China has been vigorous in its objections to South Korean consideration of
deploying the THAAD missile defense system. Beijing would likely object even more strenuously to a South Korean nuclear
weapons program, especially if it opened the door to a Japanese nuclear weapon.
Appeasement DA
 Jalil
China is governed by defensive realism
Jalil 19 - Research Fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (Ghazala, http://issi.org.pk/wp-
content/uploads/2019/04/3-SS_Ghazala_Yasmin_Jalil_No-1_2019.pdf, EM)

since the 1970s China’s policies have shown less revisionist tendencies. The country has
However,

increasingly become a state that is embracing defensive realism. One thread of this evidence is that China has toned-
down its revolutionary rhetoric. It is also not supporting insurgencies in other countries. The second thread of evidence is that since
the late 1970s China has increasingly pursued a cooperative security approach in its relations with
regional neighbours and in the international arena. By and large, China has tried to forge friendly
relations with its neighbours. It includes ameliorating relations with states like India which is traditionally a rival. Their relations did become
strained in 2017 when there was a standoff between the Indian and the Chinese forces on the Doklam plateau. Dhoklam is a territory claimed both by Bhutan (aligned with India) and China.

However, Indo-China relations improved as the two countries held an informal summit in China in April 2018. 30 The two
countries even held a joint military exercise in December 2018, called Hand-in-Hand.31 Over the years, China has also managed to resolve
border issues with so many neighbouring states. It has settled border disputes with countries like Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan initially and

recently with Russia, bordering the Central Asian States and Vietnam.32 Moreover, China has territorial disputes with India
and Japan but it has never made these disputes a hurdle in forging friendly ties with these two countries. Avery Goldstein

dubs it a neo-Bismarckian grand strategy of China whereby it is pursuing its interests by reassuring those
who may feel threatened and may form anti-China alliances. 33 This, in his opinion, has resulted in a security
environment that is conducive for China as well as for the region as a whole. Another indication that China does
not show aggressive behaviour in its policies is that China has increasingly engaged and integrated with the international

community. Over the past 30 years, China has amply demonstrated this by its increasing membership of international organisations and institutions as well as membership of treaties
since the 1980s. China has increasingly participated in the regional multilateral institutions over the years. In the last few decades, East Asia has seen a

number of regional institutions being formed. Foremost among those are the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC); the
ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF); ASEAN plus 3 and the East Asia Summit. China is part of most of these multilateral

institutions as well as an active member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). China was also a key player in the sixparty-talks in getting
North Korea to halt and roll back its nuclear and missile programmes. On the global front, China sought participation in global institutions like the World Trade Organisation (WTO). China

is also playing a very active role in the UN. According to one figure, China’s membership of international
governmental organisations doubled (from 21 to 52) during the years 1977-1997. In the same time period, its membership
of International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) increased from mere 71 to an impressive 1,163.34 Similarly, according to another account, China signed less than 30 per cent of the

China has actively taken part in the treaties of the

arms control accords it was eligible to join in the 1970s compared to 80 per cent by mid-1990s. 35

nuclear non-proliferation regime as well as those of aimed at non-proliferation of biological and

chemical weapons. It has also become a part of the voluntary non-proliferation groups like the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in 2004 and exercises strict export control
policies. Since 2004, China has also shown interest in joining the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). This is an indicator of China’s willingness to participate in international institutes
and regimes, increasing comfort towards norms of interdependent behaviour among states. It has also exhibited the desire to somewhat shape the rules of the game for regional cooperation.
This is definitely an indication of its tendency towards the status quo. It also advances China’s national interests and helps dispel concerns about its increasing economic and military power.36
This is also an indicator that China is willing to work in the existing Western-dominated systems of international institution and regimes rather than challenge the system or seek to break it up.
Moreover, China consciously pursued a good neighbour policy. The pursuit of good relations with its neighbour is the foundation of its strategy for economic development. It has the dual
benefit of attracting foreign trade and investment while, at the same time, it reassures its neighbours that it does not present a threat for them. Deng Xiaoping laid two paths for China’s
foreign policy in 1990 ─ anti-hegemonism and establishment of a new multi-polar international order of politics and economics. This meant that China adopted a policy of active defence of
China’s interest ─ of minding its own business and be neither a leader nor a challenger but a participant or co-builder of the westerns international order.37 This remains the foundation of

China’s foreign policy today. Many analysts, however, argue that participation in the international institutions is not an adequate
indicator but compliance with the norms, rules and goals of these institutions is a better indicator of whether a country is a status quo state or not. Along these lines,
Alastair Johnston considers China’s compliance with five global normative regimes: these include sovereignty, free trade, non-

proliferation and arms control, national self determination and human rights.38 As far as sovereignty is concerned he writes: “Today China is one of

the strongest defenders of a more traditional absolutist concept (of sovereignty).”39 Similarly, free trade is another international norm
that is seen as an indicator of status quo behaviour. China has moved to support the norms of global free trade. China’s membership of WTO in 2001 is a

testament to its support for free trade. China’s tariff rates have declined from over 40 per cent in 1992 to
less than 20 per cent in 1997.40 In 2015, the tariff rate was 3.4 per cent.41 China has gradually embraced global capitalist institutions and system. In the Belt and Road
Forum that China held in May 2017, hosting 30 world leaders, it released a communiqué, which was signed by all 30 world leaders present on the occasion that emphasised the need to “build
an open economy, ensure free and inclusive trade (and) oppose all forms of protectionism.”42 However, the ongoing trade war with the US has forced China to increase its tariffs. Since 2017,
the US had imposed three rounds of tariff on the Chinese products worth US$250 billion. China has retaliated by imposing US$110 billion on the US goods. Beijing has accused the US of

China has gone even a step further and initiated

starting the “largest trade war in economic history.” 43 This damages the global free trade regime.

projects like the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is envisaged as a journey towards
economic regionalisation. The CPEC is a framework of regional connectivity which is expected to be beneficial for China and Pakistan as well as the regional states like
India, Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Its primary aim is to promote geographical linkages and improve infrastructure connectivity. It would also result in a higher flow of trade and

clear indication that

businesses in the region.44 Its ultimate aim is to have a well-connected region, promote harmony and accelerate economic development. This is also a

China is focused on economic development and regionalisation instead of displaying aggressive

hegemonic behaviour. As far as China’s non-proliferation record is concerned, it has a fair record, with
no blatant violations of international nuclear non-proliferation norms. The prevailing concerns mostly centred on the transfer of
missile technology and components to Pakistan in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, China has not signed the 1987 MTCR, so it does not amount to any violations of China’s treaty
obligations. On the positive side, in 1996, China signed the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which a major nuclear non-proliferation proponent like the US has not done till date.45 It
has been cooperating with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO) and has installed four new International Monitoring System (IMS) stations, bringing the total number of
certified stations in China, to five. Furthermore, it is also a part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) since the time that it was signed. Moreover, along with Russia, China has long
been trying to get a treaty negotiated to ban the stationing of offensive weapons in outer-space. For nearly two decades, now there have been the Chinese and Russian efforts to negotiate a
treaty for Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS). Many proposals have been put forward including the two Chinese working papers and a joint China-Russia working paper in the
Conference on Disarmament (CD). However, PAROS remains blocked due to the US refusal to negotiate any such treaty because it goes against its missile defence and space plans.46 China

has also played a stabilising role in the North Korean nuclear issue. It acted as a lynchpin in hosting and
conducting the six-party talks, which were meant to solve the North Korean nuclear issue. Even after the breakdown
of the six-party talks in 2009 and the recent high tensions on the Korean Peninsula in 2017 with the US, China played the role of a stabiliser, urging both sides to show restraint and
emphasising that war was not an option for any country. China has, thus, helped strengthen the international nuclear non-proliferation norms. Also, China’s growing soft power47 or its “charm
offensive” in Southeast Asia and elsewhere is another indicator that it is not an aggressive, power maximising state. Its economic progress has been accompanied by its increasing cultural and
diplomatic influence around the globe. Its growing soft power is not only evident in Southeast Asia but also in Beijing’s economic partnerships in Latin America and Africa.48 The fact that China
is able to attract and appeal the states in the region through its soft power is an indicator that its neighbours are increasingly viewing China as less of a threat. However, this has stirred the
concerns of waning the US influence in the region. In many parts of Asia, Africa and the Latin America, the “Beijing Consensus” which advocates a mix of authoritarian government and market
economy, is overtaking the “Washington Consensus” of market economics and democratic government which was popular in the past.49 With signs that the US is placing emphasis on hard
power under President Donald Trump, China seems to be positioning itself as a champion of globalisation and economic integration. It seems to be placing an emphasis on soft power.

Taiwan issue is one instance where China’s policies are viewed by the West as a non-status quo. However,
the issue can be seen in terms of a security dilemma between the US and China. In the last few decades,
America continued selling advanced weapons to Taiwan, mainland China considers these developments
to encourage Taiwan’s independence and a threat to its interests. According to Yiwei Wang, “on the Taiwan issue, America’s
logic is that peace comes from “balance of power.” China has time and again protested the matter of
arms sales to Taiwan with the US but to no avail. China sees these moves as an effort to change the
distribution of power in the region. In turn, China has threatened Taiwan against moves for
independence and deployed missiles on the mainland as well. Consequently, this makes the US
suspicious of China’s revisionist intentions towards Taiwan – locking the two powers in a security
dilemma. Another area where China has been accused of displaying revisionist tendencies is in the South
China Sea. The dispute centres on territorial claims over two island chains the Paracels and the Spratlys and surrounding oceans. The area provides valuable trade passage and fishing
ground, as well as holds hydrocarbon resources ranging from 25,000 Mboe to 260,000 Mboe.51 China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei all have competing claims. The

dispute has existed for centuries but things got tense in the last few years. China has been island-building since 2014 and has also
increased naval patrols. It can be argued that China’s actions are defensive in nature. The US has had increased

interference in the area. Under the garb of “freedom of navigation” operations, the US sent planes and
ships in the disputed area to keep access to key shipping and air routes .52 In February 2017, the US deployed the aircraft carrier,
Carl Vinson, strike force to the South China Sea under the garb of “freedom of navigation.”53 Another week-long US and British Naval exercise took place in January 2019.54 These are meant

These exercises have angered China. China does not have

to send a signal to China to rescind claims over the disputed area.

expansionist or hegemonic designs in the South China Sea. It claims over the two island chains are not
something new. Beijing has adjusted its strategy to safeguard its interests, as it becomes increasingly
powerful. However, a military conflict over the dispute is not an option. Moreover, the US influence over
other claimants of the territory complicates matters for China. This has resulted in China acting more
assertively in the South China Sea in order to defend its interests. In fact, the US would act more
aggressively if any country was to interfere in matters close to its borders. Overall, from the above
analysis, it can be summarised that China has so far behaved more as a status quo power rather than as
an aggressive revisionist power. This is apparent in China’s engagement with its neighbours, its participation in the regional and international institutions, it is in compliance
with most of the international norms as well as its emphasis on projecting its soft power. The claims of Mearsheimer’s offensive realism are in contrast with Waltz’s defensive realism on
several points. While Mearsheimer claims that great powers act aggressively and aim to gain so much power that they are the ultimate hegemons in the system, Waltz’s defensive realism sees

states are primarily concerned with maintaining

the states as acting defensively to maintain rather than upset the balance of power. For Waltz, the

“their position in the system.”55 Defensive realists argue that offence-defence balance favours the defence. 56
Therefore, a robust defence and careful balancing should deter any aggressive impulses from great
powers. Defensive realism argues that great powers are concerned with maintaining the status quo rather than maximising their power because often the cost of
expansion outweighs the benefits. Defensive realism sees security dilemmas as a problem where an increase in the power of one state increases the insecurity of
the other causing the latter to increase its power. Under the conditions of defensive realism, great powers would try to alleviate any security dilemmas rather than exacerbate it. China’s
current policy seems to be firmly rooted in defensive realism. Its policy seems to be aimed at maintaining the balance of power rather than upsetting it. As the earlier section has argued, China
is not a revisionist power but a status quo one. The analysts like Shiping Tang are convinced that China’s security strategy flows out of its realisation of the security dilemma whereby the

Chinese leaders have understood that an aggressive expansionist strategy would just lead to
counterbalancing alliances. “This recognition has led China to adopt a defensive realism-rooted security strategy emphasising moderation, self-restraint and security
cooperation.”57 Moreover, China’s military modernisation, its Taiwan policy and its increased policies in the South China Sea also make more sense if seen through the lens of defensive
realism. China’s Taiwan policy may be more geared towards preventing redistribution of power in the region. Since the US is providing arms assistance to Taiwan, China may be averse to the
US aiding Taiwan’s independence ─ the latter issue is one where China has made clear that independence is not acceptable to China. Similarly, there is good evidence that China’s military
modernisation programmes and training exercises since the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1996 are aimed partially at dealing with the issue of the Taiwanese separation.58 On the question of whether
China is balancing against the US, Johnston says, “There seems to be little doubt that China’s military modernisation programme since the mid-1990s has been aimed in large measure at
developing capabilities to deter or slow the application of the US military power in the region.”59 It would then seem that China is not concerned with gaining power or projecting its powers

but with balancing against a predominance of the US power in the region. China has not shown any signs of hegemonic behaviour as a lot
of Western analysts feared. Instead of guided by offensive realism, China’s policies seem to be guided by defensive realism where it is concerned with survival and with
maintaining its position in the system. Just as the US fears China’s hegemonic rise, China also fears the increase of the US influence in the region and its talk of containing China. China’s policy

may change in the future to display hegemonic tendencies. However, at present, there is not much evidence to support the theory of
offensive realism.
 2AC – Link Answers: Appeasement

Extracting Chinese concessions signals strong US resolve – that preserves deterrence

posture and allied confidence – and countervailing measures solve
Glaser 15 Charles L Glaser is a professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the
Department of Political Science at George Washington University. He is also a fellow in the Kissinger
Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (“A U.S.-China Grand Bargain?”
International Security, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Spring 2015), doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00199)SEM

The Logic of a Grand Bargain The preceding assessment lays bare the complexity of a U.S. policy of territorial accommodation. On the one hand, ending the
U.S. commitment to Taiwan could greatly reduce and might even eliminate the possibility of a large war between
the United States and China by keeping the United States out of a China-Taiwan conflict. In addition, accommodation could
improve China’s understanding of U.S. goals and its image of the United States, and moderate military
competition in Northeast Asia, thereby setting U.S.-China relations on a promising trajectory that takes advantage of the relatively benign structural
environment in which China’s rise will occur. On the other hand, accommodation would be costly—running contrary to U.S. political and ideological interests—and
risky, possibly reducing U.S. security by fueling Chinese underestimates of U.S. resolve and by encouraging China to adopt more extensive geopolitical aims. The
United States’ choice of whether to end its commitment to defend Taiwan is complicated further by uncertainty about the nature and extent of China’s goals. If

China places relatively little value on expanding its control and influence beyond Taiwan, then even if
U.S. accommodation generated doubts about U.S. resolve, they would be of little consequence . In
contrast, if [End Page 78] China highly values winning all of its maritime disputes and pushing the United States out of Northeast Asia, then reductions in U.S.
credibility would be more costly. Similarly, if China’s aims are both limited and stable, then U.S. accommodation would not risk creating a more dangerous China. In
contrast, if China’s goals are still evolving and if U.S. accommodation would empower domestic hard-liners, then U.S. security would be reduced. Therefore, the
question arises whether policies exist that would reduce the risks while preserving the benefits of U.S. accommodation on Taiwan. If
combining certain
concessions by China in an overall package—a grand bargain, for lack of a better term—could achieve
this goal, then the United States’ best option might be to make ending its commitment to Taiwan
contingent on China making concessions of its own . The preceding analysis suggests that the United States should
design such a grand bargain with a variety of purposes in mind: to gain information about the nature and extent of
China’s motives; to demonstrate its resolve to retain U.S. security commitments in the region; and,
related, to preserve the credibility of its commitments to its allies. Likely the most common way to
envision a grand bargain is as an agreement in which two actors make concessions across multiple issue
to create a fair deal—that is, one in which both benefit equally—that would have been impossible in an agreement that dealt with a single issue. A
different way to envision a grand bargain is as an agreement in which the states trade across multiple issues, making both states better off, but not necessarily
equally. A grand bargain in Northeast Asia is likely to take the latter form, partly because the agreement would be in response to a power shift that favors China and
partly because China’s interests in the region are greater than those of the United States. The
first component of a grand bargain , and
probably the most important, would be for China to resolve its maritime disputes on “fair” terms.100 Oddly, there seems to be both a
little and a lot at stake in these disputes. Gaining sovereignty over the offshore islands would strengthen China’s claims to the oil and gas reserves, which have
increased the importance of the disputes. At the same time, however, the disputes have severely hindered the exploration and extraction of these resources, and
joint extraction and sharing agreements could provide all parties with substantial resource benefits. Growing nationalism has given the disputed territorial claims
importance far beyond their material and strategic value, and it has damaged the prospects for any type of agreement. [End Page 79] An
ideal solution
would be for China and its neighbors to place the territories under some sort of international control as a
maritime preserve and to share the resources.101 Other solutions include joint governance over the use of the islands/islets, agreement not to object to other
states’ sovereignty claims, and agreement to end unilateral military patrols near the disputed territories.102 China’s
willingness to reach an
agreement on the offshore islands and related maritime disputes would provide the United States with valuable information. Most obviously, it
would demonstrate that China’s aims are limited (at least for now). Closely related, it would demonstrate a degree of
reasonableness in Chinese foreign policy priorities and decisionmaking: given that the value of Taiwan dwarfs the value of these maritime
disputes, Chinese unwillingness to reach this type of bargain would indicate deep inflexibility in its emerging foreign policy and possibly overconfidence in its ability
to use its growing power to achieve all of its aims. China’s claims in these disputes are also weaker than its claims to Taiwan: for example, China did not claim the
Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands until 1970, which suggests that it should be able to moderate this claim if the benefits were sufficiently large. In addition, an
agreement would provide the United States with insights into the balance of power within China’s
foreign policy decisionmaking. If China’s more assertive policies have reflected the growing influence of the People’s Liberation Army, narrow
nationalist pressures, or both, then Chinese concessions would demonstrate that the country’s leaders could control these forces when the stakes are sufficiently
large. Taken as a whole, this information about China’s goals would make U.S. accommodation over Taiwan less risky. Insisting
on Chinese
concessions would also demonstrate U.S. resolve to protect American interests . By making its willingness to end its
commitment to Taiwan contingent on Chinese concessions, the United States would make clear that it is willing to run the

risk of protecting Taiwan and its allies’ interests in the South China and East China Seas, if China were
uncompromising. Once again, the key issue from the U.S. perspective comes back to information—if China is more likely to have unlimited aims, then the
risks of U.S. accommodation are larger and the United States should therefore be less willing to adopt this strategy. As argued above, China’s refusal to accept a
[End Page 80] grand bargain, especially one that is so clearly weighted toward its interests (unless China is determined to push the United States out of Northeast
Asia), would indicate more ambitious Chinese aims. Thus, compared
to unilateral concessions, insisting on a package deal
that included Chinese concessions would demonstrate a higher level of U.S. resolve . In addition, resolution
of the maritime disputes would directly increase U.S. security by eliminating disputes that, via alliance
commitments, could draw the United States into dangerous crises with China. A second component of a grand bargain
would be official Chinese acceptance of the United States’ long-term security role in East Asia, including its alliances and forward-deployed forces. There have been
periods when China viewed the U.S.-Japan alliance relatively favorable. For example, in 1980 China’s leader, Hua Guofeng, stated: “We appreciate Japan’s efforts to
strengthen its alliance with the United States.”103 Since then a variety of factors, including the decline of Soviet power and the redefinition of the U.S.-Japan
alliance starting in the mid-1990s have reduced, if not eliminated, China’s positive assessment.104 In recent years, some Chinese elites have begun expressing
harshly negative views. For example, in 2014 the deputy chief of the general staff of the People’s Liberation Army described the U.S. alliance system as “an
antiquated relic of the Cold War that should be replaced by an Asia-centric security architecture.”105 Although open to varying interpretations, President Xi
Jinping’s call for an Asian security order managed by Asian countries and his criticism of “alliances as unhelpful for the region’s security” can be viewed as offering a
vision of the future in which the United States no longer plays a security role in East Asia. Increasingly, there is support in China for the conclusion that “in Beijing’s
eyes, the U.S. led security architecture is outliving the usefulness it once provided by ensuring the regional stability necessary for China’s development. Instead,
China views the alliance system as increasingly incapable of providing lasting security and itself a potential source of threat.”106 Especially in light of Beijing’s
increasingly negative assessment, official
recognition [End Page 81] and acceptance of the United States’ continuing
alliance commitments would be a valuable signal (not cheap talk). It would indicate the dominance of certain domestic forces over
others and the Chinese leadership’s willingness to accept domestic political costs to advance China’s foreign policy. Such action would not guarantee stability in
China’s policy, but it would provide greater confidence that China was willing to accept a revised geopolitical status quo. Maybe more important, if China were
unwilling (or unable) to provide this official acceptance, the United States would have to be more worried that China’s leaders believe that its role in East Asia
requires pushing the United States out of the region. A grand bargain would not constitute the entirety of U.S. policy—unilateral measures and alliances would
remain essential components of the United States’ policy toward Northeast Asia. When uncertain about an adversary’s motives or when facing a state with mixed
Maintaining and
motives—a combination of security seeking and greed—a state should pursue a mix of cooperative and competitive policies.107

enhancing U.S. commitments to the region would provide some of the necessary balance in the overall
policy of the United States. These components of U.S. policy would be necessary and appropriate even if China were unwilling to make the types of
concessions discussed above, but they would become even more important in the context of a grand bargain. The key challenge is for the United

States to sustain its credibility for protecting its allies . As already discussed, to help accomplish this, the United
States could commit additional forces to the region, forward deploy larger forces, invest more in overall
U.S. military capabilities, and increase the integration of alliance military planning . These measures would provide the
additional benefits of helping to offset increases in China’s military power and to sustain the grand bargain by enhancing the U.S. ability to deter China from
breaking the agreement. There is a potential downside, however: increased U.S. capabilities would likely appear threatening to China. But this danger would be
reduced by America’s ending its commitment to Taiwan because a
U.S. buildup would no longer threaten this vital Chinese
interest and would therefore be more clearly intended only to defend U.S. allies . If, however, China wants to push the
United States out of the East Asia, then it would be strongly opposed to, and provoked by, these measures. In this case, though, given the priority that U.S. grand
strategy places on preserving the [End Page 82] United States’ alliances in East Asia, increasing U.S. capabilities would enhance its
security.

Extracting concessions in the SCS maintains a hard line toward China

Ross 16 (Pete Ross is an expert business and policy analyst, 11-1-2016, "Why the West Must Stop
China," Observer, https://observer.com/2016/11/why-the-west-must-stop-china/)SEM

Over the past decade, China has become increasingly bold, doing everything it can to act the neighborhood
bully. Narcissistic, entitled and unwilling to bear any criticism, China seems to believe it can walk over almost anyone —
mostly because no one has given them any reason to think otherwise. Nations
have refrained from criticizing China too
strongly, or taking any kind of action, because they rely on the trade that has increased so massively from a country of
over one billion people. Such reliance, however, is like continually spending on a credit card, ignoring the fact that one day the bill is going to be
due. In China’s case, we can see this with their heavy extraction of concessions from anyone with whom
they deal. It began with the Dalai Lama, and the fact that the Chinese strongly caution any national leader who dare meet with him or even
speak to him. It was always put across as a matter of respect for China’s internal sovereignty and basically not rocking the boat. Is one man
really so powerful that the CCP needs to protest people meeting with him? This summer, when Australian swimmer Mack Horton called one of
the Chinese swimmers a drug cheat, the response from the state-run Global Times was nothing short of hysterical. They demanded an apology
and referred to Australia as being “at the fringes of civilization” and that “no one should be surprised at the uncivilized acts emanating from the
country.” Quite a fit to throw over something an athlete said. Allowing of China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) was a classic case of
putting short-term gains ahead of longer term prosperity. The Chinese have shown that they have next to no respect for the concept of
intellectual property rights, AKA the cornerstone of modern business. Cheap knock-offs of everything from designer fashion brands to
ambulance stretchers continue to flood the West, with no sign of slowing down. Then there is the cyber army that is paid to steal from Western
business, government, military contractors and anyone deemed to have even the most slightly useful information. Other bad behaviors include
the fact that China continues to undervalue its currency; that it protects its own companies while putting foreign firms at a competitive
disadvantage, and that they are slow to implement WTO rules, while suddenly imposing unwritten laws that are unfavorable to foreigners.
And now we have China bullying anyone and everyone in the South China Sea, where they built a
number of artificial islands with airstrips for military aircraft. China refutes the international regulations
ruling that the islands belong to Japan , just as they refused the recent ruling of the International Court of
Arbitration ruling that the “ten dash line,” whereby China claims the entirety of the South China Sea as their territory, is illegal. Any
ruling against China is seen by them as losing face, which poses the obvious problem for the West: How
do you deal with a country that will disregard the international laws by which everyone else abides? No
one has yet stood up to China on this issue, because many of the disputed islands have been deemed
too small and insignificant to start a major diplomatic row , or even a minor scuffle over. Yet the lack of action by
both China’s neighbors and by the West has allowed China to become increasingly bold in their
actions. We are now at the point where anything short of military action—and a hard line against China’s
encroachment on the area—is going to continue to cost everyone dearly in the future.

Territorial accommodation is distinct from appeasement

Glaser 15 Charles L Glaser is a professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the
Department of Political Science at George Washington University. He is also a fellow in the Kissinger
Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (“A U.S.-China Grand Bargain?”
International Security, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Spring 2015), doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00199)SEM

Logic of a Strategy of Territorial Accommodation To lay the foundation for evaluatinga U.S. strategy toward China that
includes territorial accommodation, I begin by reviewing the general logic of its benefits and costs. Although territorial
accommodation is frequently viewed as a deeply flawed strategy—often associated with British
concessions to Germany at the 1938 Munich conference— concessions can be a state’s best option for
protecting its vital interests. I focus here on unilateral territorial concessions to an adversary designed to reduce the probability of
war.16 Territorial accommodation [End Page 56] could, however, be mutual or be part of an overall bargain in
which the adversary also makes concessions over other things it values. POTENTIAL BENEFITS There are three
paths that can lead to the success of territorial accommodation .17 The first is satisfying or partially
satisfying an adversary that wants to change the status quo, thereby reducing the costs it is willing to
pay to further change the status quo, which in turn reduces the probability of war.18 When the adversary has limited
aims, accommodation has the potential to completely satisfy it. In this case, following accommodation, a greedy state
that had limited aims in the prior status quo becomes a security seeker in the new status quo. Thus the possibility of war over those limited
aims is essentially eliminated. The second path to success is increasing an adversary’s security, which can occur
through a variety of mechanisms. For example, territorial accommodation can directly increase the adversary’s security if the state making
concessions had deployed forces on the conceded territory that threatened the adversary. Accommodation can also increase the
adversary’s security if the state deployed forces beyond the conceded territory to protect it and if these forces
threatened the adversary. Finally, as explained by defensive realism, if accommodation signals that the state is a
security seeker, or even that it has more limited hostile aims than the adversary previously believed, the adversary will be more
secure and in turn less dangerous. The third, partially related, path involves increasing both states’ security
by making unnecessary the military competition that the states would have engaged in while pursuing
capabilities to defend or attack the territory in question. Under certain conditions, this military competition could have reduced both states’
capabilities or could have communicated greedy motives, thereby straining their political relationship and making war more likely.

Accommodation isn’t appeasement – it’s key to maintain peace

Pilling 15 (David Pilling is the Africa editor of the Financial Times. He was previously Asia editor and
also formerly Tokyo Bureau Chief for the FT from January 2002 to August 2008. His column ranges over
business, investment, politics and economics., 3-18-2015, "‘Accommodating’ Beijing may be no bad
thing," Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/7480fe80-cbcf-11e4-aeb5-00144feab7de)SEM

In the 50 shades of diplomatic speak, the

word “accommodation” is only slightly less stinging than that other A-word:
“appeasement”. Last week, a senior US official rebuked the UK for its “constant accommodation” of China.
London had agreed to be a member of a Beijing-led infrastructure bank that some fear could one day challenge a US-
led World Bank. The implication is that other concessions have been made . A deal not to meet the Dalai Lama here. A
soft-pedalling on Hong Kong democracy there. “We are wary about a trend toward constant accommodation of China, which is not the best
way to engage a rising power,” the official said. That raises the question: what is the best way to engage a rising power? If “constant
accommodation” is not the answer, what is? The US would doubtless deny that the alternative is “constant containment”. Rather, it would say,
China must be coaxed into the existing international order, whose rules and norms have served the region well for 70 years. The problem is
that, from Beijing’s perspective, those rules and norms have been made in Washington’s image. That applies to multilateral institutions such as
the World Bank, where China has a 3.8 per cent share of voting rights despite having 16 per cent of global output. It also applies to norms
covering maritime affairs that, again from Beijing’s viewpoint, allow the US to police Asian waters vital to China’s interest or to preserve
postwar territorial delineations in contravention of China’s historic claims. If Beijing must abide by international norms created by the west
when China was down on its knees, who, it might reasonably ask, needs containment anyway. When it comes to the bank, now that Britain has
broken ranks, others are likely to follow. Indeed, there are good arguments for doing so. If Washington’s concern really is that the new bank will
override environmental and social norms then it would be better to try to influence it from the inside than to stand aloof. The split over the
bank is part of a much broader question of how to deal with a rising China generally. Hugh
White, an Australian academic and former
defence official, argues persuasively that China needs to be “accommodated”. That’s right: he uses the very word
wielded by the US as an insult. China simply will not accept a secondary role in its own backyard. He advocates a
political deal that would give Beijing and Washington equal clout in the region , and allow India and Japan a stake
in the new set-up. There are many objections to such thinking. For one, it sounds so 19th century. Surely the world is beyond spheres of
influence and great power carve-ups? Such a “solution” would relegate other nations, such as Indonesia and South Korea, to second-tier status.
And once the US cedes some power to China, what is to stop it pressing for more — say, by seeking to reclaim Taiwan or threatening its old
adversary, Japan? To the sceptics, “accommodation” is just another word for “appeasement”. Give Beijing an inch
and it will grab a mile (preferably with an exclusive economic zone attached). Since 1938, when Britain and France allowed Germany to annex
parts of Czechoslovakia, appeasement has had a terrible rap, associated with cowardice and disastrous miscalculation. Instead of bringing
“peace in our time”, the Allies merely emboldened an aggressive Germany. Appeasers, said Winston Churchill, fed others to the crocodile in the
hope that they would be eaten last. Professor White responds that, while
the lessons of 1938 must be learnt, they should
not be over-learnt. Today, the question must be: is President Xi Jinping’s China like Adolf Hitler’s
Germany, an evil regime bent on war? If so, then containment makes perfect sense. If not, then it may be
containment that is the disastrous miscalculation. China may come to believe it can only gain influence
in the world through conflict. “If we treat China like Nazi Germany,” concludes Prof White, “then we will
indeed end up going to war with it.” Thankfully, deciding whether to join a bank is a long way from world war three. Yet the
question still boils down to this: must China be expected to play entirely by rules it had no part in establishing?
Or will a risen China inevitably seek to influence international norms? When it comes to the infrastructure bank,
there is a strong argument for engagement. And if that looks like accommodation — well, so be it.
 2AC – Revisionism

No revisionism – accommodationist tactics solve Chinese aggression and don’t disrupt

alliances
Glaser 11 (Charles L. Glaser is professor of political science and international affairs and director of the
Elliott School's Institute for Security and Conflict Studies. “Disengaging from Taiwan; Should Washington
Continue Its Alliance With Taipei?: Glaser Replies,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2011,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/east-asia/2011-07-01/disengaging-taiwan)SEM

Glaser Replies Shyu-tu Lee s argument hinges on two key claims: that China does not feel threatened by
the United States and that China has essentially unlimited geopolitical aims . Both are quite unlikely. First,
major powers tend to see the military capabilities of their peers as threatening, unless they share
excellent political relations. Although China and the United States are not enemies, they do not have confidence
that each other's motives are benign. This is reflected in China's concern about U.S. ballistic missile defense systems, the
survivability of its nuclear force in the event of a war, and the threat posed to its sea-based commerce and energy imports by U.S. naval
forces— which could sever China's access to critical resources and render the country vulnerable to coercion during a crisis
over Taiwan. Second, although experts disagree on China's motives, the most common assessment is that China places great value
on Taiwan, some value on its ability to prevail in regional maritime disputes in the East China and South
China seas, and little value on gaining other territory. Given these judgments, U.S. policies that simply seek to
increase its ability to project power in the Pacific could needlessly spark tensions with China,
heightening the possibility of conflict. Of course, this forecast of China's goals could prove wrong. Consequently, the United
States must implement political concessions and military restraint with caution, maintaining its alliances
with Japan and South Korea to provide a successful counterbalance. Lastly, Lee's argument about the increasing
danger posed by China implies that maintaining the U.S. commitment to Taiwan will be ever more costly and perilous. This bolsters
the case for a U.S. pullback. Douglas Paal, meanwhile, believes that the people of Taiwan should have a large say in U.S. decision-
making. International politics, however, rarely works this way Especially when important national se curity interests are at stake, states
make foreign policy decisions based on their own interests. Friends, allies, and adversaries may not like these decisions,
but they have little choice but to adapt to them . Although my article focused on U.S. national security interests, it is true that
the United States has a significant interest in supporting freedom and democracy around the world, including in
Taiwan. These interests offer the strongest argument for Washington to maintain its current commitment to Taipei. But the United
States should pursue these other interests only if they do not pose a serious national security risk . Given
the potential for the U.S. commitment to Taiwan to strain relations with China and even to lead to a severe crisis, the United States
should consider scaling back—although not necessarily ending—that commitment. The United States
could stop selling arms to Taiwan but maintain its pledge to defend Taiwan should China launch an
unprovoked attack; it could continue to sell Taiwan arms but make clear that it will not intervene on Taiwan's behalf should a conflict
occur, even if Taiwan did not provoke it; or it could link its continued support to the Taiwanese government's willingness to refrain from moving
toward independence. This final arrangement would establish the connection between Taiwanese public opinion and U.S. policy that Paal so
strongly emphasizes. Given the stakes for the United States, a full-fledged analysis of these options is certainly warranted.

China is not revisionist – even if it was, the aff solves revisionism.

(Shelley Rigger, 11-29-2011, Senior Fellow in the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute,
is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. She has a
PhD in Government from Harvard University and a BA in Public and International Affairs from Princeton,
"Why giving up Taiwan will not help us with China," AEI, http://www.aei.org/publication/why-giving-up-
taiwan-will-not-help-us-with-china/) //reem
Other voices soon echoed Owens’s call for a new look at Taiwan policy. In the January 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs, Bruce Gilley describes Taiwan’s current
trajectory toward “Finlandization,” which means “Taiwan would reposition itself as a neutral power, rather than a U.S.
strategic ally, in order to mollify Beijing’s fears about the island’s becoming an obstacle to China’s
military and commercial ambitions in the region. It would also refrain from undermining the [Chinese
Communist Party’s] rule in China. In return, Beijing would back down on its military threats, grant Taipei
expanded participation in international organizations, and extend the island favorable economic and
social benefits.”[2] Gilley claims current US policy opposes this positive trend, since it retards [decelerates] the Finlandization process by encouraging
Taiwan to follow an alternative route: dependence on the United States at the expense of improved relations with the PRC. In the March 2011 issue of Foreign
Affairs, Charles Glaser makes similar arguments in analyzing Sino-American relations from the perspective of international relations theory.[3] He rejects the Realist
prediction that a rising China inevitably will clash with the United States, the reigning global power. Glaser
explains that China’s rise need
not threaten US interests because “there is actually little reason to believe that [Beijing] has or will
develop grand territorial ambitions in its region or beyond.” Therefore, Washington’s priority should be
avoiding unnecessary conflict, not countering or containing China’s growing power. The best
opportunity to reassure Beijing that the United States is not countering or containing it, he argues, is
to yield to Beijing’s preferences regarding Taiwan. Glaser adds, “The challenge for the United States will come in making adjustments
to its policies in situations in which less-than-vital interests (such as Taiwan) might cause problems and in making sure it does not exaggerate the risks posed by
China’s growing power and military capabilities.”
 2AC – Conflict Inevitable – Plan Key

Status quo means China conflict is inevitable – only the plan can solve.
(Shelley Rigger, 11-29-2011, Senior Fellow in the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute,
is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. She has a
PhD in Government from Harvard University and a BA in Public and International Affairs from Princeton,
"Why giving up Taiwan will not help us with China," AEI, http://www.aei.org/publication/why-giving-up-
taiwan-will-not-help-us-with-china/) //reem
In a May 2011 speech at the China Maritime Studies Institute, retired diplomat and China expert Chas Freeman weighed in with his case for a
new Taiwan policy.[4] He, too, stressed China’s rising power—which he contrasted with a United States he believes is in sharp decline—and
concluded, “In this context . . . it would seem wise to minimize activities that increase rather than diminish China’s perceived need to prepare
itself for future combat with the United States.” One such activity, he argued, was US defense support for Taiwan: “ The Taiwan issue is
the only one with the potential to ignite a war between China and the United States. To the [People’s
Liberation Army], U.S. programs with Taiwan signal fundamental American hostility to the return of
China to the status of a great power under the People’s Republic. America’s continuing arms sales,
training, and military counsel to Taiwan’s armed forces represent potent challenges to China’s pride,
nationalism, and rising power, as well as to its military planners.” Freeman fears the United States is in
danger of entering a competition with China for military power comparable to the last years of the
Cold War. But in this case, he warns, the United States will play the role of the USSR—exhausted and
depleted by unsustainable military spending and alliance commitments—leaving China to claim
victory. At such a moment, challenging China on an issue it considers crucial is, in his words, “oddly misguided.” He writes, “ China sees
the policies of the United States as the last effective barrier to the arrival of a ripe moment for the
achievement of national unity under a single, internationally respected sovereignty. Dignity and unity
have been and remain the core ambitions of the Chinese revolution. . . . The political dynamics of
national honor will sooner or later force Beijing to adopt less risk-averse policies than it now
espouses.”[5] Continuing to support Taiwan thus puts a depleted United States on a collision course
with an ever-more-powerful China.
 2AC – Containment failing
Trump is failing to contain China
Kempe 19 (Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, prize-winning journalist and president & CEO of
the Atlantic Council, “China is making a global power play, and the US response is coming up short,”
CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/26/china-is-making-a-global-power-play-and-the-us-response-
is-coming-up-short.html)SEM

Perhaps the greatest uncertainty for Beijing’s leadership is how – and with what impact -- the United States will
respond to China’s rise, once it has closed its trade deal , now expected by mid-June. Will it go into a more
active model of containment or even pushback, as some in the Trump administration and national security hawks in the
Pentagon and intelligence community would prefer? Or will Trump follow his more transactional instincts. Publicly,
Trump has rarely criticized Xi personally or China’s strategic policies and human rights record more
generally. At the very least, the United States needs to compete harder, and do more to galvanize friends and
allies in common cause. That’s particularly true, write the authors of a newly released study, in the infrastructure realm where the
world will need $94 trillion in investments by 2040. Through the BRI, argues a report of the CSIS’ Global Infrastructure Task Force, China has
made itself “the most significant and ambitious strategic initiative of the twenty-first century so far.” “Over the next 15 years, more hard
infrastructure is projected to be built around the world than currently exists,” argues the task force paper, co-chaired by Charlene Barshefsky
and Stephen Hadley. “Make no mistake. The United States is way behind the power curve. Incremental improvements will not do.” That seems
to be the most important message. With
China operating in ways that are anything but incremental, the United
States’ response is inadequately focused, creative or resourced. China has significant problems to
overcome, but thus far it lacks significant competition.
 2AC/1AR Appeasement Wrong

Appeasement is false – the aff results in only a symbolic reunification – otherwise US

commitments are unsustainable – and Taiwan isn’t key to security
Freeman 11 (Freeman Ambassador Chas W. Freeman Jr. is a senior fellow at Brown University’s
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, "Beijing, Washington, and the Shifting Balance of
Prestige," No Publication, http://www.mepc.org/speeches/beijing-washington-and-shifting-balance-
prestige)SEM

China has been patient for four decades, but it is now actively pondering how best to remove the United States
from what is — from its point of view — our very unhelpful residual military role in cross-Strait relations so that Beijing’s
negotiators can settle the Taiwan issue with their counterparts in Taipei. That, I take it, is a principal focus of the
national review of policy toward the United States that China is reportedly poised to launch. Americans cannot safely assume that
China’s recent objections to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan or other military actions on our part are pro forma or “just more of
the same.” It’s at least as likely that we will soon once again confront the necessity to choose between the self-imposed shackles of
longstanding policy and the imperatives of our long-term strategic interests. The underlying issue today is at root the same as forty
years ago — the contradiction between U.S. policies designed to frustrate China’s achievement of its core
objective of national unity and our need to reduce enmity and increase cooperation with China . But the
context in which we must wrestle with this contradiction today is radically different. The balance of prestige, if not yet the balance of
power, between the United States and China has shifted. In international affairs, prestige is the shadow cast by the power of
states to shape systems, attitudes, trends, and events. It is generated by the perceived decisiveness of a nation’s political system, its economic
strength, and the vision and wisdom of its leadership, as well as its military prowess. Prestige
is a major determinant of the
ability of a nation to preserve the privileges of the past or frame the freedoms of the future. Current
trends in this regard do not favor the United States over China. It is not just that China and others are regaining
the regional preeminence they enjoyed before the now defunct era of Western colonialism. It is also that
America’s fractious politics are now dispiriting rather than inspiring to foreigners and citizens alike. The financial system and
economic model of the United States have been discredited in the world’s eyes. Few look to us for leadership on either
global or regional issues, whatever their nature. Only our military power is fully respected. But, as we have shown the
world in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya, there are limits to what military power alone can accomplish .
China is widely seen as having its act together. The United States is universally viewed as in big trouble on a dismaying range of issues and not
doing much, if anything, about any of them, other than more of the same. Our fiscal situation is a central element of this perception. Total
federal revenue, from all sources (income, corporate, excise, social security, and medicare taxes) is now $2.2 trillion annually. Total federal
transfer payments to individuals for unemployment, pensions, medical care, and the like come to $2.4 trillion. The United States government is
out of cash; it has to borrow $200 billion even before it begins to fund its operations. The $1.3 trillion it costs to run the government is, in
effect, all borrowed, much of it from foreigners. About $700 billion is for the defense budget. Another $300 billion or more is military-related
but in other budgets. Total U.S. military spending comes to well over $1 trillion. Most of our politicians remain in denial, but growing numbers
of them have begun to realize that America can’t afford to continue anything like this level of outlays for our armed forces. To our
creditors, America now looks like a huge, insolvent insurance company with a mostly military workforce living on
credit rollovers. Washington can’t even pass a budget, let alone devise a credible plan to pay down our debt. Increasingly, America’s creditors
see the United States as a bad bet, not a safe haven for their money. This is not good. And it is not smart, in such circumstances, to enter a race
with the People’s Liberation Army, as we did with Soviet armed forces, to see who can spend whom into the ground. Unlike the Soviet Union,
China has a highly successful economy that is widely seen as a model combination of industrial policy
with market economics. Not everybody likes China, but it has a reputation for coherent strategic vision. China
does not operate an empire of captive satellite nations, have a history of global power projection, seek
to export an ideology, or propose to expand beyond its traditional frontiers. It has not configured its
forces for an attack on our homeland, even if it has made provision for retaliation against us in the event we strike its homeland.
China has begun, however, to object to American naval operations in its near seas that it considers hostile to it. By its attempts to deny our right
to carry out such operations, China jeopardizes our exercise of at least a portion of the global hegemony to which we have recently become
accustomed. And the Chinese
seem bent on developing defenses we cannot easily overwhelm. These are
threats to our omnipotence even it they are not threats to our homeland. China is also beginning to
show a capacity to innovate militarily in ways that challenge American ingenuity . The good news is that China
thus stimulates expensive new U.S. research and development projects as well as procurement and a conference or two. It is becoming a
justification for “military Keynesianism.” But, as the numbers show, even without China as a major driver, military spending is already an
unaffordable burden on the U.S. economy. In marked contrast, China’s
defense budget is neither a significant strain on its
economy nor likely to become one. With a GDP that seems destined to dwarf that of the United States in the foreseeable future,
China does not anticipate resource constraints as it seeks to counter and outmatch the threat to it from America. The United States is now
fiscally hollow. Yet we are entering a long-term military rivalry with China on terms that are easily bearable by China but fiscally ruinous for us.
This rivalry is all the more disadvantageous because China is competing in notably cost-effective ways, and we are not. Aggressive
reconnaissance in cyberspace is a less expensive and fatiguing way than naval and air patrols by which to probe
military capabilities and map targets in other nations. Ballistic and submarine-launched cruise missiles can kill capital ships like aircraft carriers
at a fraction of what it costs to build them. It’s much cheaper to shatter or blind satellites than to launch, maintain, or protect them. Defensive
measures are less demanding of human and material resources than power projection against them. This should give us pause. In some
disturbing ways, Sino-American
competition is beginning to parallel the contest between us and the Soviet
Union in the Cold War. This time, however, the United States is in the fiscally precarious position of the
USSR, while China plays the economically robust role we once did . The political and economic weaknesses of the USSR
made it unable to compete with us on any terms other than military. The huge expense of a military contest with an economically fitter enemy
ultimately bankrupted the Soviet state and brought it down. Moscow’s conviction that the best defense is an overwhelmingly strong offense
locked it into a military competition that, in retrospect, was as unnecessary as it was ultimately fatal. Based on parallel logic, we have come to
spend as much as the rest of the world combined on capabilities for military coercion. Our current force structure and global
military posture are not dedicated to the defense of our homeland but to sustaining a credible capacity to overwhelm
other nations’ ability to defend their homelands and adjacent areas, including their near seas. Americans do not worry that foreigners will
impose their will on us. Our armed forces exist to impose our will on those who challenge or resist it. In
this context, China’s
improving defenses are only part of what drives our military strategy. Still, they loom ever larger in its
sights. As their strong preference for asymmetric counters to the instruments of American power projection illustrate, the Chinese are
not just seeking security, but affordable security. Perhaps, given the state of our finances, we should do so too. But it’s hard
to see how an objective of affordable security for the United States could be compatible with maintaining the assured ability to overpower
China’s constantly improving defenses. The subject you are discussing — China’s strategy for its near seas — is very relevant. The Chinese
have begun to make it clear that they will not be prepared indefinitely to tolerate the long-term menace of
provocative foreign naval operations near their homeland’s coasts. So it is in its near seas that China’s
determination to carve out an exception to America’s global dominion is finding its clearest expression .
This determination does not make China a threat to the United States, but it reinforces the point that China is
a threat to U.S. military supremacy in Asia and possibly beyond it. In this context as in others, it would seem
wise to minimize activities that increase rather than diminish China’s perceived need to prepare itself for
future combat with the United States. To the extent that the U.S. and PLA navies come to confront each other in China’s near
seas, the stimulus for China to focus on ridding these seas of foreign threats simply increases . There is, after all,
an ineluctable asymmetry at play. The United States can cease to patrol China’s near seas if it chooses, but China
cannot cease to abut them. The U.S. Navy insists on the right to conduct all sorts of operations in exclusive economic zones — EEZs
— as an essential legal underpinning of our national interest in maintaining a dominant naval presence around the world. China sees its
maritime perimeter through its experience of national humiliation by repeated assaults from the sea.
What is a legal principle for Americans is a defense imperative for China. Such differences are unlikely to be resolved
anytime soon. Nor can we assume that bringing them to a head would necessarily resolve them in our
favor. The United States is not a party to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and so not in a position to avail ourselves of
the Convention’s dispute resolution mechanisms. International law evolves to reflect changes in military preoccupations, technologies, and
balances. Hence, the worldwide move — which the U.S. Navy stoutly resisted — from a three to a twelve-mile limit. Hence the subsequent
creation, also initially opposed by the United States, of a two-hundred-mile EEZ. It’s hard to argue that American views enjoy greater
international deference today than they did thirty or forty years ago. There are many countries concerned, like China, to secure themselves
from potential attack from the sea. In the post Cold War era, there are not many nations interested in preserving conditions conducive to global
power projection or worldwide naval operations. If push came to shove, a majority of UNCLOS member states might support China’s views over
ours. Ifthe Chinese were to mount their own aggressive reconnaissance operations off Guam, Pearl
Harbor, San Diego, and Puget Sound, even our own politicians might object to their right to do this . In a
world of more than one large and competent navy, the application of the golden rule to naval operations is an ever-
present, if perhaps novel and unwelcome, possibility. In sum, having a legal right to do something does not make it wise to
rub others’ noses in it. Lurking offshore to satisfy a prurient interest in the military preparedness of other nations to defend themselves can
clearly be useful. Possibly, in some circumstances, it could be essential. But the best way to preserve the right to do it may be to refrain from
doing it too obviously, too frequently, or too intrusively. Antagonistic encounters
in China’s near seas are a significant factor in
worsening Sino-American military relations but they do not have the impact of U.S. moves to shore up Taiwan’s
resistance to reunion with the mainland . The Taiwan issue is the only one with the potential to ignite a war between China and
the United States. To the PLA, U.S. programs with Taiwan signal fundamental American hostility to the return of
China to the status of a great power under the People’s Republic . America’s continuing arms sales, training,
and military counsel to Taiwan’s armed forces represent potent challenges to China’s pride,
nationalism, and rising power, as well as to its military planners. These U.S. programs appear to reflect judgments by the American
elite that the Communist dictatorship on the mainland is fundamentally illegitimate and should be prevented from extending its sway to other
parts of China even by peaceful means. U.S. interactions with Taiwan and Tibet belie the lip service American officials pay to the notion of “one
China.” The message China’s civilian and military elite get from these interactions is that the United States wants “one China in name but not in
fact — not now, and perhaps never, if America has anything to say about it.” The Chinese don’t think we should have anything to say about it.
The kind of long-term relationship of friendship and cooperation China and America want with each
other is incompatible with our emotionally fraught differences over the Taiwan issue . These differences propel
mutual hostility and the sort of ruinous military rivalry between the two countries that has already begun. We are coming to a point at which
we can no longer finesse our differences over Taiwan. We must either resolve them or live with the increasingly adverse consequences of our
failure to do so. For
Chinese, the Taiwan issue presents an increasingly stark choice between national pride
commensurate with rising prestige and continuing deference to America’s waning power . With Taiwan and
the mainland integrating in practice, China sees the policies of the United States as the last effective barrier to the arrival of a ripe moment for
the achievement of national unity under a single, internationally respected sovereignty. Dignity and unity have been and remain the core
ambitions of the Chinese revolution. China may, for now, continue to emphasize the avoidance of conflict with the United States. But
the
political dynamics of national honor will sooner or later force Beijing to adopt less risk-averse policies
than it now espouses. For Americans, the Taiwan issue presents an unwelcome choice between
potential long-term military antagonism with China and the perpetuation, despite rapid cross-Strait economic and
social integration, of Taiwan’s de facto political separation from the mainland. So far, the United States has in practice
given priority to Taiwan, in what is now best described as an effort to retard the speeding tilt of the cross-Strait military balance against Taiwan.
Given the huge stakes for the United States in our strategic interaction with China, this choice might well strike someone looking afresh at the
situation as oddly misguided. American priorities look all the more inverted when one considers that Beijing has offered to
negotiate what amounts to purely symbolic reunification with Taiwan, forgoing any political or military
presence of its own on the island. This offer cannot be dismissed as incredible. China’s willingness to
tolerate amazingly different politico-economic orders on what is nominally its territory has been amply
demonstrated in both Hong Kong and Macau. Its proposal to Taipei offers far greater autonomy than
either of these city-states enjoy. Is it worth a war with China to prevent such an outcome? If not, why are we
behaving as if it were? Both our global military posture and our approach to China seem unlikely to work out
well for us. Perhaps it’s once again time to throw off the intellectual shackles imposed by longstanding policy and address the imperatives
of long-term strategic interests. Just something to think about as you plot a course for the U.S. Navy in China’s near seas.
China Containment DA/Turn
 AT DA – China Appeasement / Credibility
Containment causes war and Taiwan isn’t key to U.S. primacy.
Stapleton 16 — Brad Stapleton, Visiting Research Fellow in Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the
Cato Institute, former Adjunct Researcher at the RAND Corporation, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science
from the University of California-Los Angeles, 2016 (“Review: The Unquiet Frontier: Rising Rivals,
Vulnerable Allies, and the Crisis of American Power – Jakub J. Grygiel and A. Wess Mitchell,” The Cato
Journal, Volume 36, Number 3, Fall, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Questia)

In The Unquiet Frontier, Jakub Grygiel and A. Wess Mitchell have articulated a provocative justification for a revitalized
strategy of containment focused on China, Iran, and Russia. That strategy is based on what they call the "rimland imperative"--the notion
that U.S. security and prosperity are vitally dependent upon supporting allies against the encroachment by "revisionist" states (those intent
upon overturning the established geopolitical order) on the periphery of Eurasia, stretching "from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea in Europe,
through the Levant and Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean and up through the littoral Asia to the Sea of Japan." In
many ways, The
Unquiet Frontier is unduly alarmist. The contention that "the U.S.-led global alliance network could
unravel in coming years" is certainly hyperbolic. Over the past decade, a number of prominent analysts have voiced trenchant
arguments in favor of U.S. retrenchment. But that perspective has failed to exert much (if any) influence over U.S. foreign policy. In fact, the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have prompted the Obama administration to place renewed emphasis on maintaining strong alliances—largely as
a means of distributing the burden for addressing threats to international security. In his FY2017 budget proposal, President Obama
recommended increasing funding for the European Reassurance Initiative by nearly 350 percent to $3.4 billion. Reports
of the death of
the American alliance system have thus been greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, Grygiel and Mitchell provide a thorough
and interesting explication of the general benefits of alliances. They can deter revisionist states by increasing the expected costs and reducing
the expected gains of aggression—and in so doing temper the ambitions of U.S. rivals. In the event that deterrence fails, alliances also extend
the reach of the U.S. military by securing access to overseas bases. And by reassuring smaller states, U.S. alliances can prevent them from
pursuing independent security initiatives that could be destabilizing—most notably, developing their own nuclear weapons. Given those
benefits, Grygiel and Mitchell view alliances as essential for preventing "the emergence of a power or combination of powers within the
Eurasian landmass that could invade or economically dominate the United States." In
promoting a strategy of forward
containment, Grygiel and Mitchell lean heavily on classical geostrategic theory . They frequently invoke the
arguments of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman stressing the importance of the global rimland. Moreover, their advocacy of the vital
importance of "frontier allies" is cut from the same cloth as the perimeter defense concept inherent in U.S. containment doctrine from the
early Cold War period. Any failure to resist revisionist probing, which Grygiel and Mitchell define as any "low-intensity and low-risk test aimed
at gauging the opposing state's power and will to maintain security and influence over a region," is purported to encourage further aggression,
which permits the growth of menacing Eurasian rivals to the United States. Even
if one acknowledges the general benefits of
alliances, the contention that small states on the periphery of the Eurasian rimland are vital to U.S.
security is unpersuasive. It is difficult to see how picking off small frontier states, through either
aggression or accommodation, would substantially augment the power of a revisionist state . In fact, such
states often prove to be liabilities rather than assets. The suggestion that Estonia and Taiwan are vital
to U.S. security and prosperity thus borders on the absurd. Grygiel and Mitchell do acknowledge, however,
that the United States cannot possibly defend every far-flung outpost in the world . Since "to defend everything is to
defend nothing," they argue that "America's strategic goal should not be to defend some abstract global architecture or global principle but to
defend specific states against specific threats." This
acknowledgment renders the advocacy of a perimeter defense
strategy even more questionable. The inherent limits of American power would seem to suggest that a "strongpoint" containment
strategy, which analysts such as George Kennan gradually gravitated toward in the early Cold War period, would be more pragmatic. Rather
than trying to contain Russia, Iran, and China along a 10,000-mile rimland, the U nited States could focus on
deterring aggression against key modern industrial states —and perhaps less developed states in key strategic locations—
whose absorption would substantially augment the material power of revisionist rivals . In other words, the
United States should focus on doing what it has been doing: preserving a strong, independent Western Europe; deterring aggression against
either Japan or South Korea; and working with Turkey and Saudi Arabia to maintain access to the straits of the Bosporus, Dardanelles, and
Hormuz. A more limited containment strategy might also be preferable since it would be less likely to
antagonize China, Iran, and Russia. That represents the largest hole in The Unquiet Frontier: Grygiel and
Mitchell devote almost no attention to the security dilemma—the idea that actions one state takes to
enhance its own security can perversely engender greater insecurity in other states . Yet recurring rounds of
NATO expansion have clearly engendered fears of isolation and encirclement in Russia. Given those fears, Russia's intervention in Ukraine
should not necessarily be interpreted as a revisionist probe; in many ways, it constitutes a desperate attempt to preserve the status quo by
preventing Ukraine from being absorbed into western political and military alliances. It
is therefore imperative to consider
whether maintaining military alliances on the doorsteps of countries like China, Iran, and Russia might
do more harm than good by confirming their suspicions that the United States is intent upon encircling
them. Ultimately, The Unquiet Frontier is symptomatic of a pervasive fear that a new Cold War may be
dawning. Yet the book makes one wonder whether adopting a rimland containment strategy would
likely turn those fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy. As George Kennan, the so-called father of containment, wrote in 1947,
"It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently
enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right."

The plan gives China a status quo it can live with — removing the motivation for
expansionism.
Kastner 16 — Scott L. Kastner, Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at
the University of Maryland-College Park, Author of Political Conflict and Economic Interdependence
across the Taiwan Strait and Beyond and Co-Editor of Globalization and Security Relations across the
Taiwan Strait: In the Shadow of China, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California-
San Diego, 2015/2016 (“Is the Taiwan Strait Still a Flash Point? Rethinking the Prospects for Armed
Conflict between China and Taiwan,” International Security, Volume 40, Number 3, Winter, Available
Online to Subscribing Institutions via Project Muse)
The analysis presented in this article has significant implications for U.S. policy toward the Taiwan Strait. On the one hand, the potential
dangers posed by a shifting cross-strait balance of power suggest that proposals calling for a reduced U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s security
carry with them significant risks. For instance, a U.S. decision to terminate arms sales to the island would almost certainly exacerbate changes
in the cross-strait balance of power. Such an effect could occur both directly, by undercutting Taiwan’s access to advanced [End Page 90]
weaponry, and indirectly, by signaling a reduced U.S. interest in Taiwan’s security (and hence reduced willingness to intervene in the event of
conflict in the Taiwan Strait). This is not to say that a concept such as Charles Glaser’s grand bargain, where the
United States would end its commitment to Taiwan in exchange for the PRC peacefully settling other
regional maritime disputes and accepting a U.S. role in the region, 103 would necessarily contribute to
instability in the Taiwan Strait. Rather , I have argued that the destabilizing effect of a shifting military balance
is conditional on the evolution of other trends, particularly those that affect China’s expected costs of
war and those that affect the degree to which Chinese policymakers are optimistic or pessimistic about
where Taiwan is heading over the long term . Yet, because a reduced U.S. commitment to Taiwan would affect
the cross-strait military balance, such a policy shift is risky and should occur only in the context of a broader
understanding that significantly increases China’s stake in a stable status quo .

Zero chance China dominates Asia — too many peer competitors and they won’t even
try.
White 13 — Hugh White, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, former
Intelligence Analyst with Australia’s Office of National Assessments and Senior Official with Australia’s
Department of Defence, 2013 (“Power and Ambition,” The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power,
Published by Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780199684717, p. 57-58)
What Does China Want? If I have persuaded you that China’s challenge should indeed be taken seriously,
two critical questions will now arise: how much power and status does China want? And what does it
have the power to get? The gloomiest possibility is that Beijing might want to establish a harsh regime of
control across Asia backed by armed force, much as Stalin did over Eastern Europe after 1945. China’s
communist political system makes it easy to assume that its strategic objectives will follow Stalin’s
example. No doubt there are some people in China who would like their country to wield this kind of
power, and their numbers may grow. The stronger China becomes, the more tempted it will be to try to
subjugate its neighbours. Guarding against this possibility must always be a prime concern for China’s
neighbours and others with an interest in Asia’s future. Nonetheless, while we should recognise this risk,
we should not exaggerate it. Much as it may grow, China has little chance of becoming powerful enough
to impose a Stalinist-style dominion over Asia. There are too many other strong states in the region that
will get in the way. Most obviously and immediately, it will face America itself. Japan, for all its
problems, will be for many decades a country with great strategic potential based in a huge economy
with great technological depth. India, if it fulfils its promise, will start to rival China’s power before the
middle of the century. Finally, Russia, though no match for China in raw economic scale, and unlikely to
be a key player in the wider Asian system, will still be a formidably armed neighbour which China must
always treat very carefully. Beijing would find it virtually impossible to dominate Asia against the
committed resistance of even one or two of these powers, let alone all of them. It could also face the
resistance of several substantial middle powers, especially South Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia, who
might well support the great powers in resisting a Chinese bid for hegemony in Asia. Against such
opposition, China would find that instead of securing assured primacy over Asia, it would be mired in an
open-ended, costly and ultimately unwinnable struggle from which it would emerge much the poorer, or
even be plunged into a catastrophic war. So far these things seem well understood in China, which no
doubt explains, better than any commitment to abstract principles of international relations, why China shows no
signs of following in Stalin’s footsteps.
 --- China Not Revisionist
No Chinese revisionism---they misunderstand intentions
Heer 19 --- National Intelligence Officer for East Asia in the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence from 2007 to 2015. He has since served as Robert E. Wilhelm Research Fellow at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies and as Adjunct Professor at
George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He is the author of Mr. X and the
Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Paul Heer, 1-8-2019, "Rethinking U.S.
Primacy in East Asia," National Interest, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/rethinking-us-
primacy-east-asia-40972)
American policy in the Western Pacific has long been framed in terms of preventing the emergence of an exclusive, hostile hegemon that could threaten vital U.S.
interests and deny American access there. The
Trump administration’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy respectively
assert that “China seeks to displace the United States” in East Asia and thus achieve “Indo-Pacific
regional hegemony.” Avoiding this possibility has required Washington, also as a matter of policy, to maintain its own hegemony in the region (although
we prefer to call it “primacy” or “preeminence”) as the best and only guarantee against such a danger. This mantra was central to the Obama administration’s
“rebalance” in East Asia, and remains central to the Trump administration’s advocacy of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific.” But this
policy mantra has
two fundamental problems: it mischaracterizes China’s strategic intentions in the region, and it is
based on a U.S. strategic objective that is probably no longer achievable. First, China is pursuing hegemony
in East Asia, but not an exclusive hostile hegemony. It is not trying to extrude the United States from the
region or deny American access there. The Chinese have long recognized the utility —and the benefits to China itself
—of U.S. engagement with the region , and they have indicated receptivity to peaceful coexistence and

overlapping spheres of influence with the United States there. Moreover, China is not trying to impose its
political or economic system on its neighbors, and it does not seek to obstruct commercial freedom of
navigation in the region (because no country is more dependent on freedom of the seas than China itself). In short, Beijing wants to
extend its power and influence within East Asia, but not as part of a “winner-take-all” contest . China does have
unsettled and vexing sovereignty claims over Taiwan, most of the islands and other features in the East and South China Seas, and their adjacent waters. Although
Beijing has demonstrated a willingness to use force in defense or pursuit of these claims, it is not looking for excuses to do so. Whether
these disputes
can be managed or resolved in a way that is mutually acceptable to the relevant parties and consistent
with U.S. interests in the region is an open, long-term question . But that possibility should not be ruled out on the basis of—or
made more difficult by—false assumptions of irreconcilable interests. On the contrary, it should be pursued on the basis of a recognition

that all the parties want to avoid conflict—and that the sovereignty disputes in the region ultimately are
not military problems requiring military solutions . And since Washington has never been opposed in principle to reunification between
China and Taiwan as long as it is peaceful, and similarly takes no position on the ultimate sovereignty of the other disputed features, their long-term disposition
need not be the litmus test of either U.S. or Chinese hegemony in the region. Of course, China
would prefer not to have forward-
deployed U.S. military forces in the Western Pacific that could be used against it, but Beijing has long
tolerated and arguably could indefinitely tolerate an American military presence in the region —unless that
presence is clearly and exclusively aimed at coercing or containing China. It is also true that Beijing disagrees with American

principles of military freedom of navigation in the region; and this constitutes a significant challenge in
waters where China claims territorial jurisdiction in violation of the UN Commission on the Law of the
Sea. But this should not be conflated with a Chinese desire or intention to exclusively “control” all the
waters within the first island chain in the Western Pacific . The Chinese almost certainly recognize that
exclusive control or “domination” of the neighborhood is not achievable at any reasonable cost, and
that pursuing it would be counterproductive by inviting pushback and challenges that would negate the
objective. So what would Chinese “hegemony” in East Asia mean or look like? Beijing probably thinks in
terms of something much like American primacy in the Western Hemisphere: a model in which China is
generally recognized and acknowledged as the de facto central or primary power in the region, but has
little need or incentive for militarily adventurism because the mutual benefits of economic
interdependence prevail and the neighbors have no reason—and inherent disincentives—to challenge China’s vital
interests or security. And as a parallel to China’s economic and diplomatic engagement in Latin America, Beijing would neither exclude
nor be hostile to continued U.S. engagement in East Asia. A standard counterargument to this relatively benign
scenario is that Beijing would not be content with it for long because China’s strategic ambitions will

expand as its capabilities grow. This is a valid hypothesis, but it usually overlooks the greater possibility that China’s
external ambitions will expand not because its inherent capabilities have grown, but because Beijing
sees the need to be more assertive in response to external challenges to Chinese interests or security .
Indeed, much of China’s “assertiveness” within East Asia over the past decade —when Beijing probably would

prefer to focus on domestic priorities—has been a reaction to such perceived challenges. Accordingly,
Beijing’s willingness to settle for a narrowly-defined, peaceable version of regional preeminence will
depend heavily on whether it perceives other countries —especially the United States—as trying to deny
China this option and instead obstruct Chinese interests or security in the region .
 --- No Military Link
No military advantage link — the plan doesn’t increase China’s power.
Glaser 15 — Charles L. Glaser, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of
the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George
Washington University, Fellow in the Kissinger Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, former Emmett Dedmon Professor of Public Policy and Acting Dean at the Harris School of
Public Policy at the University of Chicago, former Strategic Analyst for the Joint Staff in the Pentagon,
holds a Ph.D. and a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University, 2015 (“A U.S.-China Grand Bargain? The Hard Choice between Military Competition and
Accommodation,” International Security, Volume 39, Number 4, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing
Institutions via MIT Press Journals)

A second potential threat to U.S. security is that territorial accommodation could reduce U.S. military
capabilities. Although numerous analysts suggest that China's control of Taiwan would have this effect, little sustained analysis of this issue
is publically available. One possibility is that U.S. accommodation would free up military forces and
investments that China now commits to coercing and if necessary attacking Taiwan, which would in turn
enable China to shift resource to better challenge the U.S. ability to protect the East Asian SLOCs and
possibly beyond.82 According to this argument, because the Taiwan mission has absorbed the vast majority of the Chinese army's force
modernization and organizational training,83 the resources made available for other missions would be large.84 This danger is smaller
than critics suggest, however. If China decides to fully pursue more ambitious missions, it would have to
make large investments that would likely dwarf the amount it is spending on Taiwan-specific missions .
Consequently, whether China eventually gains control of Taiwan is unlikely to be decisive in determining
China's ability to invest in efforts to control the South China and East China Sea SLOCs, and beyond .
Related, it is likely that Chinese capabilities dedicated to Taiwan will eventually become so effective that
Beijing will be able to reallocate some of its future military investment to other missions .85 Moreover,
ending the U.S. commitment to Taiwan could reduce China's determination to pursue more challenging
distant naval missions because the United States will not interrupt these SLOCs, except possibly during a
severe crisis or major war. Eliminating the possibility of war over Taiwan would therefore greatly reduce
Beijing's incentives to make investments in these missions . China could, however, pursue greatly expanded power
projection capabilities for a variety of other reasons,86 including worst-case planning that imagines the United States will interrupt its SLOCs
under even the most unlikely conditions, a Mahanian view of naval power that connects “commercial health with naval primacy,”87 or the
belief that superpower status requires power projection capabilities.88 Finally, one
should not exaggerate the security risks of
being unable to fully control these SLOCs. The U nited States does not need to control the Strait of Malacca
and the East Asian SLOCs to enable shipping to reach Japan during a war with China. Instead, bypass
routes could allow shipping to reach oil ports on Japan's east coast .89 Also, the ability to deny China use
of these SLOCs would be sufficient to preserve the U.S. ability to coerce China .
 --- XT: Containment = War
Containment makes U.S.-China war certain.
Goldstein 15 — Lyle J. Goldstein, Associate Professor and Founding Director of the China Maritime
Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College, Visiting Fellow of the Watson Institute of International
Studies at Brown University, formerly served in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, holds a Ph.D.
from Princeton University, 2015 (“The Main Problem with America’s Abundant South China Sea Hawks,”
The National Interest, October 28th, Available Online at http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-main-
problem-america%E2%80%99s-abundant-south-china-sea-hawks-14186?page=show)
Still, the far more potent argument beyond the relatively obvious questions regarding feasibility against countering Chinese shenanigans with
American shenanigans is that neither
side knows where the other’s red lines actually lie . Thus, Vuving’s
prescription to “up the ante” with either containment measures or robust support for front-line states is
all but certain to increase tensions, such that “sleepwalking” into a U.S.-China direct armed clash
becomes a near certainty. What is ultimately so shallow, therefore, about Vuving’s line of critique and the
argumentation of most hawks is they do not admit that their prescriptions necessarily entail risks
associated with the slippery slope of escalation . Perhaps I’ve misunderstood him, but Vuving seems to me to be saying
implicitly: “Trust me. Beijing is not really serious. This is just a game of weiqi with no actual risk of military conflict. If Washington is serious,
Beijing will back down.” This
type of oblivious attitude to the risk of conflict could be excusable perhaps if
China was not a nuclear power with increasingly potent conventional forces to match. In fact, this demeanor is
distressingly common among hawks of the “cakewalk” school, but we have already seen that Vuving has a relatively clear appraisal of the
military balance and has recognized that outright U.S. military superiority in the Western Pacific is a vestige of the past. Thus, there
is a
clear contradiction in Vuving’s thinking: he does not view the military balance as favorable to the U.S.,
and yet he recommends escalatory maneuvers . This is not only foolhardy from a military-strategic point
of view, but also starkly ignorant of history. Did the Russian czar think that he would spark the largest
war in history when he opted to mobilize forces in response to the Serbian crisis in 1914? Did President
Roosevelt know that he was contributing to setting the Pacific War in motion when he pushed the U.S.
Pacific Fleet from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor to deter Japan from striking at Singapore in 1940?
Washington clearly misunderstood Chinese intentions in 1950 during the Korean War and
underestimated Hanoi’s determination when undertaking escalation in Vietnam . The point is that one hardly
has to look very far to find examples of leaders, including American leaders, “sleepwalking” into major conflicts.
Do we really believe our leaders are any wiser or better informed today than they were back then?

Containment is especially dangerous with Trump at the wheel — he’ll react over-
aggressively and start a war.
Klare 16 — Michael T. Klare, Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies and Director of
the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, Defense
Correspondent at The Nation, Member of the Board of Directors of the Arms Control Association, holds
a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of the Union Institute, 2016 (“Trump’s Foreign Policy: So Much for
Alliances,” The Nation, November 15th, Available Online at https://www.thenation.com/article/trumps-
foreign-policy-so-much-for-alliances/)
Turning now to the question of military action, how does Trump view the use of force in such a world? At first glance, there is some comfort to
be taken from his professed abandonment of global leadership. On several occasions, he suggested that it is not our job to be “the policeman of
the world,” and he criticized the Bush and Obama administrations for undertaking reckless interventions in the Middle East. “In a Trump
administration, our actions in the Middle East will be tempered by realism,” he declared on September 7. “The current strategy of toppling
regimes, with no plan for what to do the day after, only produces power vacuums that are filled with terrorists.” For many of his supporters,
including veterans and currently serving personnel, this suggested a disinclination to become involved in more wars like those in Iraq and
Afghanistan. But as
Trump himself made clear on many occasions, a strategy aimed at protecting America’s stature in
a fiercely competitive world inevitably entails the use of force when US interests are seen as being
imperiled. Indeed, in this view, even the hint of threat is sufficient cause to fire back, lest America’s
enemies and competitors be emboldened to push even harder . A particularly illustrative example of this impulse arose
in late August, when Iranian gunboats engaged in what was described as “harassing maneuvering” alongside US warships patrolling off Iran in
the Persian Gulf. Addressing this incident a few days later at a rally in Florida, Trump asserted, “With Iran, when they circle our beautiful
destroyers with their little boats and they make gestures that our people—that they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the
water.” This is cause for deep concern, as possibly the greatest risk we could face in the years ahead is a
clash of this sort arising in the Baltic, Black, East China, or South China seas, where Russian and Chinese
ships and planes routinely come within shooting range of US and allied warcraft . Indeed, close encounters
of this sort have become increasingly common, as Moscow and Beijing have sought to demonstrate their growing military
might and rising displeasure at the conspicuous US military presence in their respective backyards. Will they choose to pull back
now that Trump is president, believing he is less likely to “turn the other cheek” than Obama? Maybe.
But it is hard to imagine they will do so forever, especially in the case of China, if Trump turns the screws on trade.
What will he do then? His commitment to demonstrating American toughness leaves him with few
options. If threats do not work, he may feel obliged to “ shoot them out of the water” rather than
exhibit the same sort of timidity he accused Obama of . And from there, it’s anyone’s guess where such action might
lead, up to and including full-scale armed conflict.
 --- XT: Containment Fails
China won’t back down against U.S. containment or balancing.
McKinney 16 — Jared McKinney, MSc. Student at the School of International Studies at Peking
University and the Department of International History at the London School of Economics, Non-
Resident Junior Fellow at the Center for the National Interest, holds an M.S. in Defense and Strategic
Studies from Missouri State University, 2015 (“Hawks as Corinthians: Thucydides and the ‘Stand Up to
China’ Argument,” China-US Focus, March 3rd, Available Online at
http://www.chinausfocus.com/foreign-policy/hawks-as-corinthians-thucydides-and-the-stand-up-to-
china-argument/)

It has become a meme to say that if the U.S. exercises leadership and “stands up” to China , showing American
strength, then China will be forced to back down from its “aggressive” behavior and the status quo will be
comfortably maintained. This meme has the advantages of appealing to American identity as the world’s sheriff and defender of the
weak, of being easily communicable on the campaign trail, and of serving as a simple one-sentence guide to politicians eager to preserve the
post-Cold War world: increase the military budget, deter and confront China through aggressive signaling and regional alliances, and all will be
well. This argument is not an American original. To the contrary, it echoes back all the way to 432 BC, to an ancient Greek assembly at which
Sparta’s allies, particularly the Corinthians, accused the Athenians of injustices and aggression and sought to secure a Spartan decision for war
against Athens. Thucydides, who wrote the history of Greek polities during this period, would be pleased by the comparison, seeing as he
sought to write a history that would “last for ever” and in which the events of his own narration would be repeated “at some time or other and
in much the same ways” (Thucydides, 1.22). Now, we must be careful with historical analogies, and obviously it would be preposterous to
determine contemporary foreign policy solely by examining the seemingly petty disputes of ancient Greeks, but a quick exploration of the
Spartan Assembly of 432 does indeed make American hawks sound quite a bit like the belligerent Corinthians. It may just be that something
useful can be learned from this ancient dispute beyond the ahistorical fable of the Thucydides Trap. The Corinthians made four arguments for
why Sparta should stand up to Athens. For those who observe contemporary Sino-U.S. relations, these may sound eerily familiar. First,
Corinthian rhetoric cast Sparta as the sheriff, charged with keeping Athens in line. “It is you who are responsible for all this,” the Corinthians
declaimed, “it was you who in the first place” allowed Athenian power to expand (1.69). “We have to complain of Athens for her insolent
aggression,” the argument continues, “and of Sparta for her neglect of our advice” (1.68). Spartan inactivity was preventing a serious response
to Athens and letting down Sparta’s allies. Today, this is the most basic argument of President Obama’s critics. Second, Athenian “salami slicing”
was threatening the region. “As for the Athenians, we know their methods and how they gradually encroach upon their neighbors. Now they
are proceeding slowly because they think that your insensitiveness to the situation enables them to go on their way unnoticed; you will find
that they will develop their full strength once they realize that you do not see what is happening and are still doing nothing to prevent it” (1.69).
This is the line-in-the-sand argument: the adversary must be stopped at some point, and better sooner than later. It is made frequently today in
reference to China’s activities in the South China Sea. Third, the way to stop aggression is through deterrence and aggressive signaling. “The
likeliest way of securing peace is this: only to use one’s power in the cause of justice, but to make it perfectly plain that one is resolved not to
tolerate aggression” (1.71). Peace comes not just through strength but also through a foreign policy with zero tolerance for aggression. Today,
this is the precise line espoused by those who put their faith in deterrence. Finally, regional shifts threaten a state’s historic leadership. The
Corinthians end their argument with this urgent plea: “From your fathers was handed down to you the leadership of the Peloponnese. Maintain
its greatness” (1.71). In other words, true leadership requires hegemons to participate in the disputes of their neighbors so they can be
considered great. This is the idea behind the “New American Century,” the name of a (now-defunct) neoconservative thinktank, and,
unsurprisingly, presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s campaign slogan. What is to be made of these arguments that seem to transcend time and
place? To begin, the line between deterrence and war is thin. An intolerance of aggression was supposed to be the “likeliest
way of securing peace,” but as the Spartan assembly understood, it was the likeliest way of securing war. Deterrence does not work
when neither side is willing to back down . Because Athens refused to make any concessions to Sparta, war broke out a year
later, in 431 BC (see here for the full context). The connection between deterrence and war matters especially today
because hawks tend to assume that China will back down in response to American deterrence and
signaling. Those who bother to justify this assumption generally argue that China will have to give in
because of the realities of American power (and competition) and because of the threat of economic
isolation. The trouble with this reasoning is it assumes away questions of honor and the balance of
justice—something Thucydides would never have done. What Americans see as “aggression” the Chinese see as
justice: for centuries China was abused by third-parties controlling its littoral seas. Now , finally, it is
standing up to these centuries of aggression and reclaiming its ancestral waters. The argument also
assumes that China has only two options: compete and be outmatched by the strength of America and
its allies, or give in and submit to America’s order. But in fact, a serious alliance with Russia, which is increasingly
economically estranged from the West, combined with a “look West” Belt and Road strategy that significantly shifts Chinese
trade and investments towards Central Asia and Europe, could refashion the strategic and economic landscape.
Continued asymmetric investments on China’s part —pumping out submarines like so many cars, as Lyle Goldstein has
suggested—would furthermore radically shift the strategic balance. Chinese restraint thus far has prevented
this from happening. China has more than two options, especially in the long run. Finally, the argument
assumes that it is strategically tolerable for the Chinese to live in a region dominated by the military and
ideological hegemony of America and its allies. Even apart from China’s unique history, which predisposes it to
seek a secure regional leadership role, this belies the expectations of history and geography .
 --- XT: Accommodation Solves
Strategic Competition Bad — accommodation prevents war.
White 13 — Hugh White, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, former
Intelligence Analyst with Australia’s Office of National Assessments and Senior Official with Australia’s
Department of Defence, 2013 (“A Hard Choice,” The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power,
Published by Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780199684717, p. 5)

In truth, any attempt by either Beijing or Washington to dominate will lead to sustained and bitter
strategic rivalry, imposing huge economic costs and a real risk of catastrophic war. Neither side could
win, and both would stand to lose a great deal – but it could easily happen. Strategic competition
quickly builds its own momentum, escalating to the point where war can seem inescapable. War
between the United States and China is already a clear and significant danger, one that will grow if
rivalry increases. This is the most important issue at stake in America’s China choice. Asia’s alternative
futures are not American or Chinese supremacy. They are escalating rivalry, or some form of great-
power accommodation that constrains that rivalry. America’s real choice is not between dominating or
withdrawing from Asia: it is between taking China on as a strategic rival, or working with it as a partner.
 AT DA – China Invasion/Deterrence
US commitment to Taiwan’s security is unsustainable – imbalance of interests and
military strength ensure ensures the failure of deterrence, entrapping the US in a
devastating conflict with China that collapses hard power and US credibility – arms
sales key
Gomez 16 (Eric, policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, Masters of
Arts in International Affairs from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M
University, “A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,” 9-
28, https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-
defense-relationship)
The Vague U.S. Security Commitment and the Challenges it Faces

The U.S. security commitment to Taiwan consists of two pillars established in the Taiwan Relations Act
(TRA) of 1979: arms sales and an implicit promise to defend Taiwan with military force should it be attacked. Both
are set forth in Section 3 of the TRA, which states, in part, that the United States is permitted to sell Taiwan “defense articles
and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-
defense capability.”14 Comparatively, the implicit commitment to use force to defend Taiwan is less
clear. Section 3, part 3, authorizes the president and Congress to “determine, in accordance with constitutional processes, appropriate action
by the United States” in response to “any threat to the security or the social or economic system of the people on Taiwan and any danger to the
interests of the United States arising therefrom.”15 Military
force is not explicitly mentioned, but it falls within the
category of appropriate action that the United States could take.

The imprecise wording of the TRA has served the U nited States well by creating “strategic ambiguity,” the
underpinning of dual deterrence.16 Strategic ambiguity, the open question of whether or not the U.S. military
would intervene in a cross-strait conflict , had two important effects. First, it gave the United States greater freedom of action in
trilateral relations. By not binding itself to one particular position, the United States could better adapt to unpredictable events. Second,
strategic ambiguity restricted China and Taiwan’s freedom of action. Upsetting the status quo carried high costs for both sides. The United
States could warn Taiwan that no cavalry would come to the rescue if Taiwan provoked China by making moves toward de jure
independence.17 Likewise, the high costs that would be inflicted on the PLA by a U.S. intervention prevented Beijing from initiating a conflict.

China’s growing military power has diminished the value of strategic ambiguity by improving Beijing’s
ability to inflict high costs on an intervening American force . The mere possibility of American
intervention may no longer be enough to deter China if the PLA is better prepared to mitigate the
effects.

Further complicating the U.S.-Taiwan defense relationship is the slow but steady erosion of U.S. credibility
over the last two decades. This analysis uses the “Current Calculus” theory set forth by Dartmouth professor Daryl G. Press as the
basis for assessing U.S. credibility. Press states, “Decisionmakers assess the credibility of their adversaries’ threats by evaluating the balance of
power and interests … Future commitments will be credible if—and only if—they are backed up by sufficient strength and connected to weighty
interests.”18 From
Beijing’s perspective, the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan is credible if American
military power can pose a threat to Chinese forces and the United States has a strong interest in
defending Taiwan.

On the subject of interests, Taiwan carries much more importance for China than it does for the U nited
States. Charles Glaser of George Washington University writes “China considers Taiwan a core interest—an essential part
of its homeland that it is determined to bring under full sovereign control. ”19 Beijing does not appear eager to
reunite Taiwan with the mainland by force in the near future, but China’s president Xi Jinping has warned that “political disagreements that
exist between the two sides . . . cannot be passed on from generation to generation.”20 Maintaining
Taiwan’s de facto
independence may be important for the U.S. position in East Asia, but it does not carry the same
significance that China places on reunification .21
Since China enjoys an advantage in the balance of interests, the credibility of the U.S. commitment rests on American military power. According
to Press’s model, if the United States can carry out its threat to intervene with relatively low costs, then the threat is credible.22 When
the
TRA was passed in 1979, the United States enjoyed a clear advantage over a militarily weak China. That is no
longer the case. Several recently published assessments of a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan have
sobering conclusions: America’s lead is shrinking, victory is less certain, and the damage inflicted on the
U.S. military would be substantial. In China’s Military Power, Roger Cliff of the Atlantic Council writes, “Although China’s
leadership could not be confident that an invasion of Taiwan in 2020 would succeed, it is nonetheless
possible that it could succeed… . Even a failed attempt, moreover, would likely be extremely costly to the
United States and Taiwan.”23 The RAND Corporation reached a similar conclusion: “At a minimum, the U.S. military would have
to mount a substantial effort—certainly much more so than in 1996—if it hoped to prevail, and losses to U.S. forces
would likely be heavy.”24 It is impossible to determine exactly how many American ships, aircraft, and lives would be lost to defend
Taiwan from a PLA attack. But given the improved quality of PLA weapons systems and training exercises, it is safe to assume that the U.S.
military would have to cope with losses that it has not experienced in decades .
Of course, it is important to note that high costs do not flow one way. In a war, the United States and Taiwan would make an invasion very
costly for China, which reduces the credibility of Beijing’s threats to use force. However, U.S. military superiority in a Taiwan
Strait conflict was nearly absolute until very recently. This superiority made victory relatively cheap, which enhanced the
credibility of the American commitment.25 Improvements to already formidable Chinese weapons systems,
combined with recent reforms that enhance command and control for fighting modern war, continue to
ratchet up the costs the United States would have to absorb.26

If the PLA continues to improve at the rate it has done over the last 20 years, the
United States could be in the unpleasant
position of fighting a very costly conflict over a piece of territory that China has a much stronger interest
in controlling than the United States has in keeping independent . Close economic ties between the
United States and China (bilateral trade in goods was valued at $598 billion in 2015 in nominal dollars) would likely suffer as
well.27 The high costs the United States would face in a conflict over Taiwan undermine U.S. credibility.
China’s stronger interests and ability to inflict high costs on the United States could encourage Beijing to
take risks that until recently would have been considered unacceptable.
 --- XT: China Invasion/Deterrence
Deterrence failing now and unsustainable – risks cross-strait conflict and CCP lashout
Gomez 16 (Eric, policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, Masters of
Arts in International Affairs from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M
University, “A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,” 9-
28, https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-
defense-relationship)

Introduction The U.S. defense relationship with Taiwan is a risky and costly commitment that has become
increasingly difficult to sustain. Barry Posen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put it best when he wrote, “The U.S.
commitment to Taiwan is simultaneously the most perilous and least strategically necessary commitment
that the United States has today.”1 The United States can and should strive for a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan dispute, but through
means other than an implicit commitment to use military force to defend the island.

Washington’s approach to keeping the peace in the Taiwan Strait during the latter years of Taiwan’s Lee Teng-hui (1988-2000) and most of the
Chen Shui-bian (2000—2008) administrations was known as “dual deterrence.” Under
dual deterrence the United States issued a
combination of warnings and reassurances to both China and Taiwan to prevent either from unilaterally
changing the status quo.2 America’s overwhelming military advantage over the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
deterred China from using military force, while Taiwan moderated its behavior lest U.S. forces not come
to its rescue.3 However, the dual deterrence concept is ill-suited to the current military environment in
the Taiwan Strait.

Dual deterrence is no longer viable because the modernization of the PLA has improved Beijing’s ability
to inflict high costs on U.S. military forces that would come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of a Chinese
invasion attempt.4 The deployment of two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers to the waters around Taiwan during the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait
Crisis was a major embarrassment for the PLA, and it has played an important role in driving China’s military modernization.5
Improvements in China’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities have significantly complicated the ability
of the United States to defend Taiwan by making it difficult for the U.S. Navy and Air Force to operate in
and around the Taiwan Strait.6 According to a recent RAND Corporation study, “a Taiwan [conflict] scenario will be
extremely competitive by 2017, with China able to challenge U.S. capabilities in a wide range of areas .”7
This shifting balance of power strains the credibility of the U.S. defense commitment to Taiwan by
increasing the costs the United States would have to pay in an armed conflict .

Two additional developments will challenge the cross-strait peace. First, the period of rapprochement that has
characterized cross-strait relations since 2008 has ended . The former Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeou (2008-2016),
championed cross-strait cooperation and economic linkages that brought a welcome sense of calm after the tumultuous administrations of Lee
and Chen.8 However, the January 2016 landslide victory of the DPP in both presidential and legislative
elections revealed popular dissatisfaction with Ma’s policies and a weakening economy .9 President Tsai
Ing-wen pledged to maintain peace. But her unwillingness to declare support for the “1992 Consensus” (simply stated
as “one China, different interpretations”) caused Beijing to suspend communication between the Taiwan Affairs
Office and Taipei’s equivalent, the Mainland Affairs Council. 10 It is too early to tell how Tsai’s administration and a DPP-
controlled legislature will affect cross-strait relations, but the relatively high level of cooperation the Ma administration
promoted is likely over.11

Second, China’s slowing economy adds uncertainty to cross-strait relations. China’s GDP growth rate was 6.9 percent
during the first nine months of 2015, well below the double-digit GDP growth rates of the last couple of decades.12 Sliding growth and
the resulting social instability could encourage China’s leaders to behave more aggressively toward
Taiwan to bolster domestic legitimacy and ensure regime survival.13 However, a slowing economy could also restrict
military spending and encourage Chinese policymakers to avoid big conflicts as they focus on shoring up the economy. At the very least,
China’s economic situation is a source of uncertainty that was not present when the United States relied
on dual deterrence.

US defense of Taiwan is unsustainable – deterrence will inevitably collapse

Mearsheimer 14 (John J, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at
the University of Chicago, “Say Goodbye to Taiwan,” 2-25, https://nationalinterest.org/article/say-
goodbye-taiwan-9931?page=0%2C3)

While the United States has good reasons to want Taiwan as part of the balancing coalition it will build
against China, there are also reasons to think this relationship is not sustainable over the long term. For starters,
at some point in the next decade or so it will become impossible for the United States to help Taiwan defend itself
against a Chinese attack. Remember that we are talking about a China with much more military capability
than it has today. In addition, geography works in China’s favor in a major way, simply because Taiwan is so
close to the Chinese mainland and so far away from the U nited States. When it comes to a competition
between China and the United States over projecting military power into Taiwan, China wins hands down.
Furthermore, in a fight over Taiwan, American policy makers would surely be reluctant to launch major attacks against Chinese forces
on the mainland, for fear they might precipitate nuclear escalation. This reticence would also work to China’s advantage .
 Other Allies Solve
Containment is redundant – allies solve post-retrenchment
Grandpre 4-23
Nicholas, 4-23-2019, "Conflict with China is Not Inevitable," National Interest,
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/conflict-china-not-inevitable-53897

Geography means that a U.S. invasion of mainland China is virtually unthinkable, as is a Chinese invasion of
the United States. Today’s Pacific is far more security-rich than Central Europe in 1914 or 1939. There, an
enemy taking and holding crucial territory was a legitimate fear. Of course, the roots of pessimists’ fears do not stem from a fear of large-scale
invasion launched by the United States or China against the other great power. Rather, there are three arenas where conflict between the
United States and China is most likely: the South China Sea, the Senkaku Islands, and Taiwan. China views itself as the rightful first-order power
in East Asia. Assuming China’s capabilities continue to grow, it will likely use its power to the shape the region towards its interests. It is no
secret that the Republic of China’s sovereignty has long bothered the Communist Party of China. The People’s
Republic of China will probably use some combination of diplomatic, economic, and political power to undermine Taiwan. If
future U.S. leaders decide that Taiwanese sovereignty is within the purview of America’s strict national interest, then conflict will be difficult to
avoid. However, if (somewhat coldly) the United States recognizes Taiwan for what it is—a small, distant island with no
direct impact on America’s ability to procure national security for itself—then conflict, at least over Taiwan, can be
avoided. Even the conquest of Taiwan would not make China a regional hegemon, nor would it provide China with
the ability to project significant power into the Americas. A reunified China is not going to exert military power in Hawaii,
Mexico, or Peru anytime soon. For the foreseeable future, China will have enough on its plate in its own backyard.
Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, and Australia all have an interest in preventing Chinese dominance in
Asia. America shares that interest, but reaching a Balance of Power in East Asia does not necessitate extensive
security guarantees, nuclear umbrellas, and bellicose rhetoric focused on containing China at every point. Perhaps counterintuitively,
the best path to a regional Balance of Power is U.S. withdrawal. Withdrawal would provide Asia’s “middle
powers” with an incentive to balance against China by increasing their military capabilities, which may include
the pursuit of nuclear capabilities. Rather than ceding regional hegemony to China, retrenchment would facilitate what Michael Beckley argues
is an already emergent Balance of Power in the region. China’s
aggressive maritime claims and the proliferation of anti-
access/area denial (A2/AD) systems to China’s neighbors give reason to doubt that China will be capable of
establishing full control of either the South or East China Seas. The middle powers can stop China from seizing such prerequisites
for regional hegemony.
 Containment Fails
Containment fails
Swaine & Devries 3-14-2019, Michael D. Swaine has a PhD from Harvard University, Ryan Devries
has a BA from Calvin College, “Chinese State-Society Relations: Why Beijing Isn’t Trembling and
Containment Won’t Work”, article “Carnegie Endowment for International Peace”,
https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/03/14/chinese-state-society-relations-why-beijing-isn-t-
trembling-and-containment-won-t-work-pub-78596

WHY A CONTAINMENT STRATEGY DOESN’T HOLD WATER This analysis is not intended to imply that democracy is eternally ill-
suited for China or that the current government’s repression is excusable. Rather, the point is that Western policymakers pondering
how to respond to China’s authoritarian turn should ground their decisions in how China actually is , not how they might
wish it were. That is why it would be exceedingly foolish and counterproductive for the United States and other Western
nations to try to undermine and weaken the Communist Party regime by way of a Cold War–style containment policy.
The chances of success are minuscule. China is too enmeshed in global markets and its economic clout is
too considerable for containment to work. Equally important, outside pressure of this sort would not drive a wedge between China’s
rulers and ordinary Chinese people. Instead, such a strategy would likely spook many Chinese citizens into rallying around
government-sponsored nationalism, validating deep-seated suspicions that so-called hostile foreign forces seek to prevent China’s
resurgence. And even on the off-chance that Western pressure did succeed, Chinese society would almost certainly fragment in
chaotic ways with disastrous ripple effects abroad. There are more prudent steps Washington can take to put the relationship
on surer footing. First, influential figures in both countries should take a stand against both reckless verbal sparring and hollow platitudes about
win-win propositions. The relationship is undoubtedly becoming more competitive , but this shift should be managed
with clear-eyed tactfulness and a strong appreciation of the need to maintain cooperation with Beijing in critical areas such as WMD
nonproliferation, climate change, and economics. At the same time, to avoid or minimize inadvertent U.S.-China crises, policymakers should
strengthen both Track I and Track II civil-military crisis management dialogues. Second, Washington should strive to tackle its economic
disputes with Beijing shrewdly. The United States should present its top priorities far more clearly, downplaying the misplaced emphasis on the
trade balance in favor of a primary focus on commercial cyber espionage, uneven market access, and the creation of mutually beneficial and
integrated economic structures in Asia. Furthermore, trade talks should leverage the fact that many U.S. partners in Europe and elsewhere
harbor similar economic concerns and desires. Possible solutions should be framed to Beijing not as outright concessions to Western demands
but as sorely needed reforms in line with China’s own domestic plans for economic restructuring. Third, U.S. policymakers should proactively
map out the challenges and difficult choices they will face as Asia’s strategic landscape continues to shift. Congress should hold hearings
focused on assessing how the
changing contours of Asia’s security, economic, and political domains will affect regional
stability and other U.S. interests. The long-term goal should be to explore how Beijing and Washington can both take steps to defuse
regional hotspots and create at least the preconditions for a genuine, stable balance of power in Asia. Like it or not, the Communist Party
government leading China today is rooted in deep historical and political impulses. And while it is not the only conceivable regime that could
meet the Chinese people’s long-term needs, an y
more representative and less repressive Chinese government will
need to emerge on its own terms. In the meantime, the United States should pursue and protect its interests
in farsighted ways that increase the likelihood that its concerns about Chinese behavior will be
addressed while minimizing the risks of counterproductive blowback.

Current Chinese containment fails

Saetren 2018, Will Saetren has an MA from American University, 9-17-2018, “US cold war
containment strategy against China may not end the Soviet way. Instead, it could explode into armed
conflict”, article “South China Morning Post”, [6/28/2019], https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-
opinion/united-states/article/2164221/us-cold-war-containment-strategy-against-china

For months, the United States and China have been exchanging blows over trade . What began with the Trump
administration imposing tariffs on a handful of goods earlier this year has ballooned into a list that includes thousands of items. In July,
Trump announced that he is prepared to impose tariffs on all US$500 billion of imports from China. The showdown
between the world’s two economic powerhouses has shaken the global financial system to its core. Over the summer, the World
Bank warned that the trade war could trigger a drop in global trade of as much as 9 per cent, the type of economic shock the world hasn’t seen
since the 2008 financial crisis. But, in recent weeks, China has begun to suspect that the trade war is about more than just
economics. Chinese officials and academics have indicated that they see the trade war as a piece of a bigger puzzle, a grand strategy
reminiscent of the cold war policy of containment
intended to thwart China’s rise. This is a dangerous development that
has profound implications for strategic stability . Containment was designed shortly after the second world war as a
means of curbing Soviet expansionism. At its core, containment sought to confront the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) through back
door channels, support for anti-communist forces, and all other means short of direct, armed confrontation. The driving philosophy behind
the policy was that the Soviet system was rotten at its core and would eventually collapse on its own. Sure enough, in 1989,
the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and, by 1991, the Soviet Union had fully dissolved. Although containment worked in this case, it is a
policy that entails great risk. An adversary who feels backed into a corner is prone to lash out and take greater risks
to achieve limited gains and avoid losing face. This was the case with the Soviet Union, which found itself locked in an ideological struggle with a
technologically superior foe. During the Cuban missile crisis, Nikita Khrushchev tried to rectify this imbalance by
stationing nuclear missiles capable of striking the US on Cuba. But Khrushchev overplayed his hand. The US detected the transfer
before it was complete and the confrontation nearly escalated into a full-blown nuclear war. Although the cold war ended
peacefully, we are lucky to have got out of it alive. China, however, is no Soviet Union. Since opening up to the outside
world 40 years ago, China has developed into a vibrant economic behemoth. China’s gross domestic product in purchasing power parity
terms is much larger than the US’ and it is poised to become the world’s largest market for consumer goods. China’s economy
is growing at twice the rate of the global economy , and by 2028, is likely to dethrone the US as the world’s
largest economy as measured by GDP. In short, it is highly unlikely that the Chinese system will fade into obscurity. Yet this
is the path the Trump administration has chosen. In January, the US labelled China a strategic competitor in its National Defence
Strategy. Recent US moves to expand ties to Taiwan have only made matters worse. Just last month, the Trump administration passed a
bill making it harder for Chinese companies to acquire high-end technology. Shi Yinhong, a foreign affairs adviser to China’s State Council, called
the move “hi-tech containment”. People’s Daily accused the US of seeking global hegemony, and proclaimed that China should be
determined to fight. And fight they might. China has developed a powerful regional military that is likely to win any
fight it picks in its own backyard, particularly in the South China Sea. Chinese and US military forces already spar
regularly in the region as the US asserts its freedom of navigation rights in waters claimed by China. By implementing a policy of
containment towards China and labelling it as a de facto enemy, the Trump administration is pouring fuel on the fire ,
increasing tensions, and with it, the likelihood that one of these confrontations could escalate out of control. Consider
the following hypothetical scenario: a US destroyer is harassed by Chinese coastguard vessels during a freedom of navigation patrol.
Unable to change course, the US warship rams one of the Chinese vessels, killing dozens of sailors. To China, this an act of
aggression in its territorial waters, and they call for reinforcements to apprehend the destroyer’s crew . From a US
perspective, this was an accident that took place in international waters. The crew refuses to surrender. With tensions
soaring the chain of command breaks down. Someone panics and shoots. The ensuing fight escalates into a full-
blown naval battle with multiple Chinese ships sunk as well as a US$3 billion US destroyer with all hands. Through
a series of unfortunate events, two nuclear armed superpowers find themselves in an armed conflict that nobody
wants. War between the US and China would be an unmitigated disaster for both parties. Both countries depend on each other
to thrive, but that doesn’t mean that war couldn’t happen. History has taught us that when national pride is involved and one
party (or both) feels trapped in a corner, simmering tensions can erupt into a roaring blaze. We can only hope that someone in
the Trump administration was paying attention during that lesson.
 Containment fails = US-China war
Arms sales increase risk of US-China war – they don’t contain
Aitken 13 (Aaron Aitken; graduate of the Master of Arts program at Carleton University’s Norman
Paterson School of International Affairs; file:///C:/Users/defaultuser0.LAPTOP-
6N6704NF/Downloads/19032-Article%20Text-45264-1-10-20130221.pdf; The Future of U.S.-Taiwan
Arms Sales; The!Agora:!Political!Science!Undergraduate!Journal!Vol.3!No.!!(2013); 2013)

Despite good intentions, the

policy of ramping up arms sales to Taiwan in an attempt to maintain a balance of
force across the Taiwan Strait is both misguided and dangerous . The goal of achieving a balance of power across the Taiwan
Strait should not be overemphasized.42 Achieving a balance of forces across the Strait is not an end in itself. Instead, it should be viewed as means to the peaceful
resolution of the current stalemate. As a result, Taiwan does not actually need to be able to defend itself without outside support. The very idea is unsustainable.
The rate of China’s economic and military growth makes any unilateral attempt by Taiwan to maintain a
military balance across the Strait impossible in the long term. Instead, a sense of balance across the Strait relies
on the implicit possibility that the United States would become involved in a Sino-Taiwanese dispute .
One way that the U.S. signals this commitment is through periodic arms sales .43 Given the symbolic
nature of such sales, they do not need to include a considerable quantity of advanced weaponry, as their purpose is not to alter the balance of power
across the Strait. Even if ramping up arms sales to Taiwan cannot forestall the development of an asymmetrical balance between Taiwanese and Chinese forces, is
there any harm in selling increased quantities of advanced arms to Taiwan to help alleviate pressure on the U.S. military? There
are actually a number
of risks entailed in ramping up arms sales to Taiwan. As Wei-Chin Lee observes in Issues and Studies, “the unrestrained and
unconditional supply of advanced weapons to Taiwan could have the effect of upsetting the status quo
in the region”44 It is possible, for example, that an expansion of arms packages would embolden Taipei by creating the impression of unconditional American
support. This might then lead Taiwanese leaders to take a risk and declare independence on the

assumption that the U.S. would support them against China. This would almost undoubtedly provoke a
military reaction from China, as declaring independence steps over the red lines set out by China’s Anti-Succession Law.
The United States, as Taiwan’s guarantor, would then be under considerable pressure to meet China’s aggression. This is clearly a position that the United States has
a vested interest in avoiding, due to the potential for a nuclear conflict. What is the likelihood that increased arms sales would actually embolden Taiwan enough to
rashly declare independence? It is hard to say, but recent improvements in Sino-Taiwanese relations makes it somewhat unlikely. However, given the catastrophic
consequences of such an event, even the slightest possibility of U.S. entrapment in a Sino-Taiwanese conflict
ought to be avoided.
 No link – strategic ambiguity = plan
No link – the aff is a policy of strategic ambiguity because we maintain small defensive
arms packages
Aitken 13 (Aaron Aitken; graduate of the Master of Arts program at Carleton University’s Norman
Paterson School of International Affairs; file:///C:/Users/defaultuser0.LAPTOP-
6N6704NF/Downloads/19032-Article%20Text-45264-1-10-20130221.pdf; The Future of U.S.-Taiwan
Arms Sales; The!Agora:!Political!Science!Undergraduate!Journal!Vol.3!No.!!(2013); 2013)

Drawing on the discussion above, it is clear that neither abandoning nor unconditionally arming Taiwan is in the interest
of the United States. Instead, it seems to be in America’s best interests to find a careful balance between the two extremes. A third policy option, which
is the one this paper maintains is the most appropriate for the U.S. to adopt , is the policy of strategic ambiguity.

Essentially, it is a policy of dual deterrence. It entails simultaneously deterring China from invading Taiwan and deterring

Taiwan from declaring independence. It is also an approach that has a distinguished pedigree. It was first adopted by the Eisenhower
administration in the 1950s, as a means of preventing both China from invading Taiwan and Taiwan from sparking a war with China by declaring independence—
thereby avoiding resources being drawn away from the ongoing conflict in Korea.45 To this very day, the situation in the Taiwan Strait remains remarkably similar. It
continues to remain outside the interests of the United States to see either Taiwan break from China or see China feel emboldened enough to attack Taiwan. To
deploy such a policy, the
United States ought to continue arms sales to Taiwan, as is the current administration’s policy. However,
care should be taken to make sure such sales remain limited in scope . It should be unclear to both the
PRC and Taiwan as to whether or not the U.S. will become involved in any sort of crisis in the Strait . This
policy does not heavily rely on maintaining a balance of power across the strait. Instead, arms sales become more of a symbolic commitment by the United States to
defend Taiwan in the event of an attack. At the same time, limiting
arms sales also signals that U.S. support for Taiwan has
concrete limits, thereby discouraging rash action on the part of Taipei . This approach also has the benefit of balancing the
United States’ commitments under the TRA to arm Taiwan with its commitments under the August Communiqué to not sell increasing levels of arms to Taiwan. Of
the three options discussed, strategic
ambiguity is the policy that has the best chance of eventually leading to a
peaceful resolution of cross-Strait tension. It explicitly avoids conflict by maintaining the current status quo. It is under this very status quo
that Sino-Taiwanese relations have recently begun to flourish. Such links may remain primarily economic in nature for the moment. However, they may one day
develop into a political understanding as well. Essentially, the policy of strategic ambiguity works to prevent the eruption of conflict that would shatter the dream of
peaceful reunification. It is also the policy that entails the least risk for the United States—though it does require constant vigilance, lest Taiwan or China become
too emboldened. As it is both low risk and consistent with America’s long term goals, strategic ambiguity remains the best approach to dealing with conflict over
Taiwan.
Credibility DA
 2AC Credibility DA – Trump Thumps
Trump thumps any NATO stability
Burns & Lute 4/2 (Nicholas Burns is a Former Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Douglas Lute is
the former United States Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council), “NATO’s Biggest
Problem is Trump”, The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/natos-biggest-
problem-is-president-trump/2019/04/02/6991bc9c-5570-11e9-9136-f8e636f1f6df_story.html?
noredirect=on&utm_term=.0280c8651966
As NATO marks its 70th anniversary this week, this unique, often unwieldy, 29-member alliance is confronting one of the most difficult sets of
challenges in its history. NATO
is still the world’s strongest military alliance. But its single greatest danger is the
absence of strong, principled American presidential leadership for the first time in its history. Starting
with NATO’s founding father, President Harry S. Truman, each of our presidents has considered NATO a
vital American interest. President Trump has taken a dramatically different path. As former U.S.
ambassadors to NATO, we interviewed alliance leaders past and present for a new Harvard Belfer Center
report: “NATO at Seventy: An Alliance in Crisis.” Nearly all viewed Trump as NATO’s most urgent and
difficult problem. Never before has NATO had a U.S. leader who didn’t appear to believe deeply in
NATO itself. During his first two years in office, Trump has questioned NATO’s core commitment
embedded in Article 5 of the alliance’s founding treaty — that an attack on one of the allies will be
considered an attack on all. He has been weak and reactive in defending NATO against its most
aggressive adversary, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump has also been a consistent critic of
European democratic leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while publicly supporting
anti-democratic populists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Trump is the first president
to call the European Union a “foe,” rather than a partner, of the United States. Fortunately, the vast majority of
Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress disagree with Trump on NATO’s value to the United States. They should vote to approve the
bills working their way through committees that would reaffirm the United States’ commitment to Article 5 and to require congressional
approval should Trump try to diminish our commitment to NATO — or to pull the United States out altogether. Congress would be acting in
unison with the public’s strong support for NATO, according to a 2018 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Critics who agree with
Trump present three main arguments for why he is right to question NATO. First, they say NATO’s core job was finished with the end of the
Cold War. That ignores, however, Russia’s campaign to destabilize NATO members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. It also ignores Putin’s
attacks on the U.S. and European elections in 2016-2018, designed to weaken our democracies from within. Containing Russian power until
Putin’s Soviet-trained generation passes from the scene remains a core NATO aim. And, as our report shows, there are new challenges beyond
Russia confronting the alliance. Second, Trump has claimed the allies are “taking advantage of us.” Low European
defense spending is indeed a problem for NATO’s future. Germany, in particular, must do much more. But NATO allies have produced real
growth in defense spending for four consecutive years, starting with Putin’s annexation of Crimea — a collective increase of $87 billion. On this
issue, Trump would be smart to continue to push but while doing so strive to transform himself from chief critic into the unifying leader NATO
desperately needs. A third criticism is that NATO no longer contributes significantly to U.S. security in the world. Consider the facts: Canada and
the European allies came to our defense on 9/11 and invoked the Article 5 mutual-defense clause of the treaty. They viewed Osama bin Laden’s
attack on the United States as an attack on them as well. NATO allies went into Afghanistan with us where they and partner nations have
suffered more than 1,000 combat deaths. Most of those countries remain on the ground with our soldiers to this day. NATO allies have also
fought with us in the successful campaign to defeat the Islamic State caliphate in Syria and Iraq. They conduct counterterror operations with us
in Africa. The European allies have assumed full responsibility for peacekeeping in Bosnia and the bulk of the burden in Kosovo. U.S. air and
naval bases in allied countries also bring the United States a continent closer to contain Russia in Eastern Europe and confront terrorist threats
in the Middle East and South Asia. This is a decisive advantage for the United States. The reality is that NATO is a net plus for the United States
in political, economic and military terms. In the decade ahead, the United States will fight two battles with authoritarian powers China and
Russia. The first is a battle of ideas that will center on Moscow’s and Beijing’s growing confidence in the superiority of their own systems. We
will need the full weight of our democratic allies in NATO to repudiate the authoritarian model in this intensifying global debate just as
Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan did in the past. NATO allies will also be critical in a battle of technology, as the West competes
with a more assertive China in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and biotechnology. The United States has a better chance to maintain
its qualitative military edge over China if we enlist the scientific and productive capacity of all our allies in Europe as well as in the Indo-Pacific.
NATO remains the great power differential between the United States and Russia and China, which have no real allies of their own. Trump
should reflect on a last reality that all his predecessors understood. The United States would be far stronger inside NATO as it faces these
challenges than it would be alone. NATO is not just yesterday’s story but is indispensable if Americans want to reach for the elusive goal we
have been chasing since World War II: a secure United States alongside a united, democratic and peaceful Europe as its closest global partner.

Trump bullying allies into investment will make NATO allies question US credibility
anyways
Belkin 3/28 [Paul Belkin has a BA in philosophy from the University of California Berkeley, a Masters in
Public and International Affairs from Princeton University, and is currently a European Affairs Analyst at
the Congressional Research Service. “Assessing NATO’s Value”, March 28, 2019.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R45652.pdf]

Although Congress has expressed consistent bipartisan support for NATO and its cornerstone Article 5
mutual defense commitment, congressional hearings on NATO in the 115th and 116th Congresses have
reflected disagreement on the impact President Trump is having on the alliance. Some in Congress argue
that President Trump’s criticism of allied defense spending levels has spurred recent defense spending
increases by NATO members that were not forthcoming under prior Administrations despite
longstanding U.S. concern. They point out that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has
acknowledged that President Trump “is having an impact” in securing $41 billion of additional defense
spending by European allies and Canada since 2016. Others in Congress counter that President Trump’s
admonition of U.S. allies and his questioning of NATO’s utility has damaged essential relationships and
undermined NATO’s credibility and cohesion. They contend that doubts about the U.S. commitment
to NATO could embolden adversaries, including Russia, and ultimately weaken the commitment of
other allies to the alliance. Some analysts argue that European allies who feel belittled by the U.S.
president might be less likely to support future NATO operations advocated by the United States. Critics
also tend to downplay President Trump’s role in securing recent defense spending increases by NATO
allies. They argue that Russian aggression in Europe has been a greater factor behind rising defense
budgets, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.
 2AC Credibility DA – Credibility Doesn’t Matter
Decades of research prove credibility is false, but maintaining an insolvent Taiwan
commitment hurts US allied perception
Beinart 18 (Peter Beinart, contributing editor at The Atlantic and a professor of journalism and political science at the City University of
New York, citing Dartmouth College political scientists Daryl Press and Jennifer Lin, September 16, 2018. “America Needs an Entirely New
Foreign Policy for the Trump Age.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/shield-of-the-republic-a-democratic-foreign-policy-for-
the-trump-age/570010/)

There are two primary arguments against the Democratic foreign policy outlined above. The first involves credibility. If the United
States abandons Taiwan, the argument goes, it will undermine the credibility of its commitment to South
Korea, the Philippines, and Japan. Similarly, if America won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, neither Moscow nor Riga will believe
America’s promises to fight Russia in Latvia. During the Vietnam War, this logic was dubbed the “domino theory”: If the United
States didn’t defend Vietnam, its credibility would collapse and other anti-communist “dominoes” would soon fall. But the theory is
wrong. Decades of academic research show that, in the words of the Dartmouth College political
scientists Daryl Press and Jennifer Lind, “there’s little evidence that supports the view that countries’
record for keeping commitments determines their credibility.” The Soviets and West Germans did not
conclude that because America would not defend South Vietnam it would not defend West Berlin, because
they understood that America cared more about West Berlin than it cared about South Vietnam, and had a greater capacity to defend it.
Similarly, when predicting whether the United States will defend Japan, neither Beijing nor Tokyo will look at whether America defends Taiwan.
They will look at whether it is in America’s interests, and within America’s power, to defend Japan. Far
from bolstering a country’s
credibility, insolvent commitments drain its finances, overstretch its military, and undermine its
reputation for sound judgment. As Kennan put it, “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and
courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”

Perceptions of US credibility don’t spill over and are counterproductive

Walt 2015 (Stephen M. Walt, the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, January 6, 2015.
“The Credibility Addiction.” http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UUohn0SMU10J:foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/06/the-
credibility-addiction-us-iraq-afghanistan-unwinnable-war/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)
Unfortunately, this obsession with credibility was misplaced. For one thing, a state’s “reputation” for being
tough or reliable didn’t work the way most foreign-policy elites thought it did. American leaders kept worrying
that other states would question the United States’ resolve and capability if it ever abandoned an
unimportant ally, or lost some minor scrap in the developing world. But as careful research by Ted Hopf,
Jonathan Mercer, and Daryl Press has shown, states do not judge the credibility of commitments in one place by
looking at how a country acted somewhere far away, especially when the two situations are quite
different. In fact, when the United States did lose, or when it chose to cut its losses and liquidate some unpromising position, dominos
barely fell and its core strategic relations remained unaffected. In other words, how the United States responds
to a challenge in Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa tells you nothing about how it would or should
respond somewhere else, and other states understood this all along. When trying to figure out what the United
States is going to do, other states do not start by asking what the United States did in some conflict on the other
side of the world. Instead, they ask whether it is in America’s interest to act in the situation at hand. And
guess what? This implies that U.S. commitments are most credible when the American interest is
obvious to all. I mean, nobody really doubts that the United States would fight like a tiger to defend its own soil, right? Exaggerated
worries about U.S. credibility had a number of unfortunate consequences. They encouraged American leaders to act in places that didn’t
matter, in order to convince others that it would also act in places that did. Squandering resources on marginal conflicts undermined
confidence in U.S. protection, however, because it consumed resources that could have been committed elsewhere and it sometimes made a
war-weary American public even less interested in far-flung foreign adventures. Ironically, misguided
efforts to bolster U.S.
credibility may have weakened it instead. The credibility obsession also made it easier for U.S. allies to
free-ride (something they were already inclined to do), because they could always get Uncle Sucker to take on more
burdens by complaining that they had doubts about American resolve . I don’t blame them for trying this ploy, but I
do blame American officials for falling for it so often. In fact, had allies been a bit less confident that the United States
was going to protect them no matter what, these states might have been willing to spend more on their
own defense and been more attentive to Washington’s wishes . If the goal is retaining U.S. influence and
leverage, what really matters is whether other states have confidence in America’s judgment . If they
believe that the United States is good at weighing threats soberly and rationally, and if they are convinced that Washington can
set clear priorities and stick to them, then U.S. allies can calibrate their actions with ours and will be
more inclined to follow the U.S. lead. If allies and adversaries believe the United States understands
what is going on in key regions and has a clear sense of its own interests, then they will know that the
United States won’t be buffaloed into unwise actions by self-serving allied whining, or provoked into
overreactions by enemies eager to drag us into another costly quagmire. By contrast, if American leaders
panic at every sign of danger and treat minor problems as mortal threats, then other states will be less inclined to
trust Washington’s views on these matters and be more inclined to follow their own counsel. When Washington goes to war on the
basis of cooked intelligence, worst-case assumptions, and unsurpassed hubris, then other countries will be warier the next time we try to get
them to line up alongside us. If the United States keeps throwing soldiers’ lives and billions of dollars into unwinnable conflicts, confidence
in our political system’s ability to make rational decisions will decline even more. If foreign powers
believe U.S. policy is driven more by domestic politics than by strategic imperatives, they’ll view us with
barely veiled contempt and meddle even more in our porous political system . If foreign leaders pay close attention
to the bluster and balderdash that pass for strategic debate in official Washington, they’ll have reason to wonder if the self-appointed Leader of
the Free World really knows what it is doing. And of course, when they see a lengthy series of costly screw-ups (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen,
Somalia, Libya, Ukraine, etc.), they will be more inclined to think for themselves than to trust Washington’s guidance. What I’m suggesting, in
short, is that successful
diplomacy depends less on endlessly reaffirming our “will” or “resolve,” and more
on building confidence in the analytical capacity of the American foreign-policy community and the
judgment of top U.S. officials. And that’s not surprising, either. Diplomacy is mostly about persuasion; it is ultimately about convincing
others to do what we want. They are more likely to accept our recommendations when we can tell a truly convincing story, i.e., one that has
the merit of being true. And that means that credibility isn’t the key to a successful foreign policy , especially when it
becomes a reflexive tendency to respond to any and all challenges with threats, bluster, and the use of force. If America still wants other states
to follow our lead, what really matters is judgment: analyzing issues intelligently, setting clear and sensible priorities, and being
willing to rethink a course of action in response to events. New York Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez famously said that it was better to be “lucky
than good.” He was probably right, but it’s even better to be lucky andsmart. And both matter more than being mindlessly predictable. Or, to
paraphrase Walt Whitman, a “foolish credibility is the hobgoblin of small minds.”

Credibility thesis is wrong - lacks empirical support

Lanoszka 2015 (Alexander, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow @ MIT, "The Alliance Politics of Nuclear
Statecraft," http://www.alexlanoszka.com/AlexanderLanoszkaIntro.pdf)
To be sure, some scholars even dismiss the notion that policy-makers can manipulate perceptions of credibility. Jonathan Mercer writes that
states can never develop a reputation for resolve among their allies . Whatever action they implement
that advances the security interests of another is explained away as rooted in self-interest rather than
on ‘being a good ally.’13 In his study of crisis diplomacy between adversaries, Daryl Press builds on this skepticism. He argues that
balances of interest and power shape perceptions of credibility rather than past actions. It is therefore
pointless to pursue policy on the grounds of appearing credible to others.14 Not everyone agrees with such
assessments of credibility. Gregory Miller demonstrates how actions can a↵ect credibility and, by extension, the behavior of allies. However, he
relies on evidence drawn exclusively from before the First World War.15 It is unclear whether and how credibility matters among allies in the
nuclear age. And yet pundits and analysts commonly assume that the United States to this day needs to appear resolved and
credible to its allies, whether in Central Europe or the East China Sea. In light of the critical literature just mentioned, the validity of these
intuitively appealing arguments is not self-evident. We lack an empirical study that assesses such claims .
 2AC Credibility DA – No Russian Invasion
Russia isn’t capable of invading the Baltics AND status quo U.S.-Norway cooperation
have pre-empted this
Stangl 5/13 (Maxwell Stangl is a research assistant in the Department of Military & Strategic Studies at
the U.S. Air Force Academy), “Russia Won't Start a (Conventional) War in the Baltics”,
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russia-wont-start-conventional-war-baltics-57317?page=0%2C1
The sound of BM-21 rockets streaking across the sky. The smell of spent brass and burned powder. The rumble of BTR-82 armored personnel
carriers rolling through a narrow street. Rebels sprinting from building to building through an open field of fire. These sights do not evoke a
striking imagine of a modern European country, but Russian posturing in the region might lead to this. After the collapse of the Soviet Union,
international spectators believed this Eurasian military powerhouse would cease. However, the Russian Federation has returned to its old Cold
War ways, increasing aggressive activities against its neighbors in an attempt to stymie North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion. As
seen with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 or the liberation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the 2008 Georgian War, Russia has used its
military to destabilize bordering nations. Many leaders are worried that similar actions could be taken against the Baltic States of Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania. Unlike Ukraine, these three countries are a part of NATO, presenting a prime target for Russian president Vladimir Putin.
However, future aggression will likely come in the form of the hybrid warfare attacks as seen in Ukraine and Georgia rather than an all-out
invasion like many think. As Catherine Harris and Frederick Kagan from the Institute for the Study of War have hinted at, “The Russian military is
well-positioned to launch a conventional war in Ukraine and a hybrid war in the Baltic States, the opposite of what Western leaders seem to be
expecting in each theater.” Russia
is simply not prepared or properly positioned to execute a well-
coordinated, conventional attack on the Baltics. The amount of Russian units in close proximity to
make a rapid assault is limited, and most of these formations would take significant time and
resources to mobilize. It would require a large and complex movement of troops, vehicles, and
equipment to successfully plan and execute such an operation. Such activity would surely catch the
eye of NATO members, alerting them to a likely invasion. Instead, Russian posture is best suited for
hybrid warfare against these neighboring countries. A Glimpse of the Bear Report Advertisement With the Baltic States on
Russia’s Western border, the Western Military District (WMD) [Западный военный округ] would be ultimately responsible for Russian military
operations in that region. These districts are similar to the United States geographical combatant commands such as European Command
(EUCOM) and Central Command (CENTCOM), which have separate units and command structures from multiple branches across specific
regions. Russia’s WMD contains all units permanently present in the western-most part of the country while also including the enclave of
Kaliningrad bordering Poland and Lithuania. Although it is comprised of naval, air, ground, cyber, electronic, and nuclear capabilities, the
number of assets in the region and their locations simply do not lend themselves to making a surprise, conventional assault on the Baltics. For
instance, 2017 figures show that there are twenty-two combat brigades and over 1,200 aircraft within the vicinity of the Baltics, making it a very
capable force. However, these numbers do not tell the full story. Hypothetically,
if Russia were to conduct a combined-
arms invasion of the Baltic States tomorrow, only a small number of forces would be properly
positioned to attack. There are plenty of armored and mechanized units nearby, however, the only truly capable and quick reaction
military unit available for a surprise assault would be the 76th Guards Air Assault Division (GAAD). Based in Pskov only twenty miles from the
border of Estonia, they could utilize cargo aircraft (e.g. Il-76), and helicopters (e.g. Mi-8, Mi-17, and Mi-24) for airborne operations, striking the
Baltics with little warning. Additionally, it is reported that the GAAD has recent combat experience in Ukraine. This is an overlooked aspect
when talking about the effectiveness of armed forces. Size and equipment is not the only thing that determines a unit’s effectiveness. Recent
tactical combat experience can also increase lethality, something the GAAD now excels in. Report Advertisement Although
speed and
experience is great, especially in a hypothetical Baltic campaign, these air assault units simply do not
have the heavy weaponry, equipment, or logistics to maintain an offensive posture against NATO
combat units. They are outfitted for quick and rapid deployments rather than sustained fighting with a
superior force such as a U.S. Army Armored Brigade Combat Team. To counter this, Russia would have to mobilize
their armored and mechanized forces, turning the conflict into an even bigger conventional conflict, something Putin knows would not fare well
against American/NATO airpower. Instead, a more predictable, logical, and less risky approach Russia might take would be utilizing hybrid
warfare tactics like they did against Ukraine in the Crimea and the Donetsk region. By encouraging the ethnic Russian speaking populations
within the three Baltic countries to side with Russia, Putin could supply these break off enclaves with weapons and equipment to sustain a
secessionist insurgency, like he did during the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. If necessary, the GAAD could provide very small, but direct
support in a feigned attempt to protect these ethnic Russians, as Russia did in the 2008 Georgian War. With their expeditionary capability to
deliver rapid firepower in proximity of the Baltics, the GAAD would be perfectly positioned for this type of deployment. This form of warfighting
would undermine the stability and capability of a NATO country and possibly the viability of the alliance in the long-term; precisely what Putin
seeks. So NATO is doomed in Eastern Europe? Not quite Direct or indirect military confrontations are not the only way Russia could influence or
undermine the Baltic States. Methods such as political, cyber, information, and economic warfare have all been increasingly utilized by Russia in
the twenty-first century. They are the main components of hybrid warfare. Russia could easily employ them with maximum effort to degrade
and/or disable the political and military capabilities of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—or any other neighboring country for that matter. By launching
cyber-attacks, shutting down oil pipelines, or creating at least the illusion of a contested election, Russia can impart permanent and crippling
impacts in the Baltics without even firing a shot. They would not need large troop formations or armored brigades, only keyboard warriors with
their fingers at the ready. It could come at any time and without warning. The nature of these warfare methods presents their own set of
problems for the West. If tanks start rolling across the border, it is an obvious attack on a NATO country, requiring Article 5 to be invoked in
order to provide collective defense. However, should we view these hybrid warfare tactics the same way, especially with some in the Trump
administration questioning the value of the alliance? Confusion through hybrid warfare is precisely what Putin wants to achieve. Their chances
of success are higher than what most Western leaders are willing to admit. Russia’s options are certainly plentiful and effective, however that is
not to say the United States and NATO do not have ways to counter them. NATO currently has an Enhanced Forward Presence in Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, consisting of battle groups of roughly a battalion worth of troops and vehicles from multiple different nations.
These units are the first line of defense against any Russian incursion, however, due to their small size, they are really only effective at minor
deterrence. They would essentially act as a ‘holding force’ in slowing a Russian advance for no more than three days until U.S.-NATO
reinforcements could arrive. On top of these battlegroups, U.S. Marine Corps Marine Air-Ground Task Forces (MAGTF) would be the perfect
unit to rapidly respond with. Although the name may be misleading, the Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force – Crisis Response –
Africa (SPMAGTF-CR-AF) operates in Europe as well. It is designed as a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) stationed ashore, consisting of
approximately 2,200 marines utilizing dismounted infantry, armored vehicles, and aircraft. Additionally, due to recent Russian aggression,
Marine Rotational Force – Europe (MRF-E) has also been stood up to be stationed in nearby Norway. These two units would be able to quickly
support Baltic States in a limited, sudden conflict. With the possibility of Poland hosting “Fort Trump,” this would provide yet another element
of American firepower in the region. Report Advertisement With
forces even as small and light as these, supply is still a
serious concern. To combat this, the U.S. and Norway have worked together to create the Marine
Corps Prepositioning Program - Norway (MCPP-N). This program consists of six cave sites and two
airfields within Norway that house equipment and supplies necessary for the two U.S. Marine Corps
units. This reduces their crisis response time as equipment is readily available to deploy near the
battlespace. The extended logistical support of the MCPP-N also allows these units to sustain a fight
with a sizable store of supplies. Step One to Deterring the Russian Bear: Realizing and Accepting Even with NATO’s Enhanced
Forward Presence and two rapid reaction U.S. Marine Corps units near the Baltic region, they might actually be very ineffective. If defending
against a large Russian mechanized assault, their small numbers would be hopeless—unless U.S. airpower could respond rapidly enough. If
attacked through dynamic unconventional hybrid warfare tactics, most are too heavily geared and trained towards a conventional battlefield to
effectively counter such a situation. The SPMAGTF-CR-AF is arguably the only unit prepared for such operations. To be blunt, U.S. and NATO
units in the region are poorly prepared for both possible scenarios that Russia could thrust upon the Baltics. Western military planners need to
reorganize and align units in such a way that they can handle Russian hybrid warfare, while preparing for a conventional attack as a secondary
measure. This is a problem that NATO military planners fail to see. Russia
will not risk a full conventional operation
against even the smallest of NATO countries. Instead, Russia will rely on fighting the West along blurred lines of war and
peace, something that Western militaries are struggling to adapt to. Putin wants to put pressure on Europe to show that his country is still a
world power; he would gain very little material good from annexing the Baltics. Russian leaders want to make NATO appear weak, while
simultaneously avoiding a full out war. Putin sees value in destabilizing neighboring countries that want to leave their sphere of control by
aligning with the U.S. and NATO. Western leaders must come to the realization that the possibility of hybrid warfare by Russia in the Baltics is
very plausible – and winnable for Putin without the proper countermeasures in-place.
 2AC Credibility DA – No Impact

No risk of Russia war

Andrei Tsygankov 16, Professor at the Departments of Political Science and International Relations at
San Francisco State University, PhD from USC, “5 reasons why the threat of a global war involving Russia
is overstated,” Feb 19 2016, http://www.russia-direct.org/opinion/5-reasons-why-threat-great-power-
war-involving-russia-overstated

Experts and politicians are warning of high likelihood

The contemporary discussion of security interactions among major powers is depressing to participants and observers alike. us an increasingly

of a military conflict – possibly a nuclear one – between Russia and the U.S. or NATO ¶ In the , on the one hand, , on the other.

West, many argue the dangers associated with a “resurgent” Russia and vow to defend themselves from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “aggressive” actions in
Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Last month, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter accused Russia of threatening the world order and starkly warned: “Make no mistake, the United States will defend our interests, our allies, the principled international order, and the positive future it

affords us all.” ¶ The tensions have been growing and have become especially high since the Ukraine crisis 2014 . Russian military flights over the Baltic and Black Sea in response to NATO’s active

possible military conflict

buildup on Russia’s European borders has done little to calm these fears. The Turkish decision to shoot down a Russian warplane by claiming violation of its airspace in November 2015 revived the discussion of Moscow’s

with Istanbul and NATO, of which Turkey is a member. More recently, the hype has been over the Kremlin’s alleged preparations to invade the Baltic States and the West’s

need to respond.¶ In Russia, these threats and discussions are taken seriously, and the responsibility for these security tensions has been squarely placed on the Western powers. The frequently repeated charges are that the West and NATO have encircled Russia with military bases and
refused to recognize Moscow’s global interests. Russian media have actively discussed the U.S. National Security Archive’s Cold War documents on a nuclear attack against Russia and China declassified on Dec. 22, 2015. ¶ Last week, while attending the Munich Security Conference, Prime
Minister Dmitry Medvedev compared the contemporary security environment with the one that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis and reminded the audience of U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s words that “foreign policy can kill us." ¶ In the meantime, contradicting Medvedev, Russian
experts often bemoan the fact that the Cold War was far more predictable and less dangerous than today’s multipolar world. What many have initially viewed as a generally positive transition from the U.S. “diktat” is now presented as leading toward a great power war. ¶ This increasingly
apocalyptic mood on both sides reflects a growing international instability and breakdown of important communication channels between Russia and the West. Since the beginning of Ukraine crisis and up until the G20 meeting in Antalya in December 2015, the two sides have barely
interacted. Appalled by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for Ukrainian separatists, Western leaders pursued policies of sanctions and isolation, whereas the indignant Kremlin has sought to demonstrate its indifference toward such policies. ¶ Only since Antalya have Putin and
U.S. President Barack Obama resumed their attempts to regularly discuss issues of importance. Western and Russia military, too, severed their contacts although the two sides have recently begun to coordinate their actions in the Syrian airspace. The aforementioned

alarmist views and arguments are misplaced because they underestimate the dangers of the Cold War
and overestimate those of today’s world ¶ . Despite some attempts to present the Cold War as generally stable, predictable, and peaceful, this is not the time to feel nostalgic about it. Multiple crises from Berlin to

Cuba and Afghanistan extended across much of the Cold War era. State propaganda on both sides was reinforced by an intense ideological confrontation accompanied by drills and necessary preparations for a nuclear war. ¶ The Oscar-nominated film “Bridge of Spies” directed by Steven
Spielberg reproduces some of that hysterical atmosphere in the United States where the public was mobilized for any actions in support of the government. In the Soviet Union it was no different. For the world outside the West and the U.S.S.R., this was not a peaceful, but rather an
increasingly chaotic and violent time – the conclusion well documented by scholars of the Third World. ¶ Why today's world is less dangerous than the Cold War¶ Today’s world, while threatening and uncertain, is hardly more dangerous than the Cold War, for the following reasons. ¶

whatever the rhetoric, major powers are not inclined towards risky behavior when their core interests
First,

are at stake. This concerns not only the nuclear superpowers, but also Turkey. The prospect of countries such as

confronting Russia's military should give pause even to

overwhelmingly superior Erdogan someone as hot-tempered as Turkish President Tayyip . Even if Erdogan wanted to pit

¶ NATO has been careful to not be drawn into highly provocative actions, whether
Russia against NATO, it wouldn’t work. So far, it is by

responding to Russia seizing the Pristina Airport in June 1999, getting involved on Georgia’s side International during the

or providing
military conflict in August 2008 support for Ukraine. Unless Russia is the clear and proven aggressor,
by lethal military assistance and

NATO is unlikely to begin World War III.¶ Russia remains a defensive power aware of its
support Turkey and Second,

responsibility for maintaining international stability. Moscow wants to work with major powers, not
against them ¶ the U S has
. Its insistence on Western recognition of Russia’s interests must not be construed as a drive to destroy the foundations of the international order, such as sovereignty, multilateralism, and arms control. Third, nited tates

important interests to prevent regional conflicts from escalating or becoming trans-regional. Although its relative military capabilities are not where they were ten years ago, the

U.S. military and diplomatic resources are sufficient to restrain key regional players in any part of the world. Given the power rivalry across

proxy wars are

several regions, happening, but they are unlikely to escalate ¶
possible and indeed are . Fourth, unlike the Cold War era, the contemporary world has no rigid alliance

structure. The so-called Russia-China-Iran axis is hardly more than a figment of the imagination by American neoconservatives and some Russia conspiracy-minded thinkers. The world remains a space in which international coalitions overlap and are mostly formed on an ad hoc basis. ¶
Fifth, with the exception of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS), there is no fundamental conflict of values and ideologies. Despite the efforts to present as incompatible the so-called “traditional” and “Western” values by Russia or “democracy” to “autocracy” by the United

Despite the dangers the world contains a number of important

States and Europe, the world majority does not think that this cultural divide is worth fighting for.¶ of we live in, it ,

underappreciated, checks
even threat talk may be a way to pressure the
on great powers’ militarism. The coming from politicians is often deceiving. Such talk

opponent into concessions rather than to signal real intentions. When such pressures do not
various political and military

bring expected results rhetoric of war subsides Then a dialogue begins.

, the increasing frequency and isolation .¶ Perhaps, the

of exchanges between Obama and Putin including phone conversation following the since December 2015 - their recent

Munich conference - suggest recognition that the record of pressuring has been mixed at best.
a growing Russia
No Russia war
Trenin 18 ― Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, Ph.D. from the Institute of the
USA and Canada, Russian Academy of Sciences, Chair of the Foreign and Security Policy Program at the
Carnegie Center, 2018. (“Fears of World War III are overblown”, Politico, July 20 th, 2018, Available Online
at: https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-nato-crimea-fears-of-world-war-iii-are-
overblown/ Accessed 11-13-2018)

As for Russia’s own intentions, two things are clear. There is no interest in Moscow in attacking the
Baltic states or Poland. These countries are as safe now as they were before 2014. Suggestions
otherwise simply point to the deep wounds in both nations’ psyche, which will not be healed for many
decades.

Should Ukraine’s leaders decide to repeat Mikheil Saakashvili’s mistake in 2008 and launch a major
offensive to retake Donbas — however unlikely — the Russian response could indeed be devastating
and lead to Ukraine’s loss of sovereignty, as Putin recently stated. But does this mean Russia will move
on Ukraine unprovoked? Most certainly not.

Putin’s main concerns are largely domestic. He has an ambitious program that logically calls for more
economic ties with the West. To move forward, he is looking to ease tensions with the EU and the U.S.
What Putin wanted to get out of Helsinki was mainly to start a dialogue with Washington.

Those hopes are now visibly going up in smoke. It is safe to bet that Russia will continue to face the
same opposition from a coalition of U.S. and EU interests.

The first détente in the hybrid war between Russia and the West was indeed nipped in the bud by
Trump’s behavior and the vehemence of his domestic critics. So be it.

Moscow will not capitulate, and will indeed push back. But it’s not likely to take the form of an
aggressive, overt military attack. Fears of new wars are far from accurate.

No Russia war
Andrew Korybko 18, member of the expert council for the Institute of Strategic Studies and
Predictions at the People’s Friendship University of Russia, "The World War III Media Hype is Misplaced:
The US-Russian Arms Competition Might Stabilize Their Standoff in Syria",
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-world-war-iii-media-hype-is-misplaced-the-us-russian-arms-
competition-might-stabilize-their-standoff-in-syria/5635701

There are a lot of fast-moving events happening right now surrounding the latest Syrian Crisis, and it’s not the point of
this article to review them all in detail, which is why the author recommends that the reader check out his previous analysis about “The
Suspicious Timing Of The Latest Provocations In Syria” and his follow-up Facebook post from this morning about why the Alt-Media-driven hype
about World War III is totally misplaced. The
US-Russian standoff has rhetorically escalated to the point where both
Great Powers have to do something otherwise they’ll “lose face” and subsequent “prestige”, which is
why the US looks ready to hit Syria while Russia may very well militarily respond , but neither of these
actions are guaranteed to be “substantial” and could very likely just be “ superficial” in order to keep
their delicate “dance” going. The US knows that endangering the lives of Russian servicemen would
automatically trigger the tripwire that would necessitate Moscow undertaking a decisive military
response, hence why this probably won’t happen and the so-called “deconfliction mechanisms” will be
relied upon instead to prevent this “dark scenario” from materializing. By the same token, Russia knows that
shooting down the US missiles will enrage Trump and prompt his “deep state” to push him into escalating the
crisis even further in order to avoid “embarrassment”, which is one argument as to why it might not militarily respond to
this predictably forthcoming assault apart from the fact that it officially declared last year after the first one happened that it wouldn’t do if any
new ones happened either. That said, the
Russian rhetoric on this matter has gotten to such a point – and been so widely
misinterpreted by many – that there are very real expectations around the world for it to respond in one
form or another otherwise it will be “humiliated” and considered “unreliable”, and this soft power-“constructivist” impression might actually
end up influencing policy at the end of the day. However, it
doesn’t mean that Russia will intercept Trump and his allies’
cruise missiles with S-400 ones but just that it could react through diplomatic or economic means like
Russian State Duma Defense Committee Chairman and former Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Airborne Troops Vladimir Shamanov warned
earlier this week. Russia is also in a predicament when it comes to its possible response because anything less than a 100% success rate with
the S-400s might diminish their hard-earned international reputation as the world’s best anti-air and anti-missile defensive weapons system,
something that Moscow might not be willing to risk when considering that billions upon billions of dollars of future revenue is dependent on
their sales, which become even more important in the context of existing sanctions. Becauseof the dangerous escalatory risk
that could occur if Russia’s S-400s take down all of Trump and his allies’ incoming munitions (something that Moscow
said last year it wouldn’t do anyway), as well as the need to avoid any unexpected “flukes” that could result in
anything less than a 100% or other similarly “convincing” showing of this defensive system’s first-ever
battle-tested capabilities, Russia is unlikely to militarily respond to the US in any “significant” way. Nor,
for that matter, is the US expected to “significantly” change the balance of power in Syria through its
supposedly imminent and potentially multilateral strike against the Arab Republic , meaning that both
the US’ actions and Russia’s reaction will probably be “ superficial” in order for both sides to “save face”
and not risk having the other “embarrass” them by upstaging their real military capabilities. Russia’s
100% deflection of the US and its allies’ best missiles would prove that the S-400 is the most effective system for
preventing American-led aggression against any country in the world; conversely, anything less than that or similarly
“unconvincing” (and brought about by some kind of unexpected and unusual occurrence) would make the world think
whether rightly or wrongly that the S-400 doesn’t live up to its “hype” and is incapable of “saving” its
customers. Therefore, as paradoxical as it may sound, the US-Russian standoff in Syria might actually be
“stably” managed (key word, used relatively) precisely because of the military competition between these
parties’ offensive and defensive weapons respectively , with each of them knowing full well that anything
other than an “ideal” performance by either of them – which is impossible for both sides to pull off given
that they’d be challenging one another – would lead to a profound erosion of their soft power, which is a risk that
neither of them might be willing to take.
Democracy DA
 No Impact: Dem Down
Backsliding now.
Kurlantzick 16 [Joshua, fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, previously a
scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Pivotal Moment,” accessible online at
http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/39/pivotal-moment, published 2016] // BBM

Throughout much of the 1990s and the early 2000s , Southeast Asia was one of the brightest spots for
democracy globally. Since the late 2000s, however, the region’s democratization has stalled; in some of its most
economically and strategically important nations, it has even reversed. Malaysia’s democratic institutions and culture

have regressed, with the long-ruling Barisan Nasional coalition cracking down on dissent . The government essentially
reinstated under a new name the long-hated Internal Security Act, allowing people to be detained indefinitely without trial, and has put the country’s opposition leader in jail on dubious

Over the past ten years,

charges and tried to shutter press outlets that reported allegations that the prime minister may have enriched himself at public expense.

Thailand has undergone a rapid and severe democratic regression. The country has been mired in
political crisis since 2006, when the Thai military launched a coup while Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was abroad. Since then, Thailand has been
consumed by cycles of violent street protests and counter-protests, short-lived governments brought
down through extra-constitutional means, and harsh crackdowns on dissent. In Myanmar, members of
the military allegedly have been involved in new paramilitary groups emerging throughout the country, burning
down Muslims’ homes and shops, massacring Muslim families, and bombing Muslim quarters of cities. Suu Kyi has said little about these attacks, drawing widespread criticism from the

the White House’s policy

international community for her silence. Many of the reasons for democracy’s failure in Southeast Asia are unrelated to outside powers, but

toward the region has also accelerated democratic backsliding. The most serious damage to democracy has
been done by growing U.S. military ties with mainland Southeast Asian nations : These increased ties have not upheld
promises that they would help make armed forces more accountable and less abusive . Indeed, a Government
Accountability Office analysis of the International Military Education and Training program and other military-to-military training programs showed that they rarely discuss

human rights. The Obama Administration’s desire for stronger military and diplomatic relationships throughout Southeast Asia also appears
to have made the United States reluctant to take significant action when elected governments in the region are overthrown or
undermined. Most notably, after Thailand’s 2014 coup, Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the putsch and the Obama Administration suspended some
military aid to Bangkok—as it is required by law to do—but stopped short of applying tougher sanctions . Harsher measures could have included asset
freezes and travel bans on military leaders or an announcement that the United States would move the massive Cobra Gold joint exercises to another location for an extended period of time.

The Obama Administration has also deemphasized democracy promotion. In much of the region, the White House has combined
democracy promotion and governance programs. Consolidating the two types of programs has limited the time embassy staffers and contractors spend on democracy and civil society

the Administration has offered only muted criticism when electoral democracy in Southeast
promotion. In addition,

Asia has been thwarted. In Malaysia, for example, three days after parliamentary elections in May 2013, the White House congratulated Prime Minister Najib Razak’s
coalition on winning control of Parliament. The congratulations came even though Najib’s coalition had lost the popular vote to the opposition, and some election monitors had reported that
the coalition would have lost a majority in Parliament, too, if not for widespread fraud. The White House also took little action after Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party
was accused of stealing the 2013 national elections from the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party. (Hun Sen supporters allegedly committed massive fraud during vote counting.) The
opposition’s leaders appealed to foreign donors, including the United States, to push for a recount monitored by impartial observers; foreign donors provide more than 50 percent of
Cambodia’s budget and thus could have significant influence. Instead, the United States and other donors applied minimal pressure on Hun Sen. The Obama Administration approved a
congressional spending bill that suspended only a tiny portion of American aid to Cambodia.
 N/U: China Destroys Demo Now

China is destroying global democracy in the status quo.

Rogin 19 [Josh, Columnist covering foreign policy and national security for the Washington Post, “The
United States must help Taiwan resist Chinese dominance,” accessible online at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-united-states-must-help-taiwan-resist-
chinese-dominance/2019/03/28/c6c07868-5188-11e9-8d28-f5149e5a2fda_story.html?
utm_term=.ab892e82b132, published 03/28/19] // BBM

During a Hawaiian “transit stop” Wednesday, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen praised the U.S.-Taiwan relationship as “stronger than ever.” But here in
Taiwan,
it’s China that dominates every discussion. Beijing’s malign influence is apparent everywhere, while the
United States is seen as largely absent. Washington must wake up to the danger of China’s massive effort to infiltrate, undermine and eventually
abolish Taiwan’s democracy. Tsai called for Washington’s help to confront Beijing’s comprehensive campaign to exert control over Taiwanese politics and society,
which is steadily eroding a 40-year status quo that has kept a shaky peace. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which governs the U.S.-Taiwan relationship, stipulates
that the United States will “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the
peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” In 2019, those words ring hollow. Xi Jinping’s government brazenly

uses economic and political pressure to interfere in Taiwan — an attempt to turn the Taiwanese people and their leaders toward
Beijing and against the West. Xi himself smashed the status quo in January when he publicly called for Taiwan to rejoin China under the “One Country, Two
Systems” model. One look at Hong Kong should be enough for any Taiwanese citizen to realize that means a steady erosion of their freedoms and sovereignty.
During interviews with Taiwanese politicians, officials and national security experts, our delegation in Taiwan, organized by the East West Center, heard grave
warnings. Following its successful interference effort in last November’s local elections , Beijing is now
focused intensely on ousting Tsai and her Democratic People’s Party in next January’s presidential contest. “Next year’s
election might be the last meaningful election in Taiwan. After that, it will be a Hong Kong-style election,” said Chen Ming-Chi,
deputy minister of the Mainland Affairs Council. If China succeeds in returning the Beijing-sympathetic Nationalist Party (KMT) to power,

that could be the tipping point after which Taiwan can never again exert its own sovereignty , he said. “2020
would be the beginning of the reunification.” In other words, a Chinese military invasion is no longer the scenario Taiwanese fear most.
China’s strategy to take over Taiwan is focused now on the hybrid warfare tactics authoritarian regimes increasingly
deploy in free societies. Pro-Beijing interests have bought up a huge portion of Taiwanese media and coordinate

with Beijing to spread propaganda and fake news and manipulate social media. The Chinese government uses economic coercion to both recruit
and punish Taiwanese leaders. Meanwhile, China is working overtime to strip Taiwan of its diplomatic allies and keep it out of multilateral institutions. Beijing is

literally trying to erase the country from the map. Taiwan is the testing ground for these methods, but China is now exporting them to
other places, including the United States. That’s a threat not just to Taiwan but also to democracies worldwide, said Deputy Foreign Minister

Hsu Szu-chien. “Taiwan is only the beginning ,” he said. “They want their new civilization to become a new global

order. That’s what they are thinking. And together with an expansion of their physical power, now they are putting their dreams into reality.” Several KMT
officials and former officials told our delegation fears of China were overblown and seeking accommodation with Beijing was the only reasonable approach. Former
deputy foreign minister Bruce Linghu said the KMT is not “pro-China” but rather “pro-peace.” “Taiwan has to play it smart,” he said. “Why should we be provocative
with China?” KMT officials insist they support the U.S.-China relationship and are not trying to appease Beijing. But actions speak louder than words. While Tsai was
speaking to Americans, Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu, a rising KMT leader and presidential prospect, was holding controversial meetings with Chinese Communist
Party officials in Hong Kong and Macau. It’s clear which relationship the KMT prioritizes.
Deterrence
 Deterrence
Arms aren’t key to US deterrence
Gomez 16 Eric Gomez is a policy analyst in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. A
Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship September 28,
2016 https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-
defense-relationship#full

Finally, stepping down from the commitment to defend Taiwan with military force does not remove
America’s interest in keeping the Taiwan Strait free of armed conflict. The United States would retain
the ability to punish China in other ways should it attack Taiwan. Diplomatic isolation and economic
sanctions may not inflict the same kinds of costs on Beijing as military force, but they are additional
costs that would have to be absorbed.104 Additionally, U.S. arms sales are separate from the implicit
commitment to defend Taiwan and could continue, albeit in some reduced or modified form.105
Continuing to sell arms to Taiwan while stepping down from the implicit commitment to use military
force to defend the island allows the United States to demonstrate support for Taiwan’s defense
without taking on the risks associated with direct intervention.106

Worse than squo - Any inclusion of high-tech weapons assures conflict – breaks
Chinese red-lines
Panda 3/25 2019 Ankit Panda, editor at The Diplomat Are the US and China About to Face off Over
American Fighter Sales to Taiwan? If the Trump administration approves a recent request, it could set up
a major crisis. March 25, 2019 https://thediplomat.com/2019/03/are-the-us-and-china-about-to-face-
off-over-american-fighter-sales-to-taiwan/

The United States and China appear to be heading toward a major confrontation over the
possible sale of American fighters to Taiwan.

Last week, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen confirmed that the country’s Ministry of Defense had
submitted a formal request to Washington, D.C., to purchase F-16V Viper fighters. Tsai said the decision
to make the request was supported by a review of Taiwan’s defense needs.

Days later, Bloomberg News reported that the White House was poised to approve the Taiwanese
request.

If that report is true, the United States would be turning course on what has been a longstanding
reluctance to sell fighters to Taiwan, even as it has authorized other arms sales in line with the 1979
Taiwan Relations Act, which requires the U.S. government to support Taiwan “with arms of a defensive
character.”

Even as the Obama administration and the Trump administration have approved weapons and spare
parts for sale to Taiwan, fighters have long been seen as a bridge too far given Beijing serious
reservations.
The United States authorized the sale of 150 F-16 fighters to Taiwan in 1992. The Obama administration, after receiving a request from Taipei, turned it down, initiating a set of upgrades instead to Taipei’s existing fleet.

The issue hasn’t gone unnoticed in China, where Taiwan is seen as an inherent part of the country. Relations across the Taiwan Strait have been particularly strained since Tsai’s inauguration in 2016.

The Taiwanese president hails from the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), though she herself has not explicitly supported independence — long a red-line for Beijing — Tsai, however, has refused to
endorse the so-called “1992 consensus,” which her predecessor had supported and which forms what Beijing sees as the baseline for cordial cross-strait relations.
“China’s position to firmly oppose arms sales to Taiwan is consistent and clear ,” Chinese
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said during a press briefing on Friday.

“We have made stern representations to the U.S. We have urged the U.S. to fully recognize the
sensitivity of this issue and the harm it will cause.”

The prospect of a fighter sale to Taiwan this time comes at a time of particularly heightened U.S.-China
tensions. The Trump administration has been known to seek leverage with Beijing across issues and it is
possible that this may turn into the latest case of Taiwan being used a possible bargaining chip as Trump
seeks to clinch a favorable trade deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Trump, however, has been unconventional on Taiwan policy in the past. As president-elect, he broke
expectations by receiving a telephone call from Tsai. That call occurred at a time when Trump had yet to
endorse the United States’ one-China policy as president — something that he did for the first time in
February 2017.

Either way, Tsai’s fighter request and the Trump administration’s reported acceptance could set up
another major area of turbulence between the United States and China.

Arms do jack shit Taiwan is too far behind – arms sales can’t deter china – only cause
conflict
Hua 15 Zhang Hua, assistant research fellow at the Institute of Taiwan Studies, Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, Global Times Arms sales to Taiwan do not help the US
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/959549.shtml

Washington formally announced a $1.83 billion arms sale package to Taiwan on Wednesday. China
slammed the sale for interfering in its internal affairs and vowed to impose sanctions on relevant
American companies. Chinese pundits see this as new proof of Washington's desire to contain China by
roiling cross-Straits relations. In fact, arms sales to Taiwan have already had a negative impact on
the US.
Washington has to accept it is becoming far less
capable of containing China's rise. It may
upset the government of the Chinese mainland by making a fuss with Taiwan, but it won't
have a real effect.
Washington's primary intent in forging a military relationship with Taiwan is to maintain military balance
across the Taiwan Strait. However, the strategy is stretched too thin. Given the mainland's swift and
prominent ramp-up in military spending, a military balance can no longer be stricken between the
mainland and Taiwan, no matter how many advanced weapons the US sells to
Taiwan.
The possibility of using Taiwan to suppress the mainland's growing leverage in its periphery is vanishing.
The mainland's economic aggregate is more than 20 times larger than Taiwan's, so the latter has no
chance to engage in a military race with the former.
Selling arms to Taiwan doesn't mean Washington would hold on to its promise to "come and rescue" Taiwan when the island is in trouble with the mainland. It is not even a commitment to include Taiwan in its umbrella of
protection. Even some Taiwanese strategists have pointed out that Taiwan is too obsessed with the delusion that Washington will come all the way to defend Taiwan.

Washington also cunningly argues that the weaponry deal will bolster Taiwan's confidence when it needs to negotiate with the mainland in other respects. In fact, in such talks, it is always the mainland that makes more room for
Taiwan's wellbeing, not because Taiwan has a strong military capability that is feared by the mainland, but because the mainland regards Taiwan as family.

Although the US, especially its arms enterprises and political brokers, could reap fat profits from such practices, these companies and individuals might risk losing the second biggest market. The pros and cons are not hard to
weigh. In fact, some companies have started to reflect on the deal.

Washington seems to have gone on the offensive in the arms deal, but Beijing can find opportunities to strike back. From the Diaoyu Islands to the South China Sea disputes, the US keeps stirring troubles against China in recent
years during the implementation of its "rebalancing to Asia" strategy. China could have resorted to countermeasures but is too prudent to take real action. On the occasion of this arms deal, for which the US has neither moral nor
legal ground, Beijing should take the chance to carry out down-to-earth countermeasures, such as halting bilateral communications over military matters and sanctioning relevant US enterprises.

It becomes increasingly obvious that playing the Taiwan card is no longer an effective approach to
countering China's rise. On the contrary, it makes Washington take bigger risks to jeopardize a
relationship with the Chinese mainland, which is clearly more important.

Taiwan is the root cause of US-Sino trade tensions

Al Jazeera 7/13 Al Jazeera, 7-13-2019, "China vows sanctions on US firms over Taiwan arms sale,",
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/china-vows-sanctions-firms-taiwan-arms-sale-
190712133310269.html Lowell-SB

US companies involved in a potential arms sale worth $2.2bn to self-ruled Taiwan will face sanctions,
China said, warning Washington "not to play with fire".
Taiwan on Saturday defended the weapons purchase saying it will strengthen Taiwan's self-defence in the face of a growing military threat from
China.

"The national army will continue to strengthen its key defence forces, ensure national security, protect its homeland, and ensure that the fruits
of freedom and democracy won't be attacked," the defence ministry said in a statement.

The planned weapons sale, the first transfer of big-ticket US military gear to democratically governed Taiwan in decades, came as ties between
Washington and Beijing are already strained by a trade war.

"The US arms sale to Taiwan has severely violated the basic norms of international law and
international relations," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said in a statement on
Friday.

"In order to safeguard national interests, China will impose sanctions on US enterprises participating
in this sale of weapons to Taiwan," he said.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi, during a visit to Hungary, asked the US to "recognise the gravity of the Taiwan question".

China, which views Taiwan as part of its territory and has vowed to one day seize it, bristles at any
country that lends the island state any diplomatic support or legitimacy.

Even though Taiwan, which split from China following a civil war in 1949, doesn't have diplomatic ties
with the US, Washington provides Taipei with military and other support. Beijing regards this as
interference in its internal affairs.

Trade war collapses the global economy

Jones 19 Marc Jones, 5-20-2019, "Full-blown trade war will push world toward recession," U.S.,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-recession/full-blown-trade-war-will-push-world-
toward-recession-morgan-stanley-idUSKCN1SQ1R4 Lowell-SB
LONDON (Reuters) - A collapse of U.S.-China trade talks and hike in tariffs on Chinese goods would push the world economy toward recession
and see the Federal Reserve cut U.S. interest rates back to zero within a year, analysts at Morgan Stanley said on Monday.

A worker cycles past containers outside a logistics center near Tianjin Port, in northern China, May 16, 2019. REUTERS/Jason Lee
While a temporary escalation of trade tensions could be navigated without much damage at all, a lasting breakdown would inflict serious pain.

“If talks stall, no deal is agreed upon and the U.S. imposes 25% tariffs on the remaining circa $300 billion
of imports from China, we see the global economy heading towards recession,” the bank’s analysts said
in a note.

In response, the Fed would cut rates all the way back to zero by spring 2020 while China would scale up
its fiscal stimulus to 3.5% of GDP (equivalent to around $500 billion) and its broad credit growth target
to 14-15% a year, they added.
“But, a reactive policy response and the usual lags of policy transmission would mean that we might not be able to avert the tightening of
financial conditions and a full-blown global recession.”

A global recession is defined by growth dipping below the 2.5% a year threshold.

In a middle scenario where 25% tariffs on $200 billion of U.S. imports from China stay in place for 3-4
months, global growth could slow around 50 basis points to 2.7% a year.
They predicted the Fed would cut rates by 50 basis points to cushion the blow while Beijing would up its total fiscal expansion to 2.25% of GDP,
or about $320 billion.

Morgan Stanley’s analyst also warned investors could be underestimating the impact of trade tensions in a number of ways.

Firstly, the impact on the U.S. corporate sector would be more widespread as China could put up non-tariff barriers such as restriction of
purchases.

Given the global growth slowdown that would follow, profits from firms’ international operations would
be hit and companies would not be able to fully pass through the tariff increases to consumers.

The indirect impact would be “non-linear” too, with a sharp tightening of financial conditions and policy
uncertainty hitting firms’ confidence to the extent that they freeze or cutback on capital expenditure.
“Our base case is that the escalation is temporary, but we would readily admit that the uncertainty is high with regard to how trade talks could
evolve.”

“The impact on global growth is non-linear – the risks are firmly skewed to the downside and the window for resolution is narrowing.”

Econ decline causes global wars

Liu 18 Qian Liu, China-based economist. “From economic crisis to World War III.” Project Syndicate.
11/8/2018. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-crisis-military-conflict-or-
structural-reform-by-qian-liu-2018-11

The next economic crisis is closer than you think. But what you should really worry about is what comes
after: in the current social, political, and technological landscape , a prolonged economic crisis, combined
with rising income inequality, could well escalate into a major global military conflict.
The 2008-09 global financial crisis almost bankrupted governments and caused systemic collapse.
Policymakers managed to pull the global economy back from the brink, using massive monetary
stimulus, including quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates.
But monetary stimulus is like an adrenaline shot to jump-start an arrested heart; it can revive the patient, but it does nothing to cure the disease. Treating a sick economy requires structural reforms, which can cover everything
from financial and labour markets to tax systems, fertility patterns, and education policies.

Policymakers have utterly failed to pursue such reforms, despite promising to do so. Instead, they have remained preoccupied with politics. From Italy to Germany, forming and sustaining governments now seems to take more
time than actual governing. Greece, for example, has relied on money from international creditors to keep its head (barely) above water, rather than genuinely reforming its pension system or improving its business environment.

The lack of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented excess liquidity that central banks injected into their economies was not allocated to its most efficient uses. Instead, it raised global asset prices to levels even higher
than those prevailing before 2008.
In the United States, housing prices are now 8% higher than they were at the peak of the property bubble in 2006, according to the property website Zillow. The price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which measures whether stock-
market prices are within a reasonable range, is now higher than it was both in 2008 and at the start of the Great Depression in 1929.

As monetary tightening reveals the vulnerabilities in the real economy, the collapse of asset-price bubbles will trigger another economic crisis – one that could be even more severe than the last, because we have built up a
tolerance to our strongest macroeconomic medications. A decade of regular adrenaline shots, in the form of ultra-low interest rates and unconventional monetary policies, has severely depleted their power to stabilise and
stimulate the economy.

If history is any guide, the consequences of this mistake could extend far beyond the economy.
According to Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman, prolonged periods of economic distress have been
characterised also by public antipathy toward minority groups or foreign countries –
attitudes that can help to fuel unrest, terrorism, or even war.

For example, during the Great Depression, US President Herbert Hoover signed the 1930 Smoot-Hawley
Tariff Act, intended to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition. In the
subsequent five years, global trade shrank by two-thirds. Within a decade, World War II had begun.

To be sure, WWII, like World War I, was caused by a multitude of factors; there is no standard path to
war. But there is reason to believe that high levels of inequality can play a significant role in stoking
conflict.

According to research by the economist Thomas Piketty, a spike in income inequality is often followed
by a great crisis. Income inequality then declines for a while, before rising again, until a new peak – and
a new disaster. Though causality has yet to be proven, given the limited number of data points, this
correlation should not be taken lightly, especially with wealth and income inequality at historically high
levels.

This is all the more worrying in view of the numerous other factors stoking social unrest and diplomatic
tension, including technological disruption, a record-breaking migration crisis, anxiety over globalisation,
political polarisation, and rising nationalism. All are symptoms of failed policies that could turn out to be
trigger points for a future crisis.

Voters have good reason to be frustrated, but the emotionally appealing populists to whom they are
increasingly giving their support are offering ill-advised solutions that will only make matters worse. For
example, despite the world’s unprecedented interconnectedness, multilateralism is increasingly being
eschewed, as countries – most notably, Donald J. Trump’s US – pursue unilateral, isolationist policies.
Meanwhile, proxy wars are raging in Syria and Yemen.

Against this background, we must take seriously the possibility that the next economic crisis could lead
to a large-scale military confrontation. By the logic of the political scientist Samuel
Huntington, considering such a scenario could help us avoid it because it would force us to take action.
In this case, the key will be for policymakers to pursue the structural reforms that they have long
promised while replacing finger-pointing and antagonism with a sensible and respectful global dialogue.
The alternative may well be global conflagration.
 2AC Deterrence
The neg’s wrong about deterrence—US systems are expensive, outdated, and ill-equip
for Taiwan—Taiwan’s new self-defense initiative solves
Thompson 2018 (Drew Thompson was the Director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia in the Office of
the Secretary of Defense from 2011 to 2018. He is now a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan
Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. “Hope On The Horizon: Taiwan’s
Radical New Defense Concept”, https://warontherocks.com/2018/10/hope-on-the-horizon-taiwans-
radical-new-defense-concept/ , OCTOBER 2, 2018)

Taiwan is doomed. The numbers prove it. Or so we are told. Every year the U.S. Department of Defense
publishes the statistics. Taiwan’s defense budget is $10 billion. China’s is $154 billion . There are almost a million
active duty soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army versus 140,000 ground troops across the strait. Taiwan has 420 fighters versus China’s 1,490
and 23 ships versus China’s 240. Taiwan has two modern attack submarines, while China has 52. The
cross-strait military balance
seems hopeless and the conventional wisdom is that the threat of U.S. intervention in the event of an
invasion is the only thing deterring Beijing from reunifying the island by force . In the face of such
overwhelming odds, however, Taiwan’s military has not given up. In fact, they’ve greatly improved their
chances for survival. Last year, Taiwan’s Chief of the General Staff, Adm. Lee Hsi-ming quietly proposed a
revolutionary new approach to Taiwan’s defense, called the Overall Defense Concept. This new concept,
if effectively implemented, could turn the tables and give Taiwan a fighting chance of preventing China
from being able to take it by force . China considers Taiwan a rogue province — an unresolved remnant of the civil war that
otherwise ended in 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated forces retreated to Taiwan under the protection of the U.S. Navy. The U.S. military
maintained a presence in Taiwan until the normalization of diplomatic relations with China in 1979. China has stated its intent to reunify Taiwan
by force if necessary, and built up its military with the aim of both invading Taiwan and preventing the U.S. military from coming to the island’s
defense in time. Taiwan has historically been dependent on the United States to deter China through both the threat of intervention and the
provision of arms. The Taiwan Relations Act requires the United States to maintain the ability to defend Taiwan and provide it with “arms of a
defensive character.” Taiwan’s military has closely mirrored its U.S. counterpart, in miniature, for years, sending its officers to U.S. military
school houses, training together, and acquiring both new and used military platforms sold by the U.S. government. Taiwan’s military is now a
hodgepodge of U.S and indigenously built systems. Its American systems range from the cutting edge to the antique. Taiwan’s AH-64E Apache
attack helicopter is newer than the model fielded by the U.S. Army in the United States Indo-Pacific Command’s area of responsibility. Taiwan’s
F-16s are being retrofitted to include new capabilities that U.S. Air Force pilots are jealous of. However, Vietnam-era systems like M-60 tanks,
Knox-class frigates, and F-5 fighters are also found in Taiwan’s arsenal. Each of Taiwan’s services is in desperate need of recapitalization and it is
tempting to look at U.S.-made next-gen frigates, M1A2 Abrams tanks, and F-35s as logical candidates. The
problem with buying U.S.
systems wholesale is that they are expensive, designed to project power over great distances, and
maximize mobility and networks to take the fight to the enemy with overwhelming superiority. Taiwan
on the other hand, needs the opposite: systems that are short-range and defensive, able to survive an
initial bombardment from a larger adversary, and suitable for deployment close to home in defense of
the island should it come under blockade or attack. Despite mirror-imaging the U.S. military in its
doctrine, training, and capabilities for decades, Taiwan has begun to chart its own course. Taiwan’s new
defense concept employs an asymmetric defense strategy, where Taiwan maximizes its defense
advantages, and targets an invading force when it is at its weakest. Whereas Taiwan’s previous strategy
focused on fighting across the entire Taiwan Strait and defeating the enemy through attrition, the new
concept divides Taiwan’s defense operations into two phases, both closer to Taiwan’s shores where the
lines of communication are short and Taiwan’s forces can benefit from land-based air denial and more
effective surveillance and reconnaissance.
Taiwan is a distinct issue – China won’t be adventurist
Goldstein 2015 (Lyle J Goldstein is visiting fellow of the Watson Institute of International Studies at
Brown University and an associate professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI), 7/7/15,
Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry, Georgetown University Press,
MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/books/9781626161627/9781626161627-6.pdf)
Two plausible objections may be discussed briefly at this point, though each is dealt with more comprehensively in chapter 12, the book’s
conclusion. A first objection concerns the oft-made argument that any concession to Beijing represents “appeasement” that
will only invite greater aggression. For those making this argument, Taiwan is the “ultimate prize” for Beijing, and thus would raise China’s
confidence to unacceptably high levels. A related argument concerning the fate of US alliances in the Asia-Pacific region is made that any kind
of reunification between the Mainland and Taiwan would signal a “death blow” to the US-Japan Alliance, and other allies would also be dubious
of the US commitment to the region’s security. However, both arguments turn
out to be specious—having been built on
crude and simplistic assumptions. A clear view of history shows plainly that Beijing approaches the Taiwan issue
quite differently than other issues, and so the expectation that China, following unification, would
immediately seek to apply its hubris to other issues only stretches the imagination . The “Munich” appeasement
argument also seems to be ignorant of geography, neglecting the fact that Taiwan’s defense is not feasible over the long term. White quite
correctly concludes: “America can no longer defend Taiwan from China, and a policy towards Taiwan that presumes that it can is
unsustainable.”68 Even putting military capabilities aside, as Nathan and Scobell relate, “Beijing is convinced that it enjoys an asymmetry of
motivation over the United States with respect to Taiwan.”69

Sales don’t add to deterrence or help Taiwan’s self defense

Chung 2018 (Lawrence Chung covers major news in Taiwan, ranging from presidential and parliament
elections to killer earthquakes and typhoons. Most of his reports focus on Taiwan’s relations with China,
specifically on the impact and possible developments of cross-strait relations under the pro-
independence Democratic Progressive Party and mainland-friendly Kuomintang governments. Before
starting work at the South China Morning Post in 2006, he wrote for Reuters and AFP for more than 12
years. “US arms sale won’t do much to help Taiwan defend itself against Beijing, analysts say”,
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2165713/us-arms-sale-wont-do-much-help-
taiwan-defend-itself-against , 9/25/2018)

Washington’s plan to sell US$330 million of spare parts for Taiwan’s warplanes will not change the
cross-strait military situation or improve the self-ruled island’s ability to defend itself against growing
threats from Beijing, according to analysts. But they say that the proposed deal is the latest sign of strengthening US-Taiwan
ties and shows that the administration of US President Donald Trump is willing to take further steps to help ensure the island’s security as
Beijing expands its military. The Pentagon’s Defence Security Cooperation Agency on Monday announced the planned sale of spare parts and
logistics support for F-16, C-130 and F-5 indigenous defence fighter jets, pending final approval from the US Congress. It will be the second US
weapons deal under Trump, after his administration in June last year agreed to sell a US$1.4 billion arms package to Taiwan that included high-
speed anti-radiation missiles, torpedoes, missile components and technical support for early warning radar. Beijing
regards Taiwan as
a renegade province that should be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary. It has previously
warned Washington against selling weapons to Taiwan and establishing military relations with the
island, and remains locked in a trade war with the US. Taiwan was quick to express its appreciation for the proposed deal,
saying it showed Washington’s concern for the island’s security. Presidential spokesman Alex Huang said that the sale would “help boost
Taiwan’s confidence in facing security challenges” from Beijing. He also said that Taiwan “will continue to increase our investment in national
defence, boost our defence industry and technology development, and closely cooperate and communicate with the US on various security
issues and agendas”. Analysts
said that the new deal was unlikely to alter the military imbalance between the
two sides of the Taiwan Strait since it involved mainly aircraft parts and other logistics support. “Unlike
fighter jets like F-35s, this won’t actually represent any significant increase in Taiwan’s defensive
capabilities,” said Arthur Ding, an associate research fellow at the Stockholm-based Institute for Security
and Development Policy, referring to a more advanced aircraft Taiwan has sought from the US. “However,
these spare parts and the logistics support are necessary to keep the warplanes involved operational,” he said. Taiwan’s former defence
minister Andrew Yang said that the spare parts should be one of continuing arms deals between Taipei and Washington. “It should be part of
the regular military exchanges between the two sides,” he said, adding that the purpose of the sale was not to boost
Taiwan’s defences.
 1AR Deterrence

Taiwan’s self-defense is key to deterrence—US systems fail but Overall Defense

Concept solves
Thompson 2018 (Drew Thompson was the Director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia in the Office of
the Secretary of Defense from 2011 to 2018. He is now a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan
Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. “Hope On The Horizon: Taiwan’s
Radical New Defense Concept”, https://warontherocks.com/2018/10/hope-on-the-horizon-taiwans-
radical-new-defense-concept/ , OCTOBER 2, 2018)

One challenge is that Taiwan’s defense needs are diverging from the expertise and systems the U.S.
military can provide. For example, the U.S. Marine Corps does not have a dedicated opposing force that
Taiwan could train with to hone their skills in defending beaches. Commanders of Taiwan’s squadrons of
small fast attack boats can find no counterpart in the U.S. Navy to train with. U.S. Navy mine warfare is
under-resourced, unappreciated and mines are considered a problem, not a solution . Offensive mining may be
making a comeback, however, in light of the U.S. strategy identifying China as a key threat. The U.S. Navy has recently signaled its developing
interest in mine warfare, publicly demonstrating the deployment of Quickstrike mines from a B-52 in September during exercise Valiant Shield
18. With every challenge comes opportunity. As the U.S. Army develops its multi-domain battle concept and applies it to the Indo-Pacific, it will
increasingly realize that China is the challenge, and the battlespace is Taiwan. Adm. Harry Harris, then commanding Pacific Command, spoke at
the Association of the U.S. Army conference in 2016, reduced the task to, “Army’s got to be able to sink ships.” U.S.
Army could find
solutions and opportunities for expanding their reach into the maritime domain by studying and
innovating alongside their counterparts in Taiwan . Conclusion The beauty of Adm. Lee’s Overall Defense
Concept is that it embraces an asymmetric strategy, does not seek to compete with China’s larger
military head on, and focuses Taiwan’s resources on targeting the greatest threat, while surviving long
enough for third-party intervention. It eschews traditional symmetrical warfighting of surface action
groups, fighter planes, or tanks slugging it out head-to-head. Instead, it takes a page from guerilla
warfare and envisions large numbers of small, affordable, highly mobile units taking advantage of the
terrain to defeat a larger enemy. U.S. defense experts should consider these concepts as well as they contemplate how the U.S.
military can address the threat from increasingly capable adversaries. With its new Overall Defense Concept, opportunities for collaboration
with Taiwan to address asymmetric challenges will increase. Deterring
China from seeking to reunify Taiwan by force will
continue to be a complex equation. The threat of U.S. intervention remains the most critical factor, but
as the People’s Liberation Army continues to modernize and expand, including anti-access/area denial
capabilities designed to challenge a U.S. intervention, Taiwan’s own defense capabilities become
increasingly important. The survivability of Taiwan’s military, particularly its combat effectiveness weeks
after a conflict begins, and the ability to slow and attrite an invading force is critical to buy time for the
U.S. to intervene. Adm. Lee has made a courageous proposal to set Taiwan on that crucial course which will continue to assure cross-
strait stability despite the threat from an increasingly capable adversary.

The Aff won’t alter the military balance but will foster political dialogue and
cooperation
Goldstein 15 (Lyle J Goldstein is visiting fellow of the Watson Institute of International Studies at Brown
University and an associate professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI), 7/7/15, Meeting
China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry, Georgetown University Press, MUSE,
https://muse.jhu.edu/books/9781626161627/9781626161627-6.pdf)

The United States should halt the sale of new types of weapons systems. This concession is not recommended lightly, but
Steinberg and O’Hanlon seem to call for similar adjustments in US policy in exchange for a reduced Mainland military posture targeting
Taiwan.56 As true as it may be that Taiwan has had the confidence to enter into negotiations because of its military relationship with the
United States, it is just as certain, if not more so, that Taiwan may continue to resist serious negotiations regarding its
political status vis-à-vis the Mainland as long as defense ties to the United States remain robust . The
notion that the United States can indefinitely maintain such a close security relationship with a claimed
island off the coast of a nuclear-armed, rising superpower is simply absurd and defies all the “natural
laws” of international relations. Seeking for a point of comparison, one might think of the position of Berlin during the Cold War,
and yet the USSR did not claim Berlin as its own “sacred territory.” Imagine, instead, if the United States had sought to hold
Crimea or some such territory against Moscow’s will. Such a position would have been strategically untenable
and risky in the extreme. Even in present circumstances, Washington has refused to take any military steps to counter Russia’s 2014
annexation of Crimea. Military analysts knowledgeable about the cross-Strait “balance” fully recognize that
there is no balance at all. China’s military modernization has steadily outstripped Taiwan’s armed forces ,
to the point where Taiwan’s armed forces are now outclassed in practically every domain of warfare. With ballistic
and cruise missile saturation, Beijing, if it so chooses, can effectively eviscerate Taiwan’s air force (and navy), claim air superiority, and then
successfully conduct amphibious operations. Thus, arms sales
have for some time taken on a purely symbolic meaning.
This is well understood on Taiwan—hence, 66 Meeting China Halfway the reluctance to spend large sums on big-ticket weapons
systems. In effect, the Obama administration has recognized the necessity to limit arms sales to Taiwan by agreeing to upgrade existing aircraft,
rather than selling F-16C/D aircraft. Indeed, this policy is actually consistent with the 1982 US commitment not to sell Taiwan advanced military
hardware. Regarding that particular agreement, Nathan and Scobell suggest that Washington has been duplicitous in the past: “Once the
agreement was in place, the Americans proceeded to use legalistic reasoning to empty it of all meaning.”57 It is worth stating, moreover, that
Taiwan may well seek military hardware from other states, such as those in Europe or even Russia. But the value to global security of stability in
USChina relations has long outweighed any marginal gain that Taipei gains in negotiations from these weapons sales. China should restrict the
building of its amphibious fleet. Having secured major new commitments by Washington to restrict arms sales and to help facilitate an accord
regarding Taiwan’s final status, Beijing must respond with concrete and measurable new limits on its own ability to strike at Taiwan. Although
somewhat improbable, amphibious invasion still ranks near the top of Taipei’s fears regarding the Mainland, especially as the Chinese Navy
makes continual forward strides. More than Beijing’s initial testing of an aircraft carrier in 2012, the Type 071 amphibious assault ship, which
carries one marine battalion plus fifteen to twenty armored vehicles, is a platform that especially concerns Taiwan. The vessel is nearly on par
with Western equivalents, and has the special capability to launch high-speed large hovercraft, which amounts to a rapid, over-the-horizon
strike capability with the potential to overturn traditional calculations regarding the feasibility of an amphibious attack across the Strait.58 As of
2014, three Type 071s had been launched, but another may be under construction.59 In addition, all signs point to an air assault complimentary
capability, known as the Type 081, that will be capable of deploying dozens of large helicopters—also quite ideal for a modern amphibious
assault. Moreover, a 2014 exercise sought to demonstrate that new Chinese Z-10 attack helicopters, which had previously only been associated
with the ground forces, could be operated from Chinese naval vessels of various types.60 Such innovative capabilities, deployed on a large
scale, could gravely threaten Taiwan. Although missile and aerial bombardments, of course, are massively threatening to Taiwan, the threat of
amphibious assault nevertheless causes the most anxiety naturally, as it holds out the possibility of an all-out and appallingly bloody campaign
to completely subjugate Taiwan. If China builds a dozen large amphibious attack vessels (either 071s or 081s), it will have the premier
amphibious attack capability in the world, especially as state-of-the-art attack helicopters are added into the mix in extensive numbers.
Anything above that number of amphibious attack vessels (in combination with other assets, including low-technology transports) would give
China the ability to invade Taiwan outright. Undoubtedly, these multimission platforms can provide China with important new capabilities for
exerting global power—including giving humanitarian relief, evacuating Chinese nationals from a conflict situation, and even pursuing open
ocean antisubmarine warfare. Nevertheless, a dozen of these large, amphibious attack vessels should be more than adequate for implementing
China’s newly ambitious foreign and defense policies. An explicit commitment to cap the PLA Navy’s amphibious capabilities would offer Taiwan
(and other neighboring island states) the additional assurance that Beijing has no need for colossal capabilities for an amphibious attack. Such
military restraint would play an important role in a China-US cooperation spiral for Taiwan.The United States should cease all arms transfers to
Taiwan.
In halting arms shipments to Taipei, Washington can make a clean break with its involvement in
the Chinese civil war. This involvement originally was an accident of history, when the United States found itself after World War II
presiding over the entire Asia-Pacific region, and Washington, to its credit, tried hard to reconcile the Communists and Nationalists in the late
1940s for the greater good of the Chinese people. Whether or not this was warranted, or whether the Chinese people had to find their own
way, is debatable, of course. But the record clearly shows that the United States intended to leave the island to communist rule, except when
the Korean War briefly led Washington’s decision makers to believe that a titanic World War III was in the immediate offing. Thankfully, it was
not, but Taiwan by happenstance rather than by strategic design thereafter became an American protectorate. Most likely, the Taiwanese
people and even the Mainland have to some extent benefited from this accident of history, but it is time to end this unnatural protectorate
status, which would otherwise only intensify for the worse and fester like an infected wound under current global power trends. It is a wonder
that such a situation persisted for so long—a condition that can only be explained by China’s perennial weakness. The
adjustment is not
only an imperative for US foreign policy, but also for global security that demands effective US-China
cooperation in the security domain, and all others as well. Gilley is quite correct in asserting that “Taipei’s decision to
chart a new course [in 2008] is a godsend for [the] . . . United States. . . . The overburdened giant should happily watch [the cross-Strait
rapprochement] and focus on other pressing regional and global issues.”61 Also, according to Michael Swaine, “It is . . . extremely unlikely that
Washington will significantly alter its balanced policy . . . [on] the Taiwan issue.”62 But he also concludes that “Washington . . . should consider
negotiating directly with Beijing, in consultation with Taipei, a set of mutual assurances regarding PLA force levels and deployments on the one
hand, and major US arms sales and defense assistance on the other hand that are linked to the opening of a cross-Strait political dialogue.” That
is precisely the process that is being advocated here. The arms sales cutoff will not significantly alter the military
balance, which, as has been discussed above, is now largely symbolic. However, it will obviously alter the
political calculus, focusing the minds of cross-Strait negotiators to press forward toward an agreement.
Contrary to the dire predictions of American conservatives, such a policy would not destabilize the Strait, because the
military options would remain arduous and incredibly destructive. Thus, both Taiwan and the Mainland could be
expected to remain on the negotiating track.
 AT: Lose Taiwan DA

And, China wont take Taiwan --- regional backlash and weak PLA training

Gomez ‘16
(Eric, He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from the State University of New
York-College at Geneseo, and a Masters of Arts in International Affairs from the Bush School of
Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, policy analyst in defense and foreign policy studies at the
Cato Institute, “A Costly Commitment Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,”
CATO Institute Policy Analysis September 28, 2016, Number 800 //um-ef)

Ending the U.S. defense commitment to Taiwan could be detrimental to the U.S. military’s broader
goals in East Asia. Taiwan lies in the middle of an island chain that runs from Japan to the South China Sea. Control of Taiwan has important
strategic implications because of this location. The PLA could use Taiwan as a staging area to more easily project power into the South China Sea, the
East China Sea, and the western Pacific.89 Keeping this island chain free of Chinese military bases and friendly to the

United States is therefore seen as essential for America’s position in the region . Indeed, Taiwan has loomed large in
American military strategy in the region for decades. In 1950 General Douglas MacArthur described Taiwan as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender ideally located to

accomplish offensive strategy and at the same time checkmate defensive or counter-offensive operations” from the surrounding area.90 If Taiwan becomes the PLA’s
“unsinkable aircraft carrier,” it would make U.S. military actions in support of other regional interests
more difficult. Fears over China’s improved military position that would follow seizing control over
Taiwan are valid, but there are roadblocks to this outcome that exist independent of the U.S. defense
commitment. As mentioned earlier in this analysis, China would face numerous hurdles and negative consequences if it
tried to invade Taiwan, given the difficulty of conducting amphibious invasions, the high likelihood of regional backlash, and the
materiel and training limitations of the PLA.91 Taiwan could also do more to raise the costs of conflict for China through changes in military technology
and warfighting doctrine.92 For example, Taiwan’s fleet of fighter aircraft is costly to maintain and outclassed by PLA fighters and surfaceto-air missile capabilities.93 Reducing the

size of Taiwan’s fighter fleet and redirecting funds to build up mobile missile forces that could support
ground units fighting against a PLA invasion attempt would improve Taiwan’s ability to resist the PLA
and inflict heavy losses on Chinese forces.94 If President Tsai and the DPP can deliver on their promises to
increase defense spending and develop Taiwan’s defense industries, Taiwan could be capable of mounting an
effective self defense without American intervention in the coming decades.
 No Link: Plan Doesn’t Embolden China

No Link --- the plan doesn’t increase China’s power

Glaser ‘15
(Charles L. Glaser, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of the Institute for
Security and Conflict Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington
University, Fellow in the Kissinger Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,
former Emmett Dedmon Professor of Public Policy and Acting Dean at the Harris School of Public Policy
at the University of Chicago, former Strategic Analyst for the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, holds a Ph.D.
and a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, 2015 “A
U.S.-China Grand Bargain? The Hard Choice between Military Competition and Accommodation,”
International Security, Volume 39, Number 4, Spring)

A second potential threat to U.S. security is that territorial accommodation could reduce U.S. military
capabilities. Although numerous analysts suggest that China's control of Taiwan would have this effect, little sustained analysis of this issue is publically
available. One possibility is that U.S. accommodation would free up military forces and investments that

China now commits to coercing and if necessary attacking Taiwan, which would in turn enable China to
shift resource to better challenge the U.S. ability to protect the East Asian SLOCs and possibly beyond .82
According to this argument, because the Taiwan mission has absorbed the vast majority of the Chinese army's force modernization and organizational training,83
the resources made available for other missions would be large.84 This
danger is smaller than critics suggest, however. If China
decides to fully pursue more ambitious missions, it would have to make large investments that would
likely dwarf the amount it is spending on Taiwan-specific missions . Consequently, whether China eventually
gains control of Taiwan is unlikely to be decisive in determining China's ability to invest in efforts to
control the South China and East China Sea SLOCs, and beyond . Related, it is likely that Chinese capabilities
dedicated to Taiwan will eventually become so effective that Beijing will be able to reallocate some of its
future military investment to other missions .85 Moreover, ending the U.S. commitment to Taiwan could
reduce China's determination to pursue more challenging distant naval missions because the U nited States
will not interrupt these SLOCs, except possibly during a severe crisis or major war. Eliminating the
possibility of war over Taiwan would therefore greatly reduce Beijing's incentives to make investments
in these missions. China could, however, pursue greatly expanded power projection capabilities for a variety of other reasons,86 including worst-case
planning that imagines the United States will interrupt its SLOCs under even the most unlikely conditions, a Mahanian view of naval power that connects
“commercial health with naval primacy,”87 or the belief that superpower status requires power projection capabilities.88 Finally, one
should not
exaggerate the security risks of being unable to fully control these SLOCs. The U nited States does not need
to control the Strait of Malacca and the East Asian SLOCs to enable shipping to reach Japan during a war
with China. Instead, bypass routes could allow shipping to reach oil ports on Japan's east coast .89 Also,
the ability to deny China use of these SLOCs would be sufficient to preserve the U.S. ability to coerce
China.
 Uniq: Deter Collapse Inev.

Multiple alt causes – Multipolarity, arsenal reductions, cyberweapons, and peace-time

ambiguity make deterrence failure inevitable
Krepinevich 3/12 (Andrew F. Krepinevich - Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute. President and chief executive officer of Solarium LLC, a
defense consulting firm, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, founder of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments (CSBA), Former served on the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, and on the personal staff of three secretaries of
defense, He has also served as a member of the National Defense Panel, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Joint Experimentation, and
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ Defense Policy Board, Chairman of the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel and on the Advisory
Council of Business Executives for National Security, member of the Congressional National Defense Strategy Commission. <MKIM> “The
Decline of Deterrence”. 3/12/19. https://www.hudson.org/research/14871-the-decline-of-deterrence)

The United States confronts an international security system which , unlike the system between 1945 and the
present, is not bipolar or unipolar, but multipolar . The emergence of major revisionist great powers in
China and Russia, combined with the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other advanced military
capabilities to second-tier powers, has increased the number of rivals the United States seeks to
deter, providing more opportunities for deterrence to fail. With respect to nuclear weapons, the radical
reductions in U.S. and Russian Cold War nuclear arsenals, combined with the growth in Chinese , Indian, and
Pakistani arsenals, is progressively shifting the competitive environment from the bipolar Cold War
framework to a multipolar system. Consequently, some nuclear postures that contributed to stability during the Cold
War—such as “parity”—may be problematic or even impossible to achieve. The geopolitical environment is
also considerably more dynamic than either the Cold War system or the U.S.-dominated unipolar system that
followed it. This makes rapid—and potentially highly destabilizing—shifts in geopolitical alignments and the
military balance relatively more likely, presenting additional challenges to executing strategies relying primarily
on deterrence. A Multidimensional Strategic Military Competition Conventional weapons have become increasingly
precise, capable of effectively striking some targets once reserved solely for nuclear weapons. Advances in their
design have enabled the fielding of increasingly discriminate weapons. Thus the clear distinction that existed for most of the Cold War
between conventional and nuclear weapons has become progressively blurred. Yet despite this trend, a
significant number of Western political leaders believe nuclear weapons’ only use is to deter others from
employing nuclear weapons. This perceived decoupling could lower the perceived risks of waging conventional war. On the
other hand, some civilian and military leaders in countries like China and Russia assert that certain types of nuclear
weapons are, in some cases, available for use in a major conventional war. Deterrence may be
compromised if Western leaders see the risks that nuclear weapons will be employed in a
conventional war as minimal, while the Chinese and Russians view these weapons as available for use. The
introduction of cyberweapons, with their enormous but untested potential, has further muddied the deterrence waters .
Insofar as cyberweapons reduce senior decision-makers’ confidence in their early warning and
command-and-control (C2) systems, they may be compelled to delegate nuclear (or strategic) force release
authority to subordinate commanders, increasing substantially the number of individuals who can
authorize a strategic attack. If even one of these individuals is more risk tolerant than their senior decision-
maker(s), deterrence will be weakened. If the prospective attacker’s decision-makers believe the effectiveness of
a rival’s early warning and C2 systems is significantly compromised , this would logically reduce the anticipated costs
(and risks) of executing a surprise attack during a crisis, all other factors being equal. If so, the efficacy of deterrence would be
diminished. The uncertainty over the relative value and effectiveness of these military capabilities is further
complicated by the long absence of war between major military powers, which provides the ultimate test of military
systems, force structures, and the doctrines governing their employment. As time passes, uncertainty increases with
respect to the true nuclear, conventional, and cyber military balances and their interrelationships. The introduction of
new capabilities will complicate matters even further. This heightens the chances that prospective belligerents will reach significantly different
conclusions about the true military balance and, by extension, the risks of pursuing a proscribed course of action.
 Uniq: U.S. Commitment Unsustain

Current US commitment is unsustainable for deterring China

Gomez 16 (Eric Gomez is a policy analyst in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, 9-
28-2016, "A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship," Cato
Institute, https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-
taiwan-defense-relationship)SEM

Sustaining a Minimum Advantage The biggest weakness of sustaining a minimum U.S. military advantage is that it
does not resolve any of the underlying issues in the cross-strait dispute , most important of which is the fact that
Taiwan matters more to China than it does to the United States . Since the United States cannot
equalize the imbalance of stakes vis-à-vis China, credible deterrence will require the United States to
maintain military superiority over a steadily improving PLA. The United States is capable of absorbing these costs in the
short run, but the recent history of the U.S.-China military balance suggests that China will be able to narrow the gap
eventually. Maintaining stability in the Taiwan Strait will become more complicated as a result of two
trends in cross-strait relations and one higher-level trend . First, a distinct identity is taking hold in Taiwan;
the people living there see themselves as Taiwanese instead of Chinese . Surveys conducted in 2014 showed that
“fewer than 4 percent of respondents [in Taiwan] self-identified as solely Chinese, with a clear majority (60 percent) self-identifying solely as
Taiwanese.”75 A unique Taiwanese identity is dangerous to Beijing because it
makes China’s ultimate goal of reunification
more difficult, especially if the identity issue leads to greater political support for independence . Thankfully,
the Taiwanese people have been very pragmatic and have not yet made a significant push for de jure independence.76 Second, if China’s
economy continues to slow down Beijing could become more aggressive toward Taiwan . A parade of doom
and gloom headlines reveal the weaknesses of China’s economic miracle. The Chinese stock market experienced downturns
in August 2015 and January 2016 that affected global financial markets.77 China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based workers’ rights group,
recorded more than 2,700 strikes and worker protests throughout China in 2015—more than double the 1,300 recorded the year before.78 In
February 2016, Reuters reported that 1.8 million workers in China’s state-owned coal and steel companies will be laid off in the coming
years.79 This is not to say that China’s economy is in imminent danger of a catastrophic collapse. However, the
political instability
resulting from economic troubles could create an incentive for Beijing to act aggressively to burnish the
Chinese Communist Party’s image at home .80 Exacerbating this risk is the rise of nationalist forces within Chinese
society that could push the government into a more aggressive cross-strait policy. Such forces played an important
role in the government’s heavy-handed response to 2014’s Occupy Central protests in Hong Kong.81 Economic problems coupled
with aggressive ideology could prompt China to back away from any rapprochement with Taiwan. This
could make the task of deterring a Chinese attack harder for the United States. Third, America’s other
security commitments could draw attention and resources away from Taiwan. Keeping pace with the
PLA in the Taiwan Strait will require investments in military power that will become more difficult to
sustain, barring either a reduction in global commitments or a significant decrease in China’s own
economic and military power. The fight against ISIS in the Middle East and North Africa, the Russian threat to
Eastern Europe, and Chinese island-building in the South China Sea are all vying for the attention of the U.S.
military. The military has been able to cope with these contingencies, but there are signs of strain on the
force.82 Given America’s current global security posture, it will be difficult for the United States to
sustain a minimum advantage over the PLA in perpetuity. Sustaining a minimum U.S. military
advantage is growing more difficult and costly over time as these above trends develop. Fortunately, the costs
are likely to increase slowly and could be mitigated by advances in U.S. military technology. However, ultimately the United States
will be stuck in the unenviable position of trying to defend Taiwan from a China that has growing
military power and a strong interest in prevailing in any dispute.
 No Internal: Taiwan Collapses Quick

Recent shifts in conscription policy render Taiwanese recruits “cannon fodder” –

They’ll last 4 days maximum

Minnick 3/19 (Wendell Minnick - Military journalist who has spent two decades covering military and security issues in Asia, including
one book on intelligence and over 1,500 articles. From 2006-2016, Minnick served as the Asia Bureau Chief for Defense News. <MKIM> “How to
Save Taiwan from Itself”. 3/19/19. DOA: 7/10/19. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-save-taiwan-itself-48122)

Part of the problem is conscription and a decline in patriotism. Those born before 1994 were required to
serve one-year conscription, but it dropped to four months in 2016 when that generation turned eighteen. Since the
end of year-long conscription service, the military has been relying on personnel from the four-month program
to fill in at least 10 percent of the frontline strength. Conscripts now receive five weeks of basic training
and eleven weeks of specialized training. This will average about five turnovers per year for individual field
units. They are also counted as active duty personnel, despite their lack of real contribution to the overall
warfighting capabilities of the island. Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs just announced a $100 million gift to
Nicaragua; one of the numerous corrupt regimes with which Taiwan trades diplomatic status and recognition for dollars. Yet, at the same
time, it continues to cut the number of bullets , all manufactured locally, to be used for infantry training. It’s worth
noting that $100 million buys a lot of bullets. During annual exercises, individual companies in the infantry, now down to
skeleton crews, must borrow heavily from other companies to fill gaps needed to carry out what have become
dog-and-pony shows for the media. To handle anything beyond the first wave of the invasion, the military
reasons that it can dip into its 1.5 million reserves , but the effectiveness of such mobilization relies
largely on the backbone of a small but elite core of trained personnel. Officially, reservists are required to spend only five
days every two years for training, during which time they typically perform simple chores and not weapons training. However, the MND
might never contact an individual reservist due to a variety of reasons, including critical missions, budgetary
constraints, reservists refusing to comply, failure to simply locate and notify reservists, etc. One MND
source told the National Interest that the ill-trained reserves were nothing more than “cannon fodder.”
Requirements for weapons are driven by outdated estimates going back ten to twenty years for a military that will fight a conventional war in
the air, on land and at sea. Requirements set by generals who have long since retired. After all, colonels do not become generals by pushing
reforms and upgrade programs—despite their cost-effectiveness. They score shiny, new stars for procuring bright shiny objects at several times
greater cost. Today’s matrix has changed. China will destroy Taiwan’s air bases with its stockpile of 1,300
short-range ballistic missiles, satellites with infrared will locate tanks for its fighter aircraft, and its vast array of hundreds of
anti-ship missiles and submarines (over sixty) will sink its warships. This will be in the first three or four
days, according to modeling. Anyone suggesting Taiwan’s ennui over a Chinese invasion is a new problem would
demonstrate a lack of institutional memory, if not idiocy. When Taiwan first procured 150 F-16A/Bs in the 1990s, it badgered,
ranted and whined about Washington’s refusal to release the AIM-120 AMRAAM’s for its F-16s, yet when they were released in 2004, the initial
order was only for 200, then cut to 120. Critics complained Taiwan’s military was the only one on the planet that would procure 120 bullets for
150 guns. The Air Force procured more over the years, 218 in 2007, but its reputation was badly damaged. As a general rule, Taiwan
has
about one-third to one-half of the munitions it needs for two-days of aerial combat ; it plans to place an
emergency order with the United States when a war is on the horizon. In 1996, during the height of the Taiwan Strait Missile
Crisis, emergency orders were sent to Washington for a wide array of missiles and bombs, but quickly canceled when the crisis ended.
 No Link: A/S Don’t Deter

Current arms have zero benefit – they can’t deter China

Gjoza 19 (Enea Gjoza is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School
of Government, 6-11-2019, "The US Wants to Sell Taiwan the Wrong Weapons," Defense One,
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/06/us-wants-sell-taiwan-wrong-weapons/157630/)SEM

The United States is in negotiations to sell Taiwan $2 billion in weapons, a move sure to upset Beijing .
Ensuring that Taiwan can credibly deter an invasion on its own is a worthy goal. Given the existing, if ambiguous, U.S. security commitment to
the ROC, a conflict in the Taiwan Strait risks drawing the United States into a broader war with China. However, this
weapons package
fails to materially improve Taiwan’s defenses and continues to saddle the United States with most of
the (putative) defensive burden. A better approach is to push Taiwan to acquire more countermeasures to
China’s naval and air forces, thereby increasing the cost of a Chinese The proposed arms package
includes 108 main battle tanks, 250 Stinger anti-air missiles, as well as 409 Javelin and 1,240 TOW anti-tank missiles. This
would be fine if Taiwan were preparing for a ground war, but the real conflict if China invades will be at
sea and in the air. Taiwan should focus on acquiring the most cost-effective methods of stopping a
Chinese invading force before it lands. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is not inevitable. Beijing has shown
little interest in territorial conquest: since the founding of the People’s Republic, PRC troops have conquered territory in three
nations (North Korea, India, and Vietnam) that they subsequently relinquished voluntarily. But Taiwan is different, given its historical,
linguistic, and ethnic ties to China, and its strategic value. And so the risk of a Chinese invasion remains the organizing challenge for Taiwan’s
military. U.S.
efforts to provide Taiwan with weaponry have long hinged on a faulty strategy: that Taiwan
only needs to be strong enough to hold out before the United States intervenes on its behalf . As China’s
capabilities grow, a scenario in which America fights a great power war over Taiwan looks like an increasingly poor tradeoff. Taiwan can draw
important lessons from its main adversary on how to deal with a superior challenger. In seeking to limit American power in the Western Pacific,
China has built up anti-access/area denial capabilities that can cost-effectively counter U.S. carrier battle
groups and land-based aircraft. Advances in radar, sensor, and missile technology have increased the advantage that defenders
typically enjoy in war. China’s A2/AD network of radar, sensors, and weapons (surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, etc.) can impose
prohibitive costs on the expensive U.S. assets that would operate near its shores in a conflict. Taiwanshould capitalize on these
technological trends and focus its military spending on building out its own A2/AD capabilities to defend
against invasion. The ROC currently spends $10.5 billion annually on its military, a tiny fraction of the PRC’s $239 billion. China also
maintains a (vastly) numerically superior and in many aspects qualitatively superior military than Taiwan. Aircraft or warships deployed by
Taiwan in a conflict would also be in range of China’s A2/AD defenses, further compounding the disadvantage. The
scarcity of
Taiwanese defense dollars and Taiwan’s inability to match China one-for-one in ships and aircraft makes
it especially important to invest in weapons that maximize the cost to an invader. Tanks and TOW
missiles do not provide that, but a robust A2/AD network would. Taiwan should reduce investment in
long-range strike platforms and fighter aircraft (it has asked for an assortment of cutting-edge U.S. fighters), and instead grow
its stockpile of anti-air and anti-ship missiles. The Taiwanese can improve their air defenses by buying more MIM-104 Patriot batteries and
accompanying missiles. They
should also shift investments away from large surface vessels that can easily be
spotted and sunk, and instead build out a fleet of rapid attack boats and fast corvettes (like the Tuo Jiang class) equipped with anti-ship
missiles. To defend its radar and sensors, the most vulnerable and most important part of an A2/AD network, Taiwan should add more of them
and harden the defenses around them. It should also, as a 2017 report from RAND advised, develop survivable high-altitude airborne sensors
and distributed ground-based sensors that can be continually moved in the event of war. In addition to making these weapons available for
sale, Washington should push Taiwan to shift away from flashy but limited value weapons , and instead develop
a native defensive capability that is both practical and robust. While it might seem strange for the United States to dictate a foreign nation’s
military acquisitions, our current policy commits American lives and assets to Taiwan’s defense. As long as that persists, it is the responsibility of
U.S. policymakers to ensure Taiwan provides the most favorable operational environment possible. For
every big-ticket weapons
sale to Taiwan, the United States bears a political cost with China. The weapons transferred must
therefore contribute to a sound defensive strategy and deter rather than invite armed conflict. By
empowering Taiwan to properly defend itself, the U.S. can dodge the politically treacherous question of
just how far it is willing to go in Taiwan’s defense, and incentivize China to seek a peaceful resolution to
the Taiwan question.

Depleted readiness means Taiwanese deterrence is a façade – US arms are ineffective

Minnick 19 (Wendell Minnick is an author, commentator, journalist and speaker who has spent two
decades covering military and security issues in Asia, including one book on intelligence and over 1,200
articles. From 2006–2016, Minnick served as the Asia Bureau Chief for Defense News, a Washington-
based defense weekly newspaper., 3-19-2019, "How to Save Taiwan from Itself," National
Interest, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-save-taiwan-itself-48122)SEM

Washington must concoct a way to convince Taiwan’s idealistic idle chattering political elites to stop
believing in the fantasy that American troops will swing-in like Tarzan and save them from the tiger—especially
with the current destabilization of American political culture. Taiwan’s military brass are very cognizant of the China threat; it is Taipei’s
political leadership that has forced the military to reduce military readiness over the past twenty years.
Public lethargy and a lack of confidence in the military has drained the armed forces of manpower and
morale. And it is this lethargy, along with the unwillingness of Taiwan’s political elites to communicate this imminent threat to the public,
that must be addressed. Taiwan’s military wants to procure big-ticket items from the United States , but at the
same time it has been forced to reduce conscription and training due to funding issues and an
apathetic civilian population. Taiwan’s Air Force just announced an official request from the United
States for sixty-six F-16V fighter aircraft ; the Army has secured the sale of M1 Abrams main battle tanks; and the Navy has gone
forward with the initial procurement of the Mark 41 Vertical Launch System (VLS) for its upcoming local-build corvettes. The VLS will be fitted
with the Tien Hai (Tien Kung variant) surface-to-air missile. Even
if Taiwan procures all of its dreams and desires from the
U.S. government, then the question becomes: who will fly them, drive them, sail them and fire them.
According to the Ministry of National Defense (MND), the current estimate of personnel officially stands at 215,000.
Many critics argue that this is the bare minimum needed to repel the first wave of a Chinese invasion.
Now remember, that is the minimum. The reduction to 215,000 was the result of the 2011–2014 Jing-cui streamlining program,
which was extended to 2015. Fortunately, the follow-up Yung-gu plan was canceled. It would have further reduced the number from 215,000 to
175,000 and eliminated conscription entirely, opting for an all-volunteer force. Now, recruiters face a real nightmare. Last year
the big brains in the presidential office cut pensions 30 percent, with plans to further reduce it 50
percent. Even though Yung-gu is temporarily on hold, the official current number, 215,000, is an outright lie. The
actual number of operational active duty personnel is devastating. There are actually only 188,000 in total and if you
exclude civilian employees, noncombat personnel, those on leave, and cadets, the actual number of
warfighters is 152,280; 81 percent of the authorized strength levels needed for fending off an invasion.
Part of the problem is conscription and a decline in patriotism. Those born before 1994 were required to serve one-
year conscription, but it dropped to four months in 2016 when that generation turned eighteen. Since the end of year-long
conscription service, the military has been relying on personnel from the four-month program to fill in at
least 10 percent of the frontline strength. Conscripts now receive five weeks of basic training and eleven
weeks of specialized training. This will average about five turnovers per year for individual field units. They are also counted as
active duty personnel, despite their lack of real contribution to the overall warfighting capabilities of the
island. Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs just announced a $100 million gift to Nicaragua; one of the numerous corrupt regimes with which
Taiwan trades diplomatic status and recognition for dollars. Yet, at the same time, it continues to cut the number of bullets, all manufactured
locally, to be used for infantry training. It’s worth noting that $100 million buys a lot of bullets. During annual exercises, individual
companies in the infantry, now down to skeleton crews, must borrow heavily from other companies to
fill gaps needed to carry out what have become dog-and-pony shows for the media. To handle anything beyond the first
wave of the invasion, the military reasons that it can dip into its 1.5 million reserves, but the
effectiveness of such mobilization relies largely on the backbone of a small but elite core of trained
personnel. Officially, reservists are required to spend only five days every two years for training , during which
time they typically perform simple chores and not weapons training. However, the MND might never contact an individual
reservist due to a variety of reasons, including critical missions, budgetary constraints, reservists refusing to
comply, failure to simply locate and notify reservists, etc . One MND source told the National Interest that the ill-
trained reserves were nothing more than “cannon fodder.” Requirements for weapons are driven by
outdated estimates going back ten to twenty years for a military that will fight a conventional war in the air, on land and at sea.
Requirements set by generals who have long since retired. After all, colonels do not become generals by pushing reforms and upgrade
programs—despite their cost-effectiveness. They score shiny, new stars for procuring bright shiny objects at several times greater cost. Today’s
matrix has changed. China
will destroy Taiwan’s air bases with its stockpile of 1,300 short-range ballistic
missiles, satellites with infrared will locate tanks for its fighter aircraft, and its vast array of hundreds of
anti-ship missiles and submarines (over sixty) will sink its warships. This will be in the first three or four
days, according to modeling. Anyone suggesting Taiwan’s ennui over a Chinese invasion is a new problem would demonstrate a lack
of institutional memory, if not idiocy. When Taiwan first procured 150 F-16A/Bs in the 1990s, it badgered, ranted and whined about
Washington’s refusal to release the AIM-120 AMRAAM’s for its F-16s, yet when they were released in 2004, the initial order was only for 200,
then cut to 120. Critics complained Taiwan’s military was the only one on the planet that would procure 120 bullets for 150 guns. The Air Force
procured more over the years, 218 in 2007, but its reputation was badly damaged. As a general rule, Taiwan has about one-third to
one-half of the munitions it needs for two-days of aerial combat ; it plans to place an emergency order with the United
States when a war is on the horizon. In 1996, during the height of the Taiwan Strait Missile Crisis, emergency orders were sent to Washington
for a wide array of missiles and bombs, but quickly canceled when the crisis ended.
 No Impact: Deterrence Not Credible

Deterrence fails – it isn’t credible because China doesn’t believe the U.S. is willing to
incur the costs to defend

White 15 [Hugh, Professor of Strategic Studies in the School of International, Political & Strategic
Studies at the Australian National University, “Taiwan: US deterrence is failing,” accessible online at
http://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/taiwan-us-deterrence-failing, published 05/22/15] // BBM

Deterrence is a beguiling concept. It offers the hope that we can prevail over our opponents without actually
fighting them because our mere possession of military power will be sufficient to compel them to our
will. This seductive idea seems to be the basis of Michael Cole's view that deterrence will allow America and its allies to defend Taiwan from
China with incurring the costs and risks of conflict, and that they should therefore commit themselves to doing so. This view is set out in
Michael's most recent contribution to an exchange between us about this issue, and I'd like to thank him for his thoughtful part in our exchange
on this sensitive topic. Alas, I think this
view of deterrence is mistaken. Deterrence can work, of course, but only where
the deterred power believes that the deterring power is willing to incur the costs and risks of conflict . So
Washington can only deter Beijing from using force against Taiwan if Beijing is reasonably sure that
Washington is willing to actually fight to do so . Moreover, because the stakes are so high and the nuclear
threshold is so unclear, Washington must convince Beijing that it is willing to fight a nuclear war over
Taiwan if it is to deter China from starting a conventional one . Simply possessing armed forces, including
nuclear forces, is not enough to do this. You also have to convince the other side that you are willing to use
them, and are willing to incur the costs and risks of the resulting conflict . There is, as Michael acknowledges, a
parallel here with the Ukraine. Many in the West believed Russia could be deterred from any military intervention in the Ukraine. But
deterrence did not work because Moscow did not believe that Washington cared enough about Ukraine to accept the costs and risks of a
military conflict with Russia. Somemight hope that China can be convinced that the US is willing to fight , even if
it isn't. This is called bluffing, and it's a dangerous and unreliable tactic. And this is precisely why America
cannot reliably deter China from attacking Taiwan . As Michael himself acknowledges, there are real doubts that
America would be willing to go to war with China . It seems likely that those doubts are shared in Beijing, and
they cannot be dispelled simply by rhetorical reaffirmations of the T aiwan Relations Act, because they arise
from a quite reasonable assessment of the balance between costs to America of reunification on the one hand, and the costs
of war with China on the other. This assessment does not minimise the costs of unification, both to America and to the Taiwanese themselves.
It simply sets them realistically against the costs and risks of war with China, which Michael seems to agree are exceptionally grave. And if
Americans are not convinced of US resolve , why should we expect China's leaders to be? And if they are not
reasonably sure that the US would be willing to actually commit its formidable forces to fight for Taiwan, how can they deter China from
attacking it? The conclusion seems clear: America cannot defend Taiwan unless it is really willing to fight China to
do so, and unless it is plainly willing to do that, Washington should not mislead the Taiwanese into thinking that they can rely on American
support if the worst happens.
 No Impact: China Wont Advance

Zero chance China dominates Asia — too many peer competitors and they won’t even
try.

White 13
(Hugh White, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, former Intelligence
Analyst with Australia’s Office of National Assessments and Senior Official with Australia’s Department
of Defence, 2013 “Power and Ambition,” The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power, p. 57-58)
What Does China Want? If I have persuaded you that China’s challenge should indeed be taken seriously, two critical questions will now arise: how much power and status does China want?

And what does it have the power to get? The gloomiest possibility is that Beijing might want to establish a harsh regime of
control across Asia backed by armed force, much as Stalin did over Eastern Europe after 1945. China’s communist political
system makes it easy to assume that its strategic objectives will follow Stalin’s example. No doubt there are some people in China who would

like their country to wield this kind of power , and their numbers may grow. The stronger China becomes, the more tempted it will be to try to subjugate its
neighbours. Guarding against this possibility must always be a prime concern for China’s neighbours and others with an interest in Asia’s future. Nonetheless, while we should

recognise this risk, we should not exaggerate it. Much as it may grow, China has little chance of
becoming powerful enough to impose a Stalinist-style dominion over Asia. There are too many other
strong states in the region that will get in the way. Most obviously and immediately, it will face America
itself. Japan, for all its problems, will be for many decades a country with great strategic potential based in a huge
economy with great technological depth. India, if it fulfils its promise, will start to rival China’s power before the
middle of the century. Finally, Russia, though no match for China in raw economic scale, and unlikely to be a key player in the wider Asian system, will still be
a formidably armed neighbour which China must always treat very carefully . Beijing would find it
virtually impossible to dominate Asia against the committed resistance of even one or two of these
powers, let alone all of them. It could also face the resistance of several substantial middle powers,
especially South Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia, who might well support the great powers in resisting a
Chinese bid for hegemony in Asia. Against such opposition, China would find that instead of securing
assured primacy over Asia, it would be mired in an open-ended, costly and ultimately unwinnable
struggle from which it would emerge much the poorer, or even be plunged into a catastrophic war. So
far these things seem well understood in China, which no doubt explains , better than any commitment to abstract principles of
international relations, why China shows no signs of following in Stalin’s footsteps .
 AT : Power Projection Impact

Taiwan has a minimal impact on Chinese power projection

Glaser 15 Charles L Glaser is a professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the
Department of Political Science at George Washington University. He is also a fellow in the Kissinger
Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (“A U.S.-China Grand Bargain?”
International Security, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Spring 2015), doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00199)SEM
Dissecting the strategic value of Taiwan requires assessing how Chinese control would influence China’s ability to perform specific military
missions. Available
analyses provide little reason to worry that possession of Taiwan would significantly
increase China’s military reach or its ability to project power .94 Control of Taiwan would, however, enhance China’s
A2/AD capabilities by increasing its ability to send submarines into the Philippine Sea. Owen Coté explains that Taiwan plays an important role
in enabling the United States “to form effective acoustic barriers through which Chinese [diesel attack submarines/guided missile diesel
submarines] must pass in transiting” from the shallow waters along China’s coast into the deep water of the Philippine Sea.95 This access is
valuable because the United States plans to operate carrier battle groups in the Philippine Sea and Chinese diesel submarines would make
these operations more difficult and riskier. The
impact of losing this antisubmarine [End Page 76]warfare barrier might
not be large, however, because China increasingly has a variety of other ways to threaten U.S. carrier battle
groups and undermine their effectiveness, such as antiship cruise missiles that can be launched from a
diverse array of platforms (including guided missile diesel submarines), systems designed to counter U.S.
space and cyber capabilities, and an emerging antiship ballistic missile capability .96 Nevertheless, U.S. carrier
battle groups would experience some reduction in effectiveness.
 Reunification Inevitable

Trade ties make closer Taiwanese ties with China inevitable

Chen 19 (Dr. Charles I-hsin Chen is Executive Director of the Institute for Taiwan-America Studies
at Washington D.C., The Diplomat, 6-14-2019, "Why the US May Lose Taiwan to Beijing Economically,"
Diplomat, https://thediplomat.com/2019/06/why-the-us-may-lose-taiwan-to-beijing-economically/)SEM
In March 2019, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that China is a threat to the United States. “This
is a great power battle and we’re engaged in it across the world,” he added. China now challenges American influence in all
aspects, and Taiwan represents a frontier in this hybrid competition. While the island’s security still relies heavily on Washington’s
guarantees, there’s a rising risk that the United States may lose Taiwan to Beijing economically . There are
three reasons for this trend. A Drifting Taiwan The first is Taiwan’s drift. Taiwan’s trade dependency on the United States
was largely replaced by dependency on China after 2001 , when both Taiwan and China entered the World Trade
Organization (WTO). The share of Taiwan’s total trade involving the United States halved, falling from 23 percent to 12 percent, from 1998 to
2018, while China’s share doubled from 15 to 31 percent . In January 2017, Taiwan adopted a New Southbound Policy (NSP)
attempting to divert the island’s exports away from China and into South and Southeast Asia, but without concrete results. Taiwan’s
export reliance on China increased 2 percentage points to 41 percent in 2018, peaking historically at 45
percent that March, while the export share to the 18 countries covered in the NSP decreased by 1 percentage point in the same period.
Simply put, this new policy did not work well. Even worse, Taiwan’s global strategy is not leading anywhere . There are two
groups of regional integration emerging around Taiwan, but the island is unlikely to enter either. First, the Regional Comprehensive Economic
Partnership (RCEP), which targets 16 Asia-Pacific countries, including China, would require Taiwan to join as a province of China — a condition
Taiwan simply cannot accept. Second is the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which includes 11
Trans-Pacific countries, now led by Japan after the withdrawal of the United States. However, China may also block Taiwan by pressuring its
partners to veto any Taiwanese bid to join. The alternative for Taiwan to promote its trade relations is to sign free trade agreements (FTAs) with
major economies. Yet the political issue of the status of Taiwan would halt most negotiations in the first round. Unfortunately, Taiwan’s
economy is drifting to the middle of nowhere . A Pulling China The second factor is China’s pull. China’s economic
attraction for Taiwan is growing at both the regional and local levels. China’s GDP per capita has
increased nine times on a purchasing-power-parity basis since 1990. This formed a strong economic gravity pulling
all neighboring economies into China’s orbit — and particularly Taiwan , which is just 100 nautical miles off the
mainland’s southeast coast. China now is capable of offering lucrative incentives to convert the loyalty of its
commercial allies as the existing economic hegemon — namely, the United States — is in relative decline. For example,
some Eurasian leaders in developing or underdeveloped countries may see China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a good
opportunity. They may also feel that the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is more accessible
than the American-led World Bank in granting big loans for development projects. At the local level, China’s economic
influence on Taiwan specifically has become more tangible and comprehensive. Since the late 1980s, Taiwanese
investment had been lured by preferential policies from Chinese central and local governments. As of last year, the total amount of
Taiwanese investment in China has accumulated to $180 billion — 10 times the Taiwanese investment in the United
States in the same period. As a result, over 400,000 Taiwanese quality managers and talents are currently working
and living in Chinese cities with their family members. The total number may surpass 2 million people, close to one-tenth of Taiwan’s
population. In terms of cross-strait relations, the two sides of the Taiwan Strait resumed warm ties in 2008 and
reached 23 agreements during Ma Ying-jeou’s presidency . Yet the official channel of dialogue was suspended after
President Tsai Ing-wen’s inauguration in May 2016. Beijing began to unilaterally conduct cross-strait affairs without prior consultation or
negotiation with Taipei. Even while cross-strait tensions rose, in
January 2018, quasi-citizenship was granted to
Taiwanese living, studying, or working in China and some national treatments involving subsidies or
bank loans were opened to Taiwanese enterprises. Beijing’s carrot-and-stick approach towards Taiwan
remains, and the carrot is growing sweeter. A Pushing America Meanwhile, the United States risks pushing
Taiwan away. President Donald Trump’s Taiwan policy, if there is one, has been inconsistent between political and
economic affairs since 2017. In politics, the United States has strengthened its security commitment to
Taiwan to tackle the escalating tension in the Taiwan Strait . The new Taiwan Travel Act, taking effect in March 2018,
encouraged more frequent and higher level official exchanges between Washington and Taipei. To maintain Taiwan’s capacity of self-defense,
informal notification of a $2 billion sale of 108 M1A2 tanks and weapons was sent to the U.S. Congress in early June. Another,
bigger package — possibly including 66 F-16V fighter jets — may also seek Congress’ approval later this year. The Pentagon has further made
naval patrols in the Taiwan Strait a new normal to contain Beijing’s maritime aggression. Nonetheless, these
policy favors do not
apply to the economic field. While economic ties have faded in recent years, the U.S. Trade
Representative (USTR) Office did not change its tough attitude toward Taiwan . Its latest annual report reiterated
serious concerns over Taiwan’s bans on U.S. pork products and beef products containing ractopamine. Due to this first priority issue, the
USTR has suspended regular trade talks since October 2016, and put on hold the initial steps of preparing an
FTA with Taiwan. During the APEC summit last November, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence agreed to bring the Taiwanese envoy’s request
to restart talks back to Washington but there was no change. Apparently, the USTR is not inclined to compromise on this issue. Another case is
even more acute and embarrassing. Taiwanwas subjected to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to the
United States starting in March 2018, because Taiwanese steel products were suspected to contain China-
made steel. In response, Taiwan resorted to severe measures that restricted its steel products with any
content of China-made steel from being exported to the U.S. market. Taipei even launched a self-
investigation into dumping and government subsidies focused on select China-made steel products sold in Taiwan from 2015 to 2017.
Embarrassingly, these extra efforts were all in vain, and Taiwan was not included on the tariff exemption
list. While politicians in Washington have been wooing Taiwan, their economists are sabotaging that
effort.
 DIB
Arms sales to Taiwan don’t matter for the defense industrial base
Hallinan 11 (Conn - columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, he holds a PhD in Anthropology from the
University of California at Berkeley, “U.S. Arms Sales to Taiwan Accomplishes Little More Than Pushing
China’s Buttons,” 9/24/11, https://ips-
dc.org/us_arms_sales_to_taiwan_accomplishes_little_more_than_push_chinas_buttons/)

Bi-polar diplomacy anyone? It is clear that Washington

and Beijing are of two minds about their relationship. Both
are riding conflicting internal political currents , and over the next decade, threading a path between
cooperation and competition promises to be tricky. Arms sales accomplish little more than pushing
China’s nationalist button. The jobs they create in the U.S. are marginal (and the same amount spent on
civilian projects produce more employment), and the tensions they create are real. It is time to revisit the 1979
Taiwan Relations Act, a piece of legislation that reflects a very different world than the one we live in now.

DIB is declining – too dependent on foreign nations

Green, 10-5-18 (Jeff Green, staff writer at Defense News, a global website and magazine about
politics, business and technology of defense, “The decline of the defense industrial base – and what to
do about it”, Defense News) //GB

A new report released by the White House documents the gravity of the situation facing the defense
industrial base, while also offering solutions to counteract these challenges. By evaluating seven tiers deep into the supply
chain, the report has documented more than 280 major supply chain vulnerabilities and an alarming
dependency on foreign nations, especially China. The report is not all bad news, however: it notes that a targeted approach involving
funding, policy, legislation, and regulation could combat these declines and significantly improve the outlook for American defense production.

Keen observers of the defense industrial base have noticed many of the problems identified by the report, classified into
ten different “archetypes,” for years. Foreign dependencies abound within the defense supply chain, especially at the “sub-tier” levels of component or raw material
manufacturing. Even when the U.S. military is not entirely dependent on a foreign source for these supplies, it is often the case that a sole source or a single source,
often fragile, is the only remaining producer of the material. These risks are among those clearly identified by the report, which offers solutions to help them,
ranging from additional funding to keep domestic manufacturers in business to sourcing restrictions, such as the proven Berry and Specialty Metals amendments,
that protect manufacturers from hostile foreign acts.

In addressing the prevalence of hostile foreign trade practices and other strategies designed to produce
foreign dependence and weaken the American industrial base, the report goes further than the Department of Defense has
traditionally wanted to venture. The report clearly identifies five macro factors that have weakened the defense

industrial base, including the “Industrial Policies of Competitor Nations.” Though U.S. manufacturing has declined for a variety of
reasons, the report notes that China, in particular, has used illegal means to dominate critical global markets . These
means include espionage, evasion of export controls, market access restrictions, subsidies, and dumping, among others.

Link turn—reduced arms sales is good for the defense industrial base—causes an
increase in domestic procurement, which leads to higher quality defense investments
García-Alonso 7 (Maria D.C. – Lecturer in Economics at The University of Kent & Paul Levine –
Professor of Economics at The University of Surrey, “Arms Trade and Arms Races: A Strategic Analysis,”
p. 26-27, https://www.kent.ac.uk/economics/documents/GES%20Background
%20Documents/Defence/Garcia-Alonso&Levine%20Handbook.pdf)

the size of the defence industrial base is influenced by the degree of home bias
This framework can be used to examine how

for domestic production (the parameter ws), R&D costs which determine the quality qsj of system j, export controls
captured by usj and the nature of regional arms races. Collective action problems relating to possible cooperation between suppliers in procurement, R&D and
export control decisions can also be addressed with this framework. Figures 2 and 3 taken from Dunne et al. (2005) illustrate some insights provided by this model. We examine in these results
a symmetric equilibrium in which all producer countries are identical in every respect and similarly for non-producers. The utility function across producers and cost conditions for firms are
identical. The consequence of this is that procurement prices and firm numbers in each country are all equal. In Figure 2 the endogenously determined number of firms in this symmetrical

there exists a trade-off between quality and variety : an

equilibrium is shown as a function of the R&D cost parameter β. This figure shows how

increase in a cost parameter β increases barriers to entry and inhibits the emergence of new firms and
varieties (since each firm produces a single variety in our set-up). Quality and R&D costs as a percentage of total costs falls with
firms switching from quality to quantity. Figure 2 also demonstrates two effects of cooperation: the
reduction of duplication in R&D investment and the increase in varieties. The latter occurs under
cooperation because variety produced in each supplier country enters the utility of other producers as a
positive externality. In Figure 3 the endogenous number of firms in a symmetric equilibrium is plotted against the home bias parameter w ∈ [0.5, 1]. The fall in w from its value
under autarky, w = 1, to the no home bias case, w = 0.5, can be seen as one aspect of the globalization of the international defence industry as countries are more willing to look to imports to

procurement cooperation increases variety and reduces R&D investment

provide for their military needs. Again

compared with non-cooperation. Furthermore under cooperation, changes in home bias has no effect as it is internalized in the cooperative decision. With
non-cooperation, as home bias increases the willingness to invest in both quality and variety rises
(since there is less scope for importing these features). However in the vicinity of the no bias value w = 0.5, the R&D-variety trade-off sees more R&D investment at the expense of variety so
firm numbers initially fall. As w increases further, the convex nature of R&D costs means that at some value (around w = 0.7) in Figure 3) the increase in R&D drops off and variety starts to

globalization (a reduction in w) causes firm numbers to fall

increase. The prediction of the model then is for values of home bias w near the autarky value,

and thus international market concentration to increase. The model can also predict that if quality and R&D expenditure are held fixed or
indeed rise, then globalization in another sense of an increased relative size of the external market and greater willingness to export higher quality weapons will reduce the number of firms.
Taken together our results then provide an explanation for the driving forces behind the recent increases in concentration in the defence industry (see Dunne et al., 2003) .

DIB will inevitably collapse – uncertainty and workforce

Interagency Task Force September 2018 (task force found to investigate DIB, Assessing and
Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United
States)

At the microeconomic level, DoD’s budget within a specific sector does not imply uniform, stable, or
even predictable funding for suppliers . Such uncertainty creates negative ramifications within specific
industrial base sectors, even in periods with overall growth in spending . For example, when the Navy is
unable to provide consistent orders for ships, niche suppliers of components such as controllers and
actuators for nuclear powered ships cannot accurately project workloads, creating inconsistency and
increasing risk for production capabilities . Wrought aluminum plate, and specifically cold-rolled plate, is essential for armoring U.S. ground
combat vehicles, constructing Navy ships, and building military aircraft. Unlike other more common forms of rolled aluminum materials, thick cold-rolled aluminum
production capabilities and capacities are unique. DoD relies on domestic producers as well as capabilities available from ally countries in Europe .
Due to U.S.
Government budget uncertainties, unpredictable DoD demand, and other commercial market factors,
the defense industrial base can face challenges when trying to balance diverse demands for cold-rolled
plate production capacity while also informing long-term internal capital investment decisions .
Challenges facing the ground systems sector illustrate the relationship between budget uncertainty and
diminishing workforce skills. Ground systems provide defense-unique products for mobility and
firepower and are divided into tracked and wheeled vehicles for combat, combat support, and combat
service support. Under the weight of budget uncertainties, the ground systems industrial base
conducted incremental adoption of new technologies on legacy designs in order to maintain or modify
current ground systems. While this approach allowed the military to defer the long schedules and high
costs of new programs, it prevented ground systems development and maintenance personnel from
experiencing the design to fielding lifecycle for a new system. This resulted in a generation of
technicians, engineers, and scientists lacking experience in conceiving, designing, constructing, and
integrating technologically advanced combat vehicles.
China threatened to kill manufacturers over Taiwan – the aff is key
Chesson 10 Roy David Chesson, Postgraduate School Thesis for the Naal Postgraduate School. How
China could affect the future of U.S. defense corporations December 2010 Thesis Co-Advisors: Alice L.
Miller & Robert Looney https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a536529.pdf

While opportunities do exist from internationalization, so does risk. The continued operations in foreign
countries create new pressures and difficulties for these corporations.93 It is not that they are just
American companies, but that their operations are tied to the political ramifications of being a defense
corporation and a national asset to their host nation. Therefore, the continual operation of these
corporations in multiple nations raises the likelihood that political
confrontation between the
foreign nations and the corporation may occur.94 The response from the PRC over the
sales to Taiwan highlights that exact problem.
Considering that all the defense corporations from the Taiwan arms sale are multinational in their
operations and have civilian sectors that extend the globe, China has an ability to sanction
portions of the exposed civilian sectors of the defense corporations.95 Unlike the defense
sectors, civilian sectors look at foreign areas as a new market in which to gain new customers.96
Therefore, to be able to understand the effectiveness of sanctions against the civilian sectors, it is
important to register how much these defense corporations rely on their civilian sectors and how much
of a role China plays in the calculus of their future prospect.

In analyzing Table 2, one can see that both Boeing and UTC show a large reliance on their civilian sector.
According to their financial data, both companies rely heavily upon their civilian sectors’ total revenue to
maintain operations. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon have a significant amount of
civilian revenue; however, their business structure does not rely as heavily on civilian revenue and
would therefore not be in as much jeopardy if sanctions were imposed on their civilian sectors. For
Boeing and UTC, 49% and 83% are sufficiently significant that they require their civilian sectors’ revenue
and would, therefore, be extremely vulnerable to the Chinese sanctions.

Boeing sells commercial aircraft to the Chinese Airlines and UTC sells Otis elevators and Carrier brand
heating and air-conditioning in China.98 For Boeing, a complication in the Chinese market would
severely hurt their civilian revenue. Over the next two decades, Boeing expects China to spend $400
billion to purchase around 3,770 planes from certain manufacturers, therefore making China the second
largest commercial aircraft market in the world.99 According to UTC’s CEO, Louis Chenevert, “[China’s
market] feels really good right now,” adding that he sees no evidence of China’s market slowing down
and noted that the company’s Otis elevators were up by double digits, and orders for its Carrier air
conditioning systems were “starting to come up.” For UTC, the revenue from Otis Corporation
accounted for the bulk of the $3.1 billion in sales in China last year, and it is estimated that China’s
economy will grow 9.9 percent this year.100 With results and high expectations for both companies, and
a large reliance on their civilian sector’s total revenue to maintain operations, it appears as though these
two defense corporations have a large reliance on the civilian Chinese market and would, therefore, be
highly vulnerable to Chinese sanctions.
This is not to say that effective sanctions on the civilian sectors of Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin would not have a profound affect on these corporations. Referring back to the findings of Jonathan Galloway,
these corporations regardless of percentage, will take the necessary actions to rebalance the equilibrium between the three markets: Governmental, Domestic Civilian, and Foreign.101 It is hard to fathom any corporation willingly
taking hits on their overall revenue. While Raytheon only receives 7% of their total revenue from their civilian sector, this still amounts to $1.6 billion, which is no small amount.
While civilian revenue for these three corporations is significant, their overall civilian operations in China are minimal as compared to UTC and Boeing. In this case, both UTC and Boeing depend on the Chinese market to make sales
and purchases. Their dependence on the Chinese economy goes beyond that of supply chains and logistics, but also depends on consumer buying and open markets. This dependence separates them from the others in that they
have become more vulnerable to the PRC.

If China does impose the threatened sanctions against these DMNCs it could prove to be detrimental to
their international operations. While the military sectors of these defense corporations would not be
affected by sanctions from China, considering that China does not buy U.S. weapons, the civilian sectors
are left relatively unprotected. The combined dynamics of a large reliance on civilian revenue and
pressure from a government that has a lucrative market for their civilian sectors to operate in, only
demonstrates a larger possibility that certain defense corporations will be more likely to adhere to the
foreign government’s will over that of their host national government’s desires.

2. Exploitation by Use of Foreign Competitors

Another way in which China can exploit a major weakness in certain civilian sectors of the defense
corporations is through pre-existing competitive rivalries. In most cases, Lockheed Martin, Boeing,
Raytheon, UTC, Northrop Grumman and other defense corporations are in tight contention for defense
contracts relating in their respective fields, however, as was discussed, China does not have an ability to
affect this. There are pre-existing rivalries in the civilian sectors that can be exploited to create even
more pressure on the defense corporations involved in the Taiwan arms sale.

The targeting of corporations with strong rivals can serve two purposes: it can cause civilian revenue of
the defense corporations to decrease, and increase the competitive gain of their key competitor. Not
only do they lose that part of the market, but their competitor also ends up gaining from it, therefore
delivering a double blow to the defense corporation under fire. In tight competition for new markets like
China, this sort of altercation can result in a major setback to the defense corporation’s civilian revenue
and could become a crippling long-term effect. Not only does the rival gain from a sanction in China, but
also, due to the increased capital, the rival will have the ability to use this gain in other competitive
areas to help increase funding in their global market.
There are many different types of rivalries that exist in the market. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman mainly compete with each other for defense contracts and their civilian revenue is relatively low as
compared to others. This, therefore, indicates that they are somewhat protected from a Chinese exploitation of the key rivalries between them.

Conglomerate corporations might have several different rivals by the existence of multiple sectors and markets under which they operate. Therefore no one company is completely identical to that of another conglomerate
corporation and the existence of a specific rivalry is rare. UTC is a conglomerate that has different civilian sectors like Otis elevators and Carrier air-conditioners.102 The sanctions against UTC would result in fewer Otis elevators
and Carrier products; however, there are many different elevator and air-conditioner companies operating in China and, therefore, no specific competitor would gain from such sanctions. This therefore does not affect the global
competitiveness of the civilian sector of UTC but only local competitiveness in the Chinese market. Therefore, the sanctions will not make UTC as vulnerable.

Boeing on the other hand has one major rival, Airbus. As most would claim, the rivalry between Boeing and Airbus is the largest international rivalry in the world.103 Both companies are identical in that their civilian sectors
develop comparable commercial aircrafts that are competitive on the global market. Foreign corporations that choose to buy a commercial jet are usually considering whether or not they choose Airbus or Boeing and at times will
use the two corporations to play off each other in a bidding war. The stakes are extremely high for each corporation being that a single deal with an airline could be a deciding factor between success and failure over a
multibilliondollar investment.104 Therefore, one of the best strategies for both Boeing and Airbus is that of persuading prospective buyers such as nationally owned airlines (as is the case in China), to purchase their planes over the
others.105

a. Boeing Versus Airbus in China

The competition between Boeing and Airbus has been extremely tight over the years. Neither company has been able to pull away from the other, so the slightest change in their global market share gives each company a
comparable advantage over the other. For such a close race, it can be seen how important the Chinese market is to both companies. According to China’s own projections, they believe they will quadruple their aircraft fleet to
3,900 by 2025, which will create a large amount of potential revenue for either Boeing or Airbus.106 To further this, Boeing expects China to spend over $400 billion to purchase planes over the next couple of years, thus making
China the second largest aeronautics market in the world.107 China “probably has the most potential of any significant market in the world,” said the Airbus China President Laurence Barron.108

However, with such a tight contention, is Boeing at a point that they can handle a head-to-head challenge with Airbus in China, especially if sanctions are involved? With airlines in other markets struggling, and Boeing itself still
trying to recover from its much-delayed Dreamliner 787 project, Boeing seems to be on shaky ground and stands to lose more than Airbus.109 Along with this, before the arms sales to Taiwan, Airbus was already winning more
orders from China than Boeing.110

While Boeing currently has 736 Boeing planes operating in China (and another 30 from McDonnell-Douglas, which Boeing-acquired in 1997), Airbus only has 547. However, over the past couple of years, Airbus’s orders from China
have dramatically shifted to give Airbus the advantage. As of February 2010, Chinese airlines have placed orders for 358 Airbus planes and have options for another 14, while they have only ordered 244 new planes from Boeing and
have placed no options for further units. Airbus has also acquired letters of intent towards future sales of 60 planes, compared to 40 for Boeing.111

Because the three largest airline companies (China Southern, China Eastern, and Air China) are still controlled by the Chinese government, the purchasing of commercial airliners is highly politicized where government officials have
the ability to reward foreign governments with airplane sales that meet the interests of China.112 In response to such a system, Airbus, in June 2008, built an assembly base in Tianjin.113 By developing an assembly factory in
Tianjin, Airbus is hoping that building aircraft in China (and the corresponding transfer of technology) will strengthen its position with the Chinese government to a better one than that of Boeing. To further this, Airbus has also
developed an engineering center in Beijing that will train up to 200 local engineers to assist in the plant operations in Tianjin.114 In China, “if you allow for more local production and information-sharing, the purchaser is going to
be a lot more willing to accept your aircraft,” says Peter Harbison, executive chairman of the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation in Sydney.115

Boeing on the other hand is at a disadvantage. Hindered by unions and concerns of the company shifting jobs overseas, Boeing has had to maintain production in the United States. However, Boeing has argued that their presence
in China is significant because Boeing buys parts from seven local manufacturers in China. Boeing spokesman, Yukui Wang, stated that Boeing is the Chinese aviation industry’s largest foreign customer. He stresses that Boeing, over
the years, has bought $1.5 billion in aircraft parts and services from China and that this figure “will double in the next few years… Chinese suppliers now have a role in all of Boeing airplanes.”116 To emphasize their commitment to
China, Boeing ramped up its efforts and sent a sales director to Beijing to become the company’s first China-based sales executive—which is something that is not normally practiced by Boeing.117
Even with the past level of competition between Boeing and Airbus, Boeing is now at a large
disadvantage because of their defense sector’s sales of the Harpoon missiles to Taiwan. If China enacts
the sanctions against Boeing, Boeing will have to face a strong rival who just became stronger, while
they lost major ground in the battle over the Chinese market. Even if China does not impose the
sanctions, the Chinese government will probably be more likely to purchase planes from, and therefore
support a company that does not sell weapons to areas of concern and complies with their national
interests.
The defense corporations that are more reliant on their defense sales and, therefore, are not as competitive in the civilian sectors, such as Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, are not under the same kind of
pressure to expand their international production base and depend on foreign markets as is Boeing (due to their competitive nature with Airbus). If China were to take sanctions against Boeing, they would be able to meet their
aeronautical needs by buying planes from Airbus, who is Boeing’s tight competitor. Therefore not only is Boeing losing the revenue, but their main competitor is gaining from the sanctions. This double-edged sword would increase
pressure on Boeing to try and mitigate the sanctions and adhere to the Chinese request, thereby restoring their share of the world market and their political favor in the eyes of the Chinese government.

C. CONCLUDING ANALYSIS

In this section, we have explored the possible vulnerabilities due to foreign subcontracting, and civilian
operations internationally. It was shown that foreign subcontracting is not only prevalent in defense
operations but that there is no clear way of demarking and tracking exactly where all parts and pieces
are made and assembled. This is alarming in that it opens opportunities for foreign meddling and
highlights a lack of understand on how truly the defense sector depends on foreign supplies and
assistance. It is only clear that levels of dependency do exist and that the controls in place are
inadequate to exactly track such vulnerabilities.

Manufacturing solves war – key to overall military strategy

Hudson and Gerard 13 Linda P. Hudson is president and CEO of BAE Systems Inc. Leo W. Gerard is
international president of United Steelworkers. Keep BAE's Bradley program rolling in York (column)
Linda P. Hudson and Leo W. Gerard UPDATED: 10/09/2013 11:50:47 AM EDT

As the past decade has shown, the United States can be quickly drawn into conflicts around the world .
To be prepared, our country must maintain a strong and skilled defense manufacturing industry to
support the production of the equipment our troops need. But this defense base and the skilled jobs it
provides are in grave danger.

Between 1998 and 2010, the country lost 57,000 manufacturing facilities and 6 million manufacturing
jobs. If this trend continues, there is a very real risk that we will permanently lose the skills required to
make much-needed equipment for the U.S. military and will need to look overseas for suppliers.

As former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned earlier this year, "The last damn thing we need if we
face a crisis is to somehow contract out that responsibility to another country. So we have to maintain
the core industrial base that we need. The skills are essential to our ability to maintain a strong
national defense."

A prime example of this danger to both our economy and national security is the threatened shutdown
of the Bradley Industrial Base, consisting of the York, Pa., facility where BAE Systems manufactures the
Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the suppliers that support the program.

Built to protect and transport troops, the armored vehicle is the workhorse of the U.S. Army and the
embodiment of American defense industrial base know-how and engineering: The vehicle's advanced
aluminium armor and weapons systems are produced by 7,000 skilled workers in 586 businesses across
44 states.
Now, in an attempt to modernize the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and lasting at least three years. With
production halted, the businesses that make up the Bradley Industrial Base will be unable to employ the
highly skilled workers who produce the specialized parts that keep these vehicles running. Thousands of
workers will lose their jobs, and some will move on to other fields, while their skills - unique to building
combat vehicles - will become lost or obsolete. As a result, our armed forces may end up going into
harm's way without equipment manufactured in America and ready for today's battlefield.

Since World War II, our military - and all Americans - have relied on a highly skilled, dedicated and
engaged civilian defense labor force of engineers, designers, welders, electricians, machinists and pipe
fitters. Like a well-prepared combat team, this labor force - nearly 625,000 people - is continuously
training in order to maintain their technological superiority. As new technologies are developed to
address the ever-changing threats from our enemy, this labor force acquires new skills to keep pace and
meet the military's needs.

Now these workers, the products they make, the incomes their families and communities depend on
and America's ability to defend itself are all at risk.

As a nation, we must make it a priority to ensure the strength of the Army's combat vehicle program and
the skilled defense industrial base jobs that support this crucial capability. The Army can help the
Bradley Industrial Base in the near term simply by spending the $288 million provided last year to allow
industry to perform its requirements, which ensure that older vehicles are upgraded with the latest
technology our troops need.

In the longer term, the Army should work with industry to ensure that our troops can meet the missions
they might face, while providing industry with the stability to sustain the skilled jobs needed to respond
to future.

Dwindling budgets and the desire for short-term financial gains are threatening America's "arsenal of
democracy" and with it our economy. The skilled men and women of the defense manufacturing
industry do work that allows us to fly the red, white and blue, and they must not be pink-slipped.
Equipping our military is too important to outsource - our economy, our national security and our fellow
Americans count on it.

Reducing arms sales doesn’t affect US economy

Caverley, 4-6-18 (Jonathan Caverley, Political science researcher at MIT, US Naval College professor,
and Author at War on the Rocks, specializing in global arms trade, “America’s arm sales policy: Security
abroad, not hobs at home, War on the Rocks) //GB
However, the Trump administration’s new initiative threatens to disrupt this balance and undermine the often useful role that arms sales have played in U.S. foreign
policy. Tina Kaidanow, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, recently testified that the Arms Transfer Initiative not only “bolsters our
ability to protect the United States by being a force multiplier for the U.S. warfighter” but “ultimately benefits U.S. industry by driving new innovation and creating
high-quality American jobs.” But simultaneously linking
U.S. security and American jobs through arms sales , while it may seem
intuitive, rarely
works. Indeed, such a policy will carry few economic benefits, and, if done indiscriminately,
undermine what should be the central goal of the nation’s arms transfer policy: advancing the national
security of the United States and its partners. Many deals that advance U.S. goals will create few jobs in
the United States, while some of the most lucrative, job-creating arms deals can undermine U.S. interests.

The arms market is a surprisingly tiny portion of world trade . Annual estimates range from $86 to 105
billion dollars.
 Compare this to the global markets for cars ($1.35 trillion), pharmaceuticals ($613 billion), and even “human or animal blood” ($252 billion) and the
international arms industry begins to look paltry .

By any estimate, the United States already dominates this industry . The State Department’s own estimates for 2015 credit the United
States with a whopping 80 percent of the financial value of all global arms deliveries from 2013 to 2017. The
most authoritative source of
data, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, gives the United States a more conservative,
but still commanding, lead of 34 percent of arms deliveries (measured according to an index of military, rather than financial,
value) for the same time period. Russia comes in at second place with 22 percent , with the next four leading states scrapping for 5 to 7
percent each.

Easing regulations on sales to existing American customers is unlikely to have a huge effect on the size of these transactions, and even with relaxed rules, finding
new state customers will be hard. Muchof the remaining market is essentially closed to the United States . With the crucial
exception of India, there is little opportunity to encroach upon the market share of the number two weapons

exporter — Russia — since the United States restricts or bans sales of weapons to important Russian
customers like China, Venezuela, Syria, and Vietnam.
Econ DA
 No Link: Taiwan Not Profitable
Arms sales aren’t even good for the economy and only fuel conflicts.
Trevor Thrall and Jordan Cohen, 4-5-2019, “The False Promises of Trump’s Arms Sales,” CATO
Institute, https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/false-promises-trumps-arms-sales. ZKMSU

Finally,Trump’s claims about the economic benefits of arms sales ring the hollowest of all . For starters, not only
won’t arms sales create a million new American jobs , but a great number of the jobs created by arms
sales will go to citizens of the purchasing nations. As the Security Assistance Monitor report notes, the number of licenses granted
to weapons manufacturers outside the United States doubled from 2017 to 2018. As a result, more than
one-quarter of all U.S. arms “sales” last year were deals to permit the manufacturing of U.S.-designed
weapons under license — that is, they created jobs in other nations instead of the United States . The report also
finds that the Trump administration has sharply increased the number of deals in which foreign countries produce U.S.-developed weaponry under coproduction

agreements, further reducing the number of U.S. jobs tied to arms sales. Weakening the economic rationale even further is the fact that in
order to seal major deals, American defense contractors have to offer massive discounts, or offsets, to
the purchasing nations in the form of coproduction arrangements or technology transfer . In 2014, for example, these
offsets equaled roughly one-third of the value of total U.S. arms sales. These offsets mean not only that American arms sales are less profitable

than they appear on paper, but also that they lead to fewer jobs created in the United States than many,
including the president, would like to think. Trump’s big Saudi arms deal, for example, would likely lead to somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 jobs, or less than two-tenths
of one percent of the American labor market. The unpleasant truth is that the underwhelming economic benefits cannot justify

Washington’s love of arms sales. Arms sales simply do not benefit the U.S. economy nearly as much as
Trump likes to claim. Meanwhile, a large percentage of American arms sales goes to countries with horrible human rights records, to
nations where arms are at risk of finding their way into the wrong hands, and to nations embroiled in dangerous and destabilizing conflicts. Given this, it is

long past time to rethink American arms sales policy .

 Link Turn: New Markets
By not selling to Taiwan, the United States becomes opened up to newer and even
larger markets for more profit.
Zhang Hua, 12-20-2012, “Arms sales to Taiwan do not help the US,” Global Times,
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/959549.shtml. ZKMSU

Washington has to accept it is becoming far less capable of containing China's rise. It may upset the government of the Chinese
mainland by making a fuss with Taiwan, but it won't have a real effect. Washington's primary intent in forging a military relationship with

Taiwan is to maintain military balance across the Taiwan Strait. However, the strategy is stretched too thin.
Given the mainland's swift and prominent ramp-up in military spending, a military balance can no longer
be stricken between the mainland and Taiwan, no matter how many advanced weapons the US sells to
Taiwan. The possibility of using Taiwan to suppress the mainland's growing leverage in its periphery is
vanishing. The mainland's economic aggregate is more than 20 times larger than Taiwan's , so the latter has no chance to
engage in a military race with the former. Selling arms to Taiwan doesn't mean Washington would hold on to its promise to

"come and rescue" Taiwan when the island is in trouble with the mainland . It is not even a commitment
to include Taiwan in its umbrella of protection . Even some Taiwanese strategists have pointed out that
Taiwan is too obsessed with the delusion that Washington will come all the way to defend Taiwan. Washington also cunningly argues that the weaponry deal will bolster Taiwan's
confidence when it needs to negotiate with the mainland in other respects. In fact, in such talks, it is always the mainland that makes more room for Taiwan's wellbeing, not because Taiwan has a strong military capability that is

these companies
feared by the mainland, but because the mainland regards Taiwan as family. Although the US, especially its arms enterprises and political brokers, could reap fat profits from such practices,

and individuals might risk losing the second biggest market . The pros and cons are not hard to weigh. In
fact, some companies have started to reflect on the deal.
 Link Turn: Arms Sales Hurt Economy
American companies rely on Chinese business; arms sales to Taiwan destroy any
possibility of rejoinder. Also ruins any possibility of solving climate change through
international cooperation.
Mina Tanious, 2019, “"The impact of economic interdependence on the probability of conflict between
states: The case of “American–Chinese relationship on Taiwan since 1995,’” Review of Economics and
Political Science, Vol. 4(1), pg. 38-53. ZKMSU

US arms sales to Taiwan as an element of conflict and tension between China and the USA According
5.3.4 .

to the 1982 USA–China Joint Declaration, WA committed to gradually reduce the supply of arms to
Taipei In return, Beijing vowed to resolve the issue peacefully However, In the 1990s, US arms sales to
. .

Taiwan increased the USA arms sales to Taiwan was totaled by $20bn
. In 1992, the Bush administration sold 150 F-16s to Taipei and between 1991 and 1998, . On the

Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao requested Washington to stop arming

occasion of USA Vice President Al Gore’s visit to Beijing in March 1997,

Taiwan and stressed on the fact of continuing USA arming of Taiwan is one of the reasons for the
tension in bilateral relations the Defense Cooperation Agency of the US Department of Defense
. On January 29, 2010,

announced its approval of the long-awaited arms deal valued about US$6.4bn. This deal included
advanced Patriot missiles, radar, Black Hawk helicopters and others of modern weapons. China’s
reaction to the arms deal between the USA and Taiwan China has stopped exchanges and military ties :

with the United States The Chinese Government

. China called-up the US ambassador to “Beijing” to make a formal complaint showing rejection and resentment of the arms deal.

expressed its dissatisfaction with the USAs’ support for Taiwan militarily and that this would
undoubtedly affect cooperation with the USA in other fields China has taken a strong stance and .

explicitly threatened punitive measures against US companies China , such as US firm Boeing, which is involved in arms sales to Taiwan.

suspended its cooperation with the USA in the framework of coordinating the Copenhagen conference
on climate change problems Because of the desire of the USA to
. It also announced at the same month that it will be testing its missile defense recently.

maintain its relationship with China in the framework of mutual economic cooperation between them , The

Obama administration regretted the deterioration the reason for this is the recognition by the of relations with China, and

American side of the existence of common interests between the two countries, especially in the
economic sphere where the USA is well aware that the impact of relations between the two countries
,

would negatively affect USA economic interests this would do harm to US companies that benefit . Adding that

heavily from Chinese markets such as Boeing and other companies .

Fill-In DA
 Non-unique/No Link: Russia Doesn’t Care About Taiwan
Russia constantly fails to get involved in Southeast Asia and its economic slowdown
prevents any arms sales in the region from gaining a foothold.
Richard Weitz, 1-5-2016, “Putin’s Perennial Pivot Problem,” The Diplomat,
https://thediplomat.com/2016/01/putins-perennial-pivot-problem/. ZKMSU

However, Putin hardly mentioned East Asian issues in his lengthy end-of-year news conference ten days later,
reflecting the long-standing pattern of Russian officials announcing admirably grandiose projects to
deepen ties that never sustain high-level interest. Russia remains poorly integrated into East Asia’s
dynamic economies. The country has some first-rate educational establishments but most Asians who study abroad do so in Europe, the United States, or in other Asian countries. Although Putin can cite
record two-way trade figures with some countries, Russia is not a leading economic partner of China , Japan, South Korea, or most

other Asian countries. All too often, Russia’s potential contribution is treated as an afterthought in Asian initiatives. Moscow’s ability to realize its regional
goals has been hindered by Russia’s unattractive investment climate, limited use of the country’s
abundant human and natural resources, excessive dependence on energy and other natural resource
exports, unstable national currency, troubled ties with key regional players including Japan and the
United States, and unbalanced relations with others, particularly China . As seen in the recent visit by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to
Moscow, the foundation of the Russia’s relationship with many Asian states remains arms and energy. Russians are eager to reduce intra-Korean tensions to transform the Korean Peninsula into a gateway for new Russian
economic ties with South Korea and other East Asian countries. Despite several years of intense diplomacy, however, Russia’s economic ties with North Korea are still negligible, while Seoul has lost faith in Moscow’s ability to

economic and social ties between Russia and

cajole Pyongyang into abandoning its nuclear weapons program or moderating its provocative foreign policy. Meanwhile,

Southeast Asia remain modest. At the aggregate level, the Russian Federation has never ranked among
ASEAN’s largest foreign partners in tourism, trade, or investment . Finally, Moscow has been unable to
attract significant foreign direct investment (FDI) from any Asian country to the Russian Far East,
thwarting Moscow’s plans to use foreign capital and technology to transform the region into Russia’s
“window to Asia.” Those few Asian businesses that have made major investments in Russia have largely been focused on the country’s more economically developed European parts. Despite all
efforts to diversify Russian influence by revitalizing its industrial and post-industrial economy and its soft
power, and a Kremlin leadership that clearly relishes shock-and-awe diplomacy and has a first-rate
diplomatic corps to support it, Russia’s main source of influence remains its arms sales . The Russian
economic slowdown that deepened throughout 2014 has further constrained Russia’s socioeconomic
ties with Asian countries.

The Russia-China “alliance” has reached a limit even if arms sales continue.
the majority of scholars, experts and officials whose articles and statements were
In contrast to these claims, however,

reviewed for this article do not believe Russia and China have formed a de facto alliance , although they disagree on how
likely such an alliance might be in the future. For instance, Brookings Institution scholar Fiona Hill, who now serves as the Trump administration’s adviser on Russia, and Bobo Lo of the French Institute of International Relations

predicted tensions between the two countries in their July 2013 article as “ the economic and political gap between a dynamic China and a non-
modernizing Russia will be too wide for Moscow to bridge in the Asia-Pacific .” Russian commentator Mikhail Korostikov,
too, does not see a Russian-Chinese alliance either now or in the future . In a May 2019 analysis entitled “Friendship at Arm’s Length,” Korostikov

argued that “the political ties between Russia and China have reached a natural limit ” and “that the feeling of a

common threat from the United States is unlikely to lead to a military alliance between the countries.”
Allison is equally skeptical, noting in a December 2018 article that while Moscow and Beijing have succeeded in forming a “grand alignment of the aggrieved … the

prospects for a Chinese-Russian alliance in the longer run are undoubtedly grim.” Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow
Center, is more pessimistic still: “The hope of forming a close alliance with China … [has] faded ,” he wrote in April 2019.
 Link Turn: Russia Sells Arms To China
Increased US involvement in the Asia-Pacific causes Russia to sell more arms to China.
Otherwise, Russia doesn’t care; it is only done to spite America.
Alexander Gabuev, 2019, “Sino-Russian Relations in the 21st Century: Unwanted but Inevitable:
Russia’s Deepening Partnership with China Post-Ukraine,” Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, pg. 62-63. ZKMSU

Moscow believes that Russia is defending the status quo, and that a hostile West seeks to impose its
will on others Undermining the political foundations of the U.S.-led international order is therefore seen
.

as a good defense strategy, easing the pressure on Russia and its neighborhood In order to achieve this .

new ambition Russia needs to boost the efforts of other great powers challenging American
hegemony, and China is now seen as the main partner in this important undertaking Russia . Consistent with this thinking,

cooperates with China in gradually revising some aspects of global governance . While the U.S.-led order was based on an idea of globalization and

Russia’s sale of its most advanced surface-to-

universal principles, including human rights and a level-playing field for businesses, Russia and China have a common narrative centered around sovereignty.

air missile, the S-400, and its most advanced combat jet, the Su-35, to Beijing in 2015, should be seen as
part of cementing mutual trust and closer political ties with China These two weapons platforms directly .

infuence the balance of military power in critical areas for the PLA in theaters like the East China Sea the ,

Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea , . The deepening of military ties is also reflected in the number of joint naval drills that Russia and China have held in recent years, in the Mediterranean Sea in 2015, in the South
China Sea in 2016, and in the East China Sea and the Baltic Sea in 2017. Another area of military cooperation is missile defense. Russia and China held joint tabletop exercises on missile defense in 2016 and 2017, and in 2018 these may be expanded to include livefiring components. Such
drills are clearly intended to counter expansion of American missile-defense installations in Europe and Asia, including deployments of THAAD in South Korea and Aegis Ashore in Japan. Increased military cooperation does not mean that China and Russia are trying to build a formal
military alliance. The cost of a military alliance still by far outweighs the benefts for both sides. Moscow does not want to be dragged into China’s territorial conflicts in Asia, which involves important Russian partners like India and Vietnam. However, according to senior Russian military

the option of an alliance should not be excluded , and the practical foundation for an alliance thus
officials,

needs to be established. If the moment comes when

The growing number of joint military drills will teach Russian and Chinese militaries to fight together and increase their interoperability.

political leaders in Russia and China decide that the simultaneous U.S. pressure on both is too hard, they
need only sign a piece of paper to join forces, as the military foundation for an alliance will already be in
place .
 Link Turn: China Unification Good
Reunification would be a good thing for Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific theatre as a
whole.
Straits Times, 5-16-2019, “Taiwan's future lies in national reunification, mainland spokesman reacts to
Terry Gou's one-China comments,” Straits Times, https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/taiwans-
future-lies-in-national-reunification-mainland-spokesman-reacts-to-terry-gous. ZKMSU

BEIJING (CHINA DAILY/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - Taiwan's future lies in national reunification and the well-being of its people in
national rejuvenation, a Chinese mainland spokesman has said. Mr Ma Xiaoguang, a spokesman for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, made the remark in response to Foxconn founder and chairman
Terry Gou's comments on the 1992 Consensus, which embodies the one-China principle. Mr Gou, who announced last month that he would enter the Kuomintang (KMT) primaries and join Taiwan's 2020 leadership election, said

Noting that the mainland and Taiwan both belong to one China , Mr Ma said on Wednesday
the principle should be based on "respective interpretations".

(May 15) that the principle has clearly defined the nature of cross-Strait relations, which are not state-to-state

relations. It is in the common interest of people from both sides to uphold the principle , to oppose
agitation for Taiwan independence, to work for the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations and
advance the peaceful reunification of China , he said. The two sides should work together to resolve
differences based on the one-China principle, with responsibility for the Chinese nation and future
generations, he added. Mr Ma also criticised the words and deeds of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) officials and secessionists, and added that the mainland will never
tolerate or be vague about the issue . Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen recently made many visits to military camps on the island and appealed to voters to support Taiwan independence. Mr
Ma said in response: "China's sovereignty and territory brook no division . We firmly oppose any attempt to damage

the one-China principle and undermine cross-Strait relations ." Referring to arms sales by the United
States to Taiwan, Mr Ma said: "We once again warn the DPP authorities that it is not reliable to bet on
foreign force for Taiwan independence ."
 Jobs DA
Arms sales produce insignificant job growth
Thrall and Cohen 2019 – Trevor Thrall s an associate professor in the Schar School of Policy and
Government at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Jordan Cohen is a
Ph.D. student in political science at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government
(“The False Promises of Trump’s Arms Sales,” https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/false-
promises-trumps-arms-sales) bhb

Finally, Trump’s claims about the economic benefits of arms sales ring the hollowest of all. For starters, not only
won’t arms sales create a million new American jobs, but agreat number of the jobs created by arms sales will go to
citizens of the purchasing nations. As the Security Assistance Monitor report notes, the number of licenses granted to weapons
manufacturers outside the United States doubled from 2017 to 2018. As a result, more than one-quarter of all U.S. arms “sales”
last year were deals to permit the manufacturing of U.S.-designed weapons under license — that is, they
created jobs in other nations instead of the United States. The report also finds that the Trump administration has sharply increased the number of
deals in which foreign countries produce U.S.-developed weaponry under coproduction agreements, further reducing the number of U.S. jobs tied
to arms sales.

Weakening the economic rationale even further is the fact that in

order to seal major deals, American defense contractors
have to offer massive discounts, or offsets, to the purchasing nations in the form of coproduction
arrangements or technology transfer . In 2014, for example, these offsets equaled roughly one-third of the value of total U.S. arms
sales. These offsets mean not only that American arms sales are less profitable than they appear on paper, but also that they lead to
fewer jobs created in the United States than many, including the president, would like to think. Trump’s big Saudi arms deal, for
example, would likely lead to somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 jobs, or less than two-tenths of one percent of the American labor market.

The unpleasant truth is that the underwhelming

economic benefits cannot justify Washington’s love of arms sales.
Arms sales simply do not benefit the U.S. economy nearly as much as Trump likes to claim. Meanwhile, a large percentage of
American arms sales goes to countries with horrible human rights records, to nations where arms are at risk of finding their way into the wrong
hands, and to nations embroiled in dangerous and destabilizing conflicts. Given this, it is long past time to rethink American arms sales policy.
Japan Disad Answers
 2AC – Non-Unique
Trump threatening to leave defense security pack – the threat and attitude of Trump
has already destroyed US-Japan relations – Japans already expanding military
Jacobs 6/24 (Jacobs, Jennifer. “Trump Muses Privately About Ending Postwar Japan Defense Pact.”
Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 24 June 2019, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-25/trump-
muses-privately-about-ending-postwar-japan-defense-pact.)

President Donald Trump has recently mused to confidants about withdrawing from a longstanding
defense treaty with Japan, according to three people familiar with the matter, in his latest complaint
about what he sees as unfair U.S. security pacts.

Trump regards the accord as too one-sided because it promises U.S. aid if Japan is ever attacked, but
doesn’t oblige Japan’s military to come to America’s defense, the people said. The treaty, signed more
than 60 years ago, forms the foundation of the alliance between the countries that emerged from
World War II.
Even so, the president hasn’t taken any steps toward pulling out of the treaty, and administration officials said such a move is highly unlikely. All of the people asked
not to be identified discussing Trump’s private conversations. While Trump’s repeated criticism of security pacts around the world has alarmed allies from Seoul to
Paris, he hasn’t moved to withdraw from such agreements the way he has with trade deals.

Exiting the pact would jeopardize a postwar alliance that has helped guarantee security in the Asia
Pacific, laying the foundation for the region’s economic rise. Under the terms of its surrender in World War II, Japan agreed to a pacifist constitution in
which it renounced the right to wage war.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Tuesday in response to a question about the Bloomberg News report that the security framework was at the
core of the country’s alliance with the U.S. “There is no talk at all of a review of the Japan-U.S. security alliance as has been reported in the media,” Suga said,
echoing a statement by the foreign ministry.

Scrapping the treaty would risk ceding security of the Western Pacific to China and potentially spurring a
fresh nuclear arms race, if Japan decided it needed to protect itself from nuclear-armed neighbors . It
would also call into question the U.S.’s military commitments to Australia, the Philippines, South Korea,
Taiwan and a host of other allies around the world.

Meeting With Abe

The president will make his second trip to Japan in a matter of weeks on Wednesday when he travels for
the Group of 20 summit in Osaka. He’s expected to again meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who enjoys as good a relationship with the mercurial and unpredictable American
president as any foreign leader.

Yet as with many U.S. allies, there are growing tensions between the countries over Trump’s attitude
toward trade. The president has said he may enact tariffs on imports of foreign cars, calling them a
threat to national security -- an allegation called preposterous by automakers and many U.S. lawmakers.

The question of whether an American president can withdraw from a ratified treaty without
congressional approval is unsettled. President George W. Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty in 2002 without lawmakers’ consent.
Trump regards Japan’s repeated efforts to move a large U.S. military base in Okinawa as a sort of land-grab, the people said, and has raised the idea of seeking financial compensation for American forces to relocate.

Trump’s focus on the U.S. defense pact with Japan may foreshadow broader scrutiny of American treaty
obligations across the world, two people familiar with the matter said.
The president has said in private conversations previously that he has Japan’s back and is aware of the U.S.’s obligations under the treaty. But, as with his stance on other multilateral
agreements, he wants the relationship to be more reciprocal.
 “The U.S.-Japan alliance has never been stronger,” Trump told sailors and Marines last month aboard the USS Wasp, an amphibious assault ship at the naval base in Yokosuka, shared by the
U.S. and Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. “This remarkable port is the only one in the world where an American naval fleet and an allied naval fleet headquartered side by side, a testament to the
ironclad partnership between U.S. and Japanese forces,” he said.

the president has long expressed skepticism of arrangements such as the North Atlantic Treaty
At the same time,

Organization and the United Nations. He withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement
and the Paris climate accord, both agreed by President Barack Obama, and has re-negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The U.S. defense treaty with Japan was first signed in 1951 along with the Treaty of San Francisco that officially ended World War II. The defense pact, revised in 1960, grants the U.S. the right
to base military forces in Japan in exchange for the promise that America will defend the island nation if it’s ever attacked.

For decades after the war, Japan refrained from developing offensive capabilities such as long-range bombers, aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. But Abe, a relatively hawkish leader,
believes his nation should take a more robust role in its own defense. He pushed through a controversial interpretation of the constitution to allow Japanese forces to come to the aid of allies.

In May, the country’s ruling

Japan is buying advanced F-35 fighter planes from the U.S. and will fly some of them off warships effectively refashioned as aircraft carriers, its first since the war.

Liberal Democratic Party recommended the government eventually raise defense spending to about 2%
of gross domestic product, in line with NATO recommendations for its members and a threshold Trump
has said should be a minimum for U.S. allies.

‘Cornerstone of Peace’
There are currently about 54,000 U.S. military personnel based in Japan, a permanent troop presence that allows the U.S. to more easily project force across the
Pacific. U.S. Forces, Japan, calls the arrangement “the cornerstone of peace and security in the Pacific” on its website.

The president has frequently complained that U.S. allies hosting

It isn’t clear how those forces would be affected if Trump withdrew from the treaty.

American bases don’t pay enough money for what he considers a privilege , and he could seek to negotiate a new or revised treaty that
entails more Japanese financial support for the U.S. military presence.

While the president did not refer to the base by name in his recent conversations, there has been a running dispute surrounding Marine Corps Air Station Futenma on Okinawa. The American
presence has been controversial for more than two decades, since three servicemen raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl in 1995. Local people still attribute the presence of the base to higher
rates of crime and accidents in the area, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

“I just doubt we will revisit U.S. policy on the U.S.-Japan strategic

“There’s nothing that says we have to abide by treaties for all eternity,” Carafano said.

alliance,” which he also referred to as the “cornerstone” of U.S. foreign policy in Asia.
Abe reached a deal in 2013 with Obama to move the base out of Okinawa as early as 2022 if a replacement could be constructed. But Trump believes the land
underneath the base is valuable for development, and has told confidants the real estate could be worth about $10 billion, the people said.

He considers the situation another example of a wealthy country taking advantage of the U.S., the
people said.

Alliance deteriorating now - America first rhetoric, japan defense spending, and trade
negotiations
Sracic 19 (Sracic, Paul. “Why Japan Is America's Most Important Ally.” CNN, Cable News Network, 26
Apr. 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/04/25/opinions/sracic-trump-abe-japan-us-alliance/index.html.)
The failure of the Trump-Kim summit meeting in Hanoi in February means the US needs to reevaluate its approach to North Korea. There are reports that Trump has given a message to South Korean President Moon Jae-in to be

The contents of this note will almost certainly be a topic of conversation between
relayed to the North Korean leader.

Trump and Abe, and it is important that the two leaders emerge from their meetings with a common
understanding of how to approach North Korea. This is true for several reasons.

First, President Trump's "America First" rhetoric has caused allies, including Japan, to question the
reliability of the US as a partner. The administration, for its part, has explicitly reaffirmed the US commitment to defend Japan.
Japan has responded by planning increased defense spending and interpreting its constitution to allow
its military to come to the aid of the US. Therefore, unlike America's relationship with some of its other
allies, the US and Japan seem to be on the same page when it comes to alliance responsibilities . Reassuring Japan
that its interests are being considered, vis-a-vis North Korea, will not only help the US-Japan relationship, but might also serve as a positive lesson for other allies.

Of course, this lesson is not limited to friends of the US. A united US-Japan approach to North Korea will also place more pressure on Kim Jong Un and his main
benefactor, China. At the same time, it is important to ensure that engagement with the North Korea does not emerge as a wedge issue between Japan and South
Korea.

Relations between these two crucial US allies have been deteriorating in recent months, and although
there is not much that President Trump can do to heal their disputes over history, the US needs to be
careful not to worsen the situation.

A less serious but perhaps more immediate issue to be discussed on Friday involves the US-Japan
economic relationship. Last fall, the US and Japan agreed to begin negotiating a bilateral free-trade
agreement. The two nations' economies are closely linked . The US is the second-most popular destination for Japanese exports, while Japan provides a major
market for US exports, including agricultural products.

Still, the US runs a persistent trade deficit with Japan . Although Japan trails only the UK in the amount of money it invests in the US (and much of that is used to create
manufacturing jobs), the trade deficit has provoked Trump to take a hard line with Japan on trade ; it likely played

a role Trump's decision to withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

This withdrawal, however, alongside Japan's decision to move forward with remaining TPP countries to
form the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, while also signing a
major trade agreement with the EU, threatens US agricultural exports.

Japan no longer believes in US security – Trump views them as freeriders and

Japanese no longer believes in the resolve of US
Miura 19 (Miura, Lully. Lully Miura is a lecturer at the Policy Alternatives Research Institute of the
University of Tokyo. “In the Time of Trump, Japan Is Looking to Defend Itself.” South China Morning
Post, 13 Jan. 2019, www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2181764/how-trump-forced-japan-
take-security-its-own-hands.)

A decade or so from now, people may look back on 2019 as a turning point for Japan – the moment it
finally came to terms with its own security in the 21st century.

Two years of the Donald Trump administration in the United States have shaken the Japanese public,
but after a bit of shock, they have accepted a new reality. This is a post-Iraq-war world and Japan, for
the first time since the end of the second world war, is facing the challenge of providing for its own
security.

Spurned in midterms, Trump turns sights on Japanese car firms

In the quarter century since the end of the cold war, which did not conclude with a “peace dividend” for East Asia, Japan has had to cope with the changing times.
Throughout the 1990s, its alliance with the US was redefined, and Tokyo has had to confirm that such an alliance is still relevant. It has also sought to normalise its
security policy while continuing its pacifist tradition. The ability to send its Self Defence Forces to peace missions overseas, and exercise collective self-defence with
the US, were important steps during this period.
But Japan is now facing the sobering reality that its security environment has changed, more so than the
incremental steps it has so far taken towards bolstering its defences would suggest.

Asia has faced its fair share of security challenges in the past – from the Soviet military build-up of the 1950s and 1960s, to China becoming a nuclear power
in 1964 and the North Korean nuclear crisis that still rumbles on to this day – but none of these crises changed the fundamentals of East Asian

security, since the US’ relative military superiority and resolve were never in question.

So long as the region could count on US commitment, other factors were of secondary concern.

What has changed in the Trump era is American resolve. His emergence within the Republican Party,
mirrored on the left by a renewed enthusiasm for disengagement within the Democratic Party, is a clear
sign of shifting priorities in the US over whether to maintain its informal “empire” overseas.

What Japan can teach China about the American art of (trade) war

Of course, America will not simply turn over its worldwide dominance to China . Its recent focus on pressuring China
economically, and rebuilding its technological pre-eminence, are clear signs that it doesn’t intend to do so. From a security perspective, the US’

modernisation of its nuclear arsenal, investments in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, and honing
in on space warfare are all signs of its imperial resolve. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into
regional hegemony in East Asia.

Talks between the US and North Korea have also signalled a symbolic change to US foreign policy in the
region.

US appeasement towards Pyongyang has been met by feelings of disappointment and helplessness in
the Japanese media, especially when Trump mentioned Japan as one of the main cost bearers of denuclearisation, despite no concrete agreement having been made. Once again,
Japan would be paying for something it has little influence over.

The country finds itself in an awkward position, as it has no offensive capabilities to draw concessions
out of North Korea, yet the US does not share its fear of Pyongyang . Tokyo can only attempt to influence the situation by influencing
the US.

Japan bids farewell to emperor with a common touch as divisions over monarchy deepen

The talks have also exposed a more fundamental issue: the gap in perceptions between Tokyo and
Washington regarding their alliance. The Trump administration embodies a distrust of Japan as a “ free-
rider” that does not contribute enough towards its own defence. This is not a view widely shared in Japan at all. The Japanese
public is more afraid of “entrapment” by the US and becoming tangled up in its wars. This perception
gap exists because the Japanese public have largely been shielded from the realities of the alliance by a
government that has feared being abandoned by the US , but did not want to broadcast its hospitality towards the superpower for fear of a
pacifist backlash.

In the two years since Trump came to power, the Japanese public have become increasingly sceptical of
US support in the case of a limited crisis , such as one involving the disputed Diaoyu Islands, which Japan
calls the Senkaku Islands. Japanese progressives – both in opposition and in the media – have become more isolationist. They are keen to weaken the
alliance, but not necessarily build up independent military capabilities. Neither do recent progressives see China favourably, compared with the cold war period.

In the same way Japan is wary of the US, it is also wary of South Korea given their historical issues , with ties
fraying again now because of a disagreement over wartime labour compensation.

Error! Bookmark not defined.its military relationships with others , such as the members of the Quad, and plans to boost
defence spending over the next five years with advanced military equipment from the US.
 The remaining years of the Trump era are likely
Yet these guidelines, while championing resilience and self-sustainability, also continue with the basic philosophy of pacifism.

to see Japanese society further torn between isolationism and realism

 2AC – No Internal Link – No Abandonment
No internal link – fear of abandonment doesn’t motivate Japan’s decisions
Dr. Nagy, 2017
(Stephen R., Senior Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the
International Christian University, “Japan’s Proactive Pacifism: Investing in Multilateralization and
Omnidirectional Hedging”, Strategic Analysis, Vol. 41, Iss. 3, pp. 223-235, ZW)

But justthe fear of abandonment cannot fully explain Japan’s security shift under PM Abe since 2012. Firstly,
prior to his return to power in December 2012 the US and Japan had been strengthening their commitment to
each other, in terms of practice, policy and vision.

In terms of practice, 3/11 (the March 11, 2011 earthquake/tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster) provided
Japan with ample proof of US commit- ment to Japan , by way of Operation Tomodachi.32 Direct and
indirect assistance from the US to Japan following the tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi incident in the form of logistics,
transport, supplies and expertise demonstrated not only the US’ capacity to help but also the deep inter-
operability of the Japanese Self Defence Force (JSDF) and the American military forces stationed in
Japan.33

Other examples of the deepening US commitment to Japan include the strength- ening of the Japan–US Defence
Guidelines34 and the support for easing restrictions on the JSDF that would facilitate a more functional
security partnership in multi- lateral frameworks , such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD), and at the bilateral
level with countries such as Australia and India.35,36 These examples are contemporary illustrations of the pre-existing track record of the
strong security commitment of the US to Japan, as evidenced by the ‘Joint Statement of the Security Consultative Committee’ of April 27, 2012
(prior to Abe’s second stint as PM) which was promulgated during the Noda administration.37

Scholars such as Satake point out that new guidelines for Japan–US security cooperation and the US’ interest in promoting greater cooperation
with Japan are contributing to East Asia’s security architecture. He stresses expanded bilateral cooperation not only in the South China Sea
(SCS), in terms of surveillance, but also in capacity building with like-minded states in the region, such as Vietnam and the Philippines, to meet
regional and global security challenges.38

As regards the fear of entrapment, the US’ desire and encouragement to include Japan in surveillance and other security operations in
the SCS, and beyond, could be interpreted as a slippery slope that could draw Japan into a US-related conflict. Notwithstanding this possibility,
Japan has minimized this risk at the legal level by imposing rigorous limitations, as to when and how Japan
can cooperate with the US for collective security .39 At a normative level, Japan has partially inoculated itself against a
reactionary military involvement by means of public opinion that is widely sceptical of security cooperation.40

At the same time, successive politicians, including Noda (Democratic Party of Japan [DPJ]) and Abe (Liberal Democratic Party [LDP]), have
proactively sought to strengthen and expand security cooperation with the US as mainstream political parties and members of Japan’s political
centre recognize the need for a reconfigur- ing and normalization of Japan’s security architecture.41 In short, Japan has worked proactively
under several administrations and political ideologies to expand the activities of its JSDF while at the same time limiting the scope of their
involvement. This delicate balance is partly driven by the fear of entrapment, but Japanese security concerns in the region also require a
realistic calculation of how to enhance Japanese security, while remaining true to its post-World War II pacifist tradition.

In terms of policy, Japan and the US have grounded their security policy in bilateral and multilateral economic
arrangements, as illustrated by the now invalid but salvageable TPP, the Theatre Missile Defence (TMD) and a commitment to
the multilateralization of maritime security through the Rim of the Pacific Exercises (RIMPAC). Bilateral support for the installation of the
Terminal High Altitude Air Defence (THAAD) counter-missile systems in South Korea to counter North Korea`s growing
capabilities further demonstrates that, rather than abandonment or being entrapped by each other’s security issues, both
countries are proactively working together to mitigate security threats in the region. 42
 2AC – No Impact – Alliance Inevitable
Japanese alliance is inevitable – existing security guarantees outweigh Taiwan
Glaser 2015 – Charles L Glaser is a professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the
Department of Political Science at George Washington University. He is also a fellow in the Kissinger
Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. (“A U.S.-China Grand Bargain?”
International Security, Volume 39, Number 4) bhb

Although a decision by the United States to end its commitment to Taiwan would certainly send political shock
waves across the region, these concerns are overstated. There are similarities between the U.S. commitments to
Taiwan and Japan, but also clear differences. U.S. security interests in Japan are much greater; as a result,
the alliance involves much stronger political commitments and the deep integration of U.S. and
Japanese military capabilities. In addition, the United States has a clear rationale for ending its commitment to
Taiwan that does not apply to Japan: the U.S. commitment to Taiwan strains the U.S.-China relationship
and increases the probability of war in ways that the U.S. commitment to Japan does not. Japan should
appreciate these differences and therefore recognize that the ending of the U.S. commitment to Taiwan would not indicate a coming diminution of
the U.S. commitment to Japan. U.S.
leaders could work to make sure that their Japanese counterparts fully
appreciate these differences.
In addition, the United States could take other actions that would starkly distinguish its policies toward Japan from its policies toward Taiwan,
which should help to offset doubts that accommodation on Taiwan might create. Most obviously, the United States could increase the size and
improve the quality of the forces it commits to Japan’s protection. Other policies could include further deepening U.S.-Japan joint military
planning and continuing high-level discussions of the requirements for extending deterrence to Japan. Growth in Chinese conventional and
nuclear forces has increased the importance of these interactions; ending the U.S. commitment to Taiwan would make them still more valuable.98

Finally, as
China’s power continues to grow, Japan’s need for U.S. security guarantees will also grow.
Doubts about U.S. reliability are therefore likely to convince Japan to work harder to strengthen the
U.S.-Japan alliance, not to abandon it or to bandwagon with China. 99
 2AC – No Prolif – Japan
Japan won’t proliferate – the public is overwhelmingly against becoming a nuclear
state
Mochizuki, 2017
(Mike, Japan-US Relations Chair in Memory of Gaston Sigur at the Elliott School of International Affairs at
George Washington University, “Three reasons why Japan will likely continue to reject nuclear
weapons”, The Washington Post, November 6, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2017/11/06/japan-is-likely-to-retain-its-non-nuclear-principles-heres-why/?
utm_term=.6d70be40ca7a, accessed 6/24/29, ZW)

The Three Non-Nuclear Principles are a clear part of Japan’s national identity, not simply a policy
preference. Repeated polls indicate overwhelming popular support for the three principles in Japan. A 2014
Asahi newspaper poll revealed that support for the principles had risen to 82 percent, compared with 78 percent in
a 1988 poll. Despite growing concerns about North Korea ’s nuclear program and China’s military power during this
period, Japanese support for remaining non-nuclear actually increased.

Even after the provocative North

Korean missile launches over Japan in August and September , a Fuji News Network
poll showed that nearly
80 percent of the Japanese population remained opposed to Japan becoming a
nuclear weapons state. And nearly 69 percent opposed having the United States bring nuclear weapons
into Japan.

The legacy of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings leave many Japanese convinced that their country has
a moral responsibility to promote global nuclear disarmament — as well as to forgo nuclear weapons of its own. The 2011
Fukushima nuclear plant disaster has reinforced this view.

In fact, increasing numbers of Japanese believe that the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” is unnecessary for
Japanese security. A June 2010 NHK survey revealed that 20.8 percent felt that U.S. nuclear deterrence is necessary for Japan’s security
in both the present and future, while 34.8 percent believed it unnecessary. The June 2015 NHK poll showed that only 10.3
percent thought the U.S. nuclear umbrella is necessary for both the present and the future — 48.9
percent responded that it is unnecessary now and later.

Veto players ensure Japan doesn’t develop nuclear weapons

Mochizuki, 2017
(Mike, Japan-US Relations Chair in Memory of Gaston Sigur at the Elliott School of International Affairs at
George Washington University, “Three reasons why Japan will likely continue to reject nuclear
weapons”, The Washington Post, November 6, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2017/11/06/japan-is-likely-to-retain-its-non-nuclear-principles-heres-why/?
utm_term=.6d70be40ca7a, accessed 6/24/29, ZW)

In addition to public opposition to nuclear weapons, Japan

has significant “veto players” — crucial political or economic actors that
are likely to block efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
Japan has a robust nuclear energy industry. But public
acceptance of nuclear energy in the 1950s resulted from a
fundamental political bargain: nuclear energy, but no nuclear weapons.

As security scholar Jacques Hymans argues, the

development of nuclear energy in Japan boosted the number of
Japanese government agencies and private-sector actors that are committed to the peaceful use of nuclear
power — and can serve as a formidable opposition to any political move toward acquiring nuclear
weapons. These veto players include powerful economic ministries, regulatory commissions, industrial
groups and prefectural governments.

The international nonproliferation regime and public opposition to nuclear weapons give these veto
players leverage in Japan’s policy process. The International Atomic Energy Agency has closely monitored Japan’s reprocessing
programs, for instance. Japan’s nuclear energy program is also tied to bilateral agreements and multilateral bodies such as the Nuclear
Suppliers Group that embody nonproliferation principles.

Japan’s security calculations make nuclearization unlikely – political costs vastly

outweigh marginal strategic benefits
Mochizuki, 2017
(Mike, Japan-US Relations Chair in Memory of Gaston Sigur at the Elliott School of International Affairs at
George Washington University, “Three reasons why Japan will likely continue to reject nuclear
weapons”, The Washington Post, November 6, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2017/11/06/japan-is-likely-to-retain-its-non-nuclear-principles-heres-why/?
utm_term=.6d70be40ca7a, accessed 6/24/29, ZW)

There’s also a realist security calculation to consider. North

Korean nuclearization is alarming, but it does not pose such an
acute danger that Japanese leaders will be motivated to pay the high political costs necessary to
weaken, much less revoke, the Three Non-Nuclear Principles.
North Korea acquiring the ability to deliver a nuclear weapon against the United States may weaken the protective U.S. nuclear umbrella
somewhat, but U.S.
nuclear and conventional military capabilities should be adequate to deter a North
Korean nuclear attack on Japan.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump criticized several U.S. alliances and mused that it might be desirable for Japan to develop
nuclear weapons. But after
assuming office, President Trump and his foreign policy team have repeatedly confirmed the
U.S. defense commitment to Japan. The continuing presence of U.S. military forces in Japan, South Korea
and the Western Pacific makes this commitment credible to deter potential aggressors and to reassure
Japan.

Given the powerful U.S. nuclear arsenal, including ballistic missiles deployed on nuclear submarines, any
U.S. tactical nuclear
weapons in Japan itself would constitute a marginal increase in deterrence. But the political cost of
rescinding the third non-nuclear principle would be high.
Japanese defense policymakers are more likely to focus on other ways to respond to the North Korea threat, such as acquiring the Aegis Ashore
missile defense system and perhaps a conventional strike capability.

A realistic review of Japanese security requirements is likely to conclude that the best way to counter
the North Korea threat is to promote defense cooperation with the U nited States, invest in conventional
defense capabilities and increase pressure on North Korea — while looking for an opportunity for constructive
negotiations with Pyongyang.
And there’s a
final consideration: A Japanese bomb would probably destabilize the country’s relations with
China and South Korea. At a time when North Korea is making the international politics of the region
complicated, Japan is likely to stay its non-nuclear course rather than make a disruptive nuclear move of
its own.
 2AC – No Prolif – General
No rapid proliferation – lack of interest or capabilities – specifically fissile material
Keck, 2013
(Zachary, staff writer for The Diplomat, “Why Nuclear Weapons Don't Spread (Quickly)”, The Diplomat,
December 4, https://thediplomat.com/2013/12/why-nuclear-weapons-dont-spread-quickly/, accessed
on 6/25/19, ZW)

At the same time, when one examines the properties of nuclear weapons more closely, the
lack of interest is easier to
understand. Nuclear weapons have basically served one purpose for states possessing them; namely, they have deterred
others from challenging that state’s survival and other fundamental interests. But the nuclear era has also
been characterized by a sharp decline in warfare and today fewer states face fundamental external
threats to their existence. Given the high costs of building and maintaining a nuclear arsenal, it makes little sense to acquire nuclear
weapons without such an existential threat.

While lack of interest explains why some states have renounced nuclear weapons despite possessing the capability to build them, the
difficulty in building them has prevented others states that seek nuclear weapons from acquiring them.
Despite the view that “where there is a will there’s a way,” and a strong sense that globalization has exacerbated this, the historical record tells
a very different story.

As Jacques Hymans has pointed out, before 1970 seven countries launched dedicated nuclear weapon programs and all seven succeeded in an
average of seven years. Since 1970, ten states have launched dedicated nuclear weapons programs and only three have succeeded (the jury’s
still out on Iran). These three have taken an average of 17 years to succeed and Iran under the Islamic Republic has been working towards a
nuclear weapon capability for some three decades.

Just as pundits have routinely underestimated the difficulty of building nuclear weapons , so too do they grossly
overstate the number of states who are technically capable of building them. Both journalists and scholars
regularly cite 40 as the number of non-nuclear weapon states who are technically capable of building them. This figure is often
attributed to the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, who said in 2004:
“Some estimates indicate that 40 countries or more now have the know-how to produce nuclear weapons, which means if they have the
required fissile material — high enriched uranium or plutonium — we are relying primarily on the continued good intentions of these
countries.”

As Scott Sagan has pointed out, most

of those citing ElBaradei omit the latter part of his statement about having
the required fissile material. But this statement is crucial as only a handful of NNWS are capable of
producing or otherwise procuring fissile material, which is necessary for a nuclear bomb.

Moreover, thanks in no small part to President Obama’s focus on nuclear security, the
global availability of fissile material has
been declining as the U.S. and its allies help remove fissile material from some states while downsizing
the stockpiles in many others. Furthermore, compared with the Cold War era and even the 1990s, nuclear weapon holding and
nuclear capable states are much less willing to sell NNWS crucial dual use technology that can be used to indigenously produce fissile material.

Thus, contrary to common perception, there is no impeding nuclear domino about to fall.
 2AC – Impact Turn – Prolif Good – Solves Overstretch
Impact Turn – allowing “friendly” prolif reduces the risk of deadly conflict and the
benefits outweigh the risks – prefer comparative evidence
Bandow, 2016
(Doug, Senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, “Let
Them Make Nukes: The Case for "Friendly" Proliferation”, Foreign Policy, July 26,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/japan/2016-07-26/let-them-make-nukes, accessed on 6/24/19,
ZW)

But the biggest cost is the human one, since maintaining

the nuclear umbrella increases the risk of conflict.
Hypothetically, if
Washington were to aid any of these states in the face of a nuclear attack, it would expose
itself to a retaliatory attack on U.S. soil, which would put the lives of thousands if not millions of its own citizens
in jeopardy for modest or even minimal gains . Without a Cold War, the Republic of Korea is not particularly
important to U.S. security; moreover, Seoul, which is the world’s 13th largest economy, is capable of defending itself. It
could also field a much larger conventional force and South Korean experts have boasted that the country has the capability to produce a
nuclear weapon in less than two years.

Moreover, many of the risks that Washington’s help is meant to fend off are fanciful . No one could really imagine a
Chinese armada sailing into Tokyo Bay. And even if war did arise between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands,
it is unlikely that Washington would actually use nukes against China for such low stakes. The question of whether
nuclear defense alliances are necessary begs another: Do they even work? Historically, deterrence often fails. Both World Wars featured
defensive alliances that failed to prevent conflict. Instead, the military pacts expanded the conflicts.

One possible solution is to replace the nuclear umbrella with “friendly” proliferation . The United States could
allow its Asian allies—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—to develop their own deterrence against China and North Korea. If conflict
emerged, the United States would not automatically be dragged into war . Washington could reconfigure its military
for its own defense, rather than overstretch itself by providing offense for every one of its allies across the globe.

To be sure, even friendly proliferation would have negative

consequences. But they are not as alarming as commonly
thought. Permitting South Korea and Japan to build nuclear weapons would undermine the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty, but in reality, so has Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, Washington’s acceptance
of India as a nuclear power, and allied negotiation with Iran to forestall its development of nuclear
weapons. Nonproliferation policy always has been tempered by changing circumstances. Washington should allow the same in northeast
Asia.

Proliferation could also accelerate the regional arms race , particularly given that there is currently no known limit to North
Korea’s nuclear ambitions. China might also speed up improvements to its nuclear program in response, but it would be
difficult, if not impossible, for such efforts to overcome the capabilities of U.S. allies. Missiles from just
one Japanese submarine could take out China’s most important cities , irrespective of Beijing’s retaliatory capacity.

Another downside to proliferation is that the greater the number of nations with nukes, the higher the
risk of accidents, mistakes,
leakages, misuse, and more. But these risks are fairly low compared to aggressive behavior that the nuclear
umbrella encourages—essentially, it rewards U.S. allies into being more aggressive risk-takers. In the 2000s,
the emboldened Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian routinely challenged Beijing. Georgia started the 2008 war
against Russia with the apparent assumption that Washington would come to Tbilisi’s aid, if needed.
Friendly proliferation could also increase nuclear tensions and instability , especially during the transition
phase when countries are in the process of increasing their stockpiles. Other powers might be tempted to thwart
their attempts at building nuclear weapons by launching an attack. But countries secure in their deterrent capabilities, such as China,
are less likely to see a fledgling nuclear power as a threat . For example, a half century ago, the United States and the
Soviet Union, comfortable with their own capabilities, decided not to stymie China’s nascent nuclear weapons program. If North Korea
feels threatened by nuclear programs in South Korea and Japan, Washington could maintain its security
guarantee until its allies develop their retaliatory capabilities in full. That should be enough to keep Pyongyang in
check.
 1AR – Impact Turn – Prolif Good – Deters North Korea
Japanese possession of nuclear weapons would be the signal necessary to get China to
rein in North Korea
Kelly and Kubo, 2017
(Tim and Nobuhiro, staff writers for Reuters, “Allowing nuclear weapons in Japan could defuse North
Korean threat, say some policy makers”, Reuters, September 6, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-
northkorea-missiles-japan/allowing-nuclear-weapons-in-japan-could-defuse-north-korean-threat-say-
some-policy-makers-idUSKCN1BH1FO, accessed on 6/24/19, ZW)

North Korea, pursuing its weapons programs in defiance of international condemnation, fired an intermediate ballistic missile
over Japan last week, prompting authorities to sound sirens and advise residents to take cover.

On Sunday, NorthKorea tested a nuclear device that had a yield estimated at ten times that of the atom bomb
dropped by the United States on Hiroshima in 1945.

Inviting U.S. nuclear

weapons would be an attempt by Japan jolt China , North Korea’s sole major ally, to do more to rein
in its neighbor by showing there are consequences to North Korean provocations that threaten its neighbors and
destabilize the region, the policy maker said.

A simple way to do this could be for a nuclear-armed U.S. submarine to operate from one of the U.S. Navy bases in Japan, he said, a move
bound to infuriate China.

Former Japanese defense minister Shigeru

Ishiba stoked controversy on Wednesday by questioning whether Japan
can expect protection under the U.S. nuclear umbrella while maintaining its non-nuclear principles.
“Is it right that we don’t discuss this?” Ishiba asked in a television interview.

In his election campaign last year, Donald Trump chided Japan and South Korea for not contributing enough to their defenses. On Tuesday, the
president said he was ready to sell Seoul billions of dollars in weapons and scrap a limit on the size of warheads the Washington would supply.

“We don’t have any plan to begin discussing the three non-nuclear principles,” Japan Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters
when asked to respond to Ishiba’s comment.

Yet, the growing North Korean threat could stifle some of the opposition, experts say.

“Just by raising
this issue of nuclear principles, Japan will push the United States and China to act, and it is
something that Beijing is not going to like ,” said Takashi Kawakami, a security expert at Japan’s Takushoku University.

“It’s the medicine that China needs to make it act against North Korea.”
 Arms Race =/= War
Arms race doesn’t lead to conflict – most countries lack key capability elements,
maintain defensive capability
Huxley, 2018
(Tim, Executive director at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (Asia), “Why Asia's 'arms race'
is not quite what it seems”, World Economic Forum, September 12,
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/asias-arms-race-and-why-it-doesnt-matter/, accessed
6/25/19, ZW)

Media reports often highlight expensive arms purchases by Asian governments. But military capability is complex, and buying
new ‘kit’
does not provide countries with instant capabilities , as is often inferred. Other important elements of capability
include appropriate doctrine, suitable training, inspiring leadership, high morale, vital logistic support (including
defence-industrial capacity), relevant combat experience and a high level of operational integration between military
branches and services. Besides, mastery of the cyber domain may be emerging as the sine qua non of military capability, potentially
providing the capacity to take down an opponent’s ability and will to fight even before a shot is fired.

Only a minority of Asian armed forces possess all these key capability elements . In many cases, while they
might be able to hold domestic insurgents or other forms of unrest at bay , or engage in border skirmishes, their forces
would be unable to mount sustained operations against those of other countries. Moreover, most of the
military capabilities under development in the region remain essentially defensive.
This applies not least to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). China’s major, sustained, long-term defence effort is certainly enhancing the
capabilities of the PLA, which would in any conflict now be able to complicate US operational planning and activities severely. But China’s long-
range offensive capabilities – its nuclear deterrent aside - remain limited. The PLA is still a long way from matching American capabilities, and it
would have little hope of winning any conflict with the US, whose military presence and commitments continue to ensure the security of the
whole region.

More lavish military spending and arms acquisition by Asian governments mean that they would be able to inflict
greater damage on adversaries in the event of conflict. But these military efforts – with the unique exception of North Korea’s
nuclear and missile development programmes – are themselves not the most likely causes of conflict in the
region. Political differences between states deriving from geopolitical ambition, and potential miscalculation, are far more dangerous and
likely causes of war.
 No War – Japan-China ties good
Sino-Japanese relations are good – economic ties, navigating Trump, and conflict
avoidance – G-20, AIIB, and Senkakus prove
Olsen, 6/24/19
(Kelly, Hong Kong Correspondent for CNBC, “Japan and China look to strengthen ties at G-20 summit,
even as Trump looms large”, CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/25/japan-abe-and-china-xi-look-to-
strengthen-ties-at-g-20-as-trump-looms.html, accessed 6/25/19, ZW)

Analysts say reasons

for the rapprochement include economic interdependence, a need to focus on the
future and the emergence of an unforeseen wild card: the 2016 election of U.S. President Donald Trump, whose presence in Osaka
looms large for both men.

“The greatest impetus for warming Sino-Japanese relations is their realization that China and Japan need
to cooperate with each other more closely in the face of their changing relations with the United States, ” Victor Teo, an
assistant professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Hong Kong, told CNBC in an email.

Japan is a loyal U.S. ally and the countries are tightly bound economically. But Abe
is wary of Trump’s protectionist “America First”
tendencies and has — so far, at least — deftly avoided becoming a major tariff target.

Not so Xi, who has been forced to fight back in a damaging trade war launched by the Trump administration.
Almost smiling

While Trump has provided Abe and Xi with reasons to move closer, the effort long predates his arrival.

Already high bilateral tensions between China and Japan were spiraling higher just before the two Asian leaders took power, around the same
time more than six years ago.

The escalation was due in part to a simmering dispute over control of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea,
which spilled into anti-Japanese protests in Chinese cities.

Ties remained rocky and were further inflamed in late 2013 when Abe, a staunch nationalist, visited a Tokyo shrine honoring Japan’s war dead,
including from World War II, which infuriated Beijing.

China and Japan are major trade and investment partners. While they are also rivals for political and economic influence in the Asia-Pacific
region and beyond, they have come to realize the need to work together, analysts say.

A major step in the cooling off process was a wording compromise on the dispute over the small islands that both claim, but which are
effectively controlled by Japan. That was immediately followed by the grim-looking leaders clasping hands in Beijing in November 2014 just
ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit hosted by Xi.

While neither side has given up its claims to those islands — and their ships and planes continue to play cat-and-mouse in
the area — they have successfully lowered the temperature and avoided escalation. Japan’s Abe too has
refrained from further shrine visits.
By the time Abe and Xi met in Vietnam in 2017, they were almost smiling, underscoring their steadily improving ties.

“Our relations are back on a normal track ,” Chen Deming, a former Chinese commerce minister, declared in a speech in Tokyo last
month, in wording that was similar to that used by Abe in January.

Japan politics expert Brad Glosserman pointed out that there was a
significant shift last year which highlighted their thawing
ties: An agreement to cooperate in so-called third countries, such as those involved with China’s massive Belt
and Road infrastructure project and the Beijing-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
“That’s a really important development in so far as it changes thinking about innate hostility in both capitals towards each other,” Glosserman,
deputy director and visiting professor at the Center for Rule Making Strategies at Tama University in Tokyo, told CNBC.

The Belt and Road and the AIIB, which finances transportation networks, power stations and other infrastructure, are key
symbols of China’s growing global stature. Japan , which has long backed the Manila-based Asian Development Bank, was
initially wary of the Chinese initiatives but increasingly sees potential for opportunity.
 No War – Abe
Abe wants to portray the US-Japan alliance as strong to deter adversaries – no risk he
goes to war
Kelly 5/27 (Mary Louise, co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered, 2019, “As Asia Transforms, Abe Looks
To Clarify U.S.-Japan Alliance In Trump Meetings”, https://www.npr.org/2019/05/27/727358635/as-
asia-transforms-abe-looks-to-clarify-u-s-japan-alliance-in-trump-meetings, Aly M)

Well, I think the message that Abe wanted to convey was first and foremost obviously to the Japanese
people that their relationship is very close. I thought the imperial visit was very successful largely because the new emperor and
empress looked very relaxed. They spoke in English. There were no interpreters. It was a very strong debut, if
you will, for the new emperor and empress on the global stage.
I think there's also a message to be had in the region. Mr. Trump in Tokyo, with all the pomp and circumstance, with
even the irritations on trade and that mixed signal in North Korea - it was clear that this is an alliance
that was vibrant, that was coherent and that was still being deeply supported by both countries. That's
the message Mr. Abe wants to send to Pyongyang and certainly the message he wants to send to
Beijing.
KELLY: That pomp and circumstance extended to the appearance of Trump 2020 campaign banners. They
were visible as the president was making his way through Japan's streets. Another of the events that he attended
was this sumo tournament. Why is Prime Minister Abe so intent on courting President Trump?
SMITH: Well,
you know, you - the backdrop here, too, is the Japanese people are not as critical of
President Trump as many of the citizens of our other allies in Europe, for example. The president and
the prime minister do have a reasonably strong working relationship. The Japanese diplomats pointed
out before the visit that they've spoken or met 42 times since the president came into office.
KELLY: Forty-two times, wow.
SMITH: An
unprecedented amount of contact. So I think there's still this sense that this is a good
partnership and that Mr. Abe can make it work.
 Alliance Thumper
Japan alliance is thumped.
Ko Hirano 19. Staff writer at Kyodo News. 1-20-2019. "Japan-U.S. ties in deep uncertainty as Trump
enters 3rd year in office." Kyodo News+. https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2019/01/881142410568-
update1-focus-japan-us-ties-in-deep-uncertainty-as-trump-enters-3rd-yr-in-office.html

But Trump initiatives such as the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, the suspension
of U.S. military exercises with South Korea and the imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports
from Japan and other U.S. allies have dealt blows to the Abe government. In an apparent criticism of the America First
mantra, only 28 percent of Japanese respondents to a 2018 U.S. survey said Washington takes Tokyo's
interests into account when making international policy decisions, down from 38 percent in 2013 under former President
Barack Obama. In light of the U.S. pullout from the TPP and exit from the Paris climate agreement, the Pew Research
Center survey found that only 30 percent of Japanese have confidence in Trump's handling of world affairs ,
compared with a range of 60 to 85 percent under the Obama presidency. Citing concerns about planned negotiations for a Japan-U.S. trade
agreement and Trump's dealings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, experts believe uncertainty in Tokyo-Washington
relations is likely to increase as the Republican president steps up his America First agenda in his bid for
re-election in 2020. With Trump and Kim set to hold a second summit "near the end of February," some experts
fear the leaders may agree that Washington would ease sanctions in exchange for Pyongyang addressing the
issue of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could strike the United States. Such a deal, however, would leave the
issue of shorter range missiles capable of hitting Japan and South Korea unresolved. The experts also worry that
given Trump's decision in December to pull U.S. troops out of Syria -- a surprise that prompted the resignation of Jim Mattis
as defense secretary -- Trump might announce a possible withdrawal of American troops from South Korea, a
development that would significantly affect the security of Japan. "The theatrical back and forth between
Trump and Kim Jong Un has left Japan feeling sidelined and nervous about a potential deal that might be
beneficial for the U.S., but not for Japan," said Sayuri Romei, fellow for security and foreign affairs at Sasakawa Peace
Foundation USA, a Washington think tank. After the first-ever U.S.-North Korea summit last June in Singapore,
Trump said, "I want to bring our soldiers back home," in reference to 28,500 American troops stationed in South Korea.
Together with Trump's suspension of joint military exercises with Seoul -- a major concession to Kim in the absence
of Pyongyang's credible measures for denuclearization -- Romei said, "Unpredictability and surprise are the things that
allies fear the most, and I think Japan has felt that in the past two years." "The feeling of being left out is
not necessarily expressed publicly by Japanese officials, but I have heard some frustration in more private
settings," she said. Uncertainty runs deep in the economic field, as well. Japan is insisting the two countries aim for a trade
agreement on goods only but the United States is pushing for a comprehensive pact that would also cover areas such as services, investment,
intellectual property and currency as a means to reduce the trade deficit with Japan. Referring to upcoming trade talks, the Trump
administration has said it "may seek to pursue negotiations with Japan in stages, as appropriate" -- indicating the possibility of first reaching a
smaller deal that would not cover a full range of issues.
 Japan Won’t Abandon Nuclear Umbrella

Japan is critically dependent on the US nuclear umbrella and will accommodate the US
to preserve its status
Mainichi 18 (Mainichi Japan is a daily newspaper in Japan, 2/5, “Japan's dependence on nuclear
umbrella highlighted as it hails new US policy”,
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180205/p2a/00m/0na/012000c, Aly M)

The Japanese government's open-armed acceptance of the United States' Nuclear Posture Review
(NPR), which was recently released by the administration of President Donald Trump, has underscored
Japan's dependence on the U.S. nuclear umbrella amid North Korea's nuclear and missile development,
a move running counter to its own efforts toward nuclear abolition as the world's only atomic-bombed
country as a result of war.
Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono issued a statement on Feb. 3 after the NPR was released, saying
that the U.S. nuclear strategy clarified Washington's commitment to providing extended deterrence to
its allies including Japan and that Tokyo "highly appreciates" the latest NPR which showed such a policy.
The statement also touched on nuclear disarmament, saying that Japan will cooperate closely with the
United States to "promote realistic and tangible nuclear disarmament" while responding to actual
security threats, stressing Japan's reality in which the country faces a nuclear threat by North Korea.
A senior Foreign Ministry official said, "While the belief in nuclear abolition is important as ideal, this is
not the time for it. ... It is a fact that during the eight years of the administration of President Barack
Obama, China and Russia increased their military capabilities and nuclear and missile threats by North
Korea grew."
Japan supported the Obama administration's call for a "world without nuclear weapons" and its nuclear
arms reduction policy, but had conveyed its concerns to Washington over nuclear disarmament
programs that could lead to the weakening of deterrence, such as eliminating nuclear arms to be
mounted on cruise missiles. The latest NPR included the deployment of nuclear cruise missiles, which
served as one of the reasons for Tokyo to welcome the policy.
 Alliance Resilient
Japan alliance resilient – no reason why other allies aren’t the same
Pilling 15 — David Pilling, Asia editor of the Financial Times. 2015 ("An unsinkable Pacific alliance,"
Financial Times, April 22nd, Availabale Online at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e32282d8-e8cf-11e4-87fe-
00144feab7de.html#axzz3cPkFBAkt)

The closeness between America and Japan, forged in the ashes of war, goes beyond the ideological¶ If
the Americans and Japanese went in for that kind of thing they might describe themselves as being as
close as lips and teeth. In actual fact, that it is how China and North Korea have traditionally categorised
their relationship. Washington and Tokyo prefer to talk soberly about their “shared values” as fellow
democracies and market economies. Yet, despite the lack of colourful language, theirs has been one of
the closest and most enduring of postwar relationships. They stand shoulder to shoulder on most issues
from terrorism to intellectual property .¶ That closeness, forged in the ashes of the second world war,
goes beyond the ideological. In tangible ways, the two lean on each other heavily. The US regards Japan
as its representative in Asia. It depends on Japan to help fund its debt : Tokyo not Beijing is the biggest
holder of US Treasuries, if only just. Japan has supported Washington’s military interventions, with cash
and, increasingly, with logistical support. Tokyo relies on the US nuclear umbrella and on the protection
afforded by 35,000 US troops stationed on its territory. In a candid description of the relationship,
Yasuhiro Nakasone, prime minister in the mid-1980s, referred to Japan as Washington’s “ unsinkable
aircraft carrier” in the Pacific.¶ Next week Shinzo Abe, perhaps Japan’s strongest leader since Mr
Nakasone, will celebrate 70 years of that relationship with a rare speech to a joint session of Congress.
He will stress Japan’s concerted effort to revive its economy. He will urge Congress to give Barack
Obama, the US president, the fast-track authority he needs to conclude the Trans Pacific Partnership. He
will express some contrition for the war, though perhaps not enough for the taste of some in congress.
He will paint a future in which Japan, released from postwar constitutional handcuffs, can play a more
active role in helping the US to keep the world a safe and lawful place. He is unlikely to mention China.
But everyone will know what he means. ¶ Mr Abe will mostly be warmly received. Washington hopes
Abenomics will work and is prepared to tolerate a little “Abenesia” — the downplaying of Japan’s war
record — if that is the price of a strong leader. Indeed, many in Washington regard Mr Abe as the best
Japanese prime minister in a generation.
 Link Defense
Diplomacy solves the link.
Ramesh Thakur 16. Thakur is the director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament
at Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy. 8-19-2016. "Why Obama should
declare a no-first-use policy for nuclear weapons." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/why-obama-should-declare-a-no-first-use-policy-for-nuclear-weapons/

The umbrella will hold. One of the loudest objections to an American no-first-use declaration is that it could
disrupt the nuclear deterrence Washington extends to its non-nuclear allies, countries like Japan, South
Korea, and Australia. The Japanese government in particular has expressed concern about this, as have
Britain, France, and South Korea. Yet extended nuclear deterrence has its limitations, and it’s not clear if
American security guarantees would change much if Washington adopted a no-first-use policy. While the United
States has firm security commitments to countries in northern Asia, for example, these do not include,
according to the arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis, a specific commitment to use nuclear weapons in their defense—
especially against non-nuclear attacks. Michael Krepon, writing recently for Arms Control Wonk, put it this way: “The United
States is not going to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. Allies who believe otherwise are attached to a
fiction and a psychological crutch.” Thus while an American no-first-use declaration would certainly cause some
commotion in the short term, with the proper diplomatic efforts to reassure allies of Washington’s
ongoing security commitments, there shouldn’t be any long-term damage done to those relationships—
or any practical change to the security commitments themselves.

Other fights derail.

Hal Brands 1-30. Bloomberg columnist and the Henry Kissinger distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins
University’s School of Advanced International Studies. 1-30-2019. "Can U.S. alliances withstand Trump's
venom?." Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/01/30/commentary/world-
commentary/can-u-s-alliances-withstand-trumps-venom/

After two years under rhetorical assault from U.S. President Donald Trump, America’s alliances have somehow held
up. This year, however, the constraints on Trump’s anti-alliance instincts are falling away, and a mix of internal
and external pressures are endangering several key alliances at once. This trend is most visible with
respect to NATO. The trans-Atlantic alliance has been a target of Trump’s ire for decades. Since taking office, he has berated European
leaders, waffled on America’s Article 5 commitment to protect allies, and even mused about withdrawing from the pact. Yet for two years,
largely thanks to the initiative of Congress and the Pentagon, day-to-day relations with NATO remained relatively steady. The administration
increased spending on military activities meant to deter Russian aggression. The alliance also took steps to improve its military readiness and
address unconventional threats such as cyberattacks and information warfare. This progress, however, was largely dependent on the presence
of committed, pro-NATO officials in the American bureaucracy. Those officials are becoming scarcer by the day. Secretary of Defense James
Mattis is gone, replaced by an acting secretary — Patrick Shanahan — who seems more inclined to fulfill the president’s wishes. National
Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are not anti-NATO, but their hostility to the European Union poisons their
relationships with European colleagues. Less visibly, several key Pentagon and State Department officials responsible for the NATO portfolio —
Assistant Secretary of Defense Robert Karem, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas Goffus and Assistant Secretary of State Wess
Mitchell — have left or will soon leave their posts. None of this means that Trump is likely to withdraw from NATO. Bipartisan support for a
recent House resolution that seeks to prevent Trump from unilaterally pulling
out of that alliance is a clear warning of the political price
he would pay for doing so. The most likely scenario is that there will simply be less constructive leadership
from Washington — less ability to propose new initiatives or even respond to allies’ ideas — at a time
when NATO confronts major challenges from Russia and illiberalism is surging within the alliance. Things
are no better on the other side of the world. The Japan-U.S. alliance has come through the first half of
Trump’s term in stronger shape than one might have expected , given the president’s three-decade history of Japan-
bashing. Yet
the strains are subtly mounting. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s assiduous personal cultivation of
Trump did not prevent the president from peremptorily withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in his
first week in office. Now, Abe fears that Trump may cut a grand bargain with China at Japan’s expense,
or make a deal with North Korea that similarly ignores Tokyo’s security concerns. And while the challenges in the
Japan-U.S. alliance are merely simmering, the problems may be coming to a boil in two other alliances.
The U.S.-South Korea alliance is in crisis, as negotiations on the amount Seoul pays to defray the costs of
the American troop presence have deadlocked. According to South Korean officials, U.S. negotiators
asked for a dramatic hike in these payments, casting doubt on whether Washington was dealing in good
faith. The fact that the U.S. side has asked for annual renegotiations — as opposed to a multi-year
agreement — has heightened concerns that Trump will simply ask for more again next year. The resulting
impasse may lead the Pentagon to stop paying South Korean contractors starting in the spring. It could also
give an American president who has never liked the U.S. presence on the Korean Peninsula an excuse to
begin reducing that presence. Last year, Congress passed legislation prohibiting the Pentagon from cutting U.S. troop levels in South
Korea below 22,000 (from the current 28,000). That prohibition can be circumvented, however, if the secretary of defense certifies that doing
so is in the national interest. Makingthe future of the alliance even more precarious is that this internal dispute
is happening at a critical stage in U.S.- North Korea diplomacy. As the upcoming summit with Kim Jong Un
approaches, Trump will surely be tempted to make a big concession that will jump-start moribund negotiations on North
Korean missiles and nukes. Given how little he cares for the U.S. troop presence in the first place — and given that he
suspended U.S.-South Korean military exercises after his previous summit with Kim — the president may try to kill two birds with
one stone. He could withdraw some U.S. forces as a way of appeasing Kim and punishing the South Koreans for not
paying up. Doing so would be a gift to Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing: It would be a big step toward undermining the alliance with Seoul and
America’s position in Northeast Asia. Finally,
America’s most important alliance in Southeast Asia is also entering a
danger zone. For years, the U.S. has refused to clarify whether the Mutual Defense Treaty with the
Philippines covers the islands and reefs that Manila controls in the South China Sea. That ambiguity is meant to
avoid writing a “blank check” that Manila might cash by provoking China. Yet given how rapidly China’s expansionism is shifting the balance of
influence in the region, ambiguity is rapidly becoming untenable. Since 2012, when the U.S. failed to prevent Beijing from seizing control of
Scarborough Shoal, Filipino officials have worried that Washington cannot deter the Chinese salami-slicing that is paring away their country’s
sovereignty. Making matters worse, the U.S. has formally clarified its commitment to defending the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands in
the East China Sea, while evading questions about whether it has a parallel commitment to the Philippines. Further fueling the crisis is the fact
that the Philippines now have a president — Rodrigo Duterte — who is openly skeptical of the value the U.S. defense commitment provides. As
a result of all this, Philippines Secretary of National Defense Delfin Lorenzana has been signaling that Manila
may re-evaluate its commitment to the Mutual Defense Treaty if Washington doesn’t clarify its position. Yet the Trump
administration has so far been silent, perhaps because American officials sense that this issue will be a loser with a president who sees alliances
as burdens. A position of continued American ambiguity will probably not lead Duterte to pull out of the alliance. But it may reinforce his belief
that Chinese power will ultimately dominate Southeast Asia, and that Manila should accommodate rather than resist the inevitable. That, in
turn, would make it far harder for the U.S. to rally the region against Chinese revisionism; it would subtly but unmistakably erode America’s
position in Southeast Asia. To be fair, the crisis of this particular alliance is not really Trump’s fault . Reassuring an
exposed ally — while also restraining that ally from unwise actions — would test the abilities of even a competent, committed administration.
Yet the chances that things could turn out badly, with the Philippines or any of these allies, are only
heightened by the fact that America currently has a hollowed-out administration led by this particular
president. Since Trump took office, U.S. foreign policy wonks have worried that his presidency would be
a period of grave peril for America’s alliances. This might be the year that proves them right.
Politics
 Popular
Bipartisan support for the plan
Kimball 12 (Daryl Kimball, ACA, October 2012, US Conventional Arms Sales to Taiwan,
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/taiwanarms) PA

During his first term in office, President Barack Obama has sought to reduce the visibility U.S. arms sales
to Taiwan by providing new three arms packages, while simultaneously refusing to approve a deal to
provide Taiwan with new fighter jets, the most contenious issue for China. Instead, the administration
has offered to upgrade Taipei's existing fleet of F-16 fighters, rather than approve a deal that would
provide Taiwan with 66 new F-16 fighters. This upgrade agreement is in addition to the AH-64 Apache
attack helicopters, P-3C Orion maritime patrol planes and Patriot Advanced Capability-3 air defense
systems provided to Taipei as a part of the Obama administration's three arms packages to Taiwan since
entering into office in January 2008. The Obama administration has suffered bipartisan criticism from
Congress a result of both their perceived indifference to Taiwan and their concern for China's reaction to
any announced arms transfers.

No more support for Taiwan --- No backlash to the plan

Tucker and Glaser ‘11

(Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Professor of History at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, Senior Scholar at the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and Bonnie Glaser, Senior Fellow with the
Freeman Chair in China Studies and Senior Associate with the CSIS Pacific Forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Member
of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Institute of International Strategic Studies, holds an M.A. in International Economics and Chinese
Studies from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, 2011 “Should the United States Abandon Taiwan?,” The
Washington Quarterly, Volume 34, Issue 4, Fall, pg online @ https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-
public/legacy_files/files/publication/twq11autumntuckerglaser.pdf)

Congress, which was once a loud advocate of support for Taiwan, has become much less
Tellingly, the U.S.

voluble. Capitol Hill rarely celebrates Taiwan as a doughty survivor of the Cold War anymore. Old
friends, unhappy that Taiwan has sought to improve relations with China, have soured toward Taipei .
Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), for instance, although a founder in 2002 of the Congressional Taiwan Caucus, resigned as cochair in 2009, lamenting Taiwan’s decision to cooperate

The waning of congressional attention to, and enthusiasm for, Taiwan

with Beijing, rather than oppose the repressive regime.12

has taken place gradually as memories of China’s 1989 Tiananmen massacre have faded, the PRC’s economic links
to the United States boomed, and Taiwan’s presence on Capitol Hill ebbed. More than 20 years after
Tiananmen, the horror has dissipated, and many Americans think of Tiananmen Square only as a tourist
destination. China’s military modernization, its burgeoning international role, and its enormous
economic power command attention and respect. Concurrently, the boost that Tiananmen and U.S.
disillusionment with China gave to Taiwan has also diminished . In fact, the very democracy that is Taiwan’s strongest bond with the United
States has meant that Taiwan’s goals and interests are no longer articulated by a single voice, and are not clear to

busy members of Congress. Instead, multiple organizations—governmental and nongovernmental—render different and conflicting claims on U.S. friendship and
support.13 [end page 28] Ironically, Taiwan has also suffered because of its improved relations with the executive branch

of the U.S. government. After 1996, the Clinton administration struck a bargain with Taipei: if it would stop seeking to

overturn administration policies by mobilizing the Congress, the executive branch would be more
accessible and responsive. Initially a clever and productive strategy, it had unforeseen consequences as
Taiwan’s lobbying decreased and Taiwan’s legendary clout—second only to the Israel lobby—dwindled .
Nevertheless, although influential members like Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) oppose arms sales to Taiwan, others such as Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) object to ending those same sales
and abandoning Taiwan.
China’s protesting the new round of sales—means Congress wants to block them
Weihua 14 (Chen Weihua, correspondent for China Daily. US arms sales to Taiwan protested Dec 22 2014
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2014-12/22/content_19141607.htm)

The latest US arms sales to Taiwan have not only drawn sharp protests from the Chinese government
but also criticism from experts on China-US relations. US President Barack Obama signed the Naval
Vessel Transfer Act on Thursday to pave the way for the US government to sell four used Perry-class
guided missile frigates to Taiwan. It was Taiwan's first purchase of US-made military equipment in three
years. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said on Friday that the Chinese government has
lodged a formal protest to the US in Beijing and Washington, and that China reserves the right for
further actions. "The Taiwan question concerns China's core interest and remains the important and
sensitive issue in China-US relations," Qin said. "The Chinese side is firmly opposed to the arms sales
by the US to Taiwan. The position is steadfast, clear and consistent." He said the US action was
"brutally interfering in China's domestic affairs and undermines China's sovereignty and security
interests". "It goes against the trend of peaceful development of the cross-Straits relations," he said. Qin
urged the US to stop official interactions and military exchanges with Taiwan, stop selling arms to
Taiwan and do more that is conducive to the overall interests of China-US relations and the peaceful
development of cross-Straits relations. Chinese Ministry of Defense spokesman also made a similar
protest. Geng described the US action as going against the good momentum of current China-US
military-to-military relations. The two countries have witnessed growing military exchanges in the past
years with high-level visits and joint exercises, including China participating for the first time in the US-
led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval exercise this summer. China has long regarded US arms sales to
Taiwan, the US' frequent close-in surveillance along China's coast and the US Congress laws restricting
military exchanges with China as three major stumbling blocks for developing bilateral military-to-
military ties. The four frigates to be sold to Taiwan this time are the USS Taylor, USS Gary, USS Carr and
USS Elrod, commissioned in 1984 and 1985. Many Chinese have questioned why the US would make
such a move at a time when cross-Straits relations are believed by many to be at their best in decades.
Zha Daojiong, professor at the School of International Studies of Peking University, told China Daily on
Sunday that the announcement of the arms sales can cause many to wonder if the Obama
administration is backpedaling in pursuing ties with China. Zha said that while Beijing should not see
the sales as unexpected, as Washington can refer to its "gradual phase out" clause in a 1982 bilateral
agreement, the timing is not good only weeks after Obama had a productive visit to Beijing. Obama
visited Beijing last month during which the two countries reached important agreements on climate
change, military confidence building, visa extension and expansion of an information technology
agreement. . "Was it because Washington saw an opportunity to exploit a sense of uncertainty in
cross-Straits ties after the loss of KMT in local elections in Taiwan?" Zha asked. Zha said the move does
"not bode well for those in the (Chinese) mainland that prefer to see Washington working with Beijing
to enlarge areas of cooperation and minimize geostrategic suspicions." Zhiqun Zhu, a professor of
political science and international relations at Bucknell University, also said the timing of the
announcement is "unfortunate and suspicious". "With its landslide victory in Taiwan's municipal and
local elections, the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) is aiming to take full control of the government
in the 2016 election. Is the US sending some message to the DPP or the timing is just a coincidence?"
Zhu said to China Daily on Sunday.

China is an essential part of congressional calculus—they’ve caused Congress to block policy in fighter
jet sales
Tiezzi 14 (Shannon Tiezzi, Managing editor at the Diplomat, 10/24/14, China Wants More Military Co-op
With Iran (Sorry, US and Pakistan), The Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2014/10/china-wants-more-
military-co-op-with-iran-sorry-us-and-pakistan/)

No president since George H.W. Bush has approved the sale of advanced fighter jets to Taiwan, and even
that approval came under very specific circumstances. When Bush approved the sale of 150 F-16 A/B fighters to Taiwan, it
was almost entirely a ploy to increase his domestic approval ratings ahead of the 1992 presidential election. Bush had faced severe criticism
over his handling of U.S.-China relations in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square violence in 1989. Selling advanced fighters to Taiwan was a
way of contradicting Bill Clinton’s accusations that Bush was coddling “the butchers of Beijing.” Further, as James Mann argued in his book
About Face, the sale of F-16 A/B fighters was also immensely profitable for General Dynamics (the F-16 manufacturer), and created nearly 6,000
new jobs during an economic downturn. In other words, the last sale of U.S. fighters to Taiwan was dictated by a unique confluence of U.S.
domestic politics — a scenario unlikely to be repeated. It’s not a coincidence that the U.S. hasn’t sold fighters to Taiwan in over 20 years.
Instead, presidents have opted for less controversial measures, such as the 2011 agreement to upgrade
Taiwan’s existing fleet of F-16 A/B fighters. Taiwan’s military has decried this as inadequate — arguing, for
example, that the program will not address the root problem of declining fleet numbers — but their complaints are never enough
to sway the U.S. government. Neither is congressional pressure , which also remains a consistent voice in favor of selling
fighters to Taiwan. In 2011, Senator Robert Menendez (Chairman of Senate Taiwan Caucus) and 45 other senatorswrote a letter urging Obama
to expedite the sale of F-16 C/D aircraft to Taiwan. A few months later, the Obama
administration disregarded this advice
and chose (yet again) not to approve such a sale. Taiwan’s official request for F-16 C/D aircraft has now
been pending for nearly eight years. Like it or not, China remains an essential part of the United States’
calculus when it comes to arms sales to Taiwan. Beijing has made it clear, time and time again, that this single issue has the
most potential to disrupt the U.S.-China relationship. A major policy paper written in 2012 by Cui Tiankai (now the Chinese Ambassador to the
U.S.) and Pang Hanzhao called Taiwan “the most important and most sensitive issue in the [sic] China-US relations.” Xi Jinping himself
reportedly asked the U.S. to cease arms sales to Taiwan during his informal summit with Barack Obama in June 2013. Ever since Nixon made his
overtures to China in the early 1970s, the U.S. has played a balancing act, trying to keep its defense commitments to Taiwan while not scuttling
U.S.-China relations. History is full of examples of this tight-rope walk. The announcement of the normalization of U.S.-PRC relations in 1979
was closely followed by the passage of the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which promised (among other things) “to provide Taiwan with arms of a
defensive character.” UnderPresident Ronald Reagan, the U.S. issued the 1982 joint communiquewith China,
which famously promised that U.S. arms sale to Taiwan “will not exceed, either in qualitative or in
quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic
relations.” The same year, however, the U.S. government also offered the “six assurances” to Taiwan, promising that the U.S. would not set
a date for ending arms sales to Taiwan and would not consult with China prior to making decisions about arms sales. Each pair of diplomatic
decisions seems contradictory, but for better or worse this was the U.S.’s way of maintaining a balance between Taiwan and China. There is
no reason to think the U.S. government is ready to depart from this policy by selling F-35s to Taiwan.
Even in the mid-1990s, President Clinton (who came to office partly on an anti-China platform) avoided
selling fighters to Taiwan — and at that time, China was far less important to the U.S., both politically
and economically, than it is now.
 Unpopular - pc
Ending security assistance to Taiwan costs political capital – alienates powerful Taiwan
supporters and poisons domestic politics
Rigger 11 (Shelley, Fellow specializing in Asian security @ American Enterprise Institute, 11/29, "Why
giving up Taiwan will not help us with China," https://www.aei.org/publication/why-giving-up-taiwan-
will-not-help-us-with-china/)

Ending US defense assistance to Taiwan—whether by repealing the Taiwan Relations Act or by simply declining to provide
defensive equipment to Taiwan’s armed forces—would not “ripen” Taiwan for peaceful unification or obviate the rationale the United States

has historically followed regarding Taiwan. It would, however, intensify the debate over Taiwan policy within the
United States . Taiwan still has many US friends and supporters , and many foreign policy experts
would question a decision to change course . The policy changes Gilley, Glaser, Freeman, and Owens recommend
would stimulate a debate over China policy at a time when negative attitudes toward the PRC already
are on the rise . The last thing Sino-American relations need is an acrimonious, politically charged debate in Washington over policy
toward China and Taiwan. In sum, changing America’s Taiwan policy could easily induce a poisonous turn in the

domestic politics of US China policy without making peaceful unification easier.

 Unpopular - Bipartisam

The plan flies in the face of broad, bipartisan support for Taiwan
By Shirley Kan

CONGRESSIONAL SUPPORT FOR TAIWAN’S DEFENSE THROUGH THE NATIONAL DEFENSE

AUTHORIZATION ACT

https://www.nbr.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/us-taiwan_defense_relations_roundtable_may2018.pdf

May 2018

Overall, congressional oversight ensures the president’s adherence to the Taiwan Relations Act, enacted
in 1979. In addition, Congress uniquely acts as guarantor in the U.S. government to maintain the Six
Assurances that President Ronald Reagan offered to Taiwan in 1982.3 Many members see shared
interests between the United States and Taiwan, a fellow democracy, and have issued statements and
taken actions supporting closer engagement with the island. When the Trump administration notified
Congress of arms sales to Taiwan in June 2017, Senators Bob Menendez (the ranking Democrat on the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and James Inhofe (the second-highest ranking Republican on the
Senate Armed Services Committee, after the chairman John McCain) issued a bipartisan statement as co-
chairs of the Senate Taiwan Caucus. They expressed support for the arms sales as promoting U.S.
interests in a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question and a strong, vibrant, and democratic Taiwan.4
In a bipartisan letter to President Donald Trump before his visit to Beijing in November 2017, which
Taiwan feared would result in a deal at its expense, Representatives Ed Royce and Eliot Engel (the
chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the House Foreign Affairs Committee) reminded the
president that the United States and Taiwan “have fostered a close relationship that has been of
significant strategic and economic benefit to both nations; and our two peoples are bound by shared
values of democracy, human rights, and rule of law.”5 Likewise, in December 2017, after a PRC diplomat
threatened Taiwan, Senator Tom Cotton promptly issued a statement in which he countered, “I take
Beijing’s threats to use military force against Taiwan seriously. That’s why I urge both the president and
Congress to accelerate the sale of defensive weapons to Taiwan, as well as to bring Taiwan into joint
military exercises with the United States. We can’t afford to take Beijing’s saber-rattling lightly.”6 In
February 2018, Senator Inhofe led a delegation of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees to
visit Taiwan and other partners. Inhofe expressed U.S. support for Taiwan: “With China becoming more
aggressive and intent on expanding its influence globally, the United States–Taiwan security relationship
is now more important than ever.”7 The congressional delegation met with Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-
wen and senior ministers.
 Plan Isnt Congress
The plan doesn’t require Congressional action.
Boot 12/14 — Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council
on Foreign Relations, holds an M.A. in Diplomatic History from Yale University, 2016 (“Taiwan Is No
Bargaining Chip,” Commentary, December 14th, Available Online at
https://dev.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/asia/taiwan-is-no-bargaining-chip/, Accessed 01-
24-2017)

The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act obligates the U.S. “to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive
character,” but the president retains vast discretion in terms of how to implement this legislation . If
President Trump suddenly announced that as part of a “great” deal with Beijing he was not selling
Taiwan any major new weapon systems and would not be risking the lives of American service personnel
to defend Taiwan, it is doubtful that either the courts or Congress could obligate him to act otherwise .
Taiwan Prolif DA
 2AC Taiwan Prolif DA – Trump Thumps
Trump thumps Taiwan assurance
Gries & Wang 2/15/19 (Peter Gries studies the political psychology of international affairs, with a
focus on China and the United States and Tao Wang is a China Strategist), “Will China Seize Taiwan?”,
Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2019-02-15/will-china-seize-taiwan
“China must be, and will be reunified,” Chinese President Xi Jinping declared in a speech in January. Xi spoke of “peaceful reunification” with
Taiwan, but he warned, “We do not forsake the use of force.” Ever since Hong Kong and Macau rejoined Mainland China in 1997 and 1999,
respectively, Chinese expectations that Taiwan would follow suit have grown. When, a decade ago, the Beijing Olympics and the global financial
crisis boosted China’s confidence on the world stage, those expectations redoubled. But “peaceful reunification” has proved elusive. After
Taiwan elected Tsai Ing-wen, of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), to the presidency in 2016, many Mainland Chinese
lost patience with the idea. Some Chinese nationalists now argue that China has only a brief window of opportunity to seize Taiwan. Talk of
“forceful reunification” is ascendant. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. SIGN UP China has already begun to tighten the noose.
It has forced Taiwan out of international bodies, such as the World Health Organization; required airlines to replace “Taiwan” with descriptions
such as “Taiwan, Province of China”; and induced five more countries to sever relations with Taipei. Beijing seems to believe that the United
States will sit by as it squeezes Taiwan. Taipei, meanwhile, has convinced itself that China has no plans to invade. And U.S. President Donald
Trump seems to think he can rock the boat without consequences. All are wrong—and their wishful thinking is raising the odds of conflict.
“CHINA DREAM” IN BEIJING Now that Xi has consolidated power, he seeks a legacy befitting the great emperors of old: the reunification of the
Middle Kingdom. “The only thing that will make him the greatest leader in the Chinese Communist Party’s history is to take Taiwan back,” Shen
Dingli, a foreign relations scholar at Fudan University, told Quartz in 2018. “If he were to achieve China’s reunification, who will say he is second
to Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping?" There are signs that Xi believes the world will sit by if China invades Taiwan.
Xi, whose “China Dream” promises to make China great again, likely agrees. “Fight a war, win a war,” is one of his signature slogans. In 2017, he
presided over a military parade with a replica of Taiwan’s presidential palace visible in the distance. Chinese soldiers had constructed it to train
for an invasion of Taiwan. That same year, China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, circumnavigated Taiwan twice. “The PLA is likely preparing
for a contingency to unify Taiwan with China by force,” the U.S. Defense Department told Congress in 2018. There are signs that Xi believes the
world will sit by if China invades Taiwan. “Xi has told people that he was impressed by Putin’s seizure of Crimea,” a Beijing insider told the
reporter Evan Osnos in 2015. “[Putin] got a large piece of land and resources” and met little resistance from the West. Many among China’s
elite have embraced military action. “The possibility for peaceful reunification is gradually dissipating,” Wang Zaixi, a former deputy director of
the PRC’s Taiwan Affairs Office, declared in 2017. “There will very likely be military conflict,” retired Chinese General Wang Hongguang told the
People’s Daily in December. Many ordinary Chinese agree. “If we want to take our island back, we have to use force.” reads a Weibo post from
last November. Both Chinese academics and journalists argue that this sentiment is widespread. “Mainland Chinese public opinion became
impatient with Taiwan a long time ago,” former director of the Chinese Academy of Social Science’s Institute of Taiwan Studies Zhou Zhihuai
wrote in 2017. “Mainland Chinese will be very happy to see the PLA take action to punish a ‘pro-independence Taiwan’,” a Global Times
editorial claimed in 2018. WISHFUL THINKING IN TAIPEI Despite this increased militancy across the Strait, Taipei has convinced itself that China
will not attack. Many in the ruling Democratic Progressive Party have persuaded themselves that China is too sensible to take military action.
“The mainland Chinese leader today is a rational decision maker,” Tsai claimed in 2017: Xi would not provoke a war likely to drag in Japan and
the United States. Others in the DPP depict China as too weak. “China has too many domestic problems” to capture Taiwan, professor Fan Shih-
Ping wrotein 2017. Taiwan’s major opposition party, the Kuomintang, takes a rosy view of Beijing that rejects the idea that China might invade.
“There is no problem,” former president Ma Ying-jeou declared last year. “Nowadays Beijing’s top strategy is peaceful rise,” the journalist
Huang Nian wrote in April. “Forceful reunification would derail it.” This complacency has led Taiwan to neglect its armed forces. Taiwan’s
military suffers from a desperate shortage of officers—nearly half of all lieutenant positions are unfilled. In 2018, Taiwan made matters worse.
Just as talk of “forceful reunification” was rising in Mainland China, the government ended compulsory military enlistment—but allowed felons
to serve. Morale has plummeted. The United States has recommended that Taiwan consider restoring conscription. “The shift to a voluntary
military was a mistake,” U.S. officials concluded. In an April 2018 poll, more than 40 percent of Taiwanese said they had “no confidence at all”
that their military could defend Taiwan; but 65 percent had convinced themselves that the PRC would not take military action against the
island; and only six percent believed that an attack was “very likely.” “AMERICA FIRST” IN WASHINGTON The withering of Taiwan’s armed
forces has increased Taiwan’s military reliance on the United States—just when many in Beijing are questioning the U.S. commitment to
Taiwan. Trump’s “America first” doctrine has convinced many Chinese that the United States is now too isolationist to come to Taiwan’s
defense. “America will absolutely sacrifice Taiwan,” the Global Times insisted in 2017. “On the premise of America First … the United States is
not likely to send troops to fight for Taiwan.” For decades, a U.S. policy of “dual deterrence” has helped prevent conflict in the Taiwan Strait.
Washington has warned Beijing not to attack Taiwan unprovoked, but reassured Chinese leaders that
the United States would not support Taiwanese independence. It has told Taipei, in turn, that the United States
would come to its defense—as long as it did not provoke Beijing by declaring independence. Making the policy work has meant treading a fine
line, but for decades, dual deterrence has allowed Taiwan to enjoy de facto independence and helped prevent a war with China. Trump has
upset that delicate balance. In December 2016, Tsai called Trump to congratulate him on his victory. The incoming Trump administration then
began to talk of “revisiting” the One China policy, under which the United States recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal
government of China, but maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan. Beijing was outraged. Xi refused to talk to Trump until he recommitted the
United States to the One China policy. In February, Trump capitulated. In a phone call with Xi, he affirmed that the United States would
continue to support the “One China” policy. “Trump lost his first fight with Xi,” the Beijing scholar Shi Yinhong bragged to the New York Times.
“He will be looked at as a paper tiger.” Last year, however, the pendulum swung back toward confrontation. In February, Congress passed the
Taiwan Travel Act, encouraging (but not requiring) high-level U.S. officials to visit Taiwan, and high-level Taiwanese officials to visit the United
States. In the fall, Trump started a trade war with China, generating anxiety among Chinese nationalists. They now believe Trump is using
Taiwan as part of a new Cold War against China, creating a sense of urgency for reunification. A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY China could well
move to take Taiwan before 2020, when some Chinese fear that Taiwan’s presidential election will close Beijing’s window of opportunity for
military action. Many Mainland Chinese nationalists were disappointed, rather than relieved, by the pro-independence DPP’s poor showing in
last November’s local Taiwanese elections. This counterintuitive reaction reveals an alarming calculus: should a weakened Tsai and the DPP lose
the presidency in 2020 to a more pro-China candidate, the opportunity for “forceful reunification” would be lost. “What a pity,” one Weibo user
from Beijing wrote about the DPP’s losses. “We could be further away from the day of reunification.” It is the hated DPP that gives Chinese
nationalists a pretext to take Taiwan back now. That disappointment has fed a sense of urgency among many Chinese nationalists. “I request
that Mainland China issue a timetable for reunification,” one outraged Weibo user wrote in November. “Whether peaceful or forceful, please
don’t drag this out again and again.” The 2020 U.S. presidential election also looms in the minds of Chinese nationalists. Trump looks less likely
to win reelection after Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms, and many Chinese worry that a Trump loss would make forceful reunification
harder. Trumpis seen as a businessman and isolationist willing to bargain Taiwan away. “America will
sell Taiwan out in the blink of an eye,” a People’s Daily editorial claimed last year. (Few Chinese recognize the possibility that
Trump might respond forcefully to an attack on Taiwan to rally support at home.) A Trump successor, “forceful reunification” advocates fear,
may not be so willing to cut a deal. Some in Beijing even think China can retake Taiwan without violence. China may “break the enemy’s
resistance without fighting,” Wang Zaixi told the Global Times in 2017. Just as the Communist Party seized Beijing in 1949 without shooting a
single bullet, he argued, China could capture Taiwan peacefully by surrounding the island, imposing economic sanctions, and cutting off its oil
supply. “No need to shed blood,” he concluded. The idea that China can force reunification without fighting is delusional and dangerous.
Tightening the military or economic noose around Taiwan would likely provoke a reaction from the United States. Given popular nationalist
pressures, Beijing would then feel compelled to respond. Things could get out of control fast. All sides need to wake up to the dangers of
backing into a conflict that few want.
 2AC Taiwan Prolif DA – No Prolif

Taiwan won’t proliferate – proliferation risks economic and sovereignty gains

Kassenova 12 (Togzhan Kassenova has a PhD in politics from the University of Leeds and specializes in
nuclear politics and WMD nonproliferation research. “Global Non-Proliferation and the Taiwan
Dilemma”. March 22, 2012 https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/22/global-non-proliferation-and-
taiwan-dilemma-pub-47675)

Since Taiwan is outside of the global non-proliferation regime , Taipei’s unilateral policies, motivations and actions in the
non-proliferation field are paramount. There are several key drivers that influence Taiwan’s choices in this regard.
First, while the international community cannot technically hold Taiwan accountable to the treaties
and regimes to which it is not party, it does expect and pressure Taiwan to adhere to globally accepted
non-proliferation norms. The United States, for example, has played a major role in the trajectory of Taiwan’s nuclear policy. The US
government heavily influenced Taiwan’s decision to abandon a nuclear weapons program that it
attempted to begin twice, in the 1950s and the 1980s. The US has also encouraged and assisted Taiwan with developing its
strategic trade control system.8 Another dimension of Taiwan’s non-proliferation policy is economics-driven. Taipei realizes that its
trade in high-tech dual-use goods depends heavily on whether it is perceived as a reliable actor.
Legislation of some of Taiwan’s key trade partners — the US and Japan — specifically addresses the question of a state’s non-proliferation
record. US legislation makes it difficult and on occasion impossible for US companies to engage in trade with actors with a poor non-
proliferation record.9 Japanese strategic trade-control legislation imposes varying levels of export-control requirements depending on security
concerns and the stringency of the importing country’s export control system.10 Finally, Taiwan’snon-proliferation policy is
driven by its desire to be a part of the international community . While being formally outside all
international arrangements that require statehood, Taiwan aims to adhere to global non-proliferation
norms. Most noticeably, Taiwan’s non-proliferation policy manifests itself in the strategic trade control
system. Despite not being a member of any multilateral export control regimes, Taiwan chose to incorporate items controlled by all four
MECRs in its national control list. In essence, Taiwan voluntarily adheres to rules guiding trade in dual-use goods and
technologies. The Taiwanese government requires traders to seek an export-import license before engaging in transactions that involve items
listed on Taiwan’s national control list. More importantly, Taiwanese
legislation established a “catch-all” provision that
requires traders to apply for an export-import license for items that do not appear on the national
control list but might be used for WMD purposes. This allows the government to throw an even wider
net over products that might lead to proliferation . In another gesture demonstrating Taiwan’s desire to follow international
norms, Taipei established stricter non-proliferation controls with regards to North Korea and Iran . Taipei
developed a “Sensitive Commodity List” that includes a number of items that are controlled by the government if destined for these two
countries.

Taiwan has no capability or motive to go nuclear – long timeframe for impact

Ding et al 12 (Arthur S. Ding is a Research Fellow of the Institute of International Relations, National
Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. Peter R. Lavoy is Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Asian and Pacific Security Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. James J. Wirtz is Dean of the
School of International Graduate Studies, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, and Director
of the Global Center for Security Cooperation, Defense Security Cooperation Agency. Over the Horizon
Proliferation Threats. Palo Alto, CA, USA: Stanford Security Studies, 2012. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 July
2015. Copyright © 2012. Stanford Security Studies.)
Practical Obstacles Several factors contribute to the absence of a nuclear debate in Taiwan. The foremost
involves capability. Although Taiwan is often described as having the requisite technology to develop nuclear weapons, the country
lacks the industrial capability and associated military infrastructure to field a credible nuclear arsenal .
Taipei faces practical obstacles. For instance, the island lacks fissile materials . Taiwan’s heavy water nuclear reactor that can enrich
plutonium, which was located at the Institute for Nuclear Energy Research, has been dismantled. The Institute for Nuclear Energy Research
itself has been downgraded to become a division of the civilian Atomic Energy Council of the executive branch, and its mission has been
redirected toward commercial energy production. Experienced research staff also have left or retired. Waste fuel rods stored at Taipower
Company, which are under the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguard system, also are not available for use in a weapons program. 13
Even if Taiwan managed to assemble a bomb, it lacks test facilities needed for systems integration or a
full-scale test. Taiwan has no place to test a nuclear weapon, and it is impossible to test clandestinely. Simulated tests using super
computers are possible; however, Taiwan has no relevant database to gauge designs tested in this way. Many
observers have described these obstacles. Chien Chung, a nuclear chemistry expert teaching at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua
University, notes that although many research facilities exist on the island, today’s researchers lack practical
experience when it comes to designing and manufacturing nuclear weapons . He noted that it would take
several billion U.S. dollars to “re-build the nuclear weapons program” given its complete disarray. 14 Another observer who is
familiar with Taiwan’s nuclear program also suggested that it would take eight to ten years to rebuild basic scientific
and industrial capacity before any nuclear development program could be undertaken . 15 Political Obstacles
Any effort to start a nuclear program also would encounter domestic political opposition. There is a
strong antinuclear movement in Taiwan that keeps close contact with the global antinuclear movement. This opposition is also
reflected in the DPP’s nuclear-free homeland Taiwan program, which was endorsed in May 2003 with a pledge not to develop nuclear weapons.
16 Combined with highly competitive media, which closely watch sensational stories, it would probably be
impossible to rebuild the nuclear weapons program secretly. Most Taiwanese believe that reviving the nuclear option
is highly risky, with the likely costs far outweighing any potential gains. U.S. policy on weapons of mass
destruction also is likely to deter any effort to launch a nuclear program on the island. U.S. nonproliferation and
counterproliferation policy, combined with Taiwan’s security dependence on Washington, would dissuade potential nuclear advocates. They
know that it is counterproductive for Taiwan to advocate a nuclear option, especially in the context of an improving U.S.-China relationship. 17
Taipei also understands that a nuclear program would tarnish its international image, which would hurt
ongoing efforts to gain international support and sympathy.

No chance for Taiwan prolif

NTI 15 (Nuclear Threat Initiative, international arms control and non-proliferation organization,
“Taiwan”, 2015, http://www.nti.org/learn/countries/taiwan/)

Taiwan possesses much of the technological expertise necessary to develop nuclear weapons, but would face significant
obstacles in doing so—namely, U.S. opposition, international pressure, and the threat of a pre-emptive strike
by China. Recent assessments indicate that it would take Taiwan between one and eight years to
develop a complete nuclear warhead, and most likely much longer to design one light enough to be carried
by any of Taiwan's current land-attack missiles. Regardless, most analysts agree that under the current political
situation, Taiwan is very unlikely to pursue a nuclear weapons capability . [38]

No Japan Prolif
Kulacki, China Project Manager in the UCS Global Security Program, ‘15 (Gregory, “Japan Calls for
United States to End Hair-Trigger Alert,” April, Union of Concerned Scientists) But our interviews with U.S. and
Japanese participants in the EDD confirmed that that did not happen. The EDD does not focus on nuclear deterrence but
on deterrence in general. A senior U.S. Department of Defense official involved in the talks told us that the United States tries to
downplay the role of nuclear issues in the EDD. That means that today’s U.S.-Japanese dialogue on extended deterrence follows in the
footsteps of the one led by Wolfowitz on the INF Treaty 30 years earlier. Now, as
then, the U.S. gov-ernment continues to
affirm that the credibility of the U.S. defense commitment to Japan does not depend on U.S. nuclear
weapons. Why Japan Is Not a Proliferation Risk The most difficult question confronting outside ob-servers today is whether
the contradiction between Japanese government support for nuclear disarmament and the pro-nuclear
preferences of some Japa-nese officials reflects U.S. pressure on Japan, Japanese pressure on the United States, or
mutual consent. U.S. officials who argue that the United States cannot reduce the role of nuclear weapons in the alliance because Japan
might develop nuclear weapons obvi-ously believe Japanese officials are exerting pressure on the United States. Yet all the Japanese
officials we recently interviewed—including the lead political officer who testified in 2009 in support of
redeploy-ing U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Asia—argue that Japan has no leverage on the U.S. nuclear
posture. The opinions expressed in these interviews are consistent with those in a confidential Japanese De-fense
Agency (JDA) study of Japan’s nuclear options conducted by some of the country’s most conserva-tive
defense analysts. The study was commissioned by Japanese elected leaders to inform their decision on whether
to back a permanent extension of the NPT in 1995. At the time, North Korea had embarked on a program to develop nuclear
weapons, and the Chinese Communist Party, which had recently crushed stu-dent-led protests with lethal military force, was threatening
Taiwan with missile launches. The study also considered the possibility that China might use nuclear intimidation to reinforce its claims to the
Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, a focus of tensions be-tween Japan and China. The
study found no imaginable scenario where a
decision to develop nuclear weapons would be in Ja-pan’s national security interests . Even in a worst-
case scenario positing a “break-up of the U.S.- Japan alli-ance, a collapse of the nonproliferation
regime, and an inclination of various countries to go nuclear,” the study concludes: Even in such a case,
it is questionable whether there is any value for a trading nation that de-pends on the stability of
international society to try to secure its survival and protect its interests with its own nuclear weapons. It
would more like-ly undermine the basis of its own survival . Only in a case where destitution reaches a stage where the
exchange of damage with an opponent is not a concern anymore, would the geopolitical vul-nerability of Japan make the nuclear option a
possibility. This,
however, is a case where a con-dition becomes its own goal, and is not worthy of
consideration” (JDA 1995). If Japan’s most conservative defense analysts believe that a collapse of both the
NPT and the U.S.-Japan alliance are not cause to develop nuclear weap-ons , modest changes to U.S.
nuclear weapons poli-cy—such as taking all U.S. land-based ICBMs off hair-trigger alert—should not raise fears that Japan
might respond by withdrawing from the NPT and starting a nuclear weapons program.

No prolif – technical and political hurdles

Holmes, former US Navy surface warfare officer, 12 (James, “Japan: Joining the Nuclear
Weapons Club? It Could.,” http://thediplomat.com/2012/10/japan-joining-the-nuclear-weapons-club-it-
could/)
Despite Japan's renown for high-tech wizardry and long experience operating nuclear power plants, it
would take Tokyo far longer than a year to deploy a working nuclear arsenal. We're talking many years.
As J. C. Wylie defines it, strategy is a plan for using available resources and assets to accomplish some goal. Strategy goes no farther than those implements can
carry it — and strategists cannot simply conjure them into being. Toshi and I see a variety of impediments to a Japanese breakout. Let's catalogue just a few.
Consider the politics. It is certainly true that nuclear weapons are no longer the third rail of Japanese
politics — a topic officials and pundits dare not touch lest it strike them (politically) dead . But Japan's
painful past experience as a target of atomic warfare, its ardent sponsorship of nonproliferation
accords, and the fury with which pacifist-leaning citizens and Japan's Asian neighbors would greet
evidence of a bombmaking program add up to a forbidding political barrier. That barrier is hardly unbreachable, but it
would demand quite a feat of political persuasion on Tokyo's part. As the learned strategist Mike Tyson points out, "everyone has a strategy 'til they get punched in
the mouth." Memo to nuclear-weapons advocates: duck! Nor are the strategic, operational, and technical challenges less daunting. A nuclear triad — land- and sea-
based missiles combined with weapons delivered by manned bombers — holds little promise in light of Japan's lack of geographic depth and the vulnerability of
surface ships and aircraft to enemy action. That means fielding an undersea deterrent would be Tokyo's best nuclear option. But doing so would be far from easy.
The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force operates an impressive fleet of diesel submarines but has no experience with naval nuclear propulsion. And that leaves aside
the difficulty of developing sea-launched ballistic missiles and their nuclear payloads. Such engineering challenges are far from insoluble for Japan's scientific-
technical complex but cannot be conquered overnight. A force of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile subs, or SSBNs, thus looks like a remote prospect for Japan. As an
interim solution, the JMSDF might construct cruise missiles resembling the U.S. Navy's old TLAM-Ns, or nuclear-tipped Tomahawks. JMSDF boats could fire such
missiles through torpedo tubes, the easiest method. Or, shipyards could backfit Japanese subs with vertical launchers — much as the U.S. Navy installed Tomahawk
launchers in its fast attack boats starting in the late Cold War. The problem of constructing nuclear weapons small enough to fit on a missile would remain — but
nuclear-armed diesel boats would represent a viable course of action should Japan decide to join the nuclear-weapons club. Years
down the road, then
— not overnight — a modest Japanese nuclear deterrent might put out to sea . Will Tokyo proceed down
that road? I doubt It. But the prospect no longer appears unthinkable.
South Korea won’t develop nukes – trade ties, energy shortages, NPT, and economics
Hayes and Moon 14 (Executive Director, Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, PhD in IR from Yale, Professor of History
at Northwestern; professor of political science at Yonsei University and Ambassador for International Security Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and Trade, the Republic of Korea. He served as Dean of Yonsei's Graduate School of International Studies and as Chairman of the
Presidential Committee on the Northeast Asian Cooperation Initiative, a cabinet-level post. Peter and Chung-in, "Should South Korea Go
Nuclear?", 7/28/14, http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-policy-forum/should-south-korea-go-nuclear/~~#axzz3AKArVDLT, Nautilus Institute)
The ROK would face very high costs were it to move in this direction because it is deeply embedded in multilateral
and bilateral treaty commitments and nuclear energy supply trading networks. South Korea is a member of the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and therefore cannot receive, manufacture or get any assistance to produce nuclear
explosive devices or weapons under Article 2. It is also obliged to comply with the safeguard regulations of the International Atomic Energy
Agency. Seoul would have to emulate Pyongyang and leave the NPT and the IAEA. But unlike North Korea which had almost
no external nuclear ties or market relations to lose, South Korea is highly involved in global markets with Koreans serving as UN
Secretary General and World Bank president. Pulling out of the NPT and the IAEA might lead to UN action, possibly UN Security
Council sanctions as were imposed on the DPRK, as well as national sanctions. It would certainly end South Korea’s reactor
exports and likely also supply of uranium, enrichment services, and other materials and dual use
technology needed for South Korea’s nuclear fuel cycle from the Nuclear Supply Group such as the United States, Australia,
Russia, and France. Within a few years, South Korea would face an even larger power shortfall than Japan had to deal with after
shutting down all its nuclear plants in 2011. Also, Washington would likely reject not only Seoul’s request to reprocess or pyro-process spent
nuclear fuel, but also its desire to enrich uranium, even for research. IAEA alarm bells will sound loudly the moment such
proliferation activity commences, not least due to the Agency’s experience with South Korea’s enrichment research and
development.

South Korea can’t and wont proliferate – political, economic, and security costs
outweigh
Peter Hayes 15, Professor, Center for International Security Studies, Sydney University, Australia and
Director, Nautilus Institute in Berkeley, California, and Chung-in Moon, professor of political science at
Yonsei University and Ambassador for International Security Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and
Trade, the Republic of Korea. “The War that Must Never be Fought, Chapter 13: Korea: Will South
Korea’s Non-Nuclear Strategy Defeat North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout?”,
https://books.google.com/books?id=-yVpCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT241
Far from reinforcing South Korea's already overwhelming offensive military capabilities -including in almost
every dimension where North Korea has tried to develop "asymmetric" capabilities- South Korean nuclear weapons would
undermine conventional deterrence and even reduce South Korea's ability to use its conventional forces in response to a
North Korean attack. Above all, we see its feasibility as very low because of severe political, legal, and
institutional obstacles. There is no doubt that South Korea has the technological and financial capability to develop nuclear weapons.
But it has never been easy, and won't be so at any time soon, for South Korea to arm itself with nuclear weapons, let alone with a submarine or
bomber-based nuclear retaliatory capacity that is immune from preemption-the basis of stable nuclear deterrence. It
would take South
Korea years to develop and deploy even a minimum deterrent. Until then, it would not possess a
credible second-strike capability. Initially, a South Korean nuclear force would be vastly inferior to current
US nuclear capabilities. It also lacks the space-based and high-altitude reconnaissance and other intelligence systems
needed to accurately hit mobile military or leadership targets. While it develops its own nuclear weapons force-and
assuming that doing so leads to rupture of the US-ROK alliance-South Korea would be vulnerable to a preemptive first
strike by Russia or China, who would certainly target it. Seoul would lack a countervailing ability to strike back after
suffering a nuclear attack. This may not be of concern in peacetime But in wartime, these two nuclear-weapons states would be obliged to treat
a South Korean nuclear force as a potential threat (as they may do already and likely already do so with regard to North Korea's nascent nuclear
force). Where would South Korea test and deploy the weapons under such circumstances? Inwhose backyard? The late American political
scientist Kenneth Waltz argued that nuclear proliferation may lead to strategic stability based on the threat of mutual nuclear annihi ation.QQ]
But John on-fat Wong argued decades ago that two small states armed with nuclear weapons in a military standoff are engaged in an unstable
relationship that is best described as "mutual probable destruction" because of their incentive to use their nuclear weapons first rather than
lose them.Q1] That is, given the time it would take each side to strike, an independent South Korean force facing off against the North Korean
nuclear force would be characterized by escalation imperatives that would make the peninsula highly unstable, with potentially catastrophic
consequences. Far from reinforcing South Korea's already overwhelming offensive military capabilities-including in almost every dimension
where North Korea has developed offsetting "asymmetric" capabilities-South Korean nuclear weapons would undermine deterrence based on
conventional forces, and even reduce South Korea's ability to use its conventional forces in response to a North Korean attack (see below). Put
in more theoretical terms, both Koreas would be faced with a nuclear-armed adversary with a mutual incentive to strike first. Each would
therefore remain in a state of constant nuclear alert in case the other side intended to attack immediately (in contrast to general deterrence.
where nuclear weapons cast a long shadow that makes commanders very cautious but there is no immediate intention to attack and therefore
no reason to stay on constant high alert).Q.21 This state of constant fear of an immediate threat of preemptive nuclear attack would push both
Koreas to invest heavi y in improved surveillance and intelligence capabilities needed to pinpoint nuclear targets for successful preemption,
especially given the potential for deception as to location and deployment of nuclear weapons. It would be difficult for either Korea to achieve
sufficient confidence that such intelligence were reliable enough to launch a preemptive strike as soon as either gained more than a few
warheads and dispersed them-which North Korea has likely done already.Indeed, for South Korea, going it alone without US support,and
possibly losing the United States altogether as senior ally, implies reduced confidence in its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance
information, which is provided today mostly by US extra-peninsular assets, implying that the South's ability to identify targets to attack
preemptively may be lacking. However, it is also possible that in a crisis, intelligence that suggests a pending attack combined with partial but
reliable data as to locations of a substantia lfraction of the other's nuclear forces could lead either Korea to mount a damage-limiting
preemptive strike.[;li] The complications that an independent South Korean nuclear weapons capability would cause for US Forces Korea and
Combined Forces Command would be enormous. Put simply, no US commander-in-chief is going to put American forces in harm's way in Korea
if South Korea wields nuclear weapons outside of US political and military command-and-control. Since its creation in 1978, Combined Forces
Command has been headed by an American and combines the US and ROK military leadership in South Korea to face North Korea. However,
nuclear weapons remained under the sole command of the American general who also commanded us Forces Korea: nuclear command,
control, and communications were never shared with ROK m111tary counterparts when US nuclear weapons were deployed in South Korea
(from 1958to 1991). In the European context, only one state in alliance with the United States-the United Kingdom with its "special
relationship"-developed its own nuclear forces. Except for a few naval and aerial tactical nuclear weapons, all UK strategic and aerial nuclear
weapons were dedicated to NATO and, ultimately, were commanded by NATO's American military head.Q2] (French nuclear weapons were
kept outside of NATO's integrated command after the force de frappe was created in 1966.) Given the stakes in Korea, 1t is incredible that the
United States would violate the principles of unified command when it comes to nuclear weapons and accept a unilateral capacity by South
Korea to start a nuclear war. Indeed, in the case of the United Kingdom, NATO commanders assumed that once released from direct US control
in wartime, allied forces armed with nuclear weapons would rapidly lose communication with nuclear commanders, creating a risk of loss of
control that would deter Soviet aggressors .Q§] This is not a precedent that the United States will want to repeat in Korea. To the extent that
both Koreas became fully armed with operational nuclear forces targeting each other across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), independent South
Korean nuclear weapons would not only create a more volatile standoff than the Korean Peninsula already has. They would contribute to a rigid
and permanent (until it failed) state of psychologicalwarfare and nuclear threats even more ferocious than that seen over much (but not all) of
the last six decades. Of course, it is possible that both sides would recognize the immense danger in escalation/de-escalation strategies
involving nuclear threat, as did India and Pakistan in the 1999 Kargil crisis. But the opposite also seems just as possible given the nature of the
Korean conflict which, unlike the India-Pakistan conflict, involves intense dimensions of a civil war as well as ideological collisions. In short, a
nuclear-armed South Korea would ensure the continuing division and antagonism between the two Koreas and would undermine inter-Korean
trust politik, peace politik, or anything other than mutual destruction politik for the indefinite future. This nuclear standoff would be made even
more volatile because one or both Koreas armed with nuclear weapons may believe that nuclear weapons provide a threshold below which
covert or even overt conventional military provocations may be undertaken, because the aggressor Korea believes that the victim Korea would
see the risk of escalation to nuclear war arising from retaliation as too great This is the obvious lesson learned from the North's attack on the
ROK warship Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in 2010.QZJ The same lesson has been learned by India facing Pakistani-originated
violence in Kashmir and MumbaiQfil South Korea would face very high costs were it to move to nuclear armament
because it is deeply embedded in a network of multilateral and bilateral treaty commitments and
nuclear energy-supply trading networks. South Korea is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and
therefore cannot receive, manufacture, or get any assistance to produce nuclear explosive devices or weapons
under Article 2. It is also obliged to comply with the safeguard regulations of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) ,
whose alarm bells will ring loudly the moment that South Korea starts a nuclear weapons program . It
cannot emulate Israel, which has refused to sign the NPT and is believed to be one of the states with a clandestine nuclear
weapons program. Seoul would have to emulate Pyongyang if it pursues nuclear weapons sovereignty. Like the North in 1994, the South
would have to leave the NPT using the pretext of emergency. But unlike North Korea, which had almost no external nuclear ties or
market relations to lose, South Korea is highly involved in global markets . The ROK's global reputation is
exemplified by South Koreans serving as UN secretary-general and World Bank president. To say the least, it
would undermine South Korea's claim to global middle power leadership as embodied in its hosting of such
events as the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit Pulling out of the NPT and the IAEA might lead to UN action, possibly UN
Security Council sanctions as were imposed on North Korea, as well as national sanctions. It would certainly end South
Korea's profitable reactor exports, never mind the loss of supply of uranium, enrichment services, and
other materials and dual-use technology needed for South Korea's nuclear fuel cycle from the members
of the Nuclear Supply Group such as the United States, Australia, Russia,and France. South Korea would face an even
larger energy shortfall than Japan had to deal with after shutting down all its nuclear plants in 2011. Also at risk would
be the 1974 bilateral nuclear energy cooperation accord with the United States . The United States would be obliged
by domestic law to cut off all ties in nuclear cooperation and demand restitution of uranium stock, including spent fuel. Bilateral relations could
turn frigid fast, as in the 1970s when Seoul secretly pursued a nuclear weapons program.[11] Even if Seoul promised not to use nuclear
weapons-re lated capabilities for anything but peaceful purposes, it would undercut its own attempt to rewrite the bilateral 123 nuclear
agreement (Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy Act) that needs to be renewed after March 2016. Should the South start to acquire nuclear
weapons, Washington would likely reject out of hand not only Seoul's request to reprocess or pyre-process spent nuclear fuel, but alsoits desire
to enrich uranium, even for research. An independent South Korean quest for nuclear weapons will not only justify North Korea's nuclear status
and diminish the opposition from China and Russia to the North's nuclear armament, but could also trigger a nuclear domino effect in
Northeast Asia. South Korea would have to take into account hostile Japan and China armed with nuclear weapons in its defense planning. It
should be noted that some ultra-rightists in Japan relish the prospect that Seoul might make such a move so that they can justify Japanese
nuclear weapons. Generalized
nuclear armament would be a nightmare for South Korean security . In sum,
South Korea would face significant-possibly highly significant-political, economic, and security costs if it
were to develop and deploy its own nuclear weapons.

South Korea won’t get nukes because of NoKo – nuclear taboo and international costs
– it will conventionally rearm
Keck 14 (Zachary Keck, Managing Editor of The Diplomat, previously, he worked as Deputy Editor of e-International Relations and has
interned at the Center for a New American Security and in the U.S. Congress, May 31, 2014. “N. Korea Won’t Cause a Nuclear Domino in Asia
(But China Might).” http://thediplomat.com/2014/05/n-korea-wont-cause-a-nuclear-domino-in-asia-but-china-might/)
On Thursday the Wall Street Journal published excerpts from an interview it conducted with South Korean President Park Geun-hye. One article
from the interview discusses the dire consequences President Park foresees if North Korea goes through with a fourth nuclear weapons test.
“North Korea would effectively be crossing the Rubicon if they were to conduct another nuclear test,” WSJ quotes Park as saying. President Park
has also suggested that the six-party talks over North Korea’s nuclear program could end for good if Pyongyang goes through with its threat to
conduct a new kind of nuclear test. The article goes on to say that President Park also claimed that a
fourth nuclear test by
North Korea could spark a nuclear arms race in the region, where non-nuclear weapon states decide to
acquire a nuclear deterrent in response to Pyongyang’s growing atomic capabilities. “It would be difficult for us to prevent a
nuclear domino from occurring in this area,” were North Korea to conduct another test, Park is quoted as saying. Park is hardly the first to
worry that a new state acquiring a nuclear weapon will have a nuclear domino effect among its neighbors. Indeed, this has been a constant
concern in the United States since the dawn of the nuclear era. This concern continues today with many in Washington claiming that Iran
acquiring a nuclear arsenal would spark a nuclear arms race in the already volatile Middle East. Nor is Park wrong to emphasize that North
Korea conducting another test could be especially problematic for its neighbors. While many attribute North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests
entirely to domestic politics, Pyongyang’s interest in continuing with tests is almost certainly due to its desire acquire a nuclear deterrent. The
only way to be certain that a state has achieved this status is by conducting actual tests, which is why every nuclear state (very possibly
including Israel) has carried out tests. The next few North Korean nuclear tests will be particularly important because many believe that it is on
the verge of being able to build a nuclear warhead small enough to be placed on top of a missile. This will give it the operational nuclear
deterrent that it has heretofore lacked. While North Korea will initially still lack the capability to reach the U.S. with a nuclear-tipped
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), it will only be a matter of time before it can achieve this too. As we saw in the Cold War when the
Soviet Union acquired the capability to reach the continental United States with nuclear missiles, North Korea’s ability to target the U.S.
homeland will complicate extended deterrence. Still, Park’s warnings about North Korea’s growing capabilities creating
a nuclear domino effect in Asia is merely bluster. This view is premised on the argument that states
acquire nuclear weapons to deter rival nuclear armed states . This was true in the early nuclear era when
non-nuclear states had no reason to believe that their nuclear-armed rivals would not use nuclear
weapons against them. As the nuclear era progressed, however, it became clear that nuclear weapons would not be used
in the same manner as other military capabilities would. In the words of many, a taboo against the first use of
nuclear weapons took root. This taboo is especially strong when it comes to using nuclear weapons
against a non-nuclear state. North Korea would be particularly unlikely to break this taboo by launching
a nuclear attack against South Korea or Japan . To begin with, it will have an extremely small nuclear arsenal
given its financial constraints. Moreover, it will also have little in the way of early warning capabilities . This is important
because attacking Seoul or Tokyo with nuclear weapons would almost certainly invite a retaliatory nuclear strike from the U.S. And, given the
small size of its nuclear arsenal and its inability to detect incoming U.S. nuclear missiles, its entire nuclear arsenal would be wiped out in a U.S.
first strike. At that point, it
would be defenseless against a conventional attack aimed at overthrowing the regime, which
Washington would have every reason to carry out should Pyongyang break the nuclear taboo . South
Korea and Japan understand all this and therefore would not endure the enormous costs (especially to
their international reputations, alliances with the U.S., and relations with China) inherent in acquiring a
nuclear weapon. An isolated state like North Korea can endure massive international sanctions. Nations with economies highly integrated
in the global economy — such as South Korea and Japan — cannot afford to be cut off from the outside world . That’s
why South Korea is investing in conventional capabilities that would allow it to deal with North Korea’s
nuclear arsenal. Although North Korea is unlikely to precipitate a nuclear arms race in Asia, China’s
growing military capabilities and assertive diplomatic posture very well might. Indeed, just as history has demonstrated that
states don’t need nuclear arsenals to deter rivals from attacking them with nuclear weapons, it has also demonstrated that nuclear weapons
are extremely effective in deterring conventional military attacks. Thus, states
that face rivals with overwhelming
conventional military power have a strong incentive to acquire nuclear weapons to negate their rivals’
conventional superiority. This is especially true if a state fears that its conventionally superior rival covets its territory. A nuclear arsenal cannot
always deter low level skirmishes from nuclear and non-nuclear powers. But nuclear weapons are extremely effective at deterring states from
challenging core interests, first and foremost territory. This is deeply troubling given present trends in the Asia-Pacific. Most notably, China’s
economic rise is allowing it to amass a conventional military force that Japan, especially with its declining population, will eventually be
incapable of matching. China also claims the Senkaku Islands that Japan administers and there’s been evidence that it may ultimately covet the
Ryukyu Islands as well. Thus, if
current trends in the Sino-Japanese conventional balance continue , going nuclear
will be an increasingly attractive option for Tokyo, particularly if it loses faith in America’s willingness or ability to defend it.

No cascading prolif
White, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, ‘08 (Hugh, “A nuclear
Japan: The least bad option?” http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2008/07/17/A-nuclear-Japan-The-
least-bad-option.aspx) Second, more specifically, I am not sure that a Japanese nuclear capability
would automatically ignite a new wave of proliferation . Developing nuclear weapons is a big step for
anyone. Who among the non-nuclear states would find their strategic situation so profoundly altered by
a Japanese nuclear capability that they would feel impelled to take this step? The most likely, of course,
is South Korea. But if, like me, you are a inclined to doubt that North Korea will surrender its weapons,
and that an eventual unified Korea is therefore like to be a nuclear power anyway, then this horse may
already be out of the stable. Beyond Northeast Asia, I think flow-on proliferation effects are much less
likely: would Australia, or Indonesia, be more likely to seek nuclear weapons because Japan had them?
Thirdly, we might ask whether the non-proliferation regime could survive by adapting to accommodate
a nuclear-armed Japan. Is this unthinkable? Surely not, when serious thought is being given to
accommodating India as a nuclear-armed country.
 2AC Taiwan Prolif DA – No Alliance Collapse

The plan strengthens alliance relationships

Glaser, 15 - Charles L Glaser is a professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the
Department of Political Science at George Washington University. He is also a fellow in the Kissinger
Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (“A U.S.-China Grand Bargain?”
International Security, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Spring 2015), pp. 49–90, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00199

A third potential security danger is that accommodation by the United States could undermine its allies’
assessments of the credibility of the United States to come to their aid if attacked by China. More
specifically, critics believe that ending the U.S. commitment to Taiwan could lead the Japanese to doubt
America’s commitment to defend Japan, which would undermine the U.S.-Japan alliance and in turn
reduce U.S. security. Tucker and Glaser argue, “A U.S. decision to abandon Taiwan—leading to
unification of an unwilling Taiwan with China— would be particularly alarming to Japan. . . . If Japan
begins to doubt U.S. reliability, that could deal a fatal blow to the U.S.-Japan alliance.”97 Although a
decision by the United States to end its commitment to Taiwan would certainly send political shock
waves across the region, these concerns are overstated. There are similarities between the U.S.
commitments to Taiwan and Japan, but also clear differences. U.S. security interests in Japan are much
greater; as a result, the alliance involves much stronger political commitments and the deep integration
of U.S. and Japanese military capabilities.

In addition, the United States has a clear rationale for ending its commitment to Taiwan that does not
apply to Japan: the U.S. commitment to Taiwan strains the U.S.-China relationship and increases the
probability of war in ways that the U.S. commitment to Japan does not. Japan should appreciate these
differences and therefore recognize that the ending of the U.S. commitment to Taiwan would not
indicate a coming diminution of the U.S. commitment to Japan. U.S. leaders could work to make sure
that their Japanese counterparts fully appreciate these differences.

In addition, the United States could take other actions that would starkly distinguish its policies toward
Japan from its policies toward Taiwan, which should help to offset doubts that accommodation on
Taiwan might create. Most obviously, the United States could increase the size and improve the quality
of the forces it commits to Japan’s protection. Other policies could include further deepening U.S.-Japan
joint military planning and continuing high-level discussions of the requirements for extending
deterrence to Japan. Growth in Chinese conventional and nuclear forces has increased the importance
of these interactions; ending the U.S. commitment to Taiwan would make them still more valuable.98

Finally, as China’s power continues to grow, Japan’s need for U.S. security guarantees will also grow.
Doubts about U.S. reliability are therefore likely to convince Japan to work harder to strengthen the
U.S.-Japan alliance, not to abandon it or to bandwagon with China.99
The commitment to Taiwan weakens alliances – plan boosts them
Goldstein, 15 - associate professor in the Strategic Research Department at the US Naval War College
(NWC). He was also the founding director of the NWC's China Maritime Studies Institute (Lyle, Meeting
China Halfway, p. 71)

Two plausible objections may be discussed briefly at this point, though each is dealt with more
comprehensively in chapter 12, the book’s conclusion. A first objection concerns the oft-made argument
that any concession to Beijing represents “appeasement” that will only invite greater aggression. For
those making this argument, Taiwan is the “ultimate prize” for Beijing, and thus would raise China’s
confidence to unacceptably high levels. A related argument concerning the fate of US alliances in the
Asia-Pacific region is made that any kind of reunification between the Mainland and Taiwan would signal
a “death blow” to the US-Japan Alliance, and other allies would also be dubious of the US commitment
to the region’s security. However, both arguments turn out to be specious—having been built on crude
and simplistic assumptions. A clear view of history shows plainly that Beijing approaches the Taiwan
issue quite differently than other issues, and so the expectation that China, following unification, would
immediately seek to apply its hubris to other issues only stretches the imagination. The “Munich”
appeasement argument also seems to be ignorant of geography, neglecting the fact that Taiwan’s
defense is not feasible over the long term. White quite correctly concludes: “America can no longer
defend Taiwan from China, and a policy towards Taiwan that presumes that it can is unsustainable.”68
Even putting military capabilities aside, as Nathan and Scobell relate, “Beijing is convinced that it enjoys
an asymmetry of motivation over the United States with respect to Taiwan.”69 Moreover, a Washington
policy premised on Munich-type fears also ignores the fact that Mainland China has reasonable
expectations for its security. As for the US alliance structure, this book is advocating major changes in
that structure, in the hope that it would evolve toward something lighter and more defensive. Credibility
is logically questioned when commitments exceed genuine US national interests. If US commitments in
the Asia-Pacific region are constrained to cover only the clearest threats to US national security (thus
excluding Taiwan, in addition to various rocks and reefs along China’s maritime periphery), those
alliance relationships will actually be strengthened. Thus, it is well known that many South Koreans,
Japanese, and others in the region have been reasonably concerned that their states, quite against their
will, might be pulled by treaty commitments into the vortex of a Taiwan scenario. Having alleviated
such alliance strains, chiefly caused by unreasonable war-fighting requirements, these alliances will
actually benefit from enhanced and increasingly stable Taiwan–Mainland integration.
 2AC Taiwan Prolif DA – Asian Prolif Good

Prolif would curb nuclear threats which solves Sino-Japanese tensions

Samuels and Schoff 13 (Richard, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for International Studies
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, James, Senior Associate in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, “Japan’s Nuclear Hedge: Beyond "Allergy" and Breakout” https://www.nbr.org/publication/japans-
nuclear-hedge-beyond-allergy-and-breakout/)

Compared to North Korea, China’s nuclear arsenal and conventional capabilities are much larger and weigh
heavily on the minds of Japanese defense planners . The main worry is not simply that China’s defense budget has almost
tripled since 2001 to become the world’s second largest.63 Rather, it is the nature of China’s military modernization and the
relatively quick and substantial investments in capabilities that are aimed at the allies’ ability to
dominate the skies and seas around East Asia . This strategic force modernization raises the potential
costs that U.S. policymakers would need to weigh when considering the option of intervening against
Chinese interests on behalf of Japan or Taiwan . Another long-term problem is that China keeps building new nuclear warheads
(up to ten in 2012). Although official Chinese policy states that China will not use nuclear weapons first— or ever against a non–nuclear weapon
state—its intimidation tactics in the maritime and cyber domains have worried some in Japan that these
tactics could someday spread to the nuclear realm.64 The People’s Liberation Army (PLA), after all, manages one
of the world’s most active ballistic-missile programs . Many of its tactical weapons have enhanced ranges, accuracies, and
payloads, and some put Okinawa within range when forward-deployed. Upgrades to Chinese missile warheads—including
multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles—are enhancing Beijing’s deterrent and strategic-
strike capabilities vis-à-vis Japanese and U.S. missile defenses.65 These slow-moving upgrades to the quality
and quantity of Chinese nuclear weapons have some in Tokyo wondering whether Beijing will eventually seek
nuclear parity with the United State s, something that would require considerable time and investment, since the U.S. arsenal is
significantly larger. Japanese strategists have to ask how much vulnerability the United States is willing to
tolerate amid China’s strategic modernization and what it is prepared to do on Japan’s behalf, if
anything, in response to China’s moves.66 Some prominent Japanese analysts suggest that a national
nuclear deterrent, even if it were insufficient to deter a force as big as China’s in all circumstances,
could complicate strategic calculations in Beijing to the extent that China would think twice before
threatening to use (or actually using) its own nuclear forces in a regional crisis or conflict.67 In short, Japan
faces its own threats and has its own interest s. As Campbell and Sunohara suggest, “the persistence of a Japanese-American
alliance so robust that it can indefinitely persuade Japanese leaders from acquiring nuclear weapons cannot be guaranteed.”68
 2AC Taiwan Prolif DA – No Impact

No impact to Taiwan prolif

Sapolsky 14 (Harvey M. Sapolsky is Professor Emeritus and the Former Director of The MIT Security
Studies Program. Christine M. Leah is a Stanton Fellow at the MIT Security Studies Program. 4-14-2014
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/let-asia-go-nuclear-10259)

Tailored proliferation would not likely be destabilizing. Asia is not the Middle East. Japan, South Korea,
Australia, and even Taiwan are strong democracies. They have stable political regimes. Government
leaders are accountable to democratic institutions . Civilian control of the military is strong . And they
don’t have a history of lobbing missiles at each other—they are much more risk-averse than Egypt, Syria or Iran.
America’s allies would be responsible nuclear weapon states. A number of Asian nations have at one time or another
considered going nuclear, Australia for example, with tacit U.S. Defense Department encouragement in the 1960s. They chose what for them
was the cheaper alternative of living under the US nuclear umbrella. Free nuclear guarantees provided by the United States, coupled with the
US Navy patrolling offshore, have allowed our allies to grow prosperous without having to invest much in their own defense. Confident that the
United States protects them, our allies have even begun to squabble with China over strings of uninhabited islands in the hope that there is oil
out there. It is time to give them a dose of fiscal and military reality. And the way to do that is to stop standing between them and their nuclear-
armed neighbors. It will not be long before they realize the value of having their own nuclear weapons. The waters of the Pacific
under those arrangements will stay calm, and we will save a fortune.

Nuclearization has no regional impact – empirics

Panda 14 (Rajaram Panda, Former Senior Fellow, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, The Korean Journal o f Defense Analysis Vol.
26, No. 4, December 2014,407^425. “Should Japan go Nuclear?” http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy-
remote.galib.uga.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=498d6c76-aa45-45ed-b76b-cc4632695f35%40sessionmgr4005&vid=1&hid=4102)
The question that arises now: Would the United States allow, tolerate or encourage Japan and South Korea to go nuclear?
Most likely, the United States would feel highly uncomfortable if Japan and South Korea were to choose the nuclear path. But we know for sure
that the United States treated the prospect of China becoming a nuclear power as almost unthinkable. Yet
China and other countries have become nuclear powers without making the world a more dangerous
place. In South Asia, possession of nuclear weapons by both India and Pakistan has deterred both of them from going to a major war, though
occasional border skirmishes do take place without real fear of escalation on a nuclear scale. Should possession of nuclear
weapons by Japan and South Korea be worrisome to regional and world security? Developments during the
post-World War II period have proved otherwise. Nuclear weapons have encouraged cautious behavior by their possessors and
deterred any of them from threatening others’ vital interests. Besides China, North Korea’s nuclear program could precipitate
decisions both in Japan and South Korea to revisit their nuclear option . By implication, such a decision would mean
the abrogation of their security alliance relationship with the United States, which would also mean reordering the security dynamics in East
Asia, where all countries would claim to be equal in terms of sovereignty, territorial integrity and pride.

No prolif impact
Mueller 17 (John Mueller, Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University & Senior Fellow at
the Cato Institute & Senior Research Scientist with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies
at Ohio State University "76. Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation and Terrorism"
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-handbook-policymakers/2017/2/cato-
handbook-for-policymakers-8th-edition-76_0.pdf)

Except for their effects on agonies, obsessions, rhetoric, posturing, and spending, the consequences of
nuclear proliferation have been largely benign: those who have acquired the weapons have “used” them
simply to stoke their egos or to deter real or imagined threats. For the most part, nuclear powers have
found the weapons to be a notable waste of time, money, effort, and scientific talent. They have quietly
kept the weapons in storage and haven’t even found much benefit in rattling them from time to time. If
the recent efforts to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons have been successful, those efforts have
done Iran a favor.

There has never been a militarily compelling reason to use nuclear weapons, particularly because it has
not been possible to identify suitable targets—or targets that couldn’t be attacked as effectively by
conventional munitions. Conceivably, conditions exist under which nuclear weapons could serve a
deterrent function, but there is little reason to suspect that they have been necessary to deter war thus
far, even during the Cold War. The main Cold War contestants have never believed that a repetition of
World War II, whether embellished by nuclear weapons or not, is remotely in their interests.

Moreover, the weapons have not proved to be crucial status symbols. How much more status would
Japan have if it possessed nuclear weapons? Would anybody pay a great deal more attention to Britain
or France if their arsenals held 5,000 nuclear weapons, or much less if they had none? Did China need
nuclear weapons to impress the world with its economic growth or its Olympics?

Those considerations help explain why alarmists have been wrong for decades about the pace of
nuclear proliferation. Most famously, in the 1960s, President John Kennedy anticipated that in another
decade “fifteen or twenty or twenty-five nations may have these weapons.” Yet, of the dozens of
technologically capable countries that have considered obtaining nuclear arsenals, very few have done
so. Insofar as most leaders of most countries (even rogue ones) have considered acquiring the weapons,
they have come to appreciate several drawbacks of doing so: nuclear weapons are dangerous, costly,
and likely to rile the neighbors. Moreover, as the University of Southern California’s Jacques Hymans has
demonstrated, the weapons have also been exceedingly difficult for administratively dysfunctional
countries to obtain—it took decades for North Korea and Pakistan to do so. In consequence, alarmist
predictions about proliferation chains, cascades, dominoes, waves, avalanches, epidemics, and points
of no return have proved faulty.

Although proliferation has so far had little consequence, that is not because the only countries to get
nuclear weapons have had rational leaders. Large, important countries that acquired the bomb were run
at the time by unchallenged—perhaps certifiably deranged—monsters. Consider Joseph Stalin, who, in
1949, was planning to change the climate of the Soviet Union by planting a lot of trees, and Mao
Zedong, who, in 1964, had just carried out a bizarre social experiment that resulted in an artificial
famine in which tens of millions of Chinese perished.

Some also fear that a country might use its nuclear weapons to “dominate” its area. That argument was
used with dramatic urgency before 2003 when Saddam Hussein supposedly posed great danger, and it
has been frequently applied to Iran. Exactly how that domination is to be carried out is never made
clear. The notion, apparently, is this: should an atomic rogue state rattle the occasional rocket, other
countries in the area, suitably intimidated, would bow to its demands. Far more likely, threatened states
would make common cause with each other and with other concerned countries (including nuclear
ones) against the threatening neighbor. That is how countries coalesced into an alliance of
convenience to oppose Iraq’s region-threatening invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Yet another concern has been that the weapons will go off, by accident or miscalculation, devastating
the planet in the process: the weapons exist in the thousands, sooner or later one or more of them will
inevitably go off. But those prognostications have now failed to deliver for 70 years. That time period
suggests something more than luck is operating. Moreover, the notion that if one nuclear weapon goes
off in one place, the world will necessarily be plunged into thermonuclear cataclysm should remain in
the domain of Hollywood scriptwriters.

No arms racing impact

Brendan Green 18. Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. “Primacy and
Proliferation: Why Security Commitments Don’t Prevent the Spread of Nuclear Weapons” in A. T. Thrall
and B. H. Friedman eds. US Grand Strategy in the 21st Century. Routledge. 48-9.

Despite the popularity of the nuclear domino theory among policymakers, the academic literature has
turned against it. The reason is obvious: several decades of pessimistic proliferation forecasts based on
falling dominoes were proved embarrassingly wrong by history . Moeed Yusuf notes that if all the "first
tier" suspects for nuclear acquisition identified in such reports had become weapons states there would
be nineteen nuclear powers today (Yusuf 2009: 61). Instead, as noted above, the number of technically
capable nuclear states has grown, while the number of weapons states has remained small. Moreover,
there was relatively little variation in the number of states in the "exploration" or "pursuit" phases of
nuclear programs during the Cold War, despite instances of proliferation that ought to have caused
domino behavior. After the Cold War, there has been a striking decline in nuclear interest, as more
states abandon their programs and fewer states initiate new ones (Miller 2014a: 10-11).¶ The judgment
of scholars has been scathing . Yusuf concludes that "an evident shortcoming of historical predictions
was their inability to accurately estimate the pace of developments ... the majority of [potential nuclear
dominoes] never even came close to crossing the threshold. In fact, most did not even initiate a
weapons program" (Yusuf 2009: 61). John Mueller suggests that projections of falling nuclear dominoes
"have shown a want of prescience that approaches the monumental-even the pathological ... [fear of a
nuclear tipping point] continues to flourish despite the fact that it has thus far proven to be almost
entirely wrong" (Mueller 2009: 89). Francis Gavin finds no " compelling ev idence that a nuclear
proliferation chain reaction will ever occur" (Gavin 2009: 18). A two-volume study led by William Potter
and Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova cites a " consensus among the case study authors ... that nuclear weapons
spread is neither imminent nor likely to involve a process in which one country's pursuit of nuclear
weapons leads to a 'chain reaction' involving other states" (Potter and Mukhatzhanova 2010: 337-338). ¶
Research also suggests that even where security concerns matter for proliferation, their influence is
more diffuse and complex than is generally believed. Thus, even where proliferation causes security
fears, it may not beget more prolif eration. Phillip Bleek's statistical analysis suggests that nuclear
acquisition by regional competitors has only a modest effect on state exploration of nuc lear programs
and no impact on whether they pursue or acquire an arsenal . In contrast, a state's history of
conventional military disputes with its rivals strongly impacts all three phases of nuclear development
(Bleek 2010: 177). Bleek interprets these results to mean, in part, that states seek nuclear weapons for a
particular sort of security-deterring attack, not because of security competition in general. That
conclusion is consistent with other recent studies (Sechser and Fuhrmann 2013: 173-195). Thus, Bleek
concludes that his "findings strongly contradict the conventional 'reactive proliferation' wisdom that
underpins widespread predictions . . . of proliferation cascades, dominoes, tipping points, and the like"
(Bleek 2010: 179).¶ The causes of nuclear weapons proliferation reviewed above offer a reason to reject
nuclear dominoes and tipping points. As Potter and Mukhatzhanova summarize, "a fixation on security
drivers ... is apt to result in the neglect of important domestic economic and political constraints and to
exaggerate the propensity of states to proliferate," even given proliferation elsewhere (Potter and
Mukhatzhanova 2010: 338). Hymans' focus on individual psychology, for instance, implies that: ¶
Leaders' preferences are actually not highly contingent on what other states decide . Therefore,
proliferation tomorrow will probably remain as rare as proliferation today, with no single instance of
proliferation causing a cascade of new nuclear weapons states. Hymans 2006: 225-226¶ Likewise,
Solingen's "emphasis on political economic factors " suggests that one state's nuclear decisions will not
directly drive another's. In the same vein, Hymans' other work implies major bureaucratic constraints
on reactive proliferation. States are not likely to shuck off multiple nuclear veto players with ease,
even if their international environment seems more dangerous. Finally, if NPT scholarship is correct, the
treaty is likely to provide at least a modest barrier to reactive proliferation. States that absorb its norms,
a la Rublee, will be less inclined to proliferate or at least more constrained in their decision-making.
States that perceive the treaty as a grand bargain, as posited by Coe and Vaynman, are likely to stick to
the agreement so long as the great powers appear to be sanctioning the rule-breaking states. ¶ Overall,
the political science literature undermines primacy's claims about nuclear dominoes, and the probability
that a little insecurity will spawn spirals of proliferation. American alliance commitments, in so far as this
research is correct, are correspondingly diminished in their usefulness as an anti-proliferation measure.

No impact to nuclear proliferation—more nuclear states produce peace

Suzuki 15 – (June 2015, Akisato, Researcher, Institute for International Conflict Resolution and
Reconstruction, School of Law and Government, Dublin City University, MA in Violence, Terrorism and
Security at Queen's University, “Is more better or worse? New empirics on nuclear proliferation and
interstate conflict by Random Forests,” Research and Politics, SagePub)
Random Forests has three attractive and distinctive characteristics for the purposes of this paper: first, the estimation of conditional variable importance and partial
dependence plots enable conventional applied researchers to interpret non-parametric analysis in an intuitive way; second, Random
Forests can
examine non-linearity (Strobl et al., 2009: 339–341), which is desirable because, as already noted, some theories expect
non-linearity between nuclear proliferation and a systemic propensity for conflict; and finally, it can cope with
potential interactions and multicollinearity between regressors (Strobl et al., 2009: 339–341; Strobl et al., 2008). As noted
before, most of the regressors here are highly correlated, and also it is plausible to anticipate some interaction

effect between them (e.g. the number of democratic states and the gross world product). The specific capabilities of Random

Forests are therefore essential. The estimation of conditional variable importance shows that the nuclear year counter has a negative importance
score.7 Thus, the nuclear year counter is not important in explaining the dispute–state ratio. This suggests that the optimist theory is supported. The remaining
regressors have an importance score higher than the absolute value of the importance score of the nuclear year counter, meaning that they are all important.
Controlling for democratic peace, capitalist peace, and polarity, the number of nuclear states is still a significant predictor in explaining a systemic propensity for
interstate conflict. Figure 1 presents the partial dependence plots of the model.8 First, on average, a larger number of nuclear states is associated with a lower
dispute–state ratio, although the changes from two nuclear states to three and from six to seven increase the ratio instead. Thus, the
relationship is
empirically non-linear, as Bueno de Mesquita and Riker (1982) and Intriligator and Brito (1981) expected in part. Overall, however, the
optimist theory is supported, and the change from two nuclear states to nine nuclear states decreases
the dispute–state ratio approximately from 0.228 to 0.18. This means that, if there are 194 states in the system (as there were in 2009), the
number of militarized interstate dispute onsets per system-year decreases approximately from 44 to 35. This is a
substantively significant decline. Second, the nuclear year counter shows a concave relationship with the dispute–state ratio, suggesting that
new nuclear states are less prone to conflict than middle-aged nuclear states. Thus, the pessimist theory finds no support from either

the variable importance estimation or the partial dependence plot . Finally, as for the control variables, the number of

democratic states and the gross world product have a complex non-linear relationship with the dispute–state ratio, but if the number of democratic
states and the gross world product are sufficiently large, they tend to decrease the dispute–state ratio. Their
substantive effects are also significant, though not as much as the number of nuclear states . When comparing the effect
of their lowest and highest values (23 and 94 in the number of democratic states and 7 and 71.2 in the gross world product), the number of democratic states
decreases the number of militarized interstate dispute onsets per system-year approximately from 40 to 37, and the gross world product from 44 to 37.
Unipolarity is also associated with a decline in the dispute–state ratio, suggesting that unipolarity is better than bipolarity in terms of a
systemic propensity for interstate conflict; however, its effect is negligible, as it reduces the number of militarized interstate dispute onsets per
system-year from 39 to 38. One caveat is, as explained in the online appendix, that the results of the number of democratic states and unipolarity are significantly
sensitive to a parameter setting. Thus, these predictors are less robust, and the aforementioned points about them should be treated with caution. Discussion and
concluding remarks The main findings reveal that the optimist expectation of the relationship between
nuclear proliferation and interstate conflict is empirically supported:9 first, a larger number of nuclear states on average
decreases the systemic propensity for interstate conflict; and second, there is no clear evidence that the emergence of new

nuclear states increases the systemic propensity for interstate conflict. Gartzke and Jo (2009) argue that nuclear
weapons themselves have no exogenous effect on the probability of conflict , because when a state is engaged in or
expects to engage in conflict, it may develop nuclear weapons to keep fighting, or to prepare for, that conflict. If this selection effect existed, the analysis

should overestimate the conflict-provoking effect of nuclear proliferation in the above model. Still, the results
indicate that a larger number of nuclear states are associated with fewer disputes in the system. This conclusion, however, raises questions

about how to reconcile this study’s findings with those of a recent quantitative dyadic-level study (Bell
and Miller, 2015). The current paper finds that nuclear proliferation decreases the systemic propensity for interstate conflict, while Bell and Miller (2015) find
that nuclear symmetry has no significant effect on dyadic conflict, but that nuclear asymmetry is associated with a higher probability of dyadic conflict. It is

possible that nuclear proliferation decreases conflict through the conflict-mitigating effects of extended
nuclear deterrence and/or fear of nuclear states’ intervention, to the extent that these effects
overwhelm the conflict-provoking effect of nuclear–asymmetrical dyads . Thus, dyadic-level empirics
cannot solely be relied on to infer causal links between nuclear proliferation and a systemic propensity for conflict. The systemic-
level empirics deserve attention.
CPs
 Relations adv CP
Counterplan can’t solve without making concessions to China on Taiwan – it
overshadows all other aspects of relations
Glaser 16 Esteemed professor of political science and international affairs and director of the Elliott
School's Institute for Security and Conflict Studies (Charles L. Glaser, "Grand bargain or bad idea? US
relations with China and Taiwan," International Security, v. 40 #4, Spring 2016, p.178-191)

Kim and Easley prefer the United States’ current policy to a grand bargain. Both recommend some
modifications designed to reassure and engage China, including joint participation in humanitarian missions, naval
cooperation on counter-piracy operations, deepening of economic interdependence via the U.S.-China
bilateral investment treaty, and support of initiatives that would increase China’s role in international organizations. As I argue in my
article, there is much to like about the current U.S. policy toward China and East Asia more broadly. If the United States adheres to this policy,
then many of these recommendations would be useful refinements. Nevertheless, proponents of the United States’
current China policy tend to underestimate the risks inherent in the U.S. commitment to Taiwan ,
including its role in fueling military competition and supporting Chinese elites’ negative views of U.S.
motives. Neither Kim nor Easley says much about these risks, and certain of their remarks suggest they are not small. Kim holds that China is
“much more confident and ambitious” than when President Nixon visited China in 1972 and that “Chinese leaders today believe that the United
States is determined to contain and divide China internally.” Easley expresses similar concerns, stating that “[f]oreign policy ambition in Beijing
has outgrown the 1950s and 1990s cross-strait crises; [that] Chinese internal debates tend to paint the United States as a global competitor,”
and that China “is pursuing a Chinese centered regional architecture.” Given these views of China, Kim’s and Easley’s
recommendations, though useful, are likely inadequate to meet the challenges currently facing the United
States. This does not mean that such a modified U.S. policy would necessarily be inferior to the grand bargain I have recommended, given
that all options for dealing with China’s rise will involve costs or risks, or both. The advantage of my proposed grand bargain,
however, is that it confronts the challenge posed by China’s rise head on. It offers a path for eliminating the
most serious geopolitical disagreement between the United States and China and for moderating the
concomitant political strains and military competition , while providing valuable information about the limited nature of
China’s goals that, in turn, reduces the risks of accommodation. And, in combination with policies that reaffirm and deepen
the commitment of the United States to its East Asian allies , it would enable the United States to protect
its key interests in the region. Notwithstanding the points raised by Kim and Easely, the grand bargain remains the best bet
available to the United States.

US-China cooperation is impossible without ending Taiwan arm sales

Freeman 11. [Chas Freeman, American diplomat - served in the United States Foreign
Service, the State and Defense Departments in many different capacities over the
course of thirty years, “Beijing, Washington, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige”,
https://www.mepc.org/speeches/beijing-washington-and-shifting-balance-prestige]
Antagonistic encounters in China’s near seas are a significant factor in worsening Sino-American military relations but they do not have the
The Taiwan issue is the only one with the
impact of U.S. moves to shore up Taiwan’s resistance to reunion with the mainland.
potential to ignite a war between China and the United States. To the PLA, U.S. programs with Taiwan signal
fundamental American hostility to the return of China to the status of a great power under the People’s Republic. America’s
continuing arms sales, training, and military counsel to Taiwan’s armed forces represent potent challenges to China’s
pride, nationalism, and rising power, as well as to its military planners . These U.S. programs appear to reflect
judgments by the American elite that the Communist dictatorship on the mainland is fundamentally illegitimate and should be prevented from
extending its sway to other parts of China even by peaceful means. U.S. interactions with Taiwan and Tibet belie the lip service American
officials pay to the notion of “one China.” The message China’s civilian and military elite get from these interactions is that the United States
wants “one China in name but not in fact — not now, and perhaps never, if America has anything to say about it.” The Chinese don’t think we
should have anything to say about it.

The kind of long-term relationship of friendship and cooperation China and America want with each other is
incompatible with our emotionally fraught differences over the Taiwan issue. These differences propel
mutual hostility and the sort of ruinous military rivalry between the two countries that has already begun. We are
coming to a point at which we can no longer finesse our differences over Taiwan. We must either
resolve them or live with the increasingly adverse consequences of our failure to do so.

For Chinese, the Taiwan issue presents a n increasingly stark choice between national pride commensurate with
rising prestige and continuing deference to America ’s waning power. With Taiwan and the mainland integrating in practice, China
sees the policies of the United States as the last effective barrier to the arrival of a ripe moment for the achievement of national unity
under a single, internationally respected sovereignty . Dignity and unity have been and remain the core
ambitions of the Chinese revolution. China may, for now, continue to emphasize the avoidance of conflict with the United
States. But the political dynamics of national honor will sooner or later force Beijing to adopt less risk-averse policies than it now espouses.
Clarity CPs
 2AC Credibility Turn

And the U.S. will likely back down – which collapses U.S. leadership

White 15
(Hugh, professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University in Canberra,
“Will America defend Taiwan?,” pg online @
http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2015/05/05/Will-America-defend-
Taiwan.aspx //ghs-ef)
To many people it seems self-evident that America would honour the commitments enshrined in the
Taiwan Relations Act. But the TRA was passed in 1979 , when China's GDP was 1/20th the size of America's, its place in the global economy was
miniscule, its navy and air force were negligible, and its prospects for progress depended completely on America's goodwill. So back then a US-China conflict

carried much bigger economic and military risks for China than for America . That made the TRA's
commitments both highly credible and very unlikely to be tested. Washington could safely assume that
Beijing would back off to avoid a conflict in which China had so much more to lose than America. Things are different today.
China's economy is now so big and so central to global trade and capital flows that the consequences of
any disruption would be just as serious for America as for China . Militarily, America can no longer expect
a swift and certain victory in a war over Taiwan . China's anti-access/area-denial capabilities would preclude direct US intervention unless those
capabilities had first been degraded by a sustained and wide-ranging strike campaign against Chinese bases and forces. China would very likely respond to

such a campaign with attacks on US and allied bases throughout Asia. The US has no evident means to
cap the resulting escalation spiral, and no one could be sure it would stop below the nuclear threshold .
The possibility of nuclear attacks on US cities would have to be considered. These new realities of power mean that today a US-China conflict would

impose equal risks and costs on both sides. And where costs and risks are equal, the advantage lies with
those who have more at stake, and hence greater resolve . China's leaders today seem to think they hold this advantage, and they are probably
right. It is therefore a big mistake to keep assuming, as many people seem to do, that China would be sure to back off before a crisis over Taiwan became a conflict. US leaders

must therefore ask what happens if Beijing does not back down as a crisis escalates . At what point would
they back down instead? What would be the damage to US global leadership if Washington brought on
a confrontation with China and then blinked first? What could happen if Washington didn't blink first? Is Taiwan's status quo worth a global economic
collapse? It is worth a real risk of nuclear war with China? These are the questions America's leaders would have to confront in considering military action to defend Taiwan, and their

answer would very likely be that the status of Taiwan is not worth risking nuclear war or economic
collapse over. And that means American leaders and policy analysts must confront these questions now, as they decide whether to maintain the old commitments to defend
Taiwan. The promises that America was willing and able to keep in 1979 might not be ones it is willing or

able to keep now.

Doesn’t solve the Arms Control advantage – China Mod is a da to the CP

Gomez ‘16
(Eric, He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from the State University of New
York-College at Geneseo, and a Masters of Arts in International Affairs from the Bush School of
Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, policy analyst in defense and foreign policy studies at the
Cato Institute, “A Costly Commitment Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,”
CATO Institute Policy Analysis September 28, 2016, Number 800 //um-ef)

Restoring U.S. military superiority might be a boon to America’s credibility in the short term, but superiority
may be fleeting. The growing
U.S. military presence in East Asia, a result of the Obama administration’s “pivot” or “rebalance” to the region, has exacerbated the
Chinese perception of the United States as a threat.72 Restoring U.S. military superiority will likely support this
perception and provide a strong incentive for China to invest even more resources in its military.
Additionally, falling behind in the conventional balance of power could prompt China to increase the

quantity and quality of its nuclear weapon arsenal .73 If Beijing quickly offsets the advantages of stronger
U.S. military support for Taiwan, the U nited States could end up in a similar position to the one it’s in now,
but with a stronger China to deter.
Deterrence CPs
 2AC Rels DA

And, there is a relations da – the cp decreases the costs of war for china – makes the
Taiwan scenario a da to the cp

Kastner 16 (Scott L. Kastner - Professor in the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park. <MKIM> “Is
the Taiwan Strait Still a Flash Point?”. Winter 2016. 7/10/19.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/294137881_Is_the_Taiwan_Strait_Still_a_Flash_Point_Rethinking_the_Prospects_for_Armed_Confli
ct_between_China_and_Taiwan)

U.S. policymakers should be skeptical of calls to dramatically increase the U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s
security or to more visibly incorporate Taiwan into rebalancing initiatives.104 Such moves would be viewed as inflammatory in
Beijing and could generate renewed pessimism about long-term trends in the strait . Perhaps more fundamentally,
a much stronger U.S. commitment to Taiwan would stoke increased tensions in the U.S.-China
relationship. As alluded to earlier, a key component of China’s expected costs of a Taiwan Strait conflict —
regardless of whether the United States intervened—is the damage such a conflict would likely inflict on the broader U.S.-

China relationship. But if the U.S.-China relationship is in tatters to begin with, then Beijing has less to
lose in a cross-strait war. In essence, policies that increase U.S. support for Taiwan at a cost of a much
worse U.S.-China relationship risk being self-defeating, as the increased stability generated by slowing
the cross-strait power shift is canceled out by decreasing expected costs of war for China.
 2AC Independence DA

And, there is an independence da – Taiwan will feel overly reassured – causes Chinese
invasion and nuclear war

Aitken 12 — Aaron Aitken, Political Science Student and Government Relations Research Assistant at
the University of Alberta, has since obtained an M.A. in International Affairs from Carleton University,
2012 (“The Future of U.S.-Taiwan Arms Sales,” The Agora: Political Science Undergraduate Journal,
Volume 3, Number 1, January, pg online @
http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ps_sandbox/article/view/19032/14712 , p. 10-11)

is there any harm in selling increased

Even if ramping up arms sales to Taiwan cannot forestall the development of an asymmetrical balance between Taiwanese and Chinese forces,

quantities of advanced arms to Taiwan to help alleviate pressure on the U.S. military? There are actually a
number of risks entailed in ramping up arms sales to Taiwan . As Wei-Chin Lee observes in Issues and Studies, “the unrestrained and
unconditional supply of advanced weapons to Taiwan could have the effect of upsetting the status quo in
the region”44 It is possible, for example, that an expansion of arms packages would embolden Taipei by creating the impression

of unconditional American support. This might then lead Taiwanese leaders to take a risk and declare
independence on the assumption that the U.S. would support them against China. This would almost
undoubtedly provoke a military reaction from China, as declaring independence steps over the red lines
set out by China’s Anti-Succession Law. The United States, [end page 10] as Taiwan’s guarantor, would then be under considerable
pressure to meet China’s aggression. This is clearly a position that the United States has a vested interest in avoiding,
due to the potential for a nuclear conflict. What is the likelihood that increased arms sales would actually embolden Taiwan enough to rashly declare independence? It is hard to
say, but recent improvements in Sino-Taiwanese relations makes it somewhat unlikely. However, given the catastrophic consequences of such an event, even the

slightest possibility of U.S. entrapment in a Sino-Taiwanese conflict ought to be avoided .

Doesn’t solve the Arms Control advantage – China Mod is a da to the CP

Gomez ‘16
(Eric, He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from the State University of New
York-College at Geneseo, and a Masters of Arts in International Affairs from the Bush School of
Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, policy analyst in defense and foreign policy studies at the
Cato Institute, “A Costly Commitment Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,”
CATO Institute Policy Analysis September 28, 2016, Number 800 //um-ef)

Restoring U.S. military superiority might be a boon to America’s credibility in the short term, but
superiority may be fleeting. The growing U.S. military presence in East Asia, a result of the Obama
administration’s “pivot” or “rebalance” to the region, has exacerbated the Chinese perception of the
United States as a threat.72 Restoring U.S. military superiority will likely support this perception and
provide a strong incentive for China to invest even more resources in its military. Additionally, falling
behind in the conventional balance of power could prompt China to increase the quantity and quality of
its nuclear weapon arsenal.73 If Beijing quickly offsets the advantages of stronger U.S. military support
for Taiwan, the United States could end up in a similar position to the one it’s in now, but with a
stronger China to deter.
 2AC Mil Mod DA

Counterplan wrecks U.S.-China relations and ramps up Chinese military development.

Gomez 16 [Eric, policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, “A Costly
Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,” accessible online at
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-
defense-relationship#full, published 09/26/16] // BBM

-- AT: Containment Good

Restoring U.S. military superiority would shore up the credibility of the American commitment to Taiwan at the cost of severe
damage to the U.S.-China relationship. China might be deterred from attacking Taiwan, but it would have ample reason
to strongly oppose the United States across other issue areas, including the South China Sea, trade issues, and
reining in North Korea. Additionally, unequivocal American support would reduce incentives for Taiwan to improve its defenses. The
most important negative consequence of restoring U.S. military superiority is the severe damage that would be done to U.S.-China relations.
China and the United States do not see eye-to-eye on many issues , but this does not make China an
outright adversary.68 Chinese cyber espionage against American companies , the rise of alternative
development institutions led by Beijing, and island-building in the South China Sea are of great concern
to policymakers in Washington.69 However, U.S.-Chinese cooperation on other pressing issues, especially environmental
concerns and punishing North Korea after its recent nuclear tests, has supported U.S. goals.70 China is certainly not a friend or ally of
the United States, but treating it as an enemy that needs to be contained is unwise.71 Restoring U.S. military
superiority would set back much of the progress made in U.S.-China relations. Restoring U.S. military superiority might be a boon
to America’s credibility in the short term, but superiority may be fleeting. The growing U.S. military presence in East Asia , a
result of the Obama administration’s “pivot” or “rebalance” to the region, has exacerbated the Chinese perception of the
United States as a threat.72 Restoring U.S. military superiority will likely support this perception and provide a
strong incentive for China to invest even more resources in its military. Additionally, falling behind in the
conventional balance of power could prompt China to increase the quantity and quality of its nuclear weapon
arsenal.73 If Beijing quickly offsets the advantages of stronger U.S. military support for Taiwan, the United States could end up in a
similar position to the one it’s in now, but with a stronger China to deter. Increasing American support for Taiwan
without any preconditions regarding Taiwan’s role in its own defense would be detrimental in the long run. Taiwan and the United States’ other
East Asian allies are willing to cheap-ride on American security guarantees.74 Taiwan is not disinterested in self-defense, but if someone else is
shouldering the burden there is less urgency to do more, especially if increasing military spending means reducing social spending. China could
exacerbate Taiwan’s “guns vs. butter” dilemma if it restricted economic exchanges (trade, investment, and tourism) with Taiwan as a result of a
stronger U.S. posture. Increasing the American commitment to Taiwan carries
significant risks and costs for a benefit
that would likely be fleeting. The likely negative consequences of restoring U.S. military superiority would not be
worth the benefits. American policymakers should not go down this path.
 at---CP---increase US military presence

restoring US military superiority doesn’t solve – emboldens China crushes relations

Eric Gomez ‘16 is a policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. His
research focuses on U.S. military strategy in East Asia, missile defense systems and their impact on
strategic stability, and nuclear deterrence issues in East Asia. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in
International Relations from the State University of New York-College at Geneseo, and a Masters of Arts
in International Affairs from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University,
September 28th, 2016, “A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense
Relationship” from https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-
future-us-taiwan-defense-relationship, accessed 7/2/19 || OES-AT
Shortcomings of Each Policy Option ¶ Each of the three policy options has problems and shortcomings that would make their implementation
difficult and limit their effectiveness. In this section I will discuss the most important flaws of each policy option. ¶ Restore U.S. Military
Superiority ¶ Restoring U.S. military superiority would shore up the credibility of the American commitment
to Taiwan at the cost of severe damage to the U.S.-China relationship. China might be deterred from attacking
Taiwan, but it would have ample reason to strongly oppose the United States across other issue areas, including
the South China Sea, trade issues, and reining in North Korea. Additionally, unequivocal American support would
reduce incentives for Taiwan to improve its defenses . ¶ The most important negative consequence of restoring U.S.
military superiority is the severe damage that would be done to U.S.-China relations. China and the United
States do not see eye-to-eye on many issues, but this does not make China an outright adversary.68 Chinese cyber espionage against American
companies, the rise of alternative development institutions led by Beijing, and island-building in the South China Sea are of great concern to
policymakers in Washington.69 However, U.S.-Chinese cooperation on other pressing issues, especially environmental concerns and punishing
North Korea after its recent nuclear tests, has supported U.S. goals.70 China is certainly not a friend or ally of the United States, but treating it
as an enemy that needs to be contained is unwise.71 Restoring U.S. military superiority would set back much of the
progress made in U.S.-China relations. ¶ Restoring U.S. military superiority might be a boon to America’s credibility in the short
term, but superiority may be fleeting. The growing U.S. military presence in East Asia, a result of the Obama
administration’s “pivot” or “rebalance” to the region, has exacerbated the Chinese perception of the
United States as a threat.72 Restoring U.S. military superiority will likely support this perception and provide a strong incentive for
China to invest even more resources in its military. Additionally, falling behind in the conventional balance of power could prompt China
to increase the quantity and quality of its nuclear weapon arsenal .73 If Beijing quickly offsets the advantages of
stronger U.S. military support for Taiwan, the United States could end up in a similar position to the one it’s in now, but with a stronger China to
deter. ¶ Increasing American support for Taiwan without any preconditions regarding Taiwan’s role in its own defense would be detrimental in
the long run. Taiwan and the United States’ other East Asian allies are willing to cheap-ride on American security guarantees.74 Taiwan
is
not disinterested in self-defense, but if someone else is shouldering the burden there is less urgency to
do more, especially if increasing military spending means reducing social spending . China could exacerbate
Taiwan’s “guns vs. butter” dilemma if it restricted economic exchanges (trade, investment, and tourism) with Taiwan as a result of a stronger
U.S. posture. ¶ Increasing the American commitment to Taiwan carries significant risks and costs for a benefit that would likely be fleeting.
The likely negative consequences of restoring U.S. military superiority would not be worth the
benefits. American policymakers should not go down this path. ¶

sustaining a minimum advantage is too costly – overstretches the US military

Eric Gomez ‘16 is a policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. His
research focuses on U.S. military strategy in East Asia, missile defense systems and their impact on
strategic stability, and nuclear deterrence issues in East Asia. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in
International Relations from the State University of New York-College at Geneseo, and a Masters of Arts
in International Affairs from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University,
September 28th, 2016, “A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense
Relationship” from https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-
future-us-taiwan-defense-relationship, accessed 7/2/19 || OES-AT

Sustaining a Minimum Advantage ¶ The biggest weakness of sustaining

a minimum U.S. military advantage is that it does
not resolve any of the underlying issues in the cross-strait dispute , most important of which is the fact that Taiwan
matters more to China than it does to the United States. Since the United States cannot equalize the imbalance of stakes vis-à-vis China,
credible deterrence will require the United States to maintain military superiority over a steadily
improving PLA. The United States is capable of absorbing these costs in the short run, but the recent history of the U.S.-China
military balance suggests that China will be able to narrow the gap eventually. ¶ Maintaining stability in the
Taiwan Strait will become more complicated as a result of two trends in cross-strait relations and one higher-level trend. First, a distinct identity
is taking hold in Taiwan; the people living there see themselves as Taiwanese instead of Chinese. Surveys conducted in 2014 showed that
“fewer than 4 percent of respondents [in Taiwan] self-identified as solely Chinese, with a clear majority (60 percent) self-identifying solely as
Taiwanese.”75 A unique Taiwanese identity is dangerous to Beijing because it makes China’s ultimate goal of reunification more difficult,
especially if the identity issue leads to greater political support for independence. Thankfully, the Taiwanese people have been very pragmatic
and have not yet made a significant push for de jure independence.76 ¶ Second, if China’s economy continues to slow down
Beijing could become more aggressive toward Taiwan. A parade of doom and gloom headlines reveal the weaknesses of
China’s economic miracle. The Chinese stock market experienced downturns in August 2015 and January 2016 that affected global financial
markets.77 China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based workers’ rights group, recorded more than 2,700 strikes and worker protests throughout
China in 2015—more than double the 1,300 recorded the year before.78 In February 2016, Reuters reported that 1.8 million workers in China’s
state-owned coal and steel companies will be laid off in the coming years.79 This is not to say that China’s economy is in imminent danger of a
catastrophic collapse. However, the political instability resulting from economic troubles could create an incentive for Beijing to act aggressively
to burnish the Chinese Communist Party’s image at home.80 Exacerbating this risk is the rise of nationalist forces within Chinese society that
could push the government into a more aggressive cross-strait policy. Such forces played an important role in the government’s heavy-handed
response to 2014’s Occupy Central protests in Hong Kong.81 Economic problems coupled with aggressive ideology could prompt China to back
away from any rapprochement with Taiwan. This could make the task of deterring a Chinese attack harder for the
United States. ¶ Third, America’s other security commitments could draw attention and resources away
from Taiwan. Keeping pace with the PLA in the Taiwan Strait will require investments in military power
that will become more difficult to sustain , barring either a reduction in global commitments or a significant decrease in China’s
own economic and military power. The fight against ISIS in the Middle East and North Africa, the Russian threat to
Eastern Europe, and Chinese island-building in the South China Sea are all vying for the attention of the
U.S. military. The military has been able to cope with these contingencies, but there are signs of strain on the force.82 Given America’s
current global security posture, it will be difficult for the United States to sustain a minimum advantage over the PLA in perpetuity. ¶
Sustaining a minimum U.S. military advantage is growing more difficult and costly over time as these
above trends develop. Fortunately, the costs are likely to increase slowly and could be mitigated by advances in U.S. military
technology. However, ultimately the United States will be stuck in the unenviable position of trying to
defend Taiwan from a China that has growing military power and a strong interest in prevailing in any
dispute. ¶
 at---CP---rollback

rollback destroys US-China relations and leads to military conflict

Hal Brands & Zack Cooper ’18 is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at
the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). He previously served as special assistant to the Secretary
of Defense for strategic planning from 2015 to 2016. His books include What Good Is Grand Strategy?
Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Cornell University
Press, 2014) and Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post–Cold War
Order (Cornell University Press, 2016). His most recent book is American Grand Strategy in the Age of
Trump (Brookings Institution, 2018) & is the Senior Fellow for Asian Security at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies (CSIS). While at CSIS, Dr. Cooper has authored reports on U.S. strategy in Asia
and options for countering Chinese coercion in maritime Asia. Prior to joining CSIS, Cooper worked as a
research fellow at CSBA and a staffer at the National Security Council and the Pentagon. Dr. Cooper
received a BA from Stanford University and an MPA, MA, and PhD from Princeton University, Winter
2018, “GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT STRATEGY IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA” from
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26398089?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents, accessed 7/2/19 || OES-
AT
The appeal of rollback is obvious, because the strategy—if successful—would restore U.S. credibility and remove a major threat to American interests in the Asia-
Pacific. And there is little question that, if the United States were willing to pursue the most aggressive versions of rollback—military assault or blockade—it could
achieve the desired strategic objective. Great gains do not come cheaply, however, and the risks of this strategy
would be tremendous. First, given the degree to which the Chinese Communist Party has staked its
prestige and legitimacy on standing up to foreign powers in general and asserting expansive claims in the South China Sea in
particular, it seems unlikely that anything short of military conflict actually would suffice to achieve the aims of

this strategy. Retreating in the South China Sea would be a great humiliation for the Chinese leadership;
one imagines that Beijing would be willing to accept a great deal of pain rather than submit to it. After
all, Chinese leaders repeatedly have made clear that they view the South China Sea as both a part of
China and a vital national interest, and as Fu Ying, chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress of China, has
warned, “The people won’t tolerate if we lose territory yet again.” 26 Washington therefore would have to be prepared to wage

war to remove Beijing from its features in the South China Sea—and, most likely, to be willing to paint
itself as the aggressor by firing the first shot in that conflict. The United States almost certainly would win such a conflict—
particularly if it occurred in the next few years—but the military costs, potential for escalation, and reputational costs likely

would be severe. A second, related point is that the United States probably would find most regional states—which would fear being caught in the middle
of a shoot-out between their primary trading partner and their primary security patron—strongly opposed to such a strategy. Few, if any, regional states—even
other South China Sea claimants—would support rollback openly; it is not hard to imagine U.S. allies such as the Philippines moving further away from Washington
and toward Beijing were the United States to take this approach. 27 Rather than upholding U.S. relationships in the Asia-Pacific, in other words, rollback might
weaken them severely. Finally, even if rollback did not lead to a military conflict, China likely would respond by
imposing costs of its own: ceasing cooperation on an array of other issues in the relationship—from
North Korea to climate change—and perhaps increasing its coercive activities in the East China Sea, putting
additional pressure on Taiwan, or using economic measures to punish U.S. businesses. Even in the best-case scenario, then, rollback

would lead to a severe disruption of the bilateral relationship and alienate many U.S. allies and partners;
at worst, it could plunge Washington and Beijing into precisely the military conflict that American policy
makers long have sought to avert. For these reasons, it is highly unlikely that rollback will be attempted;
indeed, not even the most hawkish U.S. national security experts have advocated such a strategy openly. 28
Attempts to preserve deterrence create a dangerous security dilemma with zero
strategic benefit
Glaser 15 (John Glaser, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, 12-28-2015, "The Ugly
Truth about Avoiding War with China," Cato Institute,
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/ugly-truth-about-avoiding-war-china)SEM
While ISIS is the threat that keeps Washington policymakers up at night, it’s the rise of China that has international relations theorists in a panic.
Graham Allison argues persuasively that China’s rise portends a classic Thucydides Trap. His research shows that in twelve of the last sixteen
cases over the past five hundred years, when a rising power challenged an established one, the result was war. John Mearsheimer, somewhat
more bluntly, warns that ‘China cannot rise peacefully.” It’s an impending great power clash that makes the threat from ISIS look like child’s
play. But China threatens the United States only insofar as America insists on being the dominant power
in China’s backyard, a policy that actually contributes very little to U.S. security. If we abandon our strategy of primacy,
the risk of a clash will shrink away. If we try to contain China’s rise, on the other hand, these predictions
of doom may prove right. The current approach to China boils down to a kind of measured containment.
It manifests in essentially in three ways: 1) maintaining and strengthening U.S. ‘treaty alliances with
Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand ,” which ‘are the fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asia-
Pacific”; 2) increasing overall U.S. military presence in the region to develop ‘a geographically dispersed, politically
sustainable force posture in the region”; and 3) further integrating U.S. economic engagement in the region in a way
that marginalizes, and in some cases excludes, China. But containment is problematic: it carries the dubious
presumption that China’s most likely reaction to U.S. expansion in the region is to become a docile
power, eager to give up its regional ambitions. In reality, Washington’s determination to maintain dominance in East
Asia is much more likely to generate an intense security dilemma. To understand why, we have to try to see
the world through China’s strategic lens. According to Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell, China sees America as
‘the most intrusive outside actor in China’s internal affairs, the guarantor of the status quo in Taiwan , the largest
naval presence in the East China and South China seas, [and] the formal or informal military ally of many of China’s neighbors.” The Chinese
view the United States as ‘a revisionist power that seeks to curtail China’s political influence and harm
China’s interests.” China’s feelings of encirclement are not unwarranted . America’s presence along
China’s maritime periphery is highly militarized and provocative , with the U.S. Pacific Fleet conducting countless
exercises and training events with dozens of countries in the region. Washington’s massive military presence on the Korean
Peninsula, and just across the East China Sea on the southern tip of the Japanese archipelago, are perceived as
substantive threats to Chinese security. America’s position as the largest naval presence in the East and South China Seas also
stokes fear in China, particularly because roughly 40 percent of Chinese oil imports come by sea and pass through sea-lanes that are subject to
interdiction by the United States. Currently, China’s
‘obvious orientation,” writes Lyle Goldstein ‘is defensive,” although
‘those tendencies could change if Beijing perceives that its strategic environment has substantially
worsened.” So, what today might constitute a defensive Chinese foreign policy could in the future
transform into a more aggressive stance if increased U.S. military presence in the region convinces
Beijing that it is under threat. Fortunately, the United States can relinquish its outsized hegemonic role in
East Asia without damaging its core interests . Nothing in China’s foreign policy indicates any intention to preemptively or
preventively use force against America’s or its allies’ sovereign territory. Despite its naval buildup, China has not credibly threatened to cut off
sea lines of communication or disrupt trade routes. TheUnited States is arguably the most secure great power in
history. With weak and pliant neighbors to its north and south, vast oceans to its east and west and a superior nuclear deterrent, it is
remarkably insulated from external threats. Maintaining military predominance in East Asia simply doesn’t add
much to our unusually secure position. But primacy does impose real costs. Promising to defend a host of China’s
neighboring rivals, and maintaining tens of thousands of forward deployed troops and more than half of U.S.
naval power in Asia entail
enormous budgetary expenditures that could be kept in productive sectors of the economy. There
are also the latent costs of being entrapped into unnecessary wars. Conflict over the sovereignty of
Taiwan or uninhabited islands in the South China Sea risks entangling the United States in a regional war that serves the
interests of other countries, not its own. Primacy could conceivably be justified if the United States derived commensurate benefits. That does
not appear to be the case. As
Robert Jervis has written, ‘the pursuit of primacy was what great power politics was all about in the
past,” but in
a world of nuclear weapons, with ‘low security threats and great common interests among the
developed countries,” the game is not ‘worth the candle.” Charles Glaser similarly argues, ‘Unipolarity is much
overrated.” It is not necessary to protect core national interests and in fact causes the U.S. to ‘lose track of how secure it is and
consequently pursue policies that are designed to increase its security but turn out to be too costly and/or to have a high probability of
backfiring.” Nor does U.S. dominance reap much in the way of tangible economic rewards. Daniel Drezner contends, ‘The economic benefits
from military predominance alone seem, at a minimum, to have been exaggerated… . There is little evidence that military primacy yields
appreciable geoeconomic gains” and therefore ‘an overreliance on military preponderance is badly misguided.” The
struggle for
primacy in East Asia is not fundamentally one for security or tangible economic benefits. What is at stake is
largely status and prestige. As the scholar William Wohlforth explains, hegemonic power transitions throughout history actually see
the rising power seeking ‘recognition and standing rather than specific alterations in the existing rules and practices that constituted the order
of the day.” In Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, for example, ‘the rise of Athens posed unacceptable threats not to the security
or welfare of Sparta but rather to its identity as leader of the Greek world.” Similarly, the power transition between a rising Germany and a
dominant Great Britain in the lead up to World War I was characterized by an ‘absence of tangible conflicts of interests.” U.S. paranoia over the
rise of China is less about protecting significant strategic and economic returns, which are marginal if not actually negative, and more about a
threat to its status, prestige and reputation as the world’s sole superpower. In no way is that a just cause for war. In contrast to today’s foreign
policy, in which the United States maintains a global military presence and routinely acts on behalf of peripheral interests ,
a more
prudent approach would define U.S. interests more narrowly and reserve U.S. intervention for truly vital
national interests. Joseph M. Parent and Paul K. MacDonald advocate retrenchment, which includes deep cuts to the defense budget and
a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe and Asia. ‘Faith in forward defenses is a holdover from the Cold War,” they argue, ‘rooted in
visions of implacable adversaries and falling dominoes [that] is ill suited to contemporary world politics.” Barry Posen similarly argues the
United States ‘should reduce, not increase, its military presence” in response to China’s rise. By narrowing U.S. commitments in the region,
wealthy and capable allies can take responsibility for their own defense and balance against China. Meanwhile, the United States can
extricate itself from potentially perilous entangling alliances. The United States pursued dominance in East Asia long
before any concerns about a Chinese superpower, so continuing to justify primacy on those grounds is somewhat fishy. But even assuming
China’s continued economic growth, the prospect of China achieving regional hegemony is no sure thing, an
insight that should temper the inflated level of threat supposed by primacists. Regional hegemony requires China
to develop uncontested dominance in its sphere, but China is surrounded by major powers that would resist such a
gambit. India, which harbors great power ambitions of its own, is protected by the Himalayas and possesses nuclear
weapons. Japan is protected by the stopping power of water and is wealthy enough to quickly build up
its military and develop nuclear weapons if it feels threatened by China. Russia can check Chinese power in
Central Asia and draw Beijing’s focus away from maritime dominance in the Pacific inward toward the Eurasian
heartland. China’s serious demographic problems as well as its restive provinces like Xinjiang and Tibet
remain top level concerns for Beijing and add to the difficulty of obtaining true regional hegemony. The United
States can withdraw from East Asia and still ‘have ample warning and time to form alliances or regenerate forces before China realizes such vast
ambitions.” There are several cogent reasons — economic interdependence, nuclear deterrence and the
general obsolescence of great power war, among others — to be skeptical of warnings that conflict
between the United States and China is inevitable , or even likely. Nevertheless, history shows that great power transitions
are dangerous. If outright war is not in the cards, a long, drawn-out, burdensome cold war is quite plausible. If Washington is
tempted to maintain or expand its reach in East Asia to contain China’s rise, the chances of conflict
increase, as do the associated costs short of war, such as bigger defense budgets, strengthened security guarantees to allies and increased
deployments.
FTA CP
 Doesn’t solve Taiwan War

The counterplan crushes U.S.-China relations and increases the risk of war over
Taiwan.
Kastner 16 — Scott L. Kastner, Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at
the University of Maryland-College Park, Author of Political Conflict and Economic Interdependence
across the Taiwan Strait and Beyond and Co-Editor of Globalization and Security Relations across the
Taiwan Strait: In the Shadow of China, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California-
San Diego, 2015/2016 (“Is the Taiwan Strait Still a Flash Point? Rethinking the Prospects for Armed
Conflict between China and Taiwan,” International Security, Volume 40, Number 3, Winter, Available
Online to Subscribing Institutions via Project Muse)

For similar reasons, U.S.

policymakers should be skeptical of calls to dramatically increase the U.S.
commitment to Taiwan’s security or to more visibly incorporate Taiwan into rebalancing initiatives .104
Such moves would be viewed as inflammatory in Beijing and could generate renewed pessimism about
long-term trends in the strait. Perhaps more fundamentally, a much stronger U.S. commitment to Taiwan would
stoke increased tensions in the U.S.-China relationship . As alluded to earlier, a key component of China’s
expected costs of a Taiwan Strait conflict—regardless of whether the U nited States intervened—is the
damage such a conflict would likely inflict on the broader U.S.-China relationship. But if the U.S.-China
relationship is in tatters to begin with, then Beijing has less to lose in a cross-strait war . In essence, policies
that increase U.S. support for Taiwan at a cost of a much worse U.S.-China relationship risk being self-
defeating, as the increased stability generated by slowing the cross-strait power shift is canceled out by
decreasing expected costs of war for China .

The counterplan causes massive backlash by china --- causing the Taiwan war
advantage, or the CCP gets overthrown
Zhuang 11/4
(Zhuang Pinghui, Reporter for The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong English-language newspaper),
2016 “Xi Jinping warns Communist Party would be ‘overthrown’ if Taiwan’s independence push left
unchecked,” South China Morning Post, November 4 th, pg online @
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2042784/xi-jinping-warns-communist-party-
would-be-overthrown-if)

Mainland China’s Communist Party would be overthrown by the people if it failed to properly deal with
Taiwanese pro-independence, President Xi Jinping told the head of the Kuomintang party in Beijing this week, according to
the self-ruled island’s media. The reports, including by United Daily News, quoted unidentified sources who attended the meeting on Tuesday as saying Xi said

Beijing’s opposition to Taiwanese independence was “based on the prospect of the great rejuvenation
of the China nation”. “From the position of Chinese people’s nationalism, 1.3 billion people on the
mainland would not agree to Taiwan’s formal independence ,” Xi was quoted as saying by the Daily News. “The
Communist Party would be overthrown by the people if the pro-independence issue was not dealt with .”
Beijing “would not let other international forces intervene” should Taiwan declare independence, Xi
reportedly told KMT leader Hung Hsiu-chu. Xi and KMT chief draw hard line under need for landmark 1992 deal A member of the delegation
contacted by the South China Morning Post refused to confirm or deny the accuracy of the reports, only saying Xi’s words reflected that Beijing

did not want to see cross-strait relations descend into chaos and create unrest . “The most important goal is to avoid
social unrest. And Taiwanese can only enjoy life and development in peaceful times,” he said. Beijing cut off official communication with the

island after the independence-leaning President Tsai Ing-wen, from the Democratic Progressive Party, took office earlier this year and

refused to explicitly endorse the 1992 consensus, an agreement made that year by the semi-official organisations across the strait to
adopt the “one-China” principle. It was an understanding that there is only “one China”, but each side would have its own interpretation of what constitutes
“China”. Xi was scheduled to deliver a 15-minute speech, but he made additional remarks and spoke for 30 minutes, according to the report. Hung told reporters
after the meeting that she asked Xi to consider giving more room for Taiwan to participate in international diplomatic gatherings, to which he responded “there will
be no hurdle if the one-China position is respected”. As KMT chief heads to Beijing, some in her party wary over what she might say Zhang Zhijun, director

of the State Council’s Taiwan Affairs Office , warned the island against following the path taken by former
Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian, whose push for independence brought the two sides to “the verge of
war”, according to an article he wrote in Xinhua. But Beijing would continue to work for the benefit of Taiwanese people, he said. Zhang Wensheng, a
professor at the Taiwan Research Institute of Xiamen University, said Xi’s remarks underscored the importance
the party attached to safeguarding territorial integrity. Failure to do so would lose it support among
the Chinese people. Zhang said the article was a clear warning that seeking independence would leave
Beijing no other option but to wage war.

The counterplan causes China to invade Taiwan

Tiezzi 15 — Shannon Tiezzi, Editor at The Diplomat, former Research Associate at the U.S.-China Policy
Foundation, holds an M.A. in Regional Studies (East Asia) from Harvard University, 2015 (“6 Reasons
China Would Invade Taiwan,” The Diplomat, September 3rd, Available Online at
http://thediplomat.com/2015/09/6-reasons-china-would-invade-taiwan/)

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense submitted its 2015 report on mainland China’s military to the Taiwanese
legislature yesterday. The report noted a variety of scenarios under which China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might

invade Taiwan, and outlined the possible attack strategy. The MND report noted that leaders in Beijing are concerned about the 2016 presidential elections
in Taiwan. Tsai Ing-wen, the candidate for the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is currently leading in the polls, and Beijing has not-so-fond memories
of the previous DPP president, Chen Shui-bian. The MND suggested that recent PLA drills seeming to simulate an attack on Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, were a direct
result of Beijing’s worries. The report said that Beijing
might decide to invade Taiwan under a number of circumstances: if
Taiwan declares independence or takes steps toward de jure independence; if Taiwan obtains nuclear
weapons; if foreign troops are deployed in Taiwan; if there is extreme civil unrest or other internal
chaos in Taiwan; if foreign forces interfere in Taiwan’s affairs; or if Taiwan delays cross-strait
negotiations on eventual reunification. In 2005, when Beijing was concerned about the possibility of a move toward Taiwanese
independence under President Chen, it passed an “Anti-Secession Law,” which made it clear that Beijing will use “non-

peaceful means” if it believes that Taiwan is moving toward independence. The law also allows for the
use of force against Taiwan if “possibilities for a peaceful re-unification should be completely
exhausted.” It’s that last point that has always worried Taiwan’s leaders – the possibility that Beijing could order an invasion simply because it believes talks
on reunification are going nowhere. As for how China would attack Taiwan, the MND said the PLA would probably use a combination of

military threats and a blockade against Taiwan to intimidate Taiwanese. Then Beijing would move to use
missiles against Taiwan’s military and political centers . According to the MND, the PLA’s Second Artillery Crops currently has 1,500
missiles deployed against Taiwan. After missile attacks, the PLA would use both aircraft and amphibious vehicles to

mount an actual invasion.

Grand bargain cp
 2ac Grand Bargain

China says no-Trump

Carafano 19
*This card talks more about why guessing about a grand bargain is ridiculous, but there’s a part that
talks about why Trump doesn’t need a bargain for re-election, and depending on what arguments they
run, this might come in handy.

(Jay – a leading expert in national security and foreign policy challenges, writer at the Heritage
Foundation, May 24th 2019, “Trump’s China Syndrome – Five Things to Know Before Guessing About a
deal,” The Heritage Foundation, https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/trumps-china-syndrome-
five-things-know-guessing-about-deal) SDD.

Here is my best advice. Don’t waste your time dot-connecting. When it comes to China, Trump has done
anything but paint a clear picture. Trump-diviners just got another lesson in that. The White House
recently issued an executive order banning suspect technologies from the U.S., a directive aimed at
Huawei and other Chinese telecom companies. Separately, the administration also banned Huawei
specifically from buying U.S. technology, the full impact of which was later delayed for 90 days. Policy
experts have trotted out all kinds of interpretations. One view argues the delay represents the U.S.
yielding to pushback organized by China. Another holds that the president is just using the whole issue
as a bargaining chip in the trade talks. The Commerce Department continues to maintain that the ban is
serious. Depending on whose dot-connecting you like, you can draw very different conclusions on what
Trump is up to. But rather than guessing who guessed right, better to start with what we know than
guessing about what we don’t. Never expect the administration’s relations with China to follow a
straight line. Before Trump, the plan was to avoid confrontation with Beijing. In fact, the U.S. tried to
avoid contentious issues altogether. Trump turned that approach on its head, conspicuously looking to
confront the Chinese economically, diplomatically and militarily, forcing them to respect America’s
interests. The administration knows this strategy will have to play out over time rather than end in a
showdown at the OK Corral. There will be some pushing and shoving on both sides, ups and downs,
name-calling and back-slapping. The White House knows it’s riding a geo-political rollercoaster. So
should we. There is no grand bargain. Long before there was Trump, there was talk of a G2, a big deal
between the governments in Beijing and Washington that would divide up the world and tell everyone
else what to do. That was a fear that was unfounded then. Nothing has changed. The two sides might
make nice now and then, as when Obama and Xi reached an agreement on cyber-espionage in 2015, but
that’s just a pause in the action. The new normal is don’t expect there to be a normal – for long, anyway.
Don’t think Trump needs a deal. There is a notion that the White House in the end will be desperate for
deals, any deal, because the president needs one to burnish his chances of re-election . Don’t bet on it.
With a strong economy at his back and bipartisan support to be “tough on China,” the administration
not only might not be desperate for a deal, it could well conclude it’s happy to wait until after the
election when the White House might feel it can negotiate from an even stronger position. There might
be a deal. There might not be. Trump has cards to play. Beijing is not the irresistible economic
juggernaut that many often assume. For example, cutting off Chinese ICT manufacturer ZTE from
American products, even though the prohibition was brief, threatened to destroy the Chinese giant.
Trump also showed that supply chain dependencies are not a one-way street, with China holding the
reins of the chains. The White House also has shown that global supply chains aren’t fixed. There are
other options. Expect Trump, and American companies, to consider them . Don’t lose sight of Trump’s
policies. His rhetoric may be loose; his use of tariffs questionable; even his interpretation of free-market economics may be a bit sketchy. That said, in the end,
Trump’s policies often look far more traditional in practice than many assume. The U.S. hasn't become
isolationist. It hasn’t abandoned its values or its friends. It hasn’t devolved into a managed economy of
state-owned enterprises. Don’t expect America to stop being America. So let’s remember as we debate the great
questions (Will there be a trade deal? Will Huawei be ultimately dispatched by Trump to the global doghouse? And whither tariffs?) that however entertaining it
may be to speculate, we shouldn’t bet the house on anyone’s ability to connect dots. Zigs when we expect zags should surprise no one.

Grand bargain fails-US inertia

Brands and Cooper 19
(Hal – professor of Global Affairs at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Zack –
research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, February 2019, “After the Responsible Stakeholder,
What? Debating America’s China Strategy,” Texas National Security Revew: Volume 2 Issue 2,
file:///C:/Users/Melov/Downloads/TNSRVol2Issue2_Brands-Cooper.pdf) SDD

There are four basic options for resetting America’s China policy: accommodation, collective balancing,
comprehensive pressure, and regime change. These options are ideal-types: They illustrate the range of
possible approaches and capture distinct analytical logics about the nature of the China problem and the
appropriate response. At one extreme, Washington could seek an accommodation with Beijing in hopes
of striking a grand bargain and establishing a cooperative long-term relationship. At the other extreme,
the United States could seek regime change or even precipitate a military showdown to prevent China
from growing more powerful. Both of these options assume that America must take urgent action to
“solve” the China challenge. Yet, neither of these approaches is realistic, and, in fact, each is downright
dangerous. The real debate involves the two middle options: collective balancing and comprehensive
pressure. Collective balancing would rely on U.S. cooperation with allies and partners to prevent China
from constructing a regional sphere of influence or displacing the United States as the world’s leading
power. Comprehensive pressure would go further, attempting not simply to counterbalance Chinese
influence overseas but to actively erode China’s underlying political, economic, and military power.
These options, in turn, rest on different fundamental assumptions. Collective balancing accepts that
Chinese power is likely to expand but assumes that it is possible to prevent Beijing from using its power
in destabilizing ways. Comprehensive pressure assumes that China’s power must be limited and even
diminished, despite the risk that doing so will sharply escalate tensions. Probing the logic of these
strategies, and assessing their various strengths and weaknesses, is critical to going beyond
“competition” and adopting a new approach. The alternative — practicing tactics without strategy — is
no way to confront the daunting geopolitical challenge that China presents.

Grand Bargain collapses US hegemony

Brands and Cooper 18
(Hal – professor of Global Affairs at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Zack –
research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, November 2018, “Getting Serious About Strategy in
the South China Sea,” Naval War College Review Vol. 71, No. 1, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/
26398089.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A2a2cd3c9d6033bdb10dbfc7583c0 57fb) SDD

It seems unlikely, however, that even a complete U.S. capitulation in the South China Sea would lead
Beijing to change its policy fundamentally on North Korea, Taiwan, or any other key issue, because
Chinese leaders surely would assess that the weakness of the U.S. position on the South China Sea was
compelling the United States to seek such a “grand bargain.” And as tempting as accommodation might
be for a country with no shortage of challenges around the globe, the fact is that the benefits of this
approach would be more than offset by powerful disadvantages . A strategy of accommodation would
undercut U.S. alliances and partnerships in Southeast Asia and beyond, by demonstrating that the
United States is no longer willing to contest Chinese power in this area. Washington thereby would risk
forfeiting the leadership role that the United States long has played in the region, while perhaps
encouraging countries from Vietnam to the Philippines to align with a rising Beijing. Indeed, if the United
States cannot summon the wherewithal to uphold the rules-based order, then American leaders should
not expect smaller states to do so on their own. Moreover, although a policy of accommodation would
reduce the risk of confrontation in the short term, it might increase it in the long term. The lesson that
Beijing surely would take away from such an approach is that American redlines are not actually so red
and the country’s “ironclad” alliance commitments are not actually so ironclad; that perception, in turn,
could encourage greater Chinese risk taking that ultimately might transgress a real American redline and
bring the two countries to blows. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, this approach would
guarantee Chinese hegemony over the South China Sea, an area that American policy makers long have
deemed to be of vital economic and geopolitical importance to the United States. It thereby would
complicate dramatically any U.S. effort to defend Taiwan, the Philippines, and other partners and allies
in the event of Chinese aggression or coercion. U.S. accommodation also would put China well on the
path to becoming a regional hegemon of the sort America always has felt compelled to resist. Beijing
indeed may have a greater interest in the South China Sea than Washington does, but it hardly follows
that the United States has no interest there worth defending. Accommodation, in other words, would
have devastating effects for the U.S. position in the Asia-Pacific—with no guarantee that it actually
would reduce the danger of an eventual conflict with China
Gross Agreed Framework CP
 2AC Say No

China says no to Gross’ condition – too much disparity between Chinese and US
officials

Gawthorpe ‘14 - Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Belfer Center's International Security Program,
M.Phil. in Historical Studies from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Defense Studies from King's
College London (Andrew, “The China fallacy: How the US can benefit from China's rise and avoid another
Cold War”, Proquest)

, Gross's discussion of the security aspects of the proposed agreement seems to promise too much. For China to renounce
Similarly

the use of force against Taiwan is to acquiesce formally in the indefinite separation of Taiwan from the
mainland, given the prevailing political winds in Taipei. Whether Beijing would give up what Gross himself calls its "foremost
foreign policy objective" of reunification in exchange for a reduction in US surveillance activity on its borders and the withdrawal of some US forces from the Asia-Pacific is doubtful (212). It
also seems too much to hope that China will agree that its maritime disputes are "preeminently legal issues " to be
solved by international arbitration when so much is at stake and the long-term trends of power are so much in Beijing's favour (61).

Gross’ is wrong – His argument is premised off the fact that American actions
determine the behavior of other states

Gawthorpe 14’ - Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Belfer Center's International

Security Program, M.Phil. in Historical Studies from the University of Cambridge and a
Ph.D. in Defense Studies from King's College London (Andrew, “The China fallacy: How
the US can benefit from China's rise and avoid another Cold War”, Proquest//AK)
Such an unlikely promise lies at the heart of Donald Gross's book The China Fallacy, which is otherwise an able overview of the state of Sino-American relations and a useful corrective to an

American policy debate on China that he contends is "far narrower" than it ought to be (37). Gross contends that the US debate is dominated by
"China hawks" who have succeeded in defining China as a threat to both the security and economy of
the United States, when in reality much of China's military build-up and internal repression can be
attributed to its own perception of a "US threat ." It follows that, by reducing China's perception of this threat, its policy can be altered. Gross
argues that by reducing tension with China and ultimately arriving at a framework agreement, the
groundwork will be laid for the mutual strengthening of the Chinese and American economies, the political
liberalization of China, and an enduring Sino-American peace that extinguishes the spectre of nuclear war between the two countries. The central plank of the

proposed agreement is for the United States to follow a policy of "strategic restraint " in the Asia-Pacific and to reduce its
military forces and movements in the region in exchange for China formally renouncing the use of force against Taiwan and agreeing to submit its maritime disputes to international arbitration

China would exercise its own restraint by sharply de-escalating tensions in the Taiwan Straits and
(44).

increasing military transparency, among other more minor measures. Equally wide-ranging initiatives in the economic and political
realms would see China included in a Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement and agreement reached on a basket of political principles modelled on the Helsinki Final Act reached
between the US and the Soviet Union in 1975. Among the principles to be enshrined would be a commitment by China to the "unrestricted dissemination of information, respect for human
rights and fundamental freedoms, free exchange of peoples, and open borders," along with mutual commitments to "sovereign equality, territorial integrity of states and non-intervention in

Gross places great faith in the ability of the leaders of the US and
internal affairs" (122-123). A lawyer and diplomat by background,

China to negotiate mutually agreeable solutions to issues that arise between them by employing '"win-win' thinking" (152). This often gives
the book an unfortunate appearance of focusing overly on diplomatic process while not analyzing in
sufficient depth either the goals of China's leadership or the country's historical inheritance . This tendency is
only reinforced by the fact that most of Gross's sources are contemporary newspaper articles and think-

tank studies. One example is found in his discussion of a possible political agreement between the US
and China. Noting both that China uses the perception of a US military threat to justify internal repression and that
Soviet dissidents were able to use the Helsinki Final Act as a rallying cry, he believes that a framework agreement modeled on the act is

the best way to promote the liberalization of China and undermine one-party rule. Whether the Chinese Communist Party would regard such an
outcome as "win-win" is questionable, especially given how conscious its leaders are of the need not to repeat what they view as the mistakes of Soviet rulers. Gross does not

analyze the rather different context of the 1975 Helsinki agreement , in which Soviet leaders were determined to obtain Western
recognition of the postwar territorial settlement in Europe. The US does not have a comparable diplomatic card to play with China .

It is also hard to see how obtaining Chinese commitment to human rights can be squared with the
principle of "non-intervention in internal affairs ." Gross correctly asserts that China's leaders hold this principle dear but fails to
recognize that, for this very reason, the country's rulers would be unlikely to make any such commitment.
QPQ CPs
 2AC Say No

China wont bargain over Taiwan --- even over concessions they want. They believe it’s
a sovereignty issue.
Kim ‘17(Patricia, International Security Program research fellow at the Belfer Center and a Ph.D. candidate in
the Department of Politics at Princeton University, “History Shows Beijing Won’t Budge an Inch on Taiwan,” pg
online @ http://sports.yahoo.com/news/history-shows-beijing-won-t-152611565.html //ghs-ef)

Much has been made of President-elect Donald Trump’s phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and his statement in a recent interview that he does not
understand “why we have to be bound by a One China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things,” Some have criticized Trump for unnecessarily shaking up a
delicate understanding on Taiwan that has underpinned decades of U.S.-China relations. Others have expressed a range of cautious optimism for Taiwan’s sake, to outright praise for Trump for
refusing to “kowtow” to the Chinese. And some, including the student leaders of the 2014 Sunflower Movement that began in opposition to a Beijing-pushed trade deal, have decried the use

the real issue is this: Trump’s gambit won’t work, because Beijing doesn’t
of Taiwan as a “tool to score political points.” But

believe it owes Washington anything for recognizing Taiwan as a part of China . Trump is not the first
president to try to use Taiwan as leverage with Beijing. Richard Nixon, while negotiating the opening of relations with China
from 1971 to 1972 , tried to link American concessions on Taiwan to Chinese cooperation in Vietnam. Around

Nixon and Henry

this time, thousands of U.S. troops were deployed in Taiwan as part of the United States’ mutual defense treaty with the Republic of China (ROC).

Kissinger knew one of Beijing’s greatest priorities was obtaining American recognition of Taiwan as a part of the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) and getting U.S. troops off the island. Thus, they decided to link the withdrawal of American troops from Taiwan to China’s pledge to help the United States
achieve an “honorable exit” from the Vietnam War. The two American leaders suggested to their Chinese counterparts that they should pressure their ally, North Vietnam, to sign a peace
agreement with the United States if they wanted a quick exit of U.S. troops from Taiwan. But Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai categorically rejected the quid pro quo. Zhou insisted that because
Taiwan was a rightful part of China, Beijing had no reason to reward the United States for leaving the island. In fact, Zhou said, making such a demand was as ridiculous as China taking
exception to the United States’ sovereignty over Hawaii or Long Island. While the bargain failed, rapprochement proceeded with a general understanding that the United States would
gradually withdraw its troops from Taiwan. Beijing, however, continued to support North Vietnam’s war efforts and provided significant amounts of military assistance to its ally between 1971
and 1973. Ronald Reagan also tried to strike a bargain with Beijing that involved Taiwan when he first arrived in office. Reagan had campaigned on the platform that the Carter administration
had conceded too much to the Chinese while normalizing relations with the PRC in 1979, and suggested he would re-establish official relations with the ROC if he were elected. After assuming
office with this tough stance, the Reagan administration was immediately obliged to confront the issue of arms sales to Taiwan, and especially with the question of whether it would proceed to
sell FX fighter jets as had been discussed during the previous administration. Beijing objected not only to the potential sale of the FX, but also to all arms sales to Taiwan as an infringement
upon Chinese sovereignty. With the knowledge that Beijing coveted advanced American-made, dual-use technology and weapons, the Reagan administration decided to offer an implicit
bargain to their Chinese counterparts. Beijing was told it would be granted the status of a “friendly, non-aligned state,” making it eligible to purchase American arms if it acquiesced to the

Even though the reward was very appealing to the Chinese side, they immediately
United States’ arms sales to Taiwan.

rejected the bargain, because accepting the deal would not only undercut China’s sovereignty, but also
damage the Chinese leadership’s standing among their citizens. Furthermore, the Chinese refused to move forward with any other
aspects of the bilateral relationship until the issue of Taiwan arms sales was resolved. Finally, after months of negotiations, the two sides agreed to the Aug. 17, 1982, communiqué, which
resolved the bilateral impasse with the United States’ declaration that it would gradually reduce arms sales to Taiwan in light of China’s declaration that it would strive for a peaceful solution

to the Taiwan question.China simply will not engage in bargains that call into question its sovereignty over
Taiwan. Trump’s attempt to use the One China policy as a bargaining chip rests on the false assumption
that Beijing sees the policy as something to be negotiated . This is perhaps one of the few times the
routinely hyperbolic Global Times can be taken literally when it states that the notion of “One China”
cannot be “bought or sold.” China has stood by this principle consistently, even in the face of enticing
deals. Nixon and Reagan attempted their bargains when China was both weaker in the global arena
and less vulnerable to domestic criticism. Today, the PRC is a global power that is recognized by the vast majority of states as the official government
of China, many of which see Beijing as a critical trade partner they cannot afford to antagonize. At the same time, Chinese leaders are much more

vulnerable at home due to the rise of officially encouraged nationalism, a slowing economy, and mounting societal grievances.
As a result, Chinese leaders know they cannot afford to look weak in front of their own citizens. All of
this makes Taiwan a genuine red-line issue that cannot be manipulated to elicit Chinese cooperation
in other areas.
No Solvency — China rejects any bargain involving the “One China” policy.
Zweig ‘16 — David Zweig, Chair Professor and Director of the Center on China's Transnational
Relations at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Senior Fellow at the Asia Pacific
Foundation of Canada, Adjunct Professor at the National University of Defense Technology (China),
former Associate Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University (Canada), former Associate
Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, holds a Ph.D. in Political
Science from the University of Michigan, quoted by Cary Huang, Senior Writer and former Beijing
Bureau Chief at the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 2016 (“Are Trump’s America and Xi’s China
on a Collision Course?,” South China Morning Post, December 17th pg online @
http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2055302/are-trumps-america-and-xis-china-
collision-course)

There have been plenty of flashpoints previously in relation to the one-China issue , notably when
Beijing was enraged by a US decision to grant the independence-leaning Taiwanese President Lee Teng-
hui a visa in 1995. In response, the People’s Liberation Army fired missiles into the waters off Taiwan,
prompting Bill Clinton to dispatch two aircraft groups to sail through the Taiwan Strait. Analysts warned
similar crises might lie ahead if Trump continued to challenge the status quo. David Zweig, director of
the Centre on China’s Transnational Relations at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,
described the one-China policy as a core principle of China’s national identity, a fundamental pillar of
US-China relations, and a key component of the Communist Party’s legitimacy. Given this, he said, the
question of sovereignty over Taiwan could absolutely not be used as a bargaining chip to gain
concessions. “Challenges to China’s sovereignty, particularly on Taiwan, are infinitely more sensitive,
non-negotiable, and strategically destabilising than other issues,” Zweig said.

China says no and the counterplan escalates tensions.

Wang ‘17 — Zheng Wang, Director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies and Associate
Professor in the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, Carnegie
Fellow at the New America Foundation, Global Fellow at the Kissinger Institute on China and the United
States of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Member of the National Committee on
United States-China Relations, Senior Visiting Fellow at the China Center for the South China Sea Studies
at Nanjing University (China), former Dr. Seaker Chan Endowed Visiting Professor at the School of
International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University (China), holds a Ph.D. in Conflict Resolution
from the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, 2017 (“Trump and Xi
Need a Timeout,” Foreign Policy, January 4th, pg online @
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/04/trump-and-xi-need-a-time-out/)

Taiwan is not a bargaining chip. The history of U.S.-China relations has repeatedly proven that this is a
dangerous and unpredictable game to play, one that has been very costly for both sides in recent decades.
The 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis was one example of how explosive the issue can be. The Clinton
administration’s 1995 decision to issue a visa to then-Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui to visit Cornell University, his alma mater, ignited a
major crisis. China responded with three large-scale military exercises and missile tests near Taiwan, and the United States sent two aircraft
carrier battle groups to the Taiwan Strait in March 1996. The
danger of the Taiwan question cannot be fully understood
only through geopolitical calculations; for China, it is related to nationalism and national identity . It is
basically a non-negotiable issue to the Chinese. To play the “Taiwan card” to pressure China to back
down in the South and East China Sea, as suggested by John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, will have
precisely the opposite of the intended effect . This kind of suggestion can only come from people —
whether they call themselves China experts or not — who don’t appreciate history or reality.

Escalating cross-strait tensions make bargains unenforceable – There’s a strategic

incentive to circumvent agreements
Kastner 16 (Scott L. Kastner - Professor in the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park. <MKIM> “Is
the Taiwan Strait Still a Flash Point?”. Winter 2016. 7/10/19.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/294137881_Is_the_Taiwan_Strait_Still_a_Flash_Point_Rethinking_the_Prospects_for_Armed_Confli
ct_between_China_and_Taiwan)

James Fearon argues that a

commitment problem, arising as a consequence of strong first-strike advantages, lies
at the root of preemptive wars. Under conditions in which attacking is much more advantageous than
defending (meaning the state initiating conflict will gain the lion’s share of the good being bargained
over), peaceful bargains can become unenforceable because both states know the other has incentives
to attack, and both know they are better off acting first .30 Fearon and others note, however, that wars arising purely as a
consequence of a preemptive logic appear to be extremely rare. Rather, first-strike advantages are more likely to exacerbate other potential
causes of conflict than they are to precipitate conflict on their own.31 In the cross-strait case, the
risk of inadvertent war would
seem highest if one or both sides were deliberately undertaking risky military exercises that could potentially lead
to mishaps. They might take such risks as a way of demonstrating resolve, which might otherwise be in doubt: risky exercises are a relatively
credible signal precisely because they are costly (and they are costly because they leave something to chance). For
example, in Allen’s
scenarios of possible air force escalation in the Taiwan Strait, the
PRC initially engages in deliberately provocative (and
potentially risky) behavior—such as flying sorties near or around Taiwan— as a way to “send a ‘message’ to Taiwan.” The
fundamental underlying factor motivating a desire to signal resolve in this way would most likely be uncertainty over PRC redlines.32 In this
regard, an
inadvertent war in the Taiwan Strait—if one were to occur—would likely arise as a consequence of
both a commitment problem (stemming from possible first-strike advantages and the logic of preemption) and an information
problem (stemming from the difficulties the PRC faces in credibly signaling the true location of its redlines).

And, U.S. unilateral actions are critical – starts a cooperation spiral while building trust
– Binding QPQ’s fail

Swaine et al ‘16
(Michael D. Swaine is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of the most prominent
American analysts in Chinese security studies. specialist in Chinese defense and foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and East
Asian international relations, doctorate in government from Harvard University. WENYAN DENG is a former junior fellow in the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Asia Program, where her research focused on international relations in the
Western Pacifc, Sino-U.S. crisis-management behaviors, Chinese military development, and U.S. military strategy in Asia. She is
currently a graduate student in international relations and security studies at the University of Chicago, “Creating a Stable Asia,”
pg online @ https://carnegieendowment.org/files/CEIP_Swaine_U.S.-Asia_Final.pdf //um-ef)

Lyle Goldstein of the U.S. Naval War College presents a variant of this (and the previous) technique, in the form of
an array of escalating reciprocal Sino-U.S. “cooperation spirals” in all the major areas of bilateral
competition. As Goldstein states, through such spirals, “trust and confdence are built over time through
incremental and reciprocal steps that gradually lead to larger and more signifcant compromises .”7
Goldstein writes that the
endpoints in the cooperation spiral model “only seem utopian in the absence of the
accomplishments that result from climbing the earlier steps , and even if the endpoints remain out of reach, each step
represents a signifcant advance.”8 Although Goldstein’s specifc suggestions for reciprocal actions in most of his proposed cooperative spirals are
either inappropriate or unnecessary for our purposes, the general concept is sound. Te key challenge, however, lies in creating incentives on all sides to initiate the
process and sustain it over time, preventing defection and the emergence of a negative echo efect where, Robert Axelrod and Robert O. Keohane explain, “if the
other player defects once, [the opposite player] will respond with a defection, and then if the other player does the same in response, the result would be an
unending echo of alternating defections.”9 Such reciprocity approaches can also yield to what Goldstein calls “acrimonious and frustrating patterns of bargaining” if
rigidly enforced.10 Binding reciprocal commitments are difcult to achieve, especially in a climate of distrust and in the absence of authoritative enforcement
mechanisms. Unfortunately, in
the absence of a crisis, it can be difcult to bring all sides together to agree on an
explicit, binding negotiation (or renegotiation) of the status quo. Hence on many issues, and
particularly in the early stages of movement toward a balance of power, tacit nonbinding agreements,
involving at times initial unilateral actions by one side, are probably more feasible and effective .
According to one analyst, a tacit change can be initiated when one party makes “gapreducing,
unilateral changes” and the “other party agrees by not opposing these changes or compensating for
them.” As a result of such a “probe,” a tacit understanding is reached .11 Such “reciprocal unilateralism”
is aimed at establishing a spiral of trust and conciliatory moves that result in “informal arrangements
that can later be codifed into formal agreements .”12

And, the QPQ will be too brittle --- its based on an issue that China finds too
controversial --- collapses coop

Swaine et al ‘16
(Michael D. Swaine is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of the most prominent
American analysts in Chinese security studies. specialist in Chinese defense and foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and East
Asian international relations, doctorate in government from Harvard University. WENYAN DENG is a former junior fellow in the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Asia Program, where her research focused on international relations in the
Western Pacifc, Sino-U.S. crisis-management behaviors, Chinese military development, and U.S. military strategy in Asia. She is
currently a graduate student in international relations and security studies at the University of Chicago, “Creating a Stable Asia,”
pg online @ https://carnegieendowment.org/files/CEIP_Swaine_U.S.-Asia_Final.pdf //um-ef)

However, McGinnis also notes that linkage-based cooperation “is often very brittle, in that attempts to
include or delete issues may shatter the existing basis of cooperation.” If one side refuses to accept the
new issue, a spiral of defection is likely to dissolve all previous agreements of cooperation. McGinnis
concludes that “it is very important for players attempting to expand their range of cooperation to
exercise caution, lest their undue insistence on more contentious issues lead to an unraveling of their
original basis for cooperation.”18 The difculty in this case, therefore, is in delinking issues discussed in
later rounds from any established agreements attained during earlier rounds to avoid a never-ending
loop of renegotiations.
 2AC Taiwan Says No

Taiwan knows China wont honor their commitment --- means Taiwan rejects the
counterplan and starts a war over the strait to maintain separate status
Kastner 16 (Scott L. Kastner - Professor in the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park. <MKIM> “Is
the Taiwan Strait Still a Flash Point?”. Winter 2016. 7/10/19.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/294137881_Is_the_Taiwan_Strait_Still_a_Flash_Point_Rethinking_the_Prospects_for_Armed_Confli
ct_between_China_and_Taiwan)

Finally, commitment problems would likely complicate the search for a peaceful accommodation even if a
future Taiwan government comes to recognize that China’s redline has moved to the left of the status quo and is,
in principle, willing to bargain away some of its sovereignty to preserve the peace.98 The problem here is that the
issue being bargained over, Taiwan’s sovereign status, affects Taiwan’s future bargaining power : to
the degree that a Taiwan government bargains away some of Taiwan’s sovereign status today , Taiwan’s
future bargaining power with Beijing will be further diminished. Perhaps most importantly, even a loose unification
bargain would almost certainly reduce even further Taiwan’s confidence that the United States would intervene in a future cross-strait conflict
—because in the aftermath of a unification agreement U.S. involvement would represent intervention in a civil, rather than an international,
conflict. Thus, anybargain involving a reduction in Taiwan’s sovereignty should independently reduce Beijing’s
expected costs of war, thus pushing China’s redline , R, even further to the left. The credibility of
Beijing’s commitment to such a bargain would therefore be suspect, because once the commitment was
implemented, Beijing would have incentives to demand an even more favorable bargain (and Taiwan
would not be in a position where it could refuse). This situation thus represents a dynamic
commitment problem, where the good being bargained over (in this case, Taiwan’s sovereignty) has implications
for future bargaining power of the parties involved.99 Absent a mechanism that obliges Beijing to
honor the agreement, Taiwan could reject the bargain even if it recognizes that this could lead to war.
In short, a shifting balance of power in the PRC’s favor has the potential to create renewed instability in
cross-strait relations, if it comes to overwhelm the effects of other, more stabilizing, trends. How worried should analysts be about this
sort of a dynamic emerging in the Taiwan Strait?
 2AC Nationalism DA

And, there is a nationalism da to the CP – negotiations collapse the legitimacy of the

government

Swaine 1/11 (Michael Swaine, Senior Associate in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Coordinator of
the U.S.-China Crisis Management Program co-sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment and the China Foundation for International and Strategic
Studies, Contributor to China Leadership Monitor—a journal published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Senior Policy
Analyst and RAND Center for Asia-Pacific Policy Chair in Northeast Asian Security at the RAND Corporation, former Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, former Research Associate at Harvard University, holds a Ph.D. in
Government from Harvard University, 2017 “Nelson Report on China/Taiwan/US in wake of Tsai's visit to Houston,” The Nelson Report
reprinted in The View From Taiwan—a blog, January 11th, Available Online at https://michaelturton.blogspot.com/2017/01/nelson-report-on-
chinataiwanus-in-wake.html)

MICHAEL SWAINE, Carnegie: Chris, In the case of Taiwan, what China means by declaring it a "core"
interest is that the political status of Taiwan as an "indisputable" part of China is a non-negotiable
element of Chinese national identity and hence a vital pillar of the legitimacy of ANY Chinese
government. Therefore, any acquiescence in or acceptance by any Chinese government of perceived
moves by the U.S. to establish the permanent separation of Taiwan from the Mainland would be a Casus
Belli. To not resist such an action would ensure the downfall of the government, or at the very least
throw Chinese state and society into an unpredictable period of chaos. Every U.S. administration since
at least 1979 has clearly understood this fact, and no amount of reinterpreting of the Six Assurances or
the Taiwan Relations Act can change it.
 AT QPQ CP w/ China
Unconditional concessions is key to relations
Wang, 2019
Yuan-kang, Professor of Political Science at Western Michigan University, “Rethinking US Security
Commitment to Taiwan,” Palgrave, 6/24/19, 10.1007/978-3-319-77125-0//WS
Over the decades, the US security commitment has kept the peace in the Taiwan Strait, allowing cross-Strait social and economic exchanges to flourish. China’s rapid rise, however, puts stress
on the international system and foreshadows a dangerous power transition with the United States. The structural stress is such that both the rising power’s dissatisfaction with the current
system and the existing hegemon’s fear of being overtaken significantly increase the likelihood of war. Graham Allison coins the term “Thucydides Trap” to capture the danger of power
transition.5 The high probability of war apparently prompted Chinese President Xi Jinping to publicly deny the existence of the Thucydides Trap during his visit to the United States in 2015:
“There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for

themselves.”6 Avoiding a potential US-China war has become one of the most important issues for
policymakers as well as academic communities. Accommodation emerges as a war-avoidance strategy
during power transition. T.V. Paul defines accommodation as “mutual adaptation and acceptance by established and rising powers, and the elimination or substantial
reduction of hostility between them.”7 The term “accommodation” is a variant of the disgraced strategy of appeasement . Given the
emotional baggage of appeasement, most analysts choose to use the term “accommodation” instead. Culling through various definitions, Norrin M. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy summarize that
appeasement is “conventionally defined as the satisfaction of grievances through unilateral concessions, with the aim of avoiding war.”8 Charles Glaser defines accommodation synonymously

the strategy of accommodation

with appeasement: “unilateral territorial concessions to an adversary designed to reduce the probability of war.”9 Like appeasement,

attempts to reduce the probability of war by making unilateral concessions to a dissatisfied adversary in
hopes of turning it into a status quo power . Proponents of accommodating China on Taiwan offer three arguments. First, Taiwan is the most dangerous
issue in US-China relations and the main source of potential conflict. Removing it would pave the way for better bilateral relations. In the words of Chas Freeman: “The Taiwan issue is the only
one with the potential to ignite a war between China and the United States…. The kind of long-term relationship of friendship and cooperation China and America want with each other is
incompatible with our emotionally fraught differences over the Taiwan issue. These differences propel mutual hostility and the sort of ruinous military rivalry between the two countries that
has already begun.”10 Similarly, Charles Glaser writes, “the United States should consider backing away from its commitment to Taiwan. This would remove the most obvious and contentious
flash point between the United States and China and smooth the way for better relations between them in the decades to come.”11 Forsaking Taiwan, so the thinking goes, defuses the most
explosive issue in US-China relations and prevents a future conflict. Second, accommodationists argue that abandoning Taiwan could moderate the security dilemma between the United
States and China. Military competition is already intensifying. China is expanding anti-access area denial (A2/AD) capabilities (which the Chinese military refers to as “counter-intervention,” fan
jieru) to thwart US intervention in the Taiwan Strait, while the United States is developing its AirSea Battle concept to counter China. Charles Glaser writes, “A decision by the United States to
end its commitment to Taiwan could moderate this security Y.-K. WANG 249 dilemma….”12 Similarly, Bruce Gilley argues that ending the US security commitment would “allow Taiwan to
break this cycle by taking itself out of the game and moderating the security dilemma that haunts the Washington-Beijing relationship.”13 In this view, abandoning Taiwan enables trust-
building and facilitates cooperation between the United States and China. Third, accommodationists claim that China has limited aims in its foreign policy. “From the United States’
perspective,” writes Charles Glaser, “there is broad agreement on Taiwan—China’s goal of unification makes China a limited-aims expansionist state.”14 Chas W. Freeman, Jr., avers that
“China does not…have a history of global power projection, seek to export an ideology, or propose to expand beyond its traditional frontiers.”15 In this view, China’s security objective is
defense of the homeland, not expansionism. China does not seek regional hegemony, nor does it wish to push the United States out of Asia. If China has no desire beyond Taiwan, abandoning
Taiwan would not risk creating a more dangerous China. Once this key source of bilateral tension is removed, both Beijing and Washington could then proceed to build a more cooperative
relationship. Bruce Gilley goes even further: “Beijing has no interest in occupying or ruling Taiwan; it simply wants a sphere of influence that increases its global clout and in which Taiwan is a
neutral state, not a client state.”16 Since China is motivated by the limited aims of defending the mainland, Gilley proposes that Washington should stop antagonizing China and end its

accommodationists believe that by making

security commitment to Taiwan, letting the island become a Finlandized neutral state. Taken together,

unilateral concessions on Taiwan, the United States would remove the principal source of conflict and
disagreement with China, thereby satisfying China’s grievances, reducing bilateral tensions, and
potentially avoiding war. Although most accommodationists do not explicitly ground their argument in international relations theory, their proposal
parallels defensive realism.17 Defensive realism takes an optimistic view about the effects of anarchy, arguing that the structure of the international system is generally
benign and does not always lead to competitive policies. In the offensedefense balance, military technology and geography often favor the defense. Security is thus plentiful.18 The best means
for states to be secure is to maintain the status quo. States should not attempt to maximize relative power because it would trigger counterbalancing. Defensive realists argue that states can
convey reliable information about their motives through costly signaling and policy choices. Both China and the United RETHINKING US SECURITY COMMITMENT TO TAIWAN 250 States are
secure because they enjoy “defensive advantage” created by nuclear weapons and geographical separation. As Glaser argues, “China’s rise need not be nearly as competitive and dangerous…
because the structural forces driving major powers into conflict will be relatively weak.”19 The dangers come from secondary disputes such as Taiwan. A US accommodation on Taiwan would
indicate US benign motives toward China. If China reciprocates, such as on the South China Sea or other issues, it would convey information about the limited extent of China’s foreign policy
aims. China could thus rise peacefully, a view that is in stark contrast to offensive realism.20 As a theory, defensive realism is an intellectual cousin of idealism. It describes how the world
should work instead of how the world actually works. As Glaser makes clear, defensive realism “analyzes the strategies a state should choose” (emphasis original) to achieve their goals and as
such, “it is a prescriptive, normative theory.”21 The problem with normative theory such as defensive realism is that it does not have much explanatory power, as John Mearsheimer points

out.22 The historical record is often at odds with defensive realism, with great powers having behaved in
ways that contradict the theory. Defensive realism often attempts to explain away these anomalies by incorporating non-structural variables such as domestic politics
or misperception into their theory.23 Like idealism, the policy prescriptions of defensive realism may appear desirable, but they

are politically infeasible.24 Their proposals provide little guidance to realistic policy making. In this article, I draw on offensive realism to highlight the dangers of
accommodating China on Taiwan.25 Unlike defensive realism, offensive realism argues that the structure of the international system drives states to compete for power. To be secure, major
states will maximize relative power until they have dominated the system. Great powers seek to establish hegemony in their region, while preventing rival powers from dominating another
region. The offense-defense balance emphasized by defensive realism offers little guidance to international politics because it is inherently difficult both to distinguish defense from offense and
to operationalize the concept.26 States cannot reliably convey their motives or intentions to others. The intentions of states are difficult to know, and even if known, present intentions can still

.
change in the future.27 Because states face uncertainty about the intentions of others under anarchy, the security dilemma cannot be moderated As Mearsheimer points out, “little Y.-K.
WANG 251 can be done to ameliorate the security dilemma as long as states operate in anarchy.”28 Adopting offensive realism as the theoretical baseline reveals the flaws of
accommodationist arguments favored by defensive realists.
Track Two Diplomacy CP
 2AC Track Two Fails

Track II fails — delay, no spill up, doesn’t work with authoritarian regimes like China.
Mapendere 7 — Jeffrey Mapendere, Executive Director for the Canadian International Institute of
Applied Negotiation, Assistant Director of the Conflict Resolution Program at the Carter Center, former
Security Arrangements Expert on the UN Standby Team of Mediation Experts, Conflict Resolution
Program, 2007 (“Track One and a Half Diplomacy and the Complementarity of Tracks,” Culture of Peace
Online Journal, Vol. 2, Issue 1, pp. 68-81, Available Online at
http://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/TrackOneandaHalfDiplomacy_Mapendere.pdf,
Accecssed 09-15-2016)

Weaknesses of Track Two Diplomacy – Regardless of its advantages, Track Two Diplomacy also has
several weaknesses. The first weakness is that Track Two participants have limited ability to influence
foreign policy and political power structures because of their lack of political power. Second, Track Two
interventions can take too long to yield results. Third, Track Two has limited ability to influence change
at the war stage of a conflict. Fourth, Track Two participants rarely have resources necessary for
sustained leverage during negotiations and for the implementation of agreements. Fifth, Track Two is
not effective in authoritarian regimes where leaders do not take advice from lower level leaders. Sixth,
Track Two actors due to their lack of political power, are in most cases not accountable to the public for
poor decisions. Seventh, because of their multiplicity Track Two actors/organizations are notoriously
known for their lack of coordination.
 2AC China Says No
China says no — won’t do Track II over Taiwan.
Cole 16 — J. Michael Cole, researcher at the French Center for Research on Contemporary China in
Taipei, senior member of the Thinking Taiwan Foundation, an independent think tank founded by Tsai
Ing-wen, former intelligence officer at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, MA in War Studies
from Royal Military College of Canada, 2016 (“China ramps up information warfare operations abroad,”
The Interpreter, June 30th, Available Online at http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2016/06/30/China-
ramps-up-information-warfare-operations-abroad.aspx, Accessed 09-15-2016)

While such co-optation undoubtedly continues, China has also deepened its involvement in
international conferences, Track-Two initiatives and trilateral dialogue. No longer reactive, China is now
on a proactive track: it seeks to set the agenda by organising, or co-sponsoring, international events, or
by establishing partnerships with organisations such as UNESCO or reputable think tanks in the West
(e.g., Rand Corp). In order to do so, China has made substantial financial and human investments,
opening its own think tanks, centres and 'private' non-profits overseas (including in the US), in some
cases with the backing of powerful — and increasingly global — Chinese companies. By becoming co-
organisers, Chinese outfits are now in a position to influence the composition of speakers at various
conferences, both by inviting Chinese academics who toe Beijing’s line on 'core interests' and those
whom it has co-opted, and by screening out panelists who they know are bound to present
contradictory views. (Another component of that strategy is to shape the agenda so that 'problem'
issues, such as Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong or human rights, are ignored altogether.)
 U.S. Wont Back Down

Counterplan cant magically solve conflict without a change in U.S. policy – cant
prevent a miscalculation

Swaine et al ‘16
(Michael D. Swaine is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of
the most prominent American analysts in Chinese security studies. specialist in Chinese defense and
foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international relations, doctorate in government from
Harvard University. WENYAN DENG is a former junior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace’s Asia Program, where her research focused on international relations in the
Western Pacifc, Sino-U.S. crisis-management behaviors, Chinese military development, and U.S. military
strategy in Asia. She is currently a graduate student in international relations and security studies at the
University of Chicago, “Creating a Stable Asia,” pg online @
https://carnegieendowment.org/files/CEIP_Swaine_U.S.-Asia_Final.pdf //um-ef)

Some critics might argue that a stable balance does not require and should not involve any deliberate
understandings or undertakings between Washington and Beijing. Instead, such a balance can and
should emerge “naturally,” as a result of common economic constraints on military capabilities and
common political and diplomatic incentives to stabilize a changing power relationship over time. All that
is required, the argument goes, is an array of CBMs and CMMs that lower the likelihood of actual
confict as the two countries adjust separately to an emerging de facto balance of power relationship.
As suggested in “Beyond American Predominance,” and discussed in greater detail in chapter 2, while
such a development is not inconceivable, it is difcult to see how both Washington and Beijing could
successfully end up—without design—in a stable balance that avoided attempts by one or both sides to
achieve a relative advantage in pursuing competitive or potentially incompatible interests with regard to
Korea, Taiwan, and so on. Why would Washington ultimately adjust naturally and peacefully to the
gradual erosion of its past position of predominance and accept (indeed, work to sustain) a stable
regional balance of power unless it clearly understood the regional transition under way and accepted it
as the best possible (or necessary) outcome. Indeed, given the prevailing, strong U.S. desire to sustain its
supposedly benign position of dominance in the Western Pacifc, it is most likely that Washington’s
acceptance of such an outcome under current conditions would come about only as a result of either a
forcing event, such as a major crisis (or crises), that confrmed the loss of U.S. predominance and the
need to move peacefully toward a stable balance with Beijing (a very unlikely prospect, since such a
crisis would more likely result in an intensifed pattern of Sino-U.S. strategic rivalry) or a deliberate
decision by both the United States and China to transition to a genuine balance.

Conflicts inevitable without arms limitations --- only the aff solves

Swaine et al ‘16
(Michael D. Swaine is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of
the most prominent American analysts in Chinese security studies. specialist in Chinese defense and
foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international relations, doctorate in government from
Harvard University. WENYAN DENG is a former junior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace’s Asia Program, where her research focused on international relations in the
Western Pacifc, Sino-U.S. crisis-management behaviors, Chinese military development, and U.S. military
strategy in Asia. She is currently a graduate student in international relations and security studies at the
University of Chicago, “Creating a Stable Asia,” pg online @
https://carnegieendowment.org/files/CEIP_Swaine_U.S.-Asia_Final.pdf //um-ef)

Beyond the establishment of more extensive CBMs and CMMs, the United States and China would also
probably need to agree on specifc sets of procurement and deployment limits on types and numbers of
ofensive weapons systems to ensure that the mutual denial force posture remained central to both
sides’ military orientation. Such an agreement could be formal or informal but would require a sufcient
level of transparency to permit reliable verifcation. Te mutual denial force posture and reinforcement of
CBMs and CMMs are essential features that constitute part of a minimalist stable balance of power
environment in the Western Pacifc. Without such features, the potential will be very high for the
existing force postures, military doctrines, and low levels of trust on both sides to create severe crises as
China’s relative power grows.
 Defensive Weapons PIC
Any weapons aggravate tensions
China Internet Information Center 4/18 2019 US arms sales to Taiwan a dangerous move
Xinhua, April 18, 2019 http://www.china.org.cn/china/2019-04/18/content_74693988.htm

The U.S. arms sale plan unveiled Monday is a dangerous move that will only aggravate the already
complex and grim situation across the Taiwan Strait.

The U.S. government has approved a possible 500-million-U.S. dollar military sale to Taiwan, claiming
that the move will help to improve the security and defensive capability of the recipient.

Subsequently, Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen expressed "gratitude," saying that the arms sale was "timely."

The situation across the Taiwan Strait, which is already complicated and grim, is worsening as the United
States has been using Taiwan to contain China while the Taiwan administration kept seeking
foreign intervention.

The Taiwan question concerns China's sovereignty and territorial integrity and is the most
important and sensitive issue in China-U.S. relations.
The U.S. arms sales to Taiwan constitutes a serious violation of international law , the basic norms
governing international relations, the one-China principle and the three Sino-U.S. joint communiques
and undermine China's sovereignty and security interests.

China's firm opposition to such arms sales is consistent and firm.

Since the current U.S. administration took office, it has constantly played the "Taiwan card" to contain
China, especially in arms sales to Taiwan and military exchanges between the United States and Taiwan.

This has seriously

damaged China-U.S. relations and jeopardized peace and
stability across the Taiwan Strait.
The Taiwan question, which concerns China's core interests and the national bond of the Chinese
people, brooks no external interference.

The U.S. administration has once again stirred up sensitive nerves in the Taiwan Strait. Its gross
interference in China's internal affairs has aroused the strong indignation of the Chinese people on both
sides of the Strait.

Some Taiwan organizations and people protested outside the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) in
Taipei, condemning U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and demanding "no war, only peace," and "Taiwan is not a
pawn for the United States."

Therefore, we would like to advise the U.S. side to clearly recognize the high sensitivity and serious harm
of arms sales to Taiwan, correct mistakes, honor its commitments and handle Taiwan-related issues in a
prudent and proper manner in accordance with the one-China principle and the provisions of the three
Sino-U.S. joint communiques.
Taiwan's current Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration, which is teetering on the brink of collapse, was overjoyed at the U.S. arms sales as if it had been given a "straw to save its life."

Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP administration have escalated provocations against the Chinese mainland, created disturbances recently and cooperated with the United States in vigorously clamoring the so-called "military threat" from
the mainland.

In the face of next year's general election on the island, Tsai and the DPP will not hesitate to let Taiwan serve as a pawn for forces of external interference in order to protect their power, regardless of the safety and well-being of
the Taiwanese people.

This party has not only misjudged the situation but also deviated from the people's heart.

U.S. weapons cannot guarantee Taiwan's security . Tsai and the DPP cannot secure their power and
position by seeking foreign interference or threatening the people.

Tsai, the DPP and "Taiwan independence" separatist elements should not play with fire or even think
about it. They are doomed to be alone in the face of the pressure of their own actions.
On April 17, 124 years ago, the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed, securing foreigner's occupation of Taiwan for half a century. It left lasting, painful memories for all Chinese.

Today's China will never allow the historical tragedy of national division to repeat itself.

No one and no force should underestimate the determination and capability of the Chinese in
safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Arms aren’t key to US deterrence- only a risk it angers China

Gomez 16 Eric Gomez is a policy analyst in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. A
Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship September 28,
2016 https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-
defense-relationship#full

Finally, stepping down from the commitment to defend Taiwan with military force does not remove
America’s interest in keeping the Taiwan Strait free of armed conflict. The United States would retain
the ability to punish China in other ways should it attack Taiwan. Diplomatic isolation and economic
sanctions may not inflict the same kinds of costs on Beijing as military force, but they are additional
costs that would have to be absorbed.104 Additionally, U.S. arms sales are separate from the implicit
commitment to defend Taiwan and could continue, albeit in some reduced or modified form.105
Continuing to sell arms to Taiwan while stepping down from the implicit commitment to use military
force to defend the island allows the United States to demonstrate support for Taiwan’s defense
without taking on the risks associated with direct intervention.106

China is driven by fear not revisionism – only the aff solves China rise
Swaine 15 Michael D. Swaine, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and
one of the most prominent American analysts in Chinese security studies. Beyond American
Predominance in the Western Pacific: The Need for a Stable U.S.-China Balance of Power
https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/04/20/beyond-american-predominance-in-western-pacific-need-
for-stable-u.s.-china-balance-of-power-pub-59837

On the U.S. side, for an arguably growing number of American and some foreign observers, Beijing’s de
facto challenge to American predominance in the Western Pacific is a mere prelude to a larger effort to
eject the United States from Asia and eventually replace it as the regional (and for some, global)
superpower. Chinese support for a multipolar, balance-of-power system is thus seen as a mere tactical
feint designed to undermine U.S. power while Beijing prepares to become the new hegemon. Indeed,
for such observers, Beijing’s greater assertiveness regarding maritime territorial disputes as well as U.S.
and Japanese intelligence and surveillance activities along its coastline constitute strategic gambits
designed to “test” U.S. and allied resolve and ultimately to create “no-go” zones essential for the
establishment of Chinese control over the Western Pacific. Such an outcome would directly threaten
both U.S. and allied interests in an open, secure, and peaceful Asia-Pacific region. Given this supposedly
unambiguous threat, for these observers, the only logical course of action for the United States is to
decisively disabuse Beijing of its aspirations by enhancing American predominance and thereby
increasing, rather than reducing, Chinese vulnerability in the Western Pacific.

This view is held not only by scholars and policy analysts outside Washington. It is also fairly common
among U.S. government officials, both civilian and military. It offers a black-and-white, Manichean-type
solution to a supposedly clear-cut threat, and one that is extremely appealing to those many U.S.
policymakers and analysts convinced of the huge merits (and necessity) of continued American
predominance in maritime Asia. In fact, even for those who reject the notion that Beijing is working to
dislodge the United States from the region, predominance remains the best insurance against an
uncertain future, for the reasons outlined above. While the type of U.S. predominance in Asia espoused
by most U.S. observers can vary somewhat, depending in part on how one views China’s capabilities and
intentions, the bottom line for virtually all such individuals is the need for a clear U.S. ability to prevail in
any important military-political contingency involving China. Moreover, this view is reinforced, in their
minds, by the notion that America’s allies and friends also supposedly desire and require continued U.S.
maritime predominance.

The problem with this outlook is that it is based on an inaccurate, increasingly unrealistic, and
dangerous assessment of both the threat the United States confronts in Asia and the likely
consequences of the remedy proposed. Beijing’s de facto attempts to limit or end U.S. predominance
along its maritime periphery are motivated almost entirely by uncertainties,
fears,
insecurities, and a certain level of opportunism, not a grand strategic vision of Chinese
predominance, despite the arguably growing expression of ultranationalist views within China.
Those who view China as an aspiring hegemon seeking America’s subordination and ultimate ejection
from Asia almost without exception base their argument on shaky theoretical postulates and faulty
historical analogies or on the decidedly non-authoritative views of a few Chinese analysts, not current,
hard evidence regarding either Chinese strategies and doctrines or Chinese behavior, past and present.

Such observers argue that all rising powers seek hard-power dominance in an anarchic interstate system
and that China is a power that always sought to dominate its world. However, such absolutist beliefs run
counter to the very mixed record of power grabbing and power balancing, aggression and restraint,
deterrence and reassurance that has characterized great power relations historically. They also ignore
the fact that, in the premodern era, Chinese predominance within its part of Asia most often consisted
of pragmatic and mutually beneficial exchanges of ritualistic deference for material gains, not
Chinese hard-power control. While implying a preference for symbolically hierarchical
relationships with smaller neighbors, China’s premodern approach did not amount to a demand for
clear-cut dominance and subordination. Moreover, the advent of modern, independent, and in most
cases strong nation-states along China’s borders; the forces of economic globalization; and the existence
of nuclear weapons have enormously reduced, if not eliminated, both the willingness and the
ability of Chinese leaders today to dominate Asia and carve out an exclusionary sphere of influence,
especially in hard-power terms. By necessity, their objective is to reduce their considerable
vulnerability and increase their political, diplomatic, and economic leverage in their own backyard
to a level where Chinese interests must be reflected in those major political, economic, and security
actions undertaken by neighboring states. This is a much less ambitious and in many ways
understandable goal for a continental great power. And it does not necessarily threaten vital U.S. or
allied interests.

A2AD fails – tech can already get around it

Roblin 19 Sebastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University
and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education,
editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and
military history for War Is Boring., 4-9-2019, "A2/AD: The Phrase That Terrifies the U.S. Military (And
China and Russia Love It)," National Interest, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/a2ad-phrase-
terrifies-us-military-and-china-and-russia-love-it-51597 Lowell-SB

Not all A2AD systems are as technically mature and operationally effective as they are made out to
be.

The Swedish report points out that Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missile system (also in service in China)
has yet to actually receive its vaunted 250-mile range 40N6 missiles. Furthermore, very long-range
interceptions are only viable against large, slow aircraft (think tankers, cargo planes and AWACS radar
planes) flying at high altitude. ‘Pushing back’ vital support planes is still useful, but agile war planes may
only become vulnerable within a few dozen miles of a SAM site.

Another intimidating new technology, anti-ship ballistic missiles, has only been tested against naval
targets a few times, and never in combat

On the other hand, cruise missiles and short-range land-attack ballistic missiles have seen extensive
combat employment in the last half-century, blasting Middle Eastern cities and sinking Royal Navy ships
in the Falklands. Land-based missile transporters have proven easy to conceal and difficult to hunt
down.

The FOI study also points out that short-range air defense systems like the Pantsir-S have repeatedly
failed to stop U.S. cruise missile barrages and constant Israeli air strikes.

A2AD systems can’t see as far as they can shoot .

A 40N6 missile (when and if it enters service) may threaten aircraft up to 250 miles away. A DF-21D may
be able to sink a carrier a thousand mile away.

However, neither missile batteries’ organic fire control radars can realistically acquire targets that far
over the horizon due to the curvature of the Earth. Both would need to cue targeting data by
networking with remote AWACS radar and maritime patrol planes, drones, surveillance satellites, and
distant land and sea-based radars.
Forming such a ‘kill-chain’ is doable—but it’s technically challenging task that requires practice and is vulnerable to disruption at any point in
the chain. For instance, the surveillance and communication assets could be destroyed, or their communication links to firing platforms
jammed.
Both China and Russia, however, are assembling the surveillance capabilities to form kill chain, however, by expanding its satellite surveillance
assets and deploying new airborne radar planes.

‘Threatening’ an area doesn’t have to mean ‘denying’ it.

In recent conflicts, U.S. air and naval forces have benefited from technological ‘offsets’ allowing them to
bombard adversaries from afar at virtually no risk to return fire. For example, the U.S. did not lose a
single warplane to enemy fire in its 2011 intervention against Libya.
However, when combating a peer adversary, Western forces may simply have to accept higher degrees of risk in order to complete their
missions. In other words, A2/AD systems may take out some ships or aircraft, but not necessarily impose high enough costs to defeat
operations in a region before they are neutralized.

For example, during World War II land-based bombers posed a deadly anti-access threat to warships that passed within their range. However,
that didn’t prevent Allied naval forces from taking what lumps they had to when evacuating troops at Dunkirk and Crete, or conducting
amphibious landings in Dieppe, Sicily and Normandy.

Counter-measures against A2AD strategy and technologies already exist.

The Rand analysts argue the U.S. military could address its weaknesses versus anti-access weapons by re-allocating roughly $24 billion of its
roughly $700 billion annual budget to existing systems. In their view, sacrificing funding for, say, one or two carriers, makes sense if it pays for
capabilities that make the remaining nine floating airbases much more survivable.

Basically, the analysts think the U.S. needs a larger supply surface-strike missiles to threaten enemies at
long range; and a much larger capacity to defend against incoming long-range missiles with counter-
missiles.
In other words, fight fire with fire and water.

Naturally, greater numbers of long-range, high-capacity launch platforms are desirable.

On the offense side, promising new long-range strike weapons include the LRASM anti-ship missile, the stealthy JASSM-ER cruise missile and the
Army’s multi-faceted Long-Range Precision Fire program. On the defense side, the Army’s maneuver short-range air defense program and the
Navy’s SM-3 and SM-6 offer promising force protection capabilities.

Taking the analysts’ conclusion together, one can arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the challenges posed by anti-access weapons.
Undeniably, A2/AD weapons can threaten large areas and will likely shape operations in the regions where they are present .
However,
they cannot “shut down” access to a region by themselves, and their threat can be mitigated through
appropriate planning using existing technologies and tactics.
 Increase Arms CP
Any inclusion of high-tech weapons assures conflict – breaks Chinese red-lines
Panda 3/25 2019 Ankit Panda, editor at The Diplomat Are the US and China About to Face off Over
American Fighter Sales to Taiwan? If the Trump administration approves a recent request, it could set up
a major crisis. March 25, 2019 https://thediplomat.com/2019/03/are-the-us-and-china-about-to-face-
off-over-american-fighter-sales-to-taiwan/

The United States and China appear to be heading toward a major confrontation over the
possible sale of American fighters to Taiwan.

Last week, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen confirmed that the country’s Ministry of Defense had
submitted a formal request to Washington, D.C., to purchase F-16V Viper fighters. Tsai said the decision
to make the request was supported by a review of Taiwan’s defense needs.

Days later, Bloomberg News reported that the White House was poised to approve the Taiwanese
request.

If that report is true, the United States would be turning course on what has been a longstanding
reluctance to sell fighters to Taiwan, even as it has authorized other arms sales in line with the 1979
Taiwan Relations Act, which requires the U.S. government to support Taiwan “with arms of a defensive
character.”

Even as the Obama administration and the Trump administration have approved weapons and spare
parts for sale to Taiwan, fighters have long been seen as a bridge too far given Beijing serious
reservations.
The United States authorized the sale of 150 F-16 fighters to Taiwan in 1992. The Obama administration, after receiving a request from Taipei, turned it down, initiating a set of upgrades instead to Taipei’s existing fleet.

The issue hasn’t gone unnoticed in China, where Taiwan is seen as an inherent part of the country. Relations across the Taiwan Strait have been particularly strained since Tsai’s inauguration in 2016.

The Taiwanese president hails from the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), though she herself has not explicitly supported independence — long a red-line for Beijing — Tsai, however, has refused to
endorse the so-called “1992 consensus,” which her predecessor had supported and which forms what Beijing sees as the baseline for cordial cross-strait relations.

“China’s position to firmly oppose arms sales to Taiwan is consistent and clear ,” Chinese
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said during a press briefing on Friday.

“We have made stern representations to the U.S. We have urged the U.S. to fully recognize the
sensitivity of this issue and the harm it will cause.”

The prospect of a fighter sale to Taiwan this time comes at a time of particularly heightened U.S.-China
tensions. The Trump administration has been known to seek leverage with Beijing across issues and it is
possible that this may turn into the latest case of Taiwan being used a possible bargaining chip as Trump
seeks to clinch a favorable trade deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Trump, however, has been unconventional on Taiwan policy in the past. As president-elect, he broke
expectations by receiving a telephone call from Tsai. That call occurred at a time when Trump had yet to
endorse the United States’ one-China policy as president — something that he did for the first time in
February 2017.
Either way, Tsai’s fighter request and the Trump administration’s reported acceptance could set up
another major area of turbulence between the United States and China.

Solves none of the aff – increases Chinese aggression

Hua 15 Zhang Hua, assistant research fellow at the Institute of Taiwan Studies, Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, Global Times Arms sales to Taiwan do not help the US
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/959549.shtml

Washington formally announced a $1.83 billion arms sale package to Taiwan on Wednesday. China
slammed the sale for interfering in its internal affairs and vowed to impose sanctions on relevant
American companies. Chinese pundits see this as new proof of Washington's desire to contain China by
roiling cross-Straits relations. In fact, arms sales to Taiwan have already had a negative impact on
the US.
Washington has to accept it is becoming far less
capable of containing China's rise. It may
upset the government of the Chinese mainland by making a fuss with Taiwan, but it won't
have a real effect.
Washington's primary intent in forging a military relationship with Taiwan is to maintain military balance
across the Taiwan Strait. However, the strategy is stretched too thin. Given the mainland's swift and
prominent ramp-up in military spending, a military balance can no longer be stricken between the
mainland and Taiwan, no matter how many advanced weapons the US sells to
Taiwan.
The possibility of using Taiwan to suppress the mainland's growing leverage in its periphery is vanishing.
The mainland's economic aggregate is more than 20 times larger than Taiwan's, so the latter has no
chance to engage in a military race with the former.
Selling arms to Taiwan doesn't mean Washington would hold on to its promise to "come and rescue" Taiwan when the island is in trouble with the mainland. It is not even a commitment to include Taiwan in its umbrella of
protection. Even some Taiwanese strategists have pointed out that Taiwan is too obsessed with the delusion that Washington will come all the way to defend Taiwan.

Washington also cunningly argues that the weaponry deal will bolster Taiwan's confidence when it needs to negotiate with the mainland in other respects. In fact, in such talks, it is always the mainland that makes more room for
Taiwan's wellbeing, not because Taiwan has a strong military capability that is feared by the mainland, but because the mainland regards Taiwan as family.

Although the US, especially its arms enterprises and political brokers, could reap fat profits from such practices, these companies and individuals might risk losing the second biggest market. The pros and cons are not hard to
weigh. In fact, some companies have started to reflect on the deal.

Washington seems to have gone on the offensive in the arms deal, but Beijing can find opportunities to strike back. From the Diaoyu Islands to the South China Sea disputes, the US keeps stirring troubles against China in recent
years during the implementation of its "rebalancing to Asia" strategy. China could have resorted to countermeasures but is too prudent to take real action. On the occasion of this arms deal, for which the US has neither moral nor
legal ground, Beijing should take the chance to carry out down-to-earth countermeasures, such as halting bilateral communications over military matters and sanctioning relevant US enterprises.

It becomes increasingly obvious that playing the Taiwan card is no longer an effective approach to
countering China's rise. On the contrary, it makes Washington take bigger risks to jeopardize a
relationship with the Chinese mainland, which is clearly more important.
 Leverage CP
China would say no AND it doesn’t solve – bargaining over Taiwan makes the CP look
like bad faith – they prefer unilateral concessions
Kim 16 Patricia Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and a
research fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs, in the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University. Correspondence: Grand
Bargain or Bad Idea? U.S. Relations with China and Taiwan International Security Volume 40 | Issue 4 |
Spring 2016 https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/ISEC_c_00239

Even if one were to set aside all of the above concerns, history shows that Glaser's proposal is infeasible,
because Chinese leaders do not see the abrogation of the U.S. commitment to Taiwan as an issue over
which they must bargain and offer concessions. For example, President Richard Nixon
attempted a similar grand bargain while negotiating the opening of Sino-U.S. relations from 1971 to
1972. At the time, one of the Nixon administration's greatest concerns was ending the Vietnam War.
Beijing's greatest priority was obtaining U.S. recognition of Taiwan as a part of the People's Republic of
China (PRC) and securing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the island.2 Understanding Beijing's
desires, President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger strategized that they would offer to
remove U.S. troops in exchange for China's help in achieving peace with honor in Vietnam. Nixon's
handwritten notes for his historic trip to China demonstrate the bargain he wanted to strike:
Taiwan = Vietnam = trade off

1. Your people expect action on Taiwan

2. Our people expect action on VN

Neither can act immediately—But both are inevitable—let us not embarrass each other.3

In preparation for Nixon's official visit, Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing in July 1971 and proposed
the bargain to the Chinese leadership. In a meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, Kissinger stated
that because two-thirds of the U.S. forces in Taiwan were related to American efforts in the Indochina
theater, the withdrawal of those troops would depend on the resolution of the Vietnam War.4 He
reasoned that although the United States was sincere in wanting to end the war, several issues—ranging
from war reparations to the North Vietnamese government's refusal to talk with the South Vietnamese
government—stood in the way of an “honorable” exit.5 Kissinger implied that China's help in pressuring
its North Vietnamese ally to accept the administration's peace terms would speed the exit of U.S. troops
from Taiwan. Chinese leaders, however, refused to strike such a bargain. In their eyes, Taiwan was a
rightful part of the PRC and they did not owe the United States anything in exchange for a withdrawal of
U.S. forces from territory they considered theirs. Zhou, for example, told Kissinger during their July 1971
meeting that attempting to attach conditions to the recognition of China's sovereignty
over Taiwan was as absurd as China questioning U.S. sovereignty over Hawaii or
Long Island. He emphasized that the United States should “unreservedly” recognize the PRC's
sovereignty and withdraw all U.S. troops, as this was “the natural logic of the matter.”6 Again when
Nixon suggested during his trip to Beijing in February 1972 that ending the war in Vietnam would “help
the direction on Taiwan,”7 Zhou replied subtly that China was willing to “wait a little while,” and that
because Taiwan was China's “internal affair,” Beijing could not “place too much hope on the U.S. and
Mr. President to achieve this.”8 Moreover, China continued to fund North Vietnam's war efforts in the
name of aiding nationalist revolutions abroad. Instead of pressuring its ally, Beijing sent unprecedented
amounts of military assistance to North Vietnam between 1971 and 1973.9 China today is much more
confidant and ambitious than the China Nixon visited in 1972. There is little reason to believe that
Beijing would entertain a bargain similar to the one it rejected decades ago.

No enforcement
Roy 15 Denny Roy, senior fellow and supervisor of the POSCO Fellowship Program. The Impossible
Price of a U.S.-China Grand Bargain: Dumping Taiwan Time for a U.S.-China "grand bargain" over
Taiwan? https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-impossible-price-us-china-grand-bargain-
dumping-taiwan-13177

The “grand bargain” idea probably resonates less with Beijing than Washington. From Beijing’s point of
view, this would be asking
it to trade something it believes it already owns for
something else it believes it already owns. If they did agree, how the “bargain” would be
operationalized is unclear. What would it mean for China to “officially accept” U.S. alliances and military
bases in the Asia-Pacific? This would seem to require Beijing to renounce its proudly “principled”
opposition to any country having “Cold War era” alliances and foreign bases. At the same time, it is easy
to foresee China continuing its pre-bargain activities (military buildup, maneuvers with Russia, naval
patrols in the East and South China Sea, etc.) while claiming these were not attempts to drive U.S.
influence out of the region.

PDCP –
Resolved means firm intent – counterplan still has that
Random House Unabridged 6 (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=resolved&r=66)
re·solved Audio Help /rɪˈzɒlvd/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[ri-zolvd] –adjective
firm in purpose or intent; determined.

Should is permissive not mandatory

Words and Phrases, 2002 (“Words and Phrases: Permanent Edition” Vol. 39 Set to Signed. Pub. By
Thomson West. P. 370)

Cal.App. 5 Dist. 1976. Term “should,” as used in statutory provision that motion to suppress search
warrant should first be heard by magistrate who issued warrant, is used in regular, persuasive sense, as
recommendation, and is thus not mandatory but permissive. West’s Ann.Pen Code, § 1538.5(b).---
Cuevas v. Superior Court, 130 Cal. Rptr. 238, 58 Cal.App.3d 406 ----Searches 191.

Permutation do the plan and establish a grand bargain with China – the initial
concession makes it more likely that China will say yes to further exchanges
Glaser 15 Charles L. Glaser, professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Department
of Political Science at George Washington University, A U.S.-China Grand Bargain? The Hard Choice
between Military Competition and Accommodation Posted Online May 01, 2015
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/ISEC_a_00199
Another way to balance feasibility and benefits, therefore, could be to look for a path that divides the
grand bargain into smaller, more attainable increments. One can imagine a series of steps, including the
United States ending its arms sales to Taiwan and China ending its use of force to advance its maritime
claims, that could be implemented sequentially to create a phased grand bargain. This approach would
enable the United States to revert to its current Taiwan policy if China failed to uphold its side of the
phased agreement. Another possibility might include partial resolution of the maritime disputes. An
agreement that delayed resolution of the sovereignty disputes far into the future, or indefinitely, while
settling the resource disputes would be more feasible to achieve than a full resolution. This type of
agreement could be possible because, for the most part, the sovereignty disputes can be separated from
the resource disputes. In fact, China and Japan reached this type of arrangement in 2008, although it has
yet to be implemented.111 The United States could pursue a variant of this staged approach that would
enable it to try to push the diplomatic process forward. In this more proactive model, the United States
would make its initial
concession unilaterally, while explaining that further concessions
would hinge on China's reciprocation of its initial move.
 Maritime CP
Relations – offensive arms sales are a lynchpin issue - Taiwan is inherently problematic
– their CP is inadequate
Glaser 16 Charles L. Glaser is a professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the
Department of Political Science at George Washington University. Correspondence: Grand Bargain or
Bad Idea? U.S. Relations with China and Taiwan International Security Volume 40 | Issue 4 | Spring 2016
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/ISEC_c_00239

Kim and Easley prefer the United States' current policy to a grand bargain. Both recommend some
modifications designed to reassure and engage China, including joint participation in humanitarian
missions, naval cooperation on counter-piracy operations, deepening of economic interdependence via
the U.S.-China bilateral investment treaty, and support of initiatives that would increase China's role in
international organizations. As I argue in my article, there is much to like about the current U.S. policy
toward China and East Asia more broadly. If the United States adheres to this policy, then many of these
recommendations would be useful refinements.

Nevertheless, proponents of the United States' current China policy tend to underestimate the risks
inherent in the U.S. commitment to Taiwan, including its role in fueling military
competition and supporting Chinese elites' negative views of U.S. motives. Neither Kim
nor Easley says much about these risks, and certain of their remarks suggest they are not small. Kim
holds that China is “much more confidant and ambitious” than when President Nixon visited China in
1972 and that “Chinese leaders today believe that the United States is determined to contain and divide
China internally.” Easley expresses similar concerns, stating that “[f]oreign policy ambition in Beijing has
outgrown the 1950s and 1990s cross-strait crises; [that] Chinese internal debates tend to paint the
United States as a global competitor,” and that China “is pursuing a Chinese-centered regional
architecture.” Given these views of China, Kim's and Easley's recommendations, though useful, are likely
inadequate to meet the challenges currently facing the United States. This does not mean that such a
modified U.S. policy would necessarily be inferior to the grand bargain I have recommended, given that
all options for dealing with China's rise will involve costs or risks, or both. The advantage of my proposed
grand bargain, however, is that it confronts the challenge posed by China's rise head on. It offers a path
for eliminating the most serious geopolitical disagreement between the United States and China and for
moderating the concomitant political strains and military competition, while providing valuable
information about the limited nature of China's goals that, in turn, reduces the risks of accommodation.
And, in combination with policies that reaffirm and deepen the commitment of the United States to its
East Asian allies, it would enable the United States to protect its key interests in the region.
Notwithstanding the points raised by Kim and Easely, the grand bargain remains the best bet available
to the United States.

Couldn’t do it even if they wanted – too many obstacles

Valencia 18 Mark J. Valencia is Adjunct Senior Scholar at the National Institute for South China Sea
Studies in Haikou, China. Maritime Security Cooperation in the South China Sea: Sailing In Different
Directions “The diplomatic graveyard is full of failed proposals and efforts that did not take regional
realities into account.” September 17, 2018 https://thediplomat.com/2018/09/maritime-security-
cooperation-in-the-south-china-sea-sailing-in-different-directions/

Practical Issues

There are other conceptual and practical obstacles to maritime security cooperation in the South China
Sea.

Lack of trust — Many Asian nations harbor deep-seated, historically based suspicions of each other,
making security cooperation all the more difficult. As Lord Palmerstone and Henry Kissinger believed
and practiced “there are no permanent friends or enemies – only permanent interests.” Most countries’
decisions are influenced to some degree by the thinking behind this dictum, particularly in Asia. Some
view maritime security cooperation as advantaging the more powerful, who can display the superiority
of their technology, assets, and weapons and thus tacitly intimidate their potential opponents while
observing and detecting the their weaknesses. The same reticence applies to information sharing. This
mind-set makes maritime security cooperation all the more difficult.

Differences in scale — The scales of territory, population, military capacity, and economy among
South China Sea countries are quite asymmetric. Many have limited resources and capabilities, and do
not want to commit scarce resources to cooperation to meet threats that are low priority to them.
These might include trade in WMDs, noncommercial freedom of navigation concerns, and maritime
domain awareness, all of which are in the greater interest of outside maritime powers.

Competition between China and the U.S. — Both China and the United States (and its
allies Japan, Australia, and the U.K.) are offering cooperative maritime security exercises and assistance
to the Southeast Asian claimants. Maritime security cooperation with one side is often seen as taking a
stand against the other. This pressure to “choose sides” is reinforced by China and the United States
themselves — sometimes publicly but more often behind the scenes. Most Southeast Asian coastal
nations welcome assistance in capacity building. But they may well be more reticent to sign on to any
regional scheme that could be taken as “siding” with one side against the other — or as endorsing a
security role for external military forces.

Practical obstacles — Practical obstacles to maritime security cooperation by Southeast Asian

littoral countries include tight operating budgets; lack of common doctrine, language, and
interoperability of equipment; and widely varying stages of technological development. Intelligence
information sharing is particularly sensitive because it involves potentially indirectly revealing sources
and methods as well.
 NoKo Talks CP
China is too suspicious – phased concessions are a prerequisite
Swaine 15 Michael D. Swaine, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and
one of the most prominent American analysts in Chinese security studies. Beyond American
Predominance in the Western Pacific: The Need for a Stable U.S.-China Balance of Power
https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/04/20/beyond-american-predominance-in-western-pacific-need-
for-stable-u.s.-china-balance-of-power-pub-59837

On the Chinese side, perhaps the most significant obstacle to undertaking a transition toward a stable balance of power in
Asia derives from the insecurities and weaknesses of the Chinese government, both domestically and
abroad. China’s leaders rely, for their legitimacy and support, not only on continued economic success and rising living standards, but
also on a form of nationalism that prizes the ability of the regime to correct past injustices meted out by
“imperialist” powers during China’s so-called “century of humiliation” and to stand up to current slights, both real and imagined. Thus, their
policies often capitalize on the resentments felt by many Chinese citizens toward the supposedly arrogant West and Japan. This
viewpoint
makes the Chinese leadership hesitant to quell the more extreme forms of nationalism described above and deeply suspicious
of the United States and its allies . It also makes it more receptive to the notion that a rising yet still underdeveloped and relatively
weak China must continue to conceal its military capabilities while developing its overall capacities to the maximum extent possible. In other
words, the Chinese regime is both excessively vulnerable to ultranationalist pressures and disinclined to
contemplate self-imposed limitations on its sovereign rights (for example, with regard to Taiwan) and its political,
economic, and military abilities, especially in Asia. While this does not translate into a drive for predominance, it does make Beijing
less willing to accept the kind of mutual restraints necessary to achieve a stable balance of power in the Western Pacific. No
grand bargain, but a clear understanding and a staged process are required These obstacles clearly indicate that Washington
and Beijing are not about to undertake, much less reach, a formal grand-bargain-type of agreement to
establish a new regional security environment anytime soon .4 Such a fundamental shift in policies and
approaches can only occur gradually, in stages, and over an extended period of time . But it can only begin if elites in
Washington, Beijing, and other Asian capitals seriously examine the enduring trends under way in Asia and accept the reality of the changing
power distribution and the need for more than just marginal adjustments and assurances. Only then will they undertake a systematic
examination of the requirements of a stable balance of power over the long term, involving a serious consideration of the more fundamental
actions. Such an examination and acceptance must initially occur domestically, then among allies and protectorates, and finally via a bilateral
U.S.-China strategic dialogue aimed at developing understandings about the process and actions required. Such understandings must provide
for ample opportunities and means for both sides to assess and evaluate the credibility and veracity of the actions of the other side.

Taiwan arms sales are key

Feng 12 Zhu Feng is a professor in the School of International Studies and the deputy director of the
Center for International and Strategic Studies at Beijing University. What the U.S. Needs to Realize About
China’s Nationalism http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/09/23/should-the-us-continue-
selling-arms-to-taiwan/what-the-us-needs-to-realize-about-chinas-nationalism

However, there is no other foreign relations issue that inflames Beijing -- and ordinary Chinese -- more
than the arms sales issue. The U.S. cannot ignore the strong Chinese nationalistic sentiments over
Taiwan. China has always considered Taiwan as an inseparable part of itself . There is no need to go
through further legal routes to vindicate China’s sovereign claim over the island. But under America's
“one-China" policy, the fate of Taiwan remains “undecided," thereby validating these arms sales. This
policy was initiated in 1979 but has not changed for 32 years. During this period, China has changed
tremendously and has become the most important business partner to the U.S. In the coming decades,
the U.S.-China relations will only become more important.
Without any new policy framework to recalibrate these arms sales, mainland Chinese will continue to be
wary of the U.S. Understandably, this issue cannot be solved quickly. Washington and Beijing must work
together to find ways to tackle the challenges.

Issues regarding Taiwan must be solved before the trade war can end
Cowen 7/15(Tyler – professor of economics @ George Mason University, “What the U.S.-China Trade
War Is Really About”, Bloomberg, 7/15/19, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-
15/u-s-china-trade-war-s-main-issues-are-taiwan-and-huawei)
During my recent travels in Taiwan and China, I was asked repeatedly: What does America really want out of the trade war with China? In the
interests of mutual understanding, here is my brief guide to America’s conflicting and complicated motives. Spoiler alert: The tariffs
may get more attention, but the critical issues are Huawei and Taiwan.Start with President Donald Trump, who himself has
mixed motives. He has favored tariffs and protectionism since the 1980s, when he focused on Japan. For better or worse, protectionism seems
to be one of Trump’s most sincere views. Yet Trump also fancies himself a deal-maker, and he would like to strike a deal with China to cement
his legacy and boost his re-election chances in 2020. Those two motives are in tension with each other. More and higher tariffs limit the
chances of making trade deals. Then consider the U.S. ruling elite, namely the policy community, business leaders, media and the establishment
wings of the two major political parties. All of these groups are likely to favor free trade and trade agreements, although they are willing to
make exceptions for national security reasons (this exception, as we shall see, turns out to be important for the prospects of a China deal).
There is also a subset of the Democratic Party that identifies closely with labor unions and does not favor free trade. The new player in the
trade game is the national security establishment. It is very worried about the rise of China and the spread of Huawei equipment around the
world, and it does not have much of a stake in free trade or the stock market. Furthermore, the national security establishment is used to
getting its way; when bargaining with other U.S. political agents, compromise is not its natural inclination. Finally, there is the U.S. electorate.
American voters are not treating the trade war as a major electoral issue, at least so far, thereby giving additional leeway to the other parties
involved. Now for some speculation about what a deal might look like. To see how all these groups can affect its contours, ask yourself: On
which dimensions is a deal possible? When
it comes to tariffs and Chinese purchases of U.S. goods, a deal between
the two countries should be possible. The national security establishment will not object, the protectionist Democrats don’t run
the show, and I predict that dealmaker Trump will triumph over protectionist Trump. (To scratch his anti-trade itch, he can and will impose
other tariffs elsewhere.) The Chinese also could offer stronger intellectual property enforcement and greater domestic market access for U.S.
financial institutions, as they have already been doing. One
conclusion from all this is that the trade wars really aren’t
about tariffs. Regardless of whether you approve of any particular bargain, tariff disagreements are relatively easy to solve.So that means
the trade war is really all about Huawei and Taiwan. If the U.S. persists in trying to eliminate Huawei as a major company, by cutting off its
American-supplied inputs and intimidating foreign customers and suppliers for Huawei equipment, it will be difficult for the Chinese to accept.
In this case, the reluctance to make a deal will be on the Chinese side, and the structure and relative power of the various American interest
groups are not essential to understanding the outcome. The question, then, is whether the U.S. national security establishment, and in turn
Congress (which has been heavily influencedon this question), will accept a compromise on Huawei. Maybe that means no Huawei
communications technologies for the U.S. and its closest intelligence-sharing allies, but otherwise no war against the company. That is the first
critical question to watch in the unfolding of this trade war. The answer is not yet known, though it seems Trump is willingto deal. The
second major question, equally important but less commented upon, is Taiwan.  China has long
professed a desire to reunite Taiwanwith the mainland, using force if necessary. If you belong to the U.S.
national security establishment, and you think a confrontation with China is necessary sooner or later, if
only because of Taiwan, you would prefer sooner, before China gains in relative strength. And  that
militates in favor of the trade war continuing and possibly even escalating, as the U.S. continues to push
against China and there is simply no bargain to be had. It is far from clear what a U.S.-China deal over the status of Taiwan
could look like. How much Americans actually care about Taiwan is debatable, but the U.S. is unlikely to abandon a commitment that would
weaken its value as an ally around the world. And unlike with Huawei, it is difficult to see what a de-escalation of this issue might look like. So: If
the Huawei and Taiwan questions can be resolved, then the trade war should be eminently manageable. Now, does that make you optimistic or
pessimistic? 
 AT Incrementalism / Normalization CP
Even small deals will poising US-China relations and risks cross-straight instability
Zhihao 19 (ZHANG ZHIHAO; writer at China Daily; Ministry: $500m US military deal with Taiwan has
'poisoned' relations; http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201904/24/WS5cbfd7cfa3104842260b80a7.html;
4-24-19)

Beijing resolutely opposes the recent $500 million military deal between the United States and Taiwan,
calling the move "a complete mistake" and "very dangerous", a spokesman for the Ministry of National Defense said on
Wednesday. The new deal, approved by the US State Department on April 15 and currently being reviewed by Congress, consists of training

programs in the US for F-16 fighter jet pilots and maintenance crews. The State Department said the sale is meant to improve the defensive capabilities of
Taiwan. Senior Colonel Wu Qian, a spokesman for the ministry, said in an online statement that China resolutely opposes any country selling arms to or having
military interactions with Taiwan. "The
action by the US has seriously violated the one-China principle and the three
Sino-US joint communiques," he said. "It interferes with China's internal affairs, undermining its sovereignty
and security interests." Wu said the recent move has "poisoned the Sino-US military relationship and
seriously damaged cross-Straits relations and peace and security in the region ." He called the move "a complete mistake
and very dangerous". The Taiwan question is related to China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as its core interests, and it is the most sensitive issue in
Sino-US ties, he said. Wu said Taiwan's attempt to rely on foreign forces and the US using Taiwan to contain China are doomed to fail. China demands that the US
immediately cancel related arms sales to Taiwan and stop all military interaction with the island to avoid further damage to Sino-US military relations, bilateral ties
and the peace and security of the Taiwan Straits, he said. "The
Chinese military has the resolve, confidence and capability to
foil any form of foreign interference or Taiwan secession effort ," he said. "It will resolutely protect national
sovereignty and territorial integrity, and maintain peace and security in the region."
 AT Incrementalism / Weapons PICs – Cant Solve
China Relations
can’t solve the China advantage – any signal the US is still committed to Taiwan arms
causes inevitable war
Thrall and Dorminey 18 (A. Trevor Thrall and Caroline Dorminey; A. Trevor Thrall is an associate
professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and a senior fellow
at the Cato Institute. Caroline Dorminey is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute;
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/risky-business-role-arms-sales-us-foreign-policy#full;
Risky Business: The Role of Arms Sales in U.S. Foreign Policy; 3-13-18)

Regional Effects. Arms

sales do not just affect the recipient nation; they also affect the local balance of power, often causing ripple
effects throughout the region. Though advocates of arms sales trumpet their stabilizing influence, as we have noted above, arms sales
often lead to greater tension, less stability, and more conflict . Because of this — and the complementary problem of weapons
dispersion — the regional impact of arms sales is less predictable and more problematic than advocates acknowledge. Instability, Violence, and Conflict. First, arms
sales can make conflict more likely.79 This may occur because recipients of new weapons feel more confident about launching attacks or because changes in the
local balance of power can fuel tensions and promote preventive strikes by others. A study of arms sales from 1950 to 1995, for example, found that although arms
sales appeared to have some restraining effect on major-power allies, they had the opposite effect in other cases, and concluded that “increased arms transfers
from major powers make states significantly more likely to be militarized dispute initiators.”80 Another study focused on sub-Saharan Africa from 1967 to 1997
found that “arms transfers are significant and positive predictors of increased probability of war.”81 Recent history provides supporting evidence for these findings:
since 2011, Saudi Arabia, the leading buyer of American weapons, has intervened to varying degrees in Yemen, Tunisia, Syria, and Qatar. Second, arms sales can also
prolong and intensify ongoing conflicts and erode rather than promote regional stability. Few governments, and fewer insurgencies, have large enough weapons
stocks to fight for long without resupply.82 The tendency of external powers to arm the side they support, however understandable strategically, has the inevitable
result of allowing the conflict to continue at a higher level of intensity than would otherwise be the case. As one study of arms sales to Africa notes, “Weapons
imports are essential additives in this recipe for armed conflict and carnage.”83 Third, this dynamic appears to be particularly troublesome with respect to internal
conflicts. Jennifer Erickson, for example, found that recipients of major conventional weapons are 70 percent more likely to engage in internal conflicts than other
states. Though halting arms sales alone is not a panacea for peace and stability, arms embargoes can help lessen the destructiveness of combat in both civil and
interstate wars simply by restricting access to the means of violence.84 Finally, because of their effects on both interstate and internal conflict, arms sales can also
erode rather than promote regional stability. As noted in the previous section, where
the United States seeks to manage regional
balances of power, arms sales often create tension , whether because the American role in the region
threatens others or because American clients feel emboldened . The Middle East, for example, has seesawed between violence
and tense standoffs for the past many decades, at first because of Cold War competition and more recently because of the American war on terror. The notion that
increased U.S. arms sales since 9/11 made the Middle East more stable is far-fetched to say the least. Similarly, though many
argue that American security
commitments to countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have produced greater stability , there is a strong case
to be made that the opposite is now true . American support of South Korea has driven North Korea to develop nuclear weapons; the
presence of U.S. missile defense systems in South Korea has aggravated China, and American support of Taiwan produces continual

tension between the two powers.85

Ending ALL arms sales to Taiwan defuses war with China and boosts nonprolif regimes
Thrall and Dorminey 18 (A. Trevor Thrall and Caroline Dorminey; A. Trevor Thrall is an associate
professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and a senior fellow
at the Cato Institute. Caroline Dorminey is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute;
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/risky-business-role-arms-sales-us-foreign-policy#full;
Risky Business: The Role of Arms Sales in U.S. Foreign Policy; 3-13-18)

Forgoing arms sales is likely to be a superior strategy even in cases where the United States has an entrenched interest. In the
case of Taiwan, for example, though it is clear that Taiwan needs to purchase weapons from other countries to provide for its defense, those weapons do
not have to be made in the United States. Having Taiwan buy from other suppliers would help defuse U.S.-China tensions. Even if Taiwan’s defenses

remained robust, China would clearly prefer a situation in which American arms no longer signal an
implicit promise to fight on Taiwan’s behalf. This could also promote more productive U.S.-China
diplomacy in general, as well as greater stability in the Pacific region . Most important, breaking off arms sales
would also reduce the likelihood of the United States becoming entangled in a future conflict between
Taiwan and China. The second major benefit of reducing arms sales is that it would imbue the United States with greater
moral authority. Today, as the leading arms-dealing nation in the world, the United States lacks credibility in discussions of arms control and
nonproliferation, especially in light of its military interventionism since 2001. By showing the world that it is ready to choose

diplomacy over the arms trade, the U nited States would provide a huge boost to international efforts to
curtail proliferation and its negative consequences. This is important because the United States has pursued and will continue to pursue a wide range of
arms control and nonproliferation objectives. The United States is a signatory of treaties dealing with weapons of mass destruction, missile technology, land mines,
and cluster munitions, not to mention the flow of conventional weapons of all kinds. The
effectiveness of these treaties, and the ability to create
more effective and enduring arms control and nonproliferation frameworks, however, depends on how the United States behaves.
AT F-35 PIC
 AT F-35 PIC – Not Sold Now
Trump’s soft stance on china means F-35s are cut out of future arms deals
Gady 17 ( Franz-Stefan Gady, Senior editor at the diplomat, “Taiwan pushes for the sale of f-35 fighter
jets”, 5/3/2017, [06/26/2019], https://thediplomat.com/2017/05/taiwan-pushes-for-sale-of-f-35-
fighter-jets/) BDN
Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense will formally declare its intention to procure fifth generation Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II
fighter aircraft to U.S. officials in July, according to the country’s Minister of National Defense Feng Shih-kuan. Addressing a
meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in late April, Taiwan’s defense minister stated that
ministry representatives will formally declare Taiwan’s intention to purchase the F-35 fighter jet to
their U.S. counterparts in July during a visit to Washington, the Taipei Times reports. The United States has so far not filled
key political appointee positions which would cover U.S.-Taiwan defense relations, which, according to the minister is the
reason for the delayed request. “Because the appointments of [US] officials have not yet been completed, [a formal proposal]
would be made to Washington in July,” he said. The minister also bluntly stated to Taiwanese lawmakers that the reason for the
request is in response to “the enemy’s military development.” Given U.S. President Donald Trump’s increasingly
softer stance on China, which vehemently objects to the sale of F-35s to Taiwan, there are questions about
whether Taiwan will succeed in convincing the White House to approve the sale in the immediate future. The Trump
administration is currently drafting a new arms package for Taiwan, which according to some sources
will heavily tilt towards anti-ship, surface-to-air, and surface-to-surface missile systems . The package is
expected to exceed $1 billion in value. One of the key questions regarding the Trump administration’s arms package
whether it will include U.S. technical support for Taiwan’s new so-called Indigenous Defense Submarine (IDS) program. While
supporting the program would send a clear political message to Beijing, “U.S. technical support may be of limited value in any
case given that no American shipyard has built a diesel electric submarine since the 1950s,” I explained elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the United States has purportedly agreed to sell advanced MK-48 heavyweight torpedoes to Taiwan in 2016 and
the weapons could be part of the Trump administration’s arms package.
 AT F-35 PIC – Cant Solve Relations
Cant solve relations – F-35s is the breaking point
You and Hao, 18 (Ji You, Yufan Hao, professors of Government and Public at University of Macau
“The Political and Military Nexus of Beijing-Washington-Taipei: Military Interactions in the Taiwan
Strait”, China Review, August 2018, 6/24/2019, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26484534?
seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents) sd

As far as the PLA is concerned, the

Sino-U.S. military ties are the vulnerable point in the overall relations and will
likely worsen with power transition deepening in the region . Under this logic of evolution, there is little both militaries
can do to reverse the trend given the zero-sum nature of the contention. Institutionally, the U.S. military is forbidden to maintain substantial
contacts with the PLA by U.S. law. For instance, the U.S. 2000 National Defense Authorization Act singles out 12 areas where the U.S. military
should not interact with the PLA, leaving the bilateral cooperation only in those less than meaningful agendas such as antipiracy and
humanitarian assistance.80 The previously mentioned “third party factor,” such as the Taiwan issue, has set insurmountable barriers for both
parties to address the challenge of “trust deficits.” If
the current strife is not eased, the two militaries will be gradually
locked in a collision course and catch Taiwan in the cross-fire. For instance, both militaries regard U.S.
arms sales to Taiwan to be more of a political issue than a military one. To the United States it is even of
only symbolic military significance.81 The outcome is strikingly different. The Pentagon refuses to discuss the issue
with the PLA due to its “political” nature. Technically, the PLA would not care too much about the sold arms, which would not
alter the Strait balance of power. However, Beijing’s political depiction that the sales are violating China’s
sovereignty fundamentally clashes with Washington’s view that arms sales to Taiwan are a symbol of
U.S. security commitment to its allies and partners to sustain its global and regional leadership. The sales
will continue, partly because they commercially benefit the United States and partly because the
political cost is relatively low.82 When China and the United States cannot deal with the thorn, and politically it is unresolvable, the
option left to the PLA is very limited: suspension of military ties, set by Deng Xiaoping and tried six times so far. In fact, such an option is
increasingly ineffective and entraps Beijing in the process. In a way, the new package of arms sales in July 2017 approved by Trump was
moderate in content, although significant in expressing continued U.S. support to Taiwan by the new administration. The
PLA has not
adopted the usual countermeasure of suspension of ties with the U.S. military. Yet the dilemma lingers
on and the solution is nowhere in sight. The fatal test will emerge when the Pentagon crosses a PLA red
line on arms sales: the F-35s or submarines. Damocles’ sword hangs above .
AT F-16 PIC
 AT F-16 PIC – No F-16s Now
no sales now – trade deal and Congress hasn’t even approved them yet
Walcott and Worland 4-8
John and Justin, write for time magazine on foreign policy, 4-8-2019, "Taiwan Won't Get U.S. Fighter Jets
While Trump Seeks a China Deal," Time, https://time.com/5564773/taiwan-fighter-jet-sale-trump-china/

The Trump Administration has

put on hold a previously reported sale of jet fighters to Taiwan until the United
States seals a trade deal with China, three Administration officials told TIME on Thursday. That decision has contributed to
concern among some in the Administration that the President may soon go soft on China in his desire to secure a trade deal. The draft trade
agreement currently under negoti ati on would boost Trump’s political fortunes and ease the jittery stock market, but it is unlikely to address
many of the issues at the core of the U.S.-China trade dispute, said the U.S. officials, who spoke anonymously because they aren’t authorized to
discuss the matter publicly. The move underscores the complexity and difficulty of balancing U.S. relations with an increasingly powerful China
against the American commitment to help Taiwan defend itself. The White House’s initial decision, first reported late last month, to offer tacit
approval for Taiwan to buy 60 Lockheed Martin F-16V fighter jets was widely seen as a U.S. show of strength against China. The sale would be
the first time the U.S. has sold F-16s to Taiwan since 1992. While the U.S. has a statutory obligation to aid Taiwan’s defense in its decades-long
standoff with China, recent administrations have stopped short of allowing the island to buy new fighter jets. The
Trump
Administration’s apparent pause on the arms sale therefore represents a new deference to China. The U.S.
officials who spoke to TIME noted that the Trump Administration’s decision to temporarily set aside the Taiwan arms sale has not rattled Taipei.
Taiwanese officials remain confident that the arms sale will be completed after the U.S. and China reach a deal, and that reduced Sino-American
tensions are seen as better for the island than allowing the countries’ trade dispute, which has resulted in more than a year of damaging,
retaliatory tariffs, to escalate, they said. Congress
must also approve of any arms sales to Taiwan, and the
Administration has yet to submit that request to lawmakers. The State Department, which opposed the
proposed arms sale, has also called for an interagency meeting to determine whether the U.S. can sell Taiwan M1 tanks, according to an
Administration official. All foreign sales are coordinated through the State Department, which offered an emailed statement to TIME on
Monday: “While as a matter of policy we don’t comment on potential or pending arms sales cases before they are formally notified to Congress,
some recent reports citing anonymous administration officials regarding internal USG arms sales processes are not factual.” The State
Department did not specify which reports regarding arms sales processes were incorrect.

We haven’t sold Taiwan F-16’s since 1992 and the administration stopped plan to
Walcott and Worland 4/8 John Walcott and Justin Worland Updated, 4-8-2019, Justin Worland is a Washington D.C.-based
writer for TIME covering energy and the environment. "Taiwan Won't Get U.S. Fighter Jets While Trump Seeks a China Deal," Time,
https://time.com/5564773/taiwan-fighter-jet-sale-trump-china/) AD

The move underscores the complexity and difficulty of balancing U.S. relations with an increasingly powerful China against the American
commitment to help Taiwan defend itself. The White House’s initial decision, first reported late last
month, to offer tacit approval for Taiwan to buy 60 Lockheed Martin F-16V fighter jets
was widely seen as a U.S. show of strength against China . The sale would be the first
time the U.S. has sold F-16s to Taiwan since 1992. While the U.S. has a statutory obligation to aid Taiwan’s
defense in its decades-long standoff with China, recent administrations have stopped short of allowing

the island to buy new fighter jets. The Trump Administration’s apparent pause on the arms sale therefore represents a
new deference to China. The U.S. officials who spoke to TIME noted that the Trump Administration’s decision to temporarily set aside the
Taiwan arms sale has not rattled Taipei. Taiwanese officials remain confident that the arms sale will be completed after the U.S. and China
reach a deal, and that reduced Sino-American tensions are seen as better for the island than allowing the countries’ trade dispute, which has
Congress must also approve of any
resulted in more than a year of damaging, retaliatory tariffs, to escalate, they said.

arms sales to Taiwan, and the Administration has yet to submit that request to
lawmakers. The State Department, which opposed the proposed arms sale , has also called for an
interagency meeting to determine whether the U.S. can sell Taiwan M1 tanks, according to an Administration official. All foreign sales are
coordinated through the State Department, which offered an emailed statement to TIME on
Monday: “While as a matter of policy we don’t comment on potential or pending arms
sales cases before they are formally notified to Congress, some recent reports citing anonymous
administration officials regarding internal USG arms sales processes are not factual.” The State Department did not specify which reports
regarding arms sales processes were incorrect.

And talks of the transaction have stalled indefinitely – no chance they resume
Gehrke, 4/6
Joel, “Taiwan insists F-16 fighter jet sale still in works,” 4/6/19, 6/28/19,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/taiwan-insists-f-16-fighter-jet-
sale-still-in-works//WS

Taiwan wants new F-16 fighter jets and U.S.-made tanks to help deter any potential invasion from China ,
which regards the island as a breakaway province. Officials in Taipei, the last bastion of the Chinese government overthrown in the 1949
Communist Revolution, reacted quickly to a report suggesting that Trump’s team has put a hold on the arms deals in
the midst of a trade war with China. “The U.S. sale of F-16V fighter jets to Taiwan has not been put on hold,” the state-run outlet
maintained, citing the Foreign Ministry. But earlier this week it appeared the deal was off. “That decision has
contributed to concern among some in the Administration that the President may soon go soft on China
in his desire to secure a trade deal,” according to Time, which reported the decision. “The move underscores the complexity and
difficulty of balancing U.S. relations with an increasingly powerful China against the American commitment to help Taiwan defend itself.”
 AT F-16 PIC – Cant Solve China Retaliation
Stopping all arms is key – china sees just one sale as a threat – high tensions now
means you have a high threshold for PIC solvency
Panda 3-25
Ankit, editor, 3-25-2019, "Are the US and China About to Face off Over American Fighter Sales to
Taiwan?" Diplomat, https://thediplomat.com/2019/03/are-the-us-and-china-about-to-face-off-over-
american-fighter-sales-to-taiwan/

The United States and China appear to be heading toward a major confrontation over the possible sale of
American fighters to Taiwan. Last week, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen confirmed that the country’s Ministry of Defense had
submitted a formal request to Washington, D.C., to purchase F-16V Viper fighters. Tsai said the decision to make the
request was supported by a review of Taiwan’s defense needs. Days later, Bloomberg News reported that the White House was
poised to approve the Taiwanese request . If that report is true, the United States would be turning course on what
has been a longstanding reluctance to sell fighters to Taiwan , even as it has authorized other arms sales in line with the 1979
Taiwan Relations Act, which requires the U.S. government to support Taiwan “with arms of a defensive character.” Even as the Obama
administration and the Trump administration have approved weapons and spare parts for sale to Taiwan, fighters have long been
seen as a bridge too far given Beijing serious reservations. The United States authorized the sale of 150 F-16 fighters to
Taiwan in 1992. The Obama administration, after receiving a request from Taipei, turned it down, initiating a set of upgrades instead to Taipei’s
existing fleet. Theissue hasn’t gone unnoticed in China , where Taiwan is seen as an inherent part of the country. Relations
across the Taiwan Strait have been particularly strained since Tsai’s inauguration in 2016. The Taiwanese president
hails from the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), though she herself has not explicitly supported independence — long
a red-line for Beijing — Tsai, however, has
refused to endorse the so-called “1992 consensus,” which her predecessor
had supported and which forms what Beijing sees as the baseline for cordial cross-strait relations.
“China’s position to firmly oppose arms sales to Taiwan is consistent and clear,” Chinese Foreign Ministry
spokesperson Geng Shuang said during a press briefing on Friday. “We have made stern representations to the U.S. We have urged
the U.S. to fully recognize the sensitivity of this issue and the harm it will cause.” The prospect of a fighter sale to
Taiwan this time comes at a time of particularly heightened U.S.-China tensions. The Trump administration has been known to seek leverage
with Beijing across issues and it is possible that this may turn into the latest case of Taiwan being used a possible bargaining chip as Trump
Trump, however, has been unconventional on Taiwan policy in the
seeks to clinch a favorable trade deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
past. As president-elect, he broke expectations by receiving a telephone call from Tsai. That call occurred at a time
when Trump had yet to endorse the United States’ one-China policy as president — something that he did for the first time
in February 2017. Either way, Tsai’s fighter request and the Trump administration’s reported acceptance could set up
another major area of turbulence between the United States and China.
 AT F-16 PIC – Must End All Arms Sales
Selling F-16 signals to china US supports Taiwan split
Lee 4-3-19, Professor John Lee is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC and United States Studies Center in Sydney. From 2016-18, he
was the national security adviser to the Australian foreign minister.”Why a US Sale of Fighter Jets to Taiwan Matters”, April 3 rd, 2019, accessed:6/28/18,
https://thediplomat.com/2019/04/why-a-us-sale-of-fighter-jets-to-taiwan-matters/)

In late March, Bloomberg reported that U.S. President Donald Trump’s advisers had encouraged Taiwan to submit a formal request to buy up to 60 advanced F-16V fighter planes. Any sale

Taiwanese
must still be approved by Congress and would be the first major aircraft purchase from the United States by Taiwan since 1992. During her visit to Hawaii last week,

President Tsai Ing-wen confirmed that Taiwan had requested a purchase of new fighter jets from the United States. Days
later, two Chinese fighter planes crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait that divides China and Taiwan – the first time this has occurred
for 20 years. Even if the F-16V sale goes ahead, Taiwan’s new planes will not alter the military balance between
China and Taiwan, nor dissuade the mainland from further provocations such as the median line flyover. That is not Beijing’s primary concern, however.
The most important calculation China must make is not the relative capabilities of the Taiwanese armed forces but how the United States will

respond in the event of a crisis or conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Every clue with respect to uncovering U.S. intention is vital because U.S.
intervention could tip the military balance against China in any such conflict. In any event, it guarantees the end of any “acceptable cost” outcome in the event of

conflict for China. Under the United States’ 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, any attempt to forcibly determine Taiwan’s future is considered “a threat to peace and security of the
Western Pacific and of grave concern to the United States.” To prevent that, Washington is obligated to sell “arms of a defensive character” to Taipei to allow the latter to defend itself and

Since the Bill Clinton era, administrations have denied Taiwan’s request to
dissuade China from launching any military action.

purchase new fighter planes on the basis that the grey line from “defense” to “offense” might be
crossed. Speaking from Hawaii, Tsai let the cat out of the bag when she said the purchase of advanced fourth generation fighters would “greatly enhance our land and air capabilities,
strengthen military moral and show to the world the U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s defense.” It is the last line which sends shivers down the spine of mainland leaders. Since the Taiwan
Relations Act came into force, the United States has deliberately embarked on a policy of “strategic ambiguity” with respect to its military commitments to Taiwan in the event the latter is
attacked. Whether the United States intervenes is a matter of political judgment and strategic assessment. Under the Barack Obama administration, the decision to only offer Taipei upgrades
to its aging F-16 A/B planes suggested to Beijing that de-escalating tensions arising from differences over Taiwan was the predominant mindset. In contrast, the Trump administration has
shown unprecedented willingness to escalate tensions with China over political, strategic, and economic differences. The speech by Vice President Mike Pence last October at the Hudson
Institute and the 2017 National Security Strategy pulled no punches in identifying China as a comprehensive rival to the United States. If the sale of F-16V planes goes through, then, it is

a sale would be an
evidence that the mindset in Washington with respect to Taiwan has also changed and is less accepting of mainland sensibilities and demands. Such

indication that preserving de facto Taiwanese independence is once more considered critical to U.S. and allied strategy when it comes
to keeping the PLA confined to inside the so-called First Island Chain.
 AT F-16 PIC – Cant Solve Relations
Maintaining f-16s collapses US-China relations
Bloomberg 19 (Bloomberg News Service; https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/04/01/asia-
pacific/politics-diplomacy-asia-pacific/trumps-sale-f-16-fighters-taiwan-seen-making-china-nervous-
politically/#.XRVkROhKhPY; Trump's sale of F-16 fighters to Taiwan seen making China nervous
politically ; 4-1-19)
The U.S. may finally sell Taiwan the warplanes it has sought for more than a decade to defend against China. Their arrival would deal more of a political shock than a
military blow to Beijing. Trump administration officials have given tacit approval to Taipei’s request to buy more than 60
Lockheed Martin Corp. F-16s, according to people familiar with the matter, setting the stage for the first such deal since 1992. While a few dozen fighter jets

would hardly tip the military balance against the increasing powerful Chinese military, it
would signal a new American willingness to
back the democratically run island. “For Beijing, it would be a huge shock ,” said Wu Shang-su, a research fellow at the S.
Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. “But it would be more of a political shock than a military shock. It would be, ‘Oh, the U.S. doesn’t care how
we feel.’ It would be more of a symbolic or emotional issue.” The potential sale is among several gestures of U.S. support for Taiwan in recent months, even as
President Donald Trump and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping near a deal to end the costly trade war. The U.S. also sailed a warship through the Taiwan Strait and
accommodated President Tsai Ing-wen’s stopover in Hawaii last week, drawing protests from China, which denouncedthe moves as
“extremely dangerous.” Renewed U.S. interest in Taiwan follows growing calls in Washington for a “whole-of-government” effort to prevent China
from surpassing American military and industrial dominance. Perhaps nowhere has the power shift been felt more than on Taiwan, an island of 23.6 million people
that China aims to eventually control despite 70 years of divided rule. China
has directed its industrial strength toward huge
investments in military hardware over the past two decades, building a world-class navy and filling its coastline with missiles
capable of hitting Taiwanese targets. The country spent 23 times more than Taiwan on defense in 2017, up from double in 1997. New F-16s
won’t “change the fundamental balance of capabilities across the strait, nor will it eliminate the threat that China poses to forcibly absorb a democratic Taiwan,”
said Scott Harold, an associate director of Rand Corp.’s Center for Asia Pacific Policy. “Taiwan will continue to need to invest in missiles, electronic warfare, mines
and other advanced conventional and asymmetric capabilities designed to deter, and if necessary defeat, any Chinese effort to use coercion to compel unification.”
Rand analysts argued in a 2016 report that China’s
sophisticated short-range ballistic missiles could “cut every runway at
Taiwan’s half-dozen main fighter bases and destroy essentially all” parked aircraft in a conflict . Any planes that
made it in the air could face Chinese pilots flying jets such as the J-20, a “fifth-generation” stealth fighter considered to be a rival to Lockheed’s advanced F-22s and
F-35s. Still, the F-16 sale would represent a shift by the U.S ., which is obligated to sell “arms of a defensive character” to Taipei under the
1979 Taiwan Relations Act. Presidents since Bill Clinton have repeatedly rebuffed Taiwan’s requests for new fighter jets and other advanced weapons systems that
could provoke Beijing, with Barack Obama agreeing in 2011 to merely upgrade its aging F-16 fleet. Tsai said during her visit to Hawaii on Wednesday that a fighter
jet deal would “greatly enhance our land and air capabilities, strengthen military morale and show to the world the U.S.’s commitment to Taiwan’s defense.” The F-
16Vs requested by Taiwan are promoted as the world’s most advanced fourth-generation jet, including the latest radar and avionics, even though the original F16
model has been in service for more than 40 years. The aircraft would help the island respond day-to-day incidents such as air space incursions that fall short of open
war and mop up data during routine patrols. China, which suspended military exchanges with the U.S. in response to previous sales, protested the F-16 move.

The foreign
ministry said the country lodged “stern representations” with U.S. while the defense ministry
warned against moves that undercut the contention that the mainland and Taiwan are part of “one
China.” “Any words or actions that undermine the one-China policy are tantamount to shaking the
foundation of China-U.S. relations, are inconsistent with the fundamental interests of China and the
United States and are also extremely dangerous ,” Senior Col. Wu Qian said at a briefing Thursday in Beijing.

Selling F-16s to Taiwan angers China

Gertz 19
(Bill, Senior Editor of the Washington Free Beacon, was a national security reporter for 27 years ,”Trump Administration Approves Sale of F-16s
to Taiwan,” Washington Free Beacon, 3-15-2019, 6-28-19, https://freebeacon.com/national-security/trump-administration-approves-sale-of-f-
16s-to-taiwan/)//MA

The arms sales are being carried out under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act that authorizes the United States to provide defensive weapons to
Taiwan to counter any mainland attack. The last sale of 150 F-16A/B models took place from 1992 to 1999 under the
administration of President George H.W. Bush. As with the 1992 transfers, the sale is expected to upset Beijing , which
regards Taiwan as a breakaway province and not an independent state. After a smaller $330 million arms sale for F-16 spare
parts was announced in September, Beijing spokesmen denounced the weapons transfers as a violation
of U.S.-China agreements. "The sales severely violate international law and basic norms governing international relations, and
severely violate the one-China principle as well as the principles of the three China-U.S. joint
communiques," Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said, adding that China protested the earlier sale. The Chinese military
protested the sale as interference in China's internal affairs and damaging Chinese sovereignty and
security interests. The official newspaper China Daily stated that same month that the United States was
threatening to cross a "red line" with Taiwan arms sales . The Obama administration sold around $14 billion in arms to
Taiwan. However, that administration blocked a $1 billion arms package in December 2016. In the first two years of the Trump administration, a
total of $815.5 million in weapons were sold to Taiwan. The aircraft sale is expected to boost that number to around $14 billion. China has
stepped up pressure on the island in recent months by conducting provocative military flights around Taiwan. The island, located 100 miles
from the southern Chinese coast, was set up as the Republic of China in 1949 when Nationalist forces fled the mainland during a civil war. The
Pentagon 2018 report on the Chinese military stated that the military balance is shifting in China's favor. In terms of air power, between 2016
and 2017 China added 130 strike aircraft and bombers, increasing the numbers from 400 to 530. The jet
sales will be announced
amid increasing tensions between Washington and Beijing . Both remain locked in a trade dispute over China's unfair
trade practices and technology theft.
 Recognize taiwan
Political science scholarship proves that recognition is internationally perceived and
emboldens would-be secessionists
Mirilovic and Siroky 15 - *Assistant Prof of Poli Sci @ University of Central Florida, ** Associate
Professor of Political Science in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University,

*Nikola, *David S., Two States in the Holy Land?: International Recognition and the Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict, Politics and Religion, http://davidsiroky.faculty.asu.edu/PR2015.pdf ---

We posit two levels at which religion may shape recognition decisions — domestic religious institutions
and transnational religious affinities. Religious institutions vary in the degree to which they regulate
religious life in a given country. States that heavily regulate religion may do so because of a perceived
vulnerability to domestic threats from groups adhering to other religions. When a non-core group that is
culturally (ethnically and/ or religiously) distinct successfully challenges another state, extending
recognition to the aspiring state may set a precedent and embolden noncore groups at home.
Previous scholarly work has found that “demonstration effects” can play a significant role in
stimulating secession; that is, one key region’s separatist actions tend to encourage other regions to
behave similarly (Hale 2000). States that perceive themselves as vulnerable to non-core groups, both
religious and ethnic, should therefore prefer to keep Pandora’s Box closed by withholding recognition
from aspiring states abroad and emphasizing the principle of territorial integrity (Zartman 1966, 109).
This claim extends the theory of domestic vulnerability, which argues that nation-states facing threats
from secessionists at home will be less likely to support secessionists abroad, for fear of legitimizing the
act of secession and sending mixed signals to domestic audiences and minority groups at home (Touval
1972; Jackson and Rosberg 1982; Herbst 2000; but see Saideman 1997; 2001; 2002; 2007). While the
original “domestic vulnerability” thesis was applied to external support for secessionists, which often
takes clandestine forms that the public does not directly observe, recognition is a distinct form of
external support that is directly observable to the public in the recognizing state. Recognition decisions
may send a relatively clear signal to domestic audiences (Coggins 2011; Walter 2006). Applying this
argument to the study of international recognition, we theorize that countries facing such a threat will
be less likely to recognize an aspiring state for fear of setting a precedent that would embolden
aggrieved groups at home.

Recognition collapses US-China relations

Goldstein 18 – PhD, Professor of Government, Emeritus at Smith College and Fairbank Center
Associate (Steven, “Recognizing Taiwan’s Sovereignty? The U.S. Response to China’s Diplomatic
Pressure,” Medium, https://medium.com/fairbank-center/recognizing-taiwans-sovereignty-how-is-the-
u-s-responding-to-china-s-diplomatic-affront-54785cbc9338)//

Still, even though American administrations have pushed the boundaries of relations with  — -and
support for — Taiwan, they have carefully avoided any suggestion of support for its government’s claim
of independence and sovereign status. To cross that red line would be an explicit rejection of the
fundamentals of China’s claim to Taiwan that would shake the foundation of Sino-American relations.
The analysis in this article suggests that, in its recent reaction to El Salvador’s change in diplomatic
partners, the United States has moved perilously close to that line. The first suggestion of this came in
an unusual August 23 statement by the White House that criticized El Salvador for having acted in a way
that affected “the economic health and security of the entire American region” by its “government’s
receptiveness to Chinese apparent interference in the domestic politics of a Western hemisphere
country.” This was said to be a matter of “grave concern” to the United States that would result in a “re-
evaluation” of its relations with El Salvador. The statement cautioned others regarding the dangers of
economic ties with China and pledged that “[t]he United States will continue to oppose China’s
destabilization of the cross-strait relationship and political interference in the Western Hemisphere.”
This statement was unlike the State Department spokesperson’s anodyne statement about the
importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait made in response Panama’s switch to relations
with China in June of 2017. In it she dismissed any threat to American interests in the area,
characterizing the change as “an internal matter between the Government of Taiwan and Panama.” So,
in roughly a year, the American posture on the diplomatic competition between Taiwan and China had
moved from a narrow assessment of its impact on stability in cross-strait relations to a much wider
depiction reminiscent of the Monroe Doctrine. In this depiction the United States indicated a willingness
to intervene officially in matters beyond the strait area that affected relations between China and
Taiwan. And on September 11, it was apparent that intervention might constitute more than a
statement, when American envoys to the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Panama were recalled to
Washington for “consultations related to the recent decisions to no longer recognize Taiwan.” At the
same time in the Congress, Taiwan’s supporters rallied to support the island. Legislation was proposed
that would “restrict U.S. funding to El Salvador” in order to “send a direct message to Taiwan’s allies that
the United States will use every tool to support Taiwan’s standing on the international stage and will
stand up to China’s bullying tactics across the world.” In early September, legislation introduced into the
Senate called for the State Department to report on “actions taken by the United States to affirm and
strengthen Taiwan’s international alliances around the world.” It proposed rewarding countries that
maintained diplomatic or unofficial relations with Taiwan while penalizing those who would downgrade
relations. One instance does not, necessarily, represent a change in policy. Still, it is useful to inquire,
first, whether Washington’s reaction to Chinese recognition of El Salvador is consistent with broader
trends in United States China policy and secondly, whether it represents a change in American policy
toward the cross-strait relations. To answer the first question: the reaction described above is consistent
with the direction American China policy was taking during the summer of 2018. Sino-American relations
under President Trump continued on the downward trend that had begun in the last days of the Obama
administration. With China identified as a “revisionist” power and a “competitor” challenging “American
power, influence, and interests,” Sino-American disputes arose on issues ranging from trade to security
in the South China Sea. Consistent with this trend were Washington’s recent efforts at “strengthening
alliances and building new partnerships in the area” in response to Beijing’s involvement in Latin
America. This direction was aggressively promoted by Secretary of Defense James Mattis who toured
the area the summer of 2018 warning of Chinese economic and military ambitions and proposing that
the United States National Guard link up with South American military. In contrast to this trend, after
the December, 2016 phone call between Trump and Tsai, the cross-strait issue did not figure
prominently in the worsening Sino-American relationship — at least as far as the Executive Branch was
concerned. In Congress, Taiwan’s supporters promoted legislation consistent with the overall
“hardening” of China policy. However, the legislation was not a radical departure from past initiatives
regarding arms sales, military cooperation and visits. Thus, it is not surprising that the Trump
administration’s reaction to El Salvador’s actions was far more vigorous than reactions to earlier
defections by the island’s partners. This was consistent with the growing concern regarding the direction
of Chinese foreign policy, in general and toward Latin America, in particular. Yet, the content of the
response was neither consistent with earlier responses to the mainland’s attraction of Taiwan’s
diplomatic partners nor the United States “One China Policy.” Earlier the focus had been on the impact
on stability in the Taiwan Strait area. Now, “political interference in the Western Hemisphere” was
linked to cross-strait relations, implying that American interests in these relations were not limited to its
impact in East Asia. Moreover, implicit in the White House statement and the explanation of the recall
of diplomats to Washington was that one of those interests is that Taiwan’s remaining formal diplomatic
ties — especially in the Western Hemisphere — be maintained. This was made explicit in the proposed
Congressional legislation which not only promoted the existing American support for Taiwan’s
“unofficial relations,” but added support for “official relations” to “strengthen Taiwan’s international
alliances.” The problem here is that Taiwan’s “official relations” are based on the Republic of China
being considered a sovereign state — a fact denied by both the United States and China . Indeed, this
denial of Taiwan sovereign state status is not only one of the few areas of agreement between the two,
it is an important pillar supporting Sino-American relations. Since normalization in 1979, it has allowed
the United States to balance the provision of essential support for Taiwan with some acknowledgement
of Chinese sensitivities. Although this balance has never really satisfied China, upsetting it by
acknowledging Taiwan’s sovereign status would be catastrophic for Sino-American relations and
threaten the American interest in the security of Taiwan .
 AT: CP – CBM’s
Bargaining fails and increases the risk of miscalc – links to
deterrence/allies/perception
Swaine 11 – senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of the most
prominent American analysts in Chinese security studies (Michael, America’s Challenge: Engaging a
Rising China in the Twenty-First Century, p. 359-363

The feasibility and parameters of such an agreement could be initially explored via an authorized Track II dialogue, given its
many obvious sensitivities. Indeed, any such approach would confront three major problems for the United States. First and foremost, some
politicians and pundits in both the United States and Taiwan (and perhaps also in Japan) would attempt to label any effort
by Washington to negotiate with Beijing, even in consultation with Taipei, as a “sell-out” of Taiwan’s
interests that could result in China eventually coercing or seizing the island and, more broadly, in irreparable damage to
America’s credibility and strategic position in Asia and perhaps beyond. Second, both the United States and
China might face considerable difficulties in defining what constitutes a reasonable exchange of forces,
deployments, and arms sales to Taiwan. A third consideration, often voiced by some observers of the Taiwan situation, is that
any such U.S. attempt to intervene in the cross-Strait imbroglio could easily expose Washington to
manipulation by both Taipei and Beijing while possibly increasing the chances of a miscalculation by all three
parties.

Can’t solve mistrust or relations --- arms sales key to Chinese perceptions
Lieberthal 12 (Kenneth Lieberthal is Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy and in Global Economy and
Development and is Director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, and
*Wang Jisi is Director of the Center for International and Strategic Studies and Dean of the School of
International Studies at Peking University, “Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust,” No. 4, March,
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0330_china_lieberthal.pdf)

National Security Issues Some high-ranking Chinese officials have openly stated that the United States is China’s
greatest national security threat. This perception is especially widely shared in China’s defense and
security establishments and in the Communist Party’s ideological organizations . Several recent developments
have contributed to China’s deepening distrust of U.S. strategic intentions in the national security arena. First, despite the remarkable
improvement of relations between Beijing and Taipei since the KMT returned to power in May 2008, the United States
has continued to provide Taiwan with advanced weapons aimed at deterring the Mainland . This is
viewed as pernicious in Chinese eyes and has added to the suspicion that Washington will disregard
Chinese interests and sentiment as long as China’s power position is secondary to America’s.
 AT: CP – Deterrence
The CP is worse for relations and Taiwan self-defense.
Gomez 16 (Eric, policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, Masters of
Arts in International Affairs from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M
University, “A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,” 9-
28, https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-
defense-relationship)
Restore U.S. Military Superiority

Restoring U.S. military superiority would shore up the credibility of the American commitment to Taiwan
at the cost of severe damage to the U.S.-China relationship. China might be deterred from attacking
Taiwan, but it would have ample reason to strongly oppose the United States across other issue areas,
including the South China Sea, trade issues, and reining in North Korea. Additionally, unequivocal American
support would reduce incentives for Taiwan to improve its defenses.

The most important negative consequence of restoring U.S. military superiority is the severe damage
that would be done to U.S.-China relations . China and the United States do not see eye-to-eye on many
issues, but this does not make China an outright adversary .68 Chinese cyber espionage against American companies, the
rise of alternative development institutions led by Beijing, and island-building in the South China Sea are of great concern to policymakers in
Washington.69 However, U.S.-Chinese cooperation on other pressing issues, especially environmental concerns
and punishing North Korea after its recent nuclear tests, has supported U.S. goals .70 China is certainly not a
friend or ally of the United States, but treating it as an enemy that needs to be contained is unwise .71 Restoring
U.S. military superiority would set back much of the progress made in U.S.-China relations.

The CP is worse for deterrence – inflames Chinese threat perception, balancing, and
arms racing – turns their offense
Gomez 16 (Eric, policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, Masters of
Arts in International Affairs from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M
University, “A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,” 9-
28, https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-
defense-relationship)

Restoring U.S. military superiority might be a boon to America’s credibility in the short term, but
superiority may be fleeting. The growing U.S. military presence in East Asia , a result of the Obama administration’s
“pivot” or “rebalance” to the region, has exacerbated the Chinese perception of the United States as a threat .72
Restoring U.S. military superiority will likely support this perception and provide a strong incentive for
China to invest even more resources in its military . Additionally, falling behind in the conventional balance
of power could prompt China to increase the quantity and quality of its nuclear weapon arsenal .73 If
Beijing quickly offsets the advantages of stronger U.S. military support for Taiwan, the U nited States could
end up in a similar position to the one it’s in now, but with a stronger China to deter.
US pursuit of military advantage isn’t credible or sustainable – can’t resolve underlying
cross-strait issues that fuel conflict
Gomez 16 (Eric, policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, Masters of
Arts in International Affairs from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M
University, “A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,” 9-
28, https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-
defense-relationship)

The biggest weakness of sustaining a minimum U.S. military advantage is that it does not resolve any of the
underlying issues in the cross-strait dispute, most important of which is the fact that Taiwan matters
more to China than it does to the U nited States. Since the United States cannot equalize the imbalance of
stakes vis-à-vis China, credible deterrence will require the United States to maintain military superiority over a
steadily improving PLA. The United States is capable of absorbing these costs in the short run, but the recent history of the
U.S.-China military balance suggests that China will be able to narrow the gap eventually.
 AT: CP – Nuke Umbrella
Not credible
Mearsheimer 14 (John J, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at
the University of Chicago, “Say Goodbye to Taiwan,” 2-25, https://nationalinterest.org/article/say-
goodbye-taiwan-9931?page=0%2C3)

One might argue that there is a simple way to deal with the fact that Taiwan will not have an effective
conventional deterrent against China in the not-too-distant future: put America’s nuclear umbrella over
Taiwan. This approach will not solve the problem, however, because the United States is not going to
escalate to the nuclear level if Taiwan is being overrun by China. The stakes are not high enough to risk a
general thermonuclear war. Taiwan is not Japan or even South Korea. Thus, the smart strategy for
America is to not even try to extend its nuclear deterrent over Taiwan.
A2: Human Rights Condition CP
 Solvency Deficit: The Entire Affirmative
The counterplan can solve zero parts of the affirmative because Taiwan has no human
rights abuses.
AIT, 3-13-2019, “2018 Human Rights Report (Taiwan Part),” American Institute in Taiwan,
https://www.ait.org.tw/2018-human-rights-report-taiwan-part/. ZKMSU

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Taiwan is a democracy governed by a president and a parliament selected in

multiparty elections. In 2016, voters elected President Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party
to a four-year term in an election considered free and fair. Civilian authorities maintained effective
control over the security forces. There were no reports of egregious human rights abuses. Authorities
enforced laws prohibiting human rights abuses and prosecuted officials who committed them . There
were no reports of impunity.
 Solvency Deficit: US-China Relations Advantage
The counterplan can never solve the US-China Relations advantage; passing the
counterplan would still require formal recognition of Taiwan as an official US policy
which would trigger all of the internal links of the advantage. In fact, it would
probably be worse than the status quo because it would be a direct contradiction to
the three communiques rather than an indirect contradiction. This guarantees further
escalation.
 Solvency Deficit: Trade War Advantage
The counterplan can never solve the Trade War advantage; the internal links of the
advantage requires a complete reduction of arms sales rather than just a contingency.
Further, any increase in arms sales, which the counterplan guarantees, would result in
an escalation of the trade war which triggers all of our impacts.
 Solvency Deficit: Absent Imperialism Advantage
The counterplan can never solve the Absent Imperialism advantage; the counterplan
still allows for the silent oppression of peoples through American liberal militarism.
This time, however, rather than the arms being sold to nations globally, it is
specifically to other nations that likely practice liberal militarism, following in the
United States’ footsteps. Further, the counterplan can never solve absent imperialism
within the Asia-Pacific because it still acknowledges the de facto military bases as
possible and okay, “so long as you meet our requirements!”
 Permutations
Permutation do both – Taiwan has no human rights abuses so the net benefit is
actually stopping the sales.

Permutation do the affirmative then counterplan on a global level – this sequences the
affirmative as an a priori issue and then establishes the counterplan to all other
nations.
 Theory: Reject Condition CPs
Condition counterplans are bad:
1) They moot the purpose of the 1ac. Any negative team can win a round with a
Condition CP so long as they find the most minute of conditions to add to the
affirmative which nullifies reading the 1ac.
2) It is impossible to predict the condition added to the affirmative.
3) It’s a voter for fairness and education; the affirmative is forced to debate
against themselves because there is no way to predict random conditions
tacked onto the plan text.
 Theory: Conditionality Bad
Conditionality is bad:
1) Skews 2AC time and strategy by reading a bunch of blippy arguments that the
negative doesn’t have to stick with.
2) Makes the negative a moving target by allowing them to kick out of whatever
they want.
3) It isn’t reciprocal; the affirmative can’t sever out of the 1AC.
4) Dispositionality solves all offense by allowing the affirmative to at least make
some strategic decisions with time allocation.
5) It’s a voter for fairness and education.
 AT Improve US Hard Power CP
TURN – Improving military capabilities harms relations
Gomez 2016 – Eric Gomez is a policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato
Institute. (“A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,”
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-defense-
relationship?
utm_content=buffer855fe&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer) bhb

Restoring U.S. military superiority would shore up the credibility of the American commitment to Taiwan at the cost of severe
damage to the U.S.-China relationship. China might be deterred from attacking Taiwan, but it would have ample
reason to strongly oppose the United States across other issue areas, including the South China Sea,
trade issues, and reining in North Korea . Additionally, unequivocal American support would reduce incentives for Taiwan to
improve its defenses.

The most important negative consequence of restoring U.S. military superiority is the severe damage that would be done to U.S.-China relations.
China and the United States do not see eye-to-eye on many issues, but this does not make China an outright adversary.68 Chinese cyber
espionage against American companies, the rise of alternative development institutions led by Beijing, and island-building in the South China Sea
are of great concern to policymakers in Washington.69 However, U.S.-Chinese cooperation on other pressing issues,
especially environmental concerns and punishing North Korea after its recent nuclear tests, has
supported U.S. goals.70 China is certainly not a friend or ally of the United States, but treating it as an enemy that needs to be contained
is unwise.71 Restoring U.S. military superiority would set back much of the progress made in U.S.-China
relations.

TURN – Improving military capabilities makes war more likely

Gomez 2016 – Eric Gomez is a policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato
Institute. (“A Costly Commitment: Options for the Future of the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Relationship,”
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costly-commitment-options-future-us-taiwan-defense-
relationship?
utm_content=buffer855fe&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer) bhb

Restoring U.S. military superiority might be a boon to America’s credibility in the short term, but
superiority may be fleeting. The growing U.S. military presence in East Asia , a result of the Obama administration’s
“pivot” or “rebalance” to the region, has exacerbated the Chinese perception of the United States as a threat. 72
Restoring U.S. military superiority will likely support this perception and provide a strong incentive for
China to invest even more resources in its military. Additionally, falling behind in the conventional balance
of power could prompt China to increase the quantity and quality of its nuclear weapon arsenal. 73 If
Beijing quickly offsets the advantages of stronger U.S. military support for Taiwan, the United States could end up in a similar position to the one
it’s in now, but with a stronger China to deter.
 AT Salami Tactics CP
TURN – salami tactics will escalate hostilities – lack of confidence building
mechanisms will escalate to war
Saunders 2005 – Dr. Phillip C. Saunders is Director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military
Affairs. He has been a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies since
January 2004. Dr. Saunders served as Director of Studies for the Center for Strategic Research from
2010-12, with responsibility for supervising the Center’s research on regional, global, and functional
security issues. Dr. Saunders previously worked at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where
he served as Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program from 1999-2003 (“Long-term Trends in
China-Taiwan Relations: Implications for U.S. Taiwan Policy,” Asian Survey Vol. 45 No. 6) bhb

most dangerous issue is China’s perception that Taiwan’s leaders are using salami tactics to
Perhaps the
push toward independence without crossing Beijing’s red lines. Beijing has condemned each of Taiwan’s actions but
has been reluctant to repeat the military responses it employed in 1995–96. If Taiwan leaders conclude that they can continue to move toward
independence because the costs to China of using force are too high, Beijing
may eventually feel the need to take military
action to send a clear signal that independence is unacceptable. This would most likely involve a
carefully limited use of force, but it might escalate into a full-scale war that would involve the United
States. More generally, the mismatch between perceived adverse trends and available policy instruments
could prompt leaders to take risky actions because they lack alternative means to address growing
threats.

No Solvency – salami tactics are the status quo

Thim 2018 – Michal Thim is a Taiwan analyst at the Prague-based think tank, Association for
International Affairs (AMO), and a member of the Centre for International Maritime Security with a
research focus on cross-strait relations, and East and Southeast Asian regional politics and security.
(“Behind the US’ smaller arms package to Taiwan lie bigger problems for China,”
https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/asia/article/2166594/behind-us-smaller-arms-package-
taiwan-lie-bigger) bhb

China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang denounced the sale as a breach of China’s sovereignty and
demanded an end to US-Taiwan arms sales. Needless to say, Taiwan has praised the decision and thanked Washington for its
continuous support.

On the face of it, the content of the latest arms sale does not look particularly concerning to Beijing. The
total size of the sale is much less than the US$1.4 billion approved last June.
Unlike the sale in 2017 – which included heavyweight torpedoes for Taiwan’s submarine force - the 2018 sale does not bring any new capability
for Taiwan. The whole package is reserved for the supply of spare parts and logistics support for Taiwan’s fighter fleet and other planes,
including F-16 Vipers and indigenously developed defence fighters.

The sale is part of the Cooperative Logistics Supply Support Arrangement deal. The spare parts package may seem
underwhelming considering that this is a second arms sale to Taiwan under Donald Trump’s administration . Taipei has
been reportedly considering a letter of request for M1 Abrams battle tanks or fifth-generation F-35B stealth jets, but no official order has been
placed yet.
However, the content of the sale is not the most crucial aspect , although its utility to Taiwan’s air force cannot be
overstated. The fact that the sale is just about supply and logistics suggest a change in attitude on the US
side.

First, the
items were approved on a continuing basis and as needed and available. Second, the Trump administration has
not only moved from large bundles every few years to sales on an annual basis, but it may also indicate a move away
from bundling
orders altogether.

In the past, and especially during Barack Obama’s two terms, the US government came across as too accommodating in trying to navigate
relations with Taiwan in a way that would not upset Beijing, and Chinese leaders seized on every opportunity to capitalise.

The result was that arms sales to Taiwan were bundled into large packages and separated by long periods of
no activity, though the ever-growing military capability of the PLA warranted a response via robust arms sales, as presumed by the Taiwan
Relations Act of 1979. Something as routine as a supply of spare parts under the logistics agreement became subject to political considerations.
Now, Washington may be returning to normal.

The arms sales notification was not the only good news for Taiwan. Lockheed Martin announced that it had received an order for 18 Sniper
advanced targeting pods from Taiwan. Taiwanese pilots tested two sets of the pods after their sale was announced in 2015, and the new order
indicates that the trials were satisfactory. Sniper targeting pods increase Taiwan’s capability to strike targets from greater distances and in low
visibility.

However, Beijing does not just have the US to worry about. Taiwanese media reported on September 26 about two contracts with France on
training and upgrades to nearly 50 French-made Mirage 2000 high-altitude fighter jets in Taiwan’s air force inventory.

Moreover, Taiwan’s defence ministry decided on a European design for Taiwan’s Indigenous Defence Submarine project. The media has
speculated that French shipbuilder Direction des Constructions Navales Services and German Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft were among the
contenders, and one of them is likely to be the winner.

The French connection to Taiwan’s defence modernisation is a timely reminder that European defence industry companies are present and active
in Taiwan. With France and Germany leading European resistance against adverse effects of the Belt and Road Initiative, and greater scrutiny
over Chinese investment in and acquisition of strategic industries, Europe’s arms suppliers may find the situation ripe for taking a greater share in
Taiwan’s defence projects. Their governments may very well give them the green light.

It is too early to say if the latest arms sale to Taiwan will deliver on its promise of normalising the process of arms sales and (to the extent
possible) depoliticising decisions on arms sales by removing undue deference to Beijing’s perceptions.

America’s Taiwan policy includes the peaceful resolution of the dispute between Taipei and Beijing, one that will respect the will of Taiwanese
people. To this end, arms sales should be judged on their contribution to Taiwan’s defence posture and the gravity of the military threat stemming
from Beijing’s actions and the PLA’s capabilities.

What is clear is that the US is eager to reshape the whole process of arms sales in a direction that would
be beneficial for Taipei and Washington. Moreover, recent activity from European suppliers might indicate a greater willingness
to confront Beijing.

No Solvency – China perceives salami tactics – backlash to Taiwanese diplomacy

proves
Saunders 2005 – Dr. Phillip C. Saunders is Director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military
Affairs. He has been a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies since
January 2004. Dr. Saunders served as Director of Studies for the Center for Strategic Research from
2010-12, with responsibility for supervising the Center’s research on regional, global, and functional
security issues. Dr. Saunders previously worked at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where
he served as Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program from 1999-2003 (“Long-term Trends in
China-Taiwan Relations: Implications for U.S. Taiwan Policy,” Asian Survey Vol. 45 No. 6) bhb

The trend toward a separate Taiwan identity poses a difficult challenge for China because national identity cannot be easily
influenced by military or diplomatic means. If China wants to influence how people in Taiwan think of themselves, it must find positive ways to
appeal to them. One possibility would be to emphasize a shared ethno-cultural identity between people in China and Taiwan, while
acknowledging that people on Taiwan also have a Taiwan identity with distinctive and different characteristics. China could promote positive
aspects of Chinese culture that appeal to people on Taiwan (and perhaps even acknowledge its debt to the Republic of China for preserving
Chinese cultural artifacts that otherwise would have been destroyed in the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution). Appeals to a shared Chinese ethno-
cultural identity might be attractive on Taiwan, because many people think of themselves as having both Chinese and Taiwanese identities. If
China proves unable to influence conceptions of national identity on Taiwan, then it is left with the less attractive (and much more dangerous)
option of trying to prevent Taiwan’s government from acting on a sense of separate identity to pursue formal independence. This moves
China’s policy in the direction of threats and force rather than persuasion .
Taiwan’s “Creeping Independence”

PRC officials and security analysts believe that both Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian have used salami slicing
tactics to move Taiwan toward independence. This approach involves small movements toward a long-
term objective without ever taking an action large enough to justify a hostile response. Actions such as
dismantling the Taiwan provincial government and dissociating the government from formal commitments to unification are regarded as
steps in a process that might end in constitutional change and a formal declaration of independence. Chinese leaders
and analysts believe Lee Teng-hui consciously worked to loosen Taiwan’s ties with China and remove or weaken institutional structures and
policies that symbolized this linkage. This perception has been reinforced by Lee’s subsequent role in founding the Taiwan Solidarity Union (a
pro-independence political party) and his embrace of independence as a goal for Taiwan. Lee’s use of “vacation diplomacy” to travel to countries
that did not recognize Taiwan and efforts to increase Taiwan’s international profile are regarded as efforts to build international support for
“zero-sum” perception that any international recognition of Taiwan is a step toward independence
Taiwan independence. This
makes PRC leaders determined to isolate Taiwan in every possible international forum.

No Solvency – Altman concedes new weapons systems are destabilizing

Altman 2016 – Dan Altman is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the International Security Program in the
John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center at Harvard University. (“How to Sell Arms to
Taiwan,” https://thediplomat.com/2016/11/how-to-sell-arms-to-taiwan/) bhb
Just as important as avoiding large arms packages is avoiding long periods without any arms sales. A prolonged suspension of arms sales, even
one that begins for reasons other than assuaging China, will gradually solidify into a precedent. Once
a no-sales precedent is in
place, then even a small sale after ten years of none will become more provocative than it would be
today. China might seriously consider accepting grave risks to uphold a new status quo of zero arms
sales to Taiwan.
KRITIKS
at: afro-pessimism k
 block?
Perm do both
Williams 11(Paul Williams, 2011. Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. Race, Ethnicity and
Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds. Liverpool University
Press. 147-151) 

In asking how the cultural production of the black Atlantic has used the symbol of nuclear weapons to
critique the supposed technological and moral superiority of the Western nations developing them, I
draw upon the ideas posed by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(1993). Seeing the capital generated by slave labour on New World plantations as a necessary
component of the economic motor of modernity, Gilroy argues slavery was ‘internal to western
civilisation’. Yet members of the African diaspora were historically denied full citizenship of the West,
with scientific racism implicated in that refusal. Central to the cultures of the black Atlantic is ‘the idea of
doubleness [...] often argued to be the constitutive force giving rise to black experience in the modern
world’; the peoples of the black Atlantic were viewed as ‘in but not neces- sarily of the modern, western
world’, relegated to a limbo of primitive stasis. For Gilroy, this ambivalence has constituted the black
Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity, pointing out where its promises have gone unfulfilled for
those on the wrong side of the colour line, and where the very terms of modernity’s development, such
as the application of ration- ality and scientific discovery for often irrational and racially encoded ends,
must be transcended.3 This chapter explores the image of nuclear war in the context of the black
Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity. It asks how racial oppres- sion and nuclear weapons have
been considered concurrently by black Atlantic thinkers, writers and performers to emphasize the
structures of racial oppression within Western societies , and the questionable morality and desirability
of the West’s technological progress. Both the construc- tion and existence of nuclear armaments and
New World slavery have been justified through discourses of science and reason . As discussed in chapter
1, scientific rationales and technological developments have historically colluded in the repression of
non-white imperial subjects. Nuclear weapon technology can be placed on a continuum with, in Gilroy’s
words, ‘the racial oppression on which modernity and its antimony of rational, western progress as
excessive barbarity relied’.4 It might seem inappropriate to use a black Atlantic framework to examine
the moral questions asked of nuclear weapons, since one criticism made of the anti- nuclear movement
has been its failure to include ethnic minorities until the 1980s.5 However, as the evidence below
indicates, the peoples of the black Atlantic made enormous contributions to the official and unofficial
face of antinuclear protest during the Cold War. Another reason the threat of nuclear extinction
resonates with the descendants of slaves might be that the racial terror endured by the peoples of the
African diaspora, a terror produced and maintained by their incor- poration into modernity, casts the
diffused fear of the West during the Cold War in a different light. A collective memory of the experience
of moder- nity as mass murder and race terror understands the arrival of nuclear weapons without any
sense of real novelty. Writing in 1992, Mark Sinker suggests the dystopias of black SF are ‘an
acknowledgement that Apoca- lypse already happened’.6 In Literary Aftershocks: American Writers,
Readers, and the Bomb (1994), Albert E. Stone writes, Survival, though an exquisitely threatening
component of twen- tieth-century experience, has, of course, been present in earlier ages and personal
histories. Thus historical formulation can help Third World peoples, African-Americans, and others to
empathize with the disintegrations in Hiroshima by analogizing them to such disasters as colonialism,
slavery and the shipboard horrors of the Middle Passage, and the Civil War.7 Stone’s comment could be
applied to several black Atlantic texts which connect the atomic bombing of Japan to systems of racial
segregation. Yet Stone’s language of empathy based on comparable conditions of desperate survival
seems too broad to be employed critically. It lacks the specificity of context which would allow one to
think through when and why ‘Third World peoples, African-Americans, and others’ would exercise their
emotional solidarity with the victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This chapter tries to pay attention to
the historical and political location of the cultural producers under discussion, outlining the domestic
and interna- tional concerns that activated that empathy. Stone’s formulation fails to countenance
situations when that empathy would not be likely to be extended – by the nationalist resistance
movements in Asia fighting Japanese imperialism in the 1940s, for instance. Given the boundless scope
of the above quotation, when do historical occurrences of ‘survival’ in the face of ‘disasters’ exceed their
capacity to be analogized to the atomic bomb- ings? Faced with this question, Gilroy’s model of the
black Atlantic and germane local conditions of racism provide essential parameters to anchor the
connections made with the 1945 atomic bombings in the temporal situ- ation of the cultural producers
under discussion. American essayist and novelist Norman Mailer drew a similar analogy in ‘The White
Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster’ (1957), his diagnosis of white America’s existential angst.
The hipster is a figure who has chosen to live on the limits of society and behavioural norms. For Mailer,
one of the formational realizations of the hipster is that ‘our collec- tive condition is to live with instant
death by atomic war’, a condition prefigured by the historical experiences of the African American,
‘living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries’, and unable to pass
down a street ‘with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk’.8 Mailer’s analysis
wanders precariously close to mythologizing and romanticizing this existential awareness that the
African American and the white hipster have come to share in nuclear- jeopardized 1950s America;
literary critic Thomas H. Schaub argues that Mailer’s symbolic scheme deploys the kind of sexualized
stereotypes of black masculinity with which racists would readily concur.9 Certainly Mailer elides crucial
differences: fear of nuclear war after 1945 has been based on an always-deferred physical threat,
whereas the peoples of the African diaspora have been continually subjected to actual physical violence,
oppression and its attendant psychological brutalization. Further, nuclear fear has not replaced racial
terror, which continues alongside it. Nonetheless, the correlation Mailer identified resounds in black
Atlantic texts. In The Fire Next Time (1963), James Baldwin articulates the angst of being black in racist
America, an experience that encapsulates the onto- logical insecurity posited by the deferred nuclear
threat: ‘One has been perishing here so long! ’10 Writing in the Chicago Defender in September 1945, W.
E. B. Du Bois’s response to the atomic bomb makes a provoca- tive association with slavery : ‘We have
seen [...] to our amazement and distress, a marriage between science and destruction [...] We have
always thought of science as the emancipator. We see it now as the enslaver of mankind.’11 Baldwin
does not explicitly link African enslavement to enslavement by the Bomb, but overpowering terror
connects them both. It seems appropriate to read Baldwin’s diagnosis of racial politics in The Fire Next
Time in light of the nuclear threat, given that this book was published the year after the Cuban Missile
Crisis and makes reference to nuclear extinction. Baldwin lists how racial terror has been visited upon
the African American: the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and
humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of
life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who
needed his protection, and whom he could not protect.12 Felt at its most profound, the enormity of the
nuclear threat echoes Baldwin’s catalogue : living with the constant possibility of an imminent ,
barbarous death; a threat of non-existence destabilizing one’s very being; the instinct to protect loved
ones mocked. In the atomic age, Baldwin recognizes that this ontological terror has been projected
beyond the colour line: ‘this void, this despair, this torment is felt everywhere in the West, from the
streets of Stockholm to the churches of New Orleans and the side- walks of Harlem’.13 Theorizing and
writing about how black Atlantic thinkers have aligned racial and nuclear terror is a complex and precar-
ious process, as the problematic assumptions in Mailer’s essay attest, but studying this association
seems too illustrative and productive not to make the connection. Both testify to our ongoing
appreciation of the role of fear and atrocity in the making of the modern world.14 Baldwin offers the
hope that terror need not be paralyzing, that one can break through it: ‘If one is continually surviving the
worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring’.15 This
commitment to enduring nuclear and racial terror long enough to effect the social trans- formations
necessary to eliminate them both is a touchstone for hope throughout many of the texts discussed here.
The first section of this chapter examines representations of nuclear weapons which set out the case
that their use is informed by hierarchies of racial difference. This includes representations that
understand the USA’s use of atomic and nuclear bombs in the Pacific as the exportation of domestic
racial attitudes overseas. This leads into a discussion of texts that pose the question, if the technological
zenith of the Western world is the construction of weapons capable of extinguishing human life from
the planet, how can that trajectory of progress, compromised already by complicity with racial
oppression, continue to be valid? If the ‘onward march of Western Reason’16 is overshadowed by
nuclear extinction, where does that leave the proclamations of racial superiority predicated on the
desirability of modernity’s prizes? This chapter then shifts to Langston Hughes and his stories featuring
the character Jesse B. Semple (Simple). Simple is a resident of Harlem, originally from Virginia, and his
inimitable commentary on American society and Harlem life exasperates his wife, Joyce, and his friend,
Boyd, the stories’ narrator. The stories under examination stretch from 1945 to the 1960s, and they
include the anxiety surrounding the Berlin and Cuba crises. Hughes’ representations of atomic fallout
shelters illuminate the practical and moral limitations of America’s Civil Defense measures, and in doing
so, make apparent the inequalities characterizing mid-twentieth- century American society. As an
indication of the stories’ frankness about American inequalities, Ken Cooper states Hughes was called
before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953 and ‘taken to task for his Simple
columns in the Chicago Defender’.17 At this point, I reflect upon Derek Walcott’s essay ‘The Muse of
History’ (1974), which distances black Atlantic communities from nuclear moder- nity. I question
whether this reinforces the ahistorical and antimodern status of the African diaspora – whether seeing
the contemporary political moment in terms of myth entrenches the separateness of peoples. The Black
Atlantic asserts that the cultural production of the African diaspora demands that modernity fulfil its
promises of emancipation and civic coexistence in pursuit of ‘the best possible forms of social and
political existence’.18 This is not a rejection of modernity but a renewed commitment to the equality
and human possibility modernity represents. Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) makes a case –
through literary myth-making – for saving Western civilization from nuclear cataclysm by reconciling
that civilization with the black Atlantic values it has historically abjected. These issues echo through
black Atlantic debates into the Cold War and the space race. How credible is it that the strides in space
exploration made by NASA are ‘giant leaps for mankind’ when space-travel technology was developed
for military advantage? While some black Atlantic texts are sceptical that the population of the world
will benefit from an increasing American grip on outer space, Langston Hughes imagines a future in
which the racism corrupting US society is transcended in an atomic-powered space-age vision. This
chapter concludes by offering the voices of those like Hughes, such as Martin Luther King Jr, who realize
that confronting contemporary racial injustice on an international scale must be connected to nuclear
disarmament programmes.

Hope is good for mental health.

LaRicka R. Wingate et al., 2016. **Associate Professor and Director of Africana Studies, Oklahoma State University (OSU).
**David W. Hollingsworth, currently an Assistant Professor of psychology, Fairfield university; at the time of this publication,
graduate student in clinical psychology, OSU. **Raymond P. Tucker, graduate student in psychology, OSU. **Victoria M.
O’Keefe, currently assistant professor of health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; at the time of this
publication, graduate student in psychology, OSU. “Hope as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Interpersonal Predictors
of Suicide and Suicidal Thinking in African Americans.” Journal of Black Psychology 42(2): 175-90. Emory Libraries.

Discussion The current study investigated the relationships between hope, suicidal ideation, and the
interpersonal risk factors of suicidal desire  (Joiner, 2005) in a sample of African American college
students. Consistent with previous literature, hope was negatively correlated to symptoms
of depression, thwarted belongingness, and perceived burdensomeness .Hope was not significantly
correlated to suicidal ideation in this sample. However,the agency subscale of hope was negatively correlated to
suicidal ideation. To expand on the simple associations between hope and suicidal ideation previously established in the literature, the current study
took a contextualist approach. More specifically, through the use of moderation analyses this study sought to
better understand the circumstances of the established relationship between hope and suicidal ideation
in an African American sample. It was hypothesized that levels of hope would moderate the relationship between
feelings of perceived burdensomeness and thoughts of suicide . As hypothesized, the relationship between
perceived burdensomeness and suicidal ideation was moderated by hope . High levels of hope weakened
the relationship between perceived burdensomeness when statistically controlling for symptoms of
depression. In other words, at high levels of hope, the relationship between perceived burdensomeness and
suicidal ideation was no longer strong and positive as seen with low levels of hope . These results suggest
that those who are naturally more hopeful are buffered against deleterious effects (i.e., suicidal
ideation) when experiencing feelings of perceived burdensomeness . Individuals who feel comfortable
setting goals and are motivated to achieve them may be better equipped to cope with feelings of
perceived burdensomeness. Those who are more hopeful but feel as though they are a burden on others may be better equipped to cope with these
feelings, as they may be able to naturally identify ways they can contribute to the well-being of others and are motivated to achieve these goals. This, in turn,
may protect against thoughts of suicide when experiencing feelings of perceived burdensomeness . Also
consistent with hypotheses, high levels of hope weakened the relationship between thwarted belongingness and
suicidal ideation after controlling for symptoms of depression . Simple slope analyses indicated that the
relationship between thwarted belongingness and suicidal ideation was strong and positive at low levels
of hope but unrelated at high levels of hope . This result suggests that even though extreme feelings of social
disconnection and unreciprocated caring are strongly associated with suicidal thinking, this relationship
may only exist in those who are low in hope . Individuals who naturally engage in goal-directed thinking
and are motivated to identify and use pathways to obtain their goals may feel as though they are more
equipped to find solutions to feeling disconnected from others . Thus, when a hopeful individual feels
thwarted in their belonging, they may be less likely to experience the negative effects of this feeling
because they are better able to work toward connecting with others . Generally, the results of the current
study indicate that African Americans who exhibit higher levels of hope (i.e., engage in goal-directed
thinking, can identify pathways to achieve goals, and are naturally motivated to achieve their goals) may
be buffered against suicidal ideation even in the presence of prominent interpersonal predictors of
suicidal desire (i.e., thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness) . This investigation is timely, as the ITS has
received empirical support as a strong model of understanding suicide in the general population (i.e., Joiner et al., 2009), African Americans (Davidson et al., 2010),
American Indian/Alaska Natives (O’Keefe et al., 2013), elderly populations (Jahn & Cukrowicz, 2011), and veterans (Anestis, Bryan, Cornette, & Joiner,
2009). Although feelings of thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness have been linked to
thoughts of suicide in African Americans in both the current investigation and previous work  (Davidson et al.,
2010; Hollar, 2010; Lamis & Lester, 2012), the current study indicates that this relationship may only detrimentally
affect those African Americans who are less hopeful . Specifically, for less hopeful participants, as their
perceptions of being a burden and not belonging increased, so did their thoughts of suicide .

Libidinal economy isn’t deterministic – conflicting drives create freedom

Johnson 5. 2005, Adrian, PhD from SUNY-Stony Brook, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at
the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic
Institute in Atlanta, “Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive,” p. 340-1

Despite the apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human nature as being perturbed by
an irreducible inner antagonism, there is, surprisingly, what might be described as a liberating aspect to this splitting of the
drives. Since drives are essentially dysfunctional, subjects are able to act otherwise than as would be
dictated by instinctually compelled pursuits of gratification, satisfaction, and pleasure. In fact, subjects are forced
to be free, since, for such beings, the mandate of nature is forever missing . Severed from a strictly biological
master-program and saddled with a conflict-ridden, heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses— impulses mediated by an inconsistent,
unstable web of multiple representations, indicated by Lacan's “barring” of the Symbolic Other—the parlêtre has no choice but to
bump up against the unnatural void of its autonomy . The confrontation with this void is frequently avoided. The true extent of one's autonomy is,
due to its sometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated to the shadows of the unconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought and behavior.

The contradictions arising from the conflicts internal to the libidinal economy mark the precise places
where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chance briefly to flash into effective
existence; such points of breakdown in the deterministic nexus of the drives clear the space for the
sudden emergence of something other than the smooth continuation of the default physical and
sociopsychical “run of things.” Moreover, if the drives were fully functional—and, hence, would not prompt a mobilization of a series of
defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcend this threatening corpo-Real— humans would be animalistic automatons , namely, creatures

of nature. The pain of a malfunctioning, internally conflicted libidinal economy is a discomfort signaling
a capacity to be an autonomous subject. This is a pain even more essential to human autonomy than what Kant identifies as the guilt-inducing burden of
duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring respect. Whereas Kant treats the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to
rational beings, the reverse might (also) be the case: Such freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings. Completely “curing” individuals of this discomfort, even if

As Lacan might phrase it, the

it were possible, would be tantamount to divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their dignity as subjects.

split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a suffering that, were it to be entirely eliminated, would
entail the utter dissolution of subjectivity itself . Humanity is free precisely insofar as its pleasures are far
from perfection, insofar as its enjoyment is never absolute.

Neurological, racial bias is flexible and determined by coalitional habit

forming in the brain---orienting groups around institutional change best
breaks down bias. This is offense because their theory rejects these solutions.
Cikara and Van Bavel 15. (Mina Cikara is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Director of
the Intergroup Neuroscience Lab at Harvard University. Her research examines the conditions
under which groups and individuals are denied social value, agency, and empathy. Jay Van Bavel is
an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Director of the Social Perception and Evaluation
Laboratory at New York University. The Flexibility of Racial Bias: Research suggests that racism is
not hard wired, offering hope on one of America’s enduring problems. June 2, 2015.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-flexibility-of-racial-bias/)
The city of Baltimore was rocked by protests and riots over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man who died in police custody. Tragically, Gray’s death was
only one of a recent in a series of racially-charged, often violent, incidents. On April 4th, Walter Scott was fatally shot by a police officer after fleeing from a routine traffic stop. On
March 8th, Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members were caught on camera gleefully chanting, “There Will Never Be A N***** In SAE.” On March 1st, a homeless Black man was shot in

broad daylight by a Los Angeles police officer. And these are not isolated incidents, of course. Institutional and systemic racism reinforce
discrimination in countless situations, including hiring, sentencing, housing, and even mortgage
lending. It would be easy to see in all this powerful evidence that racism is a permanent fixture in
America’s social fabric and even, perhaps, an inevitable aspect of human nature. Indeed, the mere act of labeling others
according to their age, gender, or race is a reflexive habit of the human mind. Social categories, like race, impact our thinking quickly, often outside of our awareness. Extensive

research has found that these implicit racial biases—negative thoughts and feelings about people
from other races—are automatic, pervasive, and difficult to suppress . Neuroscientists have also explored racial prejudice by
exposing people to images of faces while scanning their brains in fMRI machines. Early studies found that when people viewed faces of

another race, the amount of activity in the amygdala—a small brain structure associated with
experiencing emotions, including fear—was associated with individual differences on implicit
measures of racial bias. This work has led many to conclude that racial biases might be part of a primitive—and possibly hard-wired—neural fear response to racial
out-groups. There is little question that categories such as race, gender, and age play a major role in shaping the biases

and stereotypes that people bring to bear in their judgments of others . However, research has
shown that how people categorize themselves may be just as fundamental to understanding
prejudice as how they categorize others. When people categorize themselves as part of a group, their self-concept shifts from the individual (“I”) to
the collective level (“us”). People form groups rapidly and favor members of their own group even when groups are formed on arbitrary grounds, such as the simple flip of a coin.

These findings highlight the remarkable ease with which humans form coalitions . Recent research
confirms that coalition-based preferences trump race-based preferences. For example, both
Democrats and Republicans favor the resumes of those affiliated with their political party much
more than they favor those who share their race. These coalition-based preferences remain powerful
even in the absence of the animosity present in electoral politics. Our research has shown that the
simple act of placing people on a mixed-race team can diminish their automatic racial bias. In a
series of experiments, White participants who were randomly placed on a mixed-race team—the Tigers or

Lions—showed little evidence of implicit racial bias. Merely belonging to a mixed-race team trigged
positive automatic associations with all of the members of their own group, irrespective of race .
Being a part of one of these seemingly trivial mixed-race groups produced similar effects on brain
activity—the amygdala responded to team membership rather than race. Taken together, these studies
indicate that momentary changes in group membership can override the influence of race on the
way we see, think about, and feel toward people who are different from ourselves . Although these coalition-based
distinctions might be the most basic building block of bias, they say little about the other factors that cause group conflict. Why do some groups get ignored while others get attacked?
Whenever we encounter a new person or group we are motivated to answer two questions as quickly as possible: “is this person a friend or foe?” and “are they capable of enacting
their intentions toward me?” In other words, once we have determined that someone is a member of an out-group, we need to determine what kind? The nature of the relations
between groups—are we cooperative, competitive, or neither?—and their relative status—do you have access to resources?—largely determine the course of intergroup interactions.
Groups that are seen as competitive with one’s interests, and capable of enacting their nasty intentions, are much more likely to be targets of hostility than more benevolent (e.g.,
elderly) or powerless (e.g., homeless) groups. This is one reason why sports rivalries have such psychological potency. For instance, fans of the Boston Red Sox are more likely to feel
pleasure, and exhibit reward-related neural responses, at the misfortunes of the archrival New York Yankees than other baseball teams (and vice versa)—especially in the midst of a

Just as a
tight playoff race. (How much fans take pleasure in the misfortunes of their rivals is also linked to how likely they would be to harm fans from the other team.)

particular person’s group membership can be flexible, so too are the relations between groups.
Groups that have previously had cordial relations may become rivals (and vice versa) . Indeed,
psychological and biological responses to out-group members can change, depending on whether or not that out-
group is perceived as threatening. For example, people exhibit greater pleasure—they smile—in response to the misfortunes of stereotypically competitive groups (e.g., investment
bankers); however, this malicious pleasure is reduced when you provide participants with counter-stereotypic information (e.g., “investment bankers are working with small
companies to help them weather the economic downturn). Competition between “us” and “them” can even distort our judgments of distance, making threatening out-groups seem
much closer than they really are. These distorted perceptions can serve to amplify intergroup discrimination: the more different and distant “they” are, the easier it is to disrespect and

all out-groups are treated the same: some elicit indifference whereas others become
harm them. Thus, not

targets of antipathy. Stereotypically threatening groups are especially likely to be targeted with
violence, but those stereotypes can be tempered with other information. If perceptions of
intergroup relations can be changed, individuals may overcome hostility toward perceived foes and
become more responsive to one another’s grievances. The flexible nature of both group
membership and intergroup relations offers reason to be cautiously optimistic about the potential for
greater cooperation among groups in conflict (be they black versus white or citizens versus police). One strategy is to
bring multiple groups together around a common goal. For example, during the fiercely contested 2008 Democratic presidential
primary process, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters gave more money to strangers who supported the same primary candidate (compared to the rival candidate). Two
months later, after the Democratic National Convention, the supporters of both candidates coalesced around the party nominee—Barack Obama—and this bias disappeared. In fact,

creating a sense of cohesion between two competitive groups can increase empathy for the
merely

suffering of our rivals. These sorts of strategies can help reduce aggression toward hostile out-groups, which
is critical for creating more opportunities for constructive dialogue addressing greater social
injustices. Of course, instilling a sense of common identity and cooperation is extremely difficult in entrenched intergroup conflicts, but when it happens, the benefits are
obvious. Consider how the community leaders in New York City and Ferguson responded differently to protests against police brutality—in NYC political leaders expressed grief and
concern over police brutality and moved quickly to make policy changes in policing, whereas the leaders and police in Ferguson responded with high-tech military vehicles and riot
gear. In the first case, multiple groups came together with a common goal—to increase the safety of everyone in the community; in the latter case, the actions of the police likely
reinforced the “us” and “them” distinctions. Tragically, these types of conflicts continue to roil the country. Understanding the psychology and neuroscience of social identity and
intergroup relations cannot undo the effects of systemic racism and discriminatory practices; however, it can offer insights into the psychological processes responsible for escalating

Even in cases where it isn’t possible to create a common identity

the tension between, for example, civilians and police officers.

among groups in conflict, it may be possible to blur the boundaries between groups . In one recent experiment, we
sorted participants into groups—red versus blue team—competing for a cash prize. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to see a picture of a segregated social network of
all the players, in which red dots clustered together, blue dots clustered together, and the two clusters were separated by white space. The other half of the participants saw an
integrated social network in which the red and blue dots were mixed together in one large cluster. Participants who thought the two teams were interconnected with one another
reported greater empathy for the out-group players compared to those who had seen the segregated network. Thus, reminding people that individuals could be connected to one
another despite being from different groups may be another way to build trust and understanding among them. A mere month before Freddie Gray died in police custody, President
Obama addressed the nation on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma: “We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable,
or that racial division is inherent to America. To deny…progress – our progress – would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better."

The president was saying that we, as a society, have a responsibility to reduce prejudice and discrimination . These recent
findings from psychology and neuroscience indicate that we, as individuals, possess this
capacity. Of course this capacity is not sufficient to usher in racial equality or peace. Even when the level of prejudice against particular out-groups decreases, it does not imply
that the level of institutional discrimination against these or other groups will necessarily improve. Ultimately, only collective action and

institutional evolution can address systemic racism. The science is clear on one thing, though:
individual bias and discrimination are changeable . Race-based prejudice and discrimination, in
particular, are created and reinforced by many social factors, but they are not inevitable
consequences of our biology. Perhaps understanding how coalitional thinking impacts

Antiblackness is not ontological – it’s predicated on a multitude of contingencies.

Policy action’s crucial to combat structures that maintain antiblackness and white
supremacy
Bouie 13 (Jamelle Bouie, Jamelle Bouie is chief political correspondent for Slate Magazine, and a
political analyst for CBS News. He covers campaigns, elections, and national affairs., 3/11/13, “Making
(and Dismantling) Racism,” The American Prospect, http://prospect.org/article/making-and-dismantling-
racism)

Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been exploring the intersection of race and public policy, with
a focus on white supremacy as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of government. This has
led him to two conclusions: First, that anti-black racism as we understand it is a creation of explicit policy
choices—the decision to exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize Africans and their descendants has as
much to do with racial prejudice as does any intrinsic tribalism. And second, that it's possible to
dismantle this prejudice using public policy. Here is Coates in his own words: Last night I had the luxury
of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few
Americans understand is that racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgan’s work and actually see
racism being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result. If we accept that racism is a
creation, then we must then accept that it can be destroyed . And if we accept that it can be destroyed,
we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin
to creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy. Over at his
blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I don’t believe the law created racism any more than it can create
lust or greed or envy or hatred. It can encourage or mitigate these profound aspects of human
psychology – it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow South or Greater Israel. But it can no more
end these things that it can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for the targets of
such hatred to become inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But
a more manageable goal than TNC’s utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making, but I'm
not sure it's relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA,"
as Sullivan writes. And if you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyalty—basically just
prejudice—then Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea that the law can "create racism any more
than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred." But Coates is making a more precise claim: That
there's nothing natural about the black/white divide that has defined American history. White
Europeans had contact with black Africans well before the trans-Atlantic slave trade without the
emergence of an anti-black racism. It took particular choices made by particular people—in this case,
plantation owners in colonial Virginia—to make black skin a stigma, to make the "one drop rule" a
defining feature of American life for more than a hundred years. By enslaving African indentured
servants and allowing their white counterparts a chance for upward mobility, colonial landowners began
the process that would make white supremacy the ideology of America. The position of slavery
generated a stigma that then justified continued enslavement—blacks are lowly, therefore we must
keep them as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't built to reflect racism as much as it was built in
tandem with it. And later policy, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, further entrenched white
supremacist attitudes. Block black people from owning homes, and they're forced to reside in crowded
slums. Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny homeownership to blacks, under the view that
they're unfit for suburbs.

Ontologizing blackness destroys alt solvency and homogenizes black bodies.

David KLINE, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Rice University, 17 [“The
Pragmatics of Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political Ontology,” Critical
Philosophy of Race, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2017, p. 51-69, Accessed Online through Emory Libraries]
Focusing on Wilderson, his absolute prioritization of a political onto-logical structure in which
the law relegates Black being into the singular position of social death happens, I contend, at the
expense of two significant things that I am hesitant to bracket for the sake of prioritizing political
ontology as the sole frame of reference for both analyzing anti-Black racism and thinking resistance
within the racialized world. First, it short-circuits an analysis of power that might reveal not
only how the practices, forms, and apparatuses of anti-Black racism have historically
developed, changed, and reassembled/reterritorialized in relation to state power, national
identity, philosophical discourse, biological discourse, political discourse, and so on—changes that,
despite Wilderson’s claim that focusing on these things only “mystify” the question of ontology
(Wilderson 2010, 10), surely have implications for how racial positioning is both thought and
resisted in differing historical and socio-political contexts. To the extent that Blackness equals a
singular ontological position within a macropolitical structure of antagonism, there is almost no
room to bring in the spectrum and flow of social difference and contingency that no doubt spans
across Black identity as a legitimate issue of analysis and as a site/sight for the possibility of a range
of resisting practices. This bracketing of difference leads him to make some rather sweeping and
opaquely abstract claims. For example, discussing a main character’s abortion in a prison cell in the
1976 film Bush Mama, Wilderson says, “Dorothy will abort her baby at the clinic or on the floor of
her prison cell, not because she fights for—and either wins [End Page 58] or loses—the right to do
so, but because she is one of 35 million accumulated and fungible (owned and exchangeable)
objects living among 230 million subjects—which is to say, her will is always already subsumed by
the will of civil society” (Wilderson 2010, 128, italics mine). What I want to press here is how
Wilderson’s statement, made in the sole frame of a totalizing political ontology overshadowing all
other levels of sociality, flattens out the social difference within, and even the possibility of, a
micropolitical social field of 35 million Black people living in the United States. Such a flattening
reduces the optic of anti-Black racism as well as Black sociality to the frame of political ontology
where Blackness remains stuck in a singular position of abjection. The result is a severe
analytical limitation in terms of the way Blackness (as well as other racial positions) exists
across an extremely wide field of sociality that is comprised of differing intensities of forces
and relational modes between various institutional, political, socio-economic, religious, sexual,
and other social conjunctures. Within Wilderson’s political ontological frame, it seems that these
conjunctures are excluded—or at least bracketed—as having any bearing at all on how anti-Black
power functions and is resisted across highly differentiated contexts. There is only the binary
ontological distinction of Black and Human being; only a macropolitics of sedimented abjection .

First – political ontology is a contradiction, prefer a phenomenological

reading. Radical humanism disproves general dishonor and policies and
aren’t a result of libidinal forces.
Gordon, 18 – (Lewis, Professor @ UConn, and Scott Phillips, runs the HSImpact Podcast, “HSI
Podcast 81 – Dr. Lewis Gordon” HSImpact, 4-24-18, transcribed 1:35-62:28,
https://hsimpact.wordpress.com/2018/04/24/hsi-podcast-81-dr-lewis-gordon/)
What do you think about to use a lose term the structural critiques
SP: So, you kind of started talking about bad faith and then moved into the idea of a license.

that within, let’s say liberalism, there has to be a group that is not human? If they are afropessimists
or settler colonialism theorists, that it’s not possible to expand the notion of white freedom and
privilege to these other groups of people – that they are just fundamentally not recognized as a
human being. Those are bad and circular arguments
Coming from an existentialist tradition, how would you respond to that argument? LG: . The first thing to bear in mind is

they throw in a sneaky premise. Once you put forward the question of “white freedom,” of course,
but if you deal the question of freedom, the question of freedom doesn’t have to be white. The
other part that’s strange about their arguments is that they’re dealing with concepts that are what
we call “bad structuralism.” Bad structuralism is when you treat the social world as
Let me explain what that is.

ontologically complete Its as if the social world is all there is and there’s nothing outside of it. The
.

problem with that sort of argument is it fails to take into account that its humans who built a
social world, and so if you’re the person who builds social worlds, you can by definition tear
it down they don’t understand what liberalism is. Liberalism is a particular form
, with a toenail outside of it. The other part of it is

of conception of the human being that emerged, though a particular kind of political philosophy that
questions the ability to have objectivity outside of the self. In other words, it collapses into form of
subjectivity that prioritizes the category for opinion . That’s why in liberalism there is this obsession with individuals. If you look at the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes for
example, he started from the premise of one atomistic individual in motion colliding with other atomistic individuals in motion which is why he made an argument for there to be a supervening stronger force to keep them form collisions, or what he called war. Most forms of
liberalism have some form of appeal like that. The problem with that is that most theories of liberalism doesn’t have a conception of freedom, and that is because most liberalisms confuse freedom with liberty and the crucial distinction between liberty an freedom is liberty is

Freedom is about the responsibility one can take for one’s liberties,
about the absence of a constraint. Freedom, however, requires something more.

and so within the framework of freedom, freedom tends to have ethical implications, it tends to
have questions of accountability, and meaning – all sorts of categories that need not be
encapsulated by liberty. So, the problem with those accounts is they are based on profound
misunderstandings, in some cases even at the level of incompetence of the concepts being
articulated . If we think to the question of what a structure is, all structures are systems that are governed by rules that are produced by human beings, and once we understand that we begin to understand the paradox of structures because it’s not only that

the human being is not a thing like a bowling ball or a

they are created by human beings, but also that in creating them the human being is also being created, in other words
glass of water that has a causal effect on other things, it’s in the very process of producing meaning
that conceptions of the human being are born. This means that human beings are an always
opening and evolving understanding of relationships, and that is also why when we talk about
many of these issues we may notice that different kinds of human beings may emerge as things
change. A great example the meaning of what it is to be African has shifted to the
relating to the racial category black or afro is that

rules and relationships we have about not only the continent of Africa and the peoples there but the
very idea because in the ancient African formulations of what Africa was particularly in the eastern and north eastern parts of the continent from roughly Ethiopia up to modern day Egypt, the word Africa emerges from a very specific language Metu neter,

if one
which simply means originating from the womb, because in that world the origins of all life was from the south, in other words, the southern African area which interestingly enough matches onto a lot of continental anthropology. But

transforms Africa into something derogatory, then its meaning is going to shift as well . Sorry for the buzz my neighbors are

even if we get to the question of black, there is no reason for black to be intrinsically
mowing their lawn. And so

negative There’s many parts of the world where black is something very positive.
. Its just something I don’t understand.

I There are many expressions of the word black that are good from financial expressions
t’s not ugly, it’s not wrong.

of “being in the black” we could talk about black beauty, the beauty of the night, But if you have whatever.

a society that’s invested in negating blackness they impose upon blackness a negative meaning. And

if we come back to this idea of systems what we begin to understand is that there’s no such
so,

thing as being able to affect the world without in that effect, that act of affecting it, the effect
is being affected – in short everything human beings do that has an impact on the world is
having an effect on human beings and transforming us. SP: So does this idea seem to imply that antiblack racism is only a conscious choice. I guess I’m thinking more
about theories of implicit bias, or in the context of afropessimist they might raise an argument about a libidinal investment. So, does this existentialist frame emphasize that there is an individual responsibility and choice element Well this is where we get to false dilemmas.

The simple answer is that some people choose deliberately to be racist while others don’t. One thing to bear in mind about bad faith is that bad faith is not
necessarily about a moral prescription. Like there are instances where it can be good to be in bad faith such as if one is afraid, to convince yourself you have superpowers or in situations where one is being tortured, one may want to convince themselves that what’s being

with the libidinal stuff that’s in psychoanalysis

done to their body isn’t being done to their personhood – but in other words we create this false dichotomy of a separated self from the body. Now

there are varieties of ways in which we live in a society and have impositions placed
– now the thing to bear in mind is

upon us and many of us respond to impositions in different ways – some of us resist them, some of us are afraid of resisting them and rationalize our incapacity

Those aren’t necessarily libidinal forces, they are just different ways people come with
to resist them.

reality. Now the question about choices you see some groups do willfully lie. For example, if you look at a history of something like the national review, the right wing magazine, they were really lying – these were individuals who were committed to the idea that
they will use any argument to defend the white race, and for that reason a fundamental deterrent to it was blacks. Now under that framework, they would espouse certain things as if they were rational or reasonable arguments, but the truth is if you look at the history of that
magazine, and there’s a fellow named Steve Dertzel who did a wonderful dissertation on this, they would argue completely opposite things. And with these people who argue opposite things, that shows it’s not really about the evidence of the arguments it’s about the position

. A lot of people confuse argumentation with positions. Positions is where people

they want to hold. And that’s the crucial part

decide they are going to stay in a particular place no matter of the evidence that’s brought forth. And

positions and positions, those are connected to a variety of other things they could be anything
dis

from clear. They could be based in ignorance, or they can just be based in a willful desire to
manipulate the problem with some of these accounts is they are reductionist, they don’t
. In other words,

really look at the particular cases in full, and they want to have a one-size-fits-all model
when it comes to discussing human phenomena the and what every human being learns from childhood onward is that one of the fundamental things about

human world is that the world is saturated with contingency. SP: In that context then, about talking about contingency. A lot of the arguments that students have

I really hate that notion of political ontology it’s a

a hard time dealing with is what you mentioned before as the move to ontologize or talk about political ontology… LG: – contradiction of

part of the commodification of theory and intelligence

terms – it’s one of the stupidest notions that’s being pushed out there. It’s . People could always cobble together things that

There is no political ontology. For something to

don’t work but they put them together because they sound intelligent and sexy but in truth they’re nonsense. And let me explain why.

be ontological it has to be absolutely complete. The problem with political is that political by
definition is that which comes out of human action Human action is fundamentally incomplete. So, .

the notion that there could be a political ontology is a contradiction of terms What one can have in .

a human action is a project – the aim – of trying to create an ontology . All an ontology means is being, so in other words here’s an ontological statement:

if a pig drops in a river and there’s some

“there is no more nor less reality than there is at any given moment of time.” That’s an ontological statement and its tautologically true, but the question

starving human around. To make the claim that the humans will eat the pig and it’s just based on
human nature and ontology just won’t work. Some might, but some wont – and some wont for the
most bizarre reasons this
– some may not because they are kosher; some may not because they are vegans; some might not because they’d rather die than kill a living thing; and then some might because they just don’t care. And

is where existentialism comes in in a very important way. Existentialism rejects the notion of
human nature because nature, human nature, is an ontological imposition on the human being .
Political ontology is just nonsense human negotiation of power is fluid . What the political is about is also the human negotiation of power, and .

But it sounds like something theoretically sound because it has the word ontology in it. there’s a But

lot of nonsense people do in theory . that I could list off For instance, people think they’re doing political analysis if they put the phrase “politics of” before any noun. But the truth of the matter is that some things
aren’t political. You could have the politics of clams, the politics of earwax, the politics of dirt. Now if you’re taking about the political negotiation in a social system of how you manage dirt or organizations of how people relate to it though rituals or as resources, that is
political, but a lot of these expressions are used when they are ultimately meaningless or ambiguous or unclear.

US heg is key to peace

Zalmay Khalilzad 16, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, counselor at the CSIS, 3/23/16, “4
Lessons about America's Role in the World,” http://nationalinterest.org/feature/4-lessons-about-
americas-role-the-world-15574?page=show

Ultimately, however, we concluded that the United States has a strong interest in precluding the
emergence of another bipolar world—as in the Cold War—or a world of many great powers, as existed
before the two world wars. Multipolarity led to two world wars and bipolarity resulted in a protracted
worldwide struggle with the risk of nuclear annihilation. To avoid a return such circumstances,
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney ultimately agreed that our objective must be to prevent a hostile
power to dominate a “critical region,” which would give it the resources, industrial capabilities and
population to pose a global challenge. This insight has guided U.S. defense policy throughout the post–
Cold War era.

Giving major powers the green light to establish spheres of influence would produce a multipolar world
and risk the return of war between the major powers. Without a stabilizing U.S. presence in the Persian
Gulf and U.S. relationships with Jordan and the Gulf States, Iran could shut down oil shipments in its
supposed sphere of influence. A similar scenario in fact played out during the 1987 “tanker war” of the
Iran-Iraq war, which eventually escalated into a direct military conflict between the United States and
Iran. Iran’s nuclear program makes these scenarios even more dangerous.

The United States can manage the rise and resurgence of great powers like China, Russia and Iran at an
acceptable cost without ceding entire spheres of influence. The key is to focus on normalizing the
geopolitics of the Middle East, Europe and the Asia-Pacific, which the United States can do by
strengthening its transatlantic and transpacific alliances and adapting them to the new, dangerous
circumstances on the horizon. The United States should promote a balance of power in key regions
while seeking opportunities to reconcile differences among major actors.

Realism is true and inevitable

de Araujo 14 [Marcelo, professor for Ethics at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, “Moral
Enhancement and Political Realism,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 24(2): 29-43]

Some moral enhancement theorists argue that a society of morally enhanced individuals would be in a
better position to cope with important problems that humankind is likely to face in the future such as, for instance, the
threats posed by climate change, grand scale terrorist attacks, or the risk of catastrophic wars. The assumption here is quite

simple: our inability to cope successfully with these problems stems mainly from a sort of deficit in human

beings’ moral motivation. If human beings were morally better – if we had enhanced moral dispositions – there would be
fewer wars, less terrorism, and more willingness to save our environment . Although simple and attractive, this
assumption is, as I intend to show, false. At the root of threats to the survival of humankind in the future is not a
deficit in our moral dispositions, but the endurance of an old political arrangement that prevents the
pursuit of shared goals on a collective basis. The political arrangement I have in mind here is the international system of states. In my analysis of the
political implications of moral enhancement, I intend to concentrate my attention only on the supposition that we could avoid major wars in the future by making individuals morally better. I
do not intend to discuss the threats posed by climate change, or by terrorism, although some human enhancement theorists also seek to cover these topics. I will explain, in the course of my
analysis, a conceptual distinction between “human nature realism” and “structural realism,” well-known in the field of international relations theory. Thomas Douglas seems to have been
among the first to explore the idea of “moral enhancement” as a new form of human enhancement. He certainly helped to kick off the current phase of the debate. In a paper published in
2008, Douglas suggests that in the “future people might use biomedical technology to morally enhance themselves.” Douglas characterizes moral enhancement in terms of the acquisition of
“morally better motives” (Douglas 2008, 229). Mark Walker, in a paper published in 2009, suggests a similar idea. He characterizes moral enhancement in terms of improved moral dispositions
or “genetic virtues”: The Genetic Virtue Program (GVP) is a proposal for influencing our moral nature through biology, that is, it is an alternate yet complementary means by which ethics and
ethicists might contribute to the task of making our lives and world a better place. The basic idea is simple enough: genes influence human behavior, so altering the genes of individuals may
alter the influence genes exert on behavior. (Walker 2009, 27–28) Walker does not argue in favor of any specific moral theory, such as, for instance, virtue ethics. Whether one endorses a
deontological or a utilitarian approach to ethics, he argues, the concept of virtue is relevant to the extent that virtues motivate us either to do the right thing or to maximize the good (Walker
2009, 35). Moral enhancement theory, however, does not reduce the ethical debate to the problem of moral dispositions. Morality also concerns, to a large extent, questions about reasons for
action. And moral enhancement, most certainly, will not improve our moral beliefs; neither could it be used to settle moral disagreements. This seems to have led some authors to criticize the
moral enhancement idea on the ground that it neglects the cognitive side of our moral behavior. Robert Sparrow, for instance, argues that, from a Kantian point of view, moral enhancement
would have to provide us with better moral beliefs rather than enhanced moral motivation (Sparrow 2014, 25; see also Agar 2010, 74). Yet, it seems to me that this objection misses the point

Many people, across different countries, already share moral beliefs relating , for instance, to
of the moral enhancement idea.

the wrongness of harming or killing other people arbitrarily, or to the moral requirement to help people in need. They may share moral
beliefs while not sharing the same reasons for these beliefs, or perhaps even not being able to articulate the beliefs in the conceptual framework of a moral theory (Blackford 2010, 83). But
although they share some moral beliefs, in some circumstances they may lack the appropriate motivation to act accordingly. Moral enhancement, thus, aims at improving moral motivation,
and leaves open the question as to how to improve our moral judgments. In a recent paper, published in The Journal of Medical Ethics, neuroscientist Molly Crockett reports the state of the art
in the still very embryonic field of moral enhancement. She points out, for example, that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) citalopram seems to increase harm aversion. There is,
moreover, some evidence that this substance may be effective in the treatment of specific types of aggressive behavior. Like Douglas, Crockett emphasizes that moral enhancement should aim
at individuals’ moral motives (Crockett 2014; see also Spence 2008; Terbeck et al. 2013). Another substance that is frequently mentioned in the moral enhancement literature is oxytocin. Some

studies suggest that willingness to cooperate with other people ,and to trust unknown prospective cooperators, may be
enhanced by an increase in the levels of oxytoci n in the organism (Zak 2008, 2011; Zak and Kugler 2011; Persson and Savulescu 2012, 118–119).
Oxytocin has also been reported to be “associated with the subjective experience of empathy” (Zak 2011, 55; Zak and Kugler 2011, 144). The question I would like to examine now concerns the
supposition that moral enhancement – comprehended in these terms and assuming for the sake of argument that, some day, it might become effective and safe – may also help us in coping

The assumption that there is a relationship between, on the one hand, threats to the
with the threat of devastating wars in the future.

survival of humankind and, on the other, a sort of “deficit” in our moral dispositions is c learly made by some moral
enhancements theorists. Douglas, for instance, argues that “according to many plausible theories, some of the world’s most important problems — such as developing
world poverty, climate change and war — can be attributed to these moral deficits” (2008, 230). Walker, in a similar vein, writes about the possibility of “using biotechnology to alter our
biological natures in an effort to reduce evil in the world” (2009, 29). And Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson go as far as to defend the “the need for moral enhancement” of humankind in a
series of articles, and in a book published in 2012. One of the reasons Savulescu and Persson advance for the moral enhancement of humankind is that our moral dispositions seem to have
remained basically unchanged over the last millennia (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 2). These dispositions have proved thus far quite useful for the survival of human beings as a species. They
have enabled us to cooperate with each other in the collective production of things such as food, shelter, tools, and farming. They have also played a crucial role in the creation and refinement
of a variety of human institutions such as settlements, villages, and laws. Although the possibility of free-riding has never been fully eradicated, the benefits provided by cooperation have
largely exceeded the disadvantages of our having to deal with occasional uncooperative or untrustworthy individuals (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 39). The problem, however, is that the same
dispositions that have enabled human beings in the past to engage in the collective production of so many artifacts and institutions now seem powerless in the face of the human capacity to
destroy other human beings on a grand scale, or perhaps even to annihilate the entire human species. There is, according to Savulescu and Persson, a “mismatch” between our cognitive
faculties and our evolved moral attitudes: “[…] as we have repeatedly stressed, owing to the progress of science, the range of our powers of action has widely outgrown the range of our
spontaneous moral attitudes, and created a dangerous mismatch” (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 103; see also Persson and Savulescu 2010, 660; Persson and Savulescu 2011b; DeGrazie 2012,
2; Rakić 2014, 2). This worry about the mismatch between, on the one hand, the modern technological capacity to destroy and, on the other, our limited moral commitments is not new. The
political philosopher Hans Morgenthau, best known for his defense of political realism, called attention to the same problem nearly fifty years ago. In the wake of the first successful tests with
thermonuclear bombs, conducted by the USA and the former Soviet Union, Morgenthau referred to the “contrast” between the technological progress of our age and our feeble moral
attitudes as one of the most disturbing dilemmas of our time: The first dilemma consists in the contrast between the technological unification of the world and the parochial moral
commitments and political institutions of the age. Moral commitments and political institutions, dating from an age which modern technology has left behind, have not kept pace with
technological achievements and, hence, are incapable of controlling their destructive potentialities. (Morgenthau 1962, 174) Moral enhancement theorists and political realists like
Morgenthau, therefore, share the thesis that our natural moral dispositions are not strong enough to prevent human beings from endangering their own existence as a species. But they differ
as to the best way out of this quandary: moral enhancement theorists argue for the re-engineering of our moral dispositions, whereas Morgenthau accepted the immutability of human nature
and argued, instead, for the re-engineering of world politics. Both positions, as I intend to show, are wrong in assuming that the “dilemma” results from the weakness of our spontaneous

both positions are correct in recognizing

moral dispositions in the face of the unprecedented technological achievements of our time. On the other hand,

the real possibility of global catastrophes resulting from the malevolent use of, for instance,
biotechnology or nuclear capabilities. The supposition that individuals’ unwillingness to cooperate with each other, even when they would be better-off by
choosing to cooperate, results from a sort of deficit of dispositions such as altruism, empathy, and benevolence has been at the core of some important political theories. This idea is an
important assumption in the works of early modern political realists such as Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. It was also later endorsed by some well-known authors writing about the origins
of war in the first half of the twentieth century. It was then believed, as Sigmund Freud suggested in a text from 1932, that the main cause of wars is a human tendency to “hatred and

destruction” (in German: ein Trieb zum Hassen und Vernichtung). Freud went as far as to suggest that human beings have an ingrained
“inclination” to “aggression” and “destruction” (Aggressionstrieb, Aggressionsneigung, and Destruktionstrieb), and that this inclination has a “good
biological basis” (biologisch wohl begründet) (Freud 1999, 20–24; see also Freud 1950; Forbes 1984; Pick 1993, 211–227; Medoff 2009). The attempt to employ Freud’s

conception of human nature in understanding international relations has recently been resumed , for instance
by Kurt Jacobsen in a paper entitled “Why Freud Matters: Psychoanalysis and International Relations Revisited,” published in 2013. Morgenthau himself was deeply influenced by Freud’s
speculations on the origins of war.1 Early in the 1930s, Morgenthau wrote an essay called “On the Origin of the Political from the Nature of Human Beings” (Über die Herkunft des Politischen
aus dem Wesen des Menschen), which contains several references to Freud’s theory about the human propensity to aggression.2 Morgenthau’s most influential book, Politics among Nations:
The Struggle for Power and Peace, first published in 1948 and then successively revised and edited, is still considered a landmark work in the tradition of political realism. According to
Morgenthau, politics is governed by laws that have their origin in human nature: “Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their
roots in human nature” (Morgenthau 2006, 4). Just like human enhancement theorists, Morgenthau also takes for granted that human nature has not changed over recent millennia: “Human
nature, in which the laws of politics have their roots, has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India, and Greece endeavored to discover these laws” (Morgenthau 2006, 4).
And since, for Morgenthau, human nature prompts human beings to act selfishly, rather than cooperatively, political leaders will sometimes favor conflict over cooperation, unless some
superior power compels them to act otherwise. Now, this is exactly what happens in the domain of international relations. For in the international sphere there is not a supranational
institution with the real power to prevent states from pursuing means of self-defense. The acquisition of means of self-defense, however, is frequently perceived by other states as a threat to
their own security. This leads to the security dilemma and the possibility of war. As Morgenthau put the problem in an article published in 1967: “The actions of states are determined not by
moral principles and legal commitments but by considerations of interest and power” (1967, 3). Because Morgenthau and early modern political philosophers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes
defended political realism on the grounds provided by a specific conception human nature, their version of political realism has been frequently called “human nature realism.” The literature
on human nature realism has become quite extensive (Speer 1968; Booth 1991; Freyberg-Inan 2003; Kaufman 2006; Molloy 2006, 82–85; Craig 2007; Scheuerman 2007, 2010, 2012; Schuett
2007; Neascu 2009; Behr 2010, 210–225; Brown 2011; Jütersonke 2012). It is not my intention here to present a fully-fledged account of the tradition of human nature realism, but rather to
emphasize the extent to which some moral enhancement theorists, in their description of some of the gloomy scenarios humankind is likely to face in the future, implicitly endorse this kind of
political realism. Indeed, like human nature realists, moral enhancement theorists assume that human nature has not changed over the last millennia, and that violence and lack of cooperation
in the international sphere result chiefly from human nature’s limited inclination to pursue morally desirable goals. One may, of course, criticize the human enhancement project by rejecting

Sparrow
the assumption that conflict and violence in the international domain should be explained by means of a theory about human nature. In a reply to Savulescu and Persson,

correctly argues that “structural issues,” rather than human nature, constitute the main factor
underlying political conflicts (Sparrow 2014, 29). But he does not explain what exactly these “structural issues” are, as I intend to do later. Sparrow is right in rejecting
the human nature theory underlying the human enhancement project. But this underlying assumption, in my view, is not trivially false or simply “ludicrous,” as he suggests. Human nature
realism has been implicitly or explicitly endorsed by leading political philosophers ever since Thucydides speculated on the origins of war in antiquity (Freyberg-Inan 2003, 23–36). True, it
might be objected that “human nature realism,” as it was defended by Morgenthau and earlier political philosophers, relied upon a metaphysical or psychoanalytical conception of human
nature, a conception that, actually, did not have the support of any serious scientific investigation (Smith 1983, 167). Yet, over the last few years there has been much empirical research in
fields such as developmental psychology and evolutionary biology that apparently gives some support to the realist claim. Some of these studies suggest that an inclination to aggression and
conflict has its origins in our evolutionary history. This idea, then, has recently led some authors to resume “human nature realism” on new foundations, devoid of the metaphysical
assumptions of the early realists, and entirely grounded in empirical research. Indeed, some recent works in the field of international relations theory already seek to call attention to
evolutionary biology as a possible new start for political realism. This point is clearly made, for instance, by Bradley Thayer, who published in 2004 a book called Darwin and International
Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict. And in a paper published in 2000, he affirms the following: Evolutionary theory provides a stronger foundation for realism
because it is based on science, not on theology or metaphysics. I use the theory to explain two human traits: egoism and domination. I submit that the egoistic and dominating behavior of
individuals, which is commonly described as “realist,” is a product of the evolutionary process. I focus on these two traits because they are critical components of any realist argument in
explaining international politics. (Thayer 2000, 125; see also Thayer 2004) Thayer basically argues that a tendency to egoism and domination stems from human evolutionary history. The
predominance of conflict and competition in the domain of international politics, he argues, is a reflex of dispositions that can now be proved to be part of our evolved human nature in a way
that Morgenthau and other earlier political philosophers could not have established in their own time. Now, what some moral enhancement theorists propose is a direct intervention in our
“evolved limited moral psychology” as a means to make us “fit” to cope with some possible devastating consequences from the predominance of conflict and competition in the domain of
international politics (Persson and Savulescu 2010, 664). Moral enhancement theorists comprehend the nature of war and conflicts, especially those conflicts that humankind is likely to face in
the future, as the result of human beings’ limited moral motivations. Compared to supporters of human nature realism, however, moral enhancement theorists are less skeptical about the
prospect of our taming human beings’ proclivity to do evil. For our knowledge in fields such as neurology and pharmacology does already enable us to enhance people’s performance in a

the question, of course, is whether

variety of activities, and there seems to be no reason to assume it will not enable us to enhance people morally in the future. But

moral enhancement will also improve the prospect of our coping successfully with some major threats to the survival
of humankind, as Savulescu and Persson propose, or to reduce evil in the world, as proposed by Walker. V. The point to which I would next like to call
attention is that “human nature realism” – which is implicitly presupposed by some moral enhancement theorists – has been much criticized over the last decades within the tradition of
political realism itself. “Structural realism,” unlike “human nature realism,” does not seek to derive a theory about conflicts and violence in the context of international relations from a theory
of the moral shortcomings of human nature. Structural realism was originally proposed by Kenneth Waltz in Man, the State and War, published in 1959, and then later in another book called
Theory of International Politics, published in 1979. In both works, Waltz seeks to avoid committing himself to any specific conception of human nature (Waltz 2001, x–xi). Waltz’s thesis is that
the thrust of the political realism doctrine can be retained without our having to commit ourselves to any theory about the shortcomings of human nature. What is relevant for our
understanding of international politics is, instead, our understanding of the “structure” of the international system of states (Waltz 1986). John Mearsheimer, too, is an important
contemporary advocate of political realism. Although he seeks to distance himself from some ideas defended by Waltz, he also rejects human nature realism and, like Waltz, refers to himself

as a supporter of “structural realism” (Mearsheimer 2001, 20). One of the basic tenets of political realism (whether “human nature realism” or “structural realism”) is, first, that the states
are the main, if not the only, relevant actors in the context of international relations; and second, that states compete for power in the
international arena. Moral considerations in international affairs, according to realists, are secondary when set against the state’s

primary goal, namely its own security and survival. But while human nature realists such as Morgenthau explain the struggle for power as a result of
human beings’ natural inclinations, structural realists like Waltz and Mearsheimer argue that conflicts in the international arena do not stem from human nature, but from the very “structure”

it is this structure that compels individuals to act

of the international system of states (Mearsheimer 2001, 18). According to Waltz and Mearsheimer,

as they do in the domain of international affairs. And one distinguishing feature of the international system of states is its “anarchical
structure,” i.e. the lack of a central government analogous to the central governments that exist in the context of domestic politics. It means that each
individual state is responsible for its own integrity and survival . In the absence of a superior authority , over
and above the power of each sovereign state, political leaders often feel compelled to favor security over morality, even if, all other things
being considered, they would naturally be more inclined to trust and to cooperate with political leaders of other states. On the other hand, when political leaders do trust and cooperate with
other states, it is not necessarily their benevolent nature that motivates them to be cooperative and trustworthy, but, again, it is the structure of the system of states that compels them. The
concept of human nature, as we can see, does not play a decisive role here. Because Waltz and Mearsheimer depart from “human nature realism,” their version of political realism has also

even if human beings turn out to become morally enhanced in the future,
sometimes been called “neo-realism” (Booth 1991, 533). Thus,

humankind may still have to face the same scary scenarios described by some moral enhancement theorists. This is likely to
happen if, indeed, human beings remain compelled to cooperate within the present structure of the system of states. Consider, for
instance, the incident with a Norwegian weather rocket in January 1995. Russian radars detected a missile that was initially suspected of being on its way to reach Moscow in five minutes. All
levels of Russian military defense were immediately put on alert for a possible imminent attack and massive retaliation. It is reported that for the first time in history a Russian president had
before him, ready to be used, the “nuclear briefcase” from which the permission to launch nuclear weapons is issued. And that happened when the Cold War was already supposed to be over!
In the event, it was realized that the rocket was leaving Russian territory and Boris Yeltsin did not have to enter the history books as the man who started the third world war by mistake

(Cirincione 2008, 382).3 But under the crushing pressure of having to decide in such a short time, and on the basis of
unreliable information, whether or not to retaliate, even a morally enhanced Yeltsin might have given
orders to launch a devastating nuclear response – and that in spite of strong moral dispositions to the
contrary. Writing for The Guardian on the basis of recently declassified documents, Rupert Myers reports further incidents similar to the one of 1995. He suggests that as more states
strive to acquire nuclear capability, the danger of a major nuclear accident is likely to increase (Myers 2014). What has to be changed , therefore, is not human

moral dispositions, but the very structure of the political international system of states within which we currently live.
As far as major threats to the survival of humankind are concerned, moral enhancement might play an important role in the future only to the extent that it will help humankind to change the

moral enhancement may possibly have desirable results in some areas of human cooperation that do not badly threaten our security –
structure of the system of states. While

such as donating food, medicine, and money to poorer countries – it will not motivate political leaders to dismantle their nuclear

weapons. Neither will it deter other political leaders from pursuing nuclear capability, at any rate not as
long as the structure of international politics compels them to see prospective cooperators in the
present as possible enemies in the future. The idea of a “structure” should not be understood here in metaphysical terms, as though it mysteriously
existed in a transcendent world and had the magical power of determining leaders’ decisions in this world. The word “structure” denotes merely a political arrangement in which there are no

in the absence of the kind of security that law-enforcing institutions have the
powerful law-enforcing institutions. And

force to create, political leaders will often fail to cooperate, and occasionally engage in conflicts and wars, in those areas
that are critical to their security and survival. Given the structure of international politics and the basic goal of survival, this is likely to continue
to happen, even if, in the future, political leaders become less egoistic and power-seeking through moral enhancement. On the other
hand, since the structure of the international system of states is itself another human institution, there is no reason to suppose that it cannot ever be changed. If people become morally
enhanced in the future they may possibly feel more strongly motivated to change the structure of the system of states, or perhaps even feel inclined to abolish it altogether. In my view,

addressing major threats to the survival of humankind in the future by means of bioengineering is
however,

unlikely to yield the expected results, so long as moral enhancement is pursued within the present
framework of the international system of states.

Criticizing Western “imperialism” obscures more insidious practices by regional powers

Shaw, 2 (Martin Shaw, professor of international relations at University of Sussex, Uses and Abuses of
Anti-Imperialism in the Global Era, 4-7-2002, http://www.martinshaw.org/empire.htm AFM)

It is fashionable in some circles, among which we must clearly include the organizers of this conference,
to argue that the global era is seeing 'a new imperialism' - that can be blamed for the problem of 'failed
states' (probably among many others). Different contributors to this strand of thought name this
imperialism in different ways, but novelty is clearly a critical issue. The logic of using the term
imperialism is actually to establish continuity between contemporary forms of Western world power
and older forms first so named by Marxist and other theorists a century ago. The last thing that critics of
a new imperialism wish to allow is that Western power has changed sufficiently to invalidate the very
application of this critical concept. 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 'global-Western
state conglomerate' (Shaw 2000). I argue that 'global' 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 'new imperialism' 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 world's people, when for many of them there are far more real and dangerous enemies
closer to home. I shall return to these political issues at the end of this paper.
 2ac material change good
Political progress happens through institutions---recognizing that doesn’t produce
complacency---building politics is far more valuable than theorizing about anti-
institutional black agency
Reed 15 – professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania
(Adolph, “The James Brown Theory of Black Liberation,” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/adolph-
reed-black-liberation-django-lincoln-selma-glory/)

What approach to political action can follow from the contention that the Thirteenth Amendment was
empty window dressing and that black slaves’ emancipation was like James Brown’s backward, Nixonian ideal of self-help?∂ The
perspective that shrivels the scope of black political concern to expressing racial “agency” similarly
diminishes the significance of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the US Supreme Court’s 1944
Smith v. Allwright decision that outlawed the infamous “white primary” (and exponentially increased
black voting in the South), the 1954 Brown decision, 1964 Civil Rights law, and 1965 Voting Rights Act
as if all were in some twisted way racially inauthentic because acknowledging their significance as
moments in the struggle for social justice detracts from the James Brown Theory of Black Liberation.∂ That
ideological commitment is what impelled Ava DuVernay to make the seemingly gratuitous move of falsifying Martin Luther King Jr’s relationship
with the Johnson administration around the Selma campaign: “I wasn’t interested in making a white savior movie,” she replied to critics, “I was
interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma.”∂ Of course, she doesn’t do the latter either, but her commitment to not
“making a white savior movie” also led her to misconstrue the tension between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma, which stemmed precisely from the SNCC activists’ objection that King and his organization
maintained secret, backdoor dealings with the Johnson administration.∂ The
psychobabbling bromides that elevate
recognition and celebration of black agency rest on an ideological perspective that in practical terms
rejects effective black political action in favor of expressive display . It is the worldview of an element
of the contemporary black professional stratum anchored in the academy , blogosphere, and the world of mass
media chat whose standing in public life is bound up with establishing a professional authority in
speaking for the race. This is the occupational niche of the so-called black public intellectuals.∂ The
torrent of faddish chattering-class blather and trivial debate sparked by Michael Eric Dyson’s recent attack on Cornel West in
the New Republic illustrates the utter fatuity of this domain, as if there were any reason to care about a
squabble between two freelance Racial Voices with no constituency or links to radical institutions between them.∂
In an illustration of what this game is all about, the Nation, sensing space for competing brands, projected some Alternative Black Voices into
this circus of spurious racial representation in a piece entitled “6 Scholars Who Are ‘Reimagining Black Politics.’ ”∂ Twenty years practically to
the week before publication of Dyson’s essay, I took stock of what was then the newly confected category of the Black
Public Intellectual and noted that the notion’s definitive irony was that its avatars were quite specifically not organically
rooted in any dynamic political activity and in fact emerged only after opportunities for real connection
to political movements had disappeared . Nor were the “public intellectuals” connected to any particular strain of scholarship or
criticism.∂ Rather, their status was no more than a posture and a brand. By the early 2000s, it was
possible to see young people entering doctoral programs with their sights on the academy as a venue
for pursuing careers as public intellectuals — i.e. among the free-floating racial commentariat. And that was before the explosion of
the blogosphere and Twitterverse, which have exponentially increased both avenues for realizing such aspirations and the numbers of people
pursuing them.∂ But the politics enacted in those venues is by and large an ersatz politics, and the
controversies that sustain them are by and large ephemeral, vacant bullshit — the “feud” between
Iggy Azalea and Azealia Banks, whether black people were dissed because Selma wasn’t nominated
for/didn’t win enough Oscars, and so on.∂ In the context of this sort of non-stop idiotic bread and circuses — and this
 it is good to reflect
may be an apt moment to remind that the blogosphere is open to any fool with a computer and Internet access —
on one of the crucial moments in American history when the linking of social and political forces
presented a clear choice between egalitarian and inegalitarian interests, and masses of black people
joined with others to strike a consequential blow for social justice and to wipe the scourge of slavery
from the United States.∂ No, it wasn’t a final victory over inequality — it didn’t usher in a utopian
order, and the greatest promises opened by the triumph were unfulfilled or largely undone. But it was one of the
most important victories that egalitarian forces have won, along with those of the twentieth-century
labor, civil rights, and women’s movements, and it is worth reflecting on it and the ways it changed
the country for the better .∂ That struggle against the slaveholders’ insurrection, along with those latter movements, also
underscores the fact that the
path to winning the kind of just world to which a left should aspire requires
building a politics that seeks, as the old saying goes, to unite the many to defeat the few. Any other focus is
either unserious or retrograde.
 at: simulation k
Simulated legal debates are crucial for social transformation---teaching legal precision
is net-better for eliminating oppression even if one-shot legal solutions don’t work the
first time
Karl Klare, George J. & Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished University Professor, Northeastern
University School of Law, “Teaching Local 1330—Reflections on Critical Legal Pedagogy,” ( ‘11). School of
Law Faculty Publications. Paper 167. http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002528
By now it has begun to dawn that one of the subjects of this class session is how lawyers translate their moral intuitions and sense of justice
into legal arguments. Most beginning students have found themselves in the situation of wanting to express their
moral intuitions in the form of legal arguments but of feeling powerless to do so. A common attitude of
Northeastern students is that a lawyer cannot turn moral and political convictions into legal arguments in
the context of case-litigation. If you are interested in directly pursuing a moral and/or political agenda, at a minimum
you need to take up legislative and policy work, and more likely you need to leave the law altogether and take up grass roots
organizing instead. I insist that we keep the focus on litigation for this class period. After the straw poll, I ask the students to simulate the role of
Staughton Lynd‟s legal assistants and to assume that the court has just definitively rejected the claims based on contract, promissory estoppel,
and the notion of a community property right. However, they should also assume, counter-factually, that Judge Lambros stayed dismissal of the
suit for ten days to give plaintiffs one last opportunity to come up with a theory. I charge the students with the task of making a convincing
common law argument, supported by respectable legal authority, that the plaintiffs were entitled to substantial relief. Put another way, I ask
the students to prove that Judge Lambros was mistaken—that he was legally wrong—when he concluded that there was no basis in existing law
to vindicate the workers‟ and community‟s rights. In some classroom exercises, I permit students to select the side for which they wish to
argue, but I do not allow that in this session. All
students are asked to simulate the role of plaintiffs‟ counsel and to make
the best arguments they can—either because they actually believe such arguments and/or because in
their simulated role they are fulfilling their ethical duty to provide zealous representation. A recurring, instant
reflex is to say: “it‟s simple—the workers‟ human rights were violated in the Youngstown case.” I remind the class that the challenge I set was
to come up with a common law theory. The great appeal of human rights discourse for today‟s students is that it seems to provide a technical
basis upon which their fervent moral and political commitments appear to be legally required. “What human rights?” I ask. The usual answers
are (1) “they had a right to be treated like human beings” or (2) “surely there is some human right on which they can base their case.” To the
first argument I respond: “well, how they are entitled to be treated is exactly what the court is called upon in this case to decide. Counsel may
not use a re-statement of the conclusion you wish the court to reach as the legal basis supporting that conclusion.” To the second response I
reply: “it would be nice if some recognized human right applied, but we are in the Northern District of Ohio in 1980. Can you cite a pertinent
human rights instrument?” (Answer: “no.”) The students then throw other ideas on the table. Someone always proposes that U.S. Steel‟s
actions toward the community were “unconscionable.” I point out that unconscionability is a defense to contract enforcement whereas the
plaintiffs were seeking to enforce a contract (the alleged promise not to close the plant if it were rendered profitable). In any case, we have
assumed that the judge has already ruled that there was no contract. Another suggestion is that plaintiffs go for restitution. A restitution claim
arises when plaintiff gives or entrusts something of value to the defendant, and the defendant wrongfully refuses to pay for or return it. But
here we are assuming that Judge Lambros has already ruled that the workers did not endow U.S. Steel with any property or value other than
their labor power for which they were already compensated under the applicable collective bargaining agreements. If the community provided
U.S. Steel with value in the nature of tax breaks or infrastructure development, the effect of Judge Lambros‟ ruling on the property claim is to
say that these were not investments by the community but no-strings-attached gifts given in the hope of attracting or retaining the company‟s
business. At this point I usually give a hint by saying, “if we‟ve ruled out contract claims, and we‟ve ruled property claims, what does that
leave?” Aha, torts! A student then usually suggests that U.S. Steel committed the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED).15 I
point out that, even if it were successful, this theory would provide plaintiffs relief only for their emotional injuries, but not their economic or
other losses, and most likely would not provide a basis for an injunction to keep the plant open. In any event, IIED is an intentional tort. What, I
ask, is the evidence that U.S. Steel intends the plant shutdown to cause distress? The response that “they should know that emotional distress
will result” is usually not good enough to make out an intentional tort. An astute student will point out that in some jurisdictions it is enough to
prove that the defendant acted with reckless disregard for the likelihood that severe emotional distress would result. I allow that maybe
there‟s something to that, but then shift ground by pointing out that a prima facie requirement of IIED is that the distress suffered go beyond
what an “ordinary person” may be expected to endure or beyond the bounds of “civilized behavior.”16 Everyone knows that plants close all the
time and that the distress accompanying job-loss is a normal feature of American life. A student halfheartedly throws out negligent infliction of
emotional distress, to which my reply is: “In what way is U.S. Steel‟s proposed conduct negligent? The problem we are up against here is
precisely that the corporation is acting as a rational profit-maximizer.” A student always proposes that plaintiffs should allege that what U.S.
Steel did was “against public policy.” First of all, I say, “public policy” is not a cause of action; it is a backdrop against which conduct or contract
terms are assessed. Moreover, what public policy was violated in this case? The student will respond by saying “it is against public policy for
U.S. Steel to leave the community devastated.” I point out once again that that is the very conclusion for which we are contending—it is circular
argument to assert a statement of our intended conclusion as the rationale for that conclusion. This dialogue continues for awhile. One
ineffective theory after another is put on the table . Only once or twice in the decades I have taught this
exercise have the students gotten close to a viable legal theory . But this is not wasted time —learning
occurs in this phase of the exercise. The point conveyed is that while law and morals/politics are inextricably
intertwined, they are not the same. For one thing, lawyers have a distinct way of talking about and analyzing
problems that is characteristic of the legal culture of a given time and place. So-called “legal reasoning” is actually a repertoire
of conventional, culturally approved rhetorical moves and counter-moves deployed by lawyers to create
an appearance of the legal necessity of the results for which they contend. In addition, good lawyers actually possess
useful, specialized knowledge not generally absorbed by political theorists or movement activists. Legal
training sensitizes us to the many complexities that arise whenever general norms and principles are
implemented in the form of rules of decision or case applications. Lawyers know, for example, that large stakes
may turn on precisely how a right is defined, who has standing to vindicate it, what remedies it provides,
how the right is enforced and in what venue(s), and so on. We are not doing our jobs properly if we argue, simply,
“what the defendant did was unjust and the plaintiff deserves relief .” No one needs a lawyer to make the “what the
defendant did was unjust” argument. As Lynd‟s account shows, the workers of Youngstown did make that argument in their own, eloquent
words and through their collective resistance to the shut-downs. If
“what the defendant did was unjust” is all we have to
offer, lawyers bring no added value to the table. Progressive students sometimes tell themselves that law is
basically gobbledygook, but that you can assist movements for social change if you learn how to spout the right gobbledygook. In this
view of legal practice, “creativity” consists in identifying an appropriate technicality that helps your client. But in the Youngstown situation, we
are way past that naïve view. There is no “technicality” that can win the case. In this setting, a
social justice lawyer must use the
bits and pieces lying around to generate new legal knowledge and new legal theories. And these new
theories must say something more than “my client deserves to win” (although it is fine to commence one‟s research
on the basis of that moral intuition). The class is beginning to get frustrated, and around now someone says “well, what do you expect? This is
capitalism. There‟s no way the workers were going to win.” The “this-is-capitalism” (“TIC”) statement sometimes comes from the right,
sometimes from the left, and usually from both ends of the spectrum but in different ways. The TIC statement precipitates another teachable
moment. I begin by saying that we need to tease out exactly what the student means by TIC, as several interpretations are possible. For
example, TIC might be a prediction of what contemporary courts are most likely to do. That is, TIC might be equivalent to saying that “it doesn‟t
matter what theory you come up with; 999 US judges out of 1,000 would rule for U. S. Steel.”17 I allow that this is probably true, but not very
revealing. The workers knew what the odds were before they launched the case. Evenif doomed to fail, a legal case may still
make a contribution to social justice if the litigation creates a focal point of energy around which a
community can mobilize, articulate moral and political claims, educate the wider public, and conduct
political consciousness-raising. And if there is political value in pursuing a case, we might as well make good legal arguments. On an
alternative reading, the TIC observation is more ambitious than a mere prediction. It might be a claim that a capitalist society requires a legal
structure of a certain kind, and that therefore professionally acceptable legal reasoning within capitalist legal regimes cannot produce a theory
that interrogates the status quo beyond a certain point. Put another way, some outcomes are so foreign to the bedrock assumptions of private
ownership that they cannot be reached by respectable legal reasoning. A good example of an outcome that is incompatible with capitalism, so
the argument goes, is a court order interfering with U.S. Steel‟s decision to leave Youngstown. This
reading of the TIC comment
embodies the idea that legal discourse is encased within a deeper, extra-legal structure given by requirements
of the social order (capitalism), so that within professionally responsible legal argument the best lawyers in
the world could not state a winning theory in Local 1330. Ironically, the left and the right in the class often
share this belief. I take both conservative and progressive students on about this. I insist that the claim that our law is
constrained by a rigid meta-logic of capitalism—which curiously parallels the notion that legal outcomes are tightly
constrained by legal reasoning—is just plain wrong. Capitalist societies recognize all sorts of limitations on the
rights of property owners. Professor Singer‟s classic article catalogues a multitude of them.18 The claim is not only false, it
is a dangerous falsehood. To believe TIC in this sense is to limit in advance our aspirations for what
social justice lawyering can accomplish. Now the class begins to sense that I am not just playing law professor and asking
rhetorical questions to which there are no answers. The students realize that I actually think that I have a theory up my sleeve that shows that
Judge Lambros was wrong on the law. If things are going well, the students begin to feel an emotional stake in the exercise. Many who voted in
the straw poll that the plaintiffs deserved to win are anxious to see whether I can pull it off. Other students probably engage emotionally for a
different reason—the ones who have been skeptical or derisive of my approach all term hope that my “theory,” when I eventually reveal it, is
so implausible that I will fall flat on my face. I begin to feed the students more hints. One year I gave the hint, “What do straying livestock,
leaking reservoirs, dynamite blasting, and unsafe products have in common?”—but that made it too easy. Usually my hints are more oblique, as
in “does anything you learned about accident law ring a bell?” Whatever the form, the students take the hints, and some start cooking with gas.
Over the next few minutes, the pieces usually fall into place. The legal theory toward which I have been steering the students is that U.S. Steel is
strictly liable in tort for the negative social effects of its decision to disinvest in Youngstown. I contend that that is what the law provided in Ohio
in 1980, and therefore a mechanism was available for the District Court to order substantial relief. A basic, albeit contested theme of modern
tort law, which all students learn in first year, is that society allows numerous risky and predictably harmful activities to proceed because we
deem those activities, on balance, to be worthwhile or necessary. In such cases, the law often imposes liability rules designed to make the
activity pay for the injuries or accidents it inevitably causes. For more than a century, tort rules have been fashioned to force actors to take
account of all consequences proximately attributable to their actions, so that they will internalize the relevant costs and price their products
accordingly. The expectation is that in the ordinary course of business planning, the actor will perform a cost/benefit analysis to make sure that
the positive values generated by the activity justify its costs. Here, I remind the students of the famous Learned Hand Carroll Towing formula19
comparing B vs. PL, where B represents the costs of accident avoidance (or of refraining from the activity when avoidance is impossible or too
costly); and P x L (probability of the harm multiplied by the gravity of the harm) reflects foreseeable accident costs.20 The tort theory that
evolved from this and similar cost/benefit approaches is called “market deterrence.” The notion is that liability rules should be designed to
induce the actor who is in the best position to conduct this kind of cost/benefit analysis with respect to a given activity to actually conduct it.
Such actors will have incentives to make their products and activities safer and/or to develop safer substitute products and activities.21 Actors
will then pass each activity‟s residual accident costs on to consumers by “fractionating” and “spreading” such costs through their pricing
decisions. As a result, prices will give consumers an accurate picture of the true social costs of the activity, including its accident costs.
Consumers are thus enabled to make rational decisions about whether to continue purchasing the product or activity in light of its accident as
well as its production costs. In principle, if a particular actor produces an unduly risky product (in the sense that its accident costs are above
“market level”), that actor‟s products will be priced above market, and he/she will be driven out of business.22 Tort rules have long been
crafted with an eye toward compelling risky but socially valuable activities or enterprises to internalize their external costs. My examples—to
which the students were exposed in first year—are the ancient rule imposing strict liability for crop damage caused by escaping livestock;23
strict liability under the doctrine of Rylands v. Fletcher for the escape of dangerous things brought onto one‟s property;24 strict liability under
Restatement (Second) § 519 for damage caused by “abnormally dangerous activities” such as dynamite blasting;25 and most recently, strict
products liability.26 Of course, there are many exceptions to this approach. For example, “unavoidably unsafe” or “Comment k products” are
deemed non-defective and therefore do not carry strict liability. And of course the U.S. largely rejected Rylands. Why was that? Because, as was
memorably stated in Losee v. Buchanan: “We must have factories, machinery, dams, canals and railroads. They are demanded by the manifold
wants of mankind, and lay at the basis of all our civilization.”27 In assuming that entrepreneurial capitalism would be stymied if enterprises
were obliged to pay for the harms they cause, the Losee court accepted a strong version of TIC. Time permitting, I touch briefly on the debate
about whether the flourishing of the negligence principle in the U.S. subsidized 19th century entrepreneurial capitalism,28 the possible
implications of the Coase Theorem for our discussion of Local 1330,29 and the debate about whether it is appropriate for courts to fashion
common law rules with an eye toward their distributive as well as efficiency consequences.30 With this as background, I argue that the District
Court should have treated capital mobility—investors‟ circulation of capital in search of the highest rate of return—as a risky but socially
valuable activity warranting the same legal treatment as straying cattle and dynamite blasting. Capital mobility is socially valuable. It is
indispensable for economic growth and flexibility. Capital mobility generates important positive externalities for “winners,” such as economic
development and job-creation at the new site of investment. However, capital mobility also predictably causes negative external effects on
“bystanders” (the ones economists quaintly label “the losers”). We discussed some of these externalities at the outset of the class—the trauma
associated with income interruption and pre-mature retirement, waste or destruction of human capital, multiplier effects on the local economy,
and social pathologies and community decline of the kind experienced in Youngstown. The plaintiffs should have argued that capital mobility
must internalize its social dislocation costs for reasons of economic efficiency, and that this can be accomplished by making investors strictly
liable in tort for the social dislocation costs proximately caused by their capital mobility decisions. An investor considering shifting capital from
one use to another will compare their respective rates of return. In theory, the investment with the higher return is socially optimal (as well as
more profitable for the individual investor). The higher-return investment enlarges the proverbial pie. But investors must perform accurate
comparisons of competing investment opportunities in order for the magic hand of the market to perform its magic. A rational investor bases
her analysis primarily on price signals reflecting estimated rates of return on alternative investment options. This comparison will yield an
irrational judgment leading to a socially suboptimal investment decision unless the estimated rate of return on the new investment reflects its
external effects, both positive and negative. Investors often have public-relations incentives to tout the positive economic consequences
promised at the new location. To guarantee rational decision making, the law must force investors contemplating withdrawal of capital from an
enterprise to also carefully consider the negative social dislocation costs properly attributable to the activity of disinvestment. This can be
achieved by making capital mobility strictly liable for its proximately caused social dislocation costs.31 This approach erects no inefficient
barriers to capital mobility, nor does it bar all disinvestment decisions that may cause disruption and loss in the exit community. Other things
being equal, if the new investment discounted by the social dislocation costs of exit will generate a higher rate of return than the current use of
the capital, the capital should be disinvested from the old use and transferred to the new use. However, if investors are not forced by liability
rules to take into account the social dislocation costs of disinvestment, the new investment opportunity will appear more attractive than it
really is in a social sense. The situation involves a classic form of market failure. The market is imperfect because investors are not obliged to
take into account the negative social dislocation costs proximately caused by their decisions. Inaccurate price signals lead to the overproduction
of capital movement and therefore to a suboptimal allocation of resources. Apart from any severance and unemployment benefits received by
workers at the old plant, the social dislocation costs of disinvestment are almost entirely externalized onto the workers and the surrounding
community. Strict tort liability will induce investors and their downstream customers to fractionate and spread the dislocation costs of capital
mobility when pricing the products of the new activity. This will provide those who use or benefit from the new activity at the destination
community more accurate signals as to its true social costs and oblige them to fractionally share in the misfortunes afflicting the departure
community. Suppose, for example, that U.S. Steel invested the money it took out of Youngstown toward construction of a modern, high-tech
steel mill in a Sunbelt state. The price of steel produced at the new mill should fractionally reflect social dislocation costs in Youngstown.
According to legal “common sense” and mainstream economic theory, the movement of capital from a lesser to a more profitable investment is
an unambiguous social good. Allowing capital to migrate to its highest rate of return guarantees that society‟s resources are devoted to their
most productive uses. Society as a whole is better off if capital is permitted freely to migrate to the new investment and there to grow the pie.
In short, the free mobility of capital maximizes aggregate welfare. We are all “winners” in the long run, even if some unfortunate “losers” might
get hurt along the way. It follows as an article of faith that any legal inhibition on the mobility of capital is inefficient and socially wasteful. This
is why mainstream legal thinking refuses to accord long-term workers or surrounding communities any sort of “property interest” in the
enterprise which a departing investor is obliged to buy out before removal.32 An unwritten, bed-rock assumption of US law is that capital is not
and should not be legally responsible for the social dislocation costs occasioned by its mobility.33 Such costs are mostly externalized onto
employees and the surrounding community, even if the exit community had subsidized the old investment with tax breaks and similar forms of
corporate welfare. The legal common sense about capital mobility is mistaken. It is not a priori true that the movement of capital toward the
greatest rate of return unambiguously enhances aggregate social welfare. Free capital mobility maximizes aggregate welfare and allocates
resources to their most productive uses only in a perfect market; that is, only in the absence of market failure. The claim that free capital
mobility is efficient is sometimes true, and sometimes it is not. It all depends on the particular facts and circumstances on the ground. Voilà.
Judge Lambros was wrong. In 1980, a mechanism did exist in our law to recognize the plaintiffs‟ claims and afford them substantial relief for
economic, emotional, and other losses.34 All that was required was a logical extension of familiar torts thinking. Had Judge Lambros correctly
applied well-known and time-honored torts principles, he would have treated the social dislocation costs of the plant closure as an externality
that must be embedded in U.S. Steel‟s calculations regarding the relative profitability of the old and new uses to which it might put its capital.
This would close the gap between private and social costs, thereby tending to perfect the market. Notice an important rhetorical advantage of
this theory—its core value is economic efficiency. The plaintiffs can get this far along in their argument without mentioning “fairness,” “equity,”
or “justice,” let alone “human rights,” values that are often fatal to legal argument in U.S. courts today.35 I now brace myself for the “you gotta
be kidding me” phase of the discussion. Objections cascade in. The progressive students want to be convinced that this is really happening. The
mainstream students want to poke holes and debunk. A few of them are grateful at last for an opportunity to show how misguided they always
knew my teaching was. Always, students assert that my summary discussion of the cost/benefit analysis omitted various costs and benefits. For
example, one year I omitted to say that the social dislocation costs in the exit community must be discounted by ameliorative public
expenditures such as unemployment insurance benefits. My response to this type of objection is always the same: “you are absolutely right,
that cost or benefit should be included in the analysis. And here are a few more considerations we would need to address to perfect the
cost/benefit analysis which I left out only in the interest of time.” But I learn from this discussion; not infrequently, students contribute
something I had not previously considered. A frequent objection is that the task of quantifying the social dislocation costs associated with
capital mobility is just too complicated and difficult. I concede that it is a complex task and that conservative estimates might be required in
place of absolute precision. I ask, however, whether it is preferable to allow investors to proceed on the basis of price-signals we know to be
wrong or to induce them to use best efforts to arrive at fair estimates. Separation of powers always comes up, as it should. I go through the
usual riffs. Yes, I concede, these problems cry out for a comprehensive legislative solution rather than case-by-case adjudication. But standard,
well-known counter-arguments suggest that Judge Lambros should nevertheless have imposed tort liability in this case. For one thing,
determining the rules of tort liability has always been within the province of courts. Deferring to the status quo (that those who move capital
are not legally responsible for negative externalities) is every bit as much a choice, every bit as much “activism” or “social engineering,” as
altering the status quo. Legal history is filled with cases in which the legislature was only prompted to address an important public policy
concern by the shock value of a court decision. Particularly is this so in cases involving the rights and interests of marginalized, insular, and
under-represented groups like aging industrial workers. I note that Congress eventually responded to the plant closing problem with the WARN
Act, a modest but not unimportant effort to internalize to enterprises some of the social dislocation costs of capital disinvestment. The statute
liquidates these costs into a sum equal to sixty days‟ pay after an employer orders a plant closing or mass layoff without giving proper notice.36
I call the students‟ attention to the provision of WARN barring federal courts from enjoining plant closings37 and ask why Congress might have
included that restriction. Another common objection concerns causation. A student will say: “The closedown of the mills, let alone the
shutdown of any particular plant, could not have caused all of the suicides, heart failures, domestic violence, and so on, in Youngstown. Surely
many such tragedies would have occurred anyway, even if U.S. Steel had remained. It isn‟t fair to impose liability on U.S. Steel for everything
bad that happened in Youngstown during the statute-of-limitations period.” I immediately say that this is a terrific point, and that I was hoping
someone would raise it. I compliment the student by saying that the question shows that he/she is now tapping legal knowledge. Typically, the
class is concerned with causation-in-fact or “but for” causation. Their question is, how do we know that a plant shutdown caused any particular
case of heart failure or suicide in Youngstown? Problems of causal uncertainty are a familiar issue, and I remind students that they were
exposed to several well-known responses in Torts. A time-honored, if simplistic device is to shift the burden of proof regarding causationinfact
to the defendant, when everyone knows full well that the defendant has no more information than the plaintiff with which to resolve the
problem of causal uncertainty.38 In recent decades, courts have developed more sophisticated responses to problems of causal uncertainty as,
for example, in the DES cases. As the court stated in Sindell:39 In our contemporary complex industrialized society, advances in science and
technology create fungible goods which may harm consumers and which cannot be traced to any specific producer. The response of the courts
can be either to adhere rigidly to prior doctrine, denying recovery to those injured by such products, or to fashion remedies to meet these
changing needs. Just as Justice Traynor in his landmark concurring opinion in Escola . . . recognized that in an era of mass production and
complex marketing methods the traditional standard of negligence was insufficient to govern the obligations of manufacturer to consumer, so
should we acknowledge that some adaptation of the rules of causation and liability may be appropriate in these recurring circumstances . . . .40
At this point, some of the progressive students are beginning to salivate. They came to law school with the hope that legal reasoning would
provide them a highly refined and politically neutral technology for speaking truth to power. The first semester disabuses most of them of that
crazy idea. They have learned that they will not find certainty or answers in legal discourse, and that legal texts are minefields of gaps, conflicts,
and ambiguities with moral and political implications. I can tell from the glint in their eyes that they are beginning to ask themselves whether
this economics stuff, which they formerly shunned like the plague, might provide a substitute toolbox of neutral technologies with which to
demonstrate that redress for workers and other subordinated and marginalized groups is legally required. I cannot allow them to think that.
Therefore, unless an alert student has spotted it, I now reveal my Achilles‟ heel. The weak link in my argument is the age-old question of
proximate causation. Assume we solve the causation-in-fact problem. For example, assume that by analogy to the Sindell theory of market-
share liability, the court arrives at a fair method of attributing to the plant shutdown some portion of the social trauma and injuries occurring in
the wake of U.S. Steel‟s departure from Youngstown. How do we know whether the plant closing proximately caused these harms? What do
we mean by “proximate causation” anyway, and why does it matter? These questions present another exciting, teachable moment. Naturally,
the students haven‟t thought about proximate cause since first year. They barely remember what it is and how it differs from causation-in-fact.
Some 3Ls shuffle uncomfortably knowing that the Bar examination looms, and they are soon going to need to know about this. I provide a quick
review of proximate causation which addresses the question, how far down the chain of causation should liability reach? I illustrate my points
by referring to Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R,41 which all law students remember. Perhaps U.S. Steel might fairly be held accountable for the
suicide of steelworkers within ninety days of the plant closing, but we might draw the line before holding U.S. Steel liable for a stroke suffered
by a steelworker‟s spouse five years later. Now keyed in to what proximate cause doctrine is about, the students eagerly wait for me to tell
them what the “answer” is, that is, where proximate causation doctrine would draw the line in the Youngstown case. That‟s when I give them
the bad news. I explain that proximate causation doctrine does not provide a determinate analytical method for measuring the scope of
liability. We pretend that buzzwords like “reasonable foreseeability” or “scope-of-the-risk” give us answers, but ultimately decisions made
under the rubric of proximate causation are always value judgments.42 The conclusion that “X proximately caused Y” is a statement about the
type of society we want to live in. At this juncture, the 3Ls grumpily realize that I am not going to be much help in preparing them for their bar
review course. I now distribute a one-page hand-out on proximate causation prepared in advance. The handout reprints Justice Andrews‟
remarkable observation in his Palsgraf dissent: What we . . . mean by the word „proximate‟ is, that because of convenience, of public policy, of
a rough sense of justice, the law arbitrarily declines to trace a series of events beyond a certain point. This is not logic. It is practical politics . . . .
It is all a question of expediency. There are no fixed rules to govern our judgment. There are simply matters of which we may take account.43 I
point out that causation-in-fact analysis, too, always involves perspective and value judgments.44 Why assume that water escaping the
reservoir diminished the value of the neighboring coal mining company‟s land? Why not assume that the coal company‟s decision to dig close
to the border diminished the value of the manufacturer‟s land (by increasing the cost of using the type of reservoir needed in its production
process)? For that matter, why assume that the cattle trample on the neighbors‟ crops? Why not assume that the crops get in the way of the
cattle? My handout also contains my variation on Robert Keeton‟s famous definition of proximate cause45: When a court states that „the
defendant‟s conduct was the proximate cause of (some portion of) the plaintiff‟s injuries,‟ what the court means is that (1) the defendant‟s
conduct was a cause-in-fact of that portion of plaintiff‟s injuries; and (2) the defendant‟s conduct and the plaintiff‟s specified injuries are so
related that it is appropriate, from the moral and social-policy points of view, to hold the defendant legally responsible for that portion of the
plaintiff‟s injuries. What we mean when we ask whether the social dislocation costs associated with the shutdown of the steel plant were
proximately caused by capital mobility is whether these costs are, in whole or in part, properly attributable from a moral/political point of view
to U.S. Steel‟s decision to disinvest. Economic “science” does not and cannot establish in a value-neutral manner that the social dislocation
costs of the plant shutdown are a negative externality of capital mobility. A conclusion of that kind requires a value judgment that we disguise
under the rubric of “proximate causation,” a value judgment about whom it is appropriate to ask to bear what costs related to what injuries.
The lesson is that in legal reasoning there is no escape from moral and political choice. If things have gone according
to plan, time conveniently runs out, and the class is dismissed on that note. What am I trying to accomplish in a class like this? What are the
objectives of critical legal pedagogy? Legal
education should empower students. It should put them in touch with
their own capacity to take control over their lives and professional education and development. It
should enable them to experience the possibility of participating, as lawyers, in transformative social
movements. But all too often classroom legal education is deadening. The law student‟s job, mastering doctrine, appears utterly
unconnected to any process of learning about oneself or developing one‟s moral, political, or professional identity. Classroom legal
education tends to reinforce a sense of powerlessness about our capacity to change social institutions .
Indeed, it often induces students to feel that they are powerless to shape and alter their own legal
education. Much of legal education induces in students a pervasive and exaggerated sense of the
constraint of legal rules and roles and the students‟ inability to do much about it. In capsule form, the goals of
critical legal pedagogy are— • to disrupt the socialization process that occurs during legal education; • to unfreeze
entrenched habits of mind and deconstruct the false claims of necessity which constitute so-called “legal
reasoning”; • to urge students to see their life‟s work ahead as an opportunity to unearth and challenge
law‟s dominant ideas about society, justice, and human possibility and to infuse legal rules and practices
with emancipatory and egalitarian content; • to persuade students that legal discourses and practices
comprise a medium, neither infinitely plastic nor inalterably rigid, in which they can pursue moral and
political projects and articulate alternative visions of social organization and social justice; • to train
them to argue professionally and respectably for the utopian and the impossible; • to alert them that legal cases
potentially provide a forum for intense public consciousness-raising about issues of social justice; • to
encourage them to view legal representation as an opportunity to challenge, push, and relocate the boundaries
between intra-systemic and extra-systemic activity, that is, an opportunity to work within the system in a way that
reconstitutes it; and • to show that the existing social order is not immutable but “is merely possible, and
that people have the freedom and power to act upon it.” 46 The most important point of the class is that social
justice lawyers never give up. The appropriate response when you think you have a hopeless case is to
go back and do more work in the legal medium.
 2ac liberalism
Reject their simplistic understanding that liberalism as an all-pervasive force---default
to particularity
Pappas 17—Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A& M University [Gregory Fernando, 2017,
“The Limitations and Dangers of Decolonial Philosophies: Lessons from Zapatista Luis Villoro”, Radical
Philosophy Review, DOI: 10.5840/radphilrev201732768] AMarb

For Villoro a serious

study of ideologies has to be as specific to time and place as possible. The quest for
theoretical barometers of good and evil at a global level and across history should be subject to critical
suspicion and may be futile since the present ideological function of a concept/category is not always
determined by its past use or the original purpose for which it was created. A distinction created to oppress
may play a different function or have different functions in different social contexts. Modernity and
liberalism have not always functioned as ideologies or to the same degree, nor does it make sense to
claim that they always will. Even native thought (indigenismo) can become an ideology if adopted to keep
the oppressed in their place, i.e., if it perpetuates subordination or oppression.39 If Villoro is correct in the above
analysis then decolonial views are vulnerable to inaccuracy and insensitivity, especially those that wish to trace back to
1492 and across different countries the ideologies that have supported coloniality—such as modernity, capitalism, or liberalism. Villoro did not
ignore how historically similar colonial structures were throughout the Americas, but for him ideologies and the logic
of domination
that operate in one particular place and time may not operate in the exact same way in another,
especially in such a complex and diverse region as the whole of Latin America. If domination and exclusion via ideologies are
local, its diagnosis and remedies must also have to be local. We need to be careful when we extrapolate from one
context to another. Villoro raised a similar criticism of leftist reactions to the problem of Eurocentrism that relies on
simple formulas that state we just need to embrace what is “ours” and reject what is European. Although
Villoro was a critic of Eurocentrism and admirer of indigenous thought, he warned Zea and the Latin Americanist or indigenismos movement to
not react to Eurocentrism and the colonial Manichaean ideas, where what is “ours” or indigenous is denigrated, with a mere inversion of the
Manicheanism. For Villoro the Left must resist the temptation to rely on lazy theoretical barometers of good
and evil. It must be able to provide a basis for being critical of Western ideas beyond the fact that they
are Western or come from the oppressor. Not all Western concepts, standards, and categories are
oppressive even to the most non-Western people. To decide between good and evil requires intelligent
discriminative judgment and not easy theoretical formulas according to geopolitical coordinates or
cultural origins. Again, even native thought (indigenismo) can become an ideology. He expected the Left to be sensitive to this,
but what he actually experienced was a Left slipping dangerously toward subtle Manichaean assumptions, i.e., simplistic barometers about the
boundaries between good and evil. This, I am afraid, is a danger in decolonial thought, one that seems unavoidable
as long as they make central to their project the coloniality axis that relies on binaries to determine the
direction of good and evil. I am aware that it is not easy to oppose a binary without just inverting it, but we must be careful. To be
fair, decolonial thought has been critical of Manichaeism as part of the colonial legacy and there is no doubt about their good
intentions to move in a pluralistic direction where there is no one central epistemology. However, this
center-versus-periphery framework is easily susceptible to slipping into the simplistic view that all evil
comes from what is at the center—Europe, the West, modernity, liberalism, capitalism. For instance,
Mignolo describes the decolonial project as “delinking” from the West and recovery of the indigenous
as if this determines what is the right path from evil toward the good. 40 This smells like a subtle
Manichaeism or at least a position that does not permit inquiry that is sensitive to historical context. The decolonialists’ criticism of the
hegemony of the West is warranted and important, but for it to continue as a growing project that does not succumb to the excesses (vices) of
the Left that Villoro diagnosed it
must be careful to not slip into any of the following assumptions : • Modernity
and liberalism were and are totally bad; they are ideologies for dominating, colonizing, and oppressing or
only have a darker side. • Eurocentrism (interpretation, standpoint) is bad, but philosophy from the periphery is good. • Western
concepts have been used to distort or occlude indigenous (non-Western) ones therefore all or most Western
concepts distort or contaminate, or are tools of domination. • Western epistemologies are imperialistic ; the epistemologies of
each of the colonialized regions are good.
 at: libidinal economy
Unconscious bias exists, but it is NOT a libidinal economy---psychoanalytic
explanations ignore specific social and cultural value systems and confuses habit with
instinct
Peter Hudis 15, Professor of English and History @ Queens College, 2015, “Frantz Fanon: Philosopher
of the Barricades,” Pg. 35-37
Fanon’s vantage point upon the world is his situated experience. He is trying to understand the inner psychic life of racism, not provide an
account of the structure of human existence as a whole. Racism
is not, of course, an integral part of the human psyche; it
is a Social construct that has a psychic impact. Any effort to comprehend social distress that
accompanies racism by reference to some a priori structure- be it the Oedipal Complex or the Collective
Unconscious- is doomed to failure.
Carl Jung sought to deepen and go beyond Freud's approach by arguing that the subconscious is grounded in a universal layer of the psyche-
which he called "the
collective unconscious:' This refers to inherited patterns of thought that exist in all
human minds, regardless of specific culture or upbringing, and which manifest themselves in dreams, fairy tales, and
myths. Jung referred to these universal patterns as "archetypes:' It may seem, on a superficial reading, that 1 Fanon is drawing from Jung, since
he discusses how white people tend to unconsciously assimilate views of blacks that are based on negative stereotypes. Even the most
"progressive" white tends to think of blacks a certain way (such as "emotional;' "physical," or / "aggressive"), even as they disavow any racist
animus on their part. However, Fanon denies that such collective delusions are part of a psychic structure; they are
not permanent features of the mind . They are habits acquired from a series of social and cultural
impositions. While they constitute a kind a collective unconscious on the part of many white people,
they are not grounded in any universal "archetype." The unconscious prejudices of whites do not derive from genes or
nature, nor do they derive from some form independent of culture or upbringing. Fanon contends that Jung "confuses habit with
instinct."
Fanon objects to Jung's "collective unconscious" for the same reason that he rejects the notion of a black ontology. His phenomenological
approach brackets out ontological claims on both a social and psychological level insofar as the examination of race and racism is concerned. He
writes, "Neither Freud nor Adler nor even the cosmic Jung took the black man into consideration in the course of his research.”

This does not mean that Fanon rejects their contributions tout court. He does not deny the existence of the unconscious. He only denies that
the inferiority complex of blacks operates on an unconscious level. He
does not reject the Oedipal Complex. He only denies
that it explains (especially in the West Indies) the proclivity of the black "slave" to mimic the values of
the white "master." And as seen from his positive remarks on Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, he does not reject the idea of psychic
structure. He only denies that it can substitute for an historical understanding of the origin of neuroses .23 Fanon adopts a socio-genetic
approach to a study of the psyche because that is what is adequate for the object of his analysis.

For Fanon, it
is the relationship between the socio-economic and psychological that is of critical import. He
makes it clear, insofar as the subject matter of his study is concerned, that the socio-economic is first of
all responsible for affective disorders: "First, economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermalization of this inferiority."24
Fanon never misses an opportunity to remind us that racism owes its origin to specific economic relations of domination- such as slavery,
colonialism, and the effort to coopt sections of the working class into serving the needs of capital. It is hard to mistake the Marxist influence
here. It does not follow, however, that what comes first in the order of time has conceptual or strategic priority. The inferiority complex is
originally born from economic subjugation, but it takes on a life of its own and expresses itself in terms that surpass the economic. Both sides of
the problem-the socio-economic and psychological-must be combatted in tandem: "The black man must wage the struggle on two levels;
whereas historically these levels are mutually dependent, any unilateral liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake would be to
believe their mutual dependence automatic:''5

On these grounds he argues that the problem of racismcannot be solved on a psychological level. It is not an
"individual" problem; it is a social one. But neither can it be solved on a social level that ores the psychological. It is small wonder that
although his name never appears in the book, Fanon was enamored of the work of Wilhelm Reich. This important Freudian-Marxist would no
doubt feel affinity with Fanon's comment, "Genuine disalienation
will have been achieved only when things, in the most
materialist sense, have resumed their rightful place:'27

That drives exist doesn’t imply that they are totalizing---psychological processes are
internally diffuse and contradictory
Adrian Johnston 5, Philosophy Professor @ University of New Mexico, Time Driven: Metapsychology
and the Splitting of the Drive, Northwestern University Press, Jul 27, 2005, pg. 340-341

In terms of the basic framework of metapsychology, Freud

delineates two fundamental types of conflict disturbing yet
organizing mental life—the conflict between drives and reality (as, most notably, the struggle In-tween the id and civilization) and
the conflict between the drives themselves in la the story of Eros against the Todrstrieb). In both cases, the individual
lends lo be portrayed as the overdetermined play-thing of powerful forces fighting semi-covert wars
with each other just out of the ego's sight . However, Freud fails to discover a third dimension of conflict in
relation to the libidinal economy—the conflict within each and every drive. The theoretical contribution of this project could
easily be summarized as the identification of this distinct type of conflict and the explication of its sobering consequences for an understanding
of the psyche. Despite the apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human nature as
being perturbed by an irreducible inner antagonism, there is. surprisingly, what might be described as a
liberating aspect to this splitting of the drives. Since drives are essentially dysfunctional, subjects are
able to act otherwise than as would be dictated by in-stinctually compelled pursuits of gratification, satisfaction,
and pleasure. In fact, subjects are forced to be free, since, for such beings, the mandate of nature is forever
missing. Severed from a strictly biological master-program and saddled with a conflict-ridden ,
heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses—impulses mediated by an inconsistent, unstable web
of multiple representations, indicated by Lacan's "barring" of the Symbolic Other—the parletre has no choice but to
bump up against the unnatural void of its autonomy . The confrontation with this raid is frequently
avoided. The true extent of one's autonomy is, due to its sometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated
to the shadows of the unconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought
and behavior. The contradictions arising from the conflicts internal to the libidi-nal economy mark the
precise places where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chance to briefly flash into
effective existence; such points of breakdown in the deterministic nexus of the drives clear the space for
the sudden emergence of something other than the smooth continuation of the default physical and
sociopsychical "run of things." Moreover, if the drives were fully functional—and. hence, would not prompt a mobilization of a series
of defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcend this threatening corpo-Real—humans would be animalistic automatons, namely,
creatures of nature. The
pain of a malfunctioning, internally conflicted libidinal economy is a discomfort signaling
a capacity to be an autonomous subject. This is a pain even more essential to human autonomy than
what Kant identifies .is the guilt-inducing burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring respect. Whereas Kant
treats the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to rational beings, the reverse might
(also) be the case: Such freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings.
Completely "curing" individuals of this discomfort , even if it were possible, would be tantamount to
divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their dignity as subjects . As Lacan
might phrase it, the split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a suffering that, were it to be entirely
eliminated, would entail the utter dissolution of subjectivity itself. Humanity is free precisely insofar as
its pleasures are far from perfection, insofar as its enjoyment is never absolute.
Behaviors are socially constructed
Brad Evans 15, senior lecturer in international relations at the School of Sociology, Politics &
International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, Intolerable Violence, symploke Volume 23, Numbers
1-2, p. muse
If the second order of politics in the age of the spectacle is to harvest our attention and seduce us into desiring our own oppression, our task is to [End Page 220]
recognize our own shameful compromises with the spectacle. This requires modes of critical reflection which not only forces us to be alert to the ways in which our
attentions might be harvested by the seduction of violent images, but how we might be co-opted by forms of depraved aesthetics that debase the political subject.
We need to learn to live with violence less through the modality of the sacred than through the critical lens of the profane. By this we mean that we
need to
appreciate our violent histories and how our subjectivities have been formed through a history of
physical bloodshed. This requires more of a willingness to interrogate violence in a variety of registers
(ranging from the historical and concrete [registers] to the abstract and symbolic) than it does a bending to

the neoliberal discourses of fate and normalization. We need to acknowledge our own seductions with the varied forces of violence.
And we need to accept that intellectualism and the ideas it generates, the imaginaries it creates, and the visions of the world it endorses shares an intimate
relationship with violence both in its complicity with violence and as an act of violence. Having said this, we cannot divorce here the idea of the desiring subject of
violence from wider systemic relations and historical configurations. Too
often, the mediation of suffering through the formal qualities of
tolerability and design are presented as matter of personal pleasure and taste rather than part of a broader
engaged social-political discourse. This all too easily leads to questions of individual pathology altogether

removed from any sense of the conditions that give rise to libidinal investments. If we are to have a better picture of
the debasement of the human subject, we need to address the relationships between individual desires, representations of

human suffering, humiliation and death as part of a wider economy of pleasure that is collectively indulged. As decadence and despair are
normalised in the wider culture—though this is very different from accomplished in the goal to remove all dissent—people are increasingly exploited for their
pleasure quotient while any viable notion of the social is subordinated to the violence of a deregulated market economy and its production of cultures of cruelty.
 at: ontology
Afropessimism mistakes “an” anti-black world, characterized by anti-black instructions
that deny Black freedom, for the antiblack world---both pessimism and optimism fail
to take political responsibility for political actions, a conception of blacks as human
reframes “so-called” failures as actions that alter the possibilities of change
Lewis R. Gordon 17, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, with affiliations in Judaic
Studies and Caribbean, Latino/a, and Latin American Studies, University of Connecticut at Storrs, Visiting
Europhilosophy Professor at Toulouse University, 12-7-17, “Thoughts on Afropessimism,” Critical
Political Theory (2017), p. 1-8
‘‘Afropessimism’’ came out of ‘‘Afro-pessimism.’’ The elimination of the hyphen is an important development, since it dispels ambiguity and in
effect announces a specific mode of thought. Should the hyphen remain, the ambiguity would be between pessimistic people of African descent
and theoretical pessimism. The conjoined, theoretical term is what proponents often have in mind in their diagnosis of what I shall call ‘‘the
black condition.’’ The
appeal to a black condition is peculiarly existential. Existentialists reject notions of
human ‘‘nature’’ on the grounds that human beings live in worlds they also construct; they produce
their socalled essence. That does not mean, however, human beings lack anchorage. Everyone has to
start from somewhere. Existentialists call that somewhere a condition or conditions for these reasons,
and the world human beings produce or through which we live is sometimes called ‘‘human reality. ’’
Critics of existentialism often reject its human formulation. Heidegger, for instance, in his ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’
lambasted Sartre for supposedly in effect subordinating Being to a philosophical anthropology with dangers of anthropocentrism (Heidegger,
1971). Yet
a philosophical understanding of culture raises the problem of the conditions through which
philosophical reflections could emerge as meaningful. Although a human activity, a more radical
understanding of culture raises the question of the human being as the producer of an open reality. If
the human being is in the making, then ‘‘human reality’’ is never complet e and is more the relations in
which such thought takes place than a claim about the thought . The etymology of existence already points to these
elements. From the Latin ex sistere, ‘‘to stand out,’’ it also means to appear; against invisibility in the stream of effects through which the
human world appears, much appears through the creative and at times alchemic force of human thought and deed. Quarrels with and against
existential thought are many. In more recent times, they’ve emerged primarily from Marxists, structuralists, and poststructuralists, even though
there were, and continue to be, many existential Marxists and even existentialists with structuralist and poststructuralist leanings. I
begin
with this tale of philosophical abstraction to contextualize Afropessimism. Its main exemplars, such as
Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson III, emerged from academic literary theory, an area dominated by
poststructuralism even in many cases that avow ‘‘Marxism. ’’ Sexton (2010) and Wilderson (2007) divert from a reductive
poststructuralism, however, through examining important existential moves inaugurated, as Daniel McNeil (2011, 2012) observed, by Fanon
and his intellectual heirs. The critical question that Afropessimism addresses in this fusion is the viability of
posed strategies of Black liberation. (I’m using the capital ‘‘B’’ here to point not only to the racial designation ‘‘black’’ but also to
the nationalist one ‘‘Black.’’ Afropessimists often mean both, since blacks and Blacks have a central and centered role in their thought.) The
world that produced blacks and in consequence Blacks is, for Afropessimists, a crushing, historical one
whose Manichaean divide is sustained contraries best kept segregated. Worse, any effort of mediation
leads to confirmed black subordination. Overcoming this requires purging the world of antiblackness.
Where cleansing the world is unachievable, an alternative is to disarm the force of antiblack racism.
Where whites lack power over blacks, they lose relevance – at least politically and at levels of cultural
and racial capital or hegemony. Wilderson (2008), for instance, explores my concept of ‘‘an antiblack world’’ to
build similar arguments. Sexton (2011) makes similar moves in his discussions of ‘‘social death. ’’ As this forum
doesn’t afford space for a long critique, I’ll offer several, non-exhaustive criticisms. The first is that ‘‘an antiblack world’’ is not
identical with ‘‘the world is antiblack.’’ My argument is that such a world is an antiblack racist project. It
is not the historical achievement. Its limitations emerge from a basic fact: Black people and other
opponents of such a project fought, and continue to fight, as we see today in the #BlackLivesMatter
movement and many others, against it. The same argument applies to the argument about social death.
Such an achievement would have rendered even these reflections stillborn. The basic premises of the
Afropessimistic argument are, then, locked in performative contradictions. Yet, they have rhetorical force. This is
evident through the continued growth of its proponents and forums (such as this one) devoted to it. In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, I argued
that there are forms of antiblack racism offered under the guise of love, though I was writing about whites who exoticize blacks while offering
themselves as white sources of black value. Analyzed in terms of bad faith, where one lies to oneself in an attempt to flee displeasing truths for
pleasing falsehoods, exoticists romanticize blacks while affirming white normativity, and thus themselves, as principals of reality. These ironic,
performative contradictions are features of all forms of racism, where one group is elevated to godlike
status and another is pushed below that of human despite both claiming to be human . Antiblack racism
offers whites self-other relations (necessary for ethics) with each other but not so for groups forced in a ‘‘zone
of nonbeing’’ below them. There is asymmetry where whites stand as others who look downward to those who are not their others or
their analogues. Antiblack racism is thus not a problem of blacks being ‘‘others .’’ It’s a problem of their not-
being-analogical-selves-and-not-evenbeing- others . Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), reminds us that Blacks
among each other live in a world of selves and others. It is in attempted relations with whites that these
problems occur. Reason in such contexts has a bad habit of walking out when Blacks enter. What are Blacks to do? As reason cannot be
forced, because that would be ‘‘violence,’’ they must ironically reason reasonably with forms of unreasonable reason. Contradictions loom .
Racism is, given these arguments, a project of imposing non-relations as the model of dealing with people
designated ‘‘black.’’ In Les Damne´ de la terre (‘‘Damned of the Earth’’), Fanon goes further and argues that colonialism is an attempt to
impose a Manichean structure of contraries instead of a dialectical one of ongoing, human negotiation of contradictions. The former segregates
the groups; the latter emerges from interaction. The police, he observes, are the mediator in such a situation, as their role is force/violence
instead of the human, discursive one of politics and civility (Fanon, 1991). Such societies draw legitimacy from Black non-existence or invisibility.
Black appearance, in other words, would be a violation of those systems. Think of the continued blight of police, extra-judicial killings of Blacks
in those countries. An
immediate observation of many postcolonies is that antiblack attitudes, practices, and
institutions aren’t exclusively white. Black antiblack dispositions make this clear. Black antiblackness
entails Black exoticism. Where this exists, Blacks simultaneously receive Black love alongside Black rejection
of agency. Many problems follow. The absence of agency bars maturation, which would reinforce the
racial logic of Blacks as in effect wards of whites. Without agency, ethics, liberation, maturation, politics,
and responsibility could not be possible . Afropessimism faces the problem of a hidden premise of white agency versus Black
incapacity. Proponents of Afropessimism would no doubt respond that the theory itself is a form of agency reminiscent of Fanon’s famous
remark that though whites created le Ne`gre it was les Ne`gres who created Ne´gritude. Whites
clearly did not create
Afropessimism, which Black liberationists should celebrate. We should avoid the fallacy, however, of
confusing source with outcome. History is not short of bad ideas from good people . If intrinsically good,
however, each person of African descent would become ethically and epistemologically a switching of the
Manichean contraries, which means only changing players instead of the game. We come, then, to the
crux of the matter. If the goal of Afropessimism is Afropessimism, its achievement would be attitudinal
and, in the language of old, stoic – in short, a symptom of antiblack society. At this point, there are several
observations that follow. The first is a diagnosis of the implications of Afropessimism as symptom. The
second examines the epistemological implications of Afropessimism. The third is whether a disposition
counts as a political act and, if so, is it sufficient for its avowed aims . There are more, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll
simply focus on these. An ironic dimension of pessimism is that it is the other side of optimism. Oddly enough,
both are connected to nihilism, which is, as Nietzsche (1968) showed, a decline of values during periods of social
decay. It emerges when people no longer want to be responsible for their actions. Optimists expect
intervention from beyond. Pessimists declare relief is not forthcoming . Neither takes responsibility for
what is valued. The valuing, however, is what leads to the second, epistemic point. The presumption
that what is at stake is what can be known to determine what can be done is the problem. If such
knowledge were possible, the debate would be about who is reading the evidence correctly. Such
judgment would be a priori – that is, prior to events actually unfolding. The future, unlike transcendental
conditions such as language, signs, and reality, is, however, ex post facto: It is yet to come. Facing the
future, the question isn’t what will be or how do we know what will be but instead the realization that
whatever is done will be that on which the future will depend. Rejecting optimism and pessimism, there
is a supervening alternative: political commitment. The appeal to political commitment is not only in stream with what
French existentialists call l’intellectuel engage´ (committed intellectual) but also reaches back through the history and existential situation of
enslaved, racialized ancestors. Many were, in truth, an existential paradox: commitment to action without guarantees. The slave revolts, micro
and macro acts of resistance, escapes, and returns help others do the same; the cultivated instability of plantations and other forms of
enslavement, and countless other actions, were waged against a gauntlet of forces designed to eliminate any hope of success. The claim of
colonialists and enslavers was that the future belonged to them, not to the enslaved and the indigenous. A result of more than 500 years of
conquest and 300 years of enslavement was also a (white) rewriting of history in which African and First Nations’ agency was, at least at the
level of scholarship, nearly erased. Yet there was resistance even in that realm, as Africana and First Nation intellectual history and scholarship
attest. Such actions set the course for different kinds of struggle today. Such reflections occasion meditations on the concept of failure.
Afropessimism, the existential critique suggests, suffers from a failure to understand failure. Consider
Fanon’s notion of constructive failure, where what doesn’t initially work transforms conditions for something new
to emerge. To understand this argument, one must rethink the philosophical anthropology at the heart of a specific line of Euromodern
thought on what it means to be human. Atomistic and individual substance - based, this model, articulated by
Hobbes, Locke, and many others, is of a non-relational being that thinks, acts, and moves along a course
in which continued movement depends on not colliding with others . Under that model, the human being is a
thing that enters a system that facilitates or obstructs its movement. An alternative model, shared by
many groups across southern Africa, is a relational version of the human being as part of a larger system
of meaning. Actions, from that perspective, are not about whether ‘‘I’’ succeed but instead about ‘‘our’’
story across time. As relational, it means that each human being is a constant negotiation of ongoing
efforts to build relationships with others, which means no one actually enters a situation without
establishing new situations of action and meaning. Instead of entering a game, their participation
requires a different kind of project – especially where the ‘‘game’’ was premised on their exclusion . Thus,
where the system or game repels initial participation, such repulsion is a shift in the grammar of how
the system functions, especially its dependence on obsequious subjects . Shifted energy affords
emergence of alternatives. Kinds cannot be known before the actions that birthed them . Abstract as this
sounds, it has much historical support. Evelyn Simien (2016), in her insightful political study Historic Firsts, examines the new set
of relations established by Shirley Chisholm’s and Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. There could be no Barack Obama
without such important predecessors affecting the demographics of voter participation . Simien intentionally
focused on the most mainstream example of political life to illustrate this point. Although no exemplar of radicalism, Obama’s
‘‘success’’ emerged from Chisholm and Jackson’s (and many others’) so-called ‘‘failure.’’ Beyond
presidential electoral politics, there are numerous examples of how prior, radical so-called ‘‘failures’’
transformed relationships that facilitated other kinds of outcome. The trail goes back to the Haitian
Revolution and back to every act of resistance from Nat Turner’s Rebellion in the USA, Sharpe’s in
Jamaica, or Tula’s in Curac¸ao and so many other efforts for social transformation to come. In existential
terms, then, many ancestors of the African diaspora embodied what Søren Kierkegaard (1983) calls an existential
paradox. All the evidence around them suggested failure and the futility of hope . They first had to make
a movement of infinite resignation – that is, resigning themselves to their situation . Yet they must
simultaneously act against that situation. Kierkegaard called this seemingly contradictory phenomenon
‘‘faith,’’ but that concept relates more to a relationship with a transcendent, absolute being, which
could only be established by a ‘‘leap, ’’ as there are no mediations or bridge. Ironically, if Afropessimism appeals to
transcendent intervention, it would collapse into faith. If , however, the argument rejects transcendent
intervention and focuses on committed political action, of taking responsibility for a future that offers
no guarantees, then the movement from infinite resignation becomes existential political action. At this
point, the crucial meditation would be on politics and political action. An attitude of infinite resignation
to the world without the leap of committed action would simply be pessimistic or nihilistic. Similarly, an
attitude of hope or optimism about the future would lack infinite resignation. We see here the
underlying failure of the two approaches. Yet ironically, there is a form of failure at failing in the
pessimistic turn versus the optimistic one, since if focused exclusively on resignation as the goal, then
the ‘‘act’’ of resignation would have been achieved, which, paradoxically, would be a success; it would
be a successful failing of failure. For politics to emerge, however, there are two missing elements in inward
pessimistic resignation. The first is that politics is a social phenomenon, which means it requires the
expanding options of a social world. Turning away from the social world, though a statement about
politics, is not, however, in and of itself political. The ancients from whom much western political theory or
philosophy claimed affinity had a disparaging term for individuals who resigned themselves from
political life: idio¯te¯s, a private person, one not concerned with public affairs, in a word – an idiot. I
mention western political theory because that is the hegemonic intellectual context of Afropessimism .
We don’t, however, have to end our etymological journey in ancient Greek. Extending our linguistic archaeology back a few thousand years, we
could examine the Middle Kingdom Egyptian word idi (deaf). The presumption, later taken on by the ancient Athenians and Macedonians, was
that a lack of hearing entailed isolation, at least in terms of audio speech. The
contemporary inward resignation of seeking a
form of purity from the loathsome historical reality of racial oppression, in this reading, collapses
ultimately into a form of moralism (private, normative satisfaction) instead of public responsibility born of and
borne by action. The second is the importance of power. Politics makes no sense without it. But what is
power? Eurocentric etymology points to the Latin word potis as its source, from which came the word ‘‘potent’’ as in an omnipotent god. If we
again look back further, we will notice the Middle Kingdom (2000 BCE–1700 BCE) KMT/ Egyptian word pHty, which refers to godlike strength.
Yet for those ancient Northeast Africans, even the gods’ abilities came from a source: In the Coffin Texts, HqAw or heka activates the ka
(sometimes translated as soul, spirit, or, in a word, ‘‘magic’’), which makes reality. All this
amounts to a straightforward thesis
on power as the ability with the means to make things happen. There is an alchemical quality to power.
The human world, premised on symbolic communication, brings many forms of meaning into being, and
those new meanings afford relationships that build institutions through a world of culture, a phenomenon
that Freud (1989) rightly described as ‘‘a prosthetic god.’’ It is godlike because it addresses what humanity historically sought from the gods:
protection from the elements, physical maledictions, and social forms of misery. Such
power clearly can be abused. It is where
those enabling capacities (empowerment) are pushed to the wayside in the hording of social resources into
propping up some people as gods that the legitimating practices of cultural cum political institutions
decline and stimulate pessimism and nihilism. That institutions in the Americas very rarely attempt
establishing positive relations to Blacks is the subtext of Afropessimism and this entire meditation. The
discussion points, however, to a demand for political commitment. Politics itself emerges under
different names throughout the history of our species, but the one occasioning the word ‘‘politics’’ is from
the Greek po´lis, which refers to ancient Hellenic city-states. It identifies specific kinds of activities conducted
inside the city-state, where order necessitated the resolution of conflicts through rules of discourse the
violation of which could lead to (civil) war, a breaking down of relations appropriate for ‘‘outsiders.’’
Returning to the Fanonian observation of selves and others, it is clear that imposed limitations on certain groups
amounts to impeding or blocking the option of politics . Yet, as a problem occurring within the polity, the
problem short of war becomes a political one . Returning to Afropessimistic challenges, the question
becomes this: If the problem of antiblack racism is conceded as political, where antiblack institutions of
power have, as their project, the impeding of Black power , which in effect requires barring Black access
to political institutions, then antiblack societies are ultimately threats also to politics defined as the
human negotiation of the expansion of human capabilities or more to the point: freedom. Anti-politics
is one of the reasons why societies in which antiblack racism is hegemonic are also those in which racial
moralizing dominates: moralizing stops at individuals at the expense of addressing institutions the
transformation of which would make immoral individuals irrelevant. As a political problem, it demands
a political solution. It is not accidental that Blacks continue to be the continued exemplars of unrealized
freedom. As so many from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Angela Davis (2003) and Michelle Alexander (2010) have shown, the expansion of
privatization and incarceration is squarely placed in a structure of states and civil societies premised on
the limitations of freedom (Blacks) – ironically, as seen in countries such as South Africa and the United
States, in the name of freedom. That power is a facilitating or enabling phenomenon, a functional
element of the human world, a viable response must be the establishing of relations that reach beyond
the singularity of the body. I bring this up because proponents of Afropessimism might object to this
analysis because of its appeal to a human world. If that world is abrogated, the site of struggle becomes
that which is patently not human. It is not accidental that popular race discourse refers today to ‘‘black bodies,’’ for instance,
instead of ‘‘black people.’’ As the human world is discursive, social, and relational, this abandonment amounts
to an appeal to the non-relational, the incommunicability of singularity, and appeals to the body and its
reach. At that point, it’s perhaps the psychologist, psychiatrist, or psychoanalyst who would be helpful, as turning radically inward offers the
promise of despair, narcissistic delusions of godliness, and, as Fanon also observed, madness. Even if that slippery slope were
rejected, the performative contradiction of attempting to communicate such singularity or absence
thereof requires, at least for consistency, the appropriate course of action: silence. The remaining
question for Afropessimism, especially those who are primarily academics, becomes this: Why write? It’s a question
for which, in both existential and political terms, I don’t see how an answer could be given from an Afropessimistic
perspective without the unfortunate revelation of cynicism. The marketability of Afropessimism is no doubt in the
immediate and paradoxical satisfaction in dissatisfaction it offers. We are at this point on familiar
terrain. As with ancient logical paradoxes denying the viability of time and motion, the best option, after
a moment of immobilized reflection, is , eventually, to move on, even where the pause is itself significant as
an encomium of thought.

Their theory of blackness creates a false dichotomy between ending the world or
being subjected to it, which homogenizes lived experiences and makes pragmatism
impossible
Kline 17 (David; 2017; Ph.D. candidate at Rice University; Critical Philosophy of Race, Vol. 5, Issue 1
“The Pragmatics of Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political Ontology,”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645848)

Wilderson’s critique of Agamben is certainly correct within the specific framework of a political ontology of racial positioning. His
description of anti-Black antagonism shows a powerful macropolitical sedimentation of [End Page 56] Black
suffering in which Black bodies are ontologically frozen into (non-) beings that stand in absolute political distinction
from those “who do not magnetize bullets” (Wilderson 2010, 80). In the same framework, Jared Sexton, whose work is very close to
Wilderson’s, is also right when he shows how biopolitical thought—specifically the Agambenian form centered on questions of sovereignty—
and its variant of “necropolitics” found in Mbembe has so often run aground on the figure of the slave (see Sexton 2010).5 Locating the
reality of anti-Blackness wholly within this account of political ontology does provide an undeniably effective
analysis of its violence and sedimentation over the modern world as a whole. However, in terms of a general structure , I
understand Wilderson’s (and Sexton’s) political ontology to remain tied in form to Agamben’s even as it seemingly
discounts it and therefore remains bound to some of the problems and limitations that beset such a formal
structure, as I’ll discuss in a moment. Despite the critique of Agamben’s ontological blind spots regarding the extent to which Black suffering
is non-analogous to non-black suffering, as I’ve tried to show, Wilderson keeps the basic contours of Agamben’s ontological
structure in place, maintaining a formal political ontology that expands the bottom end of the binary
structure so as to locate an absolute zero-point of political abjection within Black social death . To be clear, this
is not to say that the difference between the content and historicity of Wilderson’s social death and Agamben’s bare life does not have
profound implications for how political ontology is conceived or how questions of suffering and freedom are posed. Nor is it to say that a
congruence of formal structure linking Agamben and Wilderson should mean that their respective projects are not radically differentiated and
perhaps even opposed in terms of their broader implications and revelations. Rather, what I want to focus on is how the
absolute
prioritization of a formal ontological framework of autonomous and irreconcilable spheres of
positionality—however descriptively or epistemologically accurate in terms of a regime of ontology and its corresponding
macropolitics of anti-Blackness—ends up limiting a whole range of possible avenues of analysis that have their
proper site within what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the micropolitical. The issue here is the distinction between the macropolitical (molar)
and the micropolitical (molecular) fields of organization and becoming. Wilderson
and Afro-pessimism in general privilege the
macropolitical field in which Blackness is always already sedimented and rigidified into a political onto-
logical position that prohibits movement and the possibility of what Fred Moten calls “fugitivity.” The
absolute privileging of the macropolitical as [End Page 57] the frame of analysis tends to bracket or overshadow the
fact that “every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 213).
Where the macropolitical is structured around a politics of molarisation that immunizes itself from the threat of contingency and disruption, the
micropolitical names the field in which local and singular points of connection produce the conditions for “lines of flight, which are molecular”
(ibid., 216). The micropolitical field is where movement and resistance happens against or in excess of the
macropolitical in ways not reducible to the kind of formal binary organization that Agamben and Wilderson’s
political ontology prioritizes. Such resistance is not necessarily positive or emancipatory, as lines of flight name a contingency that
always poses the risk that whatever develops can become “capable of the worst” (ibid., 205). However, within this contingency is
also the possibility of creative lines and deterritorializations that provide possible means of positive
escape from macropolitical molarisations. Focusing on Wilderson, his absolute prioritization of a political onto-
logical structure in which the law relegates Black being into the singular position of social death
happens, I contend, at the expense of two significant things that I am hesitant to bracket for the sake of prioritizing political ontology as the
sole frame of reference for both analyzing anti-Black racism and thinking resistance within the racialized world. First, it short-circuits an
analysis of power that might reveal not only how the practices, forms, and apparatuses of anti-Black
racism have historically developed, changed, and reassembled /reterritorialized in relation to state power,
national identity, philosophical discourse, biological discourse, political discourse, and so on—changes that, despite
Wilderson’s claim that focusing on these things only “mystify” the question of ontology (Wilderson 2010, 10), surely have implications
for how racial positioning is both thought and resisted in differing historical and socio-political contexts.
To the extent that Blackness equals a singular ontological position within a macropolitical structure of
antagonism, there is almost no room to bring in the spectrum and flow of social difference and
contingency that no doubt spans across Black identity as a legitimate issue of analysis and as a site/sight
for the possibility of a range of resisting practices. This bracketing of difference leads him to make some rather sweeping and
opaquely abstract claims. For example, discussing a main character’s abortion in a prison cell in the 1976 film Bush Mama, Wilderson says,
“Dorothy will abort her baby at the clinic or on the floor of her prison cell, not because she fights for—and either wins [End Page 58] or loses—
the right to do so, but because she is one of 35 million accumulated and fungible (owned and exchangeable) objects living among 230 million
subjects—which is to say, her will is always already subsumed by the will of civil society” (Wilderson 2010, 128, italics mine). What I want to
press here is how Wilderson’s statement, made in the sole frame of a totalizing political ontology overshadowing all other levels of sociality,
flattens out the social difference within, and even the possibility of, a micropolitical social field of 35
million Black people living in the U nited States. Such a flattening reduces the optic of anti-Black racism as
well as Black sociality to the frame of political ontology where Blackness remains stuck in a singular
position of abjection. The result is a severe analytical limitation in terms of the way Blackness (as well as other
racial positions) exists across an extremely wide field of sociality that is comprised of differing intensities of
forces and relational modes between various institutional , political, socio-economic, religious, sexual, and other social
conjunctures. Within Wilderson’s political ontological frame , it seems that these conjunctures are excluded—
or at least bracketed—as having any bearing at all on how anti-Black power functions and is resisted across highly differentiated contexts.
There is only the binary ontological distinction of Black and Human being; only a macropolitics of
sedimented abjection. Furthermore, arriving at the second analytical expense of Wilderson’s prioritization of political ontology, I
suggest that such a flattening of the social field of Blackness rigidly delimits what counts as legitimate
political resistance. If the framework for thinking resistance and the possibility of creating another
world is reduced to rigid ontological positions defined by the absolute power of the law, and if Black existence is
understood only as ontologically fixed at the extreme zero point of social death without recourse to anything within its own
position qua Blackness, then there is not much room for strategizing or even imagining resistance to anti-
Blackness that is not wholly limited to expressions and events of radically apocalyptic political violence:
the law is either destroyed entirely, or there is no freedom . This is not to say that I am necessarily against radical political
violence or its use as an effective tactic. Nor is to say that I think the law should be left unchallenged in its total operation, but rather that
there might be other and more pragmatically oriented practices of resistance that do not necessarily
have the absolute destruction of the law as their immediate aim that should count as genuine
resistance to anti-Blackness. For Wilderson, like Agamben, anything less than an absolute overturning [End Page 59]
of the order of things, the violent destruction and annihilation of the full structure of antagonisms, is
deemed as “[having nothing] to do with Black liberation” (quoted in Zug 2010). Of course, the desire for the absolute
overturning of the currently existing world, the decisive end of the existing world and the arrival of a new world in which
“Blacks do not magnetize bullets” should be absolutely affirmed . Further, the severity and gratuitous nature of the
macropolitics of anti-Blackness in relation to the possibility of a movement towards freedom should not be bracketed or displaced for the sake
of appealing to any non-Black grammar of exploitation or alienation (Wilderson 2010, 142). The
question I want to pose, however, is
how the insistence on the absolute priority of framing this world within a rigid structure of formal
ontological positions can only revert to what amounts to a kind of negative theological and eschatological
blank horizon in which actually existing social sites and modes of resisting praxis are displaced and
devalued by notions of whatever it is that might arrive from beyond. It seems that Wilderson, again, is close to
Agamben on this point, whose ontological structure also severely delimits what might count as genuine resistance to the regime of sovereignty.
As Dominick LaCapra points out regarding the possibility of liberation outside of Agamben’s formal ontological structure of bare life and
sovereignty, A further enigmatic conjunction in Agamben is between pure possibility and the reduction of being to mere or naked life, for it is
the emergence of mere naked life in accomplished nihilism that simultaneously generates, as a kind of miraculous antibody or creation
ex nihilo, pure possibility or utterly
blank utopianism not limited by the constraints of the past or by normative
structures of any sort. (LaCapra 2009, 168) With life’s ontological reduction to the abjection of bare life or social
death, the only possible way out, it seems, is the impossible possibility of what Agamben refers to as the “suspension of the
suspension,” the laying aside of the distinction between bare life and political life, the “Shabbat of both animal and man” (Agamben 2003, 92).
It is in this sense that Agamben offers, again in the words of LaCapra, a “negative theology in extremis . . . an
empty utopianism of
pure, unlimited possibility” (LaCapra 2009, 166). The result is a discounting and devaluing of other , perhaps more
pragmatic and less eschatological, practices of resistance. With the “all or nothing” [End Page 60] approach
that posits anything less than the absolute suspension of the current state of things as unable to address
the violence and abjection of bare life, there is not much left in which to appeal than a kind of apocalyptic,
messianic, and contentless eschatological future space defined by whatever this world is not .

Pragmatism’s crucial to counter biopolitical governance and political ontology – this

requires working against and within structures that shape blackness
Kline 17 (David; 2017; Ph.D. candidate at Rice University; Critical Philosophy of Race, Vol. 5, Issue 1
“The Pragmatics of Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political Ontology,”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645848)
As I’ve argued, Wilderson’s flattening of Black social heterogeneity and the narrowing of any possibility of resistance outside the total apocalyptic destruction of the existing world is a result of his political ontology and

macropolitics of racial positions revolving around the formal poles of Master/Human and social death. The delimitation of social and political possibility happens
both in terms of Black and non-Black resistance to the structure of the racialized world . Of course, I do not want to argue for a
coalition politics or any kind of reconciliatory framework that would find a solution to anti-Blackness in some form of liberal multiculturalism or “colorblindness” that ignores the real and particular violence of white antagonism. I

do, however, want to argue for the sheer possibility of opening or breaking through the closure (s), of lines of

flight that mark a multiplicity of encounters and possibilities between forces, technologies, bodies , and what
Foucault calls dispositifs that run across varying positions and social sites that are not wholly reducible to fixed

ontological positions and which potentially provide connections and flows that break through to an
outside of political ontological sedimentation . Focusing on how the dispositifs of biopolitical forms of
governance—as opposed to the legal and formal ontological structure of sovereignty—take into account
“processes of life” as the basis for governance , Foucault theorizes what he calls the “aleatory” body that is the target of biopower and exists prior to any imposition of
governance or domination. Appealing to the “freedom” of the aleatory body is not some kind of idealized notion of the body that ignores the macropolitical fact of Black suffering’s undeniable gratuitous nature. This is

not an appeal to what Sexton calls the “in spite of the terror” argument, where notions of Black freedom are understood merely as a kind of concession to
the deeper realities at hand (Sexton 2010, 35). Rather, it is to start with the basic fact of the material body in space and time

and the idea that “resistance comes first” (Foucault 1997, 167). [End Page 61] This point is particularly salient within the
biopolitical frame because, as Deleuze puts it, “when power becomes biopower resistance becomes the power of
life, a vital power that cannot be confined within species, environment or the paths of a particular
diagram” (Deleuze 1988, 92). In other words, resistance is the micropolitical force of life that can never be fully confined or
contained within a political ontological frame (or diagram) of antagonisms .6 In terms of Wilderson’s ontology of social positioning, we might
say, following Foucault and Deleuze into Fred Moten’s Black optimism,7 that Black (aleatory) life always already precedes the gratuitous violence of an antagonism. Blackness, then, is not wholly reducible to a political ontological
position, but rather is the movement prior to and against the imposing force of any violent constitution—or, as Nathanial Mackey says, that “insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion” (Mackey 1986, 34).

Even though an antagonism functions as the political ontological constitution of a Black being as socially
dead in relation to civil society, there is still an even deeper level that precedes ontological constitution
itself: the movement and resistance of Black life .8 In In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Moten makes inseparable Blackness and resistance with this
provocative opening sentence: “the history of blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist ” (Moten 2003, 1).
Flowing in the vein of Adorno’s anti-identitarian negative dialectics and its prioritization of the object, Moten reads the history of Blackness, which for him is nothing other than a history of certain performativity as improvisation, as
a history of the object’s absolute objection to the capture of identity, the fugitive drive towards freedom where an untraceable, stateless, and ungoverned life of “improvisational immanence” is always becoming (ibid., 255n1).

Not ignoring or bracketing the problem of political ontological antagonism (although he does reject describing it in terms of social death),
he nevertheless opens the frame of analysis and social possibility to the aleatory field of life itself, or,
micropolitics. Tracing the Black radical tradition through everything from its poetry to its music to its
banal everydayness, Moten shows Blackness as a counter-force sparked into movement by the imposing
and regulating force of anti-Black power. In critical yet sympathetic opposition to Wilderson and other Afro-pessimists ,
Moten rejects the notion that a full analysis of Blackness should be reduced to the imposition of social
death. Or, to put it another way, Moten rejects the notion that Blackness is reduced to a fixed ontological position within a macropolitics that has no recourse to [End Page 62] forms of life that might resist and evade the
imposition of an antagonism. Rather, Blackness is a counter-force to ontology itself . As he puts it, blackness [is not (just)]

ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is supposed to have brought it into existence
but . . . blackness is prior to ontology; or in a slight variation of what [Nahum] Chandler would say, blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-
foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space. (Moten 2014, 739) Here, Moten is riffing on Chandler’s idea of “paraontology,” which is in specific distinction from political ontology.

Rather than an account of being

Paraontology, as Moten describes it, is “the transformative pressure blackness puts on philosophical concepts, categories, and methods” (Moten 2008, 215n3).

that seeks to uncover an essence or totalizing account of a particular social or political position , paraontology
describes the mode of being that is always already resisting the imposing logic of (political) ontology. Chandler articulates this phenomenon through Du Bois’ double consciousness, honing in on the “in between” of its double
identity. As he says, ”between” would delimit any simple notion of its spatiality or presupposed relationality. It would instead accede to the most general disruption of boundaries. . . . “[B]etween” dissipates any simple notion of
inside and outside, of above and below. . . . Du Bois’s inscription may be understood to name the opening of the sense of space, of spaciality, rather than confirm it. (Chandler 2014, 6–7) Chandler is describing the way

Blackness—in all of its social scope and complexity—overflows or breaks open the boundaries of any
formal imposition, the way Blackness cannot be reduced to a frame of abjection or the irreconcilable
position of an antagonism. From this perspective, Blackness is a rhizome, a dynamic, creative, and desiring counter-
force in which lines of flight present possible modes of freedom and sociality in excess to political
ontological positioning. As a paraontological phenomenon, Chandler and Moten understand Blackness as a unique and specific exertion within modernity—which might also be called the historical
regime of racial political ontology—that challenges every schema of formalization and [End Page 63] positional fixity. In this way, from this vantage, the history of Blackness is read as a

history of a certain performativity of the drive towards a freedom not determined by the terms or
boundaries of ontology, as a history of the object’s absolute objection to the macropolitical capture of
identity. This paraontological movement of Black fugitivity, as Moten has coined it, calls into question the framing of Blackness wholly within a political ontology that seeks to index and describe Black life in terms of pure
abjection. Again, Moten and Chandler do not in any way downplay the abjection to which Blackness is given in the modern world. Indeed, Moten considers his project and that of Afro-pessimism as two sides of a mutual project

where “Black optimism and Afro-pessimism are asymptotic” (Moten 2014, 778). Yet, by insisting on the possibilities of Black life within an immanent
and micropolitical field of becoming that moves in resistance to a rigid political ontology of social death,
Moten taps into something vital that precedes the force of imposition, the force of law, or the force of
the structure of White supremacy and its sedimented political ontological order . In this way, he also expands the frame of analysis and
praxis so that a much wider field of resources and possibilities are available in terms of a project of liberation that goes beyond the political ontological frame. This is where I suggest the decentering

of political ontology and the inclusion of the Black aleatory body as the site of struggle, evasion, and
creation becomes a pragmatic mode of framing the problem and thinking a purely practical politics of
both spontaneous creation and a calculated movement against the political ontological regime of anti-
Blackness. Although Moten would certainly object to describing this turn by way of a “pragmatic politics,” I suggest that his “Black optimism” and Chandler’s
paraontology find congruence with a kind of Foucaultian-Deleuzian pragmatics which, as Paul Patton describes Deleuze’s philosophy, “[enables] a form of description
which is immediately practical” and an “ethico-political conception of philosophy as oriented towards
the possibility of change” (Patton 2003, 16, 17). From this angle, the accurate representation of an ontological reality, while
certainly necessary and crucial to the task of naming the full scope of the problem and thinking a way
forward, does not take precedence over the task of creating new concepts and lines of flight that should
be judged on their effectiveness not in terms of properly representing an ontological problem, but in
terms of their concrete effects within a wide field of contexts, specific socio-political problems, and
conjunctures. As Deleuze and Guattari describe how pragmatics marks a study attuned to the complexity, [End Page 64] contingency, and potential danger that defines the micropolitical, “the study of the dangers of
each line is the object of pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to represent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and draw lines, marking their mixtures as well as their distinctions” (Deleuze

Pragmatics, in this way, is all about drawing lines and making maps against macropolitical
and Guattari 1987, 227).

sedimentations that lead somewhere, that create something new . Such pragmatic orientation is
especially pertinent in the contemporary biopolitical frame as Foucault understands it. As I’ve already described, Foucault’s biopolitics is premised on the idea
that when politics takes the biological body as its primary aim and object, as opposed to sovereign power’s object of the legal subject and its constitutive negative, then there is introduced into politics the possibility, as Cary Wolfe

The increasing complexity of bodily

notes, “for life to burst through power’s systematic operations in ways that are more and more difficult to anticipate” (Wolfe 2014, 158).

knowledge and the power that takes this knowledge as its operating principle means that both risk and
possibility increase in terms of what the body can do and what can be done to the body . The pragmatic
thrust of this emerges when situating it at the level of micropolitics , where, as I’ve been describing, Deleuze and Guattari locate the conditions for
lines of flight and where “there is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 216). Out of any sedimentation

The pragmatic possibility or potential , then, is that there is always a

there will always be deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

simultaneity of the micropolitical and the macropolitical that provides the conditions for an ongoing
search for new tactics, orientations, assemblages, vocabularies, and processes of becoming that are
aimed practically towards change: “What matters is to break through the wall, even if one has to become-black like John Brown. George Jackson. ‘I may take flight, but all the while I am
fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon!” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 277). This emphasis on pragmatics and lines of flight—both in potentially negative and positive terms (i.e. in terms of pure contingency)—provides a much more
expansive level for framing the problem of anti-Blackness that is not reducible to fixed political ontological positions and the macropolitical plane. Finally, I suggest this kind of pragmatics is what Moten and Harney describe as

reaching out to find connection” (Moten and Harney 2013, 5). Pragmatics
“fugitive planning and Black study,” what Jack Halberstam [End Page 65] characterizes simply as “

finds a footing in the highly dynamic and shifting terrain of power relations and its multiplicity of
conjunctures that signal the condition of movement and connection . It finds its enactment in sites such
as “the little Negro’s church and logos and gathering, this gathering in and against the word, alongside and through the word and the world as hold, manger,
wilderness, tomb, upper room, and cell” (Moten 2014, 775). Within these and other sites of micropolitical connection and the practices that take place in them, there is flight, resistance, and

the creation of something new and productive . The inclusion of these sites and practices within the
analytical frame and critique of anti-Blackness provide a much wider set of resources for thinking the
complexity of the full scope of the political field that exists in excess to the political ontological frame ,
and, in the same way, orients the fight against anti-Blackness in practical (though potentially no less revolutionary), rather than
apocalyptic, terms. This, I argue, does not have to mitigate or pass over Sexton’s call that “slavery must be theorized maximally if its abolition is to reach the proper level” (Sexton 2011, 33). The
maximum theorization of slavery and anti-Blackness does not need be completely hedged in by a
political ontological frame. However, analytical expansion beyond the political ontological frame does mean
locating a positive emphasis on what Sexton disparagingly identifies as a tendency towards “forces of
mitigation that would transform the world through a coalition of a thousand tiny causes” (ibid.). Taking Sexton’s (and
Wilderson’s) call of a maximum theorization of slavery/anti-Blackness with full seriousness, I wonder what the proper level of abolition could possibly mean other than a pragmatic coalition—or a

micropolitics—of a thousand tiny causes. As I’ve argued, thinking what this might mean would certainly necessitate an expansive analytics of power

relations flowing over a highly complex field of forces, intensities, technologies, and dispositifs that together form a
micropolitical field far in excess of sovereign power and the political ontological frame. Out of such an analytics , a pragmatics that finds its possibility in

the micropolitical field of movement and flight emerges as the condition for an ongoing life of
resistance, connection, and a movement toward freedom . [End Page 66]

Antiblackness is not ontological – it’s predicated on a multitude of contingencies.

Policy action’s crucial to combat structures that maintain antiblackness and white
supremacy
Bouie 13 (Jamelle Bouie, Jamelle Bouie is chief political correspondent for Slate Magazine, and a
political analyst for CBS News. He covers campaigns, elections, and national affairs., 3/11/13, “Making
(and Dismantling) Racism,” The American Prospect, http://prospect.org/article/making-and-dismantling-
racism)
Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been exploring the intersection of race and public policy, with a focus on white supremacy as a
driving force in political decisions at all levels of government. This has led him to two conclusions: First, that anti-black
racism as we
understand it is a creation of explicit policy choices—the decision to exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize
Africans and their descendants has as much to do with racial prejudice as does any intrinsic tribalism . And
second, that it's possible to dismantle this prejudice using public policy . Here is Coates in his own words: Last night I had
the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that
racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgan’s work and actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result. If
we accept that racism is a creation , then we must then accept that it can be destroyed . And if we accept
that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be
destroyed by methods kin to creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately
destroyed by policy. Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I don’t believe the law created racism any more than it can create
lust or greed or envy or hatred. It can encourage or mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology – it can create racist structures as in
the Jim Crow South or Greater Israel. But it can no more end these things that it can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for
the targets of such hatred to become inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more manageable goal
than TNC’s utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making, but I'm not sure it's relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that
"Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan writes. And if you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyalty—basically just
prejudice—then Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea that the law can "create racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or
hatred." But Coates
is making a more precise claim: That there's nothing natural about the black/white divide
that has defined American history. White Europeans had contact with black Africans well before the
trans-Atlantic slave trade without the emergence of an anti-black racism. It took particular choices made
by particular people—in this case, plantation owners in colonial Virginia—to make black skin a stigma, to
make the "one drop rule" a defining feature of American life for more than a hundred years. By
enslaving African indentured servants and allowing their white counterparts a chance for upward
mobility, colonial landowners began the process that would make white supremacy the ideology of
America. The position of slavery generated a stigma that then justified continued enslavement— blacks are
lowly, therefore we must keep them as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't built to reflect racism as much as it was built in tandem with
it. And later policy, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, further entrenched white supremacist attitudes .
Block black people from owning homes, and they're forced to reside in crowded slums. Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny
homeownership to blacks, under the view that they're unfit for suburbs.
 at: social death
Social death is wrong---on an ontological level slaves were never stripped of their
humanity
Mbembe 17 – Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic
Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg [Achilles, 2017, Critique of Black Reason,
Chapter Two: The Well of Fantasies, Translated by Laurent Dubois, pg 46, Duke University Press] AMarb

**gender edited – change denoted by brackets

Through the triple mechanism of capture, removal, and objectification, the slave was forcibly locked within a system that
prevented him [them] from freely making of his [their] life—and from his life—something true, something
with its own consistency that could stand on its own. Everything produced by the slave was taken from him: the products of
his labor, offspring, the work of his mind. He authored nothing that fully belonged to him. Slaves were considered mere
merchandise, objects of luxury or utility to be bought and sold to others. At the same time, however,
they were human beings endowed with the ability to speak, capable of creating and using tools. Often
deprived of family ties, they were deprived as well of inheritance and of the enjoyment of the fruits of their own labor. Those to whom they
belonged, and who extracted their unpaid labor, denied them their full humanity. Yet, on a purely ontological level at least,
their humanity was never entirely erased. They constituted, by the force of things, a supplemental
humanity engaged in constant struggle to escape imprisonment and repetition, and driven by a desire
to return to the place where autonomous creation had once been possible. The suspended humanity of
the slave was defined by the fact that he was [they were] condemned to reconstitute himself
[themselves] perpetually, to announce his [their] radical, unsinkable desire, and to seek liberty or
vengeance. This was especially true when the enslaved refused the radical abdication of the subject that
was demanded of them. Although legally defined as movable property, slaves always remained human, despite the
cruelty, degradation, and dehumanization directed at them. Through their labor in service of the master,
they continued to create a world. Through gesture and speech, they wove relationships and a universe
of meaning, inventing languages, religions, dances, and rituals and creating “community.”18 Their
destitution and the abjection to which they were subjected never entirely eliminated their capacity to
create symbols. By its very existence, the community of the enslaved constantly tore at the veil of hypocrisy
and lies in which slave-owning societies clothed themselves. The slaves were capable of rebellion and at
times disposed of their own lives through suicide, thus dispossessing their masters of their so-called
property and de facto abolishing the link of servitude. Those who were burdened with the name “Black”
were forcibly placed in a world apart, yet they retained the characteristics that made them human
beyond subjection. Over time they produced ways of thinking and languages that were truly their own.
They invented their own literatures, music, and ways of celebrating the divine. They were forced to
found their own institutions—schools, newspapers, political organizations, a public sphere dif ferent
from the official public sphere. To a large extent, the term “Black” is the sign of minoritization and
confinement. It is an island of repose in the midst of racial oppression and objective dehumanization.

Reducing black people to fungible bodies and reading their experiences through pain
creates the worst form of depoliticization – not only do they disregard black agency
and resistance, they further perpetuate a narrative of white domination
Kelley 16, Robin D.G. Kelley is one of the most distinguished experts on African American studies and a
celebrated professor who has lectured at some of America’s highest learning institutions. He is currently
Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. 3/22/16, “Black Study,
Black Struggle,” http://www.blackagendareport.com/black_study_black_struggle, NN
Second only to a desire for increased diversity, better mental health services were a chief priority for student protesters. Activists framed their concerns and grievances in the language of
personal trauma. We shouldn’t be surprised. While every generation of black Americans has experienced unrelenting violence, this is the first one compelled to witness virtually all of it, to

We are also talking about a

endure the snuffing out of black lives in real time, looped over and over again, until the next murder knocks it off the news.

generation that has lived through two of the longest wars in U.S. history, raised on a culture of spectacle
where horrific acts of violence are readily available on their smartphones. What Henry Giroux insightfully identifies as an
addiction does nothing to inure or desensitize young people to violence . On the contrary, it anchors violence in their collective
consciousness, produces fear and paranoia – wrapped elegantly in thrill – and shrouds the many ways capitalism, militarism, and racism are killing black and brown people. So one can

easily see why the language of trauma might appeal to black students. Trauma is real; it is no joke . Mental
health services and counseling are urgently needed. But reading black experience through trauma can easily slip into thinking

of ourselves as victims and objects rather than agents, subjected to centuries of gratuitous violence
that have structured and overdetermined our very being. In the argot of our day, “bodies” – vulnerable and
threatening bodies – increasingly stand in for actual people with names, experiences, dreams, and
desires. I suspect that the popularity of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), especially among black college students, rests on his singular emphasis on fear, trauma,
and the black body. He writes: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a
human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the
river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. . . . The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so

Coates implies that the person is the brain, and the brain just another organ to be crushed with the
precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings.”

makes the startling declaration that enslaved people “knew nothing but
rest of the body’s parts. Earlier in the book, he

chains.” I do not deny the violence Coates so eloquently describes here, and I am sympathetic to his atheistic skepticism. But
what sustained enslaved African people was a memory of freedom, dreams of seizing it, and
conspiracies to enact it – fugitive planning, if you will. If we reduce the enslaved to mere fungible bodies, we cannot
possibly understand how they created families, communities, sociality; how they fled and loved and
worshiped and defended themselves; how they created the world’s first social democracy. “Trauma is
real. But reading black experience through trauma can lead to thinking of ourselves as victims rather
than agents.” Moreover, to identify anti-black violence as heritage may be true in a general sense, but it
obscures the dialectic that produced and reproduced the violence of a regime dependent on black life
for its profitability. It was, after all, the resisting black body that needed “correction.” Violence was used not only to
break bodies but to discipline people who refused enslavement. And the impulse to resist is neither involuntary nor solitary. It is a choice made in community,

made possible by community, and informed by memory, tradition, and witness. If Africans were entirely
compliant and docile, there would have been no need for vast expenditures on corrections, security, and
violence. Resistance is our heritage. And resistance is our healing. Through collective struggle, we alter our
circumstances; contain, escape, or possibly eviscerate the source of trauma; recover our bodies; reclaim
and redeem our dead; and make ourselves whole. It is difficult to see this in a world where words such as trauma, PTSD, micro-aggression, and
triggers have virtually replaced oppression, repression, and subjugation. Naomi Wallace, a brilliant playwright whose work explores trauma in the context of race, sexuality, class, war, and
empire, muses: “Mainstream America is less threatened by the ‘trauma’ theory because it doesn’t place economic justice at its core and takes the focus out of the realm of justice and into

emphasizing
psychology; out of the streets, communities, into the singular experience (even if experienced in common) of the individual.” Similarly, George Lipsitz observes that

“interiority,” personal pain, and feeling elevates “the cultivation of sympathy over the creation of social
justice.” This is partly why demands for reparations to address historical and ongoing racism are so
antithetical to modern liberalism. “Through collective struggle, we alter our circumstances; contain,
escape, or possibly eviscerate the source of trauma .” Managing trauma does not require dismantling
structural racism, which is why university administrators focus on avoiding triggers rather than implementing zero-tolerance policies for racism or sexual assault. Buildings will be
renamed and safe spaces for people of color will be created out of a sliver of university real estate, but proposals to eliminate tuition and forgive student debt for the descendants of the
dispossessed and the enslaved will be derided as absurd. This is also why diversity and cultural-competency training are the most popular strategies for addressing campus racism. As if racism
were a manifestation of our “incompetent” handling of “difference.” If we cannot love the other, we can at least learn to hear, respect, understand, and “tolerate” her. Cultural competency
also means reckoning with white privilege, coming to terms with unconscious bias and the myriad ways white folks benefit from current racial arrangements. Powerful as this might be, the
solution to racism still is shifted to the realm of self-help and human resources, resting on self-improvement or the hiring of a consultant or trainer to help us reach our goal. Cultural-
competency training, greater diversity, and demands for multicultural curricula represent both a resistance to and manifestation of our current “postracial” moment. In Are We All Postracial
Yet? (2015), David Theo Goldberg correctly sees postracialism as a neoliberal revision of multicultural discourse, whose proposed remedies to address racism would in fact resuscitate late-
century multiculturalism. But why hold on to the policies and promises of multiculturalism and diversity, especially since they have done nothing to dislodge white supremacy? Indeed I want to
suggest that the triumph of multiculturalism marked a defeat for a radical anti-racist vision. True, multiculturalism emerged in response to struggles waged by the Black Freedom movement
and other oppressed groups in the 1960s and ’70s. But the programmatic adoption of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism vampirized the energy of a radical movement that began by
demanding the complete transformation of the social order and the eradication of all forms of racial, gender, sexual, and class hierarchy. The point of liberal multiculturalism was not to
address the historical legacies of racism, dispossession, and injustice but rather to bring some people into the fold of a “society no longer seen as racially unjust.” What did it bring us? Black
elected officials and black CEOs who helped manage the greatest transfer of wealth to the rich and oversee the continued erosion of the welfare state; the displacement, deportation, and
deterioration of black and brown communities; mass incarceration; and planetary war. We talk about breaking glass ceilings in corporate America while building more jail cells for the rest. The
triumph of liberal multiculturalism also meant a shift from a radical anti-capitalist critique to a politics of recognition. This means, for example, that we now embrace the right of same-sex
couples to marry so long as they do not challenge the institution itself, which is still modeled upon the exchanging of property; likewise we accept the right of people of color, women, and
queer people to serve in the military, killing and torturing around the world. “I want to suggest that the triumph of multiculturalism marked a defeat for a radical anti-racist vision.” At the same
time, contemporary calls for cultural competence and tolerance reflect neoliberal logic by emphasizing individual responsibility and suffering, shifting race from the public sphere to the psyche.
The postracial, Goldberg writes, “renders individuals solely accountable for their own actions and expressions, not for their group’s.” Tolerance in its multicultural guise, as Wendy Brown
taught us, is the liberal answer to managing difference but with no corresponding transformation in the conditions that, in the first place, marked certain bodies as suspicious, deviant, abject,

Depoliticization involves construing inequality,

or illegible. Tolerance, therefore, depoliticizes genuine struggles for justice and power:

subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and political
solutions, as personal and individual, on the one hand, or as natural, religious, or cultural on the
other. Tolerance works along both vectors of depoliticization – it personalizes and it naturalizes or culturalizes – and sometimes it intertwines them. But how can we
embrace our students and acknowledge their pain while remaining wary of a culture that reduces
structural oppression to misunderstanding and psychology ? Love, Study, Struggle Taped inside the top drawer of my desk is a small scrap of
paper with three words scrawled across it: “Love, Study, Struggle .” It serves as a daily reminder of what I am supposed to be doing. Black study and

resistance must begin with love. James Baldwin understood love-as-agency probably better than anyone. For him it meant to love ourselves as black people; it
meant making love the motivation for making revolution; it meant envisioning a society where everyone is embraced, where there is

no oppression, where every life is valued – even those who may once have been our oppressors. It did not
mean seeking white people’s love and acceptance or seeking belonging in the world created by our oppressor. In The Fire Next Time (1963), he is unequivocal: “I do not know many Negroes
who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on
this planet.” But here is the catch: if we are committed to genuine freedom, we have no choice but to love all. To love all is to fight relentlessly to end exploitation and oppression everywhere,

even on behalf of those who think they hate us. This was Baldwin’s point – perhaps his most misunderstood and reviled point. To love this way requires relentless
struggle, deep study, and critique. Limiting our ambit to suffering, resistance, and achievement is not
enough. We must go to the root – the historical, political, social, cultural, ideological, material, economic
root – of oppression in order to understand its negation, the prospect of our liberation . Going to the root illuminates
what is hidden from us, largely because most structures of oppression and all of their various entanglements are simply not visible and not felt. For example, if we argue that

state violence is merely a manifestation of anti-blackness because that is what we see and feel, we
are left with no theory of the state and have no way of understanding racialized police violence in
places such as Atlanta and Detroit, where most cops are black, unless we turn to some metaphysical
explanation. For my generation, the formal classroom was never the space for deep critique precisely because it was not a place of love. The classroom was – and still is – a
performative space, where faculty and students compete with each other. Through study groups, we created our own intellectual communities held together by principle and love, though the
specters of sectarianism, ego, and just-plain childishness blurred our vision and threatened our camaraderie. Still, the political study group was our lifeblood – both on and off campus. We
lived by Karl Marx’s pithy 1844 statement: “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly
what we have to accomplish in the present – I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of
conflict with the powers that be.” “If we argue that state violence is merely a manifestation of anti-blackness because that is what we see and feel, we are left with no theory of the state and
have no way of understanding racialized police violence.” Study groups introduced me to C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
Vladimir Lenin, Chancellor Williams, George E. M. James, Shulamith Firestone, Kwame Nkrumah, Kwame Turé, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Chinweizu Ibekwe, Amílcar Cabral, and
others. These texts were our sources of social critique and weapons in our class war on the bourgeois canon. As self-styled activist-intellectuals, it never occurred to us to refuse to read a text
simply because it validated the racism, sexism, free-market ideology, and bourgeois liberalism against which we railed. Nothing was off limits. On the contrary, delving into these works only
sharpened our critical faculties. Love and study cannot exist without struggle, and struggle cannot occur solely inside the refuge we call the university. Being grounded in the world we wish to

The most radical

make is fundamental. As I argued in Freedom Dreams nearly fifteen years ago, “Social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions.

ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations
confronting systems of oppression.” Ironically I wrote these words with my students in mind, many of whom were involved in campus struggles, feeling a bit
rudderless but believing that the only way to make themselves into authentic activists was to leave the books and radical theories at home or in their dorms. The undercommons offers
students a valuable model of study that takes for granted the indivisibility of thought and struggle, not unlike its antecedent, the Mississippi Freedom Schools.
 2ac essentialism da
The alt fails to account for international dynamics and essentializes blackness.
Wright 15 – (2015, Michelle, PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Professor
of African American Studies and Comparative Literature Studies at Northwestern University, “Physics of
Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology,” pp. 147-55, endnote on p. 188)
When interpellated through the Middle Passage epistemology, Blackness has a limited set of qualitative values or denotations that link it to the events in that epistemology such as the commitment to collective and individual struggle, “racial uplift,” and the maintenance of strong

generally, the Middle Passage epistemology like established Black linear

communities through “traditional” or heteropatriarchal family structures. More ( other

progress or antiprogress narratives e.g. Afropessimism links all Black collectives — , Afrocentrism, PanAfricanism, Negritude, )10 also

across the Diaspora to the experience of racism and the need to overcome it—so how can Ramses II be “Black”? Even further, what does it mean for us to claim him as “Black”? It is hard to interpellate
Ramses (or any of the other African kings, queens, leaders, intellectuals, politicians, scientists, etc., whose physiognomy we would acknowledge as stereotypically “Black”) within the qualitative definition of Middle Passage Blackness as making common cause with African Americans—or

any other “Black” community fighting racism and seeking socioeconomic and political equality in the African Diaspora. In attempting to interpellate Ramses within this definition, we produce Blackness as a fixed
must

identity that transcends time and space ; through this, Ramses no longer belongs to his own spacetime but retroactively becomes a denigrated “Negro” who must combat his oppression. A paradox or—as Massey terms

It is the qualitative
it, “a dichotomous result”—now confronts us: was Ramses II a Black freedom fighter or a ruler of extraordinary and largely unquestioned power, one of the greatest and most oppressive in the history of Egyptian pharaohs?

definition of Black progress that creates this dichotomy, a paradox that then “empties out” all meaning
in qualitative collapse . The attempt to interpellate Ramses II through a Black progress narrative exposes the continuing attempt and subsequent failure of the progress narrative to interpellate Ramses. He is Black because he is a Black African, but he is
not Black, because neither “Black” nor “African” operated as identities in Ramses’s spacetime. Ramses II’s life speaks to the greatness of African empires, but his unapologetic use of massive slave labor should “expel” him from Black progressive membership, the same way in which some

While we should not lose sleep over the “odd individual” whose
discourses attempt to expel Blacks whose actions deliberately harmed other Blacks. perhaps terrible

behaviors bar them from a Black progress narrative

him, her, or full or perhaps even partial mention in , there are other Black individuals who are barred from mention who have not acted against the

This dichotomy threatens to create interpellative problems for Blacks who

principle of striving for collective progress. also , unlike the Egyptian pharaoh,

move across the Atlantic at the same time as millions of Black Africans are being sailed to and sold into
the Americas but not in the same directions
, Black slaves transported outside of the , veering away from our progress narrative.

Americas to Europe, India, and elsewhere do not retain a collective identity They disappear . are sold individually and

into households factories, fields roads and city streets

, perhaps From the point of view of
, or country , intersecting with populations at large.

Black linear narratives progress their histories have

, progress has not been achieved because the collective has evanesced (and is therefore unable to achieve its goal of overcoming racism), or read another way,

become irrelevant to the collective historical theme of overcoming racism Qualitatively speaking, it .

appears difficult if not impossible to interpellate Blackness using a Black Atlantic linear narrative in a progress

significant and lasting way . In “The World Is All of One Piece: The African Diaspora and Transportation to Australia,” which is included in Ruth Simms Hamilton’s book Routes of Passage, Cassandra Pybus reprises a version of Sidney Mintz’s

A transnational historical consciousness and a capacity to encompass experience

question about the qualitative limits of Black Atlantic studies:

in disparate time and space are great strengths of African diaspora studies In so far as there is a .

weakness, it is that the Atlantic world remains the locus of discussion While some attention has begun .

to drift toward the Indian Ocean, less has been directed toward the distant Pacific scholarship . . . . In the diaspora at the detailed penal
transportation records we can find information about the African end of the eighteenth century that is very hard to come by elsewhere and that points in directions in which historians may not otherwise look.11 Pybus understands that her topic is framed by African Diaspora studies yet
constrained by its “Atlantic focus”; she then observes that despite this swirl of scholarly activity in the Atlantic, there is a “drift” and “direction” toward the Indian Ocean and the “distant Pacific.” This passage draws a connecting line moving horizontally (well, south by southeast) from the
moment of the American Revolution in the Middle Passage timeline to other moments in those kingdoms and empires that border the Indian Ocean and, more specifically, to the moment of the British penal colony of Australia. By moving us horizontally into the Pacific, Pybus traces the
journey of those (primarily) U.S. Blacks who allied with the defeated British and accompanied them on their return to England. Once there, the promised support from the Crown never materialized, and many of these former soldiers, spies, and support staff found themselves on the
London streets. These (primarily) men would have been in competition with an already burgeoning class of the dispossessed filling the streets of London and other industrial centers. As Robert Hughes argues in his monumental history of the settling of white Australia, The Fatal Shore,
land grabs by the aristocracy and the replacement of cottage industries with large industrialized factories deprived farmers, laborers, and urban workers of their former careers as well as prospects for new ones (many machines, such as looms, required fewer adult workers). Theft,
especially with the poor now rubbing shoulders with the wealthy in crowded urban centers, skyrocketed, and Parliament responded with deeply punitive measures; to steal a bit of ribbon or bread could send you to prison or heavy labor or, most fearful of all, condemn you to “transport”
(to a British penal colony). With the American colonies no longer available for convicts, Britain turned to its recently neglected “discovery” of Australia as a convenient replacement, and so white and Black Britons, along with a few U.S. and Caribbean Blacks, found themselves transported
as part of the First Fleet settlers. Pybus’s second horizontal reading comes, counterintuitively, mostly through records created by hierarchies such as court, maritime, colonial, and penal records, due to the paucity of “horizontal” archives (correspondence between peers, diaries, etc.).
Pybus, not unlike Hughes in The Fatal Shore, constructs a horizontal narrative of these Black convicts and settlers through (unavoidably) mostly vertical archival sources: state, judicial, colonial, and penal records that read these human beings as mere numbers filling ships, accepting
punishment, and perhaps enriching the Crown through forced labor. To an even greater extent than Hughes, Pybus works to retrieve the very multivalent human experiences behind these records of discipline and punishment, to see the interactions denoted, denounced, and pronounced

Yet despite two horizontal readings qualitative

through their eyes, so to speak, looking out horizontally rather than down from the (at least figurative) heights of the judge’s bench and foreman’s lash. these ,

collapse looms because Pybus has framed this history as a horizontal connection to what is ultimately
here

a vertical framework that finds meaning in the struggle against racism . Pybus’s Black Founders offers us a notable exception to our assumptions about Blackness,
but in her work, as in other histories she mentions, Blackness evanesces as the convicts and settlers perhaps married, procreated, and most certainly died without moving a coherent Black Atlantic collective forward in its quest for equality in a majority white society. Or, rather more
complicatedly, in Black Founders Blackness evanesces into either the white Australian population or the Australian Aboriginal population, in the latter case an indigenous Blackness. Most likely reflecting on this, Pybus herself does not think that this discovery of Australia’s “Black
founders” radically changes the history of the African Diaspora or Australia: “My point is not that this cohort of convicts is especially significant to the history of Australia—though it certainly challenges the conventional reading of the colonial experience—but to examine what it can tell us
about the wider world.”12 If we add Epiphenomenal time to our Black Atlantic frame, however, we can avoid the qualitative collapse that (re)produces these histories as interesting in their own right but marginal to our understanding of Black Atlantic history. Interpellated through
Epiphenomenal time, the Blackness in Black Founders first changes a person’s relationship to Blackness and indigeneity. Rather than simply “losing” indigenous status once captured and then sold, Blackness intersects twice more with indigeneity, and on two continents: North America
and Australia. In both cases, indigenous peoples sometimes helped Black slaves escape, the latter often marrying into specific American Indian nations. Middle Passage U.S. Blackness now shares a spacetime through indigeneity and raises questions about Central and South American
intersections (such as the Garifunas of Nicaragua).13 One might also see a third, more controversial intersection, between U.S. Blacks who “returned” to establish the free state of Liberia and the indigenous populations who found themselves oppressed in the resulting socioeconomic and
political hierarchy. The qualitative value of Pybus’s Blackness now meaningfully intersects with the Americas but is not swallowed by it, because the frame is horizontally comparative rather than vertically subordinating. The intersection of Blackness with indigeneity in the Americas,
Australia, and Africa also subverts the notion of a “purely” diasporic Blackness, even within the progress narrative itself, because the latter honors indigeneity as the “origin” to which the collective must eventually return. In this moment of interpellation, origin/home is achieved not
necessarily through return but through intersections with other “first nations” in the Atlantic and Pacific. Even further, we can see how Blackness, in intersecting with indigeneity when (formally) seeking “return,” as in Liberia, might produce not egalitarian unity but instead oppressive
hierarchy. Black Founders also provides us with perhaps unheard of dimensions of Blackness that, once recognized, might usefully connect to other possible spacetimes that share this dimension. As noted before, the “Atlantic Blacks” who arrived with the First Fleet and on subsequent
convict ships experienced a range of lives or careers that cannot be summed up through one collective trajectory, especially that of the progress narrative. Pybus shows that in our present moment of reading, Blackness becomes ambiguous in its meaning in these early colonies. On the
one hand, racial designations are clearly marked in the official records, but unlike in the Americas, socioeconomic and political castes are not created to wholly segregate them. There are many marriages one would designate as “interracial,” but even if one could access some
understanding of how “interracial marriage” would translate in this spacetime, marriage is rarely an ideal that denotes the cessation of difficulties over differences. As more than one wag has pointed out, the dominance of heterosexual marriage certainly does not reflect an egalitarian
harmony of relations between the sexes. The marriages in question are thus racialized outside of social racializations, meaning that to be Black in these colonies does not automatically designate a subaltern status below that of whites. In cases where Black convicts were executed or
subjected to physical punishment (whipping was the most common), we might see racially motivated causes, but in the brutal tide of regular executions and torturous punishment, it is difficult to extrapolate consistently a narrative in which this Blackness can be separated from the brutal
imperial and capitalist caste system that ruled all British subjects, including the white working poor. Blacks intermixing with the white working poor populations in England and Australia intersect with similar interactions during the earlier spacetime of indentured servitude in the United
States and the later one of late nineteenth-century Irish immigration to northeastern urban centers of the United States. If we step back from Pybus’s initial frame, which connects the history of the Black Atlantic in Australia horizontally, and instead honor the horizontality of her
interpellations of Black individuals and their intersections (through marriage, penal life, executions, manumission, etc.), one can read this history as a series of moments that intersect not only with Black Atlantic histories in the Americas but also with histories in Europe, Africa, and
perhaps India. It should be noted that, while we are discovering intersections of collectives, we do so wholly within idealist frameworks that can be further interpellated only through individuals who make up those collectives; beneficially, however, the collective identities that intersect
with these individuals produce yet more collectives in more spacetimes—more dimensions of Blackness across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. While the era of the Middle Passage produces many and varied kinds of Blackness through the intersection of linear and Epiphenomenal
time, the conflated eras of World War II and the postwar era offer yet more. I understand World War II and the postwar period as a conflation of eras because it is impossible to pinpoint where one ends and the other begins; however, when we are operating with Epiphenomenal time,
this ambiguity is productive rather than restrictive. Indeed, breadth, depth, ambiguity, ambivalence, and dominance are the strengths contributed by these overlapping eras: breadth because World War II involved almost the majority of Black Africans and Black Diasporans across the
globe, whereas slavery—which forms the cornerstone of the Middle Passage epistemology—did not; depth because the various narratives, such as that of Black African men attempting to resist forcible conscription by French and British colonial forces, or that of African American men
and women who fought for the right to be drafted, require explanation and further research; ambiguity because we find Blackness where we do not expect it and struggle to interpret it, such as Black German individuals who served in Hitler’s army and Black Brazilian troops tasked with
defending Italy; ambivalence because it is a war and its equally destructive aftermath ironically connects the African Diaspora many times over with ease and diversity; and finally, dominance because World War II and the postwar era constructed an interpellative frame that has been
used by so many across the globe, a frame that highlights the contemporary and global importance of Blackness far more frequently than themes of the Middle Passage ever do. While the rise of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), the Arab Spring, and other sociopolitical
and economic events seem to signal the framing of a new era, journalists, pundits, and politicians alike still interpret many of these events as effects of the World War II/postwar era. Even the most rigid histories cannot sustain a completely linear Second World War narrative. For
example, the invasion of Poland in 1939 must be explained by the rise of Nazism, which perhaps requires a notation about the Versailles Treaty. Likewise, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is necessary to explain the entrance of the United States into the war as a direct combatant. The Second
World War, therefore, has at least two beginnings and, even by conservative estimates, at least two endings: the surrender of the Nazis in Berlin and the signed surrender by the Japanese on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. This gives us a war with at least two timelines to which there
correspond two themes, two notions of progress, and many ways in which occupied nations must be understood: as collaborators, as wholly oppressed, as underground resisters, and so on. This nonlinear set of peoples, places, and events forces anyone seeking interpellations through
World War II to accept all the exceptions to its linear progress narrative—that is, it forces researchers to incorporate great nuance into their interpellations (in asking when the Second World War ended, for example, we have to amend the question to reflect all the surrenders and dates
that dominant discourses on World War II cite in response because, whether there were multiple wars or one great war may be a matter of definition, but there is no question that there were multiple narratives that intersected). This means that qualitative collapse will occur less
frequently in interpellations made through a wholly linear progress narrative on the war (because dominant discourses do not offer, really, any wholly linear narratives of it), but when it does, the effect is almost always “deafening,” as if it were drowning out alternative interpellations.14
Blackness can manifest through this multidimensionality, in most cases quite easily. In contrast to the difficulty involved in explaining how Blacks from the Atlantic found themselves in Australia, the global reach of the Second World War makes it easy to explain how Blackness has spread
almost everywhere. When using both Epiphenomenal and linear spacetimes to interpellate Blackness in these eras, no long, creative narratives are needed to explain the presence of West Africans under British rule, East Africans under Italian Fascist rule, or the fight for equality both at
home and abroad that was the self-appointed task of many an African American man or woman in uniform; moreover, using both spacetimes enables Black European studies to explain without much difficulty how Blacks of African descent came to fight under Hitler. We can arrive at
these explanations by starting with the individual, rather than the collective, as a point of interpellation. We can then link such an individual to his, her, or their variously realized collective identities (understanding that we should never claim that an individual is fully realized, as we can
work within distinct spacetimes only as they are imagined in the now, not in both the present and the past). Unfortunately, many of these dimensions as interpellated through the postwar epistemology are easily achieved through vertical structures: we need only locate (in ascending
order) a military battalion, a regiment, or a division that would contain Black soldiers and its encampments and headquarters. Vertical readings alone can often interpellate an agential and diverse Blackness: Black soldiers and field nurses with agency, Black civilians with choices, and a
whole roster of intersections with a broad variety of peers (soldiers and civilians) across vast geographies. At first glance, performing vertical interpellations through linear narratives appears to bear the same fruit as a horizontal reading: Blackness with agency and diversity. This might
explain why so many Black collective progress narratives of World War II use this multidimensionality to produce hierarchical, or vertical, interpellations for the collective. The “Windrush narrative” of Black Britain, for example, readily narrates the contributions of Black British Caribbeans
in the Second World War, yet uses a progress narrative to interpellate this Blackness. Like the histories of African American men who fought for the United States during World War I, the “Windrush” narrative underscores the painful hypocrisy of serving the British Crown only to be
treated as an undesirable emigrant in the postwar era.15 Drawing on oral histories of service in the war and archival records from the British War Office, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1999) interpellates Black Britishness as agential and diverse, a proud component
of the history of World War II but of official British histories of the war more particularly.16 To be sure, even when operating within World War II/postwar frameworks, we encounter obstacles. Hierarchies of power are not (unfortunately) wholly erased, and they can be complicated by
the complexities of global alliances and rivalries (no matter how easily they are manifested in the postwar epistemology). The postwar epistemology’s emphasis on the “now,” in the absence of a geographical center (a component of even the most traditional narratives of the Second
World War/postwar era),17 allows, say, Samoan warriors aiding the Allies to be interpellated through collective identities that certainly include hierarchal structures (e.g., the military command structure) but also relationships whereby power must constantly be negotiated (e.g., in
relationships between soldiers or between soldiers and civilians). The “now” complicates power, meaning that while an Epiphenomenal interpellation enables agency, it will also reflect those vertical hierarchies that inevitably accompany so many moments of interpellation in every

***BEGIN ENDNOTE*** One could read

individual life across the globe.18 Blackness through U.S. versions of 18. Smith’s first novel as interpellating

Afropessimism but this is a distinction lacking meaningful difference While it eschews the Middle
, .

Passage Epistemology’s progress narrative Blacks are destined to always be oppressed it needs this ( ),

linear progress narrative to argue against progress While claiming to be static, U.S. versions of .

Afropessimism nonetheless doggedly track each moment of the Middle Passage Epistemology to state
yet again that no progress has been made ***END ENDNOTE*** .
 2ac fetishization da
Their fetishization of whiteness as a pervasive force legitimizes it as such and dooms
any alternative conception of the world
Chatterton Williams 17 – African American author of the memoir Losing My Cool: Love, Literature
and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd [Thomas, 10/6/2017, “How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness
Power”, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/ta-nehisi-coates-whiteness-
power.html] AMarb

For having the temerity to defend himself, Mr. Packerwas accused on social media of "excusing racism" and
"whitesplaining." Such logic extends a disturbing trend in left-of-center public thinking: identity epistemology, or
knowing-through-being, somewhere along the line became identity ethics, or morality-through-being. Accordingly, whiteness and
wrongness have become interchangeable — the high ground is now accessible only by way of
"allyship," which is to say silence and total repentance. The upside to this new white burden, of course, is that
whichever way they may choose, those deemed white remain this nation's primary actors. Given the
genuine severity of the Trump threat, some readers of this essay may wonder, why devote energy to picking
over the virtue and solidarity signaling of the left? Quite simply because getting this kind of thinking
wrong exacerbates the very inequality it seeks to counteract . In the most memorable sentence in "The First White
President," Mr. Coates declares, "Whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open,
releasing its eldritch energies." I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the
process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates's wording
here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white
supremacist thinkers cherish. This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates's recent writing and
the tenor of the leftist "woke" discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in
sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism . Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color
categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray
areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as
something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a "talisman," an "amulet"
of "eldritch energies" that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early- 20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a
"meta- biological force," a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained
to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring .
This summer, I spent an hour on the phone with Richard Spencer. It was an exchange that left me feeling physically sickened. Toward the end of
the interview, he said one thing that I still think about often. He referred to the all-encompassing sense of white power so many liberals now
also attribute to whiteness as a profound opportunity. "This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist," he told me gleefully. "This is
why I'm actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip. However far-fetched that may sound, what
identitarians like Mr. Spencer have grasped, and what ostensibly anti-racist thinkers like Mr. Coates have lost sight of, is the
fact that so
long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes . We will all
be doomed to stalk our separate paths.
 2ac humanism good
A positive orientation towards history and the ideals of radical humanist freedom are
key to global liberationist struggles. Only this can avert every major existential crisis of
our times.
Karenga 6—Professor and Chair Department of Africa Studies at Cal State University and a major
figure in the Black Power movement [Maulana, Philosophy in the African Tradition of Resistance: Issues
or Human Freedom and Human Flourishing in Not Only The Master’s Tools, 2006, p. 242-5]

Surely, we are at a moment of history fraught with new and old fOnTIS of anxiety, alienation, and antagonism;
deepening poverty in the midst of increasing wealth; proposals and practices of ethnic cleansing and genocide;
pandemic diseases; increased plunder; pollution and depletion of the environment; constant conflicts, large
and small; and world-threatening delusions on the part of a superpower aspiring to a return to empire, with
spurious claims of the right to preemptive aggression, to openly attack and overthrow nonfavored and fragile
governments openly, and to seize the lands and resources of vulnerable peoples and establish
"democracy" through military dictatorship abroad, all the while suppressing political dissent at home (Chang 2002;
Cole et at. 2002). These anxieties are undergirded by racist and religious chauvinism , by the self-righteous and veiled references
of these rulers to themselves as a kind of terrible and terrorizing hand of God, appointed to rid the world of evil (Ahmad 2002; Arnin 2001; Blum1995). At
the same time, in
this context of turmoil and terror and the use and threatened use of catastrophic weapons,
there is the irrational and arrogant expectation that the oppressed will acquiesce, abandon resistance, and
accept the disruptive and devastating consequences of globalization, along with the global hegemony it implies
(Martin and Schumann 1997). There is great alarm among the white-supremicist rulers of these globalizing nations, given the metical resistance
rising up against them, even as globalization’s technological, organizational, and economic capacity continues to
expand (Barber 1996; Karenga 2002e, 2003a; Lusane 1997). There is great alarm when people who should "know" when they are
defeated ridicule the assessment, refuse to be defeated or dispirited, and, on the contrary, intensify and diversify
their struggles (Zepezauer 2002). Certainly the battlefields of Palestine, Venezuela, long suffering Haiti, and Chiapas,
Mexico, along with other continuing emancipatory struggles everywhere, reaffirm the indomitable character
of the human spirit and the durability and adaptive vitality of a people determined to be free,
regardless of the odds and assessments against them. Indeed, they remind us that the motive force of history is
struggle, informed by the ongoing quest for freedom, justice, power of the masses, and peace in the
world. Despite "end of history" claims and single-super- power resolve and resolutions, these struggles continue. For still the oppressed
want freedom, the wronged and injured want justice, the people want power over their destiny and daily lives, and the world wants
peace. And all over the world-especially in this U.S. citadel of aging capitalism with its archaic dreams of empire-clarity in the analysis of
issues, and in the critical determination of tasks and prospects, requires the deep and disciplined reflection characteristic of the
personal and social practice we call philosophy. But this sense of added urgency for effective intervention is prompted not only
by the critical juncture at which we stand but also by an awareness of our long history of resistance as a
people, because in our collective strivings and social struggles we seek a new future for our people, our
descendants, and the world. Joined also to these conditions and considerations is the compelling character of our self-understanding as a
people, as a moral vanguard in this country and the world. For we have launched, fought, and won with our allies
struggles that not only have expanded the realm of freedom in this country and the world but also have served as
an ongoing inspiration and a model of liberation struggles for other marginalized and oppressed
peoples and groups throughout the world. Indeed, they have borrowed from and built on our moral vocabulary and moral vision, sung
our songs of freedom, and held up our struggle for liberation as a model to emulate. Now, self-understanding and self-assertion
are dialectically linked. In other words, how we understand ourselves in the world determines how we assert
ourselves in the world. Thus, an expansive concept of ourselves as Africans-continental and diasporan-and
as Africana philosophers forms an essential component of our sense of mission and the urgency with which
we approach it. It is important to note that I have conceived and written this chapter within the framework of Kausaida philosophy (Karenga
1978, 1980, 1997) Kawaida is a philosophic initiative that was
forged in the crucible of ideological and practical
struggles around issues of freedom, justice, equalitys, self-determination, conullunal power, self-
defense, pan~African- ism, coalition and alliance, Black Studies, intellectual emancipation, and cultural
recovery and reconstlouction. It continued to develop in the midst of these ongoing struggies within the life of the mind and
stmggles iottbtn the life of the people, as well as within the context of the conditions of the world. Kawaida is defined as an ongoing synthesis
of the best of xAfrican thought and practice in constant exchange tuttb tl3e 'U)()ltd. It
characterizes culture as a unique,
instructive and valuable way of being human in the world-as a foundation and framework for self-
understanding and self-assertion. As a philosophy of culture and struggle, Kawaida maintains that our intellectual and
social practice as Nricana activist scholars must be undergirded and informed by ongoing efforts to (1) ground our- selves in our own
culture; (2) constantly recover, reconstruct, .and bring forth from our culture the best of what it means to
be African and human in the fullest sense; (3) speak this special cultural truth to the world and (4) use our culture to constantly
make our own unique contribution to the reconception and reconstruction of this country, and to the forward flow of human
history.
 --at: it’s bad
Radical rejection of the humanist subject is an endless repetition that goes nowhere
Ruti 17
Mari Ruti (Distinguished Professor of critical theory and of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada). Ethics
of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. Columbia University Press, March 7th, 2017. Google Books, p. 5-7.

This is a politics of negativity devoid of any clear political or ethical vision: it wants to destroy what
exists without giving us much of a sense of what should exist. It may of course be that offering an alternative politico-
ethical vision is more or less impossible. Perhaps it is not the task of theory to define the future but merely to critique the present. In principle, I
do not have a problem with the idea that the purpose of theory is to show us what is wrong rather than to tell us what to do. At the same time,
I am more inclined to look for "real-life" referents for my theoretical paradigms than those who believe that theory is—or should be—an
imaginative activity wholly divorced from the exigencies of lived reality. On the one hand, the latter attitude is freeing in the sense that
suddenly anything is possible, including the idea that stupidity represents a radical politico-ethical project. But on the other, it can
lead to what Lacan calls "empty" speech, speech devoid of any meaning (pure rhetoric). It is from this partly
unconvinced perspective that I would like to start putting pressure on three interrelated tendencies within recent queer theory. I will return to
each of these tendencies in greater detail in later chapters. Here let me merely name them briefly. First, I do not think that the celebration of
negativity for its own sake that characterizes some versions of queer theory amounts to much (besides explosive rhetoric). I prefer to work with
negativity, to see what negativity can do for us. In the next two chapters, I will try to illustrate that this is what Lacan sought to do, despite
Edelman's efforts to tell us otherwise. Second, I think that the semiautomatic—and therefore no longer honestly critical— attempt
to
annihilate "the subject" that runs through much of progressive theory, including queer theory, is a
theoretical and politico-ethical dead end. Though I understand the historical reasons for the assault on
the humanist subject, I wonder about the almost ritualistic manner in which the slaughter of "the
subject" gets undertaken from text to text, as if thinkers such as Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze somehow botched the
job back in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems to me that this all-too-predictable battering of the subject represents a
theoretical repetition compulsion in the strictly Freudian sense, indicating, among other things, a
traumatic fixation that keeps us from moving to new conceptual terrains, including the question of what
it might mean to be a subject after the collapse of the unified, arrogant, and self-mastering subject of
humanist metaphysics. Of all the recurring themes of queer theory, the assault on the subject is what, for me, gives
the strongest impression of empty speech, for it seems to have virtually nothing to do with the
personal realities of those who advocate it, most of whom live semicoherent, semicontinous lives in
semiconsistent (usually tenured) lifeworlds.
 2ac engagement not exclusive
Political engagement’s not an opportunity cost with thinking and practicing
epistemological pessimism
George Shulman 17. Professor of European and American social thought at NYU’s Gallatin school.
12/2017. “Theorizing Life Against Death.” Contemporary Political Theory, pp. 1–33.

My goal in these reflections is to assess the characteristic arguments of scholars associated under the
sign of ‘‘Afro-Pessimism.’’ They are typically identified as Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, and Jared
Sexton. In my view, this work tells an essential, dark truth about race and Euro-Atlantic modernity, but by a
problematic form of argument and affect; the work is a profound explanation of our current racial
impasse but in troubling ways it also is a symptom of that impasse and risks reifying it. To explore these
ambiguities, I will situate this work in several contexts.6 The first, obvious, context is the canon of Black political thought and literature. Using
the idea of ‘‘problem-space’’ I take from David Scott (2004) and the idea of ‘‘argumentative tradition’’ I take from Alisdair MacIntyre (1977), I
would ask: what constitutive questions (and answers) do these thinkers inherit, but also revise? First, by what concepts and narratives do we
understand and represent our condition? (We thus contrast arguments about slavery and its after-life, race and race-making, as well as white
supremacy, anti-blackness, ‘‘social death,’’ and ‘‘political ontology.’’) A second question concerns political subjectivity: how should a racially
marked people conceive the ‘‘we’’ shape themselves into a collective political subject? (Are we a ‘‘minority’’ needing allies to democratize the
civic identity [and civil society] of a nation professing universalism, a ‘‘nation’’ based in ethnicity or common interest, a ‘‘colony’’ seeking
transnational affiliations against empire?) Relatedly, third, how do we understand (say diagnose) those who constitute themselves as white?
(Answers to this question signal if or how their identity, conduct, and norms of citizenship can be changed decisively.) Implicit in these is a
fourth question: how do we narrate the relation between present and past, to dramatize the after-life of slavery and what is damaging and
valuable in a legacy of domination and struggle? Hartman thus asks Nietzsche’s question: ‘‘what is the story about the slave we ought to tell out
of the present we ourselves inhabit?’’ (Hartman and Best, 2005) That story must also judge if, as Hannah Arendt argued, the concepts we
inherit can(not) illuminate what is novel or unprecedented in our circumstances. Because I situate ‘‘Afro-pessimism’’ in the argumentative
tradition of black political thought, I will foreground Sexton’s and Wilderson’s view that modern/ western/liberal (Euro-Atlantic) society is
founded on a ‘‘political ontology’’ of ‘‘anti-blackness,’’ by which the ‘‘social death’’ of those racially marked as ‘‘nonbeings’’ is the condition of
human being and life for others. By making antiblackness and social death foundational to liberal modernity, Afro-Pessimist work depicts the
persistence of gross inequality, segregation, and gratuitous violence as the undying ‘‘after-life’’ of slavery, which liberal society never consigned
to the past. As this argument explains the failures of civil rights reform and narratives of progress, though, a second obvious context becomes
visible: Afro-Pessimism is not only a theory to juxtapose to a canon of theories, but a speech-act that
bespeaks the impasse it would address and enter. It intervenes intentionally in a problem-space of
questions and answers, but is also symptomatic of the context it claims to explain. Its rhetoric
manifests what Raymond Williams called a structure of feeling, whose character and impact requires
interpretation. On the one hand, I am inclined to say of Afro-Pessimism what Adorno said of psychoanalysis – only its exaggerations are
true – because otherwise we readily disavow a truth about our history and circumstances that is hard to acknowledge let alone bear.
Theorizing – bearing witness to – ‘‘structural positionality’’ is crucial to explaining persisting racial
domination. But on the other hand, their rhetoric is a symptom of impasse. The work of Sexton and
Wilderson, in particular, sustains the critical, systemic, and internationalist frame of Fanon and American
advocates of black power, but it lacks their animating sense of possibility. It sustains the black radical
tradition by identifying what is distinctive in black positionality in liberal modernity, but in the way it
claims exceptionality in relation to other forms of oppression, Afro-Pessimism also enacts a defensive
status politics. In turn, this articulation of blackness in terms of death and life suggest a third context, at once theological and psychoanalytical. First Context: Black Political Thought and Intractability Afro-
Pessimists draw their central – both diagnostic and generative – claim from Orlando Patterson (1982): slavery is distinguished not by intensified exploitation of labor, but by a ‘‘social death’’ he defines as natal alienation,
generalized dishonor, and violent domination. Modernity emerges in the equation of slavery as social death with blackness, whereby only those marked as black are consigned to these conditions. Hartman has condensed and
updated the idea of social death by the concept of ‘‘fungibility,’’ to denote how slavery has an after-life because blacks do not become human subjects, but remain objects of (material, accumulative, sexual, symbolic) use, including
subjection to gratuitous violence and disposability (Patterson, 1982). At the same time, the production of this social death for those marked black is the disavowed condition of possibility for the economy and culture of those
defining themselves as human, or non-black. As Hartman (1997, 2003) showed in Scenes of Subjection and interviews, even though chattel slavery was officially ended, a racializing regime instantiating devaluation has remained
foundational to the material life and symbolic order of liberal civil society. These arguments thus explain – and make meaningful – the intractability of racialized inequality and violence despite the purported displacement of overt
white supremacy by civil rights and multi-culturalism. Wilderson and Sexton, building on Fanon and Hartman, thus argue that ‘‘Blackness’’ denotes a position not an identity. Wilderson says, ‘‘Afro-pessimists are theorists of black
positionality who share Fanon’s insistence that, though Blacks are…sentient beings, the structure of the entire world’s semantic field…is sutured by anti-black solidarity…Afro-pessimism explores the meaning of Blackness not – in
the first instance – as a variously interpellated identity or conscious social actor, but as a structural position of non-communicability in the face of all other positions.’’ A position of ‘‘absolute dereliction’’ marks the non-being that
cannot signify but can be made to signify, as well as accumulated, exploited, killed (Wilderson, 2010, pp. 58–59). In Wilderson’s narrative, then, ‘‘modernity marks the emergence of a new ontology because it is an era in which an
entire race appears, people who, prior to any transgressive act or losing a war, stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world’’ (Wilderson, 2010, p. 18). Modern liberal ‘‘civil society is held together by a structural
prohibition against recognizing and incorporating a being that is dead, despite the fact that this being is sentient and appears very much alive.’’ Civil society, wage relations, and constitutionalism among rights-bearing subjects are
underwritten by generalized dishonor and violent domination of those marked black, but also by ‘‘a libidinal economy of enjoyment,’’ because ‘‘fantasies of murderous hatred and unlimited destruction, of sexual consumption and
social availability animate’’ such violence and ‘‘the psychic life of culture as well’’ (Wilderson, 2010, p. 27). Jared Sexton (2008, 2016) calls Afro-pessimism a ‘‘critique’’ of ‘‘political ontology,’’ but why use this locution? The middle
passage inaugurated a ‘‘condition of ontology and not just an event of experience’’ because chattel slavery founded (conditions of) non-being and being (Wilderson, 2010, p. 14). If ontology is the study of how we define the general
conditions of possibility for human being, then political ontology denotes how politics founds what Fred Moten calls ‘‘the nonrelationality that structures all relationality,’’ the denial of being that structures symbolic order and
material reality in modernity (Moten, 2013). ‘‘Anti-blackness’’ is ‘‘ontological’’ as an unthought, foundational (and so intractable) condition framing human being, but ‘‘political’’ because conventional, historical, potentially
changeable. In turn, to theorize ‘‘structural positionality’’ ‘‘is to be Afro-Pessimist, not Afrocentric,’’ because ‘‘blackness’’ denotes a condition (of non-being) to refuse, and neither a (prior, African) identity to retrieve, nor a ‘‘cultural
identity’’ to assert (Wilderson, 2010, p. 58). Wilderson thus posits ‘‘the inaugural difference’’ that instituted the modern and its defining ‘‘genre of the human’’ as Sylvia Wynter (2003) puts it. Marxian and Lacanian structuralism
also originate human society and culture in the structure of (class or gender) positions into which people are interpellated. But Wilderson depicts ‘‘gender or economic oppression’’ as ‘‘contingent riders’’ limiting ‘‘the freedom of
human subjects’’; ‘‘exploited humans in conflict with unexploited humans,’’ or women dominated by men, remain within human being, not set off ontologically from it. He insists on this ‘‘unbridgeable gap’’ between the ‘‘suffering
dynamics of the ontologically alive,’’ and black positionality. ‘‘Deep within civil society’s collective unconscious is the knowledge that the black position is indeed a position, not an identity, and…inextricably bound to the constituent
elements of social death.’’ By this categorical difference ‘‘gratuitous violence’’ and ‘‘exchange’’ can ‘‘mark everyone experientially’’ but ‘‘mark blacks ontologically’’ (Wilderson, 2003). This structuralism parallels Althusser and
Lacan, but it posits black positionality as exceptional, both in its equation with non-being, and as the inaugurating foundation of modernity. In turn, Sexton draws two implications. ‘‘Whatever else there may be in black culture or
cultures – in the most capacious, differentiated, global sense – a narrative of antagonism is inscribed there, powerfully and profoundly. To ‘‘inhabit’’ the ‘‘destruction’’ mandated by an ‘‘anti-black world that shapes and structures
every aspect of black existence’’ is to face the challenge of ‘‘how to stay within the anxiety of antagonism…to be guided by it, and again, even to will it?’’ (Sexton, 2016, p. 4). As if to disarm any reduction of militancy to
masculinism, Sexton quotes the martial language of Hortense Spillers: ‘‘My anxiety was finding a way to actually be in battle…to go to war.’’ He credits black feminism with linking ‘‘rage to hope’’ and forging ‘‘a non-compliant but
nonviolent alloy’’ to oppose what Spillers calls ‘‘long centuries of unregulated violence’’ (Spillers et al., 2007; Sexton, 2016, pp. 9–10). But he asks: ‘‘is there such a thing as black feminist violence?’’ Not ‘‘to elevate violence to the
level of principle,’’ he avers, but ‘‘to include it as one tactic among others’’ in a structure of antagonism. As if to disarm critics he quotes Spillers again: ‘‘the day that the enslaved decides to act out the threat of death that hangs
over her, by risking her life, is the first day of wisdom. And whether or not one survives is perhaps less important than the recognition that, unless one is free, love cannot and will not matter’’ (Spillers et al., 2007; Sexton, 2016, p.
10). In this passage, we hear Antigone and Audre Lorde, who would risk their own lives but not another’s life, but also Frederick Douglass’ Nietzschean violence as well as Huey Newton’s ‘‘revolutionary suicide,’’ when risking life
and taking life entwine. If Sexton’s first conclusion moves from political ontology to inescapable antagonism and so to a Fanonian view of violence as a condition of freedom, his second conclusion returns to the premise shared
with Wilderson, who says, ‘‘black freedom is an ontological’’ not ‘‘experiential’’ issue. ‘‘Black freedom’’ is not repeated action to contest or interrupt social death, or fugitive forms of slipping the yoke, but ‘‘an event of epic and
revolutionary proportions’’ that is ‘‘the end of both blackness and humanness,’’ the ‘‘emergence of new ontological relations’’ (Wilderson, 2010, p. 27). Critics object that arguments about social death deny both the ‘‘agency’’ of
blacks and the ‘‘hope’’ political resistance requires (Brown, 2009). Sexton denies any ‘‘rejection of the notion of agency in advance,’’ but instead depicts an ‘‘endeavor to think rigorously about its conditions of possibility.’’ Likewise,
theory must face the position of the ‘‘ex-slave without recourse to the consolations of transcendence.’’ Rather than ‘‘blaming pessimism,’’ he quotes Joshua Foa Dienstag to say, ‘‘perhaps we can learn from it. Rather than hiding
from the ugliness of the world, perhaps we can discover how best to withstand it.’’ Depicting the false solace sought by those who cannot abide the twinned truths of destruction and antagonism, Sexton (2016) enacts a pointedly
dismissive ‘‘intramural’’ critique of Black political thought. Speaking in the mode of realism to advance the ‘‘pessimistic’’ claim that the modern world is organized to negate and annihilate black agency, he practices a kind of radical
negativity. Does this view blind us to or even foreclose the ‘‘life’’ of black agency in conditions of social death, or, does it stipulate what would count as fundamental change? Does this view preclude hope for a different future, or,
stipulate its threshold, to open a possibility we cannot know or depict in advance? Here is theory as speech-act, my second context, but also, his idiom of false solace or real transcendence signals my third context, political
theology. Second Context: From Theory to Speech-Act Gayle Rubin (1975) once joined Engels and Levi-Strauss to theorize what Sexton calls the ‘‘structural positionality’’ of women in patriarchy, whereby the exchange of women
(as quasi-human objects) became the condition of ‘‘human’’ life and culture, and by using Freud and Lacan to theorize the ‘‘libidinal economy’’ tied to this exchange, she depicted how those marked as women internalized and
reproduced their position. But feminism, she argued, sought a ‘‘radical’’ reimagination of patriarchal kinship conceived as a conventional not natural condition of human being. It must be said that Rubin herself, and feminism more
broadly, did not theorize the differences slavery instituted. It took Hortense Spillers to show how the modern form of gender was produced by white supremacy, as enslaved women were denied the status of gender as a form of
being, and reduced to mere ‘‘flesh.’’ The modern sex-gender system, and its feminist critics, rested on disavowal (or unthinking presumption) of this prior denial of being (Spillers, 1987; Broeck, 2008). If this insight vindicates the
structuralist ambition of ‘‘Afro- Pessimist’’ argument, however, the animating sense of possibility that living insurgency imparted to the structuralism of radical feminist theorizing remains absent. Its avowed ‘‘pessimism’’ is partly a
symptom of our own moment of impasse, but it also minimizes the current forms of insurgency surrounding it, and in these regards it performs a black radicalism that can seem defensive, even bullying, and ‘‘academic’’ in its
distance from insurgent politics. At issue for me, then, is not the idea of a structural positionality that is both foundational and distinctive, but the motives and idioms that give it a troubling form and affect. Wilderson and Sexton
rightly claim that neither legal enfranchisement nor material assets secure immunity from vulnerability as a fungible object; they rightly see the depth and scope of the change needed to achieve equality. But they posit a
categorical and absolute (not historical or contingent) difference: between ex-slaves, as non-human beings subject to gratuitous violence; indigenous people, as ‘‘almost-human’’ subjects, who retain forms of sovereignty; and
white women and workers ‘‘whose humanity is a given.’’ They do not depict the mutual imbrication of race, class, and gender, the braiding of native dispossession and slavery, the ratio of violence or fungibility in other forms of
domination, or how political economy and culture is underwritten, especially, by women positioned as objects of available for use (and violence.) They refuse what Wilderson calls ‘‘the ruse of analogy,’’ whereby accounts of
domination as being (like) slavery deny a categorical difference in ‘‘ontological’’ positionality (Wilderson, 2010). A ‘‘political ontology of race’’ is thus tailored to address post-civil rights fragmentation in the black world, post-1965
immigration and neoliberal multiculturalism, as well as multiplying varieties of oppression. Partly, Afro-Pessimism uses abundant evidence of fungibility and violence to posit and defend black commonality against forms of upward
mobility it credibly casts as a deceptive appearance, but it also ignores or devalues the reality of appearances, that is, the real complexity of a black world increasingly differentiated and divided. Likewise, Afro-Pessimism correctly
situates recent versions of ethnic pluralism and class/gender radicalism within an unchanged black/white racial grid, to credibly mark how coalition/reform politics continue to evade the distinctive grip of antiblackness. But

rather than highlighting the intractable grip of antiblack specificity amid multi-dimensional
intersectionality, and rather than tracing how antiblackness has entwined with settler colonialism,
patriarchy, and capitalism, Sexton and Wilderson depict black exceptionality.7 Understandably
foregrounding how analogy is typically used to (trade on but) evade what is distinctive in racial domination,
they seem unable to admit let alone credit complexities and confusions in the gray zone of
intersectionality. As a result, they create a black radicalism that categorically separates not only itself
from other constituencies, but also the truly revolutionary from the mere ‘‘consolation’’ of other forms
of organized black insurgency. These versions of what I am calling exceptionality suggest my third context, because, in its very
critiques of false transcendence, Afro-Pessimism repeats the idioms of political theology . Third Context: From
Political Theology to Psychoanalysis Sexton and Wilderson seem to mean political ontology as a philosophical/political alternative to political
theology. Like Marx they criticize other-worldly forms of redemption for the sake of ‘‘soberly’’ facing our ‘‘true conditions’’; like Marx on class,
they depict blackness as a non-cultural positionality, not an identity; and like Marx, they project the necessity for, but do not depict, a world
beyond this one. They also echo the revolutionary paradigm of Fanon, which depicts consignment to non-being, narrates polarized antagonism,
and without substantializing blackness, seeks an epochal movement from social death to life. Surely, then, the emphasis on positionality,
antagonism, and eschatology evokes Carl Schmitt’s ‘‘political theology’’ as well as his ‘‘concept of the political.’’ For if American liberal
nationalism is constituted by the sovereign violence that establishes social death for some as the condition of (access to) life for others, then
those positioned as Black are thrown across a theological frontier that differentiates the damned to produce the saved. Those marked by non-
being are thus called to ‘‘decision,’’ to take exception to social death as a state of exception. Even if Wilderson and Sexton invoke insurrection
but not resurrection, can they escape entanglement in political theology? At the same time, we should recall Nietzsche’s ‘‘analysis’’ of the grip
of the ascetic ideal among those – especially democrats, abolitionists, and atheist leftists – who renounced literal theism and other-worldly
forms of redemption. For they sustain ‘‘faith in truth’’ and in its name devalue plurality, perspective, and contingency, as
well as the unavoidably constitutive impact of the drives and fantasies that motivate our thought and
action. Interpreting our will to truth as itself a motivated faith and perspective on life, Nietzsche makes faith ubiquitous by placing an act of
faith beneath every perspective or optic. He then weighs the ‘‘value’’ of contrasting faiths in terms of their motivation on one side and their
worldly consequences on the other side. In this way, he discovered the rancor driving his own faith in critical negativity, and he thus fashioned a
‘‘gay science’’ to mitigate it. How might his model of a counter-political theology help us interpret and engage a theory focused on the grim
truth of social death? Because
modernity premises life for some on consigning others to social death , Hartman
claims, deliverance is the master trope of Black culture. But how to seek life against death is contestable.
Wilderson and Sexton depict the unbearable truth of social death and unremitting antagonism between
master and slave, in contrast to which they depict our seduction by (our wish for) narrative and the
redemption it offers. They speak not to whites, whose narrative of modernity, nationhood, and progress is premised on black non-
being, but ‘‘intramurally’’ to those marked as black, who are drawn to narratives that promise to overcome white innocence (in Baldwin’s
sense) by civic integration, or that promise the redemption of black suffering by de-colonization, nation-building, or fugitive creativity.
Against seduction by narrative, Afro-pessimist structuralism is presented as the essential and all-
controlling truth of black experience; it gives off the scent of the ascetic ideal not only because it
disavows its own fictionality as an optic, genre, or organizing fantasy, but also because of its categorical
juxtaposition of friend and enemy, its heroized but abstract radicalism, and its dismissal of any other position as a demeaned
form of solace. Especially if we credit the truth to which Afro-Pessimism bears witness, including the
likelihood of white resistance to or disavowal of its validity, we may well feel pressured to assent to it.
We are pressed by the form or logic of the argument, which signifies any doubt or question as
objectionable whiteness or pathetic black acquiescence. As a white man trying to make this argument, I am struggling to
articulate both its crucial truth, and my sense, politically and theoretically, that it should be presented or inflected otherwise, with different
affective tonality and political bearing. For on the one hand, it seems to me that ‘‘social death’’ is totalized as the truth that
must be faced without consolation, while on the other hand, the only valid response is depicted as
revolutionary (perhaps violent) refusal. We are driven toward helplessness and despair by an
annihilating structure that seems impossible to change, but also, if we ask, what can be done, we
receive images of revolutionary suicide. The systematic character of critique offers a clarity that is
appealing; we also may be tempted by the appearance of heroic radicalism – and by an unavowed solace
we may derive from the form of ‘‘election’’ it offers. But we may be better served by questioning the
either-or structure of exceptionality, which juxtaposes social death in/as the ordinary to metaphors of
radical refusal. By that structure, Schmitt distinguished ordinary existence as deadening repetition, and miracle as the decision to take
exception to it; for Wilderson and Sexton ‘‘life’’ thus seems to require the decisive, unequivocal ‘‘event’’ of
overcoming an ordinary life ruled – indeed emptied out, negated, or literally killed – by inescapably gripping social death.
But what kind of life or politics is this? Might the ‘‘fact’’ or ‘‘lived experience’’ of blackness as social
death be metabolized, transfigured, resisted, or dramatized in other ways? Rather than radically
juxtapose awful truth and demeaned consolation, could we rework the relationship of critique and
repair? Or is the impossibility of repair in its usual senses – because only a revolution would be truly
reparative – the necessary assumption for rightly seeing the conditions of black agency? Rather than respond
to their critique by asking, what radical action could possibly suffice to change this world, could we ask instead, what is already
being done?8 If we grasp the truth signified by a ‘‘political ontology of anti-blackness,’’ we should and
will doubt the sufficiency of civil rights and coalition politics, but couldn’t we still value rhizomatic
practices of protest, prosaic efforts at legal redress or self-defense, local experiments in counter-
sovereignty, forms of black nationalism, or diasporic cultural politics that poeticize black creativity?
These are ongoing all around us, but virtually unremarked by Wilderson or Sexton, who focus on the
unbearable truth disavowed by most whites, and whose radical implications are evaded by many blacks.
But we should not demonize this focus as simply a fault, either .9 In addition, if I focus on the ‘‘lived truth’’ (the
affective bearing and prosaic meaning, not the referential accuracy) of Afro-Pessimism as an organizing optic, I recall how Nietzsche focused on
the rancor we must feel over our inability to will backward, and by focusing on our resentment, he foregrounded our affective orientation
toward our suffering and its injustice. In this spirit, in turn, Eve Sedgwick (2003, 2007) used Melanie Klein’s contrast of paranoid and reparative
positions to ‘‘analyze’’ the ‘‘hermeneutic of suspicion’’ in critical and queer theorizing, in ways that may help us creatively engage Afro-
pessimism. On the one hand, anti-blackness and homophobia manifest paranoid splitting, as desire and aggression –
what Phillip Roth tellingly calls ‘‘human stain’’ – are projected into objects rather than acknowledged. Through what Eric Lott called
‘‘love and theft’’ (unintentionally echoing Klein’s ‘‘envy and gratitude’’ toward the mother), the enfranchised and normal enact a
paranoid structure that produces demonized objects but that also loves – and so cannibalizes- what it
repudiates. On the other hand, Sedgwick argued, queer theory itself inhabits a ‘‘paranoid position’’ by a systemic explanation that
‘‘anticipates’’ injury and humiliation, precludes surprise, polarizes friend and enemy, and denies value to reparative action. Might
theoretical and political practice repair rather than repeat the aggressive splitting, disavowal, and longing for
innocence (or purity) that characterizes the object of critique? In regard to white supremacy, can we devise
what New Lefties called prefigurative practices, to anticipate and embody in our means the revolutionary ends
we posit? Of course, Sedgwick is often read in a ‘‘paranoid’’ way, as if she posed an either-or between the paranoid and reparative
positions, partly because at moments she herself does this splitting. But a truly ‘‘reparative’’ view of paranoid theory or
radical politics would have to value and sustain ambivalence, a tension between the hermeneutic of
suspicion and quest for deep truth that characterizes ‘‘critique,’’ and a generosity that seeks and welcomes
possibility, in the form of unexpected changes, actions, attunements. If anti-blackness is a paranoid
onto-theology in Klein’s sense, what would a reparative alternative feel like and do? Like Lacan’s psychoanalytic
theory, Wilderson and Sexton place blackness in the position of the unconscious – and in the position of maternity. Under the bar, these signify
abjection, excess, and nonsense, the threatening non-being against which subjectivity, rationality, and the human is defined in phobic, violent
ways. But they do not affirm let alone explore the life made by people positioned ‘‘in the hold,’’ under the bar – and because they are
positioned there. No more than Lacan on maternity do they substantialize blackness as a heritage to retrieve or an identity to make and assert.
But critical
negativity, focused on social death and invested in the paradoxical purity of asceticism, risks
becoming death-like; moreover, radical politics fails unless it bears witness to life against death. What this
might mean once appeared in feminist theories that risked exploring the ubiquitous but disavowed meanings of maternity, whether as the
creative genius of the ‘‘semiotic’’ juxtaposed to the symbolic, or as an ethic of care contrasted with Kantian autonomy. In
that feminist
spirit, Spillers in fact discerned opportunity hidden in conditions of social death : because enslaved women
were reduced to ‘‘flesh’’ and denied the status of gender, she argued, their children inherit the chance to do gender
and kinship otherwise (Spillers, 1987). In the essay Sexton quotes, she also says: ‘‘Men of the black diaspora are the only
men who had the opportunity to understand something about the female [and vice versa] that no other
community’’ could. Indeed, ‘‘I used to think that black culture was on the verge of creating…a kind of democratic form…in relationship to
being human. That people did whatever work was to be done, whether ‘men’s work’ or ‘women’s work’’’ (Spillers et al., 2007). Spillers never
makes an ethnic claim about blackness, but she does show catastrophe and positionality conferring ‘‘intramural’’
gifts, as well as an art and politics that disturb what Jacques Rancie`re calls the partition of the sensible. In turn, Fred Moten uses her
feminism to create an exemplary agon with Afro- Pessimism . On the one hand, he endorses its fealty to
Fanon’s basic insight: ‘‘he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a
world that knows itself through that imposition …This affirmation…is a willing or willingness to pay whatever
social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living black social life under the shadow of
social death.’’ But on the other hand, just as ‘‘blackness is not reducible to its social costs,’’ so ‘‘there is
a relation between nothing and something or…between death and life.’’ If ‘‘pessimism’’ allows us to
‘‘discern that we are nothing,’’ he calls ‘‘optimism’’ the recognition that ‘‘nothing is not absence…Poverty
in the world is manifest in poetic access to what it is of the other world that remains unheard, unnoted, unrecognized in this one.
[Whatever] you call these resources…it remains to consider precisely what is it that the ones who have
nothing have…or to which they have access? What comes of it?’’ Here, social death does not preclude agency; agency
means occupying ‘‘nothingness itself in its fullness,’’ and identifying with those ‘‘who have nothing and
who, in having nothing, have everything’’ (Moten, 2013). In encouraging us to look and ask what this everything might be,
Moten honors the radical idiom relating Jesus, William Blake, and young Karl Marx, the dionysian Christianity of Norman O. Brown, the
messianism of Walter Benjamin, the aesthetic of John Coltrane. In
this dark time, it seems crucial to bear witness against
violent repetition and against all the structural reasons we should anticipate it, but it seems as crucial to
model a politics that struggles against death by remembering the aporetic and excessive, the
improvisatory and the unexpected, as elements of our democratic faith.
 2ac engagement good
Complete rejection of institutional logic of civil society crushes anti-white supremacy
politics. We need to point out contradictions in state practices to create effective
change.
Kimberle CRENSHAW Law @ UCLA 88 [RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION
AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331 L/N]
Questioning the Transformative View: Some Doubts About Trashing The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The implications for Blacks
of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling, even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating possibilities. Trashing legal ideology
seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable and relatively indeterminate. Furthermore ,
trashing offers
no idea of how to avoid the negative consequences of engaging in reformist discourse or how to work
around such consequences. Even if we imagine the wrong world when we think in terms of legal
discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world where legal protection has at times been a
blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental problem is that, although Critics criticize law because it functions to
legitimate existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating function that has made law
receptive to certain demands in this area. The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for liberation leads
to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it reinforces not only the
discourse itself but also the society and the world that it embodies. Yet Critics offer little beyond this observation. Their focus on
delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that , once rights rhetoric has been discarded, there exists a more
productive strategy for change, one which does not reinforce existing patterns of domination . Unfortunately, no
such strategy has yet been articulated, and it is difficult to imagine that racial minorities will ever be able
to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367] excellent account of the civil rights movement, popular
struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic and a challenge to that logic . 137 People can
only demand change in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions that they are challenging . 138
Demands for change that do not reflect the institutional logic -- that is, demands that do not engage and
subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be ineffective. 139 The possibility for ideological change is
created through the very process of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis. Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by

challenging an institution internally, that is, by using its own logic against it. 140 Such crisis occurs when
powerless people force open and politicize a contradiction between the dominant ideology and their
reality. The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make
things appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is triggered by the political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent
necessary to close the apparent contradiction. This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil
rights movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that
reflected American society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology. Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a
series of contradictions -- the most important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination. Rather

than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false, civil
rights protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the “rights”
that citizenship entailed. By seeking to restructure reality to reflect American mythology , Blacks relied upon
and ultimately benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by granting formal rights.
Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the dominant order, it is the very
accomplishment of legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for change is both created and limited by legitimation.
 2ac hope good
The belief that reform and progress are possible is beneficial and distinct from the
harmful belief that it’s inevitable---their refusal of the mere possibility of progress
actively constitutes the social as static---it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that locks in
white supremacy
Melvin Rogers 17, Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University, 11/1/17, “Keeping the
Faith,” http://bostonreview.net/race/melvin-rogers-keeping-faith#.WfnpFEnhC9c.facebook

*modified for ableist language that we do not endorse

These days, the invocation of faith in the transformative possibility of self and society risks naiveté. We live in a
time, after all, when the ties that bind us have badly frayed, when we seem unable to properly regard the pain of our fellows, and when
political leaders seem hell-bent on exploiting it for gain and to satisfy their own narcissism. To defend the role of faith in political
struggle may seem odd. Yet, hear me out. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy,
is his clearest expression yet of political fatalism—his “deeply held belief that white supremacy was so foundational to this country that it would
not be defeated in my lifetime, my child's lifetime, or perhaps ever.” As in Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), we again encounter
white supremacy not as a political ideology, but as the defining feature of the U.S. polity—its essential
nature. The book comprises previously published essays—one for each of the eight years Barack Obama held the presidency—prefaced by
moving biographical and personal meditations that give each chapter philosophical weight. Taken together, it is about Obama and the United
States—and it is about Coates. It charts the course of Coates’s career from a time when he could not make ends meet to his recent position of
speaking for and to Americans about Black America. Obama’s presidency made this possible; it opened the door for a “crop of black writers and
journalists who achieved prominence during his two terms.” This is also a book about shattering a great illusion—the idea that Obama’s
presidency represented black power. “Obama, his family, and his administration were a walking advertisement for the ease with which black
people could be fully integrated into the unthreatening mainstream of American culture, politics, and myth. And that was always the problem.”
For Coates, Obama represented a possibility that had always been denied, the idea that a black American could one day inhabit the highest
office of the land. And if a black American could be president, couldn’t the United States be more than the explicit racism of its past and the
institutional racism of its present? Coates himself was taken by this seductive idea, something he laments throughout the book. As he explains:
It is not so much that I logically reasoned out that Obama’s election would author a post-racist age. But it now seemed possible that white
supremacy, the scourge of American history might well be banished in my lifetime. In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be
isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body. Herein lies the explanation
for why a man who curries favor with white supremacists assumed the presidency after Obama. Donald Trump’s ascendancy was a virulent
reaction not only to Obama, but to the idea that his presidency signaled the country’s embrace of a multiracial polity. The
running
theme in Coates’s book is that white supremacy is native and essential. It is the source of his motivation. Coates’s goal
is to distance both black Americans and himself from thinking of white supremacy as a focus of
transformative politics. And his theme should guard against the familiar tendency to deny the national
past by invoking its ever-present commitment to redemption . Sometimes denial comes in the form of efforts to sanitize
history, Coates tells us, as was the case with Americans seeking to reconcile themselves to a civil war that was about rights, or railroads, or
tariffs—anything but race. But denial also comes in the form of believing in “an arc of cosmic justice,” the sense “that good acts were rewarded
and bad deeds punished . . . ” Coates argues instead that U.S. history is merely the record of its fundamental nature. Transcendent stories
cannot relieve us of this burden. ForCoates, the desire to transform the United States reflects a naïve religious
longing. When Coates tells us that “cosmic justice, collective hope, and national redemption” are
meaningless to him, he is asking black Americans to resist the temptation to allow those things (which all seem
to be interchangeable throughout the book) to have meaning for them. This is his “black atheism.” It removes the desire to
appeal to white Americans because it removes the belief that white Americans are “interested listeners ”
(even if they are regular readers). In doing so, black Americans arm themselves against disappointment because they drop their “expectations
of white people . . . ” Challenging Coates is difficult, not because of the assuredness of his analysis, but because of his reputation as “America’s
best writer on race.” Coates bristles at this reputation, but he has also embraced his status. He has mastered the balance between speaking to
black pain and suffering (acknowledgement, after all, is so central to one's ethical and political standing in a community otherwise defined by
disregarding black life) and lacerating a class of white Americans, many of whom perversely see such attacks as moments of cathartic release.
This is as Coates intends. Similar to his affection for hip-hop music—the way in which he was captured and captivated by the lyricism of its
artists—he seeks to deploy his writings as a talisman. “Out here,” he tells us, “in the concrete and real, sentences should be supernatural,
words strung together until they compelled any listener to repeat them at odd hours . . . ” Coates understands the power of music, and from his
love for it, he crafted his “earliest sense of what writing should mean.” His audience is captured precisely because his words are incantations
that leave them spellbound. But when the United States selects its eloquent spokesperson on the “race issue”—as it always does—all other
voices become mere noise, and the complexity of our political traditions and our lived experiences are flattened out. In Coates’s view, for
instance, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr. were all failures. They performed the same script, they failed to move their
audience to action, and they never reshaped U.S. life and culture. “All of these heroes,” Coates insists, “had failed to cajole and coerce the
masters of America.” In
Coates’s telling, fine historical distinctions disappear, time stands still, and the past
and future collapse into the political horrors of the present. This is what happens when we listen only
to a single voice; no conversation is possible. We are disabled[prevented] from speaking thoughtfully
and accurately about political and cultural transformation on racial matters. But there is a sleight of hand in
Coates’s “black atheism”; it conflates hope with certainty, and hope becomes our fatal flaw. Yet
we don’t need to believe that progress is inevitable to think that, through our efforts, we may be able to
move toward a more just society. We can, however, be sure that no good will come of the refusal to engage
in this work. There is much in this that should concern us. Coates describes the pain visited on black bodies and engenders white guilt. He
erodes the idea that who we are need not determine who we may become. He obstructs rather than
opens any attempt to reckon with our racial past and present in the service of an inclusive future . And he
participates in a politics where words and actions can never aspire to change the political community in
which we live, and for that reason they only fortify our indignation and deepen our suspicion—namely, that as
black Americans, we are as alien to this polity as it is alien to us . The aspiration to defend a more exalted vision of this
country’s ethical and political life is taken as the hallmark of being asleep, dreaming in religious illusions. To be alive to an unvarnished reality,
to be woke, is to recognize that no such country is possible. This
runs roughshod over that thread in the grand tradition of
U.S. struggles for justice—a tradition in which hope and faith are forged through political darkness. Hope
involves attachment and commitment to the possibility of realizing the goods we seek. Faith is of a
broader significance, providing hope with content. Faith , the black scholar Anna Julia Cooper suggested in 1892, is
grounded in a vision of political and ethical life that is at odds with the community one inhabits . It is a
vision that one believes ought to command allegiance, for which one is willing to fight, and in which one believes others can find a home.
Faith looks on the present from the perspective of a future vision of society, and uses the vision as a
resource to remake the present. And so faith, the philosopher and psychologist William James explained in 1897, is “the readiness
to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.” In other words, faith has never been exhausted
by the political reality one happens to be living in. Political faith has always rested on the idea that we
are not finished, a thought that Coates rejects out of hand . In the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson called this
capacity for human renewal “ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms.” In our political life this means, as James Baldwin well
knew, that both our liberal democratic institutions and its culture “depends on choices one has got to make ,
for ever and ever and ever, every day.” Faith has always been a loving but difficult commitment precisely because it makes politics
about maybes rather than certainties . One of the greatest dangers of U.S. exceptionalism, for instance, is
that it has habituated us to think about the structure of political life as necessarily progressing. Writing in
the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott—a successful nonviolent campaign against racial segregation—King sought to chasten the obvious
excitement: “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social
advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability .” Yet Coates appears simply to invert U.S. exceptionalism,
replacing it with the equally fatalistic idea that the United States is fundamentally broken. In a world where
the good or bad is fated to happen, faith and hope have no foothold. This ultimately weakens our resolve
and undermines our ability to take seriously the idea of an “American experiment.” Black activists have not forged their faith
with the stone of U.S. exceptionalism . Rather, they have used their darkest hours to “make a way out of no
way”—to address the triple crises of exclusion, domination, and violence. Abolitionists such as David Walker faced
it in the form of the enslavement of black folks. Frederick Douglass encountered it with the rise and crash of reconstruction. Wells faced it as
she confronted the horror of lynching and the disposability of black life. And in our own time, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists are reminded of
a similar disposability of black life that goes unpunished. And yet, they are keepers of the faith, recognizing that its vitality is not
exhausted by the reality they struggle against. In her recent New York Times article, “Black Lives Matter Is Democracy in
Action,” Barbara Ransby narrates a powerful account of BLM activists creating contexts for collective leadership
and using those opportunities to transform the power of voice into actions that meet the needs of
ordinary people. This effort would be impossible for people who accept Coates’s perspective . Their efforts may
not win the day, but they certainly won’t win the day without the faith that winning is a possibility. Faith does not deny the present,
but refuses to be defined by it and sink into it. We now face a president who seeks to colonize every
waking moment of our lives with feelings of dread , thus arresting our ability to imagine a reality beyond television, social
The illusion of our present moment is not expressed in political
media feeds, and newspapers.

faith, but in the belief that we can respond constructively without such faith.
Political faith is fully realistic about the present disasters and rejects illusions about assured future
progress, while also insisting that we are not certain to fail. It is hopeful without being optimistic . We
may falter, and the material, psychological, and political goods of white supremacy may deplete our desire to
transform. We know the history—from the 1880s to the 1960s—of white backlash in response to a more
expansive racial justice. In fact, we are living through one such backlash given the ascendancy of Trump. But our political
community is what it is because we have made it this way. It is not fated to be. Believing otherwise
makes white supremacy something more than a collection of choices, habits, and practices—it makes it
part of human nature itself. Coates wants us to face the facts and embrace black atheism. But throughout the book he often
slides from working in the historical register to speaking in the idiom of philosophical metaphysics—at one moment he stands in time and at
another he stands outside of it, confidently telling us how history will end. For this reason, Coates doesn't dismantle white
supremacy; he ironically provides it with support. Please understand my concern. Coates is right: he doesn’t have a
“responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world.” We must, as he has often done, speak the
truth. But we must not claim to know what we cannot possibly know. Humility creates space for hope.
This is why James Baldwin remains so helpful and why his work is ubiquitous these days. The United States, he insisted, is a collection
of choices. And precisely for this reason, we must learn how to let go of former identities as we quest after better ones. He was not a
political strategist, but a keen observer and analyst of U.S. political and ethical culture and in this regard, his writings are directed to cultivating
a new orientation. Baldwin’s insight for us was that we find it challenging to live together precisely because we have not always understood
what it means to allow features of ourselves to perish. In depicting our many selves, Baldwin reduces the burden of letting go. If
there is
only one self at stake, as Coates believes, if white supremacy is the country’s only identity, then letting go is
entering an abyss.

Perhaps, as so many tell us, the sun is setting on the U.S. empire. The death of an empire is nothing to lament, tied as
intimately as empires are to death and destruction. But the United States is not only an empire. Its liberal democratic
tendencies run deep and have often been used not merely for good, but to bring about the good as it
relates to racial equality. As the empire dies, why should we abandon the idea that something new
may yet be born? What we must ask ourselves now, is what in our past might we retrieve for our present, how might those
resources be reimagined to articulate a political faith more humane and just than the reality we find
ourselves living, and how might we allow portions of ourselves to die with grace so that we might
flourish with dignity? Answering these questions begins with denying that the story of who
we are is simple and settled.
 at: slavery
Using slavery as a metaphor to describe the current racial nomos obscures the
material operations that make white supremacy a reality. Manichean dichotomies
aren’t useful
Paul GILROY, professor of American and English literature at King’s College London, interview with
George Yancy, professor of philosophy at Duquesne University, 15 [“What ‘Black Lives’ Means in
Britain,” The New York Times, October 1, 2015, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/paul-
gilroy-what-black-means-in-britain/]

G.Y.: You’ve written about the Middle Passage, about that tragic transportation of African bodies across the Atlantic. Violent disciplining of the
black body, rendering it docile, was one mechanism at work during that passage. What
ways to do think contemporary black
people in the United States or in Britain continue to undergo forms of violent discipline?

P.G.: There are many connections between the ways that we inhabit and reproduce the contemporary
racial order and the period of slavery. However, we are not slaves. It’s important not to let slavery slip
into being a metaphor and blur the difference between our condition and the predicament of the
slaves. The racial nomos has changed since the 18th century. How racial hierarchy and the exploitation
it sanctions and the terror it requires link the past to the present needs to be understood very carefully. I
know I am stepping away from the political liturgy or code used in American discussions of race and politics, but I don’t care for
Manichaean styles of thought. Abstract and reified magnitudes like “whiteness” aren’t, in my view, very
helpful in interpreting what is now going on around us. Racial categories have to be denatured. We have to
see, for example, how that whiteness is assembled and brought to actual and virtual life. What are its
historical, economic and social conditions of existence? How does it become articulated to juridical ,
scientific, medical, aesthetic, military and technological forms of expertise? These are concrete problems that
open whiteness up to multilayered struggle.
G.Y.: I certainly understand your point. Yet black people in America understand that, in so many instances, they are being shot and killed by
white police officers who are sworn to protect them. They understand how white life matters differently. And even if that life is poor, it is still
white. And they understand the reality of white privilege. Isn’t there a way in which this is a real phenomenon to be reckoned with? Black
people, it seems to me are not responsible for creating a racial Manichaean reality of “us” (blacks) versus
“them” (whites).

P.G.: In “Wretched of the Earth,” Frantz Fanon

speaks powerfully about the need and the difficulty of getting
beyond this Manichaean perspective. He describes how the Manichaeism of the colonizer creates the
Manichaeism of the colonized. That reaction cannot be avoided but it is also a bad place to get stuck. You
speak of privilege here. I know this is now the language many people use to talk about racial hierarchy but I’m not comfortable with that as a
shorthand term for capturing the complex machinery of inequality. It makes power simply a possession rather than a relationship.
 2ac util
Util is good

Bowden 9
Peter Bowden (University of Sydney, Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics). “In Defense of Utilitarianism.” Annual
Conference: Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics, June 2009. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=1534305

The most significant reason for advocating utility theory however, is that it is useful and usable. The
institutions in our society – the professional, industry and special interest groups, as well as
organisations in business and government, plus the not for profit sector - are faced with many ethical
decisions, often complex and difficult, requiring considerable thought, and eventually resolution. The
moral issues that arise in these contexts are fundamental to the institutional functioning of our society.
Yet very few people have training in moral philosophy. They need a relatively straightforward way
of making these decisions – of telling right from wrong. Mill, it will be argued, provides that method. Many who have no
training that are faced with these ethical choices will rely on intuition. Perhaps they
will use a set of values learned at
home, or from their schooling or their church. As we shall see for the more difficult ethical issues,
however, intuition is an unreliable guide. If they have training, they may remember virtue ethics, or
Kant’s deontology, but as I shall also argue later, these theories do not necessarily give straightforward
and acceptable answers. The statement that some ethical issues are difficult to resolve should generate little disagreement. Any
teacher of professional ethics can identify issues where the profession disagrees on the ethics of a particular practice. Reverse auctions, for
instance, where providers of the product or service bid increasingly lower prices, have generated debate on whether we are sacrificing quality
or safety for a lower price. Front end loading, where the work items executed earlier are loaded 3 with a higher percentage of the supplier‟s
overheads has generated a similar debate. Whistleblowing is yet another issue where the ethics are debated - whether the person revealing the
wrongdoing is ignoring the ethical obligation of loyalty to his or her employer. Or whether the risk of retaliation and losing one‟s job outweighs
the moral obligation to reveal the truth. We are also all aware of the concept of group think, where people in an organisation tend to accept
the prevailing opinion, rather than question it. This may have been a cause behind many of the ethical failures seen over recent years in HIH,
James Hardie, the Australian Wheat Board and other companies. The fact that no executive spoke out against the unethical behaviours then
practised tells us that those who want honesty and transparency were not confident enough of themselves or their judgement to speak out.
Alternatively, the failure to speak out may have been due to the tendency to find a justification for an unethical action. Wheat Board people
possibly convinced themselves for instance, that they were acting in the best interests of the Australian farmer, and therefore of the nation.
A relatively straight forward way to cut through such
And so the national benefits outweighed the negatives of their action.
fuzzy thinking would be the prior resolution of many of these issues. Utilitarianism, it will be argued,
provides that method. It would give those who wish to live and work within an ethical environment
stronger tools with which to decide how they should react.

Extinction first – VTL inevitable

Bernstein ‘2 (Richard J., Vera List Prof. Phil. – New School for Social Research, “Radical Evil: A
Philosophical Interrogation”, p. 188-192)

There is a basic value inherent in organic being, a basic affirmation, "The Yes' of Life" (IR 81). 15 "The
self-affirmation of being becomes emphatic in the opposition of life to death. Life is the explicit confrontation of
being with not-being. . . . The 'yes' of all striving is here sharpened by the active `no' to not-being" (IR 81-2). Furthermore — and this is the

crucial point for Jonas — this affirmation of life that is in all organic being has a binding obligatory force upon
human beings. This blindly self-enacting "yes" gains obligating force in the seeing freedom of man, who
as the supreme outcome of nature's purposive labor is no longer its automatic executor but, with the
power obtained from knowledge, can become its destroyer as well. He must adopt the "yes" into his will
and impose the "no" to not-being on his power . But precisely this transition from willing to obligation is the critical point of
moral theory at which attempts at laying a foundation for it come so easily to grief. Why does now, in man, that become a duty which hitherto
"being" itself took care of through all individual willings? (IR 82). We discover here the transition from is to "ought" — from the self-affirmation
of life to the binding obligation of human beings to preserve life not only for the present but also for the future. But why do we need a new
ethics? The subtitle of The Imperative of Responsibility — In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age — indicates why we need a new
ethics. Modern technology has transformed the nature and consequences of human action so radically
that the underlying premises of traditional ethics are no longer valid . For the first time in history
human beings possess the knowledge and the power to destroy life on this planet, including human life.
Not only is there the new possibility of total nuclear disaster; there are the even more invidious and
threatening possibilities that result from the unconstrained use of technologies that can destroy the
environment required for life. The major transformation brought about by modern technology is that the consequences of our
actions frequently exceed by far anything we can envision. Jonas was one of the first philosophers to warn us about the unprecedented ethical
and political problems that arise with the rapid development of biotechnology. He claimed that this was happening at a time when there was an
"ethical vacuum," when there did not seem to be any effective ethical principles to limit ot guide our ethical decisions. In the name of scientific
and technological "progress," there is a relentless pressure to adopt a stance where virtually anything is permissible, includ-ing transforming
the genetic structure of human beings, as long as it is "freely chosen." We
need, Jonas argued, a new categorical imperative
that might be formulated as follows: "Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the
permanence of genuine human life"; or expressed negatively : "Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive
of the future possibility of such a life"; or simply: " Do not compromise the conditions for an indefinite
continuation of humanity on earth "; or again turned positive: "In your present choices, include the future wholeness
of Man among the objects of your will."
 at: baudrillard
Perm Do both: Baudrillard’s position can help inform the research of debate and the
1AC. We should combine the approaches.
Cole 10 Steven J. Cole is an instructor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta.
Baudrillard’s Ontology:  Empirical Research and the Denial of the Real. Volume 7, Number 2 (July, 2010)

Baudrillard is interested in how objects

From his early writings on consumer society to his later writings on quantum physics,

come to seduce, control, and evade the subject.   Yet nowhere within his corpus does
Baudrillard seriously “deny material reality.”   While his writings on quantum physics are not intended to make a
contribution to quantum theory itself, they show that Baudrillard is indeed interested in examining and understanding empirical objects/phenomena through
empirical research.  Thus, my reading of Baudrillard supports Mirchandani’s claim that although postmodern theory starts as an epistemological critique,
“epistemological postmodernists do recognize the empirically observable social changes that prompt discourse about a new era” (2005:88, my italics). 
Mirchandani believes that as sociology uses postmodern epistemological insights to study new forms of post-modern social phenomenon we witness a shift
from postmodern epistemology to postmodern empirical research.  My own current research (unpublished) on contemporary music producers-consumers, for

Therefore my
example, uses Baudrillard’s understanding of simulation to ground empirical research into music production and technology.  

own and others’ empirical research shows that Baudrillard’s position, while hardly
flawless, can serve as a valuable theoretical framework to guide empirical research
and therefore does not warrant the dismissive characterization of “metaphysical
nonsense.”
The Gulf War occurred.
Wikipedia 17 [Wikipedia, free online encyclopedia, Gulf War, 7/17/17,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War]

The Gulf War (2 August 1990 – 28 February 1991), codenamed Operation Desert Shield (2 August 1990 –
17 January 1991) for operations leading to the buildup of troops and defense of Saudi Arabia and
Operation Desert Storm (17 January 1991 – 28 February 1991) in its combat phase, was a war waged by
coalition forces from 35 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion
and annexation of Kuwait. The war is also known under other names, such as the Persian Gulf War, First
Gulf War, Gulf War I, Kuwait War, First Iraq War, or Iraq War before the term "Iraq War" became
identified instead with the 2003 Iraq War (also referred to in the US as "Operation Iraqi Freedom").The
Iraqi Army's occupation of Kuwait that began 2 August 1990 was met with international condemnation,
and brought immediate economic sanctions against Iraq by members of the UN Security Council. US
President George H. W. Bush deployed US forces into Saudi Arabia, and urged other countries to send
their own forces to the scene. An array of nations joined the coalition, the largest military alliance since
World War II. The great majority of the coalition's military forces were from the US, with Saudi Arabia,
the United Kingdom, and Egypt as leading contributors, in that order. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia paid
around US$32 billion of the US$60 billion cost. The war was marked by the introduction of live news
broadcasts from the front lines of the battle, principally by the US network CNN. The war has also
earned the nickname Video Game War after the daily broadcast of images from cameras on board US
bombers during Operation Desert Storm. The initial conflict to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait began with
an aerial and naval bombardment on 17 January 1991, continuing for five weeks. This was followed by a
ground assault on 24 February. This was a decisive victory for the coalition forces, who liberated Kuwait
and advanced into Iraqi territory. The coalition ceased its advance, and declared a ceasefire 100 hours
after the ground campaign started. Aerial and ground combat was confined to Iraq, Kuwait, and areas on
Saudi Arabia's border. Iraq launched Scud missiles against coalition military targets in Saudi Arabia and
against Israel.

The end point of their politics, theoretically and practically, is the invisible hand of the
market – death and acceleration don’t hurt the system but allow it to maintain its
power
Noys ‘10 (Benjamin, Prof. of Critical Theory @ U. of Chichester, The Persistence of the Negative: A
Critique of Contemporary Critical Theory, pp. 5-9)

Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) is a more ambivalent and uneasy example of accelerationism. If Lyotard outbids Deleuze and Guattari then, initially,

argues that their collective retention of the signifier of desire leaves them all
outbids Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard. He

locked into a dialectics of liberation tied to the functioning of the system. As he would later put it in Forget Foucault (1977) the
attempt ‘to rediscover a phantasmal and instinctual truth of the body in desire, is still only to unearth the psychic metaphor of capital.’ 22 In a critique of accelerationism avant la lettre

Baudrillard’s
Baudrillard argues that this ‘compulsion toward liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation’ is only the replica or mirror of capitalist circulation.23 The difficulty is that

own catastrophising strategy comprises a kind of negative accelerationism, in which he seeks the point of immanent reversal that inhabits
and destabilises capital. In Symbolic Exchange and Death this is the ‘death-function’, which ‘cannot be programmed and localised’.24 Against the

law of value that determines market exchange Baudrillard identifies this ‘death-function’ with the excessive and
superior form of ‘symbolic exchange’ which is ‘based on the extermination of value’. 25 We have reached the (literally) terminal point of

resistance to capitalism. The problem for this strategy , pointed out by Lyotard in Libidinal Economy when reacting to Baudrillard’s earlier work,

is that perhaps ‘[t]here is as much libidinal intensity in capitalist exchange as in the alleged “symbolic”
exchange’.26 Baudrillard’s reversible point is vitiated by capital’s own powers of intensity. For Lyotard, Baudrillard fails to draw all
the consequences of a radically immanent thought: the abandonment of any critique or critical position. It is an irony, as we shall see, that Lyotard himself would soon return to the relative

Collectively
certainties of Kantian critique.¶ These texts trace their own pattern of acceleration and outbidding as they try to exceed each other and a deterritorialising capitalism.

they embody a shared desire to exacerbate capitalism to the point of collapse , aiming to out-radicalise Marx and Engels’s
argument that capitalism liberates us from ‘feudal, patriarchal, and idyllic relations’ by drowning these relations ‘in the icy water of egotistical calculation’.27 Heretical as they no doubt are,
and they each make much of this, we should not forget that these are Marxist heresies. It is probably unsurprising that this micro-sequence of theory is often regarded as a terminal point, if
not as symptomatic of the excesses that come from doing theory (even Lyotard later referred to Libidinal Economy as his ‘evil book’).28 I will not take this peculiarly anti-intellectual line,

this accelerationist theoretical ‘excrescence’ is an engagement with , and re-formulation of, the
because I want to argue that

political situation of the time. Against those interpretations that argued the failure of May ’68 was due to the lack of a ‘Party’ or equivalent form of organisational
discipline, this orientation gives a hyper-theoretical and abstracted form to the libertarian impulses of that moment. This accounts for the still pertinent refusal of Lyotard to engage in the
normative language of ‘perversion’, or the lashing out of Deleuze and Guattari against ‘paranoia’ as the signature disorder of domination – including for revolutionary militants.29 The
accelerationists are, however, engaged with an ambiguous situation. On the one hand, they try to stay faithful to the libertarian effects of May ’68 that involved the breaking-up of pre-existent
moral and social constraints, especially in education, sexuality and gender relations; on the other hand, they also try to find a liberating dynamic in the ‘unleashing’ of capital flows due to the

The
withdrawal of the post-war regulative mechanisms in the 1970s. They at once accept this situation and then try to ‘direct’ it, we could even say ‘surf’ it, to libertarian ends.30¶

difficulties are obvious. While the accelerationists maintain a figure of revolution or revolt traced along
existing tendencies of capitalism, they became increasingly detached from any actual social or political
agency that could actuate this politics. Where are the schizophrenics? What exactly would be the ‘subject’ of Lyotard’s libidinal band? How can the
‘dead’ or symbolic exchange produce resistance? In the retreat of political experimentation during the 1970s the
potential subject of this politics – what Lyotard sarcastically dubbed the ‘good hippy’31 – disappears. This then leaves only one subject:
‘the desire of capital’. 32 At the theoretical level the more any ‘outside’ from capitalism is eliminated , and the less

convincing any internal force of overturning appears, the more unnecessary any subjectivity appears to
be: capitalism will do the work for us. Agency disappears into a fundamental passivity – becoming agents of capital – which is

congruent with forms of passive market-formed agency such as the Smithian ‘invisible hand’. 33¶
Accelerationism, in another unintentional irony, risks restoring the most teleological forms of Second International Marxism. The slogan of Bernstein’s revisionism was ‘the ultimate aim of

The un-nuanced celebration

socialism is nothing, but the movement is everything’;34 the accelerationists put a twist on this: the movement would achieve the aim.

of the supposedly emancipatory possibilities secreted at the nucleus of capital left this orientation high-
and-dry when capitalism counter-attacked in the purity of its own desire for accumulation. As Moishe Postone
states: ‘With their critical gaze fixed upon what proved to be another passing configuration of capitalism, poststructuralist approaches backed into a still
newer configuration, a neoliberal social universe with which they were ill-prepared to deal’.35 While the
accelerationists could offer a critique of the codified normative orderings of welfare or Fordist capitalism, and puncture some illusions
concerning representation or organisation on the left, when capitalism itself became ‘purer’ these theories lost purchase. 36¶

During the 1980s those who had adopted an accelerationist position responded to this crisis by taking up more
classical positions, trying to establish relatively stable points of resistance that were not absolutely congruent with capitalist flows. While maintaining a faith in immanence, in A
Thousand Plateaus (1980) Deleuze and Guattari paid far more attention to the dangers in pursuing a full-blown ‘schizo’ deterritorialisation of desire.37 To produce the consistency of a body
without organs requires an ‘art of dosages, since overdose is a danger’,38 and it is not to be carried out with a sledgehammer but with ‘a very fine file’.39 Lyotard no longer praised the
capitalist enhancement of bodily jouissance in the environment of the factory, but took refuge in the shelter of the Jewish (or as he preferred ‘jewish’) thinking that ‘the Other is the law’,
opposed to the Heideggerian ‘Western’ thinking of the Other as being.40 This was predicated on a return to Kant, in which the sublimity of the law replaced the untrammelled jouissance of the

worker. Baudrillard retained most fidelity to his own negative accelerationism of an autophagous capitalism. In The Transparency of
Evil (1990) he figured this immanent collapse of the system through the metaphor of autoimmune disorder,41 but now even Baudrillard bolstered this with an insistence on the ‘Other’s

indestructibility’.42¶ The collapse of accelerationism under the pressure of capitalist recomposition, coupled to
the desire to preserve a point of resistance to capitalism, tended to lead to the localisation of that point
as transcendent to capitalism. In different forms these positions now risked re-constituting alterity as what Derrida called
the ‘tout-Autre’ (the totally or completely Other),43 courting the danger that they would become functionally
indistinguishable from a transcendent religious conception. This configuration actually re-connected to
elements within critical theory that had undergone a rightward shift in the 1960s, such as Horkheimer’s rather undialectical invocations
of the ‘entirely other’ (ein ganz Anderes).44 In both cases the search for a final bulwark against the advance of disenchantment

could all too quickly lead to the mysticism of the deus absconditus.

Baudrillard is over-totalizing
Robinson 13 [Andrew Robinson, political theorist and activist based in the UK, Jean Baudrillard and
Activism: A Critique, Ceasefire Magazine, 2/7/13, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-
14/]//LM

One limit to Baudrillard’s theory is his tendency to over-totalise . Baudrillard is talking about tendential processes, but he
often talks as if they are totally effective. There are still, for instance, a lot of uncharted spaces, a lot of unexplained events, a

lot of things the system can’t handle . While Baudrillard is describing dominant tendencies in the present, these tendencies coexist with older
forms of capitalism, in a situation of uneven development. The persistence of the system’s violence is a problem for

Baudrillard’s perspective: the smooth regime of neutralisation and inclusive regulation has notended older modalities of brutality. At times,
Baudrillard exaggerates greatly the extent to which the old authoritarian version of capitalism has
been replaced by subtle regimes of control. He exaggerates the extent to which contemporary
capitalism is tolerant, permissive and ‘maternal’. This may be because his works were mostly written in France in the 1970s-80s, when
the dominant ethos was still largely social-democratic. What Baudrillard recognises as the retrograde version of capitalism associated with the right-wing was to
return with a vengeance, especially after 911. Another problem is a lack of a Southern dimension. Like many Northern authors, Baudrillard’s approach
mainly applies to the functioning of capitalism in the North . The penetration of the code is
substantially less in countries where information technology is less widespread . In parts of Africa, even
simple coding exercises such as counting votes or recording censuses are extremely difficult. This is for the very reasons of
respondent reflexivity which Baudrillard highlights. People will under-record themselves to stay invisible, or over-record

themselves to obtain benefits. And without massive resources to put into its bureaucracies, the system
is unable to find enough people who will act as transmitters for the code. Instead, people use their power to extract what
they can from the system. Explosions still happen regularly in the South. Furthermore, a contracting system ‘forcibly delinks’ large portions of the globe. Its

power on the margins is lessened as its power at the core is intensified. As the system becomes ever more contracted and
inward-looking, liberated zones may appear around the edges. Without an element of border thinking, Baudrillard tends to exaggerate the

system’s completeness and effectiveness. Baudrillard assumes that any excess is everywhere
absorbed into the code. He ignores the persistence of borderlands . And when he talks about the South, he admits that the old
regime of production might still exist here: people still work seeking betterment; colonial wars are fought to destroy persisting symbolic exchange; Saddam was not
playing the Gulf War by the rules of deterrence. The Arab masses are still able to become inflamed by war or non-war; Iran and Iraq can still fight a real war, not a
simulated non-war. So perhaps only a minority, only the included layers within the North, are trapped within simulation and the ‘masses’. Perhaps reality has not
died, but been displaced to the South. It seems, therefore, premature to suggest that the system has encompassed all of social life in the code. To be sure, its reach
has expanded, but it has also forcibly delinked large areas of the globe . The penetration of simulated reality into everyday life
varies in its effectiveness. At the limit, as in Somalia, simulated states collapse under their own irrelevance. In other cases, an irrelevant state hovers
over a largely autonomous society. And the struggle Baudrillard advocated in his early works against subordination as

labour-power is not simply theoretical. In fact, there is a constant war, fought at various degrees of
intensity, between the system and its others, especially in highly marginal parts of the global South:
Chiapas, Afghanistan, the Niger Delta, Somalia, West Papua, rural Colombia, Northeast India, the Andes… The system continues
to be drawn into these conflicts, despite its apparent self-deterrence from total nuclear annihilation.

Baudrillard’s conception of hyperreality of wrong.

King 98 [Anthony King, A critique of Baudrillard’s hyperreality: towards a sociology of postmodernism,
Philosophy Social Criticism, 11/1/1998, p. 48-50, http://psc.sagepub.com/content/24/6/47]//LM
The key texts in which Baudrillard first starts using the concept of the hyperreal systematically and in which he defines (after a fashion) what he means by the term
are to be found in Fatal Strategies and Simulacra and Simulation. Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is
no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without orign or reality: a hyperreal. (Baudrillard, 1994a: 1)
The real does not efface itself in favour of the imaginary; it effaces itself in favour of the m o r e real than real: the hyperreal. The truer than true: this is simulation.
(Baudrillard, 1990b: 11) Hyperreality emerges when cultural representations (and therefore our knowledge) no longer have a social or
human reality against which to verify themselves, but become somehow autonomous and autochthon- ous.1 Hyperreality is not grounded in a reality beyond itself
but, in hyperreality, our knowledge of the world floats free from any verifying reference. Hyperreality marks the end of representation and, as both quotations
reveal, hyperreality emerges at the multinational (post- modern) stage of capitalism after the ’mirror stage’ of industrial capital- ism.2 In
modern,
industrial capitalism, cultural representations - our knowledge and construction of reality-were linked to
an independent reality. The maps, doubles, mirrors and concepts which Baudrillard uses as metaphors of the kind of knowledge typical of industrial
capitalism all reflect an exterior reality. They may have been inadequate to that reality but they were based on it. Hyperreality is a moment of

profound cultural transformation in which our cultural representations are no longer related to an
independent reality and this new culture is linked by Baudrillard to the emergence and dominance of
the television as a means of communication .3 For Baudrillard, the technological development of the television marks a fundamental
ontological transformation in culture; television culture is of a different order from that of all previous societies. For information and the media are not a scene, a
prospective space, or something that’s performed, but a screen without depth, a tape perforated with messages and signals to which corresponds a receiver’s o w n
perforated reading. (Baudrillard, 1990b: 65) For Baudrillard a scene constitutes a representation and therefore a scene is still linked to reality. Consequently, the
scene can be interpreted - it can be compared with something else and its inadequacies can be pointed up; not so the (television) screen. The screen amounts to the
end of all interpretation. The screen is automatically decoded in the receiver’s mind and there is no mediation by the receiver. The
analogy of the tape here is somewhat obscure but the image that Baudrillard seems to have in mind is of a pianola in which the music is an arrangement of
perforations on scrolls of paper to which the pianola mechanically responds. The
process of reading, interpretation and
internalization is abolished in the hyperreality of the television screen , just as the active participation of the pianist is
abolished by the pianola.Elaborating on the notion of hyperreality, Baudrillard discusses a television documentary about a family (called the Louds) which was
broadcast in 1971 to enormous audiences (1994a: 27-8). For
Baudrillard, the interesting point was that this documentaryc
laimed to be completely faithful to reality. More interesting is the illusion of filming the Louds as if TV weren’t there. The producer’s
triumph was to say: ’They lived as if we were not there.’ An absurd, paradoxical formula - neither true nor false: utopian.
(Baudrillard, 1994a: 28) This programme was hyperreal then because it tried to be realer than real; it denied that

it was a representation of family life, claiming, instead, that it captured this life as it was . The television
can never be anything other than a representation but the danger of the television (and wherein lies
its hyperreality) is that it is a representation which claims it is reality . Clearly the television crew’s presence in the house
must have influenced family behaviour; moreover, the footage of the family was not of that family as it was but necessarily a selective and interpretative
representation of that family. By claiming that it captures the real, the television effectively obliterates the real. It
asks the viewers to accept the screen image as the truth, as the direct and unmediated reality and
therefore demands that the actual reality (the Louds family as they live) is not relevant - that this family does not exist outside the
television image. Baudrillard’s discussion of the film The China Syndrome makes a similar point . This film is based on the imaginary
scenario of a leak at a nuclear power plant. It becomes hyperreal for Baudrillard because the film preceded a real leak
which occurred at Harrisburg. But The China Syndrome is also not the original prototype of Harrisburg, one is not the simulacrum of which the
other would be the real: there are only simulacra, and Harrisburg is a sort of second-order simulacrum. (Baudrillard, 1994a: 55) The epistemology of the simulacra
here is the same as we have seen in the example of the Louds family. The
potential nuclear disaster at Harrisburg is not
experienced as a reality but rather individuals experi- ence that crisis as a film on a television screen . Social
reality-and what could be more real than a nuclear cataclysm - is reduced to television images, which abolish a prior reality by presenting themselves as the reality.
Through the television the viewers think they really meet the Louds family or their potential nemesis in a nuclear meltdown. That television constitutes the end of
interpretation (and therefore of subjectivity and freedom) for Baudrillard is confirmed in a passage from Simulacra and Simulation. Now,
one must
conceive of TV along the lines of DNA as an effect in which the opposing poles of determination vanish .
(Baudrillard, 1994a: 31) Baudrillard explains why the television can be described as analogous with DNA in the next paragraph. In the process of molecular control,
which ’goes’ from the DNA nucleus to the substance that it informs,there is no longer the traversal of an effect, of an energy, of a determination, of a message.
(Baudrillard, 1994a: 31) DNA operates without mediation, it is not interpreted but merely inscribes itself on molecules which replicate the DNA exactly; each mole-
cule is a perfect clone of the DNA.

Hyperreality is reductive.
Vitucci 4 [Francisco Vitucci, critic, Critic Of Baudrillard, 12/6/2004, Germany]

Images push their way into the fabric of our social lives. They enter into how we look and what we earn,
and they are still with us when we worry about bills, housing and bringing up children. They compete for
attention through shock tactics, reassurance, sex and mystery, and by inviting viewers to participate in
series of visual puzzles. Billboard advertising showing an image without a code impose themselves,
infuriatingly, on the most recalcitrant passer-by (McRobbie, 1994, 18). Accordingly, audiences or
viewers, lookers or users are no more simple-minded multitudes, but rather active and conscious
counterparts. The more the interconnections between audiences and media representations become
intricate, the more the former division between ‘reality’ and ‘virtuality’ seems to fade in a kind of
renewed, interactive and collaborative form: Baudrillard’s pessimistic thesis is that the media appear to
extend themselves generously to their audience in a gesture designed to demonstrate democratic
embrace while in fact merely extending the sphere of their influence and control. A less pessimistic
postmodernist account might instead emphasize not just the flow of images and texts as they circulate
through the new economy of the sign but also the flow of active agents, whose role in the production
and distribution of the image is not as robotic as Baudrillard would suggest. Such an account would
also require much more analysis of the occupational culture and experience of media workers employed
in this postmodern de-regulated sector, as well as of their audiences. (…) The problems with the old
model of the moral panic are as follows. First it assumed a clear distinction between the world of the
media and the world of social reality. But in one simple sense the media are as much a part of social
reality as any other component can be. We do not exist in social unreality while we watch television or
read the newspaper, nor are we transported back to reality when we turn the TV off to wash the dishes
or discard the paper and go to bed. Indeed perhaps there is no pure social reality outside the world of
representation. Reality is relayed to us through the world of language, communication and imagery.
Social meanings are inevitably representations and selections (idem, 1994, 216-217). This approach
seems to be backed up also by other thinkers’ theories such as those of Marshall MacLuhan who arguing
that the ‘the medium is the message’ (1967) agrees on the ability of mass broadcasting to create visual
symbols and mass action as a liberating force in human affairs. According to this ‘technological
utopianism’ associated with postmodernism, digital communication would make the fragmentation of
modern society a positive feature, since individuals can seek out those artistic, cultural and community
experiences which they regard as being correct for themselves. In other words, the individual becomes
able to form its identity and to structure the ‘truth’ from fragments while gaining, at the same time, the
independence to organize his own environment. On this escort, McRobbie (1994) seems to recall
somehow the concepts explained by MacLuhan when she states that ‘real life means talking about what
was on TV last night’ . Also other authors like Lyotard (1979), debating about the possibly positive
outcomes of mass media and in particular about computerization of society, states that bringing people
knowledge in the form of information, it will produce more liberty for the entire social system.

The revenge of the object solves – also means science fails

Baudrillard 90 (Jean Baudrillard, greatest living philosopher, 1990, The Transparency of Evil, pg. 172-
174)

In the end, all figures of otherness boil down to just one: that of the Object. In the end, all that is left is
the inexorability of the Object, the irredeemability of the Object. Even at the outer frontiers of science
the Object appears ever more ungraspable: it remains internally indivisible and hence unanalysable,
infinitely versatile, reversible, ironic, and contemptuous of all attempts to manipulate it. The subject
tries desperately to follow it, even at the cost of abandoning scientific principles, but the Object
transcends even the sacrifice of scientific rationality. The Object is an insoluble enigma, because it is not
itself and does not know itself. It resembles Chesterton's savage, whom one could not understand for
the same reason that he could not understand himself. It thus constitutes an obstacle to all
understanding. The Object's power and sovereignty derive from the fact that it is estranged from itself,
whereas for us the exact opposite is true. Civilization's first gesture is to hold up a mirror to the Object,
but the Object is only seemingly reflected therein; in fact it is the Object itself which is the mirror, and it
is here that the subject is taken in by the illusion of himself. So where is science's 'other'? Where is its
object? Science has lost its interlocutor, which, like the 'savage', appears not to have responded with
genuine dialogue. It seems that it is not a good object, that it does not respect 'difference', that it
secretly evades all attempts at scientific evangelization (rational objectification), and that it is taking its
revenge for having been 'understood' by surreptitiously undermining the foundations of the edifice of
science. The diabolical pursuit-race of the Object and the subject of science is an event worth following.
All that remains is the Object as a strange attractor. The subject is no longer a strange attractor. We
know the subject too well; the subject knows himself too well. It is the Object that is exciting, because
the Object is my vanishing point. The Object is what theory can be for reality: not a reflection but a
challenge, and a strange attractor. This, potentially, is the way to go in search of otherness. There are
two methods of getting beyond alienation. Either disalienation and the reappropriation of oneself - a
tiresome process, without much prospect of success these days. Or the other extreme - the path of the
absolute Other, of absolute exoticism. This alternative path leads to an exponential defined elsewhere,
virtually, in terms of total excentricity. It goes beyond alienation but in the same direction - to what is
more other than the Other, to radical otherness. The duality of otherness implies an unchallengeable
metamorphosis, an unchallengeable supremacy of appearances and metamorphoses. I am not
alienated. Rather, I am definitively other. No longer subject to the law of desire, but subject now to the
total artifice of rules. I have lost any trace of desire of my own. I answer only to something non-human -
something inscribed not within me but solely in the objective and arbitrary vicissitudes of the world's
signs. Just as what we deem fatal in catastrophes is the world's sovereign indifference to us, so what we
deem fatal in seduction is the Other's sovereign otherness with respect to us. That otherness which
erupts into our life, with stunning clarity, in the shape of a gesture, a face, a form, a word, a prophetic
dream, a witticism, an object, a woman, or a desert. This other, when it makes its appearance, is
immediately in possession of everything that it will never be given to us to know. This other is the locus
of our secret, of everything in us that no longer belongs to the realm of the true. This other is thus not,
as in love, the locus of our alikeness, nor, as in alienation, the locus of our difference; neither the ideal
image of what we are nor the obscure model of what we lack. Rather, this other is the locus of what
escapes us, and the way whereby we escape from ourselves. The other here is not the locus of desire,
not the locus of alienation, but the locus of vertiginousness, of eclipse, of appearing and disappearing -
the locus, one might say (but we must not), of the scintillation of being. For the rule of seduction is,
precisely, secrecy, and the secret in question is that of the fundamental rule. Seduction knows that the
other is never the end of desire, that the subject is mistaken when he focuses on what he loves, just as
an utterance is mistaken when it focuses on what it says. Secrecy here is always the secrecy of artifice.
The necessity of always focusing somewhere else, of never seeking the other in the terrifying illusion of
dialogue but instead following the other like the other's own shadow, and circumscribing him. Never
being oneself - but never being alienated either: coming from without to inscribe oneself upon the
figure of the Other, within that strange form from elsewhere, that secret form which orders not only
chains of events but also existences in their singularity. The Other is what allows me not to repeat
myself for ever.

Transparency is great
Smith and Tabibnia 12 [Ryan Smith and Golnaz Talbibnia, 10/11/12, Harvard Business Review, Why
Radical Transparency is Good]//LM

Imagine you got to work on Monday and you knew exactly how you had performed the previous week,
compared to everyone else, and could look up, in a moment, how everyone else was doing. Or a
manager could go online, any time of the day or night, and see how his team was performing, who
deserved a bonus, who was lagging, even if those people were customer service staff, or engineers. It
would make everyone crazy, right? Perhaps not. Radical transparency, the idea of everyone knowing
everything, could actually be a major driver of increased organizational performance. Private research
software firm Qualtrics believes that the biggest reason companies fail is because people lose focus and
get off track. It’s particularly true of young, fast-growing companies driving to meet stretch revenue
goals and keep their investors happy. Qualtrics didn’t want to fall into that trap so the company made
the bold decision to make all employees’ performance data available to everyone in the company. By
doing so, Qualtrics removes the distractions, fears, and negativity that sap concentration. The entire
workforce has access to a host of information about the performance and practice of each employee
that includes: quarterly objectives and results in detail including revenue and satisfaction targets; weekly
snippets of each individual’s goals for the week; up to the minute performance reviews, ratings, and
bonus structures; noted successes and failures, with notes for everyone to learn from; career history at
Qualtrics Insights from neuroscience underscore that our brains work best when we no longer feel the
need to hide, cover up our mistakes, or dwell on errors. We do better when we aren’t mentally bogged
down in “threat response” worrying about which of our colleagues is the boss’ “flavor of the month,”
getting a hasty promotion, or badmouthing our work. The principles of radical transparency improve
business performance in terms of focus, engagement, and growing and recruiting talent. Here’s a
preview of how they work: 1. Focus: At the beginning of each quarter, every Qualtrics employee sets
measurable and visible objectives and key results (aka OKRs). Each individual’s progress and priorities
are clear. This helps reduce the noise and clutter that can overload our prefrontal cortex with a sense of
being “overwhelmed” about what our goals are. 2. Engagement: Radical transparency increases
commitment and motivation to the corporate mission because employee data are explicitly linked to
performance, ensuring high levels of fairness. A sense of real fairness turns out to be deeply
rewarding to the brain, especially compared to a sense of unfairness that pervades many employees’
darker thoughts, which activates a strong threat response. Everyone is benchmarked, all data are
available for inspection and analysis, and all employees are treated accordingly. The reward response
leads to increased engagement, from the strong sense of autonomy the approach brings about, defined
as a sense of control over one’s destiny. 3. Growing Talent: By making the successes of top performers
accessible and easy to compare against the department or company as a whole, newer employees at
Qualtrics are motivated to excel through mirroring the best practices of high-performing employees.
This mirroring is extremely powerful in encouraging positive work performance. Another a big plus is
that the right people get the promotions, meaning the people who are really consistently performing
are rewarded, not the people just good at getting others to think they perform well. Qualtrics knows
that the transparency process creates winners and losers, and that environment can be tough for
someone who is not an “A” player. As Marc Effron of the Talent Strategy Group reports from his global
consulting work, there’s a pervasive, irrational fear of transparency in corporations worldwide when it
comes to talent issues. Many leaders seem concerned that engagement will crater when everyone is
told the truth about their potential to advance. While there may be some rough moments, Effron tells
clients, here’s the fundamental question: How long do you feel it’s appropriate to lie to your employees
about their future? Effron holds that many executives are far more ready for stronger transparency
measures than their HR colleagues suspect. If that’s true, they should check out radical transparency.

Your ‘pataphysics gets coopted by millennials who construct political problems that
prevent them from engaging in political pragmatism, the bernie bros who constructed
Clinton as the polar opposite to Sanders and stayed home on election day allowed
Trump to get elected
Natoli 16 (Joseph, academic postmodernism scholar. “Pataphysical Conditions on the Ground”
5/13/16 Counterpunch https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/13/pataphysical-conditions-on-the-
ground/ //LP)

“‘Pataphysics is the science of the realm beyond metaphysics”. Alfred Jarry, author of Ubu Roi, 1896Pace
Hillary and Trump but manufacturing jobs once again creating a solid middle class and a moveable feast
of economic mobility will not return. Walls, embargoes, penalty taxes, passport revoking, and
resurrection of unions will not do it. “Low pay married to high profits in much of the service economy is
contributing to a widening income chasm that is rending society in all sorts of ways. Used to the
prosperity once delivered by manufacturing, American workers are rebelling against the changing tide.”
(Eduardo Porto, “Moving On From Farm And Factory,” The New York Times, April 27, 2016.) A
postindustrial tomorrow is the ticket. We are all a service economy now with a sharp distinction
between serving “on the ground” and serving in cyberspace. Flipping a burger or delivering a pizza,
mowing a lawn or cleaning a pool, walking dogs or baby carriages are “on the ground” services. In
cyberspace, brokers and investors practice their dark derivative arts, marketers and advertisers huckster
products and services, the outraged blog and tweet, and the overworked and not working surf for
personally chosen brands of anesthetics and distractions, sports, porn, gambling, and shopping high on
the list. Those still in school preparing for the service economy network socially, updates on Facebook,
videos on Instagram, occasion marking selfies, keeping up on Twitter, and rushing at nano speed beyond
all things analog, where, as Baudrillard expresses it, “the whirligig of representation goes mad.”
Whether millennials have responded to Bernie Sanders’ call for a revolution because they’ve observed
or had some “on the ground” low pay experiences, or because their adventures in cyberspace have
clued them to the disastrous divided state of the world they are inheriting, or because of both, the fact
remains that they’ve joined politics “on the ground.” One of the standout conditions on the ground has
been revealed to them in just one sentence: “Twenty Americans have as much wealth as the combined
wealth of 50% of the population.” As in a Monopoly game, it’s clear that about 20% of the population
have already been served just about all the property on the game board or profit dividend-wise by such
ownership, a condition on the ground that the young are now entering as if it were a level playing field,
as if equal opportunity and open field freedom to choose were present. This is a mockery that once
realized will not vanish because Sanders’ run for the presidency ends. Conditions on the ground, which
the coming generation are now aware of have not ended. Perhaps this is “sharing” economy and our
skewed conditions on the ground will be rebalanced by this “sharing.” A self proclaimed “Chief Sharer.”
Benita Matofska tells us that “in a Sharing Economy, people create, collaborate, produce and distribute
peer-to-peer, person-to-person (P2P). Micro-entrepreneurship is celebrated, where people can enter
into binding contracts with one another and trade peer-to-peer (P2P). Within business, people — both
co-owners, employees and customers — are highly valued, with their opinions and ideas respected and
integrated into the business at all levels of the supply chain, organization and development. I call the
people who are driving the Sharing Economy, Generation Share.” (“What is the Sharing Economy?”The
People Who Share, April 25, 2016.) If you look past the noble declarations provided by the “Chief
Sharer” it seems that 3D printing enables a limited kind of manufacturing while websites and
smartphone apps in which you can buy, sell and trade enable marketing and distribution. A spare bed in
your home is a “sleeping asset” you can list on Airbnb and you can sell or buy products on eBay or call
for car service on Uber. The sharing here is not on a worker cooperative level as we see in the Basque
cooperative Mondragon where the means of production and profits are worker shared. Nor is the
“sharing” economy anything like Fruitlands or The Farm communal society or Christian Hutterites or
Robert Owens’ New Harmony community or Bakunin’s Anarchist Federation. This is instead the
socioeconomic equivalent of a “selfie,” a true kind of pataphysics that places the individual in a post-
societal order thus overriding the worrisome matter of the post-industrial. What we share in the sharing
economy is access to various services and products on a peer to peer level, one that fits nicely into a
millennial nurtured sense of personal autonomy and personal design of every aspect of one’s life. The
framework and fabric of capitalist structure as well as the out of touch remnants of an analog/brick and
mortar world are over layered by all enterprises personally controlled. You hold the controlling device of
it all in your own hand, your smartphone, colorfully lit with innumerable apps that put the entire world a
click away. Click access is all. Conditions on the ground are superseded and surpassed by your access
network in cyberspace. Meanwhile, back on the ground, ‘pataphysical as it is, either Donald Trump
becomes the 2016 Republican presidential candidate or there will be blood in Cleveland. A battle
between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump promises to be as lucrative for the entertainment business,
aka main stream media, as the Fight of the Century between Ali and Frazier in 1971, a fight then
symbolizing a cultural battle the U.S. was fighting. Ali was the Lefist anti-Vietnam while Frazier was
conservative, pro-war, thus, traitor to the flag against true patriot. Conditions on the ground then were
crystal clear and only somewhat `pataphysical in that Frank Sinatra could not get a ringside seat. Not so
with a Trump vs. Hillary fight where Trump leads what looks like an impassioned lynch mob, burning
with grievances, animosities and frustrations that can only be released or fulfilled by Donald Trump as if
all had taken an oath of personal allegiance. The Republican Party’s allegiance to a market rule that has
resulted in a de facto plutocracy within a façade of democratic rule is not in view in this Trump faction.
Hillary Clinton has no passionate, angry, frustrated legions on her side but she does have the gentry on
both sides who find Trump offensive, an obscene mountebank who frightens them because he is
unleashed from all the moorings they respect. A President Trump would make them feel unprotected.
Anyone on the anti-plutocracy side leaves the political whirligig when Bernie leaves i t. Hillary will carry
on the fight for fully committed gun control, LGBT rights, women’s’ rights the full gamut of family issues,
which include for her immigration, a “New Deal for Communities of Color,” and, in short, a displacement
of Sanders’ single focus on plutocracy with issues that concern “Everyday Americans,” who,
`pataphysically speaking, are not the people you see every day or I see every day but Hillary sees every
day. How all this will be represented leading up to the election November 8, 2016 will be transmitted
online and offline in true `pataphysical madness. What in fact are the conditions on the ground is not a
simple matter of factual reportage but a clash of representations, none of which can validate itself in
such a way as to be uncontested. You need only go to Twitter to view the clash and the absence of any
progression in the search for truth or the recognition of any kind o f #hashtag advance in understanding.
Offline, most especially TV reportage, elections are followed like a horserace or a reality competition
show where the audience at home votes via cellphone. You cannot assume that a steady diet of such
displays of competition and voting has not brought the 2016 presidential campaign into its fold. Few
know what Trump’s position might be on, say, the flat tax or lobbyists and the revolving door, but they
are likely to know him from the show The Apprentice where he happily proclaimed, “You’re fired!” How
that talent has attracted the percentage of the population who actually have been fired, or have not
been hired, or hate but fear the bosses threatening to fire them is one of the great mysteries of this
election fortunately made crystal clear by `pataphysics. Facebook is an online source of knowledge, at
least the kind you are interested in and you are sure to get from the friends you select though secretly
you know your words of wisdom have the longevity of a single sheet in a toilet paper roll. You can of
course follow the mentors, the Virgilian guides in your life on Twitter. I am reminded in the margins of
my Facebook site to follow Bieber. Something about my writing profiles me as an ardent follower.
Another great mystery cleared up by `pataphysics. When you scroll down twice on your smartphone and
there are still words to be read, you bail out. You prefer emojis or use Vine, Snapchat or Instagram for
quick, disposable video messages because pictures are worth a thousand words, a truth story, if
established, would have preempted printing at the cave painting stage. The direct democracy of
cyberspace where everyone on the planet had a blogging site was destined to undermine society’s need
to have a majority of people on the same page often enough to justify the existence of society itself. In
an ideal world, society is defined by cohesion of values and meanings. The abyss is defined as a loud
chaotic cacophony of personal issues each imposing its truth upon the other. Fortunately, the smart
phone has prevented the calamity of a chaos of PC bloggers. What we face now is everyone corralled
within the universe of their smart phones, from apps to playlists to contact directories to favored social
media. In other words, the idea that there is a need to pursue a common understanding, or, a social
solidarity through such efforts, is a bygone idea. You might call this a `pataphysical advance. The world
of communication is still a Tower of Babel but now we each cut out our personal space and ignore the
rest, the “whatever” happenings. You may be on the same page in regard to anything as your chosen
friends but the Enlightenment idea of universally accepted universal rules of judgment and
understanding? That was a pretense and a presumption that the smart phone has shattered. We are
now heading for a world in which everyone knows everything according to his or her own preferences
and everyone therefore knows everything differently . Margaret Thatcher was right in a way. She
should have said, “The idea of society will soon be vacated from the human mind.” She was, of course,
pataphysical but not quite pataphysical enough. So, conditions on the ground as represented online and
offline seem none to promising when one considers “The Amazing Race” heading toward November 8,
2016. I wind up with a close-up of conditions on the ground. When I ask the young lady who has asked
me if I found everything I was looking for (an ordered phrase replacing paper or plastic. The mysteries of
free speech) what she thinks of Bernie Sanders she tells me he’s a moron. Really? Bernie? Then she tells
me they’re all morons. Everybody or just politicians? I ask. Politicians, she tells me. Well, thank God you
and I are not morons I tell her. She gives me a look. She’s not a moron. She’s thinking if I like Bernie
Sanders and pay attention to politics than I must be a moron. I forgive her. It’s a `pataphysical
forgiveness. On the way out, I ask myself are the real morons the folks who stand behind Trump
regardless of how low on the humanity level he goes? Or are the morons the ones who have dismissed
with a Grand Delete — “They are all morons” — an American electoral politics that has led to
plutocracy? It seems clear to me that total frustration triggered by total confusion felt by a bottom 40%
and increasingly by a middle 40% of the population has preempted a continuous state of anger by simply
casting politics and politicians into the moron/moronic pile. Perhaps those who will not let go of Trump
do so because they, like him, are assailed by powerful forces they cannot identify, the anonymous
power elite. It doesn’t matter that Trump comes from the plutocrat camp because right now he is saying
what they would say. He’s a rebel; a bad subject of the crown, a bad subject of Obama. and that’s what
they want to be. A truly astounding psychological mystery. Our conditions on the ground move very far
from the illusions of commonly accepted factual reportage or from a #hashtag resolution and remain
surrounded in dark and really crazy mysteries. Not, of course, from a `pataphysical point of view.

Academia is key to social change and political activism

Barnhardt and Reyes 16 [Cassie L. Barnhardt and Kimberley A. Reyes, Cassie L. “Barnhardt is an
assistant professor in the department of Educational Policy and Leadership Studies at the University of
Iowa and a faculty affiliate with the Center for Research on Undergraduate Education. Her research
focuses on civic and public engagement including the multiple ways in which college students learn
about and enact social responsibility, as well as the ways that universities, as organizations, contribute
to democracy and civic life. Kimberly A. Reyes is a doctoral candidate in higher education at the
University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education. Her dissertation
research, both historical and sociological in nature, examines how pioneering African American doctoral
students in prestigious academic departments contributed to an intellectual movement that discredited
biologistic ideas of racial inferiority in the first half of the 20th century.” Embracing Student Activism,
2016, pars. 6-14. AGR]

From the earliest historical accounts, campus-based activism has reflected grievances based in the
political dynamics of the nation. In the process of student protest, those broad social grievances were
projected and transferred into more precise, localized calls for transformation on campus. This pattern
continued with the campus-based movements of the 1960s. In particular, the activism surrounding area
and ethnic studies curricular offerings (depicted in books by Robert Rhoads, Fabio Rojas, and Mikaila
Mariel Lemonik Arthur) were uniquely tied to larger social movements aimed at marginalized social
identity groups, and represented a discrete effort to achieve structural changes in the academy (i.e.,
adopting new programs and majors). Recent campus unrest, then, may be a signal that universities
remain deeply connected to social change, even at a time when society is
renegotiating predominant understandings of social status, with race and ethnicity in the foreground.
Perhaps as a result of the turbulence that characterized the anti-war and racial justice campus
movements of the 1960s, there is a logic in higher education practice that characterizes student activism
merely as a short-lived product of students’ identities, rather than emphasizing the role of the
academy as a site of activism and social change. But as a society that values
higher education, we must not lose sight that student activism is an opportunity to scrutinize the
campus contexts, conditions and social realities that speak to students’ underlying claims or grievances.
So how can campus leaders engage student activism such that universities can continue to be vehicles
for social change? Here are three things to keep in mind: First, campus activism has positive outcomes
for students. Some campus leaders may view student activism as dreaded fires to be extinguished.
However, research has shown that students engaged in activism reap educational benefits such as
developing an inclination to continue their political participation well into mid-life and acquiring a
greater sense of social responsibility and identity consciousness (Cole & Stewart, 1996; Stewart, Settles,
& Winter, 1998). Increasingly, studies have noted that beneath the contention and dissatisfaction that
characterize campus protest, students on campuses with a culture of activism and advocacy experience
gains in critical thinking (Tsui, 2000) civic engagement (Sax, 2004) and commitment to the larger
community (Barnhardt, Sheets, & Pasquesi, 2015). Scholars of campus activism characterize its great
potential for teaching students about the importance of democratic participation, leadership and the
ability to build coalitions amongst a wide variety of individuals on campus (Kezar, 2010; Rhoads, Saenz,
& Carducci, 2005). For these reasons, higher education researchers stress that activism should be
viewed as a developmental component of student learning, and that campus unrest must be
understood in the context of civic engagement. Campus leaders are right to recognize that in
expressing dissent, students are constructing ideas and perspectives that may one day provide solutions
to some of our nation’s most urgent and complex dilemmas. Second, student activism also has positive
outcomes for campus leaders and is something they can learn from. While students may certainly be
inspired by social movements or political situations external to the campus, scholars of campus activism
emphasize that the interests, motivations and tactics of student activists are influenced by the campus
context. What students choose to protest about, how they choose to frame their messages, and which
actions they take to communicate their ideas are shaped by their experiences as students at the
institution. Although social activism is commonly associated with civil disobedience, research shows that
student activism tends to take on more conventional approaches that creatively disrupt taken-for-
granted norms on campus (Barnhardt, 2014). For example, Latina/o students at Duke University, who
comprise only 7 percent of the undergraduate student body, recently issued a set of demands targeted
at improving their academic and social experience. Similar to the demands made by other student
activists, the Duke students called for a number of changes that spanned cultural resources, admissions
policies, retention and the representation of faculty of color. To bring visibility to their cause, they
boycotted their traditional involvement in a major annual Latino student recruitment event. Like many
other cases of student activism, their tactical approach drew on themes of institutional history and
culture, while creating uncertainty around traditional organizational practices dealing with recruitment,
admissions and the hiring of personnel. So the nature of student activism can send important messages
about how students experience and perceive the campus, and in this case, about the effectiveness of
the institution’s structural approach to campus diversity. Third, by paying close attention to the tactical
approaches of student activists, campus leaders can create discursive spaces for the ideas they raise,
where multiple campus stakeholders can be exposed to the issues underlying the grievances. Research
suggests that campuses where student voices are valued and social activism is promoted can better
address pressing social concerns (Biddix, 2014). Campus leaders can work to build this type of campus
culture instead of allowing the condemnation of activism as merely a challenge to institutional authority.
Just as student activists may draw on discursive tactics to express dissent, so can campus leaders use
community discourse to increase understanding among the campus community and enable the
exchanges required for addressing activists’ demands in ways that are resonant with campus culture.

Universities are the starting point for political dissent and key to successful reform
Altbach 1
[Philip G. Altbach, Philip G. Altbach is research professor and the founding director of the Center for International
Higher Education. He has held appointments numerous renowned universities. He was Distinguished Scholar
Leader of the Fulbright New Century Scholars Program and was Fulbright Research Professor at the University of
Mumbai, India. He is a Fellow of the American Education Research Association and was given the Houlihan Award
by NAFSA. He has been appointed to honorary professorships by the National Research University–Higher School
of Economics in Moscow, Russia, and Peking University and Xiamen Universities in China and has been Onwell
Fellow at the University of Hong Kong. Philip Altbach has written or edited more than 50 books. He has served as
editor of the Review of Higher Education and the Comparative Education Review, Academic Freedom: International
Realities and Challenges, Higher Education, Vol. 41, No. ½, Changing Academic Workplace: Comparative
Perspectives), Jan. - Mar. 2001, New York City, 206-219, AGR]

Elusive definitions Academic freedom seems a simple concept, and in essence it is, but it is also difficult
to define. From medieval times, academic freedom has meant the freedom of the professor to teach
without external control in his or her area of expertise, and it has implied the freedom of the student to
lear. The concept was further defined with the rise of the research-oriented Humboldtian univer- sity in
early 19th century Germany. The Humboldtian concept enshrined the ideas of Lehrfreiheit and
Lerfreiheit - freedom to teach and to learn. These concepts of academic freedom gave special protection
to the professor within the classroom and the parameters of the field of expert know- ledge of the
professor. From the beginning, the university was considered a special place, devoted to the pursuit and
transmission of knowledge. Academe claimed special rights precisely because of its calling to pursue
truth. The authorities, whether secular or ecclesiastical, were expected to permit univer- sities a special
degree of autonomy. Academic freedom was never absolute, however. In the medieval university, both
church and state exercised some control over what could be taught in universities. Professors whose
teachings conflicted with the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church were sometimes sanctioned, and
loyalty to the civil authorities was also expected. Nonethe- less, greater freedom of expression existed in
the universities than elsewhere in society. In the German university of the early 19th century, academic
freedom was expanded as a concept as research became part of the academic mission. The professor
was given almost absolute freedom of research and expres- sion in classroom and laboratory. But
academic freedom did not necessarily extend to protection of expression on broader political or social
issues, nor was it considered a violation of academic freedom that socialists and other dissenters were
not eligible for academic appointments. As the research university idea crossed the Atlantic at the end
of the 19th century, the concept of academic freedom was expanded. By the early years of the 20th
century, the American Association of University Professors had defined academic freedom within the
classroom and laboratory as encom- passing all issues, not just those within the field of scholarly
expertise. The AAUP also linked the concept to special protection of expression outside of the university.
Professors were considered valuable social critics, and they were accorded special protections of
speech and writing on all topics. In Latin America, as a result of the university reform movement of
1918, a very broad definition of academic freedom came to be applied to the entire university
community - to the extent that civil authorities were forbidden to enter the property of the university
without the permission of the academic community. The concept of the "autonomous" Latin American
university was born at this time. Today, there is some confusion about the proper definition of academic
freedom. Generally, the broader New World concept has gained acceptance within the academic
community. But nowhere has academic freedom been fully delineated, and nowhere does it have the
force of law. In some coun- tries, both university and civil authorities assume the narrow Humboldtian
definition. Elsewhere, within academe and outside, the broader New World ideal prevails. There is no
universally accepted understanding of academic freedom. Controversy has arisen concerning whether
the claims of academic institu- tions and individual faculty for special rights and freedoms bring
obligations as well. For example, some have argued that universities should not take overtly political
stands or become enmeshed, as institutions, in political debates or movements. It is claimed that
institutions, and to some extent individual academics, have a responsibility to remain out of direct
conflicts in order to provide the best objective analysis. This issue is especially salient in developing
countries, where the academic community was often involved in struggles for independence and where
a tradition of political engagement evolved. In Latin America, for example, professors and students
actively participated in the struggles against military dictatorships and sometimes supported leftist
movements in the 1960s and 1970s, often bringing the wrath of the regime down upon the university. In
such countries as Argen- tina, Brazil, and Chile, large numbers of professors and students were jailed,
forced into exile, or even killed by repressive regimes. While no one would condone repression, some
have argued that academic institutions should keep aloof from partisan politics, making a distinction
between the right of indi-vidual professors to speak out on political or social issues and the concept of
institutional neutrality (Ashby 1974, pp. 73-87). In the United States, there were debates during the
1960s concerning whether universities as insti- tutions should take stands on such issues as opposing
the war in Vietnam. No one opposed the right of individual faculty or students to participate in
antiwar movements, but many felt that the institution itself should remain neutral. The issue of the
appropriate role for universities in social and political spheres remains an unresolved part of the debate
about the role of academic freedom. There has also been considerable debate over the influence of
political or ideological ideas on universities. In the United States, critics of "political correctness" have
charged factions within academe of imposing their views on academic departments or disciplinary
associations, violating as a result the norms of academic freedom (Kors and Silverglate 1998). The
intrusion of partisan politics or sometimes ethnic issues into academic appointments, university
elections, and publication and research, is evident in many coun- tries in Latin America and South Asia,
and by no means unknown in other parts of the world. These pressures, usually emanating from within
the universities themselves, threaten academic freedom. The intrusions introduce extraneous conflicts
and non-meritocratic factors into the process of academic governance, teaching, research, and affect
relations among academics. Such conflicts are often not seen as related to academic freedom. If
academic freedom means the free pursuit of teaching and research, as well as decision making on
grounds of solely academic criteria, the intrusion of political or other factors into decision making is a
concern. Many have argued that the freedom conferred by academic freedom creates a reciprocal
responsibility (Shils 1991, pp. 1-22; Poch 1993; Russell 1993). Those entrusted with teaching and
research in higher education, it is claimed, have a special obligation to dedicate themselves to truth and
objectivity in all their scholarly work. These critics argue that academe and politics should not be
intertwined. Universities are not political insti- tutions, and those involved in the academic enterprise
need to recognize that academe's survival depends on its ability to keep an appropriate distance from
partisan politics. Others have a more absolutist view of academic freedom, and feel that faculty
members should have the right to participate in any activities they deem appropriate, and that
representative bodies of the faculty may similarly be engaged. There is as yet no consensus and as a
result there is considerable debate about the appropriate limits to academic freedom. Academic
freedom also needs to be reconsidered in the era of the Internet and distance education. Are professors
entitled to academic freedom in the cyberclassroom? Does the cyberprofessor have the freedom to
design and deliver a course without external restriction from sponsors (often profit- making companies),
especially when development costs may be high? Who owns knowledge products developed for Internet
use? These are questions that impinge on traditional ideas about academic freedom, and need to be
answered as higher education moves to new modes of delivering knowledge. Historical precedents
Academic freedom has a long and controversial history. For centuries, church and civil authorities placed
restrictions on the academic community in terms of teaching, research, and public expression. The
Catholic Church forbade the teaching of theological and scientific doctrines in the universities that were
contrary to accepted doctrine. Martin Luther, a professor of theology, found himself in conflict with
church officials because of his theological views and was removed from his professorship. It was only
later, when some German universities in areas that had turned Protestant became sympathetic to his
views, that he was able to resume his academic duties. As the result of many struggles, and especially
following the rise of the research university in the early 19th century, freedom of expression gradually
expanded, and professors were given more latitude in their teaching and research. But academic
freedom has always been contested terrain - even in academic systems with strong historical traditions.
Academic freedom was effectively obliterated in Nazi Germany despite the fact that its modern ideal
was a German invention. Not only were direct restrictions placed on what could be taught in German
universities during the Third Reich, but tenured professors who did not conform to the new ideology as
well as professors who were Jewish or known to be politically dissident were fired. Few voices were
raised in protest in Germany against these developments, and both the German professors'
organizations and the student unions supported the Nazi suppression of academic freedom. In many
cases, the universities themselves implemented the changes. During the 1950s Cold War-era
anticommunist hysteria in the United States, academic freedom was challenged by govern- mental
authorities seeking to rid the universities of alleged Communists. In some cases, such as in public
universities in California and New York, a number of professors were forced from their positions by state
regulations. In others, investigations "exposed" leftist professors, leading to firings or forced
resignations. Some universities protected their faculty members in the name of academic freedom,
while others gave in to outside pressure and fired professors. While only a few faculty were actually
fired during this period, academic freedom was imperiled in an atmosphere of repression and many
academics feared dismissal. These examples show that even in coun-tries with strong academic
traditions and commitments to academic freedom universities can suffer serious consequences. The
Latin American academic tradition also contributed an important concept to the debate about academic
freedom. The idea of university autonomy enshrined in the Cordoba Reforms of 1918 has long been a
powerful force in Latin America (Walter 1968). What originated as a student protest resulted in a
significant reform of the universities not only for Argentina, but for most of Latin America. Many of
the continent's public universities are by law and tradition autonomous. This has implications for
relations with the state as well as for academic freedom - the autonomy ideal provided significant
protection for professors and students during periods of political unrest in Latin America. The protection
has not been complete, espe- cially during the era of military dictatorships during the 1960s and 1970s,
but has nonetheless been a central part of the continent's thinking about higher education. In countries
that experienced colonial rule, academic freedom is less firmly rooted historically and less well
protected. The colonial powers - whether British, French, Japanese, or others - feared unrest from
subject peoples (Ashby 1966). Thus when universities were established in the colonies, while otherwise
modeled on the metropolitan home university, they were generally not permitted freedoms that were
allowed in the metropole. As it turned out, these fears of unrest were justified, since intellectuals and
students were often in the forefront of struggles for independence. The universities in formerly colonial
countries have often had to struggle to build commitments to academic freedom. Governments have
been quick to inter- fere in academic affairs in order to maintain stability. Traditions of unrest die hard,
and universities, especially in developing countries, remain centers of dissent. When conflicts arise,
academic freedom is sometimes forgotten. Contemporary realities With more data, it would be possible
to create a "world academic freedom barometer" as is done for human rights, corruption, and other
issues. Such a mechanism, while useful, would be quite difficult to develop due to the prob- lems
discussed earlier of defining academic freedom. The following survey may serve as the first step in such
a comprehensive accounting. Severe restrictions There are a few countries in which academic freedom is
nonexistent. Perhaps the most egregious example is Burma, whose universities have been closed for
several years and are only now beginning to reopen, but under conditions of severe restrictions and with
no academic freedom. The military govern- ment closed the universities in response to student political
activism, but the regime did not trust the academic community generally. In countries with unstable
governments, universities are closed from time to time, usually to combat student unrest, but also to
limit criticism by the faculty. Regimes that are willing to shut universities down are also likely to place
severe restrictions on academic freedom of faculty - especially on their freedom to speak out on social
or political issues but including views expressed in the classroom and in the course of research. Iran is an
interesting case in point. Oppositional ideas and movements have emerged from the universities,
especially the University of Tehran, for decades. Students and faculty provided leadership in opposing
the Shah. Now, the academic community is calling for a liberalization in Iran's theocratic regime, and
conservatives in the government and among Islamic religious authorities see the universities as a threat.
The professors are caught in the midst of a power struggle in society, and it is unclear how the university
will be affected by external forces. In countries in which the universities are considered to be an integral
part of a governmental apparatus that is itself repressive, restrictions are built into the academic and
political system - rather than being caused by social unrest or political crises. Countries such as North
Korea, Syria, and Iraq are examples. Significant limitations and periodic crisis In a much larger group of
countries, while a measure of academic freedom is present in many scientific fields, significant
restrictions exist. The involve- ment of professors in activities viewed as antiregime is not tolerated.
Penalties for transgressions can be severe, and include not only loss of academic jobs, but sometimes
prosecution and imprisonment. Certainly China, Vietnam, and Cuba are examples of such countries.
Restrictions on academic freedom are an integral part of university life, especially in the social sciences
and other fields that are considered politically or ideologically sensitive. But even in these countries, the
universities generally enjoy an academic envir- onment similar to that in other countries with greater
degrees of academic freedom in most fields. Participation in international scientific and schol- arly
networks is permitted, and in most disciplines, teaching and research are only minimally inhibited by
government. At times of political tension, such as during the Tienanmen Square crisis in China in 1989,
governmental repression is dramatically increased. Indeed, the Chinese universities were kept on a
tight leash by the government for years after Tienanmen, reflecting the historical importance of the
Chinese universities as centers of political dissent (Hayhoe 1999). After all, the Chinese Imperial
government was toppled in considerable part by university-based demonstrations a century earlier.
Some Islamic countries fall into this category of countries. An absence of democratic traditions in
society, potential political instability, and intellec- tual struggles between fundamentalist and secular
forces in the universities combine to create tensions between academe and government. With a few
exceptions, universities do not have strong traditions of academic freedom and autonomy. This makes
the professoriate more vulnerable to external pres- sure. In Egypt, Algeria, and some of the Arabian Gulf
states, academics who support fundamentalist groups may face arrest or other restrictions. In Sudan,
which has had a profundamentalist regime, dissident views from the other side engender repression.
The recent arrest of a respected Egyptian sociolo- gist was seen by many in the academic community as
punishment for his oppositional views. Tension in the context of limited academic freedom A still larger
group of countries might be characterized as relatively free, especially within the classroom and with
regard to research in fields that are not considered to be politically or ideologically sensitive by the
state. In general, these countries express a commitment to academic freedom, but serious difficulties
still arise from time to time. The limits are seldom clearly articulated, and the penalties imposed for
violations of the restrictions are often unstated and not fully understood by most in the academic
community. Testing the limits of academic freedom in these countries may be dangerous, and the fact
that limits are perceived to exist creates a significant chilling effect among academics. Government
authorities may impose fairly harsh penalties, often without warning. The Ethiopian government, for
example, recently jailed a number of professors at the University of Addis Ababa for indeterminate
reasons but with overtones of political repression. In many countries, it is clear that antiregime
sentiments, expressed in the classroom or in public discourse, may cause problems. In Serbia, student
opposition to the Milosevic regime created repression in the universities as the government sought to
maintain its control (Secor 2000). There are many countries in which a considerable degree of academic
freedom may exist for most scholars most of the time, but where a polit- ical or other crisis may cause
severe difficulties for the universities and for academic freedom, creating a general atmosphere of
general unease for many academics. Much of Africa and a number of Asian countries find themselves in
this situation. Countries in this category include those who governments are weak and have little
legitimacy, in which academic traditions are not well established - often as a result of colonialism - and
whose universities tend to be dependent on the state for support. Nigeria, which has a large academic
system and periodically enjoys a considerable degree of academic freedom, often faces restrictions,
especially during rule by military officers. Smaller African countries with weaker academic traditions in
general have less academic freedom. In Asia, Cambodia, emerging from decades of repres- sion, is
slowly rebuilding its universities. Academic freedom will be difficult to establish because of the
instability of regimes, dependence on a few sources of funding, and the almost total destruction of
higher education during the Khmer Rouge years (Chamnan 2000). The challenge of instituting academic

Universities are very

freedom under conditions of polit- ical instability is considerable.

often centers of political and intellectual dissent , and regimes are

reluctant to allow institutions the freedom and autonomy that may contribute to instability. The
academic community itself, unused to academic freedom, and sometimes engaged in political struggle,
is often not in a position to create academic freedom, or exercise the self-discipline involved. Academic
freedom with limits In some nations, there are restrictions on what can be researched by professors as
well as on the freedom of public expression by academics. Although resisted by many, these restrictions
are widely accepted in the academic community. Sanctions for violating the often unstated norms can
range from mild rebukes by administrators to loss of jobs or, in rare cases, prosecution in the courts.
Singapore and Malaysia are countries that have long had informal bans on certain research topics and
the expression of oppos- itional views. Ethnic conflict, certain religious issues, and local corruption are
among the topics deemed inappropriate for academic research, espe- cially if research findings might
raise questions about government policies. Academics must also watch what they say in the classroom
on sensitive issues since the penalties for violating these norms can be serious. In Singapore, the former
prime minister, Lee Kwan Yew, would occasionally come to National University of Singapore faculty
meetings to dress down individual academics for their writings and to encourage the faculty to work in
what he defined as the national interest. Many countries have such restrictions on academic freedom.
Government authorities make it clear to university officials that continued good rela- tions, budgetary
allocations, and research funds depend on the appropriate academic and political behavior on the part
of the faculty. The re-emergence of academic freedom In two quite different parts of the world
academic freedom is gaining in strength. One of these is Latin America, which has a strong tradition of
academic freedom and autonomy, going back at least to the 1918 Cordoba reform movement. Political
turmoil throughout much of the continent in the 1960s and 1970s led to military coups, social instability,
and guerilla struggles. Many in the universities, especially the large public autonomous institutions
located in capital cities, were deeply involved in the struggles, always on the side of the leftist dissidents.
It is not surprising that the military authorities, who had little use for academic freedom in any case,
would move violently against the academic community. Academic freedom and the idea of the
autonomy of the university suffered serious setbacks during this period. Professors known for dissenting
views were forced into exile, jailed, and even killed. Student movements were violently repressed. Peru,
Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and others were all affected. Latin American universities have been
involved in national politics at least since the Cordoba movement, and partisan politics continues to
infuse campus elections and, in some universities, academic life generally. It was possible to restore, and
perhaps even strengthen, academic freedom when democracy was restored. The Latin American
experience shows that strong traditions of academic freedom can be restored even in the aftermath of
severe repression. The other region that has seen a resurgence of academic freedom is Central and
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. These countries have a venerable academic history; some
of oldest universities in the world are those in the Czech Republic and Poland. However, academic
freedom was basically destroyed, first during the years of Nazi occupation and then during the over four
decades or more of Communist rule, during which universities were considered arms of the state.
Ideological loyalty was expected, and the sanctions for violating political or academic orthodoxy were
often severe, including removal from their posts and prosecution. Academic freedom was seen as a
"bourgeois" concept, inappropriate in a socialist society. With the collapse of communism in the region,
the academic situation changed dramatically. Academic freedom was restored as a central value of
higher education, and the ideological accoutrements of the communist era were dismantled. Teaching
and research are no longer considered to be subservient to ideological and political goals. However, it
has not been easy to transform the universities. For example, many professors who were iden- tified as
having been overly loyal to the communist regimes were summarily removed from their posts. Yet,
patterns of both funding and administration inherited from the previous regime were in many cases
largely maintained. Without question, there is now a considerable degree of academic freedom in the
region. Promotions are now more likely to be decided on merit. Most academics do not fear direct
sanctions for pursuing any research or teaching. Countries with long academic traditions, stable
democratic govern- ments, fairly robust economies, and closer ties to the major Western nations - such
as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland - quickly reestablished academic norms that valued
academic freedom and autonomy for the univer- sities. Academic freedom has only a tenuous hold in
Belarus, and is in a precarious state in Ukraine and in several of the Central Asian republics. Serbia,
mentioned earlier, is in crisis, and universities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo are slowly rebuilding.
Conditions are much better in Russia and in most of Central Europe, with the exception of Slovakia
during the Mechiar regime. Weak traditions of academic freedom, university systems dependent on
governments with only limited popularity or legitimacy, and decades of severe repression have made it
difficult to establish a strong tradition of academic freedom quickly in parts of the region. The
industrialized countries Most people recognize the relative strength of academic freedom in the major
industrialized nations. Countries, such as Japan and Germany, in which academic freedom was
abolished, have reestablished strong traditions after World War II. The American anticommunist
restrictions lasted just a few years. All industrialized nations value academic freedom in teaching and
research and have accepted freedom of expression for professors within the university and in society.
Few, if any, external restrictions are placed on teaching or research in higher education. Despite this
generally healthy situation, there are some issues that deserve attention. In the United States, some
have argued that the greatest threat to academic freedom comes from within the academy. Critics claim
that the dominant forces in the professoriate, mainly in the social sciences and humanities, seek to
enforce "political correctness" - imposing academic orthodoxy, usually from a liberal or radical
perspective, on some disciplines and seeking to silence those with opposing viewpoints (Kors and
Silverglate 1998). Several of the scholarly associations, such as the Moder Language Association, have
experienced fierce ideological battles. There is, in fact, little evidence that academics with divergent
views have been restricted or have lost their jobs, but the debate about the politicization of some
academic disciplines has raised questions about tolerance of perspectives within the universities. The
politi- cization or the influence of ideology on academic institutions or disciplines is not limited to the
United States. During the 1960s, ideology played a role in academic politics and in the disciplines in
Western Europe, in many cases intruding into elections and appointments to academic posts. Some
argue that the increased involvement in academe of corporations and the growth of privately sponsored
research have transformed research funding and that this has implications for academic freedom
(Slaughter and Leslie 1997). Academe, it is argued, has become "corporatized", and the interests of firms
have become dominant on campus. Basic research is being de- emphasized in favor of applied work that
will yield quick results for corporate sponsors - and government support for basic research has either
been reduced or has not expanded to keep pace with scientific needs. A growing portion of research
funding, especially in the biomedical sciences, is directly provided by corporations, and the results are
considered proprietary - leading to patents and other benefits for the sponsor. Research findings are
sometimes actually suppressed because of corporate funding arrangements. This is considered by many
to be a violation of the freedom of academics to disseminate the results of their research. The future of
basic research has been described as jeopardized by these changed funding patterns. A related issue,
not usually discussed in the context of academic freedom, is the growth of what some have called
"managerialism" in higher educa- tion - the notable increase in the power of administrators and other
officials as distinct from the authority of the professoriate in the governance and management of
academic institutions. Academic freedom and autonomy are related, and these trends in governance
reduce the autonomy and power of the professoriate. The authority of the professors to determine the
direction of the university, to develop the curriculum, and ultimately to maintain full control in the
classroom and in the selection and implementation of research topics is compromised by this trend.
There seems little doubt that the shift in power and authority from the professoriate to professional
managers and external governing bodies will dramatically affect the traditional role of the academic
profession - with repercussions on academic freedom as well. In concluding this discussion of
contemporary realities, it is useful to report on how the academic profession itself views academic
freedom. A survey of academics in 14 countries (all middle-income and mostly indus- trialized nations,
on all continents except Africa) found a range of views as to whether the academic profession is strongly
protected. More than 75 percent of the respondents responded positively to this question in all of the
countries but two - Brazil and Russia - where majorities answered negatively. Yet, in all of the countries
included except Israel, about 20 percent of the faculty responded negatively. Similar numbers reported
that they felt no restrictions on their research and teaching. However, when asked to respond to the
state- ment "In this country, there are no political or ideological restrictions on what a scholar may
publish", significant numbers expressed disagreement - 34 percent in the United States, 25 percent in
the United Kingdom, and 27 percent in Mexico (Boyer, Altbach and Whitelaw 1994, p. 101). These
findings indicate that while academics are reasonably sanguine about the state of academic freedom in
these countries, there remains some sense of unease. Indeed, the challenges to academic freedom in
the industrialized countries are more subtle, and perhaps in some ways more harmful than the more
overt violations that have been described here and that can be readily grasped and opposed. What can
be done? History shows that academic freedom is not only a fundamental prerequisite for an effective
university, but is a core value for academia. Just as human rights have become an international priority,
so academic freedom must be placed at the forefront of concern for the higher education community.
Higher education is international in scope - the issues that affect one country have implications in
others. A sophisticated understanding of the complex issues relating to academic freedom is also
required. The following items may be part of an action agenda for academic freedom. * Academic
freedom must be at the top of the agenda for everyone concerned with higher education. At present, it
is hardly discussed. Rarely are panels devoted to the topic at international conferences. The major
actors in the academic enterprise seem to be concentrating on financial issues, accountability, and
institutional survival. * Academic freedom needs a universal definition. Should the scope be limited to
the Humboldtian ideal of protection of teaching and research within the confines of the university and in
the area of expertise of the scholar? Or should the definition encompass expression, and perhaps action
as well, on a wider range of issues both within and outside the university? At present, the lack of
agreement on the nature of academic freedom makes common understanding and unified action
difficult. * Violations of academic freedom must be monitored and subjected to publicity worldwide. In
the age of the Internet, keeping track of academic freedom issues and promptly disseminating
information about crises and trends would be easy to accomplish. An Internet-based "early warning
system" would provide information and heighten conscious- ness. * A more rigorous mechanism for
investigating academic freedom viol- ations would increase international attention to severe violations.
For many years, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has monitored academic
freedom in the United States. Universities found to have violated academic freedom can be censured,
and the academic community is thus warned about the situation. When the viola- tion is remedied,
censure can be lifted. Other than being placed on a list of censured institutions, there are no sanctions,
and in fact censure by the AAUP has little impact. A similar international arrangement would be more
problematic and more expensive to organize but would be a valuable tool for consciousness raising. * A
solidarity network for academic freedom, such as "Scholars at Risk", organized by the Human Rights
Program at the University of Chicago in mid-2000 may be a valuable tool for helping individual scholars
who are being persecuted. The network seeks to identify individuals in trouble and to place them at
universities committed to assisting them, with the broader goal of highlighting academic freedom
conditions worldwide. Conclusion Academic freedom is a core issue for higher education. It is largely
over- looked, when it should be central to every debate about the university. It is as important as
managerial accountability, distance education, and the other buzzwords of the new millennium. Indeed,
without academic freedom, the central work of teaching and research cannot be truly effective.
Moreover, academic freedom at the beginning of the 21st century is facing challenges, as much from the
impact of new technologies and the restructuring of traditional universities as from forces that would
violate academic freedom by perse- cuting professors. The future of the university depends on a healthy
climate for academic freedom.

Baudrillard’s post-modern politics are co-opted by the right- manipulation of images is

used by the right in order to control reality
Wheeler 91 (Elizabeth, Postmodern Culture 1.3, Bulldozing the Subject, Muse)

Beneath his contempt lies the assumption that people cannot detect the harshness of
their own experience and must have it explained to them. When Lyotard uses the word "therapeutic" disparagingly, he dismisses the role of the
artist as healer. It never occurs to him that the viewers, the "patients," may have experienced more horror than he will ever know . While realism is

the dominant style of commercial media, the media do not have the deep stake in
reality- effects both Lyotard and Baudrillard attribute to them. Television eats up postmodernism along with any
other style available to it. Therefore, parody is not intrinsically subversive, as Baudrillard would claim. A
postmodern segment of "Mighty Mouse," with fragments of 1940's episodes cut out of their narratives, edited by
visual and rhythmic analogy, and set to a 1960's soul song, is no more or less subversive than any
other kiddie cartoon. Jochen Schulte-Sasse makes an important refinement on the realism argument in pointing out the "simultaneity of the non-
simultaneous" between modernism and post-modernism. He remarks that neoconservative politics uses both modes,

making a modernist call for "authority" and "values" while engaging in a brilliant
postmodern manipulation of images. Schulte-Sasse sees this vacillation as a weakness, "one reason why neoconservatism is likely
to remain a transitory phenomenon." I see it as neoconservatism's strength: it has managed to win on
both fronts, to appeal to the conscience while "colonizing the id " (145). The avant-garde,
the State, or the television network can use either mode to any purpose.
Baudrillard’s analysis of existing society is dangerously ignorant of material reality-
inevitably it leads to outbreaks of violence
Hayles 91 (N. Katherine, Prof. of English @ UCLA, The Borders of Madness, Science Fiction Studies #55
vol. 18, part 3, November 1991, http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/forum55.htm)

Dominated by signs of flight, the landscape of Crash indicates otherwise. Most of the action takes place on the concrete
"flyovers" that surround the airport; planes roar overhead constantly; the narrator's wife takes flying lessons. The drive to transcend
physical limitations, to cast them off as a plane seems to cast off the shackles of gravity when it lifts into the air, imprints its signature everywhere in the text.

Vaughan dies when his car, after a brief moment of flight, crashes
Indeed, the landscape is comprised of little else but this imprint.

into the roof of an airport shuttle bus . It is difficult to miss the point that the erotic
transformations are expressions precisely of a drive toward transcendence that does in
fact culminate in flight, a flight to death. Only by ignoring this riot of signification could one argue that there is no moral point to Crash,
no warning in the borders it draws around its characters. In a sentence from the Introduction to the French edition that Baudrillard quotes only to dismiss,

Ballard explicitly states that "the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that
brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of
technological landscape" (§0:6; cf p. 319, above). In his way, Baudrillard is as skilled a fiction writer as
Ballard, Dick, or Lem. More than describe the implosion into simulation, his works enact it by
systematically eliding the borders that mark the differences between simulation and reality. The realm that Ballard sees beckoning

to us from the margins, Baudrillard places at the center and inflates to consume the
whole. The effect is exciting, stimulating, giddy—and also dangerous. One of my students described what it feels like to
read Baudrillard for several hours straight. "No doubt about it," he remarked, "it gives you a rush, a high." For the insight these performative texts give into the

meaning and dynamics of simulation, we are in their debt. But like any powerful drugs, they should be used with care. There is only one high
that can last forever—the one that ends in death.
Baudrillard erases the reality of cities like los angeles, making them all seem to be
purely postmodern glamour- the alt makes our impacts inevitable
Wheeler 91 (Elizabeth, Postmodern Culture 1.3, Bulldozing the Subject, Muse)

Intolerance is the hallmark of dogma. While postmodern theory, particularly of the French sort, claims
to have no "metanarrative," it reveals its dogmatism by only tolerating certain readings
of itself. If Baudrillard refuses to ask or answer moral questions, then perversely I want to view him as a moralist. In Simulations: The Precession of Simulacra,
he describes the death of the referent: -it is the reflection of a basic reality -it masks and perverts a basic reality -it masks the absence of a basic reality -it bears no

relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (11) What if we read Baudrillard's scale not as descriptive but as
proscriptive, as a hierarchy of values? Those of us who still believe in realities, however fragmented, contested, and multiple, can then be dismissed as
unprogressive, as "naive and cognitively immature" (Gilligan 30). 1 How could this postmodern scale of values inform

the ethnology of a particular city: Los Angeles? Baudrillard begins with the idea that "what
draws the crowds" to Disneyland is not so much the entry into fantastic worlds as the "miniaturised and religious
revelling in real America" (23). He immediately moves beyond an ideological analysis to a far more sweeping commentary: Disneyland
is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact
all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of
the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality
(ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality-principle . . . Los
Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of
endless, unreal circulation--a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions . . . this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a

perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system. (25, 26) Anyone
who has ever tried to get around Los Angeles without a car knows how real it is, how mired in
`space and dimensions,' how cruel to the poor. In promoting the unreality of Los Angeles, Baudrillard does the

cops' dirty work. Because it is the most segmented of American cities, it is possible for the mayor to instruct the
police to round up homeless people with bulldozers and drive them into camps without
shade or adequate sanitation. It is possible to grow up middle-class a few miles from Skid Row and never see a homeless person. The
myth of Los Angeles as a fabulous unreality justifies the quiet elimination of its less-
than- fabulous, all-too-real aspects. Richard Rorty speaks of the "strand in contemporary French thought" that "starts off from suspicion of Marx
and Freud, suspicion of the masters of suspicion, suspicion of `unmasking'" (161). By itself, an ideological analysis of Los Angeles would remain impoverished.

without the intellectual tool of unmasking, there is no suffering to uncover.

However,

Without awareness of power, it is the powerless who disappear .

Baudrillard’s denial of all truth claims leads to right wing militarism – the debate space
has value for overcoming entrenched government and public conservativism*
Norris 92 Christopher, professor of philosophy at the University of Wales-Cardiff, What’s Wrong with
Postmodernism, pg. 190-191

Baudnllard's alternative is stated clearly enough: 'a hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between
the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated genention of difference' (p. 167). It is a vision

which should bring great comfort to government advisers, PR experts. campaign

managers, opinion-pollsters, media watch-dogs, Pentagon spokesmen and others
with an interest in maintaining this state of affairs . Baudrillard's imagery of 'orbital recurrence'
and the 'simulated generation of difference' should commend itself to advocates of a Star Wars

program whose only conceivable purpose is to escalate East-West tensions and divert
more funds to the military-industrial complex. There is no denying the extent to
which this and similar strategies of disinformation have set the agenda for 'public
debate' across a range of crucial policy issues . But the fact remains (and this phrase carries more than
just a suasive or rhetorical force) that there is a difference between what we are given to believe and

what emerges from the process of subjecting such beliefs to an informed critique of
their content and modes of propagation. This process may amount to a
straightforward demand that politicians tell the truth and be held so account for their
failing to do so. Of course there are cases - like the lranian-Contra affair or Thatcher's role in events leading up to she Falklands war - where a
correspondence-theory might seem to break down since the facts are buried away in Cabinet papers, the evidence concealed by some piece of high-level
chicanery ('Official Secrets', security interests, reasons of state, etc.), or the documents conveniently shredded in time to forestall investigation of their

there is no reason to think as with Baudrillard's decidedly Orwellian prognosis

content. But

that this puts the truth forever beyond reach , thus heralding an age of out-and-out
'hyperreality'. For one can still apply other criteria of truth and falsehood , among them
a fairly basic coherence-theory that would point out the various lapses, inconsistencies,
non-sequiturs, downright contradictions and so forth which suffice to undermine the official version of events.
(Margaret Thatcher's various statements on the Malvinas conflict - especially the sinking of the Genera! Beigrano -

would provide a good example here,)29 It may be argued that the truth-conditions will vary from one

specific context to another: that such episodes involve very different criteria according to the
kinds of evidence available; and therefore that it is no use expecting any form of generalised theory to establish the facts of this or that case. But this

ignores the extent to which theories (and truth-claims) inform our every act of
rational appraisal, from 'commonsense' decisions of a day-to-day practical kind to the
most advanced levels of speculative thought . And it also ignores the main lesson to be
learnt from Baudrillard's texts: that any politics which goes along with the current
postmodernist drift will end up by effectively endorsing and promoting the work of
ideological mystification.
Baudrillard’s rejection of even contingent truth claims leads to a retreat from
necessary engagement with the real world – leaves unreasonable and biased media
simulation as the only political discourse
Norris 92 Christopher, professor of philosophy at the University of Wales-Cardiff, What’s Wrong with
Postmodernism, pg. 44
We can now return once more to Perry Anderson's nagging question – what price theory in an age of widespread disillusionment on the left? – with a

One response is the retreat to a

sharpened sense of the issues it raises for Western intellectuals at the present time.

'postmodern' stance of allout sceptical indifference, a stance that involves (as in

Baudrillard's case) the willingness to jettison every last notion of truth, justice, or
critical understanding. Another - exemplified by Lyotard - is the more refined version of postmodernist thinking that preserves those ideas
but only on condition of driving a wedge between judgements of a speculative (ethical) order and cognitive truth-claims of whatever kind. Then again, there is
the turn toward that thoroughly depoliticised version of deconstructionist thought that reduces all concepts to metaphors, all philosophy to an

In each case - so I have argued -

undifferentiated 'kind of writing', and hence all history to a play of ungrounded figural representations.

theory has served as an escape-route from pressing political questions and a pretext
for avoiding any serious engagement with real-world historical events. Worst of all, these
ideas deprive critical thought of the one resource most needful at present, i.e. the
competence to judge between good and bad arguments, reason and rhetoric, truth-
seeking discourse and the 'postmodern' discourse of mass-induced media simulation .
Boundaries between the simulation and material existence are inevitable-
baudrillard’s alt destroys our consciousness of these inevitable boundaries, leading to
extinction
Hayles 91 (N. Katherine, Prof. of English @ UCLA, The Borders of Madness, Science Fiction Studies #55
vol. 18, part 3, November 1991, http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/forum55.htm)
These writers differ from Baudrillard in openly acknowledging that their texts are fictional. In fiction it is possible to elide the materiality of the world and thus to

erase the gap between simulation and reality. Baudrillard's stance, by contrast, is that the gap has also been erased
for us here now, and erased everywhere. Resisting this claim is the continuing materiality of the
world, which for convenience I will call reality. In reality, borders count. Consider Southern California, which comes as close to hyperreality as
anything in the US. The bumper-to-bumper traffic that surrounds Disneyland has a material

intractibility and a stubborn resistance to manipulation that make it quite different from the simulations within the park. Even within the
boundaries of simulations, material intractability often breaks in. In a virtual reality simulation, when one
moves one's head too fast for the computer program to keep up, the display breaks down. The trip through Disneyland's Space

Mountain, with its vertiginous rocketing through simulated galaxies, is customarily preceded by several hours of standing
in a barely-moving line under the hot California sun. Of course it would be possible to simulate these conditions, too. No one is likely to do so,
however, for the point of simulations is precisely to overcome the limitations of physical

existence. When Ballard in his introduction to Crash (Vintage ed., 1985) identifies the defining characteristic of the 20th century as "the concept of
unlimited possibility" he articulates very well why we are fascinated with simulations. The borders separating simulations from

reality are important because they remind us of the limits that make dreams of
technological transcendence dangerous fantasies. Hyperreality does not erase these
limits, for they exist whether we recognize them or not; it only erases them from our
consciousness. Insofar as Baudrillard's claims about hyperreality diminish our awareness of these
limits, it borders on a madness whose likely end is apocalypse. As Pynchon vividly demonstrated in Gravity's
Rainbow, an obsessional desire to avoid death itself becomes the death it seeks to elide.

Epistemic grounding is irrelevant. We don’t need absolute truth.

Nussbaum 92 (Martha, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics – U. Chicago,
Political Theory, “HUMAN FUNCTIONING AND SOCIAL JUSTICE In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism'”,
20:2, May, JSTOR)

Let me say very directly where I stand on the objections to essentialism. I believe that Kantian and related contemporary arguments (by
Quine, Davidson, Putnam, and Goodman in particular) have indeed successfully established the untenability of extreme metaphysical realism. I cannot argue this
here, but I hope it can at least be agreed that it would be extremely unwise for a political proposal to rely on the truth of metaphysical realism, given our current

argumentative situation. On the other hand, it does not seem to me that such a result shows anything like what the relativist
objectors think it shows. When we get rid of the hope of a transcendent metaphysical
grounding for our evaluative judgments -about the human being as about anything else
-we are not left with the abyss. We have everything that we always had all along: the
exchange of reasons and arguments by human beings within history, in which, for
reasons that are historical and human but not the worse for that, we hold some things
to be good and others bad, some arguments to be sound and others not sound. Why,
indeed, should the relativist conclude that the absence of a transcendent basis for judgment

- a basis that, according to them, was never there anyway -should make us despair of doing as we have

done all along, distinguishing persuasion from manipulation ? In fact, the collapse into
extreme relativism or subjectivism seems to me to betray a deep attachment to
metaphysical realism itself. For it is only to one who has pinned everything to that hope
that its collapse will seem to entail the collapse of all evaluation -just as it is only to a deeply believing
religious person, as Nietzsche saw, that the news of the death of God brings the threat of nihilism. What we see here , I think, is a reaction of
shame -a turning away of the eyes from our poor humanity, which looks so mean and bare -by contrast to a dream of another sort.
What do we have here, these critics seem to say? Only our poor old human conversations, our human bodies

that interpret things so imperfectly? Well, if that is all there is, we do not really want to study it too closely, to look into the
distinctions it exhibits. We will just say that they are all alike, for, really, they do look pretty similar when compared to the heavenly standard we were seeking. It is
like the moment reported by Aristotle when some students arrived at the home of Heraclitus, eager to see the great sage and cosmologist. They found him -not on a
hilltop gazing at the heavens but sitting in his kitchen or, perhaps, on the toilet (for there is a philological dispute at this point!). He looked at their disappointed
faces, saw that they were about to turn away their eyes, and said, "Come in, don't be afraid. There are gods here too." Aristotle uses this story to nudge his

reluctant students out of the shame that is preventing them from looking closely at the parts of animals. When you get rid of your
shame, he says, you will notice that there is order and structure in the animal world.3" So too, I think, with realism:
the failure to take an interest in studying our practices of analyzing and reasoning , human and
historical as they are, the insistence that we would have good arguments only if they came from

heaven - all this betrays a shame before the human. On the other hand, if we really think of the hope of a
transcendent ground for value as uninteresting and irrelevant, as we should, then the news of its collapse will not
change the way we do things: it will just let us get on with the business of reasoning in
which we were already engaged.
at: cap k
 2ac cap sustainable
Unsustainable arguments are wrong – no resource crunch
Saunders 16 (Harry Saunders, Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, 2016 (“Does Capitalism
Require Endless Growth?,” Breakthrough Institute, Summer, Iss. 6, Accessible Online at
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/issue-6/does-capitalism-require-endless-growth)

The argument of Malthus was famously resurrected in the early 1970s in the Club of Rome report The
Limits to Growth.1 Around the same time, ecological economists Nicholas Georgescu-Rosen, Herman
Daly, Robert Costanza, Robert Ayres, and others advanced the idea that all human economic activity
fundamentally relies on a limited planetary endowment of what they call “natural capital.” On the other
side, Marxist scholars like Paul Sweezy2, Fred Magdoff, and John Foster3 have extended Marx’s insight,
directing our attention to what they call the “growth imperative of capitalism,” by which they mean the
indispensable necessity of capitalism to continually accumulate capital and generate a reserve of
unemployed workers if it is to remain viable. Without continual economic growth, they argue, capitalism
will collapse. Or, as Giorgos Kallis recently so succinctly put it, “Growth is what capitalism needs, knows,
and does.”4

Taken together, the dilemma is evident: An economic system that requires perpetual economic growth
on a spherical planet with finite resources simply cannot last.

Merging Marx and Malthus in this way has made Malthusian arguments accessible to elements of the
global left that had historically rejected them. Capitalism and environmental sustainability simply could
not be reconciled. Constraining the economy to keep it within a safe margin of ecological limits would
only hasten capitalism’s collapse, while allowing capitalism to grow unconstrained would result in
ecological collapse. Either way, the choice was clear: abandon capitalism or risk the end of the human
project.

But Marx and Malthus are not so easily reconciled. Marx’s central insight was that capitalism would
collapse of its own contradictions, including rising inequality and immiseration of labor that would
ultimately destroy the market for the goods that capitalists produced. As it turns out, the mechanism by
which this would occur, technological change driving greater economic productivity, was precisely the
mechanism that Malthus failed to anticipate when he predicted that food production would fail to keep
up with population growth. In Marx’s crisis lay precisely the mechanism that would prevent Malthus’
prophecy.

We see much evidence for this today. Improving technologies have driven a major expansion in food
availability, along with continuing production efficiencies across the global economy more generally.
The world faces no shortage of ecological challenges — species extinctions, collapsing fisheries,
depleted aquifers, poisoned land, and, of course, the inexorable rise of global temperatures as
atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases increase. And economists today concern themselves
with the threat of “secular stagnation,” chronically low growth rates that threaten long-term prosperity.

But it is important to distinguish these challenges from the sweeping claims made originally by Sweezy,
Magdoff, and Foster and repeated today by prominent intellectuals and activists such as Naomi Klein
and Bill McKibben. In the pages that follow, I will demonstrate that both neoclassical growth theory and
empirical evidence suggest that capitalist economies do not require endless growth but are rather
much more likely to evolve toward a steady state once consumption demands of the global population
have been satisfied. Those demands demonstrably saturate once economies achieve a certain level of
affluence. For these reasons, a capitalist economy is as likely as any other to see stable and declining
demands on natural resources and ecological services . Indeed, with the right policies and institutions,
capitalist economies are more likely to achieve high living standards and low environmental impacts
than just about any other economic system.

Neolib is sustainable and the alt is a useless political abstraction

Arvidsson 13—teaches sociology at the University of Milano
(Adam, “Thinking beyond neo-liberalism: A response to Detlev Zwick”, ephemera: theory & politics in
organization 13(2): 407-412)

This makes it trickier to do critical theory. We can of course still criticize the actual state of things. We
can point to the precarious relations that prevail among creative knowledge workers; show how
exploitative and unjust conditions are intensified by the very forces that drive the globalization of
communicative capitalism, like the outsourcing of design work; or lament the fact that a triumphant
neoliberal regime subsumes and appropriates aspects of subjectivity and social life that we think should
have been left alone. To produce such critiques remains useful intellectual work – I have done it in other
contexts (Arvidsson et al., 2010; Arvidsson, 2007), as has Detlev Zwick (2008), and many others. To the
extent that such critiques reach a mass audience, they can become a progressive impulse to action and
reflection – as in the case of Naomi Klein’s work inspiring the ‘no global’ movement (to use an
inadequate name coined by the mainstream press). But such a critique without an alternative remains
unsatisfactory for at least three reasons. First, and most superficially, since everyone else is doing it,
the marginal utility of yet another piece of critical theory rapidly diminishes, as does the intellectual
satisfaction that can be derived form producing it. Second, and more seriously, the absence of a
realistic alt ernative, or even of a historical subject in the name of which such a critique can be
pronounced, risks rendering critical theory moralistic and rather toothless . We might agree with Zwick
when he suggests that the outsourcing of design work from Toronto to the Philippines is somehow
wrong, but it is difficult to understand exactly why this would be the case. (Why shouldn’t Philippine
designers be allowed to compete with Canadian designers? Can the ‘creative class’ claim an exemption
from the global economy? Perhaps the answer is ‘yes’, but I do not know of any viable alternative vision
of society that is able to substantiate that ‘yes’.) Third, and most importantly, in the absence of an
alternative vision, critical theory remains rather unconvincing to the people in the name of whom it
proposes to speak. I can assure you – and I’ve tried! – that you won’t become an organic intellectual
among social entrepreneurs or precarious creative workers by telling them that they are exploited ,
that they sell out their subjectivity , or that the system in which they operate is unjust . Pure critique is
simply not attractive enough to make the multitude of new productive subjects, fragmented by
neoliberalism, cohere into a historical subject. To do that you need at least the myth of an alternative ,
as agitators from Sorel via Lenin to Subcomandante Marcos could tell you. Don’t get me wrong. I am not
proposing that it is wrong to point to the precarious conditions of knowledge work, or that we should
not do this as academics and researchers. This is still an important task. But it is not enough . Critical
theory must do this, but it must also do more . It must also engage with the question of what a
realistic alternative to neoliberalism could be, and it must elaborate a realistic political vision in the
name of which a critique that is productive and progressive, and not simply moralistic, can be
articulated. By realistic, I mean that such an alternative must be sought in the actual relations of
production that characterize the contemporary information economy. Zwick’s suggestion that we
imagine a commonism of productive consumption as collaborative sharing in the absence of private
property and combined with an inclusive model of political determination, collective sovereignty,
belonging and justice – and so on – is simply unproductive to my mind. We might all agree that an
economy of commons that has done away with capitalism might be more desirable, but the reality is
that hybrid forms, like the game modders that Zwick cites, where a an economy of commons co-exists
with a capitalist value logic, in some form, are indeed becoming the norm. At that point the interesting
thing to do is not so much to criticize the enduring capitalist nature of these hybrid forms, but rather
to investigate the new forms of politics that they might give rise to. This in no way implies that one
does away with conflict and politics. Rather, it implies investigating and understanding the new spaces
and discourses through which such a new type of politics can be articulated. In order to do this we
must start with what the actors involved in these processes actually think themselves. It is quite
useless to simply deploy existing philosophical perspectives, or to compare the reality of
communicative capitalism to utopian projections of the political visions of last century. Instead we
must start with the ‘empirical metaphysics’, to use Bruno Latour’s term, that actually prevail among
people engaged in such hybrid practices. We might all want to do away with neoliberalism and the
forms of life that it has promoted. But at the same time, we all recognize that the neoliberal project
has been one of the most successful projects of governmentality since, perhaps, the very project of
disciplinary power that Foucault himself described. Rebus sic stantibus we cannot simply wish it away .
We need to recognize that people have changed, that competitive individualism, self-branding and an
entrepreneurial mentality are, by now, normal features of life. The same thing goes for the popular
political myths that prevail among advanced knowledge workers, what Zwick calls ‘cyber-utopianism’.
We need to recognize that notions like peer-to-peer production, high-tech gift economies and the like
have the power to mobilize the energies of the subjects that are most likely to become the pioneers of a
new political vision – today’s version of the skilled workers that have taken the lead in most modern
political movements. Even though the social theory that they produce might be shallow and imperfect,
and even though they might not have read Marx and Foucault as well as we have, we cannot simply
dismiss this vision as a mere ideology to be replaced by our theoretically more refined ideology. Like the
relations of production that are emerging in communicative capitalism and the subjectivity of
knowledge workers, these myths are part of the raw material with which the Gramscian intellectual
must engage in order to articulate new understandings of common sense that are both politically
progressive and intuitively attractive to the people that they are supposed to mobilize. In other words,
in order to articulate an alternative, we cannot simply dismiss the reality of communicative capitalism
and fall back on what remains of the political utopias of last century. We need to engage with the
reality of neoliberal communicative capitalism and try to push its dialectic beyond its apolitical present
state. We must investigate what the real conditions of production and imagination are and ask
ourselves where they might lead. Critical theory needs to become an empirical , and not simply a
philosophical, enterprise.
 --at: system collapse
The system is resilient – it’ll bounce back
Foster 9 (JD, Norman B. Ture Senior Fellow in the Economics of fiscal policy – Heritage Foundation, "Is
Capitalism Dead? Maybe," 3-11, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101694302)

Capitalism is down. It may even be out. But it's far from dead. Capitalism is extremely resilient. Why?
Because here, as in every democratic-industrial country around the world, it has always had to struggle
to survive against encroachments — both benign and malevolent — of the state. At the moment,
capitalism is losing ground most everywhere. But when the economic crisis passes, capitalism and the
freedoms it engenders will recover again, if only because freedom beats its lack. It is said that the trouble with
socialism is socialism; the trouble with capitalism is capitalists. The socialist economic system, inherently contrary to individual liberties, tends
to minimize prosperity because it inevitably allocates national resources inefficiently. On the other hand, a truly capitalist system engaged in an
unfettered pursuit of prosperity is prone to occasional and often painful excesses, bubbles and downturns like the one we are now experiencing
globally. When capitalism slips, governments step in with regulations and buffers to try to moderate the excesses and minimize the broader
consequences of individual errors. Sometimes these policies are enduringly helpful. Severe economic downturns inflict collateral damage on
families and businesses otherwise innocent of material foolishness. Not only are the sufferings of these innocents harmful to society, but they
are also downright expensive. A little wise government buffering can go a long way. The trick, of course, is the wisdom part. A good example of
a wise government buffer is deposit insurance at commercial banks. Without it, depositors would have withdrawn their funds en masse, leading
to a rapid collapse of the banking system. It happened in years gone by. But today, deposits have flowed into the banking system in search of
safety, helping banks staunch their many severe wounds. Yet for every example of helpful government intervention, there are many more that
do more harm than good. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac leap to mind. These congressional creatures helped create, then inflate the subprime
The current financial crisis clearly has
market. When that balloon popped, it triggered a global economic meltdown.
capitalism on its back foot. Government ownership of the largest insurance company, the major banks,
and Fan and Fred are awesome incursions into private markets. But, as President Obama has
underscored, these incursions are only temporary. In time, these institutions — even Fan and Fred —
will be broken up and sold in parts. It will leave government agents with stories to tell their grandkids,
and taxpayers stuck with the losses. But the power of the state will again recede, and another new age
of freedom and capitalism will arrive and thrive… until we repeat the cycle again sometime down the
road.
 --at: limits to growth
No limits to growth—tech and demographics solve
Bisk 12 Tsvi, American Israeli futurist; director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking and
contributing editor for strategic thinking for The Futurist magazine. He is the author of The Optimistic
Jew: A Positive Vision for the Jewish People in the 21st Century. Norwich University MA, Political History
Thomas Edison State College BA, Social Sciences, 500 published articles, “No Limits to Growth,”
https://www.wfs.org/Upload/PDFWFR/WFR_Spring2012_Bisk.pdf,

by imagineering an alternative future—based on solid science and

The Case for No Limits to Growth Notwithstanding all of the above, I want to reassert that

technology— we can create a situation in which there are “ no limits to growth.” It begins with a new paradigm

for food production now under development: the urban vertical farm. This is a concept popularized by Prof. Dickson Despommier of
Columbia University.30 A 30-story urban vertical farm located on five square acres could yield food for fifty

thousand people. We are talking about high-tech installations that would multiply productivity by a
factor of 480: four growing seasons, times twice the density of crops, times two growing levels on each floor, times 30 floors = 480. This means that five acres
of land can produce the equivalent of 2,600 acres of conventionally planted and tended crops . Just 160
such buildings occupying only 800 acres could feed the entire city of New York . Given this calculus, an area the size of
Denmark could feed the entire human race. Vertical farms would be self-sustaining. Located contiguous to or inside
urban centers, they could also contribute to urban renewal. They would be urban lungs , improving the air

quality of cities. They would produce a varied food supply year-round. They would use 90% less water.
Since agriculture consumes two-thirds of the water worldwide, mass adoption of this technology would
solve humanity’s water problem. Food would no longer need to be transported to market ; it would be produced at
the market and would not require use of petroleum intensive agricultural equipment. This, along with

lessened use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, would not only be better for the environment but
would eliminate agriculture’s dependence on petroleum and significantly reduce petroleum demand.
Despite increased efficiencies, direct (energy) and indirect (fertilizers, etc.) energy use represented over 13% of farm expenses in 2005-2008 and have been increasing as the price of oil rises.31

Many of the world’s damaged ecosystems would be repaired by the consequent abandonment of farmland. A
“rewilding” of our planet would take place. Forests, jungles and savannas would reconquer nature, increasing habitat

and becoming giant CO2 “sinks,” sucking up the excess CO2 that the industrial revolution has pumped into the atmosphere. Countries
already investigating the adoption of such technology include Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and China
—countries that are water starved or highly populated. Material Science, Resources and Energy The embryonic revolution in material science now taking

place is the key to “no limits to growth .” I refer to “smart” and superlight materials. Smart materials “are materials that have one or more
properties that can be significantly changed in a controlled fashion by external stimuli.” 32 They can produce energy by exploiting differences in

temperature (thermoelectric materials) or by being stressed (piezoelectric materials). Other smart materials save energy in the manufacturing process by changing
shape or repairing themselves as a consequence of various external stimuli. These materials have all passed the “ proof of concept” phase

(i.e., are scientifically sound) and many are in the prototype phase. Some are already commercialized and penetrating the market. For

example, the Israeli company Innowattech has underlain a one-kilometer stretch of local highway with piezoelectric material

to “harvest” the wasted stress energy of vehicles passing over and convert it to electricity.33 They reckon that Israel has stretches of
road that can efficiently produce 250 megawatts. If this is verified, consider the tremendous electricity potential of the New Jersey Turnpike or the
thruways of Los Angeles and elsewhere. Consider the potential of railway and subway tracks. We are talking about tens of thousands of potential

megawatts produced without any fossil fuels. Additional energy is derivable from thermoelectric materials, which can
transform wasted heat into electricity . As Christopher Steiner notes, capturing waste heat from manufacturing alone in
the United States would provide an additional 65,000 megawatts : “enough for 50 million homes.”34 Smart glass is
already commercialized and can save significant energy in heating, airconditioning and lighting—up to 50% saving in energy has been achieved in
retrofitted legacy buildings (such as the former Sears Tower in Chicago). New buildings, designed to take maximum advantage of this and other technologies could save even more.

Buildings consume 39% of America’s energy and 68% of its electricity . They emit 38% of the carbon dioxide, 49% of the sulfur dioxide,
and 25% of the nitrogen oxides found in the air.35 Even greater savings in electricity could be realized by replacing incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs with LEDS which use 1/10th the

These three steps: transforming waste heat into electricity,

electricity of incandescent and half the electricity of fluorescents.

retrofitting buildings with smart glass, and LED lighting, could cut America’s electricity consumption and
its CO2 emissions by 50% within 10 years . They would also generate hundreds of thousands of jobs in construction and home improvements. Coal
driven electricity generation would become a thing of the past. The coal released could be liquefied or gasified (by new environmentally friendly technologies) into
the energy equivalent of 3.5 million barrels of oil a day. This is equivalent to the amount of oil the United States imports from the Persian Gulf and Venezuela together.36

Conservation of energy and parasitic energy harvesting , as well as urban agriculture would cut the
planet’s energy consumption and air and water pollution significantly . Waste-to-energy technologies
could begin to replace fossil fuels. Garbage, sewage, organic trash, and agricultural and food processing
waste are essentially hydrocarbon resources that can be transformed into ethanol, methanol, and biobutanol or biodiesel. These can be used for transportation,
electricity generation or as feedstock for plastics and other materials . Waste-to-energy is essentially a recycling
of CO2 from the environment instead of introducing new CO2 into the environment. Waste-to-energy also
prevents the production, and release from rotting organic waste, of methane—a greenhouse gas 25 times more
powerful than CO2. Methane accounts for 18% of the manmade greenhouse effect. Not as much as CO2, which constitutes 72%, but still considerable (landfills emit as much
greenhouse gas effect, in the form of methane, as the CO2 from all the vehicles in the world). Numerous prototypes of a variety of waste-to-energy

technologies are already in place. When their declining costs meet the rising costs of fossil fuels, they
will become commercialized and, if history is any judge, will replace fossil fuels very quickly—just as coal replaced wood in a matter of
decades and petroleum replaced whale oil in a matter of years. Superlight Materials But it is superlight materials that have the greatest potential

to transform civilization and, in conjunction with the above, to usher in the “no limits to growth” era . I refer, in particular, to car-bon
nanotubes—alternatively referred to as Buckyballs or Buckypaper (in honor of Buckminster Fuller). Carbon nanotubes are between 1/10,000th and 1/50,000th the

width of a human hair, more flexible than rubber and 100-500 times stronger than steel per unit of weight. Imagine the
energy savings if planes, cars, trucks, trains, elevators—everything that needs energy to move—were made of this material and weighed 1/100th what they weigh now. Imagine the types of
alternative energy that would become practical. Imagine the positive impact on the environment: replacing many industrial processes and mining, and thus lessening air and groundwater
pollution. Present costs and production methods make this impractical but that infinite resource—the human mind—has confronted and solved many problems like this before. Let us take the
example of aluminum. A hundred fifty years ago, aluminum was more expensive than gold or platinum.37 When Napoleon III held a banquet, he provided his most honored guests with
aluminum plates. Less-distinguished guests had to make do with gold! When the Washington Monument was completed in 1884, it was fitted with an aluminum cap—the most expensive
metal in the world at the time—as a sign of respect to George Washington. It weighed 2.85 kilograms, or 2,850 grams. Aluminum at the time cost $1 a gram (or $1,000 a kilogram). A typical
day laborer working on the monument was paid $1 a day for 10-12 hours a day. In other words, today’s common soft-drink can, which weighs 14 grams, could have bought 14 ten-hour days of

a soft drink can would cost $1,125 today (or $80,000 a

labor in 1884.38 Today’s U.S. minimum wage is $7.50 an hour. Using labor as the measure of value,

kilogram), were it not for a new method of processing aluminum ore. The Hall-Héroult process turned aluminum into one of the cheapest
commodities on earth only two years after the Washington Monument was capped with aluminum. Today aluminum costs $3 a kilogram, or $3000 a metric ton. The soft drink can that would

Today the average cost of industrial grade carbon nanotubes is about

have cost $1,125 today without the process now costs $0.04.

$50-$60 a kilogram. This is already far cheaper in real cost than aluminum was in 1884. Yet revolutionary methods of production are
now being developed that will drive costs down even more radically. At Cambridge University they are
working on a new electrochemical production method that could produce 600 kilograms of carbon
nanotubes per day at a projected cost of around $10 a kilogram , or $10,000 a metric ton.39 This will do for carbon nanotubes what the
Hall-Héroult process did for aluminum. Nanotubes will become the universal raw material of choice, displacing steel, aluminum, copper
and other metals and materials. Steel presently costs about $750 per metric ton. Nanotubes of equivalent strength to a metric ton of steel would cost $100 if this Cambridge process (or others

If you take just one

being pursued in research labs around the world) proves successful. Ben Wang, director of Florida State’s High Performance Materials Institute claims that: “

gram of nanotubes, and you unfold every tube into a graphite sheet, you can cover about two-thirds of a football field ”.40 Since other
research has indicated that carbon nanotubes would be more suitable than silicon for producing photovoltaic energy, consider

the implications. Several grams of this material could be the energy-producing skin for new generations of superlight

dirigibles—making these airships energy autonomous. They could replace airplanes as the primary means to transport air freight. Modern American history has
shown that anything human beings decide they want done can be done in 20 years if it does not violate the laws of nature. The atom bomb was developed in four years; putting a man on the

by 2020 or earlier, an industrial process for the inexpensive production

moon took eight years. It is a reasonable conjecture that

of carbon nanotubes will be developed, and that this would be the key to solving our energy, raw materials, and environmental problems all at once.
Mitigating Anthropic Greenhouse Gases Another vital component of a “no limits to growth” world is to formulate a rational environmental policy that saves money; one that would gain wide
grassroots support because it would benefit taxpayers and businesses, and would not endanger livelihoods. For example, what do sewage treatment, garbage disposal, and fuel costs amount
to as a percentage of municipal budgets? What are the costs of waste disposal and fuel costs in stockyards, on poultry farms, throughout the food processing industry, and in restaurants? How
much aggregate energy could be saved from all of the above? Some experts claim that we could obtain enough liquid fuel from recycling these hydrocarbon resources to satisfy all the

Turning the above waste into energy by various means would be a huge cost saver
transportation needs of the United States.

and value generator, in addition to being a blessing to the environment. The U.S. army has developed a
portable field apparatus that turns a combat unit’s human waste and garbage into bio-diesel to fuel their
vehicles and generators.41 It is called TGER—the Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery. It eliminates the need to transport fuel to the
field, thus saving lives, time, and equipment expenses. The cost per barrel must still be very high. However, the history of military technology being
civilianized and revolutionizing accepted norms is long . We might expect that within 5-10 years, economically
competitive units using similar technologies will appear in restaurants, on farms, and perhaps even in
individual households, turning organic waste into usable and economical fuel. We might conjecture that within several decades, centralized
sewage disposal and garbage collection will be things of the past and that even the Edison Grid (unchanged for over
one hundred years) will be deconstructed . The Promise of Algae Biofuels produced from algae could eventually provide a

substantial portion of our transportation fuel. Algae has a much higher productivity potential than crop-
based biofuels because it grows faster, uses less land and requires only sun and CO2 plus nutrients that can be provided
from gray sewage water. It is the primo CO2 sequesterer because it works for free (by way of photosynthesis), and in doing so produces biodiesel and ethanol in much higher

volumes per acre than corn or other crops. Production costs are the biggest remaining challenge. One Defense Department estimate pins them at more than $20 a gallon.42 But once

commercialized in industrial scale facilities, production cost could go as low as $2 a gallon (the
equivalent of $88 per barrel of oil ) according to Jennifer Holmgren, director of renewable fuels at an energy subsidiary of Honeywell International.43 Since algae
uses waste water and CO2 as its primary feedstock, its use to produce transportation fuel or feedstock for product would actually improve the environment. The Promise of the Electric Car
There are 250 million cars in the United States. Let’s assume that they were all fully electric vehicles (EVs) equipped with 25-kWh batteries. Each kWh takes a car two to three miles, and if the
average driver charges the car twice a week, this would come to about 100 charge cycles per year. All told, Americans would use 600 billion kWh per year, which is only 15% of the current total

. If cars were made primarily out

U.S. production of 4 trillion kWh per year. If supplied during low demand times, this would not even require additional power plants

of Buckypaper, one kWh might take a car 40-50 miles. If the surface of the car was utilized as a
photovoltaic, the car of the future might conceivably become energy autonomous (or at least semi-autonomous). A kWh
produced by a coal-fired power plant creates two pounds of CO2, so our car-related CO2 footprint would be 1.2 trillion pounds if all electricity were produced by coal. However, burning one
gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2.44 In 2008, the U.S. used 3.3 billion barrels of gasoline, thereby creating about 3 trillion pounds of CO2. Therefore, a switch to electric vehicles would
cut CO2 emissions by 60% (from 3 trillion to 1.2 trillion pounds), even if we burned coal exclusively to generate that power. Actually, replacing a gas car with an electric car will cause zero
increase in electric draw because refineries use seven kWh of power to refine crude oil into a gallon of gasoline. A Tesla Roadster can go 25 miles on that 7 KWh of power. So the electric car
can go 25 miles using the same electricity needed to refine the gallon of gas that a combustion engine car would use to go the same distance. Additional Strategies The goal of mitigating global

warming/climate change without changing our lifestyles is not naïve. Using proven Israeli expertise, planting forests on just 12% of the world’s semi-
arid areas would offset the annual CO2 output of one thousand 500-megawatt coal plants (a gigaton a year).45 A
global program of foresting 60% of the world’s semi-arid areas would offset five thousand 500-megawatt coal plants (five gigatons a
year). Since mitigation goals for global warming include reducing our CO2 emissions by eight gigatons by 2050, this project alone would have a tremendous

ameliorating effect. Given that large swaths of semi-arid land areas contain or border on some of the poorest populations on the planet, we could put millions
of the world’s poorest citizens to work in forestation, thus accomplishing two positives (fighting poverty and
environmental degradation) with one project . Moving agriculture from its current fieldbased paradigm to
vertical urban agriculture would eliminate two gigatons of CO2. The subsequent re-wilding of vast areas of the earth’s
surface could help sequester up to 50 gigatons of CO2 a year , completely reversing the trend. The revolution underway in material science will help us to

become “self-sufficient” in energy. It will also enable us to create superlight vehicles and structures that will produce their own energy. Over time, carbon nanotubes

will replace steel, copper and aluminum in a myriad of functions. Converting waste to energy will
eliminate most of the methane gas humanity releases into the atmosphere . Meanwhile, artificial
photosynthesis will suck CO2 out of the air at 1,000 times the rate of natural photosynthesis. 46 This
trapped CO2 could then be combined with hydrogen to create much of the petroleum we will continue
to need. As hemp and other fast-growing plants replace wood for making paper, the logging industry will largely
cease to exist. Self-contained fish farms will provide a major share of our protein needs with far less
environmental damage to the oceans. Population Explosion or Population Implosion One constant refrain of anti-growth advocates is that we are heading towards 12 billion
people by the end of the century, that this is unsustainable, and thus that we must proactively reduce the human population to 3 billion-4 billion in order to “save the planet” and human

recent data indicates that a demographic winter will engulf humanity by the middle
civilization from catastrophe. But

of this century. More than 60 countries (containing over half the world’s population) already do not have replacement birth
rates of 2.1 children per woman. This includes the entire EU, China, Russia, and half a dozen Muslim countries, including Turkey, Algeria, and Iran. If present trends
continue, India, Mexico and Indonesia will join this group before 2030 . The human population will peak
at 9-10 billion by 2060, after which, for the first time since the Black Death, it will begin to shrink. By the end of the century, the human
population might be as low as 6 billion-7 billion. The real danger is not a population explosion; but the consequences of the impending population
implosion.47 This demographic process is not being driven by famine or disease as has been the case in all previous history. Instead, it is being driven by

the greatest Cultural Revolution in the history of the human race: the liberation and empowerment of women . The fact is that even with

present technology, we would still be able to sustain a global population of 12 billion by the end of the
century if needed. The evidence for this is cited above.
 2ac cap solves war
Capitalism prevents war and increases global living standards and stability
Adorney 16 (Julian Adorney, Thorpe Research Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Freedom, Young
Voices Advocate for the Foundation for Economic Freedom, citing Patrick McDonald, Professor of
Economics at the University of Texas, Austin, and Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard
University, 2016 (“Actually Bernie, Markets, Not Socialism, Promote Kindness,” Foundation for Economic
Education, March 21st, Accessible Online at https://fee.org/articles/actually-bernie-markets-promote-
kindness-not-government/,)

Why? Because markets humanize our trading partners. Trade requires us to sit down in business
meetings (or at least Skype sessions) with people from other countries to resolve differences and create
win-win transactions. You’re less likely to want to go to war with a country if you’ve spent time with its
people than if you only see it as lines on a map.

Markets Make Us Value Human Life More

In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker notes that violence has
been declining for centuries. This is true in every category, from murders to hate crimes to child abuse.
One factor behind the decline is the spread of commerce. We have become conditioned to trade with
others to get what we want. As a result, strangers “switch from being targets of demonization and
dehumanization to partners in reciprocal altruism.”

Another factor is the rise in living standards that capitalism has enabled. In the United States, for
instance, life expectancy has risen from 39.4 years in 1880 to 78.7 years in 2011. This change wasn’t
inevitable; until the 19th century, life expectancy fluctuated from 30 to 40 years. Only since the
Industrial Revolution has life expectancy climbed steadily.

Due to market-fueled innovations and new technologies, living standards have increased dramatically
since the Industrial Revolution. Kids survive childhood, and shorter working hours mean that families
can be closer-knit.

All of this makes people see their own lives as more valuable. This decreases their willingness to
potentially throw their life away in crime, violence, or war. That’s one reason we see less violence in
wealthier countries — and thanks to markets, we’re all a lot wealthier than our ancestors.
 2ac cap k2 environment
Capitalism is crucial to resolve environmental and pollution problems – empirics
McMaken 15 (Ryan McMaken, Communications Director and Editor for the Ludwig von Mises
Institute, Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Indiana University, Bloomington, M.A. in Political Science and
Public Affairs from the University of Colorado, Denver, B.A. in Economics from the University of
Colorado, Denver, 2015 (“Pope Francis’s Relentless Pessimism Fuels His Faith in Politics ,” Mises Daily —
a Publication of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, June 19 th, Accessible Online at
https://mises.org/library/pope-francis%E2%80%99s-relentless-pessimism-fuels-his-faith-politics)

Human health is more and more ravaged by pollution every day, Francis suggests. And yet, one familiar
with the real state of worldwide economic development doubts these assertions.

In an editorial at the Catholic Herald, Philip Booth writes:

Firstly, as is often the case with Pope Francis, his analysis of the economic state of the world is
unduly pessimistic. It is correct to say that pollution leads to premature deaths. Indeed, many
would argue that climate change will do so and some that it already does so. But, there are
trade-offs. And the underlying picture is one of huge increases in life expectation and health
because of the economic development that is taking place. Indeed, in many parts of the world,
the environment is improving dramatically.

Let’s review the actual facts:

As Booth notes, air pollution leads to real health problems. But to find this at work, one should not look
to wealthy countries, but to countries that have long shunned the market economy . China, for
instance — which is on nobody’s list of most-free countries — is a pioneer in dumping pollutants into
the water and air. Similarly, during most of the twentieth century, one found the most unfortunate
pollution in the communist world which continued with its belching smoke stacks long after the
capitalist world had cleaned up its own air. In other words, there is a solution to these problems, and it
is the more market-oriented parts of the world that have found it.
 2ac cap k2 heg
Breaking down neoliberalism kills leadership
Duménil and Lévy 09
[Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, Directors of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique in Paris, The Crisis of Neoliberalism and U.S. Hegemony, 2009,
http://www.beigewum.at/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009_2_006-13.pdf]

Beginning the historical investigation at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States,
neoliberalism appears as the third such »social order«. A first financial hegemony prevailed from the beginning of the century,
but it was destabilized during the Great Depression and the New Deal, a period of intense class struggle. The social
order characteristic of the period that stretches from the New Deal to the late 1980s can be denoted as »social democratic« or »Keynesian«, with significant
differences among countries. Its main social feature was a »compromise« between managerial and popular classes, paralleling the containment of capitalist
interests. How neoliberalism was established historically lies beyond the limits of the present study. Conversely, the description of the
methods used is rather straightforward. A new discipline was imposed on workers, with the control of their purchasing power, new labor conditions, and the decline
of welfare. While, after World War II, a large percentage of profits were conserved within nonfinancial corporations to the end of investment, in neoliberalism,
profits were lavishly distributed as dividends and, up to 2000s, a large fraction was paid out as interest.
Policies aiming at price stability were substituted for macro policies tending to growth and employment. Financial regulations inherited from

the Great Depression were gradually lifted. Restrictions to international trade were eliminated to the
benefit of free trade, and the free international mobility of capital was imposed to most countries . Neoliberal
globalization allowed for the deployment of transnational corporations worldwide. The United States emerged from the two world wars as the

leading international power. While other imperialist countries , as France or the United Kingdom, were still involved
in the defense of their traditional empire, the United States abandoned the first attempts at the constitutions of such an
empire at the end of the 19th century, to the benefit of the Wilsonian vision of the informal dominance of the most advanced
among capitalist countries, with the gradual imposition of the dollar as international currency. The Great Depression did not destabilize this
hegemony, which was dramatically consolidated by the victorious participation of the country in World War II. The United States never accepted the new rules of
the Bretton Woods agreements limiting international trade and the international movements of capital, and the dollar was confirmed as a substitute for a truly
international currency. After World War II, the United States fought for the defense, in front of the Soviet Union, of the so-called »free world« and for
their own dominance worldwide. Everywhere, corruption, subversion, and wars were used to these ends. The U.S. economy came
to dominate the nonfinancial and financial world economy. The transnational corporations of the country were
the most powerful, in particular financial institutions. In the 1970s, many analysts of global trends pointed, however, to a decline of
U.S. hegemony and the formation of a »triad« (the United States, Europe, and Japan). Neoliberalism inverted these trends and strengthened the

preeminence of the U.S. economy. As of the 2000s, the U.S. economy was presented to other major capitalist
countries as a model to be emulated, and the United States as a leader to be followed.

Nuclear war
Brooks et al 13 [Stephen G. Brooks is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.G.
John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton
University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs. He is also a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University.William C. Wohlforth is the Daniel
Webster Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. “Don't Come Home,
America: The Case against Retrenchment”, Winter 2013, Vol. 37, No. 3, Pages 7-
51,http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/ISEC_a_00107]

  engagement is that it prevents the emergence of a far more dangerous global security environment. For one
A core premise of deep

thing, as noted above, the United States’ overseas presence gives it the leverage to restrain partners from taking

provocative action. Perhaps more important, its core alliance commitments also deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony from contemplating expansion and make its
partners more secure, reducing their incentive to adopt solutions to their security problems that threaten others and thus stoke security dilemmas. The contention that engaged U.S. power
dampens the baleful effects of anarchy is consistent with influential variants of realist theory. Indeed, arguably the scariest portrayal of the war-prone world that would emerge absent the
“American Pacifier” is provided in the works of John Mearsheimer, who forecasts dangerous multipolar regions replete with security competition, arms races, nuclear proliferation and
associated preventive wartemptations, regional rivalries, and even runs at regional hegemony and full-scale great power war. 72 How do retrenchment advocates, the bulk of whom are
realists, discount this benefit? Their arguments are complicated, but two capture most of the variation: (1) U.S. security guarantees are not necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries and
conflict in Eurasia; or (2) prevention of rivalry and conflict in Eurasia is not a U.S. interest. Each response is connected to a different theory or set of theories, which makes sense given that the
whole debate hinges on a complex future counterfactual (what would happen to Eurasia’s security setting if the United States truly disengaged?). Although a certain answer is impossible, each
of these responses is nonetheless a weaker argument for retrenchment than advocates acknowledge. The first response flows from defensive realism as well as other international relations
theories that discount the conflict-generating potential of anarchy under contemporary conditions. 73 Defensive realists maintain that the high expected costs of territorial conquest, defense
dominance, and an array of policies and practices that can be used credibly to signal benign intent, mean that Eurasia’s major states could manage regional multipolarity peacefully without
theAmerican pacifier. Retrenchment would be a bet on this scholarship, particularly in regions where the kinds of stabilizers that nonrealist theories point to—such as democratic governance
or dense institutional linkages—are either absent or weakly present. There are three other major bodies of scholarship, however, that might give decisionmakers pause before making this bet.
First is regional expertise. Needless to say, there is no consensus on the net security effects of U.S. withdrawal. Regarding each region, there are optimists and pessimists. Few experts expect a
return of intense great power competition in a post-American Europe, but many doubt European governments will pay the political costs of increased EU defense cooperation and the

Europe that is incapable of securing itself from various threats

budgetary costs of increasing military outlays. 74 The result might be a

that could be destabilizing within the region and beyond (e.g., a regional conflict akin to the 1990s Balkan wars), lacks capacity for global security
missions in which U.S. leaders might want European participation, and is vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers. What about the other parts of

Eurasia where the United States has a substantial military presence? Regarding the Middle East, the
balance begins toswing toward pessimists concerned that states currently backed by Washington — notably
Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—might take actions upon U.S. retrenchment that would intensify security
dilemmas. And concerning East Asia, pessimismregarding the region’s prospects without the American pacifier is
pronounced. Arguably the principal concern expressed by area experts is that Japan and South Korea are likely to obtain a nuclear
capacity and increase their military commitments, which could stoke a destabilizing reaction from China. It is notable that during the Cold War,
both South Korea and Taiwan moved to obtain a nuclear weapons capacity and were only constrained from doing so by astill-engaged United States. 75 The second body of scholarship casting
doubt on the bet on defensive realism’s sanguine portrayal is all of the research that undermines its conception of state preferences. Defensive realism’s optimism about what would happen if
the United States retrenched is very much dependent on itsparticular—and highly restrictive—assumption about state preferences; once we relax this assumption, then much of its basis for
optimism vanishes. Specifically, the prediction of post-American tranquility throughout Eurasia rests on the assumption that security is the only relevant state preference, with security defined
narrowly in terms of protection from violent external attacks on the homeland. Under that assumption, the security problem is largely solved as soon as offense and defense are clearly

research across the social and other sciences,

distinguishable, and offense is extremely expensive relative to defense. Burgeoning

however,undermines that core assumption: states have preferences not only for security but also for prestige, status, and other

aims, and theyengage in trade-offs among the various objectives. 76 In addition, they define security not just in terms of territorial protection but in

view of many and varied milieu goals. It follows that even states that are relatively secure may nevertheless engage in highly
competitive behavior. Empirical studies show that this is indeed sometimes the case. 77 In sum, a bet on a benign postretrenchment
Eurasia is a bet that leaders of major countries will never allow these nonsecurity preferences to influence their strategic choices. To the degree that these bodies of scholarly knowledge have

U.S. retrenchment would result in a significant deterioration in the security environment in at least some
predictive leverage,

ofthe world’s key regions. We have already mentioned the third, even more alarming body of scholarship. Offensive realism predicts that the withdrawal of
the American pacifier will yield either a competitive regional multipolarity complete with associated
insecurity, arms racing, crisis instability, nuclear proliferation , and the like, or bids for regional hegemony, which may be
beyond the capacity of local great powers to contain (and which in any case would generate intensely competitive behavior, possibly including
regional great power war).
 2ac alt fails – too abstract
The alt will fail – neoliberalism is over generalized and offers no explanatory power
Barnett 5 (Clive, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Geoforum 36, “The consolations of
‘neoliberalism,’” p. 9-10, Ebsco)

The blind-spot in theories of neoliberalism —whether neo-Marxist and Foucauldian—comes with trying to account
for how top-down initiatives ‘take’ in everyday situations . So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop
thinking of “neoliberalism” as a coherent “hegemonic” project altogether. For all its apparent critical force, the
vocabulary of “neoliberalism” and “neoliberalization” in fact provides a double consolation for leftist academics: it supplies us with plentiful
opportunities for unveiling the real workings of hegemonic ideologies in a characteristic gesture of revelation; and in so doing, it invites us to
align our own professional roles with the activities of various actors “out there”, who are always framed as engaging in resistance or
contestation. The conceptualization of “neoliberalism” as a “hegemonic” project does not need refining by adding a splash of Foucault.
Perhaps we should try to do without the concept of “neoliberalism” altogether , because it might
actually compound rather than aid in the task of figuring out how the world works and how it changes .
One reason for this is that, between an overly economistic derivation of political economy and an overly statist
rendition of governmentality, stories about “neoliberalism” manage to reduce the understanding of
social relations to a residual effect of hegemonic projects and/or governmental programmes of rule (see
Clarke, 2004a). Stories about “neoliberalism” pay little attention to the pro-active role of socio-cultural
processes in provoking changes in modes of governance, policy, and regulation . Consider the example of the
restructuring of public services such as health care, education, and criminal justice in the UK over the last two or three decades. This can easily
be thought of in terms of a ‘‘hegemonic’’ project of “neoliberalization”, and certainly one dimension of this process has been a form of anti-
statism that has rhetorically contrasted market provision against the rigidities of the state. But in fact these ongoing changes in the terms of
public-policy debate involve a combination of different factors that add up to a much more dispersed populist reorientation in policy, politics,
and culture. These factors include changing consumer expectations, involving shifts in expectations towards public entitlements which follow
from the generalization of consumerism; the decline of deference, involving shifts in conventions and hierarchies of taste, trust, access, and
expertise; and the refusals of the subordinated, refer- ring to the emergence of anti-paternalist attitudes found in, for example, women’s health
movements or anti-psychiatry movements. They include also the development of the politics of difference, involving the emergence of
discourses of institutional discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, and disability. This has disrupted the ways in which welfare agencies
think about inequality, helping to generate the emergence of contested inequalities, in which policies aimed at addressing inequalities of class
and income develop an ever more expansive dynamic of expectation that public services should address other kinds of inequality as well (see
Clarke, 2004b). None
of these populist tendencies is simply an expression of a singular “hegemonic” project of
“neoliberalization”. They are effects of much longer rhythms of socio-cultural change that emanate from
the bottom-up. It seems just as plausible to suppose that what we have come to recognise as
“hegemonic neoliberalism” is a muddled set of ad hoc, opportunistic accommodations to these
unstable dynamics of social change as it is to think of it as the outcome of highly coherent political-
ideological projects. Processes of privatization, market liberalization, and de-regulation have often followed an ironic pattern in so far as
they have been triggered by citizens’ movements arguing from the left of the political spectrum against the rigidities of statist forms of social
policy and welfare provision in the name of greater autonomy, equality, and participation (e.g. Horwitz, 1989). The
political re-
alignments of the last three or four decades cannot therefore be adequately understood in terms of a
straightforward shift from the left to the right , from values of collectivism to values of individualism, or
as a re-imposition of class power. The emergence and generalization of this populist ethos has much
longer, deeper, and wider roots than those ascribed to “hegemonic neoliberalism”. And it also points towards
the extent to which easily the most widely resonant political rationality in the world today is not right-wing market liberalism at all, but is,
rather, the polyvalent discourse of ‘‘democracy’’ (see Barnett and Low, 2004).
 2ac no alt
The alt lacks a realistic alternative

Jones 11
Owen, Masters at Oxford, named one of the Daily Telegraph's 'Top 100 Most Influential People on the Left' for 2011, author of "Chavs: The
Demonization of the Working Class", The Independent, UK, "Owen Jones: Protest without politics will change nothing", 2011,
www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-protest-without-politics-will-change-nothing-2373612.html

My first experience of police kettling was aged 16. It was May Day 2001, and the anti-globalisation movement was at its peak. The turn-of-the-
century anti-capitalist movement feels largely forgotten today, but it was a big deal at the time. To a left-wing teenager growing up in an age of
unchallenged neo-liberal triumphalism, just to have "anti-capitalism" flash up in the headlines was thrilling. Thousands of apparently
unstoppable protesters chased the world's rulers from IMF to World Bank summits – from Seattle to Prague to Genoa – and the authorities
were rattled. Today,as protesters in nearly a thousand cities across the world follow the example set by the
Occupy Wall Street protests, it's worth pondering what happened to the anti-globalisation movement. Its
activists did not lack passion or determination. But they did lack a coherent alternative to the neo-
liberal project. With no clear political direction, the movement was easily swept away by the jingoism
and turmoil that followed 9/11, just two months after Genoa. Don't get me wrong: the Occupy movement is a glimmer of sanity
amid today's economic madness. By descending on the West's financial epicentres, it reminds us of how a crisis caused by the banks (a
sentence that needs to be repeated until it becomes a cliché) has been cynically transformed into a crisis of public spending. The founding
statement of Occupy London puts it succinctly: "We refuse to pay for the banks' crisis." The Occupiers direct their fire at the top 1 per cent, and
rightly so – as US billionaire Warren Buffett confessed: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and
we're winning." The Occupy movement has provoked fury from senior US Republicans such as Presidential contender Herman Cain who –
predictably – labelled it "anti-American". They're right to be worried: those camping outside banks threaten to refocus attention on the real
villains, and to act as a catalyst for wider dissent. But a coherent alternative to the tottering global economic order
remains, it seems, as distant as ever. Neo-liberalism crashes around, half-dead, with no-one to administer the killer blow. There's
always a presumption that a crisis of capitalism is good news for the left. Yet in the Great Depression, fascism consumed much of Europe. The
economic crisis of the 1970s did lead to a resurgence of radicalism on both left and right. But, spearheaded by Thatcherism and Reaganism, the
New Right definitively crushed its opposition in the 1980s.This time round, there doesn't even seem to be an alternative for the right to defeat.
That's not the fault of the protesters. In truth, the left has never recovered from being virtually smothered out of existence. It was the victim of
a perfect storm: the rise of the New Right; neo-liberal globalisation; and the repeated defeats suffered by the trade union movement. But,
above all, it was the aftermath of the collapse of Communism that did for the left. As US neo-conservative Midge Decter triumphantly put it:
"It's time to say: We've won. Goodbye." From the British Labour Party to the African National Congress, left-wing movements across the world
hurtled to the right in an almost synchronised fashion. It was as though the left wing of the global political spectrum had been sliced off. That's
why, although we live in an age of revolt, there remains no left to give it direction and purpose.

Can’t solve the productivity link—degrowth fails to build new institutions

Rigon 17
Andrea Rigon (lecturer at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London). “Degrowth Politics and Policies for Degrowth.”
March 13th, 2017. https://www.degrowth.de/en/2017/03/degrowth-politics-and-policies-for-degrowth/

As a provocative minority and plural community, degrowth would die in internal conflicts and face
political irrelevance if it were to present a full political proposal by setting out a coherent and complete set of policies for a new
society. While degrowth may inspire a “new left” alternative to the extractivist and growth-led model of recent Latin American left government
experiences, the construction of a fully-fledged alternative or the political agenda of a minority party should not be the priority.
Instead, degrowth should speak to existing political forces and engage with policies that can be implemented by existing governments (at
various scales). Working within existing institutions The degrowth community should work to challenge and change social norms, particularly in
terms of growth as social objective. More importantly, however, it should engage with existing institutions. Imagining new institutions
for a degrowth society is an important thought-exercise, but building new institutions takes enormous
efforts. At the same time, there is no guarantee that new institutions would be more democratic and
better than the old ones, because institutions are the result of long, non-linear and complex processes.
Moreover we need to start working right now. Therefore, we need to work within the existing institutions of society, towards incremental
pragmatic policy changes.
 2ac econ rationality
Economic rationality is a useful heuristic
Arena 13
Phil Arena (assistant professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, SUNY). “In Defense of Homo Economicus.” Duck of Minerva.
March 14th, 2013. http://duckofminerva.com/2013/03/in-defense-of-homo-economicus.html

I don’t think human behavior is identical to that of Homo Economicus. Neither does anyone else. But
one could argue that the degree of similarity between human behavior and that expected from Homo
Economicus rates about a 6 out of 10 . I won’t call that something it’s not — simple theoretical models based on unrealistic
assumptions do not achieve perfect explanatory power.* But if your goal is to see how far you can get with a model simple enough to allow you
to be very confident that your conclusions actually follow from your assumptions, you can do worse than we’ve done by focusing on Homo
Economicus. What makes me say we’ve achieved a 6? Well, there’s obviously room for disagreement here. I wouldn’t argue too much with
someone who thinks that 5 would be more accurate. But the only way to say that there is minimal similarity between
human behavior and that expected from Homo Economicus is to ignore the available evidence . Consider,
for example, one of the most influential papers demonstrating the failures of Homo Economicus. In no uncertain terms, the authors inform us
that the predictions of the Ultimatum game are not born out any of the 15 small scale societies they studied. But how far removed from reality
are the predictions of this model? When I first describe this game to my students, I ask them what they expect the results to be. A large number
of them tell me that they expect most people to propose equitable divisions — to propose half of the money. And some people do just that. In
some societies, such behavior is even typical, at least according to these experiments. But it’s not in most of the societies the authors studied.
The following table gives the mean offers for each of the 15 societies the authors studied (click to enlarge). giving In almost every society, the
person designated as the proposer offers less than half of the money, contrary to many people’s intuitions. And that’s with face to face
experiments. One study of the closely related Dictator game (where the receiver doesn’t have to approve the division) found just under half the
Perhaps more
participants giving away least $3 of a $10 pie under normal experimental conditions, but only 15% under anonymity.
striking, if you give people the choice between dividing $10 between themselves and another person or
taking $9 without anyone ever getting designated as a potential recipient, a good number take the $9.
That’s not what Homo Economicus would do, which would be to play the Dictator game and keep all $10. But it sure as heck ain’t altruism or a
concern for fairness or anything like that. Moreover, if you but offer people the option to take instead of give, most will take. They don’t take
everything, a Homo Economicus would, but the fact that they take at all is quite telling. As Levitt and List forcefully argue, much of the
putatively pro-social behavior we’ve discovered through laboratory experiments appears to be an artifact of the laboratory setting. We haven’t
learned that people aren’t selfish — we’ve learned that they don’t want people to think that they’re selfish. When people play the Trust Game,
they usually transfer about half the pile of money, and receive about half of what becomes a larger pile back. This seems to indicate that people
are happy to take advantage of opportunities for mutual gain by lending money to those who will use it productively because they trust that
they will receive back more than they loaned out. Great! So why do we have banks, and why is it necessary for the federal government to
backstop those banks through the FDIC? Where’s all the trust? The spontaneous cooperation with total strangers in the absence of legal
institutions protecting them against exploitation? Again, no one is arguing that Homo Economicus is anything but a mythical creature. Real
people are not so narrowly self-interested. But the behavior we observe in the real world bears more than a little resemblance to what we’d
expect from Homo Economicus. Reasonable people can disagree about how much complication we should accept in pursuit of greater
explanatory power. I myself choose different assumptions for different projects, sometimes accepting more complication and sometimes
keeping things more simple. I’m not trying to say that we should always assume that human behavior is similar
to that of Homo Economicus. What I’m saying is that it can be useful, at times, to do so. That it’s pretty
amazing that we can reproduce trade winds, storm systems, and the Gulf Stream with a dishpan, a turntable, and a Bunsen Burner.**
 2ac inevitable
Neoliberalism inevitable – elites shut down opposition
Vakulabharanam 12
[Vamsi Vakulabharanam, faculty member with the School of Economics at the University of Hyderabad,
India., Why Does Neoliberalism Persist Even After the Global Crisis?, 12/20/12,
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/why-does-neoliberalism-persist-even-after-the-global-
crisis.html]

The 2007-9 crisis in global capitalism brought a new energy and focus to the heterodox economists, and more broadly to the critics of
neoliberalism from different arenas of society. It seemed clear at that time that neoliberalism had run its course when it met its structural contradiction – with the burst of the US
housing bubble and the concomitant financial crises across the world, it looked like the avenues through which demand was being generated were closed and the system was poised for

structural change. Three years later, Southern Europe is witnessing an intense so-called sovereign debt crisis with the working people bearing the brunt of it, and real economies
in the developed world are continuing to witness slow growth. The US seems to be under the threat of the so-called fiscal cliff (which seems more

like a political event rather than an economic one). The economies that grew quickly during the neo-liberal period, like China and

India, have slowed down considerably. Across the globe, we seem to be going through a period of uncertainty without a clear path ahead. Yet,
neoliberalism persists. Why? There are multiple explanations for this. Bailout packages of various governments were directed at rescuing financial capital, and
this has pitted the interests of financial capital against the interests of the majority. The global left has not been

strong enough to take advantage of the crisis to better represent the interests of the majority. Governments across the world,
after a brief gap, have returned to their neoliberal posture of supporting financial capital and so forth. There is truth in all these explanations. However, we
need to broaden the array of explanations both to take into account the spatial diversity of neoliberalism, as well as to deepen our analytical understanding of this persistence. I offer one such
explanation from field explorations in India to add to the existing explanations. This addition is not simply academic, but it shows the need for deeper political engagement to bring about
systemic change, given that our explanations of the structural contradictions of neoliberalism are on the mark. In two recent field visits that we (a group of local researchers) undertook to
understand the persistence of neoliberalism at the concrete level, we found some interesting phenomena. Both these visits were in the state of Andhra Pradesh in South India. The first visit
was in the region of Telangana, which is highly politicized right now, as the people of the region are fighting for a separate state within the Indian nation-state. The second visit was to a tribal
habitat in the northeastern region of the same state, where communist struggles have been active for a while. In both these areas, there are continued appropriations of common lands,
common resources and minerals, such as Granite and Bauxite by local and foreign capitalist elites aided by the State. In the process, these elites are destroying the local livelihoods without
creating credible alternative. Both these are classic cases of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession, a process that has centrally defined neoliberalism over the last thirty-five

years across the globe. Accumulation by dispossession operates in our times through the following modes of appropriation. First, it operates through
the acquisition of lands from small producers such as peasants, tribal people, artisans and the urban poor in the name of Special Economic Zones and the
like. Some of the lands acquired thus, have became open to speculative enterprises of real estate dealers. Second, there has been a large-scale privatization

drive in most countries that has made public sector enterprises alienate their properties at throwaway
prices to private players. Third, and these are the cases that we have focused on – commons have been appropriated with ease either
because the laws governing them are weak or because common properties are often meddled with by
the State. What we found in these two regions is that the particular modes of appropriation that have come into being with great force during the neoliberal period have persisted even
after the crisis. Why is this the case? One explanation that ties in with the explanations above is that resistance has not been strong enough or effective from the people and their social

that neoliberalism has been able to create structures of

movements or from the larger left movements. The other explanation that we offered is

populism that are deeply entrenched. The local elites have pursued a three-fold strategy for the continued
appropriation of the commons. First, they (with the support of the State) have put in place various populist policy
imperatives that have temporarily addressed the consumption needs of the majority without altering the deeper
neoliberal structural forces that have inhibited employment growth and wage growth over the last thirty years. For example, there are schemes such as housing or subsidized food for the poor
even as their productive resources such as land are acquired by the elites/states. These have tended to perpetuate themselves after the global crisis, even with the loud demands for austerity.

the elites have continued to appropriate common and public resources to keep their own
Second,

accumulation levels above an acceptable minimum in a time of slowdown of accumulation opportunities

through regular economic growth. Resistance is sought to be controlled through populism of the kind discussed above. Even in regions that are highly politicized,
such as Telangana, the leadership of the movement has been hand-in-glove with the local elites who gain consistently through the perpetuation of these appropriation practices.Third,

professionals and middle classes have been the beneficiaries of a system that has thrived on the
creation of enclave economies where there is a sharing of rents among the elites and these professional
groups. These professional classes have taken up key positions in the government, media, corporate executive roles, and as intermediaries between the elites and the working people who
use the commons. The broad support of these classes for the local elites has played a key role in the perpetuation

of neoliberalism. As long as these processes persist, neoliberalism will be strong on the ground, with the elites and non-
elites bound together in the larger neoliberal system through the different , yet entangled processes of appropriation, rent
sharing and populism. Of course, this cannot go on, since the logic of austerity is bound to create contradictions in the path of populism. However, this contradiction may unfold very
differently across space and time, as not all governments are going to react identically to the demands of austerity. The 1% in the US (that the Occupy movement has targeted) or the top decile
of the population (in countries like China and India) continue to benefit from the perpetuation of the neoliberal configuration while they are pitted against their large majorities. As long as the

as long as there are continued benefits

political groups on the ground do not make their voices heard loudly enough against the top 1% or the top 10%, and

for the elites from the perpetuation of neoliberalism, the system will persist.
 at: root cause
No root cause claims
Bakker 9
Karen Bakker (professor of geography at University of British Columbia). “Commentary.” Environment and Planning, 2009.
http://www.envplan.com/epa/editorials/a4277.pdf

With this sort of example as inspiration, one hopes that scholars of neoliberal nature would take on Castree's task. Yet one can anticipate
refusals (and this pertains directly to Castree's two final questions, about the effects of nature's neoliberalization and their evaluation). Some
will argue that `neoliberalism' is constituted of a range of diverse, locally rooted practices, thereby justifying a sector-specific, case-study
approach for which attempts at terminological systematization are of little utility. This is, as Castree notes, an evasion rather than a convincing
A more compelling argument is that the biophysical characteristics of resources and associated
response.
resource economies differ so greatly that expedience (and analytical rigour) demands a high degree of
specialization. But the most fundamental objection (and one that Castree overlooks) is that the chain of
causality in the study of environmental impacts arising from projects of neoliberalization is so
attenuated, and the confounding variables so numerous (particularly given the multiple scales of
regulation and resource production involved), that it is almost impossible to prove that the
environmental `impacts' we might identify do indeed arise from a particular strategy identified as
neoliberal.

Disregard their impact claims – attributing consequence to neoliberalism is

epistemologically asinine.
Castree 6 (Noel, Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester, Environment and Planning A,
volume 38, Issue 1, “From neoliberalism to neoliberalisation: consolations, confusions, and necessary
illusions,” p. 1-5)
Yet in the slow (but enjoyable) process of reviewing the literature I have become increasingly confused as to the precise object of analytical attention. It is not simply that the research papers I am reading focus on different kinds of natural and altered environments (hardly surprising given

neoliberalism’ seems to alter its shape from paper to paper

the world's biophysical diversity). In addition, the political economic project driving environmental change – ‘ – . So,

although the essays share a common analytical focus

authors whose – it turns
and chapters I am reading appear to – their different environmental expertises notwithstanding

out that this focus is rather fuzzy This is not just an empirical issue In theoretical terms what counts as
. .

neoliberalism does not appear to be a matter of consensus among critics in geography and cognate fields. In some cases privatisation and marketisation are the key criteria; in other
cases additional features are listed among its differentia specifica. Empirically, it is no surprise to discover that, however defined, `neoliberalism' does not `ground itself' unchanged from place to place. Rather, as the case studies I have been reading show so well, its embedding in real-
world situations muddies the clean lines of its conceptual specification. So far so unexceptional. Anyone with an even passing familiarity with geographical debates over previous grand abstractions – such as postmodernity, post-Fordism, or globalization – will doubtless interpret my `fuzzy
concept' problem as no problem at all. Given time, it might be thought that those researchers whose empirical work I am surveying will sharpen theoretical understandings of neoliberalism by carefully specifying different modalities of `actually existing neoliberalism'. This being early days,
it might be thought that we still have some way to go before research into the `nature' of neoliberalism reaches maturity. `Maturity', from this perspective, would be a situation in which a substantial body of evidence has both arisen from and altered increasingly refined
conceptualisations of what neoliberalism is all about. As this involves increased theoretical complexity, then the theoretical abstraction ‘neoliberalism’ will, over time, give way to plural understandings of neoliberalisation as a really existing process rather than an ageographical thing. The
end result will be that environmental geographers – like other geographers interested in neoliberalism – will move from the heavens of abstract theory to the nitty-gritty of empirical specifics ending up somewhere in between: with mid-range conceptualisations that have genuine

explanatory and normative purchase. Though the above scenario is not implausible, I have nagging doubts – ones whose implications extend way beyond my immediate subject of concern. My worry is that analysts of neoliberalism 's

environmental impacts are travelling down a road to nowhere . The potential dead end to which I refer is not a function of the topic being researched – like any political economic project, neoliberalism will have
nontrivial effects on the nonhuman world (and therefore on us). It is essential that these effects be described, explained, and evaluated. But the key question – and the basis of my concern – is what precisely produces these effects. Ostensibly it is ‘neoliberalism’ of course. But because
geographical researchers of neoliberalism are rightly trying to complicate and dehomogenise this thought-abstraction, the issue of what, precisely, the object of analysis is arises. If, as Clive Barnett (2005, page 9) states, ``There is no such thing as neoliberalism!'', then we are forced to
recognise one of two possibilities. The first – apropos the mid-level theory mentioned above – is that there are distinct kinds of neoliberalisation whose environmental impacts can be fairly accurately understood (even though there is unlikely to be a consistent relationship between kinds
and impacts). The second is that even at this mesolevel neoliberalism can only exist as a thought-abstraction not a `real entity' because ‘it’ only ever exists in articulation with actors, institutions, and agendas that immediately call into question whether a thing called ‘neoliberalism’ –
however carefully specified – can be held responsible for anything. Clearly, I am touching here upon fundamental research issues – those of ontology and epistemology – that cannot be resolved at a purely philosophical level. To date, researchers of neoliberalism in urban and economic
geography have tended to resist the second possibility mentioned above (perhaps because it appears to lead to the dead end of an idiographic focus on the unique and the singular). Instead, they believe that ongoing empirical research can be synthesised and compared so that mid-level
concepts will emerge. The likelihood is that the environmental geographers whose research I have recently been reading will, similarly, see the production of such grounded concepts as their long-term objective. If so, I wish to give them pause for thought – so too all those other
geographers undertaking theoretically informed and theoretically relevant empirical research into neoliberalism's actually existing forms. A brief exploration of some unresolved tensions in the writings of Wendy Larner and Jamie Peck is instructive here. Economic geographers both,
Larner and Peck's overview pieces on neoliberalism have enjoyed a wide readership among critical geographers (Larner, 2003; Peck 2001; 2004; see also Peck and Tickell, 2002). Both authors have tried to set agendas for current and future geographical research into neoliberalism that

neoliberalism needs to be given ``an identity crisis''

touch upon the source of my concern in this commentary. Larner (2003, page 510) has argued that . Following J K Gibson-Graham (1996) she

when critical scholars reify neoliberalism as a hegemonic, unified entity they, perversely,
argues that

exaggerate its power despite their oppositional stance towards it . Her recommendation is that we take aspatial and universal conceptions of neoliberalism and render them
geographical: that we pay attention to ``the different variants of neoliberalism, to the hybrid nature of contemporary policies and programmes...[and] to the multiple and contradictory aspects of neoliberal spaces, techniques, and subjects'' (page 509, emphasis in the original). However,
perhaps aware that this argument can be seen to license the proliferation of disconnected case studies, she also stresses ``the important contributions of academic work focused on identifying the similarities between different forms of neoliberalism'' (page 510). The hidden tensions in
Larner's argument become manifest in Peck's excellent synoptic essays on neoliberalism. He notes that neoliberalism is a ``perplexingly amorphous political economic phenomena'' (2004, page 394) because it remains unclear at what geographical scales and levels of theoretical
abstraction we can identify it. As he puts it, ``While the neoliberal discourses and strategies that are mobilized in ... different settings share certain family resemblances, local institutional context clearly (and really) matters in the style, substance, origins and outcomes ...'' (page 395). This
is more than a reiteration of Larner's apparently sensible attempt to give the grand abstraction `neoliberalism' an identity crisis. More than Larner, Peck wants to identify commonalities within apparent difference without succumbing to ``the fallacies of monolithism ... or convergence
thinking'' (page 403). As he continues, ``While geographers tend to be rightly sceptical of spatially totalizing claims, splitting differences over varieties of neoliberalism cannot be an end in itself, not least because it begs questions about the common roots and shared features of the
unevenly neoliberalized landscape that confronts us.'' What Peck seems to have in mind here is not a process of pure thought abstraction: one in which generic similarities among different neoliberalisms are identified yielding a `neoliberal model' that nowhere exists as such. Instead, he
recognises that all neoliberalisations are hybrid from the outset [“even the United States represents a ‘case’, rather than the model itself'” (page 393)]. It follows for him, therefore, that “in the absence of a more careful mapping of these hybrids-in-connection, the
concept of neoliberalism remains ... seriously underspecified, little more in some cases than a radical-theoretical slogan'' (page 403). It seems to me that,
despite his best efforts, Peck fails to address satisfactorily some key problems in the argument that both he and Larner are advancing. In a sense both authors want to have their cake and eat it. They insist that we identify different modalities of neoliberalism without giving up on the task
of discussing “the abstraction we might provisionally term neoliberalism in general'” (page 395) – where the latter now arises from a comparative consideration of empirical research rather than from a priori thought-experiments or reference to the programmatic writings of Friedman and
Hayek. For my own part I see difficulties with this `both/and' agenda even as I understand the intentions behind it. Let me explain. First, part of neoliberalism's ‘perplexing amorphousness’ – whatever geographical scale or level of theoretical abstraction we are dealing with – stems from a
fairly intractable inability to ‘fix’ the term's meanings and real-world referents. Unlike, say, water – which in one of its three states remains water wherever and whenever it is – neoliberalism does not possess stable characteristics. We only ‘know’ that a given phenomena is neoliberal – or
has “a more than trivial degree of neoliberal content” (page 403) – because we have selected from among several definitions that other researchers or real-world actors use to specify what neoliberalism is. Because these definitions are multiple – as I noted earlier, critics usually offer
between two and several criteria when defining what counts as a neoliberal idea or policy – then `the real world' can only partly function as a ‘court of appeal’ to resolve competing claims as to what is (or is not) neoliberal in degree and kind. Second, even if this were not an issue,
neoliberal practices always, as Larner and Peck rightly argue, exist in a more-than-neoliberal context. The context matters because it introduces difference, path dependency, and unevenness in terms of process and outcome: neoliberalisations in the plural. But this then begs the
question: what does it mean to abstract from context (again, whatever geographical scale or level of theoretical abstraction we are dealing with) in the way that Larner and especially Peck recommend? Even in Peck's subtle reading of ‘neoliberalism in general’ we confront the possibility

neoliberalism
that we are simply listing generic – albeit historically specific – characteristics found in multiple geographical contexts. Because the effects of these characteristics can only ever be understood contextually then the suspicion arises that depicted over

and above context is a pure archetype: something unreal that has no consequences or existence in itself . This, of course, raises the key
question of where context begins and where it ends. Phrased differently, it raises the question of geographical scale: at what socially constituted scale(s) does (do) discrete modes of neoliberal policy and practice exist? The answer, as the growing empirical literature shows, is that it very
much depends. One of the reasons that critics see neoliberalism as tendentially hegemonic is because it has been `rolled out' by global institutions (such as the World Bank) with the (apparent) power to impose their will on whole countries. But this does not, of course, mean that it is
implemented uniformly over space because of preexisting differences in the configurations of state, business, and civil society. What is more, national, regional, and local level actors in various parts of the world have enacted their own neoliberal policies in relation to specific sets of
people, places, natural resources, industries, and so on. So even if neoliberal ideas have, these last twenty years, diffused out from globally powerful bodies this does nothing to alter the fact of hybridity and variety that Larner and Peck both discern. My third point, in light of this, is that

it is wrong to believe that ‘larger’ geographical scales constitute a more uniform (for example, the North American Free Trade Agreement area)

neoliberal landscape even global policies and rules ‘bite’ differently all the
‘overlaying’ more regionally and locally variable ones. The point, surely, is that

way from the continental down to the local scales . In other words, ‘difference’ does not begin (or somehow `deepen') at the local scale alone (as implied by Perreault and Martin, 2005). Neither Larner
nor Peck suggest that it does, but there is nonetheless the risk that their arguments can be seen to imply that there is a scale or scales where geographical difference ends and spatial similarity begins. As I suggested in the previous paragraph, neoliberalism is ‘impure’ at all geographical
scales, meaning that the search for similarities can easily become a formal rather than substantive exercise. The way to avoid this last possibility is to do what critical realists in human geography have been doing for years. Supposing that we can agree on what neoliberalism's defining
characteristics are, we start by recognising that it exists in an overdetermined socionatural universe. We therefore acknowledge that it never acts alone – only in a fairy-tale world where everything is privatised, marketised, and commodified would this not hold true. Therefore, when we
identify specific variants of neoliberalism we are not examining varieties of a really existing, homogenous genus. Instead, we are doing two things. First, we are seeing how a really existing and quite widespread set of policy ideas are having conjoint effects at specific geographical scales
(up to and including the global). In other words, we are examining contingently occurring processes and outcomes that may well have operated differently if the ‘neoliberal component’ had not been present. Second, this means the object of analysis in any given research project is not a
mere temporary ‘variant’ of something more enduring and solid but rather a qualitatively distinct phenomenon in its own right: namely, an articulation between certain neoliberal policies and a raft of other social and natural phenomena. Rigorously pursued, a critical realist approach to
neoliberalism or any other topic resists the ‘violence of abstraction’: that is, the habit of confusing epistemic discussions about a phenomenon abstracted from its contexts of operation with ontological discussions about its actual behaviour and its material effects. As the now-distant
‘localities debate’ showed, the best critical realist research does not doubt that certain phenomena cover wide spans of space and time. Instead, it insists that such phenomena are likely to be impure at all scales and this impurity must be respected not seen as a deviation from some
norm or essence. How does this relate to attempts to compare different variants of neoliberalism? The answer is that critical realists would look for substantial (not formal) similarities in causal processes and contingent similarities in how those processes work out on the ground. In other
words, geographical difference matters to critical realists ‘all the way down’ which is not the same as saying that the world is necessarily a patchwork of unlike parts. Critical realists, though not discussed by Peck in his recent work (though further back in time see Peck, 1996), would
doubtless approach neoliberalism in the way he recommends. They would identify similarities between neoliberalisations not to suggest that the differences can be bracketed but to suggest, instead, that even with these differences substantial commonalities of process and outcome
occur. Equally, though, they would be open to the evidence telling them a different story: one in which the differences make such a difference that the commonalities exist only in name (conceptually) not in actuality. In either case, it would be axiomatic that it is never `neoliberalism'
alone that causes anything, but always ‘neoliberalism-plus’ – begging the empirical question of at one point of ‘impurity’ it becomes impossible to use the term neoliberal in any meaningful analytic sense. What is the relevance of all this to the relatively new research literature exploring

neoliberalisms and the nonhuman world? In a recent critical review of work by Larner, Peck, and other geographic analysts of neoliberalism, Barnett (2005, pages 9-10) has made the following observation. “For all its apparent critical force'”, he argues, “ the
vocabulary of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘neoliberalization’ in fact provides a double consolation for leftist academics: it supplies us with plentiful opportunities for unveiling the real workings of hegemonic ideologies
in a characteristic gesture of revelation. In so doing, it invites us to align our own professional roles with the activities of various actors ‘out there’, who are always framed as engaging in resistance or contestation.'' If Barnett is right (and I think he might be) then it is important that the
still-young geographical research literature on neoliberalism and nature avoids the consolations to which he refers. In a recent theme issue of this journal on neoliberalism in Latin America – in which several essays examine environmental impacts – Thomas Perreault and Patricia Martin
(2005) seem drawn to these consolations despite themselves. On the one side, like Larner and Peck, they deny that neoliberalism tout court exists (only specific versions of it). Yet they also make plenary claims about ‘its' implications for the environment and its governance (page 193).

grand abstractions
What is the appeal of continuing to talk in terms of , even as they are being called into question? One answer is that the `bad' (that is, aspatial) habits of social science thinking continue to affect geographical thinking. As Barnett implies,

academic critics feel important if the object of their animus appears hegemonic, global, and
are made to to be

powerful It is far less `sexy' to have constantly to describe ones objects of

: something that demands urgent critical scrutiny. glamorous and

analysis as multiple, complex, and varied through time and space . As David Harvey (1985, page xi) argued many years ago, spatiotemporal specificity appears to paralyse the
generalising impulses of mainstream and radical social scientists (like economists and social theorists).
 at: ethics
Neoliberalism allows for individual rights and whistle blowing – solves their VTL
offense
Bjorkelo and Madsen 13
[Brita Department of Post Graduate Studies, Norwegian Police University College Department of
Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen, and Ole, Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the
Humanities, University of Bergen, April 2013. Whistleblowing and neoliberalism: Political resistance in
late capitalist economy, http://www.psychologyandsociety.org/__assets/__original/2013/04/4.pdf]

Now, what have these suggested societal changes to do with the individual act of whistleblowing? Quite a lot, as individual responsibility in the workplace, and the
chance of someone exercising it, is not simply down to personal character, but as Power (2011) states related to historical, social and political circumstances. Of
particular interest is what the ‘workplace’ actually has come to mean to workers. Bourdieu (1998b) called
neoliberalism a political project
dedicated to the methodical destruction of collectives. He emphasised how this presented a new kind of
economic responsibility on agents. Bourdieu linked this tendency to the overall neoliberal individualisation of working life where organisational
profits are turned into individual merit (through personal contracts and salaries) and individual responsibility. Thus, workers cling to their jobs and organisations
under conditions of insecurity, suffering and stress. On the other hand, neoliberalism
can be argued to having opened society for
more individual rights, independent of social class, as working life before neoliberalism tended to be
heavily based on class hierarchies. Thus, the focus on the actual merit related to one’s job performance,
independent of class, is perhaps the positive outcome of the new working life where everyone is given
the opportunity to take control over their own individual career. Modern management techniques seek to abolish the
traditional authoritative hierarchy, which initially may sound like a humane development. However, an outcome of new management can also be that responsibility
becomes much more elusive than in the past. Sennett (1998) for instance views the tendency to diminish the traditional hierarchy of authority and instead make
every worker responsible in the new capitalism with suspicion. Neoliberalism
forces each and every one to accept a greater
responsibility for themselves and their individual careers. Who then holds the responsibility for ‘the bigger picture’ traditionally
guaranteed by the state? What happens to traditional politics? As one manager states when confronted with the decline in jobs: ‘We are all victims of time and
place’ (Sennett, 1998, p. 114). Neoliberalism is in a sense freeing everyone and leaving no one to blame for the misery, not even top
managers. The conditions of whistleblowing under neoliberalism can therefore be seen as a paradox as neoliberalism is based on a firm belief in
the sole individual’s capacity while traditional moral at the same time becomes superfluous (cf. Dufour, 2008). Transferred to the organisation this means that the
organisation depends more on workers to report wrongdoing, while morals are silently, but methodologically downplayed (cf.
Sennett, 1998). The long-term effects of globalised neoliberalism can thus be a loss of community and faith in local values (cf. Nafstad, et al., 2007). Such
collective resources that individuals traditionally have drawn upon to become moral agents.
Organisational members that report wrongdoing at work is one example of such ’moral agents’ (Tsahuridu &
Vandekerckhove, 2008, p. 111).
 2ac util
Util is good

Bowden 9
Peter Bowden (University of Sydney, Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics). “In Defense of Utilitarianism.” Annual
Conference: Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics, June 2009. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=1534305

The most significant reason for advocating utility theory however, is that it is useful and usable. The
institutions in our society – the professional, industry and special interest groups, as well as
organisations in business and government, plus the not for profit sector - are faced with many ethical
decisions, often complex and difficult, requiring considerable thought, and eventually resolution. The
moral issues that arise in these contexts are fundamental to the institutional functioning of our society.
Yet very few people have training in moral philosophy. They need a relatively straightforward way
of making these decisions – of telling right from wrong. Mill, it will be argued, provides that method. Many who have no
training that are faced with these ethical choices will rely on intuition. Perhaps they
will use a set of values learned at
home, or from their schooling or their church. As we shall see for the more difficult ethical issues,
however, intuition is an unreliable guide. If they have training, they may remember virtue ethics, or
Kant’s deontology, but as I shall also argue later, these theories do not necessarily give straightforward
and acceptable answers. The statement that some ethical issues are difficult to resolve should generate little disagreement. Any
teacher of professional ethics can identify issues where the profession disagrees on the ethics of a particular practice. Reverse auctions, for
instance, where providers of the product or service bid increasingly lower prices, have generated debate on whether we are sacrificing quality
or safety for a lower price. Front end loading, where the work items executed earlier are loaded 3 with a higher percentage of the supplier‟s
overheads has generated a similar debate. Whistleblowing is yet another issue where the ethics are debated - whether the person revealing the
wrongdoing is ignoring the ethical obligation of loyalty to his or her employer. Or whether the risk of retaliation and losing one‟s job outweighs
the moral obligation to reveal the truth. We are also all aware of the concept of group think, where people in an organisation tend to accept
the prevailing opinion, rather than question it. This may have been a cause behind many of the ethical failures seen over recent years in HIH,
James Hardie, the Australian Wheat Board and other companies. The fact that no executive spoke out against the unethical behaviours then
practised tells us that those who want honesty and transparency were not confident enough of themselves or their judgement to speak out.
Alternatively, the failure to speak out may have been due to the tendency to find a justification for an unethical action. Wheat Board people
possibly convinced themselves for instance, that they were acting in the best interests of the Australian farmer, and therefore of the nation.
A relatively straight forward way to cut through such
And so the national benefits outweighed the negatives of their action.
fuzzy thinking would be the prior resolution of many of these issues. Utilitarianism, it will be argued,
provides that method. It would give those who wish to live and work within an ethical environment
stronger tools with which to decide how they should react.

Extinction first – VTL inevitable

Bernstein ‘2 (Richard J., Vera List Prof. Phil. – New School for Social Research, “Radical Evil: A
Philosophical Interrogation”, p. 188-192)

There is a basic value inherent in organic being, a basic affirmation, "The Yes' of Life" (IR 81). 15 "The
self-affirmation of being becomes emphatic in the opposition of life to death. Life is the explicit confrontation of
being with not-being. . . . The 'yes' of all striving is here sharpened by the active `no' to not-being" (IR 81-2). Furthermore — and this is the

crucial point for Jonas — this affirmation of life that is in all organic being has a binding obligatory force upon
human beings. This blindly self-enacting "yes" gains obligating force in the seeing freedom of man, who
as the supreme outcome of nature's purposive labor is no longer its automatic executor but, with the
power obtained from knowledge, can become its destroyer as well. He must adopt the "yes" into his will
and impose the "no" to not-being on his power . But precisely this transition from willing to obligation is the critical point of
moral theory at which attempts at laying a foundation for it come so easily to grief. Why does now, in man, that become a duty which hitherto
"being" itself took care of through all individual willings? (IR 82). We discover here the transition from is to "ought" — from the self-affirmation
of life to the binding obligation of human beings to preserve life not only for the present but also for the future. But why do we need a new
ethics? The subtitle of The Imperative of Responsibility — In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age — indicates why we need a new
ethics. Modern technology has transformed the nature and consequences of human action so radically
that the underlying premises of traditional ethics are no longer valid . For the first time in history
human beings possess the knowledge and the power to destroy life on this planet, including human life.
Not only is there the new possibility of total nuclear disaster; there are the even more invidious and
threatening possibilities that result from the unconstrained use of technologies that can destroy the
environment required for life. The major transformation brought about by modern technology is that the consequences of our
actions frequently exceed by far anything we can envision. Jonas was one of the first philosophers to warn us about the unprecedented ethical
and political problems that arise with the rapid development of biotechnology. He claimed that this was happening at a time when there was an
"ethical vacuum," when there did not seem to be any effective ethical principles to limit ot guide our ethical decisions. In the name of scientific
and technological "progress," there is a relentless pressure to adopt a stance where virtually anything is permissible, includ-ing transforming
the genetic structure of human beings, as long as it is "freely chosen." We
need, Jonas argued, a new categorical imperative
that might be formulated as follows: "Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the
permanence of genuine human life"; or expressed negatively : "Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive
of the future possibility of such a life"; or simply: " Do not compromise the conditions for an indefinite
continuation of humanity on earth "; or again turned positive: "In your present choices, include the future wholeness
of Man among the objects of your will."
AT: pan
 No Link
No link – China “threat” isn’t saying China is evil
Michael D. Swaine, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of the
most prominent American analysts in Chinese security studies 2015 Beyond American Predominance in
the Western Pacific: The Need for a Stable U.S.-China Balance of Power
https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/04/20/beyond-american-predominance-in-western-pacific-need-
for-stable-u.s.-china-balance-of-power-pub-59837

The core assumptions underlying this negative dynamic juxtapose , on the one side, the post–World War II American
notion that long-term order and prosperity depend on the unique leadership role and dominant military power of the United States as a
security guarantor, dispute arbiter, deterrent force, supporter of international law, and provider of public goods for states located in critical
regions of the world, including the maritime Asia-Pacific. Indeed, for virtually all U.S. officials and many Asian leaders, American military
predominance, meaning the clear ability to defeat any potential military challenge to U.S. and allied interests anywhere along the Asian littoral
and across the Western Pacific, from the continental United States to the Indian Ocean, has provided the foundation for a seventy-year-long
period of relative peace and economic growth throughout most of the region. In this view, U.S. maritime primacy has forestalled arms races
and armed disputes over long-standing rivalries and permitted a sustained focus on peaceful economic development. ¶ On the other side, the
Chinese espouse the belief that order and prosperity, especially in an increasingly multipolar and interdependent world, should rely on a largely
benign and roughly equal balance of power between the major nations, rooted in the need to cooperate to manage an arguably increasing
number of common challenges and mediated, whenever possible, through international institutions such as the United Nations. In this more
broadly dispersed yet hierarchical power structure, stronger powers have a duty both to guide and shape smaller powers in mutually beneficial
directions, not to dominate and manipulate them. In this world, no single power should have the ability or the intention to keep other powers
in a condition of military or political subservience, and no power should seriously infringe on the sovereignty of another power without the
endorsement of the international community.¶ To some extent, these U.S. and Chinese views are self-serving. While taking on many
burdens across the globe in defending public goods such as sea lines of communication and enduring persistent trade deficits in order to
stimulate global development, Washington nonetheless benefits enormously from a U.S.-led international order in which its views and
preferences are given special consideration. Its military power and economic clout ensure a privileged position in major finance, trade, and
security-oriented regimes, meaning that the makeup, purpose, and rules of those regimes largely reflect its power and interests, operate in
ways that affirm U.S. views on the most critical issues, and cannot be changed in major ways without Washington’s approval. Conversely, the
Chinese seem to believe that a genuine balance-of-power system and a strengthened process of rules-based, international decisionmaking—
meaning that no single power has the clear unilateral ability to compel others to accept its rules and procedures—will benefit China by giving it
a greater voice among nations and serving to restrain a supposedly arrogant, unilateralist, and at times threatening the United States. ¶ Aside
from such obvious self-interest, however, policy
communities in both nations genuinely believe that their preferred
international distribution of power best reflects the current and future reality of the international
system: For most Americans, despite the forces of globalization, which are creating ever more dispersed and interdependent levels of
economic, political, social, and military power among nations, peace and stability only results from the unique ability of a single, relatively
benign superpower to shape, lead, and deter major threats to global peace and prosperity. For the Chinese, all major industrialized powers seek
to control the international order in ways that can and at times do weaken or threaten lesser (and especially developing) powers and to varying
degrees diminish the overall stability and prosperity of the system. However, in light of the steady diffusion of power occurring across the
international system, many Chinese also believe that even the most powerful states will need to overcome their drive for dominance and
cooperate in unprecedented ways.¶ Despite such stark differences, these views coexisted more or less peacefully for many decades after World
War II, primarily because Beijing had neither the capacity nor the desire to alter the U.S.-dominated order, both globally and in maritime Asia.
From the 1950s through the late 1970s, China was wracked by economically and socially destructive Maoist ideological campaigns and
internecine political struggles, and it was threatened by the Soviet Union, its huge, better-armed continental neighbor to the north. Such
problems not only distracted China’s leaders for decades but also eventually compelled them to embark on an unprecedented overture to the
West, both to counter the Soviet Union and to facilitate the kind of market-driven economic development strategy that was needed to
reestablish China as a major regional and possibly global power. In fact, under such conditions, many Chinese viewed American predominance
in maritime Asia and the U.S.-led alliance system that sustained it as on balance beneficial to China. It kept the Soviets largely out of the region,
kept Japan nonmilitarized and oriented toward peace, and allowed Beijing’s Asian neighbors to concentrate on outward-oriented, beneficial
economic growth instead of disruptive arms races or historical rivalries. Washington was only too happy to oblige Beijing in sustaining such an
order.¶ All this is now changing, at least in Asia. China’s overseas trade- and investment-driven economic success, the collapse of the Soviet
Union and other Communist regimes, and the fear—intensified by the massive Tiananmen demonstrations and bloody crackdown of 1989 as
well as the more recent color revolutions—that the Chinese regime could be the next to fall, have vastly increased China’s dependence on and
influence over external economic, political, and social forces across Asia and beyond, while deepening its sense of vulnerability and suspicion
toward the United States. Prior to the reform era, China’s wealth and power derived largely from domestic sources, many located far from its
coastline, and its security relied, by necessity, on a largely peasant-based but massive army and only rudimentary air and naval forces. These
factors, along with its acquisition of a small nuclear weapons arsenal in the 1960s, made it possible for Beijing to rely on a security
strategy of nuclear deterrence through a modest second-strike capability and attrition through a protracted conventional defense
centered on “luring the enemy in deep.”1 ¶ This strategy can no longer provide adequate security for China . Beijing must
now defend against threats before they can reach the Chinese homeland and vital coastal economic
centers. For the first time in its history, Beijing now has both the ability and the motivation to seek to diminish significantly if not eliminate
the potential threat to its domestic and growing regional economic interests posed by America’s long-standing predominance in the Western
Pacific. Indeed, its ongoing acquisition of military capabilities designed in large part to counter or complicate U.S. and allied air, naval, missile,
space, and cyber operations along its maritime periphery, as well as its increasing economic and political-diplomatic initiatives across the Asian
littoral and its call for a new, post–Cold War cooperative security architecture for the Asia-Pacific, partly serve such ends. Moreover, the desire
to reduce America’s past maritime superiority and economic power has become more achievable and hence more compelling to many Chinese
as a result not only of China’s continued economic success but also of the troubles now plaguing America and the West, from anemic economic
growth and domestic political dysfunction to image concerns resulting from arguably unjust Middle East wars and apparent egregious human
rights abuses.¶ This should not be surprising to anyone who understands modern Chinese history and great power
transitions. Beijing has an ongoing and likely long-term and deep incentive to work with the U nited States and
the West to sustain continued, mutually beneficial economic growth and to address a growing array of
common global and regional concerns, from pandemics to climate change and terrorism. At the same time, it
understandably wishes to reduce its vulnerability to potential future threats from the U nited States and other
politically and militarily strong nations, while increasing its overall influence along its strategically important maritime periphery. As
Beijing’s overseas power and influence grow, its foreign interests expand, and its domestic nationalist backers
become more assertive, it will naturally become less willing to accept or acquiesce in international political and
economic relationships, norms, and power structures that it believes disproportionately and unjustly favor Western
powers; put China at a strategic, political, or economic disadvantage; or generally fail to reflect movement toward a more multipolar global
and regional power structure. It will also likely become more fearful that a declining (in relative terms) Washington
will regard an increasingly influential China as a threat to be countered through ever more forceful or
deliberate measures. Indeed, this view is already widespread among many Chinese observers. ¶ One does
not need to cast Beijing as an evil or predatory entity to understand the forces driving such beliefs.
They stem from national self-interest, historical insecurity (and nationalist pride), suspicion, fear, and
uncertainty. To some degree, they also stem from a level of opportunism, driven in part by fear, but also in part by the
understandable desire to take advantage of China’s growing regional and global influence and America’s
apparent relative decline in order to strengthen Chinese leverage in possible future disputes.
 2ac – extinction first
Extinction is A big deal
Torres 16 (Phil Torres; founding director of the X-Risks Institute, an affiliate scholar at the Institute for
Ethics and Emerging Technologies; https://thebulletin.org/2016/09/how-likely-is-an-existential-
catastrophe/; 9-7-16)

In the past few decades, the

number of existential risk scenarios has risen , and it will likely rise even more this
century. Consider that only 72 years ago, prior to the first atomic bomb exploding in the New Mexico desert, Homo sapiensfaced only a handful of existential
risks—all of them natural—including asteroid and comet impacts, supervolcanic eruptions, and global pandemics. Today the situation is quite different:
Anthropogenic risks such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and nuclear weapons now haunt our
species. In addition, a swarm of emerging risks hover on the horizon: an engineered pandemic, a war involving nanotech weapons,
self-replicating nanobots, geoengineering, and artificial superintelligence. If this trend continues into the future, we should expect even more

existential risk scenarios before the 22nd century. The increasing number of risk scenarios suggests that the overall
probability of disaster may have risen as well . The more landmines placed in a field, the more likely one is
to step in the wrong place. According to the best estimates available, the probability of a doomsday catastrophe has
indeed increased over the same period of time . For example, an informal survey of 19 experts conducted by the Future of Humanity Institute

in 2008 yielded a 19 percent chance of human extinction this century. And Sir Martin Rees, co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge

University, argues that civilization has no better than a 50-50 chance of making it through the 21st century

intact. These estimates are far higher than the probability of doom brought about by any natural phenomenon before the Atomic Age. Putting risks in
perspective. To underline the urgency of existential risks, let’s compare these estimates to the probability of an average American dying in an “air and space
transport accident”—which is 1 in 9,737 over the course of a roughly 80-year lifetime. As mentioned above, the Future of Humanity Institute survey participants
assigned a 19 percent chance of human extinction by the year 2100, which would mean that the
average American is at least 1,500 times
more likely to die in a human extinction catastrophe than in a plane crash.
 AT: Psycho
Death drive wrong and doesn’t explain violence
Jonathan Dollimore 13, Professor in the School of English and American Studies at the University of
Sussex, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, googlebooks

The death-drive theory has not found wide acceptance it has been explicitly among Freud's followers. With significant exceptions like Melanie Klein,

denounced as misconceived biology, unsubstantiated speculation, logically incoherent and /or without
evidence It has also been attributed to Freud's own painful personal circumstances: the death of his
.

daughter, the death of a grandson, his own illness (cancer), and his lifelong preoccupation with death Of .

those who have been sympathetic to the idea, most have tended to tame it One move was to - as indeed did Freud himself.

rewrite the instinct as largely an instinct of aggression . But for Freud the aggressive aspect of the death drive had been secondary; the instinct was primarily self-destructive. Sadism derives from
a more primordial masochism, which means in effect that human aggression is, originally, self destructiveness. Of all subsequent theorists of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan takes the death drive most seriously, and most contemporary psychoanalytic attention to it comes via him. To his
credit, Lacan does not underplay or tame the death drive, and he locates Freud firmly within the Western tradition when he remarks that Freud questioned life as to its meaning and his answer was not that it had none 'which is a convenient way of washing one's hands of the whole
business' - but that life has 'only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by death' (Ecrits, p. 277). According to Lacan, the Freudian world is one not of things, nor even of being, but rather of desire. More so even than Freud, Lacan finds in desire 'the paradoxical, deviant, erratic,
eccentric, even scandalous character by which it is distinguished from need'. Although this distinction has been 'always obvious to moralists worthy of the name', psychoanalysis nevertheless misses the point by pursuing an obscurantist reduction of desire to need (p. 286). And that, for
Lacan, is a cardinal error. This distinction belween desire and need leads him to dwell on something else in both Freud and earlier writers, moralists and otherwise: the relation between desire and lack. In modern psychoanalysis we find a secularized, intensified version of an existential
perception that goes back a long way, even though the immediate influences here are Heidegger and Kojeve: Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn't the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists. (Lacan, Seminar,
11.222-3) For Lacan, death is the name for a primordial absence intrinsic to presence; as John Forrester puts it, 'presence includes as its very condition the limit beyond which is its absence' (p. 176).16 To bind desire so resolutely into lack and absence means that it inevitably becomes a
kind of essential negativity (Lacan, Seminar, 1.146)*' - something premised on an initial failure of satisfaction and which, as such, comes to exist only by virtue of its own alienation; as Juliet Mitchell puts it, 'Desire persists as an effect of a primordial absence and it therefore indicates that,
in this area, there is something fundamentally impossible about satisfaction itself (Lacan. Feminine Sexuality, p. 6). One consequence of this is a radical fragmentation of the human subject.18 In one respect Lacan recasts the familiar metaphysical idea that life is rooted in death: 'it is
death that sustains existence' (Ecrits, p. 300). In his development of this idea he combines diverse elements of the Western tradition of desire's impossibility: a theology of desire as death, crossed with something more romantic if no less severe - desire as annihilating excess, a primordial
discord. The two elements are fused in those places where, for example, he speaks of 'that desperate affirmation of life that is the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct' (p. 104). These ideas then get reworked according to structuralist and linguistic preoccupations, as
when he speaks of the 'frenzy' of desire 'mocking Ihe abyss of Ihe infinite', and of how this amounts to 'no other derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails - eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else - of metonymy. Hence its "perverse" fixation at
the very suspension-point of the signifying chain where the memory-screen is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish is petrified' (p. 167). In the same vein Lacan suggests that it is from death that existence takes on all the meaning it has; the lack which is at the heart of desire
is also the price that human beings pay for their admission to language and culture. Death makes life possible in that it makes meaning and representation possible; it is not only before speech but 'primordial to the birth of symbols' (pp. 104-5, 300). Hence Lacan's most well-known
formulation, that the unconscious is structured like a language, and his claim to have demonstrated 'the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech' (Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 20; Merits, p. 101). Richard Boothby regards this as the most
radical and innovative aspect of Lacan. I remain unconvinced.19 Lacan's invocations of death's centrality to life are more derivative than their complex, often obscure, formulations suggest.20 When he declares that All that life is concerned with is seeking repose as much as possible while
awaiting death. This is what devours the time of the suckling baby at the beginning of its existence... Life is concerned solely with dying {Seminar. 11.233) we can hear Freud and Schopenhauer most closely, but also Montaigne (especially in that last assertion - 'Life is concerned solely with
dying'), who also, incidentally, consolidated his own perception of this truth with extensive citation of classical sources. In the giving over of the newborn child to death we might hear too the early Christian Fathers. Lacan does not exactly disguise his precedents; the passage just cited
continues with a reference to Hamlet's 'to die, to sleep, perchance to dream' and to the idea developed by philosophers in antiquity that it would have been better not to have been born. But (and this recalls Freud's own evasive acknowledgment of his influences) in Lacan these

allusions to the past are fleeting, in passing, almost secretive; the implication is that these past writers
anticipate something which can only properly, and only now, be understood through the lens of Lacanian

psychoanalysis whose complexity is, at the same time, almost guaranteed to defeat the attempt. Some
,

at least of that complexity is obscurantist . In the wake of contemporary cultural developments, including the perceived failure of sexual radicalism and the trauma of AIDS, there are those who have turned to Lacan

what I find is an overtheorized expression

for a more honest view of desire, and, via him, are reconsidering a severe account of human desire. I should not speak for them; in Lacan of something more significantly

symptomatic of a much wider tendency in (post-) modern theory

and relevantly expressed elsewhere (in Freud and before). It this respect I believe he is . But in terms of his
influence alone Lacan remains significant for this study. By crossing Freud's death drive with the philosophy of lack and nothingness derived from Kojeve's version of Hegel (itself influenced by Heidegger), he continues to drive death ever further into being; now, perhaps more inexorably

the antihumanist wish to decentre

than ever before, death is the lack which drives desire. In doing that he also exemplifies another significant tendency in modern thought which I have already remarked, namely

'man' in the name of a philosophy which is truly adequate to the complexity of being yet which seeks to ,

retain a residual human mastery in the very effort of articulating this complexity . As we have seen, the philosophical bid to comprehend the truth

modern theory, having lost faith in older

of being was always a form of intellectual empowerment - even, or rather especially, when issuing in the declaration that life, desire and the world have to be renounced. But

philosophical notions of truth, now half-settles for the mastery of a new kind of complexity which it
partly produces in order to enable this performance of mastery. Phoenix-like, the omniscient, masterful
and above all complex analytic of the modern theorist rises above his sacrifice of 'man' to death .

Psychoanalytic theory is too insular and untested to be of explanatory value

Bornstein 01. Robert, Robert F. Bornstein received his PhD in clinical psychology from the State
University of New York at Buffalo in 1986, completed a year-long internship at the Upstate Medical
Center in Syracuse, NY, and is a professor of psychology at Gettysburg College. Bornstein has published
more than 150 articles and book chapters on personality dynamics, diagnosis, and treatment, “The
Impending Death of Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Psychology, 3/20/2001

Torrey's (1992, p. 211) assertion that psychoanalytic theory “is on precisely the same scientific plane as
the Loch Ness monster” might be a tad overstated. Nonetheless, there are at least a few grains of truth
in Torrey's statement. Many concepts in Freudian theory have been contradicted repeatedly by the
results of controlled empirical studies, yet these concepts continue to be discussed by psychoanalysts as
if they were valid (Bornstein & Masling, 1998; Spence, 1994). Perusal of papers in contemporary
psychoanalytic journals reveals that such constructs as castration anxiety, penis envy, cathexis, and
repression (in the traditional Freudian sense) are still treated as heuristic and useful, when in fact they
are not. The same is true of contemporary psychoanalytic conferences and meetings. Consider one
recent symposium sponsored by a well-known psychoanalytic training institute, which devoted a full day
to the study of “Six Theoretical Perspectives on the Demon Lover Complex” (Object Relations Institute
for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, 1999, p. 35). Continued consideration of such topics by analytic
journals and training institutes illustrates why psychoanalysis is no longer taken seriously by scientific
psychologists and research-minded practitioners. Within the psychoanalytic canon, concepts
contradicted by empirical findings are intermingled with those that have been supported , and no
systematic effort has been made to distinguish between the two. It is no sin for a theory to be
inaccurate in certain respects, especially a theory as ambitious and sweeping as this one. It is, however,
a grievous sin when adherents fail to correct demonstrable wrongs within that theory, choosing instead
to treat those wrongs as if they were truths. Indifference Contemporary psychoanalysis is inaccurate
because within the psychoanalytic community there are few contingencies that reward accuracy and
punish inaccuracy in scholarly discourse. In part, the indifference of many psychoanalysts to external
evidence stems from Freud's own writings on this topic (Gay, 1988; Grunbaum, 1984; Masling &
Schwartz, 1979). In addition, psychoanalysts' indifference to others' ideas and findings is propagated by
the large number of highly specialized psychoanalytic journals that are edited and read almost
exclusively by adherents to the prevailing theoretical views. An isolated “psychoanalytic universe of
ideas” has inadvertently been created by those within the discipline , and for the most part this universe
is detached from empirical data and the influence of competing theoretical concepts. Roughly 15 years
ago, Cooper (1984) recognized the risks inherent in this situation, and he gave a warning: Our exciting
debates will become arid if they are not sprinkled with new data. Even if we do not feel impelled by our
scientific and theoretical curiosity, we might respond to the demands of a society that will not forever
allow us to practice clinical psychoanalysis without evidence of its efficacy, (p. 259) Fisher and
Greenberg (1996, p. 13) echoed Cooper's view, noting that “the future power of Freud's psychoanalytic
formulations will depend on how permeable they are to new empirical input.” It is no sin to
acknowledge the importance of internal reality in theory-building and insight-oriented treatment.
However, it is sinful to emphasize internal reality to the utter exclusion of external reality. A useful
theory cannot be indifferent to events occurring outside itself. Irrelevance Because of the insularity and
indifference of members of the psychoanalytic community, psychoanalysis has become irrelevant in
contemporary psychology. This irrelevance has pervaded the laboratory, classroom, and clinic to the
point that the next generation of psychologists will have little exposure to psychoanalytic theory's key
concepts during their undergraduate and graduate training. What little exposure these young
psychologists get is likely to come from textbooks and from academicians opposed to psychoanalysis.
Much of this information will be biased and inaccurate (Bornstein, 1995; Hogan, 1994; Westen, 1998).
Practicing psychoanalysts seem unconcerned (or perhaps unaware) of this situation, exacerbating the
problem. Irrelevance within the scientific community is no sin, but an unwillingness to acknowledge
one's irrelevance in the face of overwhelming evidence certainly is. The insularity of the psychoanalytic
community has enabled its members to ignore the marginalized status of psychoanalysis in
contemporary psychology rather than confronting this issue in a productive way. Inefficiency Virtually
every undergraduate and graduate textbook that mentions psychoanalysis decries the theory's lack of
parsimony and the length and expense of psychoanalytic therapy. These criticisms are justified. Classical
psychoanalytic theory, object-relations theory, ego psychology, and self psychology are all burdened by
excess theoretical baggage—constructs and concepts that are not critical to the central propositions of
psychoanalysis but linger at the periphery simply because they have been associated with the theory for
so many years. A parallel argument can be made regarding the inefficiency of psychoanalytic therapy:
Numerous longstanding psychoanalytic treatment techniques are of questionable value (e.g., free
association, dream analysis), yet they continue to be taught in analytic training institutes primarily
because they always have been (Bornstein, 1993; Holt, 1992; Spence, 1994). Aside from some recently
developed short-term dynamic therapies (e.g., Crits-Christoph & Barber, 1991), psychoanalytic
treatment is lengthy beyond what can be justified by its results. It is no sin for a theory to be complex or
for a therapy to be time-consuming. However, it is a sin when theorists do not avail themselves of
opportunities to make a complicated theory less complicated by jettisoning its useless components.
Similarly, it is no sin to engage in a lengthy course of treatment when lengthy treatment is warranted.
However, it is sinful when practitioners choose to do in many sessions what studies suggest can be
accomplished just as well in only a few.

Psychoanalysis is political defeatism, preclude coalitional politics and simply espouses

a new grand narrative that doesn’t solve their aff
Gordon 01. Paul, psychotherapist, Psychoanalysis and Racism: The politics of defeat, Race & Class v.
42, n. 4, 2001

The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live with disappointment. All the tragedies of the political project of
emancipation ± the evils of Stalinism in particular ± are seen as the inevitable product of men and women trying to create a better
society. But, rather than engage in a critical assessment of how, for instance, radical political movements go
wrong, they discard the emancipatory project and impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity for having failed them: `the intellectuals and
academics have fled into discourse and deconstruction and representation ± as though to interpret the world is more
important than to change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a changing
world'.58 To justify their flight from a politics holding out the prospect of radical change through self-activity, the disappointed intellectuals and
abundant intellectual alibis for themselves in the very work they champion, including, in Cohen's case, psychoanalysis. What Marshall Berman says of Foucault seems true also of

psychoanalysis; that it offers `a world-historical alibi' for the passivity and helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and
that it has nothing but contempt for those naive enough to imagine that it might be possible for
modern human-kind to be free. At every turn for such theorists, as Berman argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination, we are
nothing but prisoners: there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break . . .
There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only
add more links to our chains; however, once we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax .59 Cohen's
political defeatism and his conviction in the explanatory power of his new faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be contemptuous and dismissive of
any attempt at political solidarity or collective action. For him, `communities' are always `imagined' , which, in
his view, means based on fantasy, while different forms of working-class organisation, from the craft fraternity to the revolutionary group, are dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufficient combination'.60 In

this scenario, the idea that people might come together , think together, analyse together and act together as rational
beings is impossible. The idea of a genuine community of equals becomes a pure fantasy , a `symbolic
retrieval' of something that never existed in the first place: `Community is a magical device for conjuring something apparently solidary out of the thin air of
modern times, a mechanism of re-enchantment.' As for history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented traditions.'61 Now, this is not only non- sense, but

dangerous nonsense at that. Is history `always false'? Did the Judeocide happen or did it not? And did not some people even try to resist it? Did slavery exist or did it not, and did not people resist that too
and, ultimately, bring it to an end? And are communities always `imagined'? Or, as Sivanandan states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle? Furthermore, all attempts to legislate against ideology are
bound to fail because they have to adopt `technologies of surveillance and control identical to those used by the state'. Note here the Foucauldian language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is bad. But is it? No society can
function without surveillance of some kind. The point, surely, is that there should be a public conversation about such moves and that those responsible for implementing them be at all times accountable. To equate, as Cohen
does, a council poster about `Stamping out racism' with Orwell's horrendous prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's image was intensely personal and destructive; the other is
about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective evil.) Cohen reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about punitive action
against racists, as though punishment or other firrm action against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social or legal norms) precluded `understand- ing' or even help through psychotherapy. It is indeed a
strange kind of `anti-racism' that portrays active racists as the `victims', those who are in need of `help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In their move from politics to the

academy and the world of `discourse', the postmodernists may have simply exchanged one grand
narrative, historical materialism, for another, psychoanalysis.62 For psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par excellence. It is a theory that seeks to account for the world and which
recognises few limits on its explanatory potential . And the claimed radicalism of psycho- analysis, in the hands of the
postmodernists at least, is not a radicalism at all but a prescription for a politics of quietism, fatalism and defeat. Those wanting to

change the world, not just to interpret it, need to look elsewhere

Their framework is a rigged game and should be re rejected—it presupposes all its
central conclusions, precludes criticism, and blocks specific politics
Robinson 4--Postgraduate Student, School of Politics, University of Nottingham Andrew, The Politics of
Lack, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations Volume 6, Issue 2, pages 259–269, May
2004

since Lacan's work deals

As should by now be clear, the central claims of Lacanian theory are ontological rather than political. Indeed,

with politics only very occasionally, the entire project of using Lacan politically is
fraught with hazards. With rare exceptions, Lacanian theorists put ontology in the driving seat,
allowing it to guide their political theorising. Political discourse and events are
subsumed into a prior theoretical framework in a manner more reminiscent of an
attempt to confirm already-accepted assumptions than of an attempt to assess the
theory itself. Among the authors discussed here, Žižek takes this the furthest: the stuff of theory is ‘notions’, which have a reality above and beyond
any referent, so that, if reality does not conform to the notions, it is ‘so much the worse for reality’ (in Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000, 244 ). The

selection and interpretation of examples, whether in concrete analysis of political discourse or in theoretical exegesis , is
often selective in a way which appears to confirm the general theory only because
inconvenient counterexamples are ignored. The entire edifice often appears wholly  a
priori and non-falsifiable, and the case for its acceptance is extremely vague. Most often , the imperative to adopt a
Lacanian as opposed to (say) a Rawlsian or an orthodox Marxist approach is couched in terms of
dogmatically-posited demands that one accept the idea of constitutive lack. A failure
to do so is simply denounced as ‘shirking’, ‘blindness’, ‘inability to accept’ and so on. In this way, Lacanian
theory renders itself almost immune to analytical critique on terms it would find
acceptable. Furthermore, a slippage frequently emerges between the external ‘acceptance’ of antagonism and its subjective encouragement. For
instance, Ernesto Laclau calls for a ‘symbolisation of impossibility as such as a positive value’ (in Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000, 1999, original emphasis).

Their Lacanian frame halts politics and ethics in their tracks—their rhetorical appeal
conceals fundamental conservativism—every deployment of the lacanian frame for
politics has resulted in neoconservative force
Robinson 5 PhD in Political Theory, U of Nottingham Andrew Robinson. The Political Theory of
Constitutive Lack: A Critique, Theory & Event. Baltimore: 2005. Vol. 8, Iss. 1

. There is more than an accidental relationship between the mythical operation of

38

the concept of "constitutive lack" and Lacanians' conservative and pragmatist politics .
Myth is a way of reducing thought to the present: the isolated signs which are included in the mythical gesture are thereby attached to extra-historical

abstractions.On an analytical level, Lacanian theory can be very "radical ", unscrupulously exposing the
underlying relations and assumptions concealed beneath officially-sanctioned discourse . This radicalism, however, never

translates into political conclusions : as shown above, a radical rejection of anti-"crime" rhetoric turns into an endorsement of
punishment, and a radical critique of neo-liberalism turns into a pragmatist endorsement of

structural adjustment. It is as if there is a magical barrier between theory and politics

which insulates the latter from the former . One should recall a remark once made by Wilhelm Reich: 'You plead for
happiness in life, but security means more to you'133. Lacanians have a "radical" theory oriented towards happiness, but politically, their primary concern is

As long as they are engaged in politically ineffectual critique, Lacanians will

security.

denounce and criticize the social system, but once it comes to practical problems, the
"order not to think" becomes operative . 39. This "magic" barrier is the alibi function of
myth. The short-circuit between specific instances and high-level abstractions is
politically consequential. A present evil can be denounced and overthrown if located
in an analysis with a "middle level", but Lacanian theory tends in practice to add an
"always" which prevents change . At the very most, such change cannot affect the
basic matrix posited by Lacanian theory , because this is assumed to operate above history. In this way , Lacanian
theory operates as an alibi: it offers a little bit of theoretical radicalism to inoculate
the system against the threat posed by a lot of politicized radicalism 134. In Laclau and Mouffe's
version, this takes the classic Barthesian form: "yes, liberal democracy involves violent exclusions, but what is this compared to the desert of the real outside
it?" The Zizekian version is more complex: "yes, there can be a revolution, but after the revolution, one must return to the pragmatic tasks of the present". A
good example is provided in one of Zizek's texts. The author presents an excellent analysis of a Kafkaesque incident in the former Yugoslavia where the state
gives a soldier a direct, compulsory order to take a voluntary oath - in other words, attempts to compel consent. He then ruins the impact of this example by
insisting that there is always such a moment of "forced choice", and that one should not attempt to escape it lest one end up in psychosis or

The political function of Lacanian theory is to preclude critique by encoding

totalitarianism135.

the present as myth.

Reject any claim of causality
Grunbaum 7 – Professor U. of Pittsburgh Adolf, “THE RECEPTION OF MY FREUD-CRITIQUE IN THE
PSYCHOANALYTIC LITERATURE” Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol. 24.3
B. Philosopher Hanly declared without ado that the unconscious memories, and fantasies “are the agents [pathogens, causes] of the patient's neurosis.” How
does he know that? Amazingly, he offers a mere ipse dixit, apparently feeling no need to justify this crucial etiologic conclusion on which he hangs his “Achilles
heel” chastisement of me. True, at the time of Hanly's, 1988 review-essay, I had not yet published my meticulous rebuttal (1993, pp. 152–158) of Marshal
Edelson's valiant, though unsuccessful 1984 defense of etiologic transference interpretations, a rebuttal that I conveniently summarized in this Journal (2006,
pp. 272–274). And I rest my case against Hanly regarding this etiologic issue on that rebuttal. Ironically, vis-à-vis his charge as to my supposed incomprehension
being the Achilles heel of my argument, I found it delicious that Robert Wallerstein cites the 1952 complaint of the British analyst E. Glover that there is “no
effective control of conclusions based on interpretation, [and this fact] is the Achilles heel of psychoanalytical research” [italics added] (Wallerstein, 2006, p.
304). In important respects, I find Hanly's mode of disputation frustrating, when he declares or assumes the validity of important psychoanalytic tenets without
coming to grips with my explicit arguments against them: A cardinal example in point is my indictment of the method of clinical causal investigation by “free
association,” as inferentially fallacious, if only because it commits a fallacy of causal inversion (Grünbaum, 1984, pp. 186–187, 192, 234), and as causally
nonprobative in other significant respects (Grünbaum, 1997a, §b, pp. 338–345; 2006, pp. 268–272). In my article in this Journal (2006, p. 274), two of my three
objections to etiologic transference interpretations as defended by Marshall Edelson were the following: (a) They beg the etiologic question by inferring that,
qua assumedly being thematically recapitulated, the infantile episodes had been pathogenic at the outset, and (b) the adult patient's supposed thematic
reenactment is also pathogenically recapitulatory, such that the putative current replica of the infantile episodes is pathogenic in the here-and-now. This
animadversion of mine is of-a-piece with my strenuous objections to inferring, from a mere thematic connection between two topically kindred mental events,
that they must therefore also be causally (etiologically) connected (Grünbaum, 1984, pp. 55, 62, 198, 227–228; 1993, pp. 121–138). Yet I had been careful to
emphasize (1993, p. 138) that a thematic kinship between events does not militate against there also being a causal linkage between them, although specific

“Freud should not be faulted for

evidence is importantly required to attest the latter connection. Hence I declared:

asserting, in principle, that some mental events can be linked both thematically and
causally, though he mistakenly claimed entitlement to infer the latter linkage from
the former alone.” I developed the core of my objections to causal inferences from mere thematic affinity by detailed reference to Freud's,
1909 case history of the Rat-Man, which features such logical malfeasance galore (Grünbaum, 1993, pp. 121–138). Indeed, as early as in his own separate 1893
Lecture on the substance of his joint 1893 Communication with Breuer, he had unwittingly offered a series of illicit and even bizarre inferences on the basis of
merely allusive thematic kinships (Freud, 1893/1962b, pp. 33–34). In these examples, he speaks of events to which certain hysterical symptoms were “traced
back,”—a term retrodictively asserting a causal origin without ado—although there was avowedly only a thematically allusive or “symbolic” similarity between
the symptoms and the retrodicted events. In this way, malgré lui, Freud furnishes a paradigm example of the familiar post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Fortunately, Freud's other observations of hysterics put a salutary end to such frivolous hermeneutical mischief: “In the case, however, of… the typical
symptoms of hysteria… a psychical mechanism of this sort cannot be demonstrated” (p. 34). Mirabile dictu, the eminent American psychologist, philosopher of
psychology, and veteran practicing psychoanalyst Paul E. Meehl hailed my challenge to psychoanalytic causal inferences from mere thematic affinity as “the
biggest single methodological problem that we [psychoanalysts] face” (Meehl, 1995, p. 1021). I hope I am forgiven for taking great pride and pleasure in
Meehl's watershed acknowledgment of my critique. Fittingly, I think, he published it in JAPA, in his 1995 “Commentary: Psychoanalysis as Science.” Indeed,
Meehl speaks very soberingly concerning the import of the failure to meet the epistemological difficulty I posed. As he put it in context: His [Grünbaum's] core

objection, the epistemological difficulty of inferring a causal influence from the existence of a theme
(assuming the latter can be statistically demonstrated), is the biggest single methodological problem that we

[psychoanalysts] face. If that problem cannot be solved, we will have another century in which psychoanalysis can be accepted
or rejected, mostly as a matter of personal taste. Should that happen, I predict it will be slowly but surely abandoned,

both as a mode of helping and as a theory of the mind [reference omitted]. In the light of Meehl's
commendation, I draw the important conclusion that, unless Hanly can rebut my interrelated objections to etiologic transference interpretations and to causal
inferences from mere thematic affinity, his contentions against me on these counts are mere ipse dixits. Yet, I should report that, by the time Hanly and I were
copanelists at the aforementioned 1995 San Francisco meeting of the IPA, he publicly recognized the seriousness of my challenge even in terms similar to

psychoanalysis will have

Meehl's. As I vividly recall—I can still hear it!—Hanly declared that if I cannot be answered effectively, then

the status of being just a branch of the humanities like literature, a judgment I also heard later from
the academic psychoanalyst Robert Michels (Cornell University).

Non-falsifiable
--this card is best against non-Zizek psycho-a k’s

Mahrer 99 - professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa School of Psychology Alvin R.,
“Embarrassing Problems for the Field of Psychotherapy” John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Clin Psychol 55: 1147–
1156, 1999. p. 1154, via Wiley Inter Science

Here is a small sample of the absolute truths in the virtual foundation of the field of psychotherapy: There
are mental illnesses, diseases, and disorders. Biological, neurological, physiological, and chemical variables

are basic to psychological variables. Responses with satisfactory consequences tend to be strengthened, and responses with
unsatisfactory consequences tend to be weakened. The brain is a basic determinant of human behavior. There are psychobiological stages of human
development. There are universal basic needs, drives, and motivations. Therapists first diagnose and assess the problem or mental disorder and then apply the

The therapist-client relationship is prerequisite to therapeutic change.

appropriate treatment.

Clients seek therapy for relief of problems and distress. The catechism of absolute
truths is so hallowed that it is elevated virtually beyond serious questioning and
examination of where these truths came from , of what endows them with the mantle
of absolute truths, and of just why we should worship them as basic scientific
knowledge. One common answer is that great thinkers proclaimed them as absolutely true. Another common answer is that they were bequeathed
by what we simply accept as more fundamental sciences such as biology, neurology, physiology, and experimental psychology. A third common answer is that
they were placed there by basic researchers. However, a serious problem is that these absolute truths are accepted as true more on the basis of trusting faith

than careful questioning (Feigl, 1959; Feyerabend, 1972; Mahrer, 1995, 1996; Meehl, 1978). Almost without exception, none of these
absolute truths has been examined in a way that could find them to be false, wrong,
disconfirmed, disproven, or unworthy of a place in a respected pool of absolute
truths. Nor have many, if any, of these absolute truths been admitted to or removed from this pool on the basis of rigorous research scrutiny (Chalmers,
 psychotherapy rests on a foundation of supposedly
1982; O’Donohue, 1989). The conclusion may well be that

absolute truths that are beyond questioning, examination, or falsification. Most of what we accept
as absolutely true is accepted as true because we unquestioningly accept it as true .
Psychology doesn’t explain international politics – enemies are material, and conflicts
aren’t purely constructed
Steinberg 88 - Associate Prof. Pol. Sci. – McGill U. and Advanced Candidate in Psychoanalytic Training
– Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, Blema, “Psychoanalysis and the Nuclear Threat: Clinical and
Theoretical Studies”, Ed. Levine, Jacobs, and Rubin, p. 158
In the post-Freudian era, however, the dominant psychoanalytic perspec¬tive on the nuclear issue deplores the practice of deterrence and regards the
existence of nuclear arsenals to implement deterrence as a sign of pathology. The superpowers' retention of these weapons of mass destruction is ex¬plained
in the dominant psychoanalytic paradigm as the product of split¬ting, mirror-imaging, and projection. This is often the case, but it need not be seen as the only

set of factors at work. It can also reflect, suggests Hoffmann (1986), the conviction that one's country has interests that are
not mere figments of the imagination and need to be protected both because of the material costs of losing them, and because
of the values embedded in them fp. 10). In his view, the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union cannot be transcended both because it is of

the very essence of international politics in an anarchic world that the two biggest actors must be rivals, that the growth of the power
of one must cause fear in the other, that each one shall see the other as malignant, itself as benign; and also because these two
actors have (objectively, as Pravda would say) widely conflicting interests and worldviews fp. 5). An intrapsychic approach that

fails to appreciate the importance of such factors can seriously distort reality and aggravate
the situation. It aggravates it by releasing unnecessary narcissistic rage and by promoting fragmenta¬tion, impaired reality testing, and resistance, rather than

Enemies are not mere projections of negative identities; they

reintegration and cooperative collaboration.

are all too often quite real. To be sure, Hoffmann avers, "the Nazis' view of the Jews was replete
with projected split-off parts of their own disavowed selves," but , he asks, "were those
Jews who understood what enemies they had in the Nazis doing the same?" (p. 9). There
is a risk, he argues, that we distort the complexity of international politics when we
presume that our fears flow only from our private fantasies and not from concrete
realities and the fantasies that the international state of nature generates as well.
Psychoanalysis is anti-political—blocks the possibility of social action
Homer 96 Lecturer in Psychoanalytic Studies @ U of Sheffield Sean, PSYCHOANALYSIS,
REPRESENTATION, POLITICS: ON THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF A PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF IDEOLOGY?,
The Letter, Summer 1996

I
Let me just pause here to raise some preliminary objections, or more precisely questions, to this kind of theorizing. Firstly, on a rather superficial level,

begin to get worried when radical politics can find itself in agreement with the
Thatcherite right that there is no such thing as a society . This may make for good theory but, I would ask,
does it make for good politics? Secondly, a moment ago I criticized a previous group of Marxist theorists for the ease with which they passed from social,
political and cultural theory to psychoanalysis and back, at the cost of specificity of each discourse. But is not post-marxism, as well as Zizek, also in danger of
falling into this trap, is there not a certain elision between Zizek’s utilization of the object a, for example, and Laclau and Mouffe conception of society as
structurally incomplete and never able to fully constitute itself? Finally, as Elizabeth Bellamy pointed out in her article ‘Discourses of Impossibility’, what is
eccluded in the elision between object a and the social as an impossible object is the possibility of politics itself. A situation, she observes, that begs a number

of questions, not least as to whether or not political theory needs psychoanalysis in the first place. Indeed, ‘is it possible-indeed, is it desirable-
to constitute a psychoanalytic politics?”9 The radical intentions of writers such as Laclau, Mouffe, and
Zizek, tehn, would appear to come up against a certain theoretical and political impasse .
Psychoanalysis originally served t o estrange and undermine our complacent assumptions
of subjectivity and at the same time it radically brought into question the status of the object itself but as a consequence
the preconditions and possibility of political discourse as such would appear to be
seriously in doubt.
Reject psychoanalysis---it’s totally fabricated and perpetuated by complicit scholars
who distort truth
Dufresne 14 Todd, Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Interview with Alex
Tsakiris of skeptiko, "235. Dr. Todd Dufresne on Freud's Looming Shadow of Deception", January 7,
www.skeptiko.com/235-todd-dufresne-freud-deception/
Alex Tsakiris: Before we talk past that too much, give people a sense for this criticism. There are layers of criticism and the way you’re saying it I think people might

get the impression that there’s a little tussle over how this should be interpreted or that should be interpreted when in fact the real historical
touch-points that we have paint just a horrible picture of Freud—of someone who’s really a

complete fraud. Who manufactures evidence in order to support his theories, that copies without attribution other people’s work or at least he
promotes himself as being this original great genius when he’s really stood on the shoulders of all these other people. I mean, the history of it beyond just critiquing

The other side of that that I really want you to get

theory is just stunning for people who haven’t fully encountered it.

into to support that is how we know this information was really held under lock and key and protected
under the tightest controls for so long. Then it’s gradually pried loose. So give people a sense for that. Dr. Todd Dufresne: There’s so

much to say I hardly know where to begin. In some ways, from my perspective, what really happened was Ernest Jones came out with this three-volume
biography in 1953, 1955, 1957, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Then he died. Basically you have everything after the Jones biography, which is an official biography
of psychoanalysis, as kind of a response to this official biography. What happens is that people start becoming more and more critical of psychoanalysis. For me,
Rosen is one of the first figures in this regard and it’s around 1967 when he publishes a book called, Brother Animal, in which he reveals that one of Freud’s earlier
followers committed suicide. I guess the radical side of this is that Freud was very unmoved by this follower’s plight. He was a sycophant like half the people
surrounding Freud, and Freud rebuffed him in various ways and the guy committed suicide. Okay, that’s horrible but not entirely surprising in some ways. But
deeper and more radical than that, Rosen exposed that during two periods in the 1920s Freud analyzed his own daughter, Anna, and that’s what really got him into
trouble. That’s kind of the beginning of this movement to reassess the fundamental myths of psychoanalysis or the things we didn’t know were myths but certainly
we now know are myths. I call it really the beginning of critical Freud studies. I take it to be a post-Jones movement, roughly from the mid-‘60s through to the late
1990s and maybe going on today, as well. I see it as like the whole purpose of scholarship and Freud studies is to move to critical Freud studies. Now how did it

happen? It’s really amazing.One of the untold stories of psychoanalytic studies or Freud studies, as it’s usually called, is
that one of the reasons there’s so much misinformation is that the vast majority of
books published and that appear under the library heading of BF173 to BF175 roughly—go to any library and you’ll find all the Freud books there.
Most of this work is vanity publishing. So much of the field is run by psychoanalysts who
have positions of authority. They start their own book publishers. They start their own
journals. Pretty soon they have an authority in the marketplace of ideas so it’s very , very
hard to actually find in the thousands of books published on Freud anything that
actually tells the truth. It’s a hard thing for somebody to free themselves from many,
many misconceptions about Freud. You mentioned a couple of them. Freud manufactured evidence. One of
the things that’s not well-appreciated is how Freud went out of his way to manipulate the reception of his

own work, right? He wrote his own histories, first of all. Many times he revised his own histories
and sometimes there are discrepancies with his own histories . He was always trying to spin his history in advance because
Freud always perceived himself as an historically important person, so he proceeded accordingly. He destroyed some of his

correspondence. He would destroy some of his process notes that he used to create his
famous case studies, of which there really is only four that he wrote, all of which are failures , by
the way.He destroyed the notes and these were important cases . You’d think you’d keep them but he destroyed
them. He tried to get his famous letters with Wilhelm Fliess destroyed but Marie Bonaparte preserved them against his wishes. So Freud was always

interested in manipulating the reception of his work and he was largely successful in many ways. People have generally
believed what he said. Alex Tsakiris: Can we stop right there? One of the things I always like to do when we get into these discussions with people and I have just a

very superficial understanding of this stuff—you could get into it in much greater detail. I always stop at this point and say, “ What would that look
like in modern academic standards?” Just what we already know there. What would that look like if any intellectual, academic figure
of our time was known to have done those things? I can’t imagine but that they would be completely ostracized as just the beginning of it. They’d be a complete

Dufresne: The problem is, Alex, that’s there’s hardly any modern equivalent to
joke. Dr. Todd

Freud. What Freud got away with for so long, which is essentially passing off incomplete results or
fraudulent results as the truth—I can give you some examples as we get into it later. He did all of the things you said he did. He
manufactured evidence and even the evidence that he had, he may have felt legitimately and honestly is so
shot-through with epistemological problems because there’s the contamination of
results by the expectations he had on the patients. We know this is called “suggestion,” right?
And undue influence. One of the things that’s interesting about Freud is that he was a scientist and as a scientist he had followers. These
followers routinely referred to his major works like The Interpretation of Dreams as their “bibles.” So we’re already in Freud’s life in the presence of a kind of cult or
church or something that’s not scientific. This guy was a trained neurologist, right? He asked some legitimate questions. He explored these questions but at some

point ambition took over and he fudged the results in many ways like you’re saying.What should happen with Freud is the
minute people see that he fudged the results in a number of ways that are absolutely
clear—there’s no question—well, anybody that has any fair-mindedness would say that
everything that follows from these results is therefore questionable. But that’s not what happens with
Freud, and that’s because we’re in the presence of a belief system, like a religion, so people don’t

want to question it. Anything like this today, you’d lose tenure. You’d lose your job. You’d be fired. When this
happens people fall into disgrace. But Freud has never really seriously fallen into disgrace. One of the things that’s

happened which is amazing to me because I’m somebody who works in the humanities is that part of the blame belongs to people

in the humanities and social sciences that don’t really care about science, or in some ways truth, not to be
too general about it. They don’t care that maybe he fudged the results; they’re just interested in this

as a hermeneutic system, a way of interpreting the world . So this is the place we get,
where people are really non-skeptical about Freud and they don’t want to hear it, you know?
They do not want to hear it. And that’s my colleagues, I’m afraid.

Psychoanalysis is not empirical and has no explanatory power --- prefer social science
because it can explain events based on causal relationships
Sadovnikov 7, Slava York University, "Escape from Reason: Labels as Arguments and Theories",
Dialogue XLVI (2007), 781-796, philpapers.org/archive/SADEFR.pdf

The way McLaughlin shows the rosy prospects of psychoanalytical social theory boils down
to this: there are people who labour at it. He reports on Neil Smelser’s lifelong elaborations of psychoanalytical sociology, which prescribed
the use of Freudian theories. Then he presents a “powerful” psychoanalytical theory of creativity of Michael Farrell, commenting on how the theorist “usefully

He correctly expects that I might not view his

utilizes psychoanalytic insights,” though McLaughlin does not specify them.

examples as scientific. Their problems begin well before that. First, due to their informative
emptiness, or tautological character , all they amount to is rewordings of everyday
assumptions. Second, due to their vagueness these accounts are compatible with any
outcomes; in other words, they lack explanatory and predictive power . The proposed
ideas are too inarticulate to subject to intersubjective criticism, and to call them
empirical or scientific theories would be, no matter how comforting, a gross misuse of
words. On the constructive side, a psychoanalytic theorist may be challenged to unambiguously formulate her suppositions and specify conditions of their
disproof, to leave out what we already well know and smooth out internal inconsistencies, and revise the theories in view of easily available counter-examples and
competing accounts. Only after having done this can one present candidate theories to public criticism and thus make them part of science, and fruitfully discuss

That
their further refinements. Another suggestion is not to label them “powerful theories,” “classics,” or anything else before their real scrutiny begins.

criticism and disagreement are indispensable for science is not a “Popperian

orthodoxy ,” although Popper does champion this idea; it is the pivot of the tradition (which we owe to the Greeks) which
identifies rationalism with criticism. 4 McLaughlin ostensibly bows to the critical tradition but does not put it to use. Instead of
critical evaluation of the theories in question he writes of “compelling case,” “powerful analytic model,” and “useful conceptual tool.” On the

methodological side of the issue, we should inquire into the mode of thinking
common to Fromm and all adherents of confirmation-ism. The trick consists in mere replacement of familiar
words with new, more peculiar ones; customary expressions are substituted by “instrumental intimacy,” “collaborative circles,” and
“idealization of a self-object.” Since the new, funnier, and pseudo-theoretical tag does the job of naming

just as well, it “shows how” things work. The new labels in the cases criticized here do not add
anything to our knowledge; nor do they explain . We have seen Fromm routinely abuse this technique. The vacuity of
Fromm’s explanations by character type was the central point in my analysis of Escape , yet McLaughlin conveniently ignores it and, like Fromm, uses the method of

The widely popular practice of mistaking new labels for

labelling as somehow supporting his cause.

explanations has been exposed by many methodologists in the history of philosophy, but probably the most
famous example of such critique comes from Molière. In the now often-quoted passage, his character delivers a vacuous explanation of opium’s property to induce
sleep by renaming the property with an offhand Latinism, “virtus dormitiva.” The satire acutely points not only at the impostor doctor’s hiding his lack of knowledge
behind foreign words, but also at the emptiness of his alleged explanation. (Pseudo-theoretical literature is boring precisely because of its “dormitive virtue,” its
shuffling of labels without rewarding inquiring minds.) Let me review notable criticisms of this approach in the twentieth century by Hempel, Homans, and Weber
leaving aside their forerunners. This problem was discussed in the famous debate between William Dray and Carl Hempel. Dray argues, contra the nomological

social scientists often try to answer the question, “What is this

account of explanation, that historians and

phenomenon?” by giving an “explanation-by-concept ” (Dray 1959, p. 403). A series of events may be better
understood if we call it “a social revolution”; or the appropriate tag may be found in the expressions “reform,” “collaboration,” “class struggle,” “progress,” etc.; or,
to take Fromm’s suggestions, we may call familiar motives and actions “sadomasochistic,” and any political choice save the Marxist “escape from freedom.” Hempel

such concepts may be explanatory, but they are so only if the chosen
agrees with Dray that

labels or classificatory tags refer to some uniformities, or are based on nomic analogies. In other words, our
new label has explanatory force if it states or implies some established regularity (Hempel 1970, pp.
453-57). For example, you travel to a foreign country and , strolling along the street, see a

boisterous crowd. Your guide may explain the crowd with one of several terms: that it is
the local soccer team’s fans celebrating its victory, or it is a local religious festival, or a teachers’
strike, etc. The labels applied here—celebration, festival, strike— have explanatory
value , because we know that things they refer to usually manifest themselves in noisy
or unruly mass gatherings. If, on the other hand , by way of explaining the boisterous crowd

the guide had invoked some hidden social or psychological forces , or used expressions
such as embodiment, mode of production, de-centring, simulacra, otherness, etc., its causes would remain
obscure . If she had referred to psychoanalytic “character types” (say, Fromm’s authoritarian, anal, or
necrophiliac types), the explanation would not make much sense either . Nothing prevents us nevertheless from

unconditionally attaching all these labels to any event. The mistake McLaughlin and confirmationists persistently make is in

thinking that labelling social phenomena alone does theoretical and explanatory
work. 5 George Homans observed the prevalence of this trick some decades ago: Much modern sociological theory seems to
us to possess every virtue except that of explaining anything . . . . The theorist shoves
various aspects of behavior into his pigeonholes, cries “Ah-ha!” and leaves it at that.
Like magicians in all times and places, the theorist thinks he controls phenomena if he is able to
give them names, particularly names of his own invention. (1974, pp. 10-11)
 AT: Queer Theory
Politics is good & they read Lacan backwards; the gap between symbolic and real
holds the potential for utopian change not queer assimilation
Brenkman 2002
John, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and
Baruch College, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, pg. 189-190

What I have challenged is the claim that this discourse defines, or even dominates, the political
realm as such. It is the discourse of conservative Catholicism and [End Page 189] Christian fundamentalism, and even though it
resonates in strands of liberal discourse, it represents an intense reaction, backlash, against changes that have already taken place in
American society, many of them as the direct result of feminism and the gay and lesbian movement. It is indeed important not to
underestimate the depth and danger of this reaction, but it is a reactionary, not a foundational, discourse. The uncoupling of sexuality and
reproduction is ubiquitous in American culture today as a result of multiple developments beyond the expansion of gay rights and the right
to abortion, including birth control, divorce, and changing patterns of family life, as well as consumerism and mass culture; it may well be
that the sheer scope, and irreversibility, of these developments also intensifies the targeting of gays by conservative ideology and Christian
fundamentalist movements. But that is all the more reason to recognize that the deconstruction of the phobic
figuration of the queer is a struggle to be pursued inside as well as outside politics . I stand by my
claim that Edelman builds a psychoanalytic theory of the political realm, in the sense that he gives a
psychoanalytic account of what the political realm is. Politics in his account fuses the Symbolic
order to the social order and, in response to the Symbolic's inherent failure to symbolize the Real of the drives that unhinge
every human being's integration into the social-symbolic order, generates a subtending futurist-nostalgic fantasy of
sexuality as reproduction. Because the fantasy too is everywhere exceeded by reality, this mechanism in turn produces the
homophobic figuration Edelman has described in "The Future is Kid Stuff": "the order of social reality demands some figural repository for
what the logic of its articulation is destined to foreclose, for the fracture that persistently haunts it as the death within itself" ("Future is Kid
Stuff" 28). I cited Claude Lefort at some length because he visits the same precincts of the psychoanalytic theory of discourse in order to
formulate the discursive dynamic of democracy. But rather than conceptualizing the entire social-political order as a psychic apparatus as
Edelman does, Lefort draws on Lacan's notion of the inherent gap between symbolization and the "real" to formulate the modern state's
representation of the "real" of the social. Since the democratic state limits its own powers and thus delimits
civil society as the nonpolitical space it impossibly must represent, the gap between symbolic and
real is the opening of political conflict and change, not an endless replication or reaffirmation of the
social order. Every ideological or political articulation—whether the particular discourses of power (law, economics,
aesthetics, etc.) or the institution of the state itself— holds a potentiality for change because of, not in spite of the
fact that its representation of the "real" fails. Therein lies the crux of the difference between
Edelman's position and my own.

Bailing on futurity is bad – locks in current oppression – we should imagine a future

even if they’re right
Manalansan 2015 (Martin F. Manalansan IV - Associate Professor of all of the following at The University of Illinois: Gender and Women's Studies,
Asian American Studies, Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, LAS Global Studies, Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, and Center for Global
Studies. The author holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from The University of Rochester and studied philosophy, Asian Studies and anthropology at the University
of the Philippines. As part of claims about futurity, the author references lived excahnges with queer trans women of color. The author also references concurring
professional exchanges with David L. Eng, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; Gayatri Gopinath, who  is an associate professor of Social and
Cultural Analysis and director of Asian/Pacific/American Studies at New York University.; Roderick Ferguson, who is a professor of African American and Gender and
Women's Studies in the African American Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago; Chandan Reddy, who is an Associate Professor of Gender,
Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington; and the late José Esteban Muñoz, was an American academic in the fields of performance studies,
visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory; "A Question from Bruno Latour" This article is part of the series Queer Futures. Fieldsights -
Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, July 21, 2015 - https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/703-a-question-from-bruno-latour)
My response to the question of “no future” comes from my encounters, engagements, and
conversations with colleagues under the aegis of queer-of-color critique, scholars like David Eng, Gayatri
Gopinath, Roderick Ferguson, Chandan Reddy, and the late José Esteban Muñoz, among others. We
appreciate the renegade antireproductive stance of the “no future” camp, which states that we should
not subscribe to a future that is entrenched in heteropatriarchal dreams of marriage and procreation.
However, there was a general sense among us that the issue of “no future” comes from a vantage point
and a comfortable perch of privilege. As a scholar invested and immersed in the plight of queers of
color, futurity is not just a possibility but a necessity. To paraphrase my queer-of-color critique
colleagues, we cannot not think of a future—it is the very fuel of existence, the pivot that animates and
propels energies, performances, feelings, and other bodily capacities. The promise and peril of queer,
both as a stance and as a field of study, is precisely in its anticipatory and hopeful dimensions. Queer is
constituted by a yearning and a longing for something better than what is here right now. It is, as
Muñoz would say, a horizon that we are drawn to and which is not yet here. Consider the group of
undocumented immigrant queers of color in New York City whose lives I have been following for years.
Dwelling in cramped domiciles and working in contingent jobs, there is very little to witness in their lives
that suggests a kind of gay/lesbian triumphalism or the bright markers of the new normal. In fact, they
live in precarious conditions but—a very important caveat—they live in moments that showcase fleeting
gestures and images of fabulosity set amidst the squalor and mess of their lives . These moments, while
fleeting, provide some way for them to think of another day, giving them a brief glimpse of a time and
a place where there are sequined gowns, plush salons, and many sparkling things. While this might be
called naïve hopefulness, thinking of a future that is an alternative to the present is a potent way to
think beyond and against the status quo—to plant the seed for social transformation. In other words,
there is a political potential to queer futurity. Or, to put it another way, we need to complicate and
unravel the negativity inherent in the “no future” stance and to be open to the various alternative ways
a future or futures can be imagined, particularly by those in the margins. Otherwise, we can all just
pack our bags, go back home, put on some makeup, close the door, and hide under the bedcovers.

Death drive wrong and doesn’t explain violence

Jonathan Dollimore 13, Professor in the School of English and American Studies at the University of
Sussex, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, googlebooks

The death-drive theory has not found wide acceptance it has been explicitly among Freud's followers. With significant exceptions like Melanie Klein,

denounced as misconceived biology, unsubstantiated speculation, logically incoherent and /or without
evidence It has also been attributed to Freud's own painful personal circumstances: the death of his
.

daughter, the death of a grandson, his own illness (cancer), and his lifelong preoccupation with death Of .

those who have been sympathetic to the idea, most have tended to tame it One move was to - as indeed did Freud himself.

rewrite the instinct as largely an instinct of aggression . But for Freud the aggressive aspect of the death drive had been secondary; the instinct was primarily self-destructive. Sadism derives from
a more primordial masochism, which means in effect that human aggression is, originally, self destructiveness. Of all subsequent theorists of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan takes the death drive most seriously, and most contemporary psychoanalytic attention to it comes via him. To his
credit, Lacan does not underplay or tame the death drive, and he locates Freud firmly within the Western tradition when he remarks that Freud questioned life as to its meaning and his answer was not that it had none 'which is a convenient way of washing one's hands of the whole
business' - but that life has 'only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by death' (Ecrits, p. 277). According to Lacan, the Freudian world is one not of things, nor even of being, but rather of desire. More so even than Freud, Lacan finds in desire 'the paradoxical, deviant, erratic,
eccentric, even scandalous character by which it is distinguished from need'. Although this distinction has been 'always obvious to moralists worthy of the name', psychoanalysis nevertheless misses the point by pursuing an obscurantist reduction of desire to need (p. 286). And that, for
Lacan, is a cardinal error. This distinction belween desire and need leads him to dwell on something else in both Freud and earlier writers, moralists and otherwise: the relation between desire and lack. In modern psychoanalysis we find a secularized, intensified version of an existential
perception that goes back a long way, even though the immediate influences here are Heidegger and Kojeve: Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn't the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists. (Lacan, Seminar,
11.222-3) For Lacan, death is the name for a primordial absence intrinsic to presence; as John Forrester puts it, 'presence includes as its very condition the limit beyond which is its absence' (p. 176).16 To bind desire so resolutely into lack and absence means that it inevitably becomes a
kind of essential negativity (Lacan, Seminar, 1.146)*' - something premised on an initial failure of satisfaction and which, as such, comes to exist only by virtue of its own alienation; as Juliet Mitchell puts it, 'Desire persists as an effect of a primordial absence and it therefore indicates that,
in this area, there is something fundamentally impossible about satisfaction itself (Lacan. Feminine Sexuality, p. 6). One consequence of this is a radical fragmentation of the human subject.18 In one respect Lacan recasts the familiar metaphysical idea that life is rooted in death: 'it is
death that sustains existence' (Ecrits, p. 300). In his development of this idea he combines diverse elements of the Western tradition of desire's impossibility: a theology of desire as death, crossed with something more romantic if no less severe - desire as annihilating excess, a primordial
discord. The two elements are fused in those places where, for example, he speaks of 'that desperate affirmation of life that is the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct' (p. 104). These ideas then get reworked according to structuralist and linguistic preoccupations, as
when he speaks of the 'frenzy' of desire 'mocking Ihe abyss of Ihe infinite', and of how this amounts to 'no other derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails - eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else - of metonymy. Hence its "perverse" fixation at
the very suspension-point of the signifying chain where the memory-screen is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish is petrified' (p. 167). In the same vein Lacan suggests that it is from death that existence takes on all the meaning it has; the lack which is at the heart of desire
is also the price that human beings pay for their admission to language and culture. Death makes life possible in that it makes meaning and representation possible; it is not only before speech but 'primordial to the birth of symbols' (pp. 104-5, 300). Hence Lacan's most well-known
formulation, that the unconscious is structured like a language, and his claim to have demonstrated 'the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech' (Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 20; Merits, p. 101). Richard Boothby regards this as the most
radical and innovative aspect of Lacan. I remain unconvinced.19 Lacan's invocations of death's centrality to life are more derivative than their complex, often obscure, formulations suggest.20 When he declares that All that life is concerned with is seeking repose as much as possible while
awaiting death. This is what devours the time of the suckling baby at the beginning of its existence... Life is concerned solely with dying {Seminar. 11.233) we can hear Freud and Schopenhauer most closely, but also Montaigne (especially in that last assertion - 'Life is concerned solely with
dying'), who also, incidentally, consolidated his own perception of this truth with extensive citation of classical sources. In the giving over of the newborn child to death we might hear too the early Christian Fathers. Lacan does not exactly disguise his precedents; the passage just cited
continues with a reference to Hamlet's 'to die, to sleep, perchance to dream' and to the idea developed by philosophers in antiquity that it would have been better not to have been born. But (and this recalls Freud's own evasive acknowledgment of his influences) in Lacan these

allusions to the past are fleeting, in passing, almost secretive; the implication is that these past writers
anticipate something which can only properly, and only now, be understood through the lens of Lacanian

psychoanalysis whose complexity is, at the same time, almost guaranteed to defeat the attempt. Some
,

at least of that complexity is obscurantist . In the wake of contemporary cultural developments, including the perceived failure of sexual radicalism and the trauma of AIDS, there are those who have turned to Lacan

what I find is an overtheorized expression

for a more honest view of desire, and, via him, are reconsidering a severe account of human desire. I should not speak for them; in Lacan of something more significantly

symptomatic of a much wider tendency in (post-) modern theory

and relevantly expressed elsewhere (in Freud and before). It this respect I believe he is . But in terms of his
influence alone Lacan remains significant for this study. By crossing Freud's death drive with the philosophy of lack and nothingness derived from Kojeve's version of Hegel (itself influenced by Heidegger), he continues to drive death ever further into being; now, perhaps more inexorably

the antihumanist wish to decentre

than ever before, death is the lack which drives desire. In doing that he also exemplifies another significant tendency in modern thought which I have already remarked, namely

'man' in the name of a philosophy which is truly adequate to the complexity of being yet which seeks to ,

retain a residual human mastery in the very effort of articulating this complexity . As we have seen, the philosophical bid to comprehend the truth

modern theory, having lost faith in older

of being was always a form of intellectual empowerment - even, or rather especially, when issuing in the declaration that life, desire and the world have to be renounced. But

philosophical notions of truth, now half-settles for the mastery of a new kind of complexity which it
partly produces in order to enable this performance of mastery. Phoenix-like, the omniscient, masterful
and above all complex analytic of the modern theorist rises above his sacrifice of 'man' to death .

Psychoanalysis is political defeatism, preclude coalitional politics and simply espouses

a new grand narrative that doesn’t solve their aff
Gordon 01. Paul, psychotherapist, Psychoanalysis and Racism: The politics of defeat, Race & Class v.
42, n. 4, 2001

The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live with disappointment. All the tragedies of the political project of
emancipation ± the evils of Stalinism in particular ± are seen as the inevitable product of men and women trying to create a better
society. But, rather than engage in a critical assessment of how, for instance, radical political movements go
wrong, they discard the emancipatory project and impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity for having failed them: `the intellectuals and
academics have fled into discourse and deconstruction and representation ± as though to interpret the world is more
important than to change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a changing
world'.58 To justify their flight from a politics holding out the prospect of radical change through self-activity, the disappointed intellectuals and
abundant intellectual alibis for themselves in the very work they champion, including, in Cohen's case, psychoanalysis. What Marshall Berman says of Foucault seems true also of

psychoanalysis; that it offers `a world-historical alibi' for the passivity and helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and
that it has nothing but contempt for those naive enough to imagine that it might be possible for
modern human-kind to be free. At every turn for such theorists, as Berman argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination, we are
nothing but prisoners: there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break . . .
There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only
add more links to our chains; however, once we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax .59 Cohen's
political defeatism and his conviction in the explanatory power of his new faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be contemptuous and dismissive of
any attempt at political solidarity or collective action. For him, `communities' are always `imagined' , which, in
his view, means based on fantasy, while different forms of working-class organisation, from the craft fraternity to the revolutionary group, are dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufficient combination'.60 In

this scenario, the idea that people might come together , think together, analyse together and act together as rational
beings is impossible. The idea of a genuine community of equals becomes a pure fantasy , a `symbolic
retrieval' of something that never existed in the first place: `Community is a magical device for conjuring something apparently solidary out of the thin air of
modern times, a mechanism of re-enchantment.' As for history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented traditions.'61 Now, this is not only non- sense, but

dangerous nonsense at that. Is history `always false'? Did the Judeocide happen or did it not? And did not some people even try to resist it? Did slavery exist or did it not, and did not people resist that too
and, ultimately, bring it to an end? And are communities always `imagined'? Or, as Sivanandan states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle? Furthermore, all attempts to legislate against ideology are
bound to fail because they have to adopt `technologies of surveillance and control identical to those used by the state'. Note here the Foucauldian language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is bad. But is it? No society can
function without surveillance of some kind. The point, surely, is that there should be a public conversation about such moves and that those responsible for implementing them be at all times accountable. To equate, as Cohen
does, a council poster about `Stamping out racism' with Orwell's horrendous prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's image was intensely personal and destructive; the other is

about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective evil.) Cohen reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about punitive action
against racists, as though punishment or other firrm action against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social or legal norms) precluded `understand- ing' or even help through psychotherapy. It is indeed a
strange kind of `anti-racism' that portrays active racists as the `victims', those who are in need of `help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In their move from politics to the

academy and the world of `discourse', the postmodernists may have simply exchanged one grand
narrative, historical materialism, for another, psychoanalysis.62 For psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par excellence. It is a theory that seeks to account for the world and which
recognises few limits on its explanatory potential . And the claimed radicalism of psycho- analysis, in the hands of the
postmodernists at least, is not a radicalism at all but a prescription for a politics of quietism, fatalism and defeat. Those wanting to

change the world, not just to interpret it, need to look elsewhere

The alt fails---deriding all attempts at action as “freezing becoming” leaves no way to
deal with difficult political choices--- they can’t convince others to abandon liberal
subjectivity
Joseph Schwartz 8, Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Future of Democratic
Equality, 56-62

A politics of radical democratic pluralism cannot be securely grounded by a whole-hearted epistemological

critique of “enlightenment rationality.” For implicit to any radical democratic project is a belief in the
equal moral worth of persons; to embrace such a position renders one at least a “critical defender” of
enlightenment values of equality and justice, even if one rejects “enlightenment metaphysics ” and believes
that such values are often embraced by non-Western cultures. Of course, democratic norms are developed by political practice

and 60 struggle rather than by abstract philosophical argument. But this is a sociological and historical reality rather than a
trumping philosophical proof. Liberal democratic publics rarely ground their politics in coherent ontologies and

epistemologies; and even among trained philosophers there is no necessary connection between one’s
metaphysics and one’s politics. There have, are, and will be Kantian conservatives (Nozick), liberals (Rawls), and radicals (Joshua Cohen; Susan
Okin); teleologists, left, center, and right (Michael Sandel, Alasdair McIntyre, or Leo Strauss); anti-universalist feminists (Judith Butler, Wendy Brown) and quasi-
universalist, Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser).¶ Post-structuralists try to read off from an epistemology or ontology a politics; such attempts
simply replace enlightenment meta-narratives with postmodern (allegedly anti) meta-narratives. Such efforts represent an idealist version of the materialist effort—
which post-structuralists explicitly condemn—to read social consciousness off of the structural position of “the agent.” A
democratic political theory
must offer both a theory of social structure and of the social agents capable of building such a society . In
exchanging the gods of Weber and Marx for Nietzsche and Heidegger (or their epigones Foucault and Derrida), poststructuralist theory has

abandoned the institutional analysis of social theory for the idealism of abstract philosophy. ¶ Connolly, Brown, and
Butler reject explicit moral deliberation as a bad faith Nietzschean attempt at “ressentiment.” Instead, they celebrate the amoral, yet ethical strivings of a
Machiavellian or Gramscian realist “war of position.”44 Sheldon Wolin, however, has written convincingly of how Machiavelli can be read as an ethical realist, a
theorist of moral utilitarianism.45 Even a Machiavellian or Gramscian political “realist” must depend upon moral argument to justify the social utility of hard political
choices. That is, if one reads both as ethical utilitarians who believe that, at times, one must “dirty” one’s hands in order to act ethically in politics, then they
embrace a utilitarian, “just war” theory of ethical choice. According to this consequentialist moral logic, “bad means” are only justifiable if they are the only,
unavoidable way to achieve a greater ethical good—and if the use of such “bad means” are absolutely minimized. Such “hard” political choices
yield social policies and political outcomes that fix identities as well as transform them .¶ Not only in regard to
epistemological questions has post-structuralist theory created a new political “metaphysics” which misconstrues the nature of democratic political practice; the

post-structuralist analysis of “the death of man” and “the death of the subject” also radically preclude meaningful
political agency. As with Michel Foucault, Butler conceives of “subjects” as “produced” by powerknowledge discourses. In Butler’s view, the modernist
concept of an autonomous subject is a “fictive construct”; and the very act of adhering to a belief in autonomous human choice

is to engage in “ exclusion and differentiations, perhaps a repression , that is subsequently concealed, covered over, by the
effect of autonomy.”46 That is, the power of discourse, of language and the unconscious, “produces subjects.” If those “subjects” conceive of

themselves as having the capacity for conscious choice, they are guilty of “repressing” the manner in
which their own “subjectivity” is itself produced by discursive 61 exclusion: “if we agree that politics and a power exist already at
the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its
construction.”47 Susan Bickford pithily summarizes the post-structuralist rejection of the modernist subject: “power is not wielded by autonomous subjects; rather
through power, subjectivity is crafted.”48 Bickford grants that post-structuralism provides some insight into how group and individual identity is “culturally
constructed.” But Bickford goes on to contend that after post-structuralism exposes the “lie of the natural” (that there are
no natural human identities), “socially constructed” modern individuals still wish to act in consort with
others and to use human communication to influence others : “ people generally understand
themselves as culturally constituted and capable of agency .”49¶ For if there is no “doer behind the
deed,” but only “performative” acts that constitute the subject, how can the theorist (or activist) assign agency or moral
responsibility to actors who are “constituted by discursive practices .” (“Discursive practices” engaged in by whom, the
observer may ask?) Butler insists that not only is the subject “socially constituted” by power/knowledge discourses, but so too is the “ontologically reflexive self” of
the enlightenment. Now if this claim is simply that all social critics are socially-situated, then this view of agency is no more radical a claim than that made by
Michael Walzer in his conception of the social critic (or agent). Walzer argues that even the most radical dissident must rely upon the critical resources embedded
within his own culture (often in the almost-hidden interstices of that culture). Effective critical agency cannot depend on some abstract universal, external logic.50
Asserting that critical capacities are themselves socially constructed provides the reader with no means
by which to judge whether forms of “resistance” are democratic and which are not. That is, no matter how
hard one tries to substitute an aesthetic , “ironic,” “amoral ethical sensibility” for morality, the social critic and political
activist cannot escape engaging in moral argument and justification with fellow citizens.¶ Butler astutely notes
that “resistance” often mirrors the very powerknowledge discourses it rejects—resisting hegemonic norms without offering alternative conceptions of a common
political life. But Butler seems to affirm the possibility (by whom?) of effective rejection of such “norming” by “performative resignification.” But the

“resignification” of “performative” discursive constructions provides no criteria by which to judge

whether a given “resignification” is emancipatory or repressive .51 And just who (if not a relatively coherent, choosing human
subject) is “performing” the resignification. Furthermore, if all forms of identity and social meaning are predicated upon

“exclusion,” then the democratic theorist needs to distinguish among those identities which “exclude” in
a democratic way and those which exclude in an anti-humanist , racist, and sexist manner. Some social
“identities” are democratic and pluralist, such as those created by voluntary affiliations. But other
“identities,” such as structural, involuntary class differences and racial and sexual hierarchies, must be
transformed, even eliminated, if democracy is to be furthered . And how we behave—or “perform”—can subvert (or reinforce)
such undemocratic social structures. But if these social structures are immutably inscribed by62 “performative practices,” then there can be no democratic
resistance. In her call for an ironic politics of “performative resistance,” Butler seems to imply that human beings have the capacity to choose which “performative
practices” to engage in—and from which to abstain. If this is the case, then a modernist conception of agency and moral responsibility has covertly snuck its way
back into Butler’s political strategy.52

Queer theory’s focus on the individual destroys communities that could sustain
liberation.
Kirsch 2k Max H., Associate Professor and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Comparative Studies: The
Public Intellectuals Program at the Florida Atlantic University, Routledge, “Queer theory and social
change”, p121-123

But
Queer theory has developed along a path that questions the basic tenets of past resistance movements while championing the right of inclusion.

despite calls for the recognition of diversity, it has done little to further a true
inclusiveness that would have the ability to form communities of resistance. Again,
this is primarily due to the insistence on the uniqueness of the individual and the relativity of
experience. The call made by Queer theory is familiar to those who have participated in resistance movements: the assertion of

independence from oppressive authority while claiming the right to envision and
create new forms of being. But instead of focusing on the creation of a society that
guarantees freedom and expression for all, it has instead focused on the individual as
a site of change. Indeed, this fear of connection , as argued in Chapter 5, has real possibilities for
generating self-harm. The actions of those with power exert dominance in both conscious and unconscious ways, redirecting
energy towards objective oppression and subjective self-hate in the process. While the belief that
heterosexuality is the norm is purveyed, violence, both psychological and physical, is enacted on those outside of that projected norm, and experienced by
them as being “outside” the facets of daily social life. Beyond making it more difficult to identify with others, such alienation causes a reaction to even the

“The right to be oneself” thus becomes a mechanism for self-protection

attempt to do so.

rather than a call for equality . Current Queer theory’s engagement of this fear and concentration on the deconstruction of identity are
results of such a reaction to power, a reductionistic view of the possibilities for change generated by the politics of the 1960s and 1970s. The reaction has taken
place most prominently in the academy, where the purveyors of this theory are in positions that pose real danger to those opposing them. They have become
the new academic elite, completely with editorships of journals, the power to hire, to decide who publishes, to deny tenure, and the ability to apply pressure
with regard to which theory is well received and which disregarded. Let there be no mistake: they do act on their privileges. They are self-protective in much
the same way that the managers of capitalist enterprises control the organization of work. It is not in their interest to further communities of dissidence,

particularly While Queer theory does not call for the destruction of
against themselves.

communities, at least by name, its consequences are the same: communities must be
deconstructed to free the individual for self-expression .5 As the individual becomes
the center of analysis in all aspects of social life , and as late capitalism emphasizes individualism on a global scale,
resistance theory has closely followed the dominant streams. At best, wishful thinking and the consolidation of position underpins this direction, the hope that
the mind can reframe the significance of harm while one’s job is not threatened. At worst, such a stance is in operative support of current structures of

Social and emotional health are

capitalist relations of being. Community, identity, and self-actualization are indeed complementary.

promoted by active participation with others in community. The community is where

“safe space” is created. Power in numbers has been the call of resistance movements
world-wide, from anti-colonial struggles to fights for better working conditions. Such struggles have larger outcomes. The community
is a forum for debate for the construction of strategy . Communities exist with varied needs that are part of the
complexity of society. It is in communities that social change begins in embryonic form.

Separatist movements have proven unproductive as the community becomes

isolated and involutes with disagreement . Assimilationist movements cannot work toward sustained social change because
there is no confrontation with the basis of oppression . The call for individuality is the most harmful strategy of

all, for it separates every person from any concrete sense of identity and collective
opposition.
Your uncritical acceptance of the queer subject naturalizes heterosexuality, maintains
a male subject position and cannot produce a meaningful form of politics for freedom
from oppression
Goodloe 9 (Amy, University of Colorado, Lesbian-Feminism and Queer Theory: Another "Battle of the
Sexes"? http://www.lesbian.org/essays/lesfem-qtheory.html [accessed 2/20/11])
This is not to suggest, however, that all lesbian feminists find it impossible to reconcile their perspective with queer theory; on the contrary, quite a few
theorists who consider themselves lesbian feminists have embraced the new queer politics enthusiastically, and in fact some of the most influential thinkers in
queer theory are female: Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, Teresa de Lauretis. In her article, "Making it All Perfectly Queer" (1992), Lisa Duggan argues in favor of
both the word "queer" and the project of queer theory, which she believes is a necessary counterpoint to the limited strategies of nationalism and liberalism
which have for so long dominated gay politics (11). Because these earlier strains of activism posit a unified, coherent "gay identity," they fail to adequately
account for the varieties of difference within the ranks of "gay," with the result being that a politics which claims to represent all gay people does so only for
white, middle class gay men (18). Duggan argues that the notion of "a 'queer community' can work somewhat differently [because it] is often used to construct
a collectivity no longer defined solely by the gender of its members' sexual partners. This new community is unified only by a shared dissent from the dominant
organization of sex and gender" (20). While I would have to disagree with her implication that earlier models of gay identity were defined solely on the basis of

the gender of one's sexual partners, since lesbian feminism in particular worked towards a much broader definition, Duggan's point that queer
signals a "shared dissent" from heteronormativity is well taken, even though , as I mentioned
earlier, this tends to naturalize heterosexuality . Duggan goes on to explain that the constructionist position supported by
queer theory "stake[s] out a new stance of opposition... [which] is constituted through its dissent from the hegemonic, structured relations and meanings of
sexuality and gender, but its actual historical forms and positions are open, constantly subject to negotiation and renegotiation" (23). In other words, Duggan
claims that queer identity cannot, by its very nature, be fixed, but is constantly under negotiation, as it were, defining itself over against the non-queer, the
normative, the institution of compulsory heterosexuality. This, Duggan believes, is a politically useful strategy, one that is bound to be more successful than
traditional liberal or nationalist strategies, although it currently occupies the critical margins in the arena of political activism (26-7). Michael Warner, in his
introduction to Fear of A Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993),also makes positive political claims for queer theory, although his analysis is
slightly more problematic because he tries to suggest a partnership between queer theory and feminist theory that, to the minds of most lesbian feminists,
does not exist. According to Warner, queer theory is "opening up in the way that feminism did when feminists began treating gender more and more as a
primary category for understanding problems that did not initially look gender-specific" (xiv). Not only is Warner assuming that all feminists hold gender to be
the central category of oppression, he is also implying that queer theory posits sexuality as the central category for understanding social problems, and given
queer theory's insistence on the complete separation of sex and gender, it would seem then that these two modes of theoretical analysis are therefore in
contradiction with each other. Warner downplays the possibility of contradiction by drawing out similarities between the two theoretical positions: Much of
the work of feminist social theory has consisted of showing that basic conceptualizations -- ways of opposing home and economy, the political and personal, or
system and lifeworld -- presuppose and reinforce a paradigmatically male position. Queer theory is beginning to be in a position to make similar criticisms,

what this analysis fails to account for is

sometimes with reference to the same oppositions,... but also with others. (xxiii) But

the "paradigmatically male position" that informs so much of queer theory , which is precisely
Jeffreys' and Zita's most vehement complaint against it. Warner also uncritically assumes that the term queer

"represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization ; it rejects a minoritizing logic of
toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the

normal" (xxvi). Here Warner is making a point similar to Duggan's, but given his apparent need to demonstrate the similarities between feminism and
queer theory, it is surprising that he does not mention that this is precisely the position of early lesbian feminism: that lesbians represent "resistance to

regimes of the normal" by resisting compulsory heteropatriarchy. He also fails to see the ways in which queer itself can
operate as "minoritizing logic," since it assumes not only a fixed majority "norm"
against which it constitutes itself as "queer," but also a fixed minority "queerness,"
which never slips into the realm of the norm . Given that most gay men participate in
normative male privilege, it seems unrealistic to believe that queerness alone is
sufficient to constitute oneself entirely on the margins . Although I was not clear when I began this review where
I would locate myself in the debate, my particularly critical response to Warner leads me to believe that, at least at this point, I would argue that queer

theory is not politically useful for lesbian feminism. That is not to say, however, that with a more thoroughgoing analysis of its
assumptions about gender queer theory might indeed fulfill its promise of being "all-inclusive," in the way that Duggan envisions, but as long as its central
category of analysis is sexuality, to the exclusion of gender or indeed even race, class, etc., queer theory and feminism will continue to be at odds with each
other. While lesbian feminists might usefully employ queer theory's critique of US liberalism and the tendency of early gay activists towards militant
nationalism, it is hardly necessary to embrace queer theory on the whole, especially since lesbian feminism, in its new "decentered" form analyzed by Stein,
contains within it the elements necessary to make such a critique on its own. Perhaps, then, this is my most fundamental criticism of queer theory: that it fails
entirely to acknowledge and build on the theoretical and political work that has long been done by lesbian feminists, preferring instead to assume that it alone
is capable of inventing and sustaining "important" forms of political analysis for lesbians and gays. For so many feminists, the male arrogance that supports this
assumption is all too familiar, and altogether unwelcome.

Edelman’s thesis is wrong – politics is a site of reform – that’s why people vote, care
about the environment and live in communities – there is value in tangible
improvements in the human condition
Brenkman 2 (John, Distinguished Professor of English and Comprative Literature at CUNY Graduate
Center, Narrative, “Queer Post-Politics”, Volume 10, Issue 2, p. 174-180, Project Muse)
But Edelman interprets this nonrecognition in very different terms from those I have just used. When he asserts that "there are no queers in that future as there can be no future for queers," he is
not making a mere statement of protest; rather, he is announcing the theoretical position that is the explicit stake of his entire argument. I [End Page 175] now want to turn to his theoretical
project, which involves an argument in political theory and an argument from psychoanalysis and a link between the two. The Political Theory Argument For Edelman the image of the child-as-
future is more than a powerful trope in the political discourse of the moment. It in effect defines the political realm: "For politics, however radical the means by which some of its practitioners
seek to effect a more desirable social order, is conservative insofar as it necessarily works to affirm a social order, defining various strategies aimed at actualizing social reality and transmitting it
into the future it aims to bequeath to its inner child" (19). The burden of this argument is that a genuinely critical discourse cannot arise via the marking or symbolizing of the gap between the
present and the future. Such symbolizing has indeed been the defining feature of modern critical social discourse, whether among the Enlightenment's philosophes, French revolutionaries,
Marxists, social democrats, or contemporary socialists and democrats. Jürgen Habermas, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, defines modern time-consciousness itself as a taking of

For him any such political discourse or activity steps into "the
responsibility for the future. Edelman sees in such a time-consciousness an inescapable trap.

logic by which political engagement serves always as the medium for reproducing our social reality" (26).
Certainly the political realm—whether viewed from the perspective of the state, the political community and citizenship, or political movements—is a medium of social reproduction, in the sense

not simply a mechanism of social

that it serves the relative continuity of innumerable economic and non-economic institutions. But it is
reproduction; it is also the site and instrument of social change. Nor is it simply the field of existing power relations; it is
also the terrain of contestation and compromise. Edelman compounds his reductive concept of the political realm by in turn postulating an ironclad intermeshing of social reproduction and
sexual reproduction. Here too he takes a fundamental feature of modern society, or any society, and absolutizes it.
Sexual reproduction is a necessary dimension of social reproduction , almost by definition, in the sense that a
society's survival depends upon, among many other things, the fact that its members reproduce. Kinship practices, customs, religious authorities,
and civil and criminal law variously regulate sexual reproduction. However, that is not to say that the imperatives of social reproduction

dictate or determine or fully functionalize the institutions and practices of sexual reproduction. The
failure to recognize the relative autonomy of those institutions and practices underestimates how
seriously feminism and the gay and lesbian movement have already challenged the norms and institutions of compulsory
heterosexuality in our society. They have done so through creative transformations in civil society and everyday life
and through cultural initiatives and political and legal reforms. The anti-abortion and anti-gay activism of the Christian Right arose, in
response, to alter and reverse the fundamental achievements of these movements. How then to analyze or theorize this struggle? A motif in Edelman's analysis [End Page 176] takes the rhetoric
and imagery of the Christian Right and traditional Catholicism to be a more insightful discourse than liberalism when it comes to understanding the underlying politics of sexuality today. I think

this is extremely misguided . The Right does not have a truer sense of the social-symbolic order than liberals and
radicals; it simply has more reactionary aims and has mobilized with significant effect to impose its phobic and repressive values on civil society and through
the state. The Christian Right is itself a "new social movement" that contests the feminist and gay and lesbian social movements. To grant the Right the status of

exemplary articulators of "the" social order strikes me as politically self-destructive and theoretically just
plain wrong.

Politics is not reproductive futurity or normalization – their aff is too totalizing and
doesn’t solve
Powers, Prof @ Roehampton University, 9
(Nina, “Non-Reproductive Futurism,” borderlands, vol.8 No.2,
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol8no2_2009/power_futurism.pdf)

Edelman’s desire to conflate all politics with reproductive futurism does an injustice to the politics
behind some of the historical shifts in the way abortion , for example, has been conceived. Even in the examples Edelman
himself gives of anti-reproductive movements, he is quick to state that these campaigns for abortion rights frame the

argument in terms of a ‘fight for our future – for our daughters and sons’ (Edelman, 2004: 3). But, whilst it is true that the
anti-abortion debate (especially in America) is often played out on the territory of the right (where the rhetoric of pro-life reigns ), it is certainly not the

case in other parts of the world that abortion is defended in the name of those children already born, i.e.
trapped in the framework of reproductive futurity. Elsewhere, it is the rationality of the woman , her ability to make economic

and pragmatic decisions that feature foremost in any debate about the rights and wrongs of abortion. Historically, too, discussions about abortion
took place in broader contexts that stressed abortion alongside questions of the equal right to work, progressive notions of family structure and so on. Before

Stalin repealed the laws, the Soviet Union under Lenin was the first to provide free and on demand
abortions. These laws were couched not in terms of ‘life,’ but in terms of pragmatism predicated on a
notion of political equality. As Wendy Z. Goldman puts it: Soviet theorists held that the transition to capitalism had transformed the family by
undermining its social and economic functions. Under socialism, it would wither away and under communism, it would cease to exist entirely. (Goldman, 1993: 11)
Unless the family is considered in its social and economic function, it makes no sense to speak of its power as an image, however powerful this image might be.
Edelman ultimately concedes far too much to a very narrow ideological image of the family that , whilst pernicious,
is easier to undo with reference to history and practice than he seems to think. As Tim Dean puts it: ‘the polemical ire
that permeates No Future seems to have been appropriated wholesale from the rightwing rants to which he recommends we hearken’ (Dean, 2008: 126). In the
first section I tried to identify some of the contradictions between the contemporary family and the demands of capitalism, while above I gave examples of politics
not based on reproduction and reproduction not based on futurity: what follows from this is that there are important historical shifts in the way in which the family
and the image of the child comes to shift in and out of focus. Take the discussions surrounding in vitro fertilisation. First viable as a reproductive practice in the late
1970s, early artificial insemination was regarded as a ‘paganistic and atheistic’ practice (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982: 11). Now, however, despite the wastage of
potential viable embryos in the process, it is generally regarded as a practical option for infertile couples. Here the contradictions of contemporary social feeling
towards children is exposed once again: reproductive
futurism turns out not to be invested in all children, but only
those it chooses to keep out of a pragmatism enabled by technology . Edelman talks about the ‘morbidity inherent in
fetishization as such’ when opponents of abortion use photos of foetuses to highlight the proximity of the foetus to the ‘fully-formed child’ (Edelman, 2004: 41).
He is right that morbidity and the politics of life seem to go hand-inhand, but then proceeds to argue
that it is the queer alone that has a duty to remain true to this morbidity, to expose the ‘misrecognised’
investments of ‘sentimental futurism’ : The subject … must accept its sinthome, its particular pathway to jouissance … This, I suggest, is the
ethical burden to which queerness must accede in a social order intent on misrecognising its own investment in morbidity, fetishisation, and repetition: to inhabit
the place of meaninglessness associated with the sinthome; to figure an unregenerate, and unregenerating, sexuality whose singular insistence on jouissance,
rejecting every constraint imposed by sentimental futurism, exposes aesthetic culture – the culture of forms and their reproduction, the culture of Imaginary forms
– as always already a “culture of death” intent on abjecting the force of a death drive that shatters the tomb we call life. (Edelman, 2004: 47-8) This does not exactly
seem like a revelation. We live for the most part in pragmatic acceptance of this culture of death. It hardly shocks us when, for example, statistics reveal that, in
2004, 60% of women who had abortions had already given birth to at least one child (Sharples, 2008). Those people most identified with children – mothers – turn
out, quite often, to deal with ‘life’ rather more pragmatically than we might otherwise believe. Edelman has to ignore historical and current examples of abortion
rights campaigns, and other attitudes towards the family, in order to shoehorn all politics into a single vision to which he then opposes his notion of the queer. As
Brenkman puts it: ‘To
grant the Right the status of exemplary articulators of “the” social order strikes me as
politically self-destructive and theoretically just plain wrong’ (Brenkman, 2002: 177). There are genuine
moments of historical and political importance in terms of thinking about the family that seem to escape
Edelman’s dismissal of politics as inevitably futural. We do not need to give up on politics altogether, whilst still accepting that the
image of the child is a massive ideological obstacle. Rancière’s notion of political equality (‘Politics … is that activity which turns on equality as its principle’
(Rancière, 1999: ix)) neither concedes ground to politics as it appears (the ordering of the state, the police, a supposed consensus) nor does it think that politics is
impossible or nondesirable, as Edelman does. We must ask: is all politics conservative by definition? Does
negativity or resistance to existing
power structures always translate back into some stable and positive form? The examples of the
kibbutzim and the various contradictions in the ideology and practices of contemporary reproduction
make it clear that Edelman, whilst having a strong argument about the shape that the ideology of the child takes, has to ignore the
unstable compromises that the contemporary world has already made with itself regarding life and
death in reproduction. Alan Sinfield has questioned whether we should really conflate all political
aspirations with Edelman’s conception of reproductive futurism: ‘perhaps reproductive futurism is
capturing and abusing other political aspirations and they should be reasserted’ (Sinfield, 2005: 50). It is not,
then, that all politics is reproductively futural , but that this image has come to pervert other political

desires, which may have a more complex relationship to children and a progressive conception of
humanity. Edelman polemically dismisses the ‘left’ attitude to the queer , as ‘nothing more than a sexual practice in need of
demystification’ (Edelman, 2004: 28). Whilst a certain strain of leftist thinking does pursue this demystificatory line (arguing, for example, that many forms of sexual
expression are ‘natural’), Edelman
reduces the left position on sexuality to a simple question of acceptance, as a
way of arguing that the queer can mean nothing to the left. But there are, as indicated above, quite different ways of thinking
about the family (in a non-futural, non-ideological way) and about politics, and the two together. When Rancière discusses the ‘subject of politics’, he makes it clear
that: The subject of politics can precisely be identified neither with “humanity” and the gatherings of a population, nor with the identities defined by constitutional
texts. They are always defined by an interval between identities, be these identities determined by social relations or juridical categories. (Rancière, 2006a: 59)
Could this ‘interval between identities’ be the jouissance that Edelman aligns with the queer? Whilst Edelman’s psychoanalytic subject could in no way be
understood as a similar (non)entity to Rancière’s ‘subject of politics,’ this idea of the interval seems to indicate a site of noncapture that could be described in a
certain sense as ‘queer.’ In Edelman’s response to John Brenkman he states that: ‘Sexuality refuses demystification as society refuses queerness’ (Edelman, 2002:
181-5). By
reifying sexuality as something that ‘refuses’ meaning, Edelman oddly substantialises it;
Rancière’s way out of the identities determined by social relations or juridical categories is much less
dependent on any pre-existing identity , even though he retains the very concept of politics that
Edelman rejects. There seems to be no reason why the subject of politics for Rancière couldn’t be a
‘queer’ subject in Edelman’s sense, at the same time as reclaiming a notion of rationality away from
the categories of the state. Before turning to a brief summary of this tentative queer rationalism, one more structural element of Edelman’s
argument will be addressed: that of the death drive.
Their critique precludes queer futurism regulating feminized, reproductive bodies to
the periphery facilitating their extermination.
Fraiman 2003
Susan, Cool Men and the Second Sex, pg 132-133

The problem with this is not only that it conflates the female body, maternity, and heteronomativity but
also that it posits, on the other side, a queerness unpolluted by procreative femininity or, as Edelman
says defiantly, “outside the cycles of reproduction.” Here Edelman makes use of parallel clauses to
underscore the equation between those “choosing to stand” apart from reproduction and those
“choosing to stand” by the side of AIDS sufferers. Elsewhere in “Kid Stuff” progeny-free queerness is
represented by the Tom Hanks character in Philadelphia and by the autobiographical gay male “I” who
steps forward, momentarily, to gloss a billboard against the grain of its pro-child message. Observing
that the child is tendered in opposition at once to abortion and to queer sexualities, the speaker would
refuse “the compulsion to embrace our own futurity in the privileged form of the child and thereby to
imagine the present as pregnant with the child of our identification”; instead, he challenges us to
embrace abortion, to eradicate the poignant optimism of pregnancy. Within such a stark binary schema,
what remains unthinkable is queer pregnancy, queerness within the cycles of reproduction, queer
women with biological children whether from hooking, marriage, or artificial insemination —or, for
that matter, queer men with kids genetically their own. The elision of these figures whose depiction
would flout the logic of AIDS-versus-pregnancy is evident at two moments in particular, when Edelman
acknowledges gay liberal demands for the right to adopt children (in a different register from his own
case against the figurative child). In the first instance, he mentions lesbians and gay men working for the
right “to adopt and raise children of their own”; in the second he invokes “the children we’d as eagerly
fly to China or Guatemala in order to adopt”. My interest here is not in the merits of campaigns for gay
“normalization” and marriage rights but rather in Edelman’s suppression of procreative queerness even
as he brings up lesbian and gay parenting. By tying this firmly and exclusively to adoption, Edelman
keeps the category of queerness apart from the feminized, reproductive body, which is imagined as
scarcely any closer or more familiar than China or Guatemala.

Only demands on the state can solve their aff – the aff doesn’t create change
otherwise
Duggan 1994
Lisa, Queering the State, Social Text, No. 39 (Summer, 1994), pp. 1-14

The problem for those of us engaged in queer scholarship and teaching, who have a stake in queer politics,
is how to respond to these attacks at a moment when we have unprecedented opportunities (we are present in
university curriculums and national politics as never before), yet confront perilous and paralyzing assaults. It is
imperative that we respond to these attacks in the public arena from which they are launched. We
cannot defend our teaching and scholarship without engaging in public debate and addressing the nature
and operations of the state upon which our jobs and futures depend. In other words, the need to turn our
attention to state politics is not only theoretical (though it is also that). It is time for queer intellectuals to
concentrate on the creative production of strategies at the boundary of queer and nation-strategies
specifically for queering the state.5
*Their embrace of total uncertainty turns the aff – some stable foundations is vital to
radical change and avoid cooption while avoiding reproductive futurity
Campbell 12 (Peter, University of Pittsburgh, English, Faculty Member, research focus on the
relationships between U.S. judicial argument and “radical,” or anti-establishmentarian queer of color
political advocacy“The Procedural Queer: Substantive Due Process, Lawrence v. Texas, and Queer
Rhetorical Futures”,
https://www.academia.edu/1521770/The_Procedural_Queer_Substantive_Due_Process_Lawrence_v._
Texas_and_Queer_Rhetorical_Futures)

The contingent aspect of radical queer politics has less to do with the inevitably probabilistic nature of
situations that demand attempts at change, than with the political choice to embrace uncertainty itself
as the basis and desired end result of politics of resistance to ever shifting boundaries of oppression.
Here critical legal rhetorical and radical queer futurist analysis differ in their conclusions about the
ethical value of legal rhetorical culture grounded in and understood through contingency. For the one,
the temporary articulation of normative certainty in the face of contingent rhetorical situations163 is
politically productive; for the other, the value of contingent politics is the ability to constantly reject
strategies of normative foundationalism. This tension can be productive rather than prohibitive to
future queer rhetorical analyses of the law. If the ‘‘standard’’ of justice itself is ‘‘contingent
probability,’’ then the end goal of judicial advocacy is the temporary resolution of the uncertainty this
contingent probability is reflective of.164 Kennedy’s doctrinal decisions in Lawrence can certainly be
understood as no different than any judge finding ‘‘some judicial choices logical and others irrational’’
based on her inevitable (as a human being) adoption of ‘‘a particular worldview, peopled with particular
kinds of human agents.’’ 165 The end goal of radical queer politics cannot be the resolution of
uncertainty, as such resolutions (for instance, Kennedy’s in Lawrence) will likely only participate in the
production of Puar’s ‘‘new normativities and exceptionalisms through the cataloguing of unknowables.’’
166 Nonetheless, my analysis of Kennedy’s meta-arguments in Lawrence suggests the possibility of
future queer rhetorical legal scholarship grounded in queer rhetorical contingency. The normative
limitations of Kennedy’s doctrinal arguments do not necessarily foreclose the possibility of radical
interpretive openness in his meta-procedural arguments about the future of due process analysis in
constitutional law. Reconsidering some of her earlier positions, Butler acknowledges in 2004 that
temporarily locating sexual-liberation struggles on certain normative foundations need not necessarily
foreclose the long-term radical undecidability of queer politics.167 In this way, critical rhetorical
understandings of the relationship between legal rhetoric and contingency can make a rich contribution
to queer scholarship performing practical168 queer analysis of how status quo homo- and
heteronormative liberal sexual politics might be co-opted for radical queer political ends.

Overidentification with the death drive fails to escape the social order--- Queerness is
produced and made possible by its position within that order, not in its negation.
Brenkman 2002
John, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and
Baruch College, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, pg. 178-180
What I want to question here is the idea that queer sexualities can be said to enact or embody or afford
the experience of the underlying mechanism of the subject and the signifier, jouissance and the
death drive, in the psychoanalytic sense. More generally, I am questioning whether any sexual practice
can be equated with the logic of the signifier, the structure of desire, and so on . This is more than a
philosophical category mistake, though it is that too. First of all, sexual practices and experiences, unlike the logic of
the signifier or the structure of desire (assuming these are plausible concepts in the first place), are carried out by
individuals through the whole of their being, putting in play their identity formations, their
fantasies and fetishes, their social embodiment. In short, sexuality is practiced and experienced not by
the "subject" but by the "person." Second, assuming that the second version of jouissance and the
death drive is the secret of the force within the social-symbolic order that ruptures the symbolic
and the subject, then this jouissance and death drive are surely at work in all sexualities, including
the straightest heterosexual practices and experiences. Third, while queer sexualities are obviously in this
historical moment anti-social, it does not follow that they are the very embodiment or enactment of
asociality or the asymbolic. What has given, for example, anonymous sex its value in the gay community—what has made it
worth fighting for—is its role in creating an alternative sociality. The bars and the baths are a cultural creation, a subculture, which makes
certain sexual practices and experiences possible. Queerness
is not outside sociality; it is an innovation in sociality .
In sum, there is no match between sexualities of any sort and the "structure" or "logic" or
"mechanism" of the psyche.
at: reps k
 2ac discourse doesn’t shape reality
Discourse isn’t the primary shaper of reality --- material change from the plan
outweighs --- internal link turns reps
Thierry Balzacq 5, Professor of Political Science and IR @ Namar University, “The Three Faces of
Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context” European Journal of International Relations,
London: Jun 2005, Volume 11, Issue 2
However, despite important insights, this position remains highly disputable. The reason behind this qualification is not hard to understand.
With great trepidation my contention is that one of the main distinctions we need to take into account while examining securitization is that
between 'institutional' and 'brute' threats. In its attempts to follow a more radical approach to security problems wherein threats are
institutional, that is, mere products of communicative relations between agents, the CS has neglected the importance of 'external or brute
threats', that is, threats that do not depend on language mediation to be what they are - hazards for human
life. In methodological terms, however, any framework over-emphasizing either institutional or brute threat risks losing sight of important
aspects of a multifaceted phenomenon. Indeed, securitization, as suggested earlier, is successful when the securitizing agent and the audience
reach a common structured perception of an ominous development. In this scheme, there is no security problem except through the language
game. Therefore, how problems are 'out there' is exclusively contingent upon how we linguistically depict them .
This is not always true. For one, language does not construct reality; at best, it shapes our perception of it.
Moreover, it is not theoretically useful nor is it empirically credible to hold that what we say about a
problem would determine its essence. For instance, what I say about a typhoon would not change its
essence. The consequence of this position, which would require a deeper articulation, is that some security problems are the attribute of the
development itself. In short, threats are not only institutional;
some of them can actually wreck entire political
communities regardless of the use of language. Analyzing security problems then becomes a matter of understanding how
external contexts, including external objective developments, affect securitization . Thus, far from being a departure from
constructivist approaches to security, external developments are central to it.
 2ac china reps
Assessing Chinese motivation is possible and prevents security dilemmas
Joseph K. Clifton 11, “DISPUTED THEORY AND SECURITY POLICY: RESPONDING TO “THE RISE OF
CHINA”,” 2011, http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1164&context=cmc_theses

First,motives can be known. Mearsheimer is correct in observing that assessing motives can be difficult, but this does not mean that
the task is impossible. There clearly are ways of finding out information about the goals of states and the means with which they

plan to achieve them. One of the most important roles of intelligence analysts, for example, is to determine state interests and expected behavior based on obtained information. The possibility that

information may be flawed should not lead to a rejection of all information. People make decisions
based on less than perfect knowledge all of the time . This ability to know motives extends to future motives, because an analyst can use
information such as historical trends to observe consistencies or constant evolutions of motives. Prediction of the

future is necessarily less certain in its accuracy, but the prediction can still be made .104¶ Second, even if there is still some
uncertainty of motives, the rational response is not to assume absolute aggression. Assuming aggressive motive in a situation of uncertainty ignites the security dilemma, which could actually decrease a state’s security.
Mearsheimer calls this tragic, but it is not necessary. An illustrative example is Mearsheimer’s analysis of the German security situation were the United States to withdraw its military protection. Mearsheimer argues that it would
be rational for Germany to develop nuclear weapons, since these weapons would provide a deterrent, and it would also be rational for nuclear European powers to wage a preemptive war against Germany to prevent it from
developing a nuclear deterrent. 105 This scenario is not rational for either side because it ignores motives. If Germany knows that other states will attack if it were to develop nuclear weapons, then it would not be rational for it to

the
develop nuclear weapons. And if other states know that Germany’s development of nuclear weapons is only as a deterrent, then it would not be rational to prevent German nuclear development. The point is that

security dilemma exists because of a lack of motivational knowledge, so the proper response is to try to
enhance understanding of motives, not discard motivational knowledge altogether . Misperception is
certainly a problem in international politics, but reducing misperception would allow states to better conform

to defensive realist logic, which results in preferable outcomes relative to offensive realism. 106¶ Assessing motives is vital
in the case of the rise of China, because mutually preferable outcomes can be achieved if China is not an aggressive power, as
offensive realism would have to assume, but is actually a status quo power with aims that have limited effect on the security of the U.S. and other potentially affected countries. I do not mean here to claim

with certainty that China is and will always be a status quo power , and policymakers likely have access to
more intentional information than what is publicly known . At the very least, valuing motivational assessments
empowers policymakers to act on this knowledge, which is preferable because of the possibility of
reducing competition and conflict.

Assessing China war scenarios are good – key to sound policymaking even if it’s not
the most realistic
Goldstein 13 (Avery, David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations and
Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania, Senior
Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Published in International Security, Vol.
37, No. 4 (Spring 2013), pp. 49–89)

Two concerns have driven much of the debate about international security in the post–Cold War era.
The first is the potentially deadly mix of nuclear proliferation, rogue states, and international terrorists, a
worry that became dominant after the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11,
2001.1 The second concern, one whose prominence has waxed and waned since the mid-1990s, is the
potentially disruptive impact that China will have if it emerges as a peer competitor of the United States,
challenging an international order established during the era of U.S. preponderance.2 Rejecting this
second concern, some analysts have expressed reservations about the dominant post–September 11
security agenda, arguing that China could challenge U.S. global interests in ways that terrorists and
rogue states cannot. In this article, I raise a more pressing issue, one to which not enough attention has
been paid. For at least the next decade, while China remains relatively weak, the gravest danger in Sino-
American relations is the possibility the two countries will find themselves in a crisis that could
escalate to open military conflict.

In contrast to the long-term prospect of a new great power rivalry between the United States and China,
which ultimately rests on debatable claims about the intentions of the two countries and uncertain
forecasts about big shifts in their national capabilities, the danger of instability in a crisis
involving these two nuclear-armed states is a tangible, near-term concern .3 Even
if the probability of such a war-threatening crisis and its escalation to the use of significant military force
is low, the potentially catastrophic consequences of this scenario provide good reason for analysts to
better understand its dynamics and for policymakers to fully consider its implications. Moreover, events
since 2010—especially those relevant to disputes in the East and South China Seas—suggest that the
danger of a military confrontation in the Western Pacific that could lead to a U.S.-China standoff may
be on the rise.

Skeptics underestimate the risk.

Littlefield and Lowther 15 — Alex Littlefield, Assistant Professor in the Department of International
Trade at Feng Chia University (Taiwan), holds a Ph.D. in International Politics from National Chung Hsing
University (Taiwan), and Adam Lowther, Research Professor at the Air Force Research Institute at
Maxwell Air Force Base, Director of the School of Advanced Nuclear Deterrence Studies at the Air Force
Global Strike Command, former Assistant Professor of Political Science at Arkansas Tech University and
Columbus State University, holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Alabama, 2015
(“Taiwan and the Prospects for War Between China and America,” The Diplomat, August 11th, Available
Online at http://thediplomat.com/2015/08/taiwan-and-the-prospects-for-war-between-china-and-
america/, Accessed 06-25-2016)

While the scenario described is certainly not inevitable, the fact tha[t] many American readers will see it
as implausible if not impossible is an example of the mirror-imaging that often occurs when attempting
to understand an adversary. China is not the United States nor do Chinese leaders think like their
counterparts in the United States. Unless we give serious thought to possible scenarios where nuclear
conflict could occur, the United States may be unprepared for a situation that escalates beyond its
ability to prevent a catastrophe.
 at: pan
Pan concedes our reps aren’t the cause of war
Pan 12 (Chengxin Pan, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University, PhD, Political
Science and IR from Peking University, November 2012, “Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global
Politics: Western Representations of China's Rise,” Edward Elgar Publishing)

Despite the powerful effect of the 'China threat' paradigm on policy-making, we must acknowledge that
the 'threat' representation is not the only contributing factor. To the extent that international relations are
interactively constructed, the hardline China policy in the US is in part constituted by China's strategic
behaviour. For example, the concept of AirSea Battle' (developed by the Washington-based Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and now seriously entertained by the Pentagon as a part of a
broader strategy of dealing with China) might be seen as a necessary response to Beijing's growing
A2/AD capabilities,61 rather than a pure brainchild of the 'China threat" discourse . Yet, equally, even as we
turn attention to Chinese capabilities and behaviour in global politics, we must not lose sight of the constitutive role of the 'China threat*
paradigm in the development of Chinese worldviews and strategic behaviour in the first instance. For example, the growth of China s A2/AD
capabilities cannot possibly take place in an international vacuum, rather, they can themselves be seen as responses to still earlier Western
policies on China, policies which are inevitably shaped by the 'China threat' perception In this section, I will examine how some key- indicators
of the China threat, such as jingoistic Chinese nationalism, realpolitik thinking, and assertive foreign policy, can be understood not as inherent
Chinese traits, but as social constructs courtesy of the China threat' theory as practice.

Pan is reductionist and the alt fails — can never generate a meaningful relationship
with China.
Jones 14 — David Martin Jones, Professor of Politics at University of Glasgow, PhD from LSE, Australian
Journal of Political Science, February 21, 2014, 49:1, "Managing the China Dream: Communist Party
politics after the Tiananmen incident ", Taylor and Francis Online

Notwithstanding this Western fascination with China and the positive response of former Marxists, such
as Jacques, to the new China, Pan discerns an Orientalist ideology distorting Western commentary on
the party state, and especially its international relations (6). Following Edward Said, Pan claims that such
Western Orientalism reveals ‘not something concrete about the orient, but something about the
orientalists themselves, their recurring latent desire of fears and fantasies about the orient’ (16). In
order to unmask the limits of Western representations of China’s rise, Pan employs a critical
‘methodology’ that ‘draws on constructivist and deconstructivist approaches’ (9). Whereas the ‘former
questions the underlying dichotomy of reality/knowledge in Western study of China’s international
relations’, the latter shows how paradigmatic representations of China ‘condition the way we give
meaning to that country’ and ‘are socially constitutive of it’ (9). Pan maintains that the two paradigms of
‘China threat’ and ‘China opportunity’ in Western discourse shape China’s reality for Western ‘China
watchers’ (3). These discourses, Pan claims, are ‘ambivalent’ (65). He contends that this ‘bifocal
representation of China, like Western discourses of China more generally, tell us a great deal about the
west itself, its self -imagination, its torn, anxious, subjectivity, as well as its discursive effects of othering’
(65). This is a large claim. Interestingly, Pan fails to note that after the Tiananmen incident in 1989,
Chinese new left scholarship also embraced Said’s critique of Orientalism in order to reinforce both
the party state and a burgeoning sense of Chinese nationalism . To counter Western liberal discourse,
academics associated with the Central Party School promoted an ideology of Occidentalism to deflect
domestic and international pressure to democratise China. In this, they drew not only upon Said, but
also upon Foucault and the post-1968 school of French radical thought that, as Richard Wolin has
demonstrated, was itself initiated in an appreciation of Mao’s cultural revolution. In other words, the
critical and deconstructive methodologies that came to influence American and European social science
from the 1980s had a Maoist inspiration (Wolin 2010: 12–18). Subsequently, in the changed
circumstances of the 1990s, as American sinologist Fewsmith has shown, young Chinese scholars
‘adopted a variety of postmodernist and critical methodologies’ (2008: 125). Paradoxically, these
scholars, such as Wang Hui and Zhang Kuan (Wang 2011), had been educated in the USA and were
familiar with fashionable academic criticism of a postmodern and deconstructionist hue that
‘demythified’ the West (Fewsmith 2008: 125–29). This approach, promulgated in the academic journal
Dushu (Readings), deconstructed, via Said and Foucault, Western narratives about China. Zhang Kuan, in
particular, rejected Enlightenment values and saw postmodern critical theory as a method to build up a
national ‘discourse of resistance’ and counter Western demands regarding issues such as human rights
and intellectual property. It is through its affinity with this self-strengthening , Occidentalist lens, that
Pan’s critical study should perhaps be critically read. Simply put, Pan identifies a political economy of
fear and desire that informs and complicates Western foreign policy and, Pan asserts , tells us more
about the West’s ‘self-imagination’ than it does about Chinese reality. Pan attempts to sustain this claim
via an analysis, in Chapter 5, of the self-fulfilling prophecy of the China threat, followed, in Chapters 6
and 7, by exposure of the false promises and premises of the China ‘opportunity’. Pan certainly offers a
provocative insight into Western attitudes to China and their impact on Chinese political thinking. In
particular, he demonstrates that China’s foreign policy-makers react negatively to what they view as a
hostile American strategy of containment (101). In this context, Pan contends, accurately, that Sino–US
relations are mutually constitutive and the USA must take some responsibility for the rise of China
threat (107). This latter point, however, is one that Australian realists like Owen Harries, whom Pan
cites approvingly, have made consistently since the late 1990s. In other words, not all Western
analysis uncritically endorses the view that China’s rise is threatening. Nor is all Western perception
of this rise reducible to the threat scenario advanced by recent US administrations. Pan’s subsequent
argument that the China opportunity thesis leads to inevitable disappointment and subtly reinforces the
China threat paradigm is, also, somewhat misleading . On the one hand, Pan notes that Western
anticipation of ‘China’s transformation and democratization’ has ‘become a burgeoning cottage
industry’ (111). Yet, on the other hand, Pan observes that Western commentators, such as Jacques,
demonstrate a growing awareness that the democratisation thesis is a fantasy. That is, Pan, like Jacques,
argues that China ‘will neither democratize nor collapse, but may instead remain politically authoritarian
and economically stable at the same time’ (132). To merge, as Pan does, the democratisation thesis into
its authoritarian antithesis in order to evoke ‘present Western disillusionment’ (132) with China is
somewhat reductionist . Pan’s contention that we need a new paradigm shift ‘to free ourselves from the
positivist aspiration to grand theory or transcendental scientific paradigm itself’ (157) might be
admirable, but this will not be achieved by a constructivism that would ultimately meet with the
approval of what Brady terms China’s thought managers (Brady: 6).
 --at: orientalism/integration=imperialist
China wants to be part of the international order, no one is forcing or “dominating”
them
Irvine 2017 PhD in Asian Studies from the University of Adelaide. Irvine, Roger.
“Nationalists or Internationalists? China’s International Relations Experts Debate the
Future.” Journal of Contemporary China (2017): 1-15.
Although they supported a moderate form of nationalism, many of China’s leading IR experts were strongly attracted to
the view that it should play a supportive and responsible role in the international system. This was
seen as vital for both China’s national and international interests. Given their belief that China’s strength was over-
rated, and that it should therefore pursue its goals with greater sensitivity and less haste, they tended not unexpectedly to emphasize
the benefits to China of enhancing its international relationships within a cooperative framework. Qin
Yaqing was one of the strongest advocates of internationalism. He argued for a new form of pluralistic global governance based on equal
participation of all countries rather than the present bias toward individual country interests, which he saw as a failed form of global
governance that would be insufficient to cope with new challenges.43 Wu Xinbo
(Fudan University) described China as a
supporter of ‘peace-oriented power’, meaning that in an interdependent world it stood for a collective
approach to world leadership with joint responsibility for the multilateral management and reform of
international mechanisms. China would ‘never seek to monopolize the leadership of world affairs’.44 Chu Shulong
recommended in regard to global governance that China (and the US) must develop ‘new thinking that
surpasses traditional concerns over national interests’. While national interests were important, in ‘an increasingly
interconnected global village’ all countries needed to support global interests. 45 Fu Mengzi (CICIR)
supported the view that China was a beneficiary of the existing international order. It was therefore ‘not
necessary to subvert or change that order’ even though it was ‘far from perfect’.46
 2ac taiwan reps
Confrontation with Taiwan is more likely than any other hotspot
Swaine 16 (Michael Swaine, Senior Associate in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, Coordinator of the U.S.-China Crisis Management Program co-sponsored by the
Carnegie Endowment and the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies, Contributor to
China Leadership Monitor—a journal published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former
Senior Policy Analyst and RAND Center for Asia-Pacific Policy Chair in Northeast Asian Security at the
RAND Corporation, former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of
California-Berkeley, former Research Associate at Harvard University, holds a Ph.D. in Government from
Harvard University, with with Wenyan Deng, former Junior Fellow in the Asia Program at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, Graduate Student in International Relations and Security Studies at
the University of Chicago, and Aube Rey Lescure, former Research Assistant in the Asia Program at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016 (“The Seven Components of a Stable Balance of
Power,” Creating a Stable Asia: An Agenda for a U.S.-China Balance of Power, Available Online at
http://carnegieendowment.org/files/CEIP_Swaine_U.S.-Asia_Final.pdf)

A Largely Demilitarized Taiwan Strait

Arguably, a Sino-U.S. confrontation over Taiwan, more than any other hotspot in the Western Pacific,
has the potential to escalate to a direct military conflict of major proportions. Indeed, this constitutes
the most likely potential trigger for an outright war between the two powers. As countless experts and
pundits have observed, despite ever-closer cross-strait economic ties and people-to-people contacts and
a long, recent period of positive cross-strait relations under former Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou, the
combination of growing sentiment on Taiwan against reunification (under almost any conditions),
continued U.S. political and military support for the island, and China’s growing military and economic
strength could significantly increase the potential for future crises. These could arise over tension-
producing political events on Taiwan or the mainland or as a result either of a much stronger China’s
refusal to accept future U.S. arms sales to the island or the emergence of a new pattern of Taiwan
politics dominated by pro-independence elements. In fact, the recent 2016 election by a large margin of
members of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party to both the Taiwan presidency and the
Legislative Yuan suggests that cross-strait relations might become more turbulent in the near future, as
cross-strait relations languish and especially if Beijing becomes significantly less confident in the
prospects for eventual reunification. And such increased turbulence is particularly likely to become a
long-term problem if this election portends a fundamental long-term weakening of the pro–One China
Nationalist Party (Guomindang), as many observers believe.16

Without a more stable long-term modus vivendi between China, Taiwan, and the United States, any
future balance of power in the Western Pacific will quite likely remain precarious, if not significantly
unstable. Unfortunately, such an arrangement is unlikely to involve any kind of major political
breakthrough across the strait, whether in the direction of peaceful unification or a peaceful transition
to de jure Taiwan independence. As long as Beijing remains committed to reunifying the island with
mainland China, Taipei remains opposed to entering into talks with Beijing on the political status of the
islands, and Washington remains committed to providing the island with a level of political and military
support that permits such opposition, it is hard to imagine that such a breakthrough will occur, even if
cross-strait economic and people-to-people ties deepen significantly. Hence the most that can be
achieved, and what would most likely be necessary to ensure a reasonably stable balance of power, is
the elimination or, failing that, the significant reduction of the Taiwan issue as a major source of security
competition between the United States and China. This would require at best the demilitarization and
political stabilization of the existing uneasy dynamic, via a more explicit understanding of restraint
between Beijing and Washington over arms deployments and [end page 88] a possible future use of
force. Failing that, at the very least, it would require more comprehensive CBMs and tacit
understandings designed to reduce the potential for a dangerous use of force. This would most likely
include assurances to Beijing that Taiwanese independence will not occur without Beijing’s approval and
to Washington that Beijing will not employ force against the island in the absence of clear Taiwanese
attempts to achieve permanent separation from the mainland.
 2ac econ predictions
Economic predictions accurate – using it is a productive tool
Avent 11 (Ryan, author of The Gated City, “Economic Science” 3/17//11, The Bellows)
http://www.ryanavent.com/blog/?p=2380

Is economics a science? Let me first associate myself with Adam Ozimek’s comments here. If you want
to say that economics isn’t a “hard science”, that might be all right, depending on just what you mean by
it. If you mean that economists can’t run lab experiments and can’t predict outcomes as accurately as,
say, chemists, then that’s acceptable to me. If you mean that economists have no experiments, or don’t
use the scientific method, or something of that nature, then you’re dead wrong. The currency of the
economics realm is evidence. When economists do research they form hypotheses, build models, gather
data, test the models against the data, and publish their conclusions. If other economists try to get
similar results and fail, the original result is called into question. Economics is quite often effectively
predictive. If the supply of one good is disrupted, economists can tell you with great certainty what will
happen to demand for complementary goods and substitutes. If supply levels are known and research
establishing elasticities has been done, they can tell you even more about what will happen. Their
predictions will nearly always be right. And this is true for many aspects of economics. It’s important to
note that because economists can’t always run their own experiments, there will tend to be more
confidence about theories that focus on things which occur very often. Prices shift constantly, and
economists consequently know a LOT about prices. Massive, global economic recessions occur about
once a century. There is obviously a lot more uncertainty regarding the theories that describe these
events. Economics struggles with limited data at times. Economists could substantially increase their
macroeconomic sample sizes if they had good data on economic activity for all of human history, but
unfortunately governments haven’t been collecting data all that long. (Though economic historians have
put together respectable careers carefully assembling historical data sets.) The Job Openings and Labor
Turnover Survey, which has been the subject of intense study in this recession, only goes back to 2000.
But much of the progress of “hard” science has been about improving the available data. These
limitations don’t detract from the scientific endeavor at the heart of the economics discipline.
Economics is not empty philosophizing or groping in the dark.

Economic predictions are accurate and can improve

Douglas w. Hands 84 (Department of Economics University of Puget Sound, “What Economics Is Not:
An Economist's Response to Rosenberg Source: Philosophy of Science”, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp.
495-503 http://www.jstor.org/stable/187496)

the "predictive weakness" (p. 297) of

1. Economic Predictions. Much of Rosenberg's discussion is directed toward explaining
modem economics and the discipline's inability (or lack of desire) to "improve its predictive content" (p. 301).
This failure to generate successful predictions and to improve the few predictions which are made is taken as an
empirical fact about even the most applied economic theories. No evidence is provided, or even suggested, to support
this empirical claim. Rosenberg certainly needs to provide evidence for the ubiquitous predictive failure of applied economic theory.
Such criticism is by no means "well known" or "standard" in the literature on economic methodology . It is
"standard" to argue that economic theories are insulated from direct falsification that they are built on inadequate behavioral foundations and
that in their most abstract form they fail to yield predictions or even to systematically connect up with applied theories which might yield pre-
dictions. But systematic
predictive failure is not a standard methodological criticism of applied economic
theory. The reason why such predictive failure is not a standard criticism is quite simple: Rosenberg has
exaggerated the extent of this failure. Predictive failure is simply not the ubiquitous fact of modem
economic theory which Rosenberg assumes. While nowhere near the standards of the best natural science, applied economic
theories (both micro and macro) do generate an ocean of successful predictions, on everything from the
impact of trucking deregulation to the demand for consumer credit . Rosenberg's claim that economic
predictions have not "improved" (p. 301) with time is also exaggerated. While there is always room for more
improvement, modem macro econometric models provide extraordinary accuracy relative to pre-World
War I1 business cycle models. Where substantial errors do occur, such as the inability to predict the
inflationary impact of the OPEC induced supply-side shock, the models are improved so that failures of
the same type are less likely to reoccur.3 Rosenberg even goes so far as to argue that more predictively successful
alternatives currently exist (at least in the micro domain) and are neglected, ostensibly because of an irrational
professional attraction to intentional and extremal views of human behavior . He tells us that even if a more
predictive theory were available: "it is not likely to actually deflect practicing economists from their
intentional extremal research program . . . the reason is that they are not really much interested in
questions. Readers of earlier drafts of this paper noted that while Rosenberg is faulted for not providing specific examples of "failure," the
above discussion does not provide specific examples of "success." Examples of success abound in any
copy of an applied economics journal, a Federal Reserve Bulletin, or any other publication specializing in
applied economics.
 2ac globalization k
Failure to engage with market mechanisms only reproduces the worst parts of the
status quo – only working with the world as it is renders another world possible
Bryant 12—professor of philosophy at Collin College (Levi, We’ll Never Do Better Than a Politician:
Climate Change and Purity, 5/11/12, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/well-never-do-
better-than-a-politician-climate-change-and-purity/)

However, pointing this out and deriding market based solutions doesn’t get us very far. In fact, such a
response to proposed market-based solutions is downright dangerous and irresponsible. The fact of
the matter is that 1) we currently live in a market based world, 2) there is not , in the foreseeable future an
alternative system on the horizon, and 3), above all, we need to do something now. We can’t afford
to reject interventions simply because they don’t meet our ideal conceptions of how things should be. We
have to work with the world that is here , not the one that we would like to be here . And here it’s crucial to
note that pointing this out does not entail that we shouldn’t work for producing that other world. It just
means that we have to grapple with the world that is actually there before us. ¶ It pains me to write this post
because I remember, with great bitterness, the diatribes hardcore Obama supporters leveled against legitimate leftist criticisms on the
grounds that these critics were completely unrealistic idealists who, in their demand for “purity”, were asking for “ponies and unicorns”.
This rejoinder always seemed to ignore that words have power and that Obama, through his profound power of rhetoric,
had, at least the power to shift public debates and frames, opening a path to making new forms of
policy and new priorities possible. The tragedy was that he didn’t use that power, though he has gotten
better.¶ I do not wish to denounce others and dismiss their claims on these sorts of grounds. As a Marxist anarchists, I do believe that
we should fight for the creation of an alternative hominid ecology or social world. I think that the call to commit and
fight, to put alternatives on the table, has been one of the most powerful contributions of thinkers like Zizek and Badiou. If we don’t
commit and fight for alternatives those alternatives will never appear in the world. Nonetheless,
we still have to grapple
with the world we find ourselves in. And it is here, in my encounters with some Militant Marxists, that I
sometimes find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that they are unintentionally aiding and abetting the
very things they claim to be fighting. In their refusal to become impure, to work with situations or
assemblages as we find them, to sully their hands, they end up reproducing the very system they
wish to topple and change. Narcissistically they get to sit there, smug in their superiority and purity,
while everything continues as it did before because they’ve refused to become politicians or engage
in the difficult concrete work of assembling human and nonhuman actors to render another world possible.
As a consequence, they occupy the position of Hegel’s beautiful soul that denounces the horrors of the world, celebrate
the beauty of their soul, while depending on those horrors of the world to sustain their own position.
¶ Toengage in politics is to engage in networks or ecologies of relations between humans and nonhumans. To engage in ecologies is to
descend into networks of causal relations and feedback loops that you cannot completely master and that will modify your own
commitments and actions. But there’s no other way, there’s no way around this, and we do need to act now.

Globalization’s inevitable and necessary

Barnhizer 6 (law professor at Cleveland State University (David, Georgetown International
Environmental Law Review, “Waking from Sustainability's "Impossible Dream": The Decisionmaking
Realities of Business and Government”, http://www.allbusiness.com/human-resources/employee-
development-leadership/4077913-1.html)

The scale of social needs, including the need for expanded productive activity, has grown so large that it cannot be shut
off at all, and certainly not abruptly. It cannot even be ratcheted down in any significant fashion without producing serious harms to human
societies and hundreds of millions of people. Even if it were possible to shift back to systems of local self-sufficiency, the
consequences of the transition process would be catastrophic for many people and even deadly to the point of continual
conflict, resource wars, increased poverty, and strife. What are needed are concrete, workable, and pragmatic strategies that
produce effective and intelligently designed economic activity in specific contexts and, while seeking efficiency and
conservation, place economic and social justice high on a list of priorities.60

Many developing country groups involved in efforts to protect the environment and resist the impacts of free trade on their communities have
been concerned with the harmful effects of economic change. Part of the concern is the increased scale of economic activity. Some
concerns relate to who benefits and who loses in the changing context imposed by globalization. These
concerns are legitimate and understandable. So are the other deep currents running beneath their political positions, including those
of resistance to change of any kind and a rejection of the market approach to economic activities. In the system described inaccurately as free
market capitalism, economic activity not only breaks down existing systems, it creates new systems and-as Joseph Schumpeter observed-
continually repeats the process through cycles of "creative destruction."61 This pattern of creative
destruction unfolds as
necessarily and relentlessly as does the birth-maturation-death-rebirth cycle of the natural environment. This occurs even
in a self-sufficient or autarkic market system capable of managing all variables within its closed dominion. But when
the system breaks out of its closed environment, the ability of a single national actor to control the system's dynamics erodes and ultimately
disappears in the face of differential conditions, needs, priorities, and agendas.

Globalization's ability to produce wealth for a particular group simultaneously produces harms to different people
and interests and generates unfair resource redistribution within existing cultures. This is an unavoidable consequence of globalization.62 The
problem is that globalization has altered the rules of operation of political, economic, and social activities, and in doing so multiplied greatly our
ability to create benefit and harm.63 While some understandably want the unsettling and often chaotic effects of globalization to go away, it
can only be dealt with, not reversed. The system in which we live and work is no longer closed. There are few contexts
not connected to the dynamics of some aspect of the extended economic and social systems resulting from globalization. This means the
wide ranging and incompatible variables of a global economic, human rights, and social fairness system are resulting
in conflicts and unanticipated interpenetrations that no one fully understands, anticipates, or controls.64 Local self-sufficiency is
the loser in this process. It can remain a nostalgic dream but rarely a reality. Except for isolated cultures and niche
activities, there is very little chance that anyone will be unaffected by this transformational process. Change is the constant, and it will take
several generations before we return to a period of relative stasis. Even then it will only be a respite before the pattern once again intensifies.
 AT: Set Col
Perm do both- The state can be reformed to help Native Americans – our evidence
cites ten recent empirics that their authors ignore.
Bureau of Indian Education reform, increased tribal control of schools, removing regulatory barriers to
development, land return, cooperation with tribal governments, crime prevention on reservations,
annual White House conferences, disaster assistance, allowing tribal courts to prosecute non-Natives
who commit crime on their land, and vetoing Keystone.

Zezima 14 [Katie, national political correspondent covering the 2016 presidential election. She
previously served as a White House correspondent for The Post. As Obama makes rare presidential visit
to Indian reservation, past U.S. betrayals loom June 13, 2014,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-to-make-rare-presidential-visit-to-indian-reservation-
past-betrayals-loom-over-meeting/2014/06/13/70046890-f26f-11e3-9ebc-2ee6f81ed217_story.html
accessed 9.27.2015] JCH-PF

This isolated town nestled in the undulating prairie of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Nation is so small,
its only formal sign is a boulder spray-painted with “C. Ball.” But Friday afternoon, it briefly became the
center of the American political world when President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama visited. It
was Obama’s first stop as president on an Indian reservation, where he touted the strides his
administration has made with Native Americans, unveiled new tribal education and economic measures,
and touched on the difficult work that remains to pull many Indians out of crippling poverty and
endemic unemployment. “My administration is determined to partner with tribes,” Obama said. “It
takes place every day on just about every issue that touches your lives.” The president met with Native
American children ahead of the tribe’s annual Flag Day powwow. Groups of tribal dancers clad in
vibrantly colored costumes performed a traditional dance for him. The administration announced plans
to reform the Bureau of Indian Education to better educate native children and increase tribal control
of schools. The White House also plans to remove regulatory barriers to infrastructure and energy
development, encourage the use of tax-exempt bonds for economic development and increase the
number of veterans that the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Health Services hire. Many tribal leaders
say Obama has done more in six years for Native Americans than all of his predecessors
combined. The administration has given land back to tribes and worked one-on-one with tribal
governments, and it is cracking down on crime in Indian Country. “The best thing that’s happened to
Indian Country has been President Obama being elected,” said Dave Archambault II, chairman of
Standing Rock. But many Native Americans also retain deep distrust of a federal government that
historically has reneged on agreements and, many believe, treated Native Americans as an afterthought
for generations. “There’s been a bad track record. Our fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers
have gone to Washington, and there’s been no promises made and no promises kept. That’s why we’ve
not trusted the federal government,” said Tex “Red Tipped Arrow” Hall, tribal chairman of the Mandan,
Hidatsa and Arikara Nation in North Dakota. Here on Standing Rock, where cows graze on the Cannon
Ball River and a casino is the main economic driver, the statistics paint a bleak picture: 40 percent of the
residents live in poverty and two-thirds are unemployed. Sexual assault and violence have long been
problems on the reservation, which stretches down into South Dakota and is roughly the size of
Connecticut. Rates of suicide and alcoholism are high and at least half of high school students drop out.
“It’s kind of a poor town. There’s no money,” said resident Paul Red-Dogg, who stood outside Cannon
Ball’s small post office on Friday waiting for it to open. He is unemployed and his options are limited
because he cannot afford a car. Despite such realities, Archambault said he remains optimistic, in part
because of Obama’s outreach to Native Americans. Obama has hosted annual conferences for tribal
leaders in Washington, where native officials discussed issues facing their communities with White
House and administration staffers. Obama’s senior policy adviser for Native American Affairs, Jodi
Gillette, grew up on Standing Rock. “The fact that tribal leaders can annually go sit down with the
president, this is something that has rarely ever occurred,” said Eddie Brown, a professor and director of
American Indian Studies at Arizona State University. Obama has also made it easier for Native American
nations to receive disaster assistance by allowing them to directly contact the Federal Emergency
Management Agency and streamlined permitting for economic development projects. “It’s taken out
that step of having to go to the governor. That is just such a boost to our sovereignty,” said Cynthia Iyall,
leader of the Nisqually Indian tribe in Washington state. The administration agreed to pay $3.4 billion to
settle a decades-long class-action lawsuit against the government for mismanaging native land-trust
royalties. The payments, however, have been delayed because thousands of people who were deemed
ineligible are appealing. Montana senators have formally complained that the process is shrouded in
secrecy. The government also established a land buy-back program, which pays owners who voluntarily
sold their land. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has made improving safety in Indian Country a top
priority, creating a task force that has been conducting hearings across the country since December. The
group is examining disparities in criminal sentencing for Native Americans. It established a permanent
office of tribal justice and proposed language in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act
that allows tribal courts to prosecute non-Indians who assault native women on tribal lands. The law,
which Obama signed last year, does not go into effect until 2015, but the Justice Department chose
three tribes to begin enforcing the law a year ahead of the country’s other 563 federally recognized
tribes. Despite the recent efforts, the deep scars on Indian Country remain, and many worry that the
initiatives, which will take years to come to fruition, may stall after Obama leaves office. “We’ve made
promises we frankly haven’t met to provide education and other services to Indian people,” said Kevin
Washburn, assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the Interior Department and an enrolled member of
the Chickasaw nation in Oklahoma. “It’s a tough legacy to live down.” Many Native American leaders
from Montana to Oklahoma are vehemently opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline, which the Obama
administration again postponed a decision on in April. Other Native American nations are fighting for the
right to take part in the oil boom in North Dakota. Hall said the layers of bureaucracy that Native
Americans must go through to receive drilling permits make working on Indian lands undesirable for
energy companies. “If you contract for an oil rig for $30,000 a day, you’re not going to wait for a year.
You’re going to go off the reservation,” he said. “You’re going to have a donut hole around the Indian
nations.” Archambault said he and other tribal members have spent the last week giddily anticipating
the president’s trip. Obama is the first president to visit Native American land since Bill Clinton in 1999;
before him it was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Obama also visited the Crow Nation in Montana during his 2008
campaign. “I know what the president is making is not going to solve all of our problems overnight. I
know that it’s not going to undo all the wrongs that have been done to Native Americans or to Indian
Country, but it’s going to inspire a lot of people,” Archambault said. “If it brings some hope to one
individual, if it helps one single mother, if a veteran feels pride, it’s worth it.”
Decolonizing academic spaces like debate does nothing to solve their impacts and
provides an out for liberal settlers to assuage guilt and protect power structures.
Tuck 12 Eve Tuck (Asst. Prof. Educational Foundations @ State Univ. of New York, New Paltz).
“Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1.1 (2012), pp. 1-
40

Fanon told us in 1963 that decolonizing the mind is the first step, not the only step toward overthrowing
colonial regimes. Yet we wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to focus on decolonizing
the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness , as if it were the sole activity of decolonization; to
allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land. We
agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to see settler
colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values in
search of ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the
front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization , even though the experience
of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is
indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into
action that disrupts settler colonialism. So, we respectfully disagree with George Clinton and Funkadelic
(1970) and En Vogue (1992) when they assert that if you “free your mind, the rest (your ass) will follow.”
Paulo Freire, eminent education philosopher, popular educator, and liberation theologian, wrote his
celebrated book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in no small part as a response to Fanon’s Wretched of the
Earth. Its influence upon critical pedagogy and on the practices of educators committed to social justice
cannot be overstated. Therefore, it is important to point out significant differences between Freire and
Fanon, especially with regard to de/colonization. Freire situates the work of liberation in the minds of
the oppressed, an abstract category of dehumanized worker vis-a-vis a similarly abstract category of
oppressor. This is a sharp right turn away from Fanon’s work, which always positioned the work of
liberation in the particularities of colonization, in the specific structural and interpersonal categories of
Native and settler. Under Freire’s paradigm, it is unclear who the oppressed are, even more ambiguous
who the oppressors are, and it is inferred throughout that an innocent third category of enlightened
human exists: “those who suffer with [the oppressed] and fight at their side” (Freire, 2000, p. 42). These
words, taken from the opening dedication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, invoke the same settler
fantasy of mutuality based on sympathy and suffering. Fanon positions decolonization as chaotic, an
unclean break from a colonial condition that is already over determined by the violence of the colonizer
and unresolved in its possible futures. By contrast, Freire positions liberation as redemption, a freeing of
both oppressor and oppressed through their humanity. Humans become ‘subjects’ who then proceed to
work on the ‘objects’ of the world (animals, earth, water), and indeed read the word (critical
consciousness) in order to write the world (exploit nature). For Freire, there are no Natives, no Settlers,
and indeed no history, and the future is simply a rupture from the timeless present. Settler colonialism is
absent from his discussion, implying either that it is an unimportant analytic or that it is an already
completed project of the past (a past oppression perhaps). Freire’s theories of liberation resoundingly
echo the allegory of Plato’s Cave, a continental philosophy of mental emancipation, whereby the
thinking man individualistically emerges from the dark cave of ignorance into the light of critical
consciousness. By contrast, black feminist thought roots freedom in the darkness of the cave, in that
well of feeling and wisdom from which all knowledge is recreated. These places of possibility within
ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through
darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power,
of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is
neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. (Lorde, 1984, pp. 36-37) Audre Lorde’s
words provide a sharp contrast to Plato’s sight-centric image of liberation: “The white fathers told us, I
think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams, I feel
therefore I can be free” (p. 38). For Lorde, writing is not action upon the world. Rather, poetry is giving a
name to the nameless, “first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (p. 37).
Importantly, freedom is a possibility that is not just mentally generated; it is particular and felt. Freire’s
philosophies have encouraged educators to use “colonization” as a metaphor for oppression. In such a
paradigm, “internal colonization” reduces to “mental colonization”, logically leading to the solution of
decolonizing one’s mind and the rest will follow. Such philosophy conveniently sidesteps the most
unsettling of questions: The essential thing is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously and to
answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32)
Because colonialism is comprised of global and historical relations, Cesaire’s question must be
considered globally and historically. However, it cannot be reduced to a global answer , nor a historical
answer. To do so is to use colonization metaphorically. “What is colonization?” must be answered
specifically, with attention to the colonial apparatus that is assembled to order the relationships
between particular peoples, lands, the ‘natural world’, and ‘civilization’. Colonialism is marked by its
specializations. In North America and other settings, settler sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality,
raciality, language, religion and property in specific ways. Decolonization likewise must be thought
through in these particularities. To agree on what [decolonization] is not: neither evangelization, nor a
philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny...
(Cesaire, 2000, p. 32) We deliberately extend Cesaire’s words above to assert what decolonization is not.
It is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic
process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against
oppressive conditions and outcomes. The broad umbrella of social justice may have room underneath
for all of these efforts. By contrast, decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous
land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice. We don’t intend to discourage those
who have dedicated careers and lives to teaching themselves and others to be critically conscious of
racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, and settler colonialism. We are asking them/you to
consider how the pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical
enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence - diversions, distractions, which relieve the
settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege.
Anna Jacobs’ 2009 Master’s thesis explores the possibilities for what she calls white harm reduction
models. Harm reduction models attempt to reduce the harm or risk of specific practices. Jacobs
identifies white supremacy as a public health issue that is at the root of most other public health issues.
The goal of white harm reduction models, Jacobs says, is to reduce the harm that white supremacy has
had on white people, and the deep harm it has caused non-white people over generations. Learning
from Jacobs’ analysis, we understand the curricular pedagogical project of critical consciousness as
settler harm reduction, crucial in the resuscitation of practices and intellectual life outside of settler
ontologies. (Settler) harm reduction is intended only as a stopgap. As the environmental crisis escalates
and peoples around the globe are exposed to greater concentrations of violence and poverty, the need
for settler harm reduction is acute, profoundly so. At the same time we remember that, by definition,
settler harm reduction, like conscientization, is not the same as decolonization and does not
inherently offer any pathways that lead to decolonization.

Their wholesale rejection of the state and pragmatic anti-colonial action reifies
colonial power and flattens difference which makes alt solvency impossible
Snelgrove, MA Candidate, Indigenous Governance, University of Victoria, 14
(Corey, Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with
Indigenous nations, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 3, No. 2, 2014, pp. 1-32)

This relational, interdependent focus is also important amongst settlers ourselves – perhaps as a way to
Corey:

counter the flattening of differences that occurs amongst settlers, particularly in solidarity work. Settlers obviously need to
be doing our own work and challenging ‘our’ institutions and practices that serve to protect or further colonization. But we
can’t do this if we flatten the differences and ignore the inequalities and power relationships that exist
within settler society. Not only does such flattening prevent much needed alliances but flattening itself can
actually work to protect certain elements of settler colonialism. For instance, white supremacy works to
naturalize white settler presence. In terms of solidarity then, I find it problematic for myself, as a white, class privileged, cis-hetero, and able bodied male (as well as
people like me) to demand other peoples to act in solidarity, while also not holding myself (and others like me) responsible and accountable to other forms of violence that may be a

I’m not arguing for the continued eschewal

contributing factor to the further reification of structures that support settler colonialism, like the State. Now

of Indigenous governance and legal orders because others experience violence, but rather, that the
substantive recognition of Indigenous governance and legal orders also requires a dismantling of other, related
forms of domination. This latter dismantling I see as necessary but also insufficient for the dismantling of settler colonialism. These sites and spaces of domination and
resistance are distinct, but also connected dialectically. This seems to be something that settlers, white settlers specifically, have yet to articulate and take up, critique and act against. And this
is perhaps most evident in how settlers seem to be continuously waiting for instruction from Indigenous peoples on how to act. Rita: I wonder if this relational approach is a more useful
direction for settler colonial studies, not unlike the kind of work you do Jeff, in thinking about colonialism in a global, comparative context. Jeff: And I think, the more you can make those links,
the British occupation of Maori territory is directly related to HBC’s strategy to begin treaty making here… All those things are interrelated. They are shared, and they are seen as shared
strategies. The other thing I see is this impulse to delocalize it… it’s always that kind of Free Tibet Syndrome… the further away acts of genocide are from your location, the more outrage
expressed at these injustices. It’s a way of avoiding complicity, but it’s also a way of recasting the gaze. It’s like, ‘We’re not going to look right here, because this appears to be fairly peaceful’
And so it’s always that sort of re-directing away from localized responsibility, and almost magnifying impacts farther away. Rita: So what settler colonial studies does do, is help us relocate to
locality, which is helpful. You mention the HBC. I wonder what was the relationship between the Hudson Bay Company in Canada and the East India Company or the East Africa Company? If
we’re thinking about settler colonialism as a structure, how is it related to other modalities of gendered and sexualized white supremacy? How are the logics of State sovereignty and authority
over nonwhite bodies connected? If we’re thinking about it, as non-Indigenous peoples being ‘in solidarity’, part of that is locating, attacking the whole structure of imperialism that is deeply
gendered and homonationalist, that depends on neo-liberal projects of prioritizing able-bodied workers who can serve capitalism. Corey: Part of this, I think, what we’ve been discussing here,

the framing of ‘settler’ as event, rather than structure – where we are perhaps overly
relates to what I sometimes see as

focused on the question of ‘who’ at the expense of the ‘how’. If we don’t understand how settlers are
produced we run the risk of representing settlers as some sort of transhistorical subject with
transhistorical practices. So I’m worried that while in one moment the term ‘settler’ denaturalizes our – that is all non-
Indigenous peoples – presence on Indigenous lands, in the next, and through this construction of the ‘settler’
as transhistorical, we renaturalize it. In short, we go from a disavowal of colonization, to its representation
as inevitable. Here is where I think a historical materialist or genealogical approach to the production of settler subjects
may be useful in showing how this production is conditioned by but also contingent on a number of
factors – white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, capitalism, colonization, the eschewal of Indigenous
governance and legal orders, environmental degradation, etc. Now this is also not to say that the binary of
Indigenous/Settler isn’t accurate. I think its fundamental. Rather, I think it is possible and important to recognize
that there have been, and are, individuals (or even collectives) that might be referred to as something other
than settlers by Indigenous peoples, perhaps as cousins . Or in a similar vein, that there have been and are
practices by settlers that aren’t colonial (and here is where centering Indigenous peoples’ accounts of Indigenous-settler relations, as well as their own
 I think it’s just as important to recognize that these relations have and do
governance, legal and diplomatic orders is crucial). But

not occur despite settler colonial and imperial logics , and thus outside of the binary. Rather, such relations occur in the
face of it. The binary then is fundamental as the logics that uphold the binary cannot be ignored due to the

existence of possiblly good relations as the logics that uphold the binary threaten those relations
through the pursuit of the elimination of Indigenous peoples . Rita: Yet, how do we act in light of these entanglements, and with, rather than
overcoming differences? Corey: Tuck and Yang (2012) had this really great article, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” In it, they talk about the importance of an ethics of incommensurability –
a recognition of how anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles are incommensurable with decolonization. But what I’ve been thinking about recently is whether these struggles are incompatible.

recognizing that
For example, in the Indigenous resurgence literature, there is a turn away, but it’s also not an outright rejection. It also demands settlers to change. Yet

settlers are (re)produced, the change demanded is not just an individual transformation, but one
connected to broader social, economic, and political justice. There are then, it seems, potential lines of
affinity between decolonization and others, though incommensurable, struggles. And in order to sustain
this compatibility in the face of incommensurability, relationships are essential in order to maintain
accountability and to resist repeating colonial and other relations of domination, as well as, in very strategic terms,
in supporting each other’s resistance . Rita: As some anti-racist and Indigenous feminists have long argued, it’s not possible for people of colour to confront
different racisms without thinking about sexism, capitalist exploitation, homophobia and transphobia, Indigenous struggles – they are tied to one another. There is an affinity between
decolonization and other struggles. Differently positioned people of colour and Indigenous peoples are not operating with the same kinds or degrees of authority as whites or each other, but
nonetheless we are not outside of these relations and forces of power. Jeff: I like building off Tuck and Yang too. It’s a way of showing the linkages across these movements, but also how they
can be tighter. How can we deepen them and focus on the everyday acts of resurgence that Indigenous peoples engage in? Rita: What you say reminds me Corey about a question you have
raised in another context on temporal and spatial solidarities. Corey: In June 2013, at Congress, you both were on a panel titled “Solidarities, Territorialities, and Embodiments.” At this panel,
Jeff, you seemed to be challenging Rita’s notion of “temporary solidarities” by emphasizing the importance of relationship grounded in place. So I first would question how useful ‘temporary
solidarities’ as a concept is. Second, I’m wondering about the importance of bringing the role of territorialities within these discussions of solidarity themselves. Maybe, Jeff, what you were
talking about at Congress and in conversations you and I have had, is a gesturing towards what we could potentially call ‘spatial solidarities’ – or bringing spatiality into discussions of solidarity.
Jeff: As the late Vine Deloria, Jr. (2001) has said, “power and place produce personality.” In this sense, place-based relationships are personal and anything approaching spatial solidarity would
entail the regeneration of Indigenous languages, ceremonial life, living histories, and nationhood. For this reason, spatial solidarities can be a way to localize struggles for Indigenous

Harper’s government that

resurgence. While the “Idle No More” movement, which began in 2012 in Canada as a response to proposed legislation by Prime Minister Stephen

undermined Indigenous protections of land and water, tapped into an ongoing and collective Indigenous
struggle for land, culture and community, the settler support for it was predominantly temporally
driven and performative rather than localized and land-based. I find that the most powerful mobilization for change happens when the
spatial and temporal intersect. Rita: This centering of land strikes me as constitutive to any kind of political work with Indigenous peoples. Can you give an example Jeff? Jeff: One example
might be how settlers are welcomed onto Indigenous homelands among Native nations in Australia. Beginning in the 1980’s, Tasmanian activist and lawyer, Michael Mansell, issued ‘Aboriginal
Passports’ to an Indigenous delegation visiting Libya in 1988. More recently, Aboriginal Passports have been issued to non-Indigenous people living on Indigenous homelands. Someone visiting
Indigenous homelands in Australia can apply for an Aboriginal Passport and sign a pledge stating that, “We do not support the colonial occupation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands”
(Aboriginal Passport Ceremony, 2012). This innovative strategy challenges the authority of the Australian government to regulate the travel of visitors onto Indigenous homelands and raises
awareness of contemporary struggles of Indigenous peoples in order to build solidarity for future movements. Rita: Corey, your question is helpful, and Jeff’s response also helps me think
through the movement between time-situated and place-based practices of ‘solidarity’ and ways of thinking about these situated practices in terms of an ethos of ‘unsettled solidarities’ that
moves across time and space, that is a way of being in the world, a set of ongoing relations. Where I, where we, are never outside of struggle, everyone is ‘structurally implicated’ in the
dispossession of Indigenous lands. Everyone is differentially structurally implicated, where the ideology of presumed consent underlies settler colonialism. Jeff: I would add that living on
another Indigenous nation’s territory also carries an obligation to support those defending their homelands. Cheryl Bryce from Songhees First Nation started the “Community Tool Shed” in
2009 to generate support for the restoration of Lekwungen food systems. The Community Tool Shed in Victoria, British Columbia, is where settlers and Indigenous peoples can come together
to rid the land of invasive species, such as Scottish Broom, and to revitalize traditional plants such as kwetlal or camas. Cheryl’s focus for this informal group is on reclaiming traditional place
names, educating people about the destructiveness of invasive species, and reinstating Lekwungen food systems. The tool shed meets once per month to pull invasive species on places that
have been managed by Cheryl’s family for generations, such as Meegan (aka, Beacon Hill Park), and Sitchamalth (Willows Beach). To a ‘resident’ of Lekwungen homelands, the above-
mentioned places are public lands. This demonstrates the urgency of reclaiming Indigenous place names in tandem with the restoration of Indigenous foodscapes and landscapes. The May 22,
2013 reclamation of the name PKOLS (formerly known as Mount Douglas) is one of many examples where communities can come together to demand representation on their own terms.
These are everyday acts of resurgence that highlight the terrain of Indigenous struggles to restore and reconnect a place-based existence. Corey: And both examples you highlighted Jeff do not
foreclose a wide-range of participants. The PKOLS reclamation led by the W̱ SÁNEĆ peoples, involved participation from Indigenous peoples across Vancouver Island and across Turtle Island, it
involved the university through the Indigenous Governance program, and it involved local, non-Indigenous, activist groups, most notably Social Coast. The Community Tool Shed, a project that
I’ve also been involved in for the past two years, does something similar. What I find really interesting in this work is that settlers and Indigenous peoples challenge our environmentally
degraded and colonial present simultaneously. Yet, there is still attention paid to the different roles and responsibilities in this work. For instance, non-Lekwungen people in removing invasive
species, and Lekwungen people in managing these lands and in harvesting plants such as camas. So unlike other stewardship groups around Victoria, those participating are not seeking to
depoliticize this work, nor do they argue that this work erases their complicity or their potential complicity in colonization. In supporting Cheryl’s assertion of her roles and responsibilities, they
aren’t seeking to restore land in order to claim it for themselves. They aren’t Locke redux. And, given the nature and extent of Broom here – you find it pretty much everywhere around
Southern Vancouver Island, something like 18,000 seeds are produced in a single plant, and those seeds can lie dormant for up to thirty years – pulling broom one time really does not mean

is a demand for longterm work, which itself can help build accountability through such place-
much. So there

based relationships. And since land is the irreducible element of settler colonialism , and that
environmental degradation has often proceeded through and in support of settler colonialism, it provides
an example of non-Indigenous practices with the land that aren’t necessarily colonial . Now I’m not saying that this is
an example of decolonization or that those involved are somehow not settlers. After all, decolonization and the transformation of settlers requires subjective and objective transformations.

Rather it’s a practice that does not reify colonization, and thus challenges settler colonial studies
construction of settler colonialism as inevitable and transhistorical. Decontextualized conceptions of
settler colonial studies, ‘settler’, and solidarity risk further eschewing Indigenous peoples and thereby reifying
the stolen land each of the above is founded upon. Perhaps, most centrally, this is done through de-centering Indigenous peoples own articulations
 Such de-centering
of Indigenous-settler relations, their governance, legal, and diplomatic orders, and the transformative visions entailed within Indigenous political thought.

has the potential to present settler colonialism as complete or transhistorical, as inevitable, rather than conditioned and
contingent. This failure to attend to the conditions and contingency of settler colonialism can also be
traced to the marginalization of how colonization actually proceeds across time and space . That is, as
entangled with other relations of domination, and not only through structures, but also practices that
serve as, what Paige Raibmon (2008) refers to, “microtechniques of dispossession.” Those who critique settler colonialism
through transhistorical representations are then able to feel good and satisfied about their criticisms,
despite their ahistoricism and decontextualization , and thus their own role in actually sustaining colonial
power by failing to attend to its conditions and contingency.

Indigenous engagement with Western knowledge and institutions is good – pure

rejection strengthens colonialism
Grande 07 – Connecticut College education associate professor
(Sandy, Critical Pedagogy: Where are we now? By Peter McLaren, “Red Lake Woebegone: Pedagogy,
Decolonization, and the Critical Project” p330)

Audre Lorde’s essay, The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House, is one of the most
quoted essays in academic history and, I would also venture to say, one that needs rethinking. While it is
self-evident that indigenous knowledge is essential to the process of decolonization, I would also argue
that the Master’s tools are necessary. Otherwise, to take Audre Lorde seriously means to create a
dichotomy between the tools of the colonizer and those of the colonized. Such a dichotomy leaves the
indigenous scholar to grapple with a kind of “Sophie’s Choice” moment where one feels compelled to
choose between retaining their integrity (identity) as a Naitve scholar by employing only indigenous
knowledge or to “sell out” and employ the frames of Western knowledge . Does it signify a final
submission to the siren’s son, seducing us into the colonialist abyss with promises of empowerment? Or
is it the necessary first step in reclaiming and decolonizing an intellectual space – an inquiry rom – of our
own? Such questions provoke beyond the bounds of academic exercise, suggesting instead the need for
an academic exorcism. The demon to be purged is the specter of colonialism. As indigenous scholars, we
live within, against, and outside of its constant company, witnessing its various manifestations as it
shape-shifts its way into everything from research and public policy to textbooks and classrooms. Thus,
the colonial tax of Native scholars not only requires a renegotiation of personal identity but also an
analysis of how whole nations get trans- or (dis)figured when articulated through Western frames of
knowing. As Edward Said observes, “institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even
colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles” all support to the “Western discourse” (Said, 1985, p. 2). In
other words, is it possible to engage the grammar of empire without replicating its effects? At the same
time indigenous scholars entertain these ruminations, Native communities continue to be impacted and
transformed by the forces of colonization, rendering the “choice” of whether to employ Western
knowledge in the process of defining indigenous pedagogies essentially moot. In other words, by virtue
of living in this world and having to negotiate the forces of colonization, indigenous scholars are given
no choice but to know, understand, and acquire the grammar of empire as well as develop the skills to
contest it. The relationship between the two is not some liberal dream of multicultural harmony but
rather the critical and dialogical tension between competing moral visions.
Framing colonial power as an oppressive totality is itself a colonial strategy of
domination – it’s better to frame colonialism as fractured and contingent and thus
able to be occupied for strategic ends – means the perm solves
Zanotti 14 – Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech
(Laura, “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 38(4):288-304, accessed 5-26-16 //Bosley)

For Ashley and Walker, in other words, political

action is about questioning assumptions about the unity of identity,
the mighty homogeneity of power, and the stability of categories of thought . Downplaying ambiguity is
indeed itself a technique of power. In taking issue with ‘‘descriptive’’ governmentality theories, Jacqueline Best argued representing social

events as totally calculable is itself a governmental strategy , part of government’s very attempts to
depoliticize them.65 For Best, such representations undermine the analysis of what ‘‘exceeds efforts to govern through risk.’’66 Therefore, one should
not be seduced by contemporary governmental strategies’ own promise of infallibility. For Best, ambiguity brings to the foreground the limits of knowledge and
should be included in current analyses of governmental tactics. Ambiguity is a fundamental trajectory of power, rooted in the nontransparency of language that
always calls for hermeneutics and opens the possibility for political interpretation and manipulation even in the presence of governmental strategies of regulation.
Indeed, pace liberal institutionalism that looks at norms as ‘‘entities’’ and explanatory variables for institutional behavior, regulations are only a shell and norms are
always in context, negotiated and renegotiated in the contingent spaces within which they are interpreted. Postcolonial literature has also offered interesting
insights of how political
agency may be exerted in the face of power’s self representation as a powerful and
mighty script. Homi Bhabha has argued that colonial power’s self-representation as ‘‘unity’’ is a colonial strategy of
domination and explored the subversive potential of the mimicry and mockery of the colonized.67 For Bhabha, The display of hybridity—its peculiar
‘‘replication’’—terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery. Such a reading of colonial authority profoundly unsettles the demand that
figures at the centre of the originary myth of colonialist power. It is the demand that the space it occupies be unbounded, its reality coincident with the emergence
of an imperialist narrative and history, its discourse nondialogic, its enunciation unitary, unmarked by the trace of difference-a demand that is recognizable in a
range of justificatory Western ‘‘civil’’ discourses.68 Bhabha sees subjection and resistance as intimately related. Political agency is a process of hybridization through
transformation of meaning. Thus, ‘‘Colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures which can then be resolved as an
issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other
‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition.’’69 Political agency is not
portrayed as the free subjects’ total rejection of a unified totalizing assemblage of power . While (the colonizer’s) power
attempts to reproduce its script by creating the ‘‘mimic men,’’ that is, the ‘‘docile colonial subjects who are ‘almost the same, but not quite’,’’70 it also creates an
ambivalence, a contradiction between ‘‘same’’ and ‘‘not quite’’ that can be appropriated by the subaltern. Mimicry is easily camouflaged as mockery, with the
colonial subject consequently subverting or refusing to simply repeat the master’s lessons. Instead of producing a controlled imitation or a managed response from
the native, the civilizing mission elicits an answer back, a menacing look, a distorted and disturbing echo.71 Agency is exerted through moves that are imbricated
with discourses of power but also recognize and question them. In this way, universal claims are unsettled and power’s purported unity menaced. Bhabha

sends a note of caution to those whose response to subjection is direct opposition, a warning that ‘‘overcoming
domination, far from getting rid of it, often occasions its mere reversal.’’72 Thus, Ilan Kapoor suggests that ‘‘the agent must
play with the cards s/he is dealt, and the hegemon, despite the appearance of absolute strength, needs or desires the subaltern.’’73

Attempts to transition without meaningful blueprint ensure horrific violence and

transitionary wars- turns the K- it magnifies every flaw of cap
Condit 15 [Celeste, Distinguished Research Professor of Communication Studies at the University of
Georgia, “Multi-Layered Trajectories for Academic Contributions to Social Change,” Feb 4, 2015,
Quarterly Journal of Speech, Volume 101, Issue 1, 2015]

The theories of social change that dominated American Communication Studies at the close
of the twentieth century echoed those of the Western humanities. These theories spurred
extensive thought about the performances of individual identity and the relationship of identity to mass
media and culture, and they probably had some laudable influence on the broader culture. They are,
however, inadequate to the evolving contexts I have described . One can sum up the most widely
circulating theories of social change among “critical social theorists” of the twentieth century in
the following, admittedly simplified, statement: There is an (evil) Totality (fill in the blank
with one or more: patriarchy, whites, the West, the U.S., neo-liberalism, global capitalism)
that must be overturned by a Radical Revolution . We don't know the shape of what will
come after the Revolution, but The Evil is a construction of the Totality, so anything that
comes after will be better. All you need is … (fill in the blank: Love, Courage, Violence, etc.). For
an example, read Slavoj Žižek's attack on the evil Totality (“capitalism,”5 pp. 41/49), which requires
the “excess” of violence named as “courage”6 (pp. 75, 78, 79), via “a leap”7 (p. 81), to eliminate
“democracy” for a yet-to-be-imagined “new collectivity” (p. 85).8 The resilience of this social
theory identifies it as a rhetorical attractor ; a predispositional symbolic set that readily
transmits emotive potency. To appropriate Kenneth Burke's terms, the bio-symbolics of
human political relationships readily create a “grammar” and “rhetoric” in the form of a
unified enemy that can be imagined as defeated in a singular battle, after which , things
in “our” tribe may be harmonious. To identify this fantasy theme in this way is to suggest
that it may not merely be the product of “Western” or “capitalist” imaginations, but rather that it
arises from an intersection of the structural characteristics of language systems and the
nature of human biologies (which readily adopt both tribal social cooperation and inter-tribal
competition). Because neither biology nor symbolics are deterministic systems, this fantasy theme is
avoidable, even if it is powerfully attractive. Because both biology and symbolics are material, however,
specific kinds of work are necessary in order to avoid the lure of that predisposition. This point is crucial,
because it invalidates the twentieth century (idealist) approaches to social change, which envisioned a
single (violent) leap away from the social as sufficient to create and maintain better worlds. Thus, when
Žižek and others urge us to “Act” with violence to destroy the current Reality, without a vision of
an alternative, on the grounds that the links between actions and consequences are never certain,
we can call his appeal both a failure of imagination and a failure of reality. As for reality,
we have dozens of revolutions as models, and the historical record indicates quite
clearly that they generally lead not to harmonious cooperation (what I call
“AnarchoNiceness” to gently mock the romanticism of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the
production of totalitarian states and/or violent factional strife. A materialist constructivist
epistemology accounts for this by predicting that it is not possible for symbol-using animals to exist in a
symbolic void. All symbolic movement has a trajectory, and if you have not imagined a
potentially realizable alternative for that trajectory to take, then what people will leap
into is biological predispositions—the first iteration of which is the rule of the strongest
primate. Indeed, this is what experience with revolutions has shown to be the most
probable outcome of a revolution that is merely against an Evil. The failure of
imagination in such rhetorics thereby reveals itself to be critical , so it is worth pondering sources
of that failure. The rhetoric of “the kill” in social theory in the past half century has repeatedly reduced
to the leap into a void because the symbolized alternative that the context of the twentieth century
otherwise predispositionally offers is to the binary opposite of capitalism, i.e., communism. That
rhetorical option, however, has been foreclosed by the historical discrediting of the readily imagined
forms of communism (e.g., Žižek9). The hard work to invent better alternatives is not as
dramatically enticing as the story of the kill: such labor is piecemeal, intellectually
difficult, requires multi-disciplinary understandings, and perhaps requires more creativity
than the typical academic theorist can muster. In the absence of a viable alternative , the
appeals to Radical Revolution seem to have been sustained by the emotional zing of the
kill, in many cases amped up by the appeal of autonomy and manliness (Žižek uses the former term and
deploys the ethos of the latter). But if one does not provide a viable vision that offers a
reasonable chance of leaving most people better off than they are now, then Fox News has a
better offering (you'll be free and you'll get rich!). A revolution posited as a void cannot
succeed as a horizon of history, other than as constant local scale violent actions , perhaps
connected by shifting networks we call “terrorists.” This analysis of the geo-political situation, of the
onto-epistemological character of language, and of the limitations of the dominant horizon of social
change indicates that the focal project for progressive Left Academics should now include
the hard labor to produce alternative visions that appear materially feasible.
Double Bind – either they only advocate the discursive reclamation of indigeneity in
which case they link back to their own K – purely discursive shifts toward
decolonization reifies settler innocence because it denies literal repatriation in favor
of spaces only accessible within spaces like debate which excludes pragmatic reforms
that actually restore ancestral lands.
Tuck and Yang 12 [Eve – SUNY New Paltz, and K. Wayne – UC San Diego, “Decolonization is not a
metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society.] JCH-PF

Fanon told us in 1963 that decolonizing the mind is the first step, not the only step toward
overthrowing colonial regimes. Yet we wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to focus
on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of
decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing
stolen land. We agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to
see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and
values in search of ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work.
However, the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though
the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel
like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate
into action that disrupts settler colonialism. So, we respectfully disagree with George Clinton and
Funkadelic (1970) and En Vogue (1992) when they assert that if you “free your mind, the rest (your ass)
will follow.” Paulo Freire, eminent education philosopher, popular educator, and liberation theologian,
wrote his celebrated book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in no small part as a response to Fanon’s
Wretched of the Earth. Its influence upon critical pedagogy and on the practices of educators committed
to social justice cannot be overstated. Therefore, it is important to point out significant differences
between Freire and Fanon, especially with regard to de/colonization. Freire situates the work of
liberation in the minds of the oppressed, an abstract category of dehumanized worker vis-a-vis a
similarly abstract category of oppressor. This is a sharp right turn away from Fanon’s work, which always
positioned the work of liberation in the particularities of colonization, in the specific structural and
interpersonal categories of Native and settler. Under Freire’s paradigm, it is unclear who the oppressed
are, even more ambiguous who the oppressors are, and it is inferred throughout that an innocent third
category of enlightened human exists: “those who suffer with [the oppressed] and fight at their side”
(Freire, 2000, p. 42). These words, taken from the opening dedication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
invoke the same settler fantasy of mutuality based on sympathy and suffering. Fanon positions
decolonization as chaotic, an unclean break from a colonial condition that is already over determined by
the violence of the colonizer and unresolved in its possible futures. By contrast, Freire positions
liberation as redemption, a freeing of both oppressor and oppressed through their humanity. Humans
become ‘subjects’ who then proceed to work on the ‘objects’ of the world (animals, earth, water), and
indeed read the word (critical consciousness) in order to write the world (exploit nature). For Freire,
there are no Natives, no Settlers, and indeed no history, and the future is simply a rupture from the
timeless present. Settler colonialism is absent from his discussion, implying either that it is an
unimportant analytic or that it is an already completed project of the past (a past oppression perhaps).
Freire’s theories of liberation resoundingly echo the allegory of Plato’s Cave, a continental philosophy of
mental emancipation, whereby the thinking man individualistically emerges from the dark cave of
ignorance into the light of critical consciousness. By contrast, black feminist thought roots freedom in
the darkness of the cave, in that well of feeling and wisdom from which all knowledge is recreated.
These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have
survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an
incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The
woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is
deep. (Lorde, 1984, pp. 36-37) Audre Lorde’s words provide a sharp contrast to Plato’s sight-centric
image of liberation: “The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of
us - the poet - whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free” (p. 38). For Lorde, writing is not
action upon the world. Rather, poetry is giving a name to the nameless, “first made into language, then
into idea, then into more tangible action” (p. 37). Importantly, freedom is a possibility that is not just
mentally generated; it is particular and felt. Freire’s philosophies have encouraged educators to use
“colonization” as a metaphor for oppression. In such a paradigm, “internal colonization” reduces to
“mental colonization”, logically leading to the solution of decolonizing one’s mind and the rest will
follow. Such philosophy conveniently sidesteps the most unsettling of questions: The essential thing is to
see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what,
fundamentally, is colonization? (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32) Because colonialism is comprised of global and
historical relations, Cesaire’s question must be considered globally and historically. However, it cannot
be reduced to a global answer, nor a historical answer. To do so is to use colonization metaphorically.
“What is colonization?” must be answered specifically, with attention to the colonial apparatus that is
assembled to order the relationships between particular peoples, lands, the ‘natural world’, and
‘civilization’. Colonialism is marked by its specializations. In North America and other settings, settler
sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion and property in specific ways.
Decolonization likewise must be thought through in these particularities. To agree on what
[decolonization] is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push
back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny... (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32) We deliberately extend
Cesaire’s words above to assert what decolonization is not. It is not converting Indigenous politics to a
Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating
suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. The broad
umbrella of social justice may have room underneath for all of these efforts. By contrast,
decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a
metonym for social justice. We don’t intend to discourage those who have dedicated careers and lives
to teaching themselves and others to be critically conscious of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism,
xenophobia, and settler colonialism. We are asking them/you to consider how the pursuit of critical
consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves
to innocence - diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility,
and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege. Anna Jacobs’ 2009 Master’s thesis explores
the possibilities for what she calls white harm reduction models. Harm reduction models attempt to
reduce the harm or risk of specific practices. Jacobs identifies white supremacy as a public health issue
that is at the root of most other public health issues. The goal of white harm reduction models, Jacobs
says, is to reduce the harm that white supremacy has had on white people, and the deep harm it has
caused non-white people over generations. Learning from Jacobs’ analysis, we understand the
curricular-pedagogical project of critical consciousness as settler harm reduction, crucial in the
resuscitation of practices and intellectual life outside of settler ontologies. (Settler) harm reduction is
intended only as a stopgap. As the environmental crisis escalates and peoples around the globe are
exposed to greater concentrations of violence and poverty, the need for settler harm reduction is acute,
profoundly so. At the same time we remember that, by definition, settler harm reduction, like
conscientization, is not the same as decolonization and does not inherently offer any pathways that
lead to decolonization.

OR they do advocate concrete land return – in which case the ALT uses legal action
just like the AFF which is negative state action – supercharges the “no link” and perm
debate.
Their totalizing analysis of settlerism is wrong and misrepresents the contingent
nature of coloniality. Their fatalistic abstractions recreate colonial violence and only
the perm can solve
Snelgrove et al 14 (Corey, University of British Columbia, “Unsettling settler colonialism: The
discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with Indigenous nations”,
http://www.corntassel.net/Unsettling.pdf) mlm

Decontextualized conceptions of settler colonial studies , ‘settler’, and solidarity risk further
eschewing Indigenous peoples and thereby reifying the stolen land each of the above is
founded upon. Perhaps, most centrally, this is done through de-centering Indigenous peoples
own articulations of Indigenous-settler relations, their governance, legal, and diplomatic
orders, and the transformative visions entailed within Indigenous political thought . Such
de-centering has the potential to present settler colonialism as complete or transhistorical, as
inevitable, rather than conditioned and contingent. This failure to attend to the
conditions and contingency of settler colonialism can also be traced to the
marginalization of how colonization actually proceeds across time and space. That is, as
entangled with other relations of domination, and not only through structures, but also practices that
serve as, what Paige Raibmon (2008) refers to, “microtechniques of dispossession.” Those who
critique settler colonialism through transhistorical representations are then able to feel
good and satisfied about their criticisms, despite their ahistoricism and
decontextualization, and thus their own role in actually sustaining colonial power by
failing to attend to its conditions and contingency . We ask: what good is it to analyze settler
colonialism if that analysis does not shed light on sites of contradiction and weakness, the conditions for
its reproduction, or the spaces and practices of resistance to it? What is the purpose of deploying
‘settler’ without attention to its utility, to what it alludes to or eludes from? What good is solidarity if it
cannot attend to the literal (and stolen) ground on which people stand and come together upon? In this
paper, we have argued for a contextual approach to the questions of settler colonialism, settlers, and
solidarity. It is ultimately about accountability to each other, as the Tsalagi word, digadatsele’i
suggests, and treating Indigenous resurgence as a process that cannot occur in isolation .
This, as argued throughout this paper, demands a centering of and support for Indigenous
resurgences, and a shift from a one-dimensional to a relational approach to settler
colonial analyses that is connected to the issue of other Others . This also demands place-
based solidarities – that is, relationships and practices – that center both Indigenous resurgences and
more relational approaches to settler colonial power. After all, settler colonialism will not be
undone by analysis alone, but through lived and contentious engagement with the
literal and stolen ground on which people stand and come together upon .
Defining indigenous identity in opposition to white and western epistemologies
reduces Native peoples to a caricature of everything that non-Natives are not --
Valuing indigenous perspectives because of their difference is condescending and
creates a static identity trap.
Andersen 9 Chris Michif (Métis) from western Canada. He is an associate professor in the
Faculty of Native Studies @ Alberta ‘9 “critical indigenous studies From Difference to Density” Cultural Studies Review 15 (2) p. 80-84

Champagne’s abstraction, imprecision and internal contradictions make it difficult to produce definitive
conclusions about his work. However, Indigeneity-as-different constitutes a major staple of his argument
and even a sympathetic reading requires some agility to avoid the essentialism which grounds it. My
point is this: Champagne’s argument that the ‘continued emphasis on how race and ethnic identity in
mainstream institutions tends to overshadow the less well understood perspectives of an Indigenous
paradigm grounded in the cultures, sovereignty, identities, land, and nation building of indigenous
peoples’42 loses its relevance if it fails to include a precise explanation of what the latter terms mean
and how they differ from ‘race’ and ‘ethnic identity’. His repeated failure to delineate them leaves little
analytical purchase to deal with the complexities of being Indigenous in modern, Western societies,
either with respect to how we identify ourselves, how we critique dominant, whitestream
representations or how we employ Western discursive authorities in our daily struggles. For example,
Champagne proposes that ‘[i]mproving existing theories or categorizations [of Western
disciplines] will involve significant revision, and it is doubtful that existing theories can
conceptualize or explain the cultural, land, self-government, and colonial histories of
Indigenous nations’;43 and further, that ‘most current theories do not provide powerful enough
tools for explaining the Indigenous experience’.44 One of many questions which arise from such
statements, of course, is the extent to which Indigenous studies —which must necessarily place
itself within the same academic relations of power that shape ‘Western’ disciplines—
can under any circumstances cash the kind of cheque Champagne is writing on its behalf
(more on this in part three). Of more immediate concern: given that Native studies must operate
within the forms of power and associated conditions of possibility that characterise
other academic disciplines, what allows it to step outside in ways the other disciplines
cannot? For Champagne, it is our valorisation of Indigenous epistemologies . Given the
centrality of his criticism of Western concepts, his positioning of their central terms deserves to be
quoted in their full length, precisely because they explicate the conceptual bases from which he
launches his critique of Western disciplines: race: ‘Race and critical race theories focus on
marginalization of socially conceived racial groups and provide critiques of dominant group methods of
oppression and control … the focus of race and critical race theories tends to assume
achievement of equality and inclusion into US society as a primary goal . Such goals of
social equality are taken up by some American Indians, but race and critical race
theories do not conceptualize or center collective American Indian goals such as
preservation of land, self-government, and reclaiming culture’ ;45 class: ‘while helpful, class
theory provides little conceptual or explanatory power for understanding American Indian emphases on
reclaiming culture and collective tribal forms of economic organization’;46 ethnicity: ‘Theories of
ethnicity focus on group organization and culture but do not include issues such as collective land
retention and institutions of self-government’;47 nation: ‘ “Nation” is a term often used in Indian
country today partly because the expression makes sense in English and in American culture for a
political grouping, but its meaning may have powerful cultural meanings for many American Indian
communities that are not implied in the English expression’;48 post-modernism/post-colonialism: ‘are
imbued with the deep social epistemologies of Western society. There is much emphasis on
marginalization, generally in materialistic forms, and on emancipation and liberation from oppression.
Such arguments make sense given the economic and colonial conditions under which indigenous
peoples often live, but the goals of the theories should not be imputed to be the goals and values of
many indigenous peoples and communities’.49 Given the apparent inadequacy of these concepts in
Champagne’s argument and his stated focus on Indigenous communities and nations, what is he left
with in his pursuit of an academic basis for Indigenous studies? His looming but largely
unacknowledged essentialism leaves him—as essentialism usually does—with an emphasis
on Indigenous difference. Champagne repeatedly stresses elements which supposedly render
Indigenous communities and cultures different from settler society and its communities: for example,
our collective forms of governance, collective land retention and institutions of self government, the
centrality of non-human powers and the importance of balance between human and nonhuman
powers, all sit outside the ability of Western disciplines to analyse.50 Thus, the epistemological
(and, one assumes, ontological) commitment of concepts of race, class, ethnicity, nation
and culture to Western society—to assimilation or renationalisation—precludes the
‘deep cultural or institutional perspective of American Indians or center American Indian
history or individual, group, or cultural experiences’ .51 They fail, for example, to ‘emphasize
ways of life that seek spiritual or moral balance with the human and nonhuman forces of the world’.52
Perhaps equally importantly, (Champagne’s) American Indian communities are, he tells us, likely to find
such concepts troubling insofar as they rely on ‘epistemological assumptions usually alien to those made
in American Indian communities and traditions’.53 Few Native studies practitioners would
quarrel with Champagne’s argument that Indigenous communities differ in fundamental
ways from dominant, whitestream society. This acknowledgement, however, is accompanied
by two rubs. First, in the specific context of the academy, in his failure to explain
specifically why Indigenous studies as a discipline should hold a privileged place in the
academy to render pronouncements regarding the authenticity of this difference .
Second and relatedly, Champagne unproblematically conflates community Indigeneity
with its academic manifestation and in doing so reproduces the very same
epistemological power of whiteness (at the heart of all academic disciplines) he critiques
in his original formulation. What epistemological distances exist between academic and
community knowledge? Where can we place Native studies in this continuum?
Champagne doesn’t answer these questions because for him, the latter question is, in
an ideal world, a solution to the former: Native studies is Indigenous knowledge in the
academy. Champagne’s failure to account for the constitutive character of power which
shapes ‘academic Indigeneity’ pushes his argument unnecessarily and uncomfortably close to
an ‘Aboriginalist’ logic which locates Indigeneity by precisely what, apparently, it is not:
white/ capitalist/secular/modern . Certainly, his intentions differ from those of colonial
administrators who sought to destroy our distinctiveness, disregard our complexity and
produce representations which apparently reaffirm(ed) their superiority over us .
Nonetheless, his essentialism effectively marginalises ‘dynamic, kinetic, and unfolding
[Indigenous] voice[s]’54 at a time when many (including Champagne himself) have laboured
so intensively to interrogate and denaturalise such static representations . Perhaps equally
importantly, his analytical lens remains focused solely in the direction of Indigenous communities and in
so doing handcuffs our ability to undertake an immanent deconstruction of Indigenous representations
produced in and by white society.

No solvency—settler colonial studies don’t create material actions to contribute to the

decolonization process
Snelgrove 14 [Corey, Rita Kaur Dhamoon, University of British Columbia, et. al University of Victoria,
Jeff Corntassel, University of Victoria, 2014, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 3, No.
2, 2014, pp. 1-32, “Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity
with Indigenous nations,” http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/21166/17970, Accessed
7.11.17 CT @ GDI]
The institutionalization of settler colonial studies (rather than Indigenous studies) is on the one hand a
significant shift in the academy. On the other hand, as de Leeuw, Greenwood, and Lindsay (2013) rightly
argue, even when (and perhaps because) there are good intentions to decolonize and to “cultivate a
culture of ‘doing the right thing,’” there are no “fundamental shifts in power imbalances between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples or the systems within which we operate ” (p. 386). Settler
colonialism and the study of settler colonialism, in other words, cannot be decolonized because of good
intentions. Following this, paradoxically and in deeply troubling ways, settler colonial studies can
displace, overshadow, or even mask over Indigenous studies (for example, see Veracini, 2013) and
variations within Indigenous studies, especially feminist and queer Indigenous work that is centred on
Indigenous resurgence. Indeed the link between Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies is still in
process. The synergies between the literature by/on two-spirited Indigenous identities, queer theory,
Indigenous studies more broadly, and settler colonial studies are notable in their interwoven
conversations across fields of study. But at times, Indigenous peoples and issues are de-centred in
settler colonial studies (for example, Rifkin, 2013, p. 323). Furthermore, while Rifkin is right to argue that
settler colonial practices and processes operate in everyday ways, are these practices really in the
“background” (2013, p. 331), and for whom? Is settler colonialism “largely invisible”, as Barker (2012)
claims? Yes, settler colonialism is naturalized, pervasive, and not just state-centred, but for whom is
settler colonialism in the background and invisible? These kinds of claims seem to presume white settler
subjectivity as the monolithic lens through which to examine settler colonialism and dispossession, both
in the context of whites and people of colour, in ways that obscures differentials of power. For
Indigenous peoples, settler colonialism may not be the primary lens of living or theorizing, but it is also
neither in the background or invisible.

You should understand settler colonialism contingently – no root cause – their

argument overdetermines the geographical and historical dimensions of systems
Ribeiro 11 – (2011, Gustavo Lins, PhD in Anthropology, Ángel Palerm Chair of the Autonomous
Metropolitan University of Iztapalapa (Mexico City) and is a Distinguished Scholar at the Iberoamericana
University, “Why (post)colonialism and (de)coloniality are not enough: a postimperialist perspective,”
Postcolonial Studies, 14:3, 285-297)
In this section, I will make a few general concluding remarks and will draw conclusions that are specific to the Brazilian scenario but that relate to the need to
further develop post-imperialist perspectives.

In spite of the power of structuration of colonialism, it cannot be seen as an overall force determining all
current sociological, economic, political and cultural scenarios in previously colonized nation-states. The duration of
the post-colonial period and the prominence of the coloniality of power vary in different historical
settings. The definition of such moments needs to be found on a case-by-case basis. I would argue that in Bolivia, for
instance, the moment of shift from the prominence of the coloniality of power to the beginning of the construction of the nationality of power happened only with
the election of Evo Morales as president in 2006. This leads me to think that the close relation between the formulation of the theory on the coloniality of power
and the political life of Andean countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, is an index of the relative strength of the power of structuration of
colonialism in these countries. In
view of the variability of glocal historical experiences, the ‘nationality of power’
cannot be subsumed under colonial frameworks of analysis, nor under globalized ones; it is a specific object of
enquiry. Therefore a more complete framework of analysis includes causal hierarchies that are sensitive

to the different geographies and histories of colonialism and of nation-building, the power of structuration of
which varies over time according to the outcome of different historical conflicts in different nation-
states. In sum, former colonies are differently subject, today, to the diverse powers of structuration stemming from the coloniality of power, the nationality of
power (which includes the histories, specificities and contradictions of the local and regional levels) and the globality of power. All of the latter needs to be
understood within the framework of an ever expanding capitalist political economy with its dynamics and contradictions.
Throughout the postcolonial and national history of Brazil, a strong ideology of the ruling elites developed, according to which the country is destined to become a
world power. The construction and consolidation of Brasilia as the country’s new capital was a most important step in the development of the Brazilian nationality
of power; it reassured the ‘great destiny of Brazil’ to nationalist ideologues and reinforced the discursive matrix of a powerful future. In the current moment of the
world system, especially after the 20082009 crisis when the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) became the most publicized examples of fast response to
the crisis, the sense that the ‘sleeping giant’ is about to wake up has increased within Brazilian political and economic elites. It is already possible to see that Brasilia
will become in the near future the capital city of a major global player with part of its elite with (sub)imperialist pretensions.29 The role of critical thought in Brazil in
this regard is to make a preemptive move in order to go beyond such pretensions and favour the rise not only of a post-imperialist capital city but also of a post-
imperialist country. By this I
mean a kind of cosmopolitics that imagines a world system without imperialisms and
fosters national formulations and actions in international arenas that stress and truly promote
cooperation and peace at the same time that it criticizes inequality and war. To do that there is a need to
dedicate more time to a post-imperialist imagination, critique and programme ; to dedicate, in sum, more
time to utopian struggles than to ideological ones . Post-imperialism would thus be a cosmopolitics
capable of pointing to new moments of the world system and its unfoldings.

Opposition between Western and indigenous epistemologies is rooted in essentialism.

Criticism of so-called Western epistemological forms undermines struggles against
colonialism.
Andersen 9 (Chris Michif (Métis) from western Canada. He is an associate professor in the
Faculty of Native Studies @ Alberta ‘9 “critical indigenous studies From Difference to Density” Cultural Studies Review 15 (2) p. 80-84)

In two recent articles,3American Indian studies professor Duane Champagne challenges ‘Western’ academic
disciplines’ epistemological ability to analyse contemporary Indigeneity .4 Specifically, their failure to consider
Indigenous collectivities’ active role in colonial contexts in terms not readily discernable in Western
forms of knowledge means these disciplines miss large elements of Indigeneity and, as such, fail to offer a plausible basis for
its analysis. Champagne contends that despite its current failure to do so, American Indian studies—extrapolated here to include all Indigenous studies—should

instead assume this mantle by presuming the distinctive agency of Indigenous peoples , including a focus
on exploring our relations according to our distinctive epistemologies and according to the goals and mandates set by
Indigenous communities. Not only will this distinguish Native studies from the rest of the academia, it will better position it to assist Indigenous peoples in righting their
relationships with dominant, ‘whitestream’ society.5 I agree with Champagne’s assertion that Indigenous studies—whether within or outside specific departments and

faculties—should exist in contemporary academia and that Indigenous communities ought to constitute a central focus to this endeavour. Despite his obvious love for the discipline

(a fidelity I share), however, his peculiar positioning of Indigenous studies as different needlessly marginalises our

density and, in doing so, unnecessarily gives ground to disciplinary turf long claimed by older disciplines .
Thus, although he usefully positions Indigenous communities as producers of complex knowledge about indigeneity, his separation of Indigenous from white society unnecessarily marginalises
two elements of our density critical to this relationship: 1) the extent of Indigenous communities’ knowledges about whiteness (a social fact which requires an expertise in ‘Western’ concepts);
and 2) the extent to which the production of academic knowledge through Indigenous studies is shaped by the ‘whitestream’ academic relations of power, marking it in tension with other

the epistemological aprioris of whiteness are a

forms of knowledge (such as community knowledge). Both are unfortunate omissions. Regarding the first,

dominant representational source through which Western societies produce and consume Indigeneity.
As such, Champagne recklessly jettisons so-called Western disciplinary concepts and methodologies as
immutable precisely where and when they are most necessary. Regarding the second, he dismisses the contextual importance of
accounting for the academic institutional conditions under which native studies units (are allowed to) exist. My sympathetic critique of Champagne’s argument is divided into three major parts

I examine his charge that

and a conclusion. Part one extrapolates his analysis of current native studies and his prescriptions for how to fix it. In this context

‘Western’ disciplines (anthropology, history, sociology and so on) are too epistemologically constricted
to properly explain Indigenous agency or communities and I emphasise his failure to account for the
conditions of possibility under which Native American studies entered into academic history (to borrow
Foucauldian phraseology).6 This latter element challenges the relationships he posits between both Indigenous

studies and other academic disciplines and Indigenous knowledge within and outside the academy. Part two
unpacks his tropes to reveal an epistemological and ontological essentialism which positions Indigeneity as

separate from (his notion of) colonialism, such that an endogamous focus on the former obviates the need for
accounting for the influence of the latter (or at least, that native studies can analyse the former in a manner which separates it from the Western academic
herd). I argue that Champagne reproduces a variant strain of ‘Aboriginalism’ 7 that oversimplifies contemporary Indigeneity and overstates the
immutability of concepts emanating from existing ‘Western’ disciplines. In doing so, he unnecessarily limits the contributions Indigenous studies is ideally positioned to make in deconstructing
Aboriginalist discourses and in doing so produces an oddly parochial formulation of the discipline. Finally, in part three I offer my own prescriptions for an Indigenous studies anchored in
Indigenous density (rather than difference). The temporal and epistemological complexity of our relationships with whitestream society means that Indigenous studies must counter
hegemonic representations of Indigeneity which marginalise or altogether ignore our density. Following in the footsteps of Geonpul scholar Moreton-Robinson’s path-breaking work, I argue

Indigenous studies’ study of both Indigeneity and whiteness must use all available epistemologies, not
that

just those which apparently distance Western disciplines from Indigenous studies analysis .8 While Champagne’s
formulation can possibly be stretched to examine whiteness, the epistemological strategies he proposes for analysing Indigeneity capture only specific, isolated elements of our complexity.
The essay ends with a discussion of the implications of this argument. I Locating (Champagne in) the discipline of native studies Native studies ‘state of the discipline’ pieces often begin by
differentiating our scholarship from that of longer-standing disciplines.9 Though these are as often prescriptive as reflective of actual practice, such immanent analysis signals a healthy and
growing discipline. American Indian scholar Clara Sue Kidwell suggests that, at least in native studies, these debates often play themselves out in a tension between two poles of analysis:

the essentialism cluster is rooted in an extreme form of post-colonialism

essentialism/difference and adaptation/assimilation.10 She suggests that

which ‘implies that American Indian ways of thinking existed before colonialism and remain unknowable by anyone outside those cultures . Native American
studies/American Indian studies can recover the long-suppressed values, epistemologies, and voices from colonial
oppression’.11 Conversely, adaptation clusters typically emphasise the agency of Indigenous collectivities in the face of whitestream colonialism. Like the essentialism cluster,
however, Kidwell argues that in its extreme variant: the idea of adaptation, or acculturation, or agency represents the ultimate disappearance of Indian identity into American society. If Indians
dress like everyone else, speak like everyone else, attend public schools, are citizens of the state in which they live and citizens of the United States, how can they justify claims to a distinctive

Champagne contends that Indigeneity and Indigenous

identity?12 Like others taking the essentialist position in the debate,13

communities are fundamentally different in ways which elide the epistemological premises of Western
disciplines (more on this in part two). These disciplines employ data collection concepts and practices
saturated with a concern for ‘examining the issues, problems, and conceptualizations that confront
American or Western civilization’.14 Indigenous issues are merely positioned as a specific instance of more general patterns of minority oppression.15 Such
thinking has, he suggests, detracted intellectual energy from the more laudable Indigenous studies
disciplinary goal of ‘conceptuali[s]ing, researching, and explaining patterns of American Indian individual
and collective community choices and strategies when confronted with relations with the American
state and society’.16 Champagne suggests that most native studies departments are multidisciplinary in character with faculty scattered in numerous disciplines teaching
theories and concepts from numerous academic fields, to students as often as not from non-Aboriginal backgrounds, with a vague mandate for increasing or generating broader awareness
about Indigenous history and contemporary realities.17 He admits that this multidisciplinarity is often advantageous in that ‘programs could be constructed from long-standing disciplines, and
often seasoned scholars could be called upon to provide guidance and support’.18 However, to the extent that concepts central to Western disciplines remain ‘oriented toward examining the
issues, problems, and conceptualizations that confront American or Western civilization’,19 these approaches effectively stifle the ability of American Indian studies to produce disciplinarily
endogamous theory and methodology. The existing Indigenous studies academic landscape is thus, Champagne explains, littered with disjointed and epistemologically scattered forays into
(and about) Indigenous communities. The current inability to produce distinctive theory and method has exacerbated institutional marginality (his context is American but this is readily
extrapolated more broadly): fiscal conservativism limits the likelihood that even well-meaning administrators will build-in the solid, permanent funding required for stable Native studies
departments (since money made available for ‘Aboriginal issues’ is just as likely to go to more wellregarded disciplines such as anthropology, history or education); broader multicultural or
diversity concerns overshadow the distinctiveness of Indigenous experiences by linking them to broader forms of ‘minority’ oppression (thus the seemingly natural fit of native studies
departments within ‘ethnic studies’ faculties); and mainstream theorising and methodological thinking has shown a reluctance to ‘think outside the box’ of Western modes of analysis.20

Champagne argues in a nutshell that: the university bureaucratic environment, weak resource support, the
emphasis on race and ethnic paradigms over an indigenous paradigm, and the relegation of Indian
Studies to serve general diversity interests for the university will continue to constrain, and often will prevent, full
development of indigenous studies departments and programs at many universities.21 Champagne’s understanding of native
studies’ relationship to the academy is reminiscent of the humanism Foucault critiques in his
examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexuality regulation .22 Foucault takes such
explanations to task for their tendency to position power repressively as an entity which prevents
actions and curtails freedoms. Foucauldian notions of power instead stress its repressive and constitutive character. They emphasise
how discursive power shapes the formation of subjectivities which, in turn, shape the conditions under which subjects ‘enter into history’. Wedded to a repressive understanding of power,

Champagne makes a homologous correlation between the current academic institutional marginality of
Native studies and the forms of marginality Indigenous communities experience outside the academy .
Thus correlated, he argues that a robust and holistic Indigenous paradigm can assist in rectifying this
repression. For Champagne, then, academic and nonacademic Indigenous knowledge are comrades-in-arms,
with Indigenous studies—anchored in an Indigenous paradigm—providing the missing link. In this guise, his Indigenous paradigm
places Indigenous communities and nations at its centre , instead of colonial critique. Native studies, Champagne
explains, ‘cannot center on a critique of the colonial experience but rather must focus on the individual and community choices
American Indians make to realize their culture, values, and political and economic interests within the
constraints and opportunities presented by changing colonial contexts’ .23 While colonial critique can be useful for examining
external forces relating to political, legal and market conditions, it ‘exclude[s] choice and social action on the part of Native historical and cultural experience, and in effect American Indians are

Champagne thus
not analyzed as players in their own historical contexts but rather viewed as billiard balls knocked around by powerful colonial powers and forces’.24

draws a clear distinction between, on the one hand, what he thinks Western disciplines, with their focus on colonialism, can
explain about indigeneity and on the other, what makes Indigenous peoples truly Indigenous and, presumably, what
these disciplines remain unable to explicate. Perhaps equally importantly, he assumes that such boundaries are discrete and readily discernable, such that
he effectively erases the object–subject relationship within which all other academic disciplines produce
knowledge.25 Champagne’s ostensible focus on Indigenous communities reflects a central disciplinary trope of native studies. For example, Cook-Lynn states bluntly that ‘Indian
Studies as an academic discipline was meant to have as it constituencies the native tribal nations of America and its major purpose the defense of lands and resources and the sovereign right
to nationtonation status’.26 This emphasis on tribally specific knowledge is also emphasised by Muskogee scholar Craig Womack, who argues the need for ‘more attention devoted to tribally
specific concerns’ in a literary context,27 part of a larger ‘literary nationalism’ movement with broadly allied concerns.28 Holm et al. argue even more specifically that native studies should
emphasise the exploration and support of and for what they term ‘peoplehood’, positioned to include language, sacred history, territory and ceremony,29 while Kidwell suggests that native
studies should endeavour to emphasise Indigenous relationships with land, the inclusion of Indigenous intellectual traditions, our inherent sovereignty and the importance of our Indigenous

languages.30 Thus, while Champagne’s focal concerns are not abnormal, his attempt to isolate Indigenous communities epistemologically
from the broader social fabric of dominant, whitestream society effectively removes a large part of our
arsenal for combatting the damaging representations of Indigeneity woven into larger society. Parts of his
argument turn on the idea that colonialism exists external to Indigenous communities and nations, as something we are subject to. Thus, it isn’t that we don’t suffer

(from) colonialism; rather, its power resides outside our communities . From this perspective, theories of
colonialism are explanatory tools but are not enough in-and-of-themselves because their externality
precludes their ability to fully comprehend and analyse our communities’ distinctiveness . In line with the repressive
formulation of power which anchors his understanding of Indigenous studies, for Champagne colonialism = sameness/assimilation and

indigeneity = difference/freedom. I will have more to say on this below, but suffice it to say for now that his prescriptions become particularly problematic when he
attempts to circumscribe the theories and methods native studies should use in analysis of/with Indigenous communities. One can perhaps forgive Champagne’s diagnosis in this context, since
it represents only part of his argument and, as I said, is a common trope of Indigenous studies. However, consider a fuller example of his positioning of colonialism: Colonial theories emphasize
external forces such as political, legal, market, and cultural constraints and hegemonies to which American Indian communities are subject. Colonial arguments are powerful tools and explain
much change in American Indian communities, but the kind of change that is explained is externally enforced and often coercive. Such change is often subtly resisted and not internalized.
[footnote omitted] An old Spanish saying is ‘I bend my knee but not my heart’.31 While his statements might legitimately swell our hearts with pride at the ways our ancestors resisted
colonialism/oppression while retaining their dignity, traditions and collective self consciousness, they nonetheless avoid questions about how the cultural power of nationstates do not merely

Champagne’s essentialism in effect marginalises the complex ways in which our

oppress, but seduce as well.32

Indigenous habitus (to borrow from Pierre Bourdieu) is inevitably and irrevocably constituted in and by the fields of struggle
we occupy.33 His colonialism thus staggers between a vulgar Marxism which stresses an autonomous
subject who can/must reject (or accept) colonialism and an equally vulgar structural-functionalism that
measures Indigenous agency and collective choices against a Cartesian indigeneity which exists outside
the life and reach of contemporary nation-states’ cultural power .
Security K/State K Answers
Sterling-Folker/Taiwan Identity Offense
 2AC Taiwan Identity Turn

And, power-politics and state-based institutions have protected Taiwanese from

violence by China --- analyzing the history of U.S. and Taiwanese institutions creates
better understandings of how radical politics work ---- abandoning the state and
security discourses DOOMS the Taiwanese to subjugation and violence

Jennifer Sterling-Folker & Rosemary E. Shinko ’05 are Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut at Storrs, USA, the Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut. She is a specialist in International Relations theory & Lecturer in Political
Theory and International Relations at the University of Connecticut at Stamford, USA, a theorist whose
research focuses on the critical interrogation of seminal IR concepts and themes including sovereignty,
peace, autonomy, ethics, and identity with a PhD, international relations theory and political theory,
University of Connecticut; MA, political science, Duquesne University, BA, political science and speech,
Duquesne University, June 1st, 2005, “Discourses of Power: Traversing the Realist-Postmodern Divide”
from https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/03058298050330031801,
accessed 7/13/19 || OES-AT

A postmodern approach to cross-strait relations seeks to locate sites of disruption where discourses
that emphasise territorial integrity and political sovereignty are laid open to ambiguity and
uncertainty. The point is to isolate those ongoing discussions and disagreements over the composition of national identity, history, and political and cultural legitimacy, in order to
expose the contingency of all national, territorial security discourses. It is in the exposure of those contingencies that change becomes possible. Zero-Sum Interests and the Realist State
Granting that postmodernism is seeking out the sources for radical change in and of the Westphalian sovereign system, how else are sources for rescripting to become translated into change

Doesn’t the
in the ChineseTaiwanese relationship except via the nations of China and Taiwan, their respective states, and the strategic relationship they share with the US?

Taiwanese state also protect identity difference from Chinese repression? Collective identities may be
socially-constructed, but their content can still be zero-sum . What would it have meant for the
individuals of Taiwan in the 1970s to have refused the national, territorial security discourses of
realism and to have embraced identity tolerance with China instead? Certainly the latter could only have been achieved by
embracing China on its own terms, and so it would have involved the political and economic subjugation of the Taiwanese

people to Beijing. The vast majority of Taiwanese were already victims of identity intolerance at the hands of the Nationalist KMT, but they were neither Mandarinspeaking, nor
did they identify with the Chinese mainland. Although the KMT were initially welcomed by the Taiwanese population as liberators from the Japanese occupation, Soong notes that ‘the
expectation that Taiwanese could now share power with their “mainland brothers” was crushed by the KMT’.54 Clashes and civil unrest ensued over KMT authoritarianism, corruption, and
favoritism, and in 1947 the KMT declared martial law. The formation of political parties was banned, the military was given considerable legal and censorship powers, thousands of opponents
were executed, and for the next thirty-five years Taiwan became a virtual police state dominated by Mainlanders who insisted that Mandarin be the official language. While the KMT remained
obsessed with returning to mainland China, it was not a goal shared by many Taiwanese. Those who dreamt of Taiwanese independence from China developed underground or overseas

There was little desire among the majority of Taiwanese to embrace identity
movements that later evolved into the DPP.

tolerance with China on the latter’s terms. Simultaneously, there was the possibility of greater
participation in the political institutions of Taiwan itself. For the Taiwanese, at that moment, to have
refused the national, territorial security discourses of IR in favor of ambiguity and tolerance would
have been to refuse the very identity and goals that distinguished them from the KMT and mainland
Chinese (and for which many of them had suffered). It would have meant a refusal of themselves, which hardly seems likely or even desirable. As
Elshtain puts it, ‘we are dealing with identities, remember, not easily sloughed off external garments’.55 To say that if the Taiwanese stop thinking of China as a problem then tensions will

It was the Taiwanese desire to

dissolve is true in an abstract sense but not in any practical sense for the vast majority of people who live these identities.

embrace statehood and the parameters of the Westphalian system that, along with US strategic
deterrence, prevented a Chinese invasion of Taiwan . To argue that the individuals of Taiwan would be
safer if they refused statehood is to ignore the Chinese commitment since 1949 to subjugate Taiwan
according to its own identity parameters. It is also to ignore the desire of the vast majority of
Taiwanese not to be subjugated according to those parameters. The ROC would not even exist if it had not been for
classic balance-of-power politics between two nation-states, the US and China, in the context of the
early Cold War. Its evolution into a democracy is just as indebted to its relationship with the US , since it was the
US decision to improve its relations with China in the 1970s that forced the KMT to pursue democratisation as means of national consciousness. Simultaneously, the goal of

Taiwanese nation-state building was to confirm for other nation-states that the ROC had a legitimate
claim to sovereignty (in opposition to China’s claim that it is only a province), because the ROC government has the legitimate support of its population. Hence the
increasing identity tolerance between Taiwan and China has only been realised through the avenues
and mechanisms of national identity politics and the governing institutions of China and Taiwan, no
outside or beyond them. Certainly nations have the option of refusing to become nation-states, but it would make little sense for nations and the individuals who comprise
them to do so, when those parameters promise control over a specified territory via intra-national decision-making institutions. This is why civil wars are endemic to the Westphalian systerm

If we don’t examine particular,

and why nations will pursue statehood even when they are, in reIative terms, politically and economically comfortable,

historical contexts, identities, and institutions - that is, if we insist upon, in Morgenthaus words, the
`neglect of the contingencies of history and of the concreteness of history and of the concreteness of
historical situations – then we will miss the way in which radical ideas work through and shape existing
institutions and practices, and are in turn shaped by them . Thus we will miss the most essential link between that which changes (namely,
history), and what remains the same (namely. structure).
 2AC Ethics DA to K’s of State

And, we have an Ethics DA to their alt ---- abandoning the state in the name of the
marginalized DOOMS the Taiwanese to subjugation and violence --- their k is a
DANGEROUSLY incomplete understanding of how marginalized groups around the
world can use the nation-state and power-politics for good

Jennifer Sterling-Folker & Rosemary E. Shinko ’05 are Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut at Storrs, USA, the Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut. She is a specialist in International Relations theory & Lecturer in Political
Theory and International Relations at the University of Connecticut at Stamford, USA, a theorist whose
research focuses on the critical interrogation of seminal IR concepts and themes including sovereignty,
peace, autonomy, ethics, and identity with a PhD, international relations theory and political theory,
University of Connecticut; MA, political science, Duquesne University, BA, political science and speech,
Duquesne University, June 1st, 2005, “Discourses of Power: Traversing the Realist-Postmodern Divide”
from https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/03058298050330031801,
accessed 7/13/19 || OES-AT
It is precisely the equation between the state and order that leads realism, in turn, to question the possibility of such a de-territorialised posimodern ethics. The
postmodern notion of self-making in a register of freedom' suggests that individuals can and want to be free to remake their identity but that they are prevented from
doing so by the state. The problem with such a formulation from a realist perspective is that individuals do not want freedom from settled identity; and in any case it is the
nation, not the state, that is the chief oppressor in this regard. Human beings are social creatures whose humanity is only realisable within the context of a group, and, as a

human beings do not embrace identity ambiguity.3~ They will form groups even when there is no rational
result,

reason to do so, and group formation means the demarcation of identity difference from other human beings. What binds a collective
of individuals is always the opposition to something normatively different , external, and less desirable,
because without this juxtaposition the members of a collective cannot know who they are and they cannot function as a collective. The need for order and stability is `lot a
function of the state, then, it is a function of human sociability that derives, in turn, from the anarchic conditions of species evolution, Postmodernism is correct to argue
that the act of identity-settling is never complete and the content of identity contestdble. This is what allows for identity manipulation, imposition, and subjugation in the

name of a greater collective good. But realism counter-proposes that the human need for a settled identity is stronger than
the desire for con- tesability, and the voices offering ambiguity and contingency cannot prevail against those offering clarity of identity difference
instead. In contemporary world politics the most pertinent group identity is the nation , which subsumes other
forms of group identity and is married to the state as a type of social institution and process for determining intra-
group resource decisions.~ Individual identity is intimately linked to the state as the primary
decision-making structure for the national collec- tive. A refusal to engage in this link
analvtically means an analytical failure to recognise how important the state remains for
intra-national quarrels over identity and resource allocation. And to encourage the identity
ambiguity while refusing engagement with the state is to play into the hands of the forces
that post-modernists wish to counter-act: the builders of territorially-defined nation-
states. It is no accident, then, that the ROC's development into a full- fledged democracy gave pro-
independence forces access to the Taiwanese state and the opportunity to enact policies that
encourage nationalist identity difference, Early pro-independence movements were as much about secession from China as they were
opposition to the KMT's authoritarian rule over Taiwan between 1949 and 1989, and there was an ethnic link between China and the KMT that was in opposition to the

For many Taiwanese, they belong to a separate nation that has no more
island's Taiwanese majority.

enduring connections to China than it does to Japan or even the Netherlands, its former colonial rulers.h1 This has proven to be electorallv
significant, and the DPP candidate, Chen Shui-bien, won the Presidency in 2000 and 2004 on a party platform that aligns pro-independence with Taiwanese ethnicity
Taiwanese ethnic identity' began enjoying a tailwind of popular support during Chen's first term, and the 2004 Presidential election was cast `as a choice between

Conversely, the political identity of the Taiwanese

subjugation to Communist China and Taiwanese nalionalism.4

Nationalists is rife with ambiguity which works to the political advantage of the DPP voting
margins from the last two Presidential elections, to which Chen won by thirty-nine percent and fifty percent, suggest to electoraI strate- gists that the Nationalists will need

to embrace native Taiwanese nation- alism, and downplay their Mandarin Chinese ethnic identities, if they wish to prevail electorally. Meanwhile, Chen and the
DPP show every sign of pursuing the nation-state building agenda of their campaign, which includes revising
the Taiwanese constitution, restructuring its government, redefining Taiwan's territory, and changing the ROC's name to the Republic

of Taiwan. According to Van Xuetong, a foreign policy expert at Beijing's Quingha University Chen is determined to be the founding father of a new nation by
20O8; something which China has vowed to prevent with force if necessary . Competitive elections over

control of the state are a driving force in the upsurge in Taiwanese nationalism, because the state remains the primary resource allocating institution of

contemporary global politics. Hence access to and control over it ensures the ability to pursue and obtain specified preferences and agendas, and so it is a site

where stuggles over resource control and identity differentiation come together. Failure to
examine the political and national struggles over state control that occur on a daily basis
around the globe, and a preference for the study of the rnarginalised and ambiguous
instead, will get us no closer to understanding or realising individual identity or security;
either globally or in the Chinese-Taiwanese relationship specifically And to suggest to
individuals and subgroups within China and Taiwan that their cause will he furthered by
embracing identity ambiguity while simultaneously refusing participation in the state is not
simply unrealistic; it is an ethical abdication in its own right, as there is no surer way to
marginalise oneself from the sites of and exercise of power .
 ---1AR DA to Alt

The alt will collapse back into security politics—the state and a historical analysis is
critical to a smooth transition, vote aff to prevent inevitable violence at the local and
state level

Jennifer Sterling-Folker & Rosemary E. Shinko ’05 are Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut at Storrs, USA, the Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut. She is a specialist in International Relations theory & Lecturer in Political
Theory and International Relations at the University of Connecticut at Stamford, USA, a theorist whose
research focuses on the critical interrogation of seminal IR concepts and themes including sovereignty,
peace, autonomy, ethics, and identity with a PhD, international relations theory and political theory,
University of Connecticut; MA, political science, Duquesne University, BA, political science and speech,
Duquesne University, June 1st, 2005, “Discourses of Power: Traversing the Realist-Postmodern Divide”
from https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/03058298050330031801,
accessed 7/13/19 || OES-AT
Both realism and postmodernism have a problematic relationship with their conceptualizations of power and its implication in the possibibilities for structural stasis and
historical change. For neoclassic realism, there is no other way to understand contemporary global politics except through the institutions and mechanisms that national
groups continue to rely upon to make resource allocation decisions. Those who control such institutions will have at their disposal material resources (such as weapons or
currency reserves) and ideational resources (such as the moral legitimacy to ask individuals to die on behalf of group survival. These can be utilised to pursue particular

agendas and interests those pursuits involve choices both within and between national groups over who will be allocated what. Small wonder then, that the state
remains the primary site of struggle in world politics according to realism, since to those who control the group mechanisms
of resource. allocation go the spoils. Conversely, postmodern attempts to understand global politics inevitably

devolve into a study of conflicts from within their local, con- tingent and historicised locations, because postmodernists operate on the
assumption that there is no universal rationality that Can uniformly comprehend and evaluate the entirety of global politics. However, the power to elude, resist, or alter
realist representational practices of power politics is always already present within the emergent moment of thought and action. What else then can postmodemism rety
upon except anecdotal instances of individual/collective acts of resistance and trans- gression to illustrate the emergence of new forms of international sub- jectivity?
There is no one mode of being or form of subjectivity that can be deployed as a measure of teleological progression. There is no one conception of freedom that can be
relied upon to evaluate expressions of self-making. There is no final arbiter, no final measure upon which determinations of success can come to rest. It is also

there is something eerily sim- ilar in the conclusions of realism and

interesting to observe that

postmodernism juxtaposed here. The realist position cautions us to took at the particulars of historical structure, while the postmoderrt position draws our
attention to the necessity of thinking more expansively about the structure of historical possibility. Thus, in our dialogue, the realist and the postmodernist have traded
places; shifting the analytical divide so that in order to understand stasis and change, the realist insists we study the particu- lars of history, while the postmodernist insists

whether one deploys the realist term, power,

we study power as an over-arching, structurally encompassing phenomenon. And

or its postmodem variant, power relations, both ultimately rely upon an understanding of
power that is rooted in struggle. Thus we realise that our dialogue serves as an analytic of power within which difference can be recognised
and respected, without being absorbed into a unifying totality. Both realists and postmodernists discursively fill the content of the `empty space of power with referents

such as order, discipline, vulnerability survival, uncertainty and indeterminacy. And in this sense the two positions can be viewed as
mirror images. Postmodemism, as discussed by Ashley and Walker, is not an anarchical stance where anything goes, but a process whereby difference can be
expressed, negotiated and recognised Within the disciplined effort of listening, questioning and speaking. Similarly. realism as dismissed by Morgenthau arid Bull,

is not a position whereby violence is sanctioned and recommended. Rather it seeks to

understand how human difference can exist and be protected it structural continuity is
demanded by human sociability itself. This is not, in either case, a valorisation of totalising
chaos or violence. This recognition of otherness is further implicated in a larger con- textual struggle involving the tactical and symbolic content that we
ascribe to the concept of power. Drawing upon Newman's notion of the empty place of power enables us to open up the spaces within which power is rendered visible
and determined to beat work: These sites are the sites of identity/difference, security/insecurity, order/disorder, sell/other, vulnerability/invulnerability, and
uncertainty/certainty. Security is inextricably linked to power, which both realists and post- modernists would concede, but what is the content of the
security/power nexus? Power is already always implicated in the strug- gle to make life go on, but security is the rationale, which underlies both realist and postmodern

Realism and postmodernism share a similar

reasons for the desire to exercise, resist or trans- gress power in the first place.

recognition that life involves struggle, and that the concept of power serves as both a
means and a site of struggle. But how we view this struggle is where we part company and resume our agonistic postures. Postmodernists view
struggle in terms of an agonism, where individuals constitute them- selves as contending identities', whereas realists conceive of it as an essential antagonism reflective of
timeless modes of human nature.~' Thus we have returned to a point of discursive incommensurability in our attempt to conceptualise power's productive capacity for
ushering in structural change within the movement and construction of history For postmodernists the admission and recognition of vulnerability serves as a tactical way
to resist and/or transgress realist power politics, whereas for realists power can mitigate or lessen vulnerability. Postmodernists focus on the survival of people in the
broadest definition of the term security, while realists focus on the survival and security of the state, which they link to the survival of the nation arid its people. But this

once historical contingency and diversity

return to an incommensurable difference is precisely the point of our discussion because `

enter the analysis opportunities for critique and creativity in discussions of political
possibility increase.
 2AC Perm vs. Security

realist and postmodern perspectives are compatible – both can be used to analyze
power structures specifically between China and Taiwan
Jennifer Sterling-Folker & Rosemary E. Shinko ’05 are Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut at Storrs, USA, the Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut. She is a specialist in International Relations theory & Lecturer in Political
Theory and International Relations at the University of Connecticut at Stamford, USA, a theorist whose
research focuses on the critical interrogation of seminal IR concepts and themes including sovereignty,
peace, autonomy, ethics, and identity with a PhD, international relations theory and political theory,
University of Connecticut; MA, political science, Duquesne University, BA, political science and speech,
Duquesne University, June 1st, 2005, “Discourses of Power: Traversing the Realist-Postmodern Divide”
from https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/03058298050330031801,
accessed 7/13/19 || OES-AT
Power, Structure, History, and Ethics For realism and postmodernism, power is pervasive and functions as both a capability and an effect.
Beyond these generic similarities, however, lie vast analytical differences. Realism
locates power in things – such as bombs,
money, people, and institutions – but these things must have an effect on others. 9 That is, a gun in a closet of
which no human being is aware is not power. Instead, realists know that power exists when it is exercised by an actor (whether
it a state or individual) that utilises things regarded as powerful in order to impose their preferences on others who would, in turn, prefer not to
have such imposition. Alternative preferences lead to resistance, the disruption of the balance of power, and thus the use of power in order to
re-establish such balance. Resources that signal power are used to get one’s preferences or to resist letting others have their way. It is in its
effects that power is made known, thus, as Guzzini notes, realist ‘power implies potential change, which in turn implies a counterfactual
situation of potential continuity’.10 Control and struggle are also relevant to postmodern conceptualisations of
power.11 According to postmodernists, these two facets of power manifest themselves in two distinct yet interrelated ways. First, there
are the physical and intellectual structures that impose certain ways of knowing and doing things.
Physical structures include the institutions of governmentality, such as bureaucracies, while the
intellectual structures are those which determine how we frame things and our knowledge of the world.
Such structures are reflective of the productive and deterministic aspects of power in that they produce fixed identities, territorial
grounding, origins of meaning, and presence. But the second sense in which power is analysed emerges within Foucault’s
understanding of the relationality of power and the possibilities for resisting structural domination. Since power is conceptualised as
fluid, reversible and non-linear (i.e., as a network or web), it carries within it productive possibilities that can serve as resources not
only to resist structural constraints, but to (re)configure them. Within both perspectives, then, resistance to the power imposed
by structure is a key point of analysis, but realists are more interested in how alternative preferences, which are embedded in
and produced by alternative and competing structures, utilise power in order to resist one another. Postmodernists, on the
other hand, are interested in how resistance to all structure is an act of power in itself and has the potential to
reconfigure existing physical and intellectual structures. Hence while both perspectives concur that power
is pervasive and simultaneously a structural and individual phenomenon, their analytical focus is very
different. Neorealists and neoclassical realists focus on state structures, with the former concentrating on inter-state competition while the
latter concentrates on intra-state competition.12 Alternatively, postmodernism is interested in acts of resistance to what is structurally fixed
and disciplinary. Resistance is a power resource that insists upon being ad hoc and fluid, thereby preventing structures from solidifying. In other
words, while
realism examines the competition of structures which want to stay in being, postmodernism
examines resistance to structural ways of being. In both instances power is seen as a resource that is capable of
simultaneously maintaining structures and inducing historical change, but what wields power and why it does so are seen to be very different.
For realists, historical change occurs within a timeless context of competing structures which wield power against one another either to change
the status quo or maintain it. For postmodernists, historical change occurs when structural fixity is displaced by acts of resistance, which are a
form of power. Because realists take as given the very structures that postmodernists see as disciplinary and oppressive, postmodernists regard
realist analysis as part of the problem. Epistemologically realists separate the analysis of power from its practice, but postmodernists argue that
analysis is practice, and therefore taking structures as analytical givens only reifies them. Because structure and domination are intertwined,
there is an openly ethical dimension to all postmodern IR analysis and heeding those voices that contest the disciplinary power of ostensibly
given structures is central to postmodernism’s analytical practice. Such voices are found at the margins of inter- and intra-state relations.
Realism, on the other hand, ignores these voices because it is skeptical of the ability to displace existing structures, and it assumes that
structural reconstitution in one form or another is a fact of human existence. What happens after the power of resistance has been unleashed
and existing structures are displaced is a particular worry of realists, since the opposite of structure is anarchy and newly constituted structures
may be relatively worse than what was displaced.13 This may explain why realists analyse power as outcome, and the limitations on power
identified by realists involve the relative inability to exercise power effectively and obtain one’s preferences. Realism focuses on the aftermath
of power’s exercise, because it is skeptical and fearful of structural disruption. The
similarities and differences between realist
and postmodern conceptions of power, structure, history, and ethics are reflected in our discussion of
the China-Taiwan relationship that follows. The realist analysis conceives of the China-Taiwan
relationship as a power struggle between three states, which each have contradictory preferences: the United States
(US), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and Taiwan. Taiwan’s intra-state political structures are particularly important
to this trilateral power struggle because Taiwanese and Chinese preferences are zero-sum, and Taiwan’s electoral
politics (and the role of identity formation in these politics) impacts its relationship with China. State
structures on both sides of the Taiwan straits reinforce the desire for settled identities that are ultimately zero-sum, as does the inter-state
relationship between all three states. Thus the possibility of violence among these three states remains relatively high. The
postmodern
analysis, conversely, conceives of the ChinaTaiwan relationship as representing both structural closure
and an opportunity for structural change. State leaders and policy-makers on both sides of the straits
are seen as seeking to impose a closure of identity and thus to foreclose more ethically acceptable
change. Post modernists thus focus on the voices of resistance to such closures, particularly in Taiwan
(and in contradistinction to realism’s focus on its intra-state structures). These voices must be recognised
and thereby encouraged, since it is in the act of resistance that the possibility of radical reconfiguration
of existing structures may be found. In this way the belief that identity relationships are zero-sum and violence is inevitable may
be subverted from within the relationship itself. We now turn to a dialogue between realism and postmodernism in order to problematise
these conceptualisations of power.

examining sites of contestation questions securitization rhetoric and representations

of international relations
Jennifer Sterling-Folker & Rosemary E. Shinko ’05 are Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut at Storrs, USA, the Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut. She is a specialist in International Relations theory & Lecturer in Political
Theory and International Relations at the University of Connecticut at Stamford, USA, a theorist whose
research focuses on the critical interrogation of seminal IR concepts and themes including sovereignty,
peace, autonomy, ethics, and identity with a PhD, international relations theory and political theory,
University of Connecticut; MA, political science, Duquesne University, BA, political science and speech,
Duquesne University, June 1st, 2005, “Discourses of Power: Traversing the Realist-Postmodern Divide”
from https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/03058298050330031801,
accessed 7/13/19 || OES-AT

Realist Power Struggle: US-China-Taiwan What

does it mean to say ‘the China-Taiwan relationship’? For a structural realist
there is an obvious reality with respect to Taiwan, but it begins with
the US and the PRC, which are both concerned with
the potential damage that the other could do to their national security and economies. 14 These concerns
result from each nation-state’s desire to dominate the politics and economics of the region, and both possess
substantial resources in this regard, including large numbers and types of military weapons, large portions of their citizenry engaged in their
militaries, sizeable economies, vast networks of trading partners and linkages, and considerable financial resources and influence. Given the
military resources each possesses, combined with the trade linkages they have developed with one another, both nation-states seek to avoid
direct military confrontations with one another. Yet
they also simultaneously seek to balance one another’s military
and economic power in order to avoid any advantage the other might accrue in their competition for
regional domination. From a structural realist perspective, Taiwan represents a third and relatively weaker entity
in the mix. For the PRC, Taiwan represents unfinished business.15 Originally a province of China, Taiwan is an island 100 miles off the coast
of China’s Fukien province, and the body of water that separates them, the Taiwan Strait, is a major commercial shipping avenue. Taiwan had
been annexed to and occupied by the Japanese from 1895 until 1945 when it was returned to China. When the decades-long Chinese civil war
culminated in a communist victory over the mainland in 1949, remnants of the US-supported Nationalists (Kuomintang or KMT) escaped to the
island and established their own government, the Republic of China (ROC). From its inception, the ROC was intended to be a temporary
solution. The Nationalists argued that they were the sole legitimate government of China and insisted that they would some day re-conquer the
mainland. Meanwhile the PRC made plans to reclaim Taiwan after it had consolidated power on the mainland. What prevented this invasion
was the US interest in balancing Chinese aggression in light of the Korean War. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Taiwan became the
cornerstone in the US Cold War containment strategy in Asia. The US sent naval forces into the Taiwan Strait several times in response to
Chinese provocations, it supplied the ROC with economic aid, and it signed a mutual defense treaty with it in 1954. This Cold War context
changed by the early 1970s, however, as China had by then developed a mutual interest with the US in counter-balancing the Soviet Union, and
the US and China explored the possibility of improved relations. In 1979 the US established full diplomatic relations with the PRC, terminated its
1954 mutual security pact with Taiwan, and reaffirmed the one-China principle that there is only one China and Taiwan is a part of it.
Simultaneously, however, the US adopted the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which declared that the US has a commitment to Taiwan’s security
and is obligated to sell sophisticated defensive arms to it. The US has also consistently argued it has a right to pro tect Taiwan from the PRC, and
in 1996 it dispatched two aircraft carrier groups to the region in response to Chinese military activities in the strait. The triangular relationship
between the US, the PRC, and the ROC is replete with strategic deterrent calculations. The US attempts to pacify China with
regards to Taiwan while also containing China and protecting Taiwan from it. The PRC attempts to
intimidate Taiwan while preventing direct US involvement in their bilateral conflict. And the ROC seeks
to maintain and increase its independence from China while being careful not to alienate American
support. This trilateral structural relationship can also be examined from a neoclassical realist perspective, which focuses on the domestic
politics of these states. Competing subgroups within the US, the PRC, and the ROC emphasise either cooperative economic linkages or
militaristic policies in their relationships with one another. The extent to which any of these particular subgroups are in ascendance results from
electoral competition in the US and the ROC, and internal bureaucratic struggles in the PRC.16 Taiwan’s development into a full-fledged
democracy in the 1990s has increased hostilities between the ROC and the PRC, because democratisation allowed the main pro-independence
political party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), to gain control over and utilise state power in the pursuit of its nationalist policies.
Given neoclassical realism’s concern with non-systemic variables, the impact
of identity formation on intra-state politics in
Taiwan is particularly important. The DPP and other pro-independence groups are intimately linked to a
Taiwanese identity that sees itself as distinct from that of mainland China. These Taiwanese, who emigrated from
Mainland China before World War II and may be divided into two groups (Hoklos and Hakkas) based on linguistic differences, constitute eighty
five percent of the population17 ‘Mainlanders’ are the Mandarinspeaking KMT who retreated to Taiwan after WWII; they constitute only
fourteen percent of the population. As long as the Nationalists prevailed electorally, Taiwan pursued a foreign policy with China that subtly
mixed accommodation (including the public acceptance of the oneChina principle) and resistance (such as pursuing sovereign member ship in
IGOs). Under the DPP, on the other hand, Taiwan has declared its intention to become a full-fledged sovereign nation-state within the next ten
years; something the PRC has consistently indicated it will use force to prevent. These
internal developments make conflict
between the PRC and the ROC even more likely than international structural considerations alone
would have done. Given US strategic interests in the region, the Taiwan Strait is, as David Lampton, Director of China Studies at John
Hopkins observes, ‘the only probable place . . . where two big nuclear powers could come into conflict’.18 Postmodern Recognition and
Expressions of Doubt From a postmodern perspective, power is already at play in the ways in which a realist analysis
describes and discusses what it has supposedly objectively framed as a potentially dangerous
flashpoint.19 But how can postmodernism maintain that power is implicit in the very act of describing the realist version of ‘reality’? Can
this exercise of power be drawn out and made visible? The key lies in explicating the postmodern claim that not only is IR a
discursive process, but that it is ‘a process of knowledge as power’. 20 Starting from this perspective, power is
understood in terms of its relational context. Power relations are made known where attempts are made to bring
ambiguity under control, where a privileged interpretation emerges, or where conduct is disciplined and
discourse limited.21 Thus when we choose to comprehend the world in a certain way, we thereby impose
an order on it which must inevitably be held in place by power; a power which simultaneously produces us as ‘knowers’
of the world and disciplines us to know the world in accordance with an established mode of certitude.22 Realism
is the established
mode of certitude through which we have come to know the international, and it centers on national
security as power politics. According to Taiwan’s ‘Guidelines for National Unification’ issued in 1991, for example, any timeframe for
the unification of Taiwan and China must ‘respect the rights and interests of the people in the Taiwan area, and protect their security and
welfare’.23 Realism’s national security power/knowledge grid establishes the order whereby security and
welfare are conflated with the state and deployed to justify the use (or threat) of violence in order to
maintain that discursive equation of state and security/welfare. It is this frame of sovereign certitude that a
postmodern analysis seeks to disrupt. It is not, as George suggests, that postmodernists are attempting to somehow
move beyond power, but rather that they are attempting to shift the focus of the knowledge/power
grid through which we represent the world of IR.24 In order to radically question the singular,
irreducible version of reality imposed on the world via realist politics, we need to look to the various
marginal sites and be attentive to what Ashley refers to as the ‘reality of human struggles to make life go on’.25
We need to look at the various local sites where identity and territoriality have been thrown into radical
doubt. This recognition of radical doubt opens a space for individuals to question and resist those who
would marshal the forces of violence in the name of territorial certitude.26 This recognition shifts us
from relations of power that define security in terms of national security, to relations of power that
exceed the limited purview of states. One site to deconstruct is the representation of two titanic foes, the
US and China, squaring off in a primordial contest between good and evil. Such a dichotomous representational frame oversimplifies myriad
complexities and also encourages political practices which necessarily categorise actions, words and thoughts as
either/or. Framing China as a ‘looming menace’ scripts a scenario whereby cross-strait relations become denotated as one of the most
dangerous sites in global politics. This script easily roles over into an attitude of resignation like that clearly expressed by Kurt Campbell,
Director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, when he admits that it appears as if almost inexorable forces are at work in the
straits area.27 Disrupting this realist representation of reality entails drawing out counter narratives. Certainly
one marginal site
where acts of resistance and transgression are transpiring is in the movement of Taiwan’s indigenous
peoples for recognition and cultural survival. There are currently eleven major indigenous peoples in Taiwan who make up less
than two percent of the total population. Prejudice, pressures to assimilate and a general underprivileged status constitute the context within
which they struggle to make life go on. It is here, in their
marginal existence, that the power deployed to construct an
overarching, unified, national Taiwanese identity becomes visible . Many of these groups have become politically active
at both the local and national levels in order to promote the welfare of their communities and to maintain their expression of difference.28
They fear the narrative power of Taiwanese national identity, which threatens to subsume and eventually erase their cultural and historical
memory.29 These are marginalised sites of difference, yet they locate a possibility that contests the
inevitability of a move toward the solidification of one homogenising national Taiwanese identity . In these
sites of struggle security issues are also of paramount concern, but the security issues here are qualitatively different than those glimpsed from
the triangulation of US, Chinese, and Taiwanese representations of national security. These sites are fraught with doubt, contingency and
chance, and they expose how focusing on titanic struggles between competing national identities and strategic foes is merely an attempt to
impose a simplistic order on the complexity of life itself. It is not that the state is irrelevant to postmodern concerns, but in
order to
problematise discourses that presume the inevitability and historical necessity of the state, we must
locate sites of contestation that do not conflate state security and survival with that of individuals or
communities. It is the rupture between these paradoxical positions that postmodernism seeks to explore.30
 State Key/Necessary/Effective

engaging the state is necessary because it is a primary decision-making structure but

postmodern ethics can be used to examine political and national structures
Jennifer Sterling-Folker & Rosemary E. Shinko ’05 are Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut at Storrs, USA, the Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut. She is a specialist in International Relations theory & Lecturer in Political
Theory and International Relations at the University of Connecticut at Stamford, USA, a theorist whose
research focuses on the critical interrogation of seminal IR concepts and themes including sovereignty,
peace, autonomy, ethics, and identity with a PhD, international relations theory and political theory,
University of Connecticut; MA, political science, Duquesne University, BA, political science and speech,
Duquesne University, June 1st, 2005, “Discourses of Power: Traversing the Realist-Postmodern Divide”
from https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/03058298050330031801,
accessed 7/13/19 || OES-AT
Realism is What States Do It is not that change is not possible in realism, or that alternative sites of struggle are not important, but the
parameters of and sites of struggle for change highlighted by postmodernism seem analytically misplaced. If ‘realism’ is not simply explanation
by ivory-tower academics but is what states and policy-makers do (it
is, after all, Chinese and US officials who designate
one another as menaces, and it is Taiwanese state officials who equate national security and welfare in
their own documents), then why study the marginalised instead of the states and policy-makers
involved? Why not talk about change within the context of state-society politics and among state policy-makers? The state is one of the
ultimate sites of political, economic, and social struggle and power in contemporary world politics, and it seems counter-productive to look for
and promote change in representative practices while simultaneously ignoring the state and its relationship to these alternative sites of
representation. If change is both possible and afoot in our representations of the world, shouldn’t it be recognisable in the politics of and
struggle over the state and its functions in society? The fact that many states, such as the US and the ROC, are democracies underscores this
point, since they have been institutionally designed to respond to majorities and minorities within their societies. Even China’s totalitarian
regime responds to multiple interests emanating from its society. Hence it is not clear to realists why a discussion of the marginalised does not
also involve understanding the structural mechanisms whereby doubt and uncertainty are translated into political practice. Conversely, while
there is a great deal of radical doubt in the world, but not all of it matters to individual security or territorial violence and competition among
nation-states. If
the radical doubt engendered by the marginalised (in this case, two percent of Taiwan’s
population) is not realised through state structures, then studying them won’t get us any closer to
understanding change and stasis in the ChinaTaiwan relationship. Wouldn’t our understanding of change in this
triangular relationship be better served by examining how the majority and the minority interact within the political structures, parties, and
interest groups of the US, the PRC, and the ROC and, in so doing, effect the politics and behavior of the other states involved? Postmodern
Responsibility to Otherness Such realist queries go to the heart of alterity in postmodern analysis. There is, in
the continued realist
focus on the state, an underlying presumption that there is a necessity for stability and order that can
only be maintained with the perpetuation of a state-centric system . Perhaps most problematic are the effects of a
realist perspective that would marshal all of its power in an effort to discipline and limit the individual’s prospects for ‘self-making in a register
of freedom’.31 Ashley and Walker describe freedom as that which exists prior to the imposition of limitations, necessity and need. On one level
then, freedom finds its expression in a register or space which provides an opening to contemplate new ethical modes of behavior in the
conduct of international politics. Thus self-making in a register of freedom becomes possible amid the recognition of the contingency, chance
and ambiguity of life. Yet, this process of self-making does not transpire in a relational vacuum, nor is it a freedom in which anything goes.
According to Ashley and Walker, all those engaged in questioning boundaries and resisting the imposition of limitations share the problem of
freedom. And while no one’s paradigm for questioning, resisting and /or transgressing boundaries should become the universal or standard
paradigm for others to replicate, such freedom enacts an ethics that ‘does discipline the active labor of self-making, orienting that labor not
only to respect the uncertainties of every immediate locality but also to explore the connections across localities upon which the struggle for
freedom depends’.32 Thus postmodernism offers its version of a de-territorialised ethics, which draws its
power from an engagement between individuals across locales who struggle to resist the sovereign
imperative of exclusion in all its various guise s.33 An interesting vantage point from which to view this ‘open-ended, always
hazardous contest among plural cultural possibilities’ is within the contentious debate over the construction and
content of Taiwanese literature.34 This debate has engaged scholars on both sides of the straits, and has profound implications for
future cross-strait relations because at its heart lies issues of self-reflexivity and identity. Nativists advocate the creation of a Taiwanese
national literature distinct from other Asian literary expressions and traditions. As Tang notes, these scholars and writers exemplify a
‘willingness and desire to identify with and represent the land of Taiwan’.35 However, this representation trades on the positing of a nativist
identity in opposition to an oppressive Chinese other. Tang confirms that the nativist ‘objective
is to institute and fortify a new
sense of collective identity often through instilling a victim consciousness, so as to lend cultural and
moral legitimacy to the pursuit for political selfdetermination’ .36 Nativist literature thus reiterates the binding tie
between people and territory while relying on the identification of China as a looming, ominous threat. This literary
debate is the site of disagreement and contest where issues of identity intersect with issues of originality (self-
determination), particularity (authenticity) and subjectivity (national sovereignty) .37 The impulse of some within
the nativist camp is to reduce these crosscutting currents to a simple juxtaposition between separatists and unificationists, delineating the
choice as an either/or determination between those Taiwanese who are pro-independence and those who favor eventual reunification with
China. For instance, Chen Wanyi criticises the more exclusionary aspects of nativism and espouses the development of a literary tradition that
includes ‘literature written in the Taiwanese dialect’, ‘Hakka literature’, ‘literature of the indigenous people’, and ‘military compound
literature’.38 Ultimately what Tang advocates is encouraging a fluid exchange of ideas that keeps alive the play of difference and ambiguity. The
point, then, is to open up possibilities for cross-strait discussions and the exploration of connections that would recognise the struggles for
freedom occurring across these various locales. From a postmodern perspective, the crucial activity is to question,
test and expose the power that lies behind the impulse to construct and impose an exclusionary
version of either Chinese or Taiwanese identity that would demarcate itself as a bounded, sovereign
territorial space compelled to defend the certitude of its identity by the threat, or actual use, of force.
Realist Identity and Reinforcing Structures It is precisely the equation between the state and order that leads
realism, in turn, to question the possibility of such a de-territorialised postmodern ethics. The postmodern
notion of ‘self-making in a register of freedom’ suggests that individuals can and want to be free to remake their identity but that they are
prevented from doing so by the state. The problem with such a formulation from a realist perspective is that individuals do not want freedom
from settled identity; and in any case it is the nation, not the state, that is the chief oppressor in this regard. Human beings are social creatures
whose humanity is only realisable within the context of a group, and, as a result, human beings do not embrace identity ambiguity.39 They will
form groups even when there is no rational reason to do so, and group formation means the demarcation of identity difference from other
human beings. What binds a collective of individuals is always the opposition to something normatively different, external, and less desirable,
because without this juxtaposition the members of a collective cannot know who they are and they cannot function as a collective. The need
for order and stability is not a function of the state, then, it is a function of human sociability that derives, in turn, from the anarchic conditions
of species evolution. Postmodernism is correct to argue that the act of identity-settling is never complete and
the content of identity contestable. This is what allows for identity manipulation, imposition, and subjugation in the name of a
greater collective good. But realism counter-proposes that the human need for a settled identity is stronger
than the desire for contestability, and the voices offering ambiguity and contingency cannot prevail
against those offering clarity of identity difference instead . In contemporary world politics the most pertinent group
identity is the nation, which subsumes other forms of group identity and is married to the state as a type of social institution and process for
Individual identity is intimately linked to the state as the primary
determining intragroup resource decisions.40
decision-making structure for the national collective. A refusal to engage in this link analytically means
an analytical failure to recognise how important the state remains for intra-national quarrels over
identity and resource allocation. And to encourage the identity ambiguity while refusing engagement
with the state is to play into the hands of the forces that post-modernists wish to counter-act : the
builders of territorially-defined nation-states. It is no accident, then, that the ROC’s development into a fullfledged
democracy gave pro-independence forces access to the Taiwanese state and the opportunity to enact policies that encourage nationalist
identity difference. Early pro-independence movements were as much about secession from China as they were opposition to the KMT’s
authoritarian rule over Taiwan between 1949 and 1989, and there was an ethnic link between China and the KMT that was in opposition to the
island’s Taiwanese majority. For many Taiwanese, ‘they belong to a separate nation that has no more enduring connections to China than it
does to Japan or even the Netherlands, its former colonial rulers’.41 This has proven to be electorally significant, and the DPP candidate, Chen
Shui-bien, won the Presidency in 2000 and 2004 on a party platform that aligns pro-independence with Taiwanese ethnicity. Taiwanese ethnic
identity began ‘enjoying a tailwind of popular support’ during Chen’s first term, and the 2004 Presidential election was cast ‘as a choice
between subjugation to Communist China and Taiwanese nationalism’.42 Conversely, the political identity of the Taiwanese Nationalists is rife
with ambiguity, which works to the political advantage of the DPP. Voting margins from the last two Presidential elections, in which Chen won
by thirty-nine percent and fifty percent, suggest to electoral strategists that the Nationalists will need to embrace native Taiwanese nationalism,
and downplay their Mandarin Chinese ethnic identities, if they wish to prevail electorally.43 Meanwhile, Chen and the DPP show every sign of
pursuing the nation-state building agenda of their campaign, which includes revising the Taiwanese constitution, restructuring its government,
redefining Taiwan’s territory, and changing the ROC’s name to the Republic of Taiwan. According to Yan Xuetong, a foreign policy expert at
Beijing’s Quingha University, Chen ‘is determined to be the founding father of a new nation by 2008’;44 something which China has vowed to
prevent with force if necessary. Competitive elections over control of the state are a driving force in the upsurge in Taiwanese nationalism,
because the state remains the primary resource allocating institution of contemporary global politics. Hence access to and control over it
ensures the ability to pursue and obtain specified preferences and agendas, and so it is a site where struggles over resource control and identity
differentiation come together. Failure
to examine the political and national struggles over state control that
occur on a daily basis around the globe, and a preference for the study of the marginalised and
ambiguous instead, will get us no closer to understanding or realising individual identity or security;
either globally, or in the Chinese-Taiwanese relationship specifically. And to suggest to individuals and subgroups
within China and Taiwan that their cause will be furthered by embracing identity ambiguity while simultaneously refusing participation in the
state, is not simply unrealistic; it is an ethical abdication in its own right, as there is no surer way to marginalise oneself from the sites of and
exercise of power.

rethinking assumptions through a postmodern lens allows a multiplicity of views to

emerge
Jennifer Sterling-Folker & Rosemary E. Shinko ’05 are Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut at Storrs, USA, the Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut. She is a specialist in International Relations theory & Lecturer in Political
Theory and International Relations at the University of Connecticut at Stamford, USA, a theorist whose
research focuses on the critical interrogation of seminal IR concepts and themes including sovereignty,
peace, autonomy, ethics, and identity with a PhD, international relations theory and political theory,
University of Connecticut; MA, political science, Duquesne University, BA, political science and speech,
Duquesne University, June 1st, 2005, “Discourses of Power: Traversing the Realist-Postmodern Divide”
from https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/03058298050330031801,
accessed 7/13/19 || OES-AT
Difference and Ambiguity as Postmodern Political Resources The realist insistence that power is something that has a specific location and can
be possessed is precisely the problem from a postmodern perspective. Postmodern power is not rooted in material capabilities, in access to
institutional assets, nor in expressions of violent governmental force, it is rooted in doubt, uncertainty and vulnerability. In opposition to the
centrality of order and unity in a realist analysis, the role of uncertainty and doubt are crucial to postmodern power. Power constrains and
limits, but it can also be said to constitute and produce certain modes of subjectivity. Where knowledge is expressed as certitude and order, as
in the modern concept of sovereignty, power functions to produce docile and disciplined subjects. Knowledge claims imbued with doubt spawn
resistant subjects because uncertainty and multiplicity encourage ‘the undecidability of being and the proliferation of meaning as effective
techniques of power’.45 For Foucault there can be no exercise of power without resistance because power operates within a relational web.46
If there were no possibility for resistance then a totalitarian order would emerge which would foreclose all possibilities for active, political
resistance and all possibility for political relationships. Hence power functions to produce subjects who are free to create themselves. Doubt
gives those confronted with knowledge claims pause to rethink their presumptions, assumptions and
conclusions. Such a pause opens the space to think things anew and it also provides a space for a
multiplicity of views to emerge. Together, doubt and multiplicity operate as political resources to resist
and transgress current modes of subjectivity. The postmodern conceptualisation of power ultimately relies upon the ability of
individual thought to ‘present it [power] to oneself as an object of thought and question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals’.47
Thought is capable of creating a critical space between itself and external events, and this is the space where postmodern power becomes
visible. This power is a power immanent only in the present and in the possibility inherent in the exercise of self-creative freedom. Power is
productive in the immanently local moment wherein the individual exercises their capacity for critical thought, and they are empowered to
challenge power’s disciplinary order because they too can access power’s productive capability.48 Thus the expression of difference opens the
space wherein the individual can confront the existing web of power relations with an expression of that
which it (the existing set of power relations) has yet to know, yet to discipline within its established set of
practices. Proliferating sites of difference are the immanent conditions of possibility for expressions of freedom and self-making. Difference
and ambiguity are political resources that could serve to move the discussion beyond the confines of nationalist ideology and realist certitude
by drawing attention to the ways in which the constructs of ‘Taiwan’ and ‘China’ function as absolute signifiers. To
return to the example of Taiwanese literature, nativist discursive framings are open to disruption by calling attention to the island’s varied mix
of Malayo-Polynesian, Japanese Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, American and other cultural legacies; the struggle of the indigenous peoples for social
justice amid assimilationist pressures; the rise of consumer, environmental, labor, women’s, students, aboriginal and human rights social
movements; and the gay and lesbian counter-culture movements.49 The simple dichotomisation that would reduce these complex and varied
expressions of identity down to an either or choice between Taiwaneseness or Chineseness would miss the complexity and nuance of these
other contentious identity debates. Thus, Peng Ruijin, who served as editor of Literary Taiwan, cautioned the nativists, who are striving to
establish a new literary tradition for Taiwan, that they ‘do not have the right to restage a historical tragedy, to manufacture the authenticity of
Taiwan literature and monopolise the right of interpretation’.50 What has been transpiring within Taiwanese politics constitutes a paradigmatic
expression of the postmodern play of power. It involves a struggle between competing iterations of foundational origins, collective memories
and memoralisations that reveal an active and engaged struggle to attach meaning to the noun ‘Taiwan’ and its correlate, ‘Taiwanese’. This is a
struggle over definition and signification that is shot through with power. Within this struggle we can witness the contention and competition
among a proliferation of different voices from various social, political and economic sites. Will this polyphonic discourse succumb to the
pressures of homogenisation and uniformity or will it remain indeterminately open? How power coalesces around these two trajectories will
inevitably shape not only Taiwan’s identity, but also its relationship with China. In other words, how will the knowledge/power nexus play out?
Will the play of power in Taiwanese politics open up possibilities for the emergence of a new form of
subjectivity? Postmodernism analyses these possibilities and indicates that the key to a new form of subjectivity lies
within the practices of creativity, tolerance and self-transformation . Tang advises those involved in the debate over
the concept of Taiwanese literature to recognise the play of ambiguity and difference in their own discussions and to be open to the ambiguity,
difference and contestation that is also playing itself out in China.51 He refuses attempts to impose a monolithic identity on either China or
Taiwan.52 Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao advocates the cultivation of Taiwan’s internal hybridity as a resource in order to negotiate crossstrait
relations. He argues that the cultural drive for a pure and totalising expression of Taiwanese identity requires the positing of a contaminated,
impure and threatening other. Thus Hsien-hao Liao concludes, ‘If Taiwan’s being contaminated by China were no longer considered a problem,
China would not be perceived as a monolith. Then, and only then, could (the threat of) “China” be “dissolved” . . . through constructive cross-
strait dialogues on the basis of a recognition of the multiple temporalities inherent in all socioscapes’.53 In sum, the recognition of ambiguity
and difference within one’s own position, as well as that of the other, is a tactical resource that has the potential to rescript the possibilities for
politics across the region. A postmodern approach to cross-strait relations seeks to locate sites of disruption where discourses that emphasise
territorial integrity and political sovereignty are laid open to ambiguity and uncertainty. The point is to isolate those ongoing discussions and
disagreements over the composition of national identity, history, and political and cultural legitimacy, in order to expose the contingency of all
national, territorial security discourses. It is in the exposure of those contingencies that change becomes possible. Zero-Sum Interests and the
Realist State Granting that postmodernism is seeking out the sources for radical change in and of the Westphalian sovereign system, how else
are sources for rescripting to become translated into change in the ChineseTaiwanese relationship except via the nations of China and Taiwan,
their respective states, and the strategic relationship they share with the US? Doesn’t the Taiwanese state also protect identity difference from
Chinese repression? Collective identities may be socially-constructed, but their content can still be zero-sum. What would it have meant for the
individuals of Taiwan in the 1970s to have refused the national, territorial security discourses of realism and to have embraced identity
tolerance with China instead? Certainly the latter could only have been achieved by embracing China on its own terms, and so it would have
involved the political and economic subjugation of the Taiwanese people to Beijing. The vast majority of Taiwanese were already victims of
identity intolerance at the hands of the Nationalist KMT, but they were neither Mandarinspeaking, nor did they identify with the Chinese
mainland. Although the KMT were initially welcomed by the Taiwanese population as liberators from the Japanese occupation, Soong notes
that ‘the expectation that Taiwanese could now share power with their “mainland brothers” was crushed by the KMT’.54 Clashes and civil
unrest ensued over KMT authoritarianism, corruption, and favoritism, and in 1947 the KMT declared martial law. The formation of political
parties was banned, the military was given considerable legal and censorship powers, thousands of opponents were executed, and for the next
thirty-five years Taiwan became a virtual police state dominated by Mainlanders who insisted that Mandarin be the official language. While the
KMT remained obsessed with returning to mainland China, it was not a goal shared by many Taiwanese. Those who dreamt of Taiwanese
independence from China developed underground or overseas movements that later evolved into the DPP. There was little desire among the
majority of Taiwanese to embrace identity tolerance with China on the latter’s terms. Simultaneously, there was the possibility of greater
participation in the political institutions of Taiwan itself. For the Taiwanese, at that moment, to have refused the national, territorial security
discourses of IR in favor of ambiguity and tolerance would have been to refuse the very identity and goals that distinguished them from the
KMT and mainland Chinese (and for which many of them had suffered). It would have meant a refusal of themselves, which hardly seems likely
or even desirable. As Elshtain puts it, ‘we are dealing with identities, remember, not easily sloughed off external garments’.55 To say that if the
Taiwanese stop thinking of China as a problem then tensions will dissolve is true in an abstract sense but not in any practical sense for the vast
majority of people who live these identities. It
was the Taiwanese desire to embrace statehood and the parameters
of the Westphalian system that, along with US strategic deterrence, prevented a Chinese invasion of
Taiwan. To argue that the individuals of Taiwan would be safer if they refused statehood is to ignore the Chinese commitment since 1949 to
subjugate Taiwan according to its own identity parameters. It is also to ignore the desire of the vast majority of Taiwanese not to be subjugated
according to those parameters. The ROC would not even exist if it had not been for classic balance-of-power politics between two nation-states,
the US and China, in the context of the early Cold War. Its evolution into a democracy is just as indebted to its relationship with the US, since it
was the US decision to improve its relations with China in the 1970s that forced the KMT to pursue democratisation as means of national
consciousness. Simultaneously, the
goal of Taiwanese nation-state building was to confirm for other nation-
states that the ROC had a legitimate claim to sovereignty (in opposition to China’s claim that it is only a province), because
the ROC government has the legitimate support of its population.

analyzing power through a realist and postmodern lens prevents one-sided dialogue
Jennifer Sterling-Folker & Rosemary E. Shinko ’05 are Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut at Storrs, USA, the Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor of Political Science at the
University of Connecticut. She is a specialist in International Relations theory & Lecturer in Political
Theory and International Relations at the University of Connecticut at Stamford, USA, a theorist whose
research focuses on the critical interrogation of seminal IR concepts and themes including sovereignty,
peace, autonomy, ethics, and identity with a PhD, international relations theory and political theory,
University of Connecticut; MA, political science, Duquesne University, BA, political science and speech,
Duquesne University, June 1st, 2005, “Discourses of Power: Traversing the Realist-Postmodern Divide”
from https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/03058298050330031801,
accessed 7/13/19 || OES-AT

Observations about a Realist-Postmodern Dialogue Both realism and postmodernism have a problematic relationship
with their conceptualisations of power and its implication in the possibilities for structural stasis and
historical change. For neoclassical realism, there is no other way to understand contemporary global politics except through the
institutions and mechanisms that national groups continue to rely upon to make resource allocation
decisions. Those who control such institutions will have at their disposal material resources (such as weapons or currency reserves) and
ideational resources (such as the moral legitimacy to ask individuals to die on behalf of group survival). These can be utilised to pursue
particular agendas and interests, and those pursuits involve choices both within and between national groups over who will be allocated what.
Small wonder, then, that the
state remains the primary site of struggle in world politics according to realism,
since to those who control the group mechanisms of resource allocation go the spoils. Conversely,
postmodern attempts to understand global politics inevitably devolve into a study of conflicts from
within their local, contingent and historicised locations, because postmodernists operate on the
assumption that there is no universal rationality that can uniformly comprehend and evaluate the
entirety of global politics. However, the power to elude, resist, or alter realist representational practices of power politics is always
already present within the emergent moment of thought and action. What else then can postmodernism rely upon except anecdotal instances
of individual/collective acts of resistance and transgression to illustrate the emergence of new forms of international subjectivity? There is no
one mode of being or form of subjectivity that can be deployed as a measure of teleological progression. There is no one conception of freedom
that can be relied upon to evaluate expressions of self-making. There is no final arbiter, no final measure upon which determinations of success
can come to rest. It is also interesting to observe that there is something eerily similar in the conclusions of realism and postmodernism
juxtaposed here. The realist position cautions us to look at the particulars of historical structure, while the postmodern position draws our
attention to the necessity of thinking more expansively about the structure of historical possibility. Thus, in our dialogue, the
realist and
the postmodernist have traded places; shifting the analytical divide so that in order to understand stasis and
change, the realist insists we study the particulars of history, while the postmodernist insists we study
power as an over-arching, structurally encompassing phenomenon . And whether one deploys the realist term, power,
or its postmodern variant, power relations, both ultimately rely upon an understanding of power that is rooted in struggle. Thus we realise that
our dialogue serves as an analytic of power within which difference can be recognised and respected,
without being absorbed into a unifying totality. Both realists and postmodernists discursively fill the content of the ‘empty
space of power’ with referents such as order, discipline, vulnerability, survival, uncertainty and indeterminacy. And in this sense the two
positions can be viewed as mirror images. Postmodernism, as discussed by Ashley and Walker, is not an anarchical stance
where anything goes, but a process whereby difference can be expressed, negotiated and recognised within the disciplined effort of listening,
questioning and speaking. Similarly, realism, as discussed by Morgenthau and Bull, is not a position whereby violence is sanctioned and
recommended. Rather it seeks to understand how human difference can exist and be protected if structural continuity is demanded by human
sociability itself. This is not, in either case, a valorisation of totalising chaos or violence. This recognition of otherness is further implicated in a
larger contextual struggle involving the tactical and symbolic content that we ascribe to the concept of power. Drawing upon Newman’s notion
of the ‘empty place of power’ enables us to open up the spaces within which power is rendered visible and determined to be at work.60 These
sites are the sites of identity/difference, security/insecurity, order/disorder, self/other, vulnerability/invulnerability, and uncertainty/certainty.
Security is inextricably linked to power, which both realists and postmodernists would concede, but what is the content of the security/power
nexus? Power is already always implicated in the struggle to make life go on, but security is the rationale, which underlies both realist and
postmodern reasons for the desire to exercise, resist or transgress power in the first place. Realism and postmodernism share a similar
recognition that life involves struggle, and that the concept of power serves as both a means and a site of struggle. But how we view this
struggle is where we part company and resume our agonistic postures. Postmodernists view struggle in terms of an agonism, where individual’s
‘constitute themselves as contending identities’, whereas realists conceive of it as an essential antagonism reflective of timeless modes of
human nature.61 Thus we have returned to a point of discursive incommensurability in our attempt to conceptualise power’s productive
capacity for ushering in structural change within the movement and construction of history. For postmodernists the admission and recognition
of vulnerability serves as a tactical way to resist and/or transgress realist power politics, whereas for realists power can mitigate or lessen
vulnerability. Postmodernists focus on the survival of people in the broadest definition of the term security, while realists focus on the survival
and security of the state, which they link to the survival of the nation and its people. But this return to an incommensurable difference is
precisely the point of our discussion, because ‘once historical contingency and diversity enter the analysis, opportunities for critique and
creativity in discussions of political possibility increase’.62
Threat Reduction
 Coop Solves Thrt Con

cooperation with China makes conflict less likely – self-interested behavior is

suppressed and China’s intentions are perceived as benign
Chikako Kawakatsu Ueki ’06 M.A. International Relations, 2006, “The rise of "china threat" arguments”
from https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/37435, accessed 7/17/19 || OES-AT

The study seeks to explain the rise of "China threat" arguments in the United States and Japan in the 1990s by using
three theories of states behavior- realism, organization theory, and democratic peace theory. The rise of "China threat"
arguments occurred in the United States and Japan because of a convergence of several factors, the most
important of which was the increase of China's relative power after the Cold War. The distribution of
power among states strongly affects their intentions and military capabilities. The study introduces and suggests
the importance of the strategic safety-net in shaping threat perception. A strategic safety-net emerges
when state's survival depends on cooperation with another state. When the strategic safety-net exists,
states suppress self-interested behavior and the ally's intentions are perceived as benign. Interviews with
former government officials in the United States and Japan confirmed that strategic necessity restrained U.S. and Japanese behavior towards
China during the Cold War and limited suspicion of China. The
fraying of the strategic safety-net led to the advent of
"China threat" arguments. ¶ (cont.) The main difference between the United States and Japan was that whereas in the U.S. case
threat perception was shaped by a primacy strategy, Japan had to face a preponderant United States and a rising China at the same time.
"China threat" arguments were suppressed in Japan while Japan was unsure about its relationship with the United States .
The
consolidation of Japan's relationship with the United States led to a surge of"China threat" arguments in
Japan in 2000. The interests of domestic organizations were not the major cause of the initial rise of "China threat" arguments. The relevant
The study
organizations, including the military services, made "China threat" arguments only after they gained currency within the society.
also finds that China's undemocratic nature did not independently cause the perception of threat.

the plan restores US-China relations – cooperation reverses the construction of China
as a threat and takes out their internal links
Chikako Kawakatsu Ueki ’06 M.A. International Relations, 2006, “The rise of "china threat" arguments”
from https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/37435, accessed 7/17/19 || OES-AT

The primacy strategy requires that the United States continue to prepare itself to fight major powers in the future. If the primacy
strategy succeeds and China is dissuaded, another target may be necessary to sustain U.S. primacy. However, threat arguments
involve costs. This was why we observed a suppression of "China threat" argument s in Japan in the early- to
mid-1990s, and a decline of "China threat" arguments in the United States after the September 11 terrorist
attacks. States forsake possibilities of cooperative relations by making threat arguments. The
opportunity costs and benefits of making threat arguments have to be weighed carefully. The study found
that in many cases, military organizations were not the initiators of threat arguments but were followers. This means that once threat
arguments gain certain currency in the policy making community, threat arguments are more likely to be used to further organizational
interests. More than a decade has passed since the rise of "China threat" arguments in the early-1990s. When the arguments started, some
argued that "China threat" arguments were a fad, soon to disappear. However,
"China threat" arguments increased in
magnitude and intensity, and seem to be on the rise again in the United States and in Japan today . History
suggests that there might be an increase of "China threat" arguments in the future. As "China threat" arguments gained currency, more
organizations made "China threat" arguments. This
has resulted in a spread of "China threat" arguments and a
deterioration of relations between the United States and China - and Japan and China. This trend is likely to
continue. Both in Washington and in Tokyo, "China threat" arguments have become easier to make. This will increase the incentives to make
"China threat" arguments and decrease the incentives to argue against the "China threat." Finally, we can infer from the cases that China
will perceive the United States and Japan as threats. The United States has aggregate and military power far beyond China's.
Japan, while no longer developing rapidly and lacking some critical military capabilities, also exceeds China's power in several areas. In addition,
the combined power of the United States and Japan far exceeds that of China. Without the strategic safety-net provided by the Soviet threat,
China is likely to view the United States and Japan as threats. This notion that China may be acting based on insecurity is
often forgotten in policy debates. China is seen to act on its own initiative rather than reacting to U.S. or Japanese actions. It
should be remembered that past wars have sometimes occurred when the stronger power felt insecure about the rise of a weaker power. If
China has learned this lesson, it should be very worried about the United States and Japan. It
is important to remember that
"China threat" arguments that are intended to increase domestic support for security strategies have
audience in China and elsewhere. The consequences of making threat arguments should be assessed
and security dilemmas minimized.

cooperation between the US and China necessary for effective foreign policy
Morgan Thomas ‘15 B.A., Christopher Newport University, 2015, “Strategic Liminality in the U.S.-China
Security Dilemma: How Conflicting Philosophies of World Order Can Establish Points of Productive
Cooperation” from https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0368941,
accessed 7/17/19 || OES-AT
Knowing and understanding the relationship between Chinese strategic language and observable tactical level maneuvering is more a proactive
than reactive task for the United States and cannot be one guided by latent hostility. Goldstein’s
“cooperation cycles” provide a
starting point by which Beijing and Washington might begin coming to agreement through key points of
concession. In other words, the Trump administration will need to “meet China halfway,” and update prior notions of American
preeminence to count for the shifting balance of power in the Indo-Asia-Pacific. Goldstein is right to make note of the observable power shift
and its 128 destabilizing side effects, but
the engagement process with China will also require an element of in-
depth intellectual discourse. China must be engaged on a deep philosophical level to disallow ambiguity on the tactical level that
inevitably translates from meta-strategic ideas, if Xi in fact oscillates between the strategic bifurcation of Legalist praxis and civilizational
righteousness embedded in Confucian thought. A way the U.S. and China might do this is through the collaboration and exchange of high level
officials and scholars to discuss more plainly the modus operandi of each state’s grand strategy. The particulars of tactics need not be revealed,
nor should the two nations agree on some common policy trajectory, but future talks must be focused on getting at the deep level questions
that make up both American and Chinese first-causal conceptions of world order. In the words of Oswald Spengler, there must be an interaction
between “the world as happening,” and “the world as history;” Between the “man of action,” and “the man of contemplation,” to engage the
diverging philosophic conceptions of world order as they are distinguished by Chinese and American thought. One might think of this policy
building block 129 as hybrid reflexivity, or an interdisciplinary framework in which the relationship between truth, order, destiny, history and
policy is elucidated through pointed dialogue, not simply “trust building.” There must be, on the other hand, a discussion about the “reality of
things” not as mere the rhetorical, archetypical, or symbolic significance they might have to a state’s grand strategy. In short, as Mircea Eliade
sought to do in his text Cosmos and History, policymakers must actively attempt to understand the “deep meaning” or the “constituting
metaphysics” bound up within the “symbols, myths, and rights,” that are habituated into our language.130 For it is within the layers of strategic
language, discourse, and their historicity that tactical ambiguity arises. The reconciliation of two teleologies and two diverging epistemic
conceptions of order rendered in grand strategic preference, will most likely be disorderly, an amalgamation of the organic and inorganic as
China and the US continue to engage one another in contested spaces.131 Warfare of the minds must be the focus of future
battles between Beijing and Washington, pressing for a spiral of reassurance and collaboration rather
than pure transaction. In addition to Goldstein’s cooperation spiral prescription, Xi and the Trump administration might commit to a
contractual form of explanation and understanding of strategic intent. This proposal underscores what Eric Voegelin terms as man’s “obligation
to understand his condition.” And “part of this condition is the social order in which he lives. . . This order has today become worldwide.”
From these notions of order, meaning emerges and defense policy follows. 132 Constructing strategic
dialogue and exchange, in turn, will require both Beijing and Washington to face the demanding task of
articulating the continuities in deeply held ideas about world order and strategy. Only by doing this can
both countries “coevolve” and maintain order that both undeniably benefit from. Such is the distinction
between appeasement and engagement.

taking the China’s perspective makes us less likely to perceive actions as threatening
Joshua D. Kertzer et al. ‘18, Ryan Brutger, and Kai Quek are Paul Sack Associate Professor of Political
Economy, Department of Government, Harvard University, Assistant Professor, Department of Political
Science, University of Pennsylvania, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics and Public
Administration, The University of Hong Kong, November 19 th, 2018, “Strategic Empathy and the Security
Dilemma: Cross-National Experimental Evidence from China and the United States” from
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~jkertzer/Research_files/SCS_KQB_Web.pdf, accessed 7/18/19 ||
OES-AT

Our STM model for the

effect of the perspective taking treatment in the Chinese escalation condition also
points to the importance of threat perception. As Figure 3b shows, when China increases its military activities, the
perspective taking treatment is associated with a significant decrease in language emphasizing
Americans’ concern for projecting power and protecting other countries. Encouraging our American
respondents to take the perspective of the other side appears to make them less likely to perceive
Chinese actions as threatening, which reduces the likelihood that people believe we need to protect
ourselves or others from Chinese actions.
 Solvency: Coop Solves Sec Dilemma

US-China cooperation reverses security dilemma logic – key to avoid great power
conflict
Wang Dong ‘13 is an associate professor of School of International Studies and director of the Center
for Northeast Asian Strategic Studies at Peking University, January 17 th, 2013, “Addressing the U.S.-China
Security Dilemma” from https://carnegieendowment.org/2013/01/17/addressing-u.s.-china-security-
dilemma-pub-50668, accessed 7/17/19 || OES-AT
Preparing for his second term as U.S. president, Barack Obama has reshuffled his cabinet, bringing on new secretaries of state and defense. But
despite the personnel changes in the second Obama administration—as well as in China following its recent once-in-a-decade leadership
transition—the fundamentals of U.S. policy toward Asia will not change. Yet, that does not mean the two sides should not work to overcome
the strategic distrust that plagues them. ¶ It was just four years ago that strategists such as Zbigniew Brzezinski floated the idea of a Group of 2
(G2). And people’s expectations for U.S.-China cooperation ran high when President Obama went on a state visit to China in October 2009, as
the two countries declared in a joint statement that they would endeavor to build a “positive, comprehensive, and cooperative” relationship.
That partly reflected the strong sentiment at the time that common threats ranging from climate change to financial crisis to nuclear
proliferation would bind the two countries together. ¶ But many analysts now agree that increasing
strategic distrust between
China and the United States in recent years has posed significant challenges not only to U.S.-China
relations but also to regional peace and security at large . Since the end of 2009, the United States and China have drifted
apart. The two powers are increasingly trapped in an action-reaction cycle, so much so that many lament that the United States and China are
doomed for a “strategic collision.” ¶ Underlying the growing strategic distrust is an emerging security dilemma—a situation in which one state’s
efforts to enhance its own security will lead others to feel less secure—between Beijing and Washington. Both the Chinese public and elite
believe that the Obama administration’s pivot or rebalancing to Asia is a thinly veiled attempt to restrain and counterbalance, if not encircle or
contain, a rising China. And many U.S. officials and analysts perceive an increasingly assertive China that does not shy away from flexing its
muscles, “bullying” its neighbors, and pursuing its “narrow” interests relentlessly. ¶ Numerous moves by the Obama administration have all
been perceived in China as evidence of U.S. hostility toward Beijing. These moves have included deploying U.S. Marines to Darwin, Australia;
asserting U.S. interests in freedom of navigation in the South China Sea; bolstering military alliances with the Philippines, Japan, and Australia;
enhancing security cooperation with Vietnam and India; improving bilateral relations with Myanmar; and beefing up the United States’ ballistic
missile defense systems in East Asia. ¶ Going
forward, the United States will continue to hedge against the rise of
China and perceived Chinese assertiveness. It will strengthen its deterrence posture, build up its forward
deployment, and reinforce military alliances and security partnerships in Asia. Yet, because of the almost-
inevitable shrinking of the U.S. defense budget, it remains to be seen whether Washington can match its rhetoric with action. ¶ Interestingly,
quite a number of American analysts have become critical of the Obama administration’s handling of the U.S. pivot or rebalancing to Asia,
particularly of the way it was rolled out. Now, even the administration officials have acknowledged that too much emphasis was initially put on
the military and security aspects of the pivot. In that sense, the U.S. rebalancing strategy itself needs to be
“rebalanced.” It is likely that the second Obama administration will recalibrate its approach by putting more emphasis on economic
cooperation and people-to-people exchanges in the Asia-Pacific, including with China. ¶ The way the Chinese leadership transition is structured
and institutionalized ensures continuity and predictability in China’s foreign policy. Around the time President Obama was elected to a second
term, the Chinese leadership too changed. At the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of China, a new Standing Committee of the Politburo
was elected. Xi Jinping, who has been China’s vice president since 2008, assumed the positions of general secretary of the Central Committee
and chairman of the Central Military Commission. He and Executive Vice Premier Li Keqiang, respectively, will almost certainly assume the
presidency and premiership at the National People’s Congress meeting next March. ¶ Both men have been in senior leadership positions for
many years. Other members of the top leadership have also been in senior posts for quite some time. The new Chinese leadership will maintain
strong consensuses on major domestic and foreign policy agendas, which prioritize the continuation of deeper reform and China’s peaceful
development. ¶ Looking ahead, the U.S.-China relationship is entering a challenging period. How the relationship
between China and the United States is to be managed is a question that will define the strategic landscape of the Asia-Pacific in the twenty-
first century. China
and the United States should not allow themselves to be engulfed by mutual hostility
and suspicion, blindness to the effects their actions have on the relationship, misperceptions, and the
fatalistic pessimism inherent in a hardcore realist mentality. Rather, they should accurately gauge each
other’s strategic intentions and try to increase mutual strategic understanding and trust through
candid discussion and exchanges at the highest level of leadership. ¶ To mitigate the emerging security
dilemma between the two countries, military-to-military exchanges and cooperation are critical. The
recent development in military-to-military relations—including a joint counter-piracy exercise in the Gulf of Aden, a joint disaster-relief
simulation and exercise, and the United States inviting China to participate in the 2014 Pacific Rim Exercise—are all signs that the U.S.-China
relationship is moving in a positive direction. Increasing these exchanges will gradually build mutual understanding and trust. ¶ In
the
medium-to-long run, both countries also need to gradually develop a shared vision of global affairs
through genuine dialogue and cooperation. And to reverse the trend in both countries to view the other
as “the enemy,” people-to-people exchanges, particularly exchanges among young generations and at local levels, need to be
strengthened. ¶ The Chinese leadership has now proposed a “new type of great-power relationship” as the vision and
intellectual framework for resolving a century-old puzzle in international history : whether it is possible for rising
powers and established powers to break away from a destiny of conflict. The concept has been well received in the United States. Now more
creative and forward thinking is needed to further substantiate the conceptual framework. ¶ The
two sides must work together
to draw a roadmap for building a new type of great-power relationship between China and the United
States—one that transcends the logic of the security dilemma and great-power conflict and that makes
the world a safer and better place to live.
 Solvency: Coop Solves Sec Dilemma

the CCP is receptive to public opinion – strategic empathy key to mitigate security
dilemma between the US and China
Joshua D. Kertzer et al. ‘18, Ryan Brutger, and Kai Quek are Paul Sack Associate Professor of Political
Economy, Department of Government, Harvard University, Assistant Professor, Department of Political
Science, University of Pennsylvania, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics and Public
Administration, The University of Hong Kong, November 19 th, 2018, “Strategic Empathy and the Security
Dilemma: Cross-National Experimental Evidence from China and the United States” from
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~jkertzer/Research_files/SCS_KQB_Web.pdf, accessed 7/18/19 ||
OES-AT

What is interesting about both of these worst-case scenarios is that they carve out an important role for strategic
empathy, or
perspective-taking. Because hegemonic wars depend on the rising power harboring revisionist intentions, debates in
Washington over how the United States should handle a rising China — whether we should engage China and enmesh
it in international institutions (Ikenberry, 2008), reassure China by using reciprocal gestures to reduce tensions
(Steinberg and O’Hanlon, 2014), contain it militarily (Mearsheimer, 2014), or some combination thereof — are partially debates about future
states of the world (e.g. how much will Chinese economic growth slow? How much will Chinese nationalism rise?), but are also debates about
what China wants (Johnston, 2003). At their heart, then,
American grand strategy debates over the Asia-Pacific hinge
on the fundamental challenge of overcoming “the problem of other minds” and accurately assessing the
motivations of others (Morgenthau, 1985; Herrmann, 1988). As Butterfield (1951, 154) noted when coining what he referred to as the
“irreducible dilemma”, the same attributional challenge serves as the core of the security dilemma . In his influential
discussions of the security dilemma, Jervis (1978, 181) discusses environmental features that make security dilemmas more likely to occur, but
also explicitly attributes the dilemma to “failures of empathy", and notes that “empathy and skillful statesmanship can reduce this danger" (p.
212).7 An ability to put oneself in others’ shoes is also central to what Booth and Wheeler (2008) call
“security dilemma sensibility", crucial to breaking out of the dilemma. Some of these challenges explicitly implicate strategic
empathy at the level of political elites. For example, if the theoretical literature referenced above is accurate, maintaining a robust
diplomatic corps with deep area-specific knowledge should enable decision-makers to more accurately
understand how the Chinese government perceives their country’s national interests, helping American
political leaders make better decisions in both long-term planning and short-term crises (White, 1986). Others,
though, also implicate the mass public, the population we study here. This is obviously the case in democratic countries like the United States,
where the linkages between public opinion and foreign policy are more solidified than in non-democratic regimes like China (Holsti, 2004). As
Kertzer (2016, 50-51) argues, public opinion shapes foreign policy in democracies through four pathways. IR scholars
typically focus on the direct pathway (what Aldrich et al., 2006 call “the electoral connection"), in which voters punish incumbents for foreign
policy misadventures (Fearon, 1994), but public opinion also exerts influence on foreign policy through indirect pathways. One is “latent" public
opinion, in which strategic politicians take expected public reactions into account ex ante when formulating their policy choices (Saunders,
2015); this is one reason why troop contributions to foreign military interventions tend to oscillate with election cycles (Marinov, Nomikos and
Robbins, 2015). Another works through domestic opposition groups, who are more likely to capsize the president’s broader legislative agenda
when her foreign policy is unpopular (Gelpi and Grieco, 2015). Another works through foreign decision-makers, who know threats and promises
coming out of the White House are less credible when the mass public is not behind the President (Kertzer, 2016, 51). In
the specific case
of US-China relations, Pew has found that negative attitudes towards China have increased by 26
percentage points in the United States since 2006 ,8 and President Trump made lambasting China a central part of his
campaign speeches in the 2016 Presidential election. In experimental research, Tingley (2017) finds that m any members of the
American public tend to think of a rising China using the same commitment problem framing that
underlies models of preventive war (see also Gries, 2017). Understanding how susceptible the US public is to security dilemma
thinking is a similarly worthy endeavor. Yet understanding whether similar patterns exist in Chinese public opinion is also important. One major
concern among Western pundits is that the Chinese Communist Party’s domestic legit imacy is tied to maintaining high levels of economic
growth; as growth rates inevitably slow, the regime may instead fan the flames of nationalism in the mass public, redirecting discontent
away from Beijing and towards foreign actors like the United States (Friedberg, 2005, 29-30). It is for this reason that
outside observers have been so fixated on nationalist sentiment in the Chinese public (Weiss, 2014; Johnston, 2017), particularly if the Chinese
government cultivates nationalist protests at home as a way to tie its hands in international negotiations abroad (Weiss, 2013, see also Gries,
2001; Wallace and Weiss, 2015). Ross (2009), for example, argues that China’s maritime buildup is attributable to “naval nationalism" in a public
that associates great power status with maritime grandeur. More generally, a recent strand of research on authoritarian accountability suggests
that the Chinese government is sensitive to public sentiment in a variety of ways (e.g. Chen, Pan and Xu, 2016;
Distelhorst and Hou, 2017; Truex, 2016; Meng, Pan and Ping, 2017). Indeed, despite maintaining an authoritarian regime, the Chinese
government spends considerable effort monitoring public opinion; Weiss and Dafoe (2016) note that the Chinese
government employs two million analysts to monitor public sentiment on Chinese social media, precisely because it is aware of the outsized
role that domestic unrest has historically played in response to international disputes. Better understanding the dynamics of Chinese public
opinion towards the use of force (e.g. Reilly, 2011; Li, Wang and Chen, 2016; Weiss and Dafoe, 2016; Bell and Quek, 2018) is thus a politically
consequential task. 1.2 The dark side of strategic empathy Does strategic
empathy have the potential to dampen distrust
and mitigate security dilemma thinking between the United States and China ? Much of the literature in both IR
and American politics summarized above, by pointing to the positive effects of perspective-taking on building trust and reducing
misperceptions, would answer in the affirmative. If the security dilemma is indeed a “failure of empathy", redressing this surfeit should have
beneficial effects. According
to this conventional wisdom, which we dub the palliative effects of empathy
hypothesis, more strategically empathetic individuals should be less prone to misperceptions, and more
likely to take other perspectives into account. Encouraging individuals to think about the situation from
the perspective of the other side should lead them to exercise more caution and prudence.
 Solvency: Miscalc/Threat
US policy on Taiwan key to avoid threat construction
Jessica Tran ’18 University of San Francisco, May 28th, 2018, “Security Dilemma in U.S.-China Relations:
A Nontraditional Security Studies Perspective” from https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=2149&context=thes, accessed 7/17/19 || OES-AT

Third, in
identifying dangerous sources of tension in U.S.-China relations, scholars also provide policy
recommendations that may help to mitigate those tensions. One debate includes whether U.S. military presence in the
Pacific acts as a stabilizing or exacerbating force to regional stability. Christensen (1999) focuses on the security dilemma in Sino-Japan relations
and argues that the U.S. needs to be mindful about expanding Japanese security role in the region. He advises that the U.S. pursue
development of theatre missile defense on their own, so as to not abandon Taiwan but also avoid fueling misperceptions of
threat between China and Japan. More importantly, he highlights U.S. military presence as a stabilizing force in the region whose sudden
withdrawal can propel the region (mainly Japan and China) into interstate armed conflict. In a follow-up article, Christensen (2002) continues
the discussion by arguing that U.S.
policy on the Cross-Strait relations necessitates both deterrence to prevent
the outright invasion of Taiwan, but at the same time, reassurance that U.S. involvement is not a means to
subvert China’s political legitimacy over the island. However, Kang (2003) argues against the U.S.-asregional-stabilizer
viewpoint, positing that a strong China has historically coincided with extended periods of peace and stability in the region. Therefore,
withdrawal of U.S. military presence in the Pacific will not inevitably lead to catastrophe . Additionally, U.S.
military rebalancing could actually prove counterproductive. Zhang (2011) similarly points to U.S. demilitarization and less-hawkish political
rhetoric as important methods to moderating the security dilemma with China. Scholars
predominantly call for greater
cooperation, military diplomacy exchanges, multilateral talks, and transparency between the U.S. and China in order
to reduce misperception and misinterpretation of one another’s intentions (Liff and Ikenberry 2014; Zhang 2011;
Zhe 2015; Christensen 2002). Johnson (2017) proposes that a more nuanced understanding of the difference between military capabilities and
military intentions are vital
in avoiding miscalculation of threat. Liff and Ikenberry (2014) argues that recognition of the
security dilemma occurring in interstate relations by practitioners can help states to evade it. “The United
States must avoid being unnecessarily provocative in its strategic moves and rhetoric, more proactively explaining the comprehensive (not
military-specific) nature of its growing focus on the Asia Pacific and linking it explicitly to a stable regional status quo that serves the interests of
all” (Liff and Inkenberry 2014, pg. 89). Scholars
highlight the importance of projecting benign intentions, promoting
greater transparency, and obtaining more accurate information to form correct perceptions and thus,
more effective U.S. foreign policy. China as a Threat and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Asia-Pacific The discussion regarding
the security dilemma in U.S-China relations can also be situated in the broader China-as-a-threat
discourse. Moreover, the U.S. pivot to Asia under Obama’s administration exemplifies a recent example of a U.S. foreign policy response to
the China-as-athreat perception, as it pushes for the shifting of military focus from the Middle East to bases in the Pacific. In other words, it is a
significant example of a U.S. response to the security dilemma with China, and thus, has generated much discussion in both mainstream media
and academia. A portion of the China-as-a-threat literature includes assessments and cost-benefit analyses of the Pacific Pivot, which outlines
U.S. economic and military objectives, challenges, and strategic propositions in order to facilitate a successful rebalancing initiative (Manyin et
al. 2012; Futter 2015; Nguyen and Hang 2016; Campbell 2016). They argue that the policy is necessary in maintaining security in the Asia-Pacific
region and frame China as a military and economic threat that must be addressed. Other articles take more critical positions, as they analyze
the Pacific Pivot’s potential impacts on U.S.-China relations, as well as China’s reaction to the increase of U.S. militarization of the Pacific; they
argue that increased military presence will exacerbate already high tensions in the region, especially following ongoing issues surrounding the
SCS conflict (Swaine 2012; Ratner 2013). Furthermore, Robert Ross (2012) contends that the “new U.S. policy unnecessarily compounds
Beijing's insecurities and will only feed China's aggressiveness, undermine regional stability, and decrease the possibility of cooperation
between Beijing and Washington” (pg. 71). In essence, he states that the Pacific Pivot will worsen the security dilemma in U.S.-China relations.
In this discussion, scholars address and problematize U.S. increasing militarization of the Pacific and high-profile displays of military alliances
with countries surrounding China.
 A/S – Chinese Threat/Aff Solves

arms sales to Taiwan construct China as an adversary – changing our ontology and
epistemology deconstructs the perception of China as a rising threat
J. J. Suh et al. ’04, Peter J. Katzenstein, and Allen Carlson are Jae-Jung Suh is associate professor and
Director of Korea Studiesat the U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, Peter Joachim
Katzenstein FBA is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University.
Recognized by the journal Foreign Affairs as a "renowned scholar of international relations" in 2013,
Katzenstein specializes in Asian as well as European roles and norms in international relations, Allen
Carlson is an Associate Professor in Cornell University’s Government Department. He was granted his
PhD from Yale University’s Political Science Department. His undergraduate degree is from Colby
College. In 2005 he was chosen to participate in the National Committee’s Public Intellectuals Program,
and he currently serves as Director of Cornell’s China and Asia Pacific Studies program and advisor of its
East Asia Program, 2004, “Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power, and Efficiency” from Google
Books, pages 77-82, accessed 7/18/19 || OES-AT
Conclusion The chapter has argued that in most respects Chinese diplomacy is more accepting of extant international institutions, international
norms (such as they are). and U.S dom-inance of the international and regional power structure than at any time since 1949. The
most
obvious and dangerous exception to this status-quo-ization of Chinese diplomacy is the Taiwan issue.
Here China reserves the right to use force to change the political and military 'facts on the ground'. in an effort to defend its symbolic claim to
"name” the island of Taiwan. In an effort to stake this claim Chinese leaders have taken military measures that
have raised doubts outside of China about the over-all status quo orientation of Chinese power in the
region. These doubts have been magnified by changes in political ideologies and definitions of interests in some key capitals—Washington,
Tokyo, and Taipei in particular. Their response, in turn. have magnified doubts in Beijing that these three other players
will accept China's self-perceived legitimate intents on questions of sovereignty and territorial integrit y.
The militarization of security interactions among these four players, this mutual construc-tion of adversarial image, is best
explained by security dilemma theory, not by some simplistic characterization of Chinese revisionism or
American hegemonism. The limited U.S.-Chinese counterterrorism cooperation after September is has not changed these dynamics
much. The tenor of Sino-U.S. relations improved some-what after 9/11 as Chinese leaders realized that both countries shared an interest in
defending sovereign states against violent nonsovereign state actors. There is, accord-ing to press reports, some limited sharing of intelligence.
In addition Chinese leaders were helpfully low-keyed about Japan's unprecedented decision to send a small naval force to assist the United
States in the Arabian Sea. The United States and China share an interest in seeing a multiethnic, more or less secular, Afghanistan. China and
the United States also have every interest in seeing Pakistan survive as a unified, moderate Islamic state. There has been relatively close
coordination recently in try-ing to convince die DPRK to abandon it nuclear weapons program. But precisely because so much of the U.S.
perception of other states' level of co-operativeness will be viewed through the 9/11 lens (for us or against us), the potential for speeding up
security dilemma dynamics, perhaps even for transitioning China's interests into more overtly revisionist ones, is there. If the United States al-
lows states to choose from a wide menu of actions in support of the war against ter-rorism, then China can offer intelligence or assistance in
tracking the terrorists' fi-nancial networks. These will be less demanding ten of China's cooperation. A narrow menu of choice will be a tougher
test, one that nukes it more likely that China may “fail." In light of the ongoing debate over the nature of Chinese power, a failure will have
added weight in determining that China is a fundamentally revi-sionist state. A Chinese "failure" will also contrast sharply with my Taiwanese
sup-port for the U.S. war on terrorism, however symbolic that support may be. Even though it does not appear to be along for any explicit or
short-term quid pro quo for cooperation thus far, the
Chinese leadership has to expect that the United States should
become more sympathetic to China's "legitimate" interests. Yet the U.S. policies that worry the Chinese
leadership most—arms sales to Taiwan, closer U.S.-Taiwan political and military relations, National Missile Defense, the China-
directed elements of U.S. bilateral alliances in Asia, among others—are issues for which there is strong support in Congress and the Pentagon.
Domestic critics of any strategy of cooperation with the United States will certainly be looking for, even while not ex-pecting, U.S. concessions
on these issues. The absence any substantial U.S. overtures will be used as evidence of the failure of a conciliatory approach to U.S. power. This
leads to my next point. It should be noted that the decline in revisionist in-terests in China does not mean their elimination nor the impossibility
of their reap-pearance. For China, "globalization"—a headlong, relatively unregulated, rush for short-term benefits under the rubric of the open
door policy—has created vast, income discrepancies. These can be sustained with relatively high rates of absolute growth across socioeconomic
groups. But it is not hard to imagine social unrest lead-ing to political preferences that are at odds with status quo interest in the current
economic "division of labor" within China and between China and other states. China
moved from being a revolutionary
"revisionist" state to a "status quo” one in forty-odd years. It is not implausible that a more fundamental "revisionism"
might emerge from disillusionment with marketization, or from problems of internal secession, or from the domestic effects of Taiwan's
gradual reconstruction as a U.S. ally in the containment of China. Indeed, because of security dilemma dynamics and the negative effects of
unrestrained marketization, in retrospect we may see the 1980s and 1990s as a period of relative Chinese "status quo-ness," sandwiched by
Maoist revi- sionism and some post-Jiang quasi-fascism. This leads me to my final point. The
security dilemma arguments may
best char-acterize the changing nature of the interaction between China, the United States, Japan, and
Taiwan is not a theoretical breakthrough . In the policy and punditry worlds, however, this is a controversial argument because of
the pervasiveness of attribution errors in in-group worldviews. To argue in the policy world for security dilemma explanation is to argue that all
actors are more or less status quo oriented or at least would prefer to minimize conflict in the relationship, and that there is at least some
moral equivalence in the actions that promote tensions. This argument is po- litically unacceptable in the U.S. government (even as, ironically,
more and more peo-ple are making it tentatively in the PRC). In the theory world, the dynamics of security dilemmas are left fairly under-
theorized. It is assumed that they can be produced by two basic "facts"—states want to maximize their security, and states operate under
conditions of uncertainty. But, in far these two assumptions are loaded theoretically, and empirically often wrong. They are theoretically loaded
because, as
Glaser and Wendt have pointed out from two war different perspectives, there is nothing
natural about a security dilemma. For Glaser it requires rational security maximizing actors to believe that it is
cheaper to achieve security and to reduce uncertainty through an open-ended arms buildup rather than
through the exploration of a codifiable modus vivendi. Why they would believe this—why state leaders would believe that security is more
certain in an arms buildup than in the search for ways to institutionalize the status quo—when history suggests that often this belief is
empirically wrong, speaks to die question of why bad lessons are relearned by rational actors in IR. That is, why are realpolitik lessons of var-
ious stripes so persistent when it is clear that only rarely does a truly revisionist state come along? For Wendt a security dilemma requites the
prior construction of a Hobbesian or a Lockean culture of anarchy. Moreover, in dynamic is such that it can create revisionist actors where there
once were none. Standard security dilemma the-ory assumes that the goals, desires, and level of satisfaction of actors do not change much.
Scholars speak of security dilemmas of status quo stare (a stag hunt gone bad) or security dilemmas of opportunist states (a prisoner dilemma).
They do not tend to talk about security dilemmas where the interaction shifts from stag hunt interests to prisoner's dilemma interests or worse,
deadlock interests (in the latter case, the conflict is no longer a security dilemma. We know that shifts can go in the other direction, as
experiments in iterated prisoner's dilemma play have Mown (Alker 996). Thus the fact of a security dilemma, and the
possibility of an intensifying one, in Sino-U.S. relations requires an explanation, and it does not come
naturally from as-sumptions of fixed state interests and the inherent uncertainty of anarchy. This par-ticilar
security dilemma—its timing, and the issues that are most salient in propelling it forward—have a lot to do with Taiwan's status in
modern Chinese nationalism, domestic developments in Taiwan, and Taiwan's place in Sino-U.S.
interactions over the last fifty years. These are ideational and historical factors that various stripes of re-alism and an exclusively
domestic-politics-focused theorizing do not have much room for. We need, then, to theorize about the kinds of issues that are salient in
security dilemmas. In particular, does variation in these issues explain variation in the intensity of a security dilemma? And to what degree does
the social history of a se-curity dilemma actually change interests in a way that would not have happened ab-sent the security dilemma? One
might expect the literature on enduring rivalries to help here. But it does not since it too posits a fixed-ness in state interests through the entire
history of the rivalry This is odd, since presumably one of the reasons for an enduring rivalry is the construction
over time of images of self and other (hence definitions of the interests of self and others) that are dynamic, not static.
The China case suggests that the degree of dissatisfaction may be in flux and may be related to the is-
sue at the heart of this particular dilemma . This leads to an interesting implication for security dilemma theorizing. I think in-
ternational relations theory typically considers a security dilemma as falling within a defensive realist ontology—it is, according to this
kind of realism, a real phenomenon of uncertainty under anarchy when states are security seekers . Thus,
security dilemmas are a reason for the reproduction of realpolitik practice and this is why realists can be confidently ahistorical and a-cultural in
their claims about realpolitik practice. Anar-chy plus (more or less) status quo states creates security dilemmas. Other realisms (of-fensive)
claim that the presence of revisionist or status quo states (the balance of interests) is the source of realpolitik practice—revisionists pursue
realpolitik and status quo states have no rational choice but to respond with realpolitik practice. But the
emerging U.S.-Chinese
security dilemma suggests something a little different, syn-thesis of these two realisms that only a
socialization perspective can understand—namely, that security dilemmas can change state interest s in “hard
realpolitik” directions. One needs to think a bit more endogenously. 1That is security dilemmas create features of a Hobbesian anarchy. Security
dilemmas may be a critical (though not the only source—ideology is clearly another) in death, some kinds of non-status quo states. These
states, in turn, accentuate or sharpen the features of Hobbesian anarchy. Even Robert Jervis, the most perceptive analyst of security dilemmas,
strongly implies that in security dilemmas interests remain fixed. There is no security dilemma when one state is so dissatisfied with the status
quo that it is willing to risk survival to change it (an aggressor state). But he does not suggest that security dilemmas can in fact create these
kinds of actors. It is necessary to view security dilemmas as social interactions—socializing experiences—in order to understand this change in
funda-mental interests. Enduring rivalries are enduring because the security dilemma features in the early
interaction of these actors creates mutual dissatisfaction with the status quo, hence a willingness to take
greater risks in trying to eliminate the other rival . Or put differently, the level (concessions required to reassure become so
great that no side is willing to make them. Charles Glaser hints at the possibility of security dilemmas creating
more revisionist states out of less revisionist ones through a process of increasing the adversary’s
“interest in expansion.” This interest in turn is a function of a growing perception that the first state is not a status quo state, but a
revisionst (or greedy) state. This perception can be formed by particular kinds of military buildups by the first state, or by a self-perception of
oneself as clearly status quo oriented. Thus the other side’s buildup can only be aggressive, since one’s own motives are so clearly not a threat
to the other side (Glaser 1997). This
captures some of the dynamics in the U.S.-China dilemma, but it does not
capture the question of changed interests . True, U.S. and Chinese decision makers, or important sectors of them, view the other
as aggressive because they view themselves as inherently peaceful or status quo oriented. But adding to this dynamic is that the security
dilemma may be leading to an ideational devaluation of the payoffs from status quo behavior in other areas in the relationship. In other words,
there is a spillover effect. The only major student of war in U.S. IR who conceptualizes security dilemmas as socializing processes is John
Vasquez. But even Vasquez is ambivalent about whether security dilemmas change preferences of actors, or change the political power of
actors with realpolitik preferences. He suggests the latter—that security dilemmas create domestic conditions that are not conducive to the
victory of ideas for cooperative strategies. Hard-liners win out in the marketplace of ideas. He does not address the possibility that cooperators
actually change their conceptualization of the adversary as well. There is evidence this may be happening in the U.S.-
China case. Engagers in the United States have not just been under attack from primacists for being soft on China. But due to this and
Chinese behavior (for instance, in the EP-3 incident) some engagers are rethinking their conceptions of Chinese intentions. Many propose now
with certainty that China wants to fundamentally alter the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific, yet
they cling to the notion that
engagement can perhaps constrain the pursuit of this goal. This creates considerable tension in their
arguments and probably weakens their voices politically. But there is nothing particularly inevitable—certainly nothing
inevitable derived from anarchy per se—about security dilemmas. The U.S.-China security dilemma is in large measure a
function of the Taiwan question. How can one best understand the salience of Taiwan in this security dilemma? As a function of
specific and politically powerful claims about Chinese, Taiwanese, and American identity: The political forces in these three countries most
active in supporting behavior that accentuates the security dilemma are Chinese nationalists with a bias towards military solutions, Taiwanese
nationalists with a bias towards de jure independence instead of satisfaction with de facto independence, and American primacists who
understand the world in power-transition terms. This does not mean one should be overly optimistic about the ability of “agents” to
“construct” more peaceful and stable Sino-U.S. relations. I try to avoid tea-leaf reading. But here I would agree with Aaron Friedberg’s
pessimistic conclusion about the future of relations despite the recent improved tenor in the post-9/11 world (Friedberg 2002). we disagree
about the reasons for this pessimism, however. His have to do with the dominant ontology and epistemology that
has helped create the trope of a rising, dissatisfied China—mentioned at the start of the chapter—namely, an
ontology and epistemology that accepts that rising powers are inherently dissatisfied because the “rules
of the game” (and the “distribution of power” that reinforce them) are set by dominant powers. My pessimism comes from the possibility
that the level of dissatisfaction with the rules of the game (to the extent these exist and are identifiable) can be rooted in issues that are
nonstructural, that have little to do with distributions of power or rules of the game per se but have a lot to do with how
the concept of
“rising powers are inherently dissatisfied” itself becomes a lens through which these issues are
analyzed. In short, the China case suggests that security dilemmas can turn nonstructural conflicts into perceived
structural ones: the socializing experience of security dilemmas consists of the amplification of threats and
threat perceptions such that one side begins to only look for confirming evidence of the other’s
predisposition to threaten. The China-U.S. case suggests security dilemma theory needs to go more micro, to abandon unitary
rational-actor assumptions, and look at the political, societal, and ideational implications of treating others as adversaries. By combining the
notion of socialization and the possibility of endogenized changes in interests with the concept of a security dilemma, we come to a better
understanding of the dynamics of Sino-U.S. relations in the post-Cold War era by problematizing the notion of a “rising” China’s dissatisfaction
with the “rules of the game.”
arms sales to Taiwan perpetuate the construction of China as a threat
Chengxin Pan ’04 Department of Political Science and International Relations, Faculty of Arts,
Australian National University, June-July 2004, “The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The
Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics” from https://www.jstor.org/stable/40645119?
seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents, accessed 7/13/19 || OES-AT

The ''China Threat" Discourse and the New U.S. Containment Policy ¶ The
discursive construction of the U.S. self and the
"Chinese threat" argument are not innocent, descriptive accounts of some "independent" reality . Rather,
they are always a clarion call for the practice of power politics. At the apex of this pow is the politico-strategic question of "what is to be done"
to make the United States secure from the (perceived) threats it faces. At a general level, as Benjamin Schwarz proposes, this requires an
unhindered path to U.S. global hegemony that means not only that the United States must dominate wealthy and technologically sophisticated
states in Europe and East Asia - America's "allies" - but also that it must deal with such nuisances as Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and
Kim Jong II, so that potential great powers need not acquire the means to deal with those problems themselves. And those powers that eschew
Amer- ican supervision - such as China - must be both engaged and contained. The upshot of "American leadership" is that the United States
must spend nearly as much on national security as the rest of the world combined.67 ¶ This
"neocontainment" policy has been
echoed in the "China threat" literature . In a short yet decisive article titled "Why We Must Contain China," Washington Post
columnist Charles Krautham- mer insists that "containing China" and "undermining its ruthless dictatorship"
constitute two essential components of "any rational policy toward a rising, threatening China." Not only is
a policy other than containment considered irrational, but even a delay to implement it would be undesirable, as he urges that "containment of
such a bully must begin early in its career." To this end, Kraut- hammer offers such "practical" options as strengthening regional alliances (with
Vietnam, India, and Russia, as well as Japan) to box in China; standing by Chinese dissidents; denying Beijing the right to host the Olympics; and
keeping China from joining the World Trade Organization on the terms it desires.68 ¶ Containing
China is of course not the only
option arising from the "China threat" literature. More often than not, there is a sub- tle, business-style
"crisis management" policy. For example, Bern- stein and Munro shy away from the word containment, preferring to call
their China policy management.69 Yet, what remains unchanged in the management formula is a continued promotion of control-
ling China. For instance, a perusal of Bernstein and Munro's texts reveals that what they mean by management is no different than
Krauthammer's explicit containment stance.70 By
framing U.S.- China relations as an issue of "crisis management,"
they leave little doubt of who is the "manager" and who is to be "managed." In a more straightforward manner,
Betts and Christensen state that coercion and war must be part and parcel of the China manage- ment policy: ¶ In addressing the China
challenge, the United States needs to think hard about three related questions: first, how to avoid crises and war through prudent, coercive
diplomacy; second, how to manage crises and fight a war if the avoidance effort fails; third, how to end crises and terminate war at costs
acceptable to the United States and its allies.71 ¶ This is not to imply that the kind of perspectives outlined above will automatically be
translated into actual China policy,
but one does not have to be exceedingly perceptive to note that the "China
threat" perspective does exert enormous influence on U.S. policy making on China. To illustrate this point, I
want now to examine some specific implications of U.S. representations of the "China threat" for U.S.-China
relations in relation to the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisi s and the "spy plane" incident of 2001. ¶ Theory as
Practice 1: The Taiwan Strait Missile Crisis ¶ In the eyes of many U.S. China watchers, China's approach to
the Taiwan question is a microcosm of its grand strategy to dominate Asia. The argument is that nowhere is the
threatening ambition more palpable than in China's saber-rattling missile tests near Tai- wan's coast in 1995-1996, in addition to its long-
standing refusal to renounce the use of force as a last resort to settle the dispute.72 While the 1995-1996 missile crisis has been a favorite
"starting point" for many pundits and practitioners to paint a frightening pic- ture of China and to justify U.S. firm response to it, what is often
conveniently overlooked is the question of how the "China threat" discourse itself had played a constitutive role in the lead-up to that crisis.
Limits of space forbid exploring this complex issue here. Sim- ply put, the Taiwan question was created largely as a result of wide- spread U.S.
perceptions of China as a "Red Menace" in the wake of the "loss of China" and the outbreak of the Korean War. To thwart what it saw as an
orchestrated Communist offensive in Asia, the United States deployed the U.S. Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait as part of its Cold War
containment strategy, thereby effectively pre- venting the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China. While the United States abandoned its
containment and isolation policy toward China in the 1970s and the two countries established full diplomatic relations in 1979, the
conventional image of the "Red Menace" lingered on in the United States. To
manage such a "threat," the U.S. Congress
passed the Taiwan Relations Act shortly after the normalization of U.S.-China relations, renewing U.S.
com- mitment to Taiwan's defense even though diplomatic ties with the island had been severed.73 ¶
This confrontational policy serves not only to shore up Taiwan's defense capabilities but also to induce its
independent ambition and further complicate cross-strait relations . As former U.S. defense official Chas Freeman
remarked, "U.S. arms sales to Taiwan no longer work to boost Taipei's confidence that it can work out its
dif- ferences with Beijing. Instead, they bolster the view that Taiwan can go its own way. "74 For instance, amid
growing sympathy from the Republican-dominated Congress and the elite media as well as the expanded ties with the United States, Taiwan
responded coolly to Beijing's call for dialogue in January 1995. In June 1995, Taiwan's flexible diplomacy, designed to burnish its independent
image, cul- minated in its president Lee Teng-hui's high-profile visit to the United States. This in turn reinforced Beijing's suspicion that the real
U.S. intention was to frustrate its reunification goal, leaving it apparently no other choice but to prepare militarily for what it saw as a worst-
case scenario. All this constituted the major context in which the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile exercises took place. For most Chinese, the
carrying out of these military exercises, well within their own territory, had little to do with attacking Tai- wan, much less with challenging U.S.
security interests in the west- ern Pacific. Rather, it was about China's long-cherished dream of national unity, with its "sabre rattling" tactics
serving merely as a warning to the United States, as well as to Taiwan. However, inter- preting such exercises as China's muscle-flexing with
direct security implications for the region, with "an almost 19th-century display of gunboat diplomacy,"75 the United States dispatched two
nuclear- powered aircraft carriers to the region of Taiwan. ¶ While not denying the potential security repercussions of China's missile tests for
the region, I suggest that the
flashpoint of Taiwan says as much about the danger of this U.S. approach to
China as about the threat of Beijing's display of force itself. "Had Bill Clinton projected a constancy of purpose and vision
in China policy ... in 1993-1994," David M. Lampton argues, "he might not have been challenged in the Taiwan Strait in 1995-1996 with missile
exercises."76 Indeed, it was primarily in the context of this U.S. intervention that Zhongguo keyi shuo bu (China can say no), one of the most
anti-U.S. books ever produced in China, emerged and quickly became a best-seller in the Chinese reading world.77 Mean- while, some Chinese
strategic thinkers were so alarmed by the U.S. show of strength that they told Helmut Sonnenfeldt, one of Henry Kissinger's close associates,
that they were rereading the early works of George F. Kennan because "containment had been the basis of American policy toward the Soviet
Union; now that the United States was turning containment against China, they wanted to learn how it had started and evolved."78 ¶ If such a
scary interaction between the United States and China remained somehow obscured here, it would soon be manifested again in another
standoff in U.S.-China relations; namely, the spy- plane incident of 2001.
 2AC/1AR China = Defensive Realist

China’s island posturing exemplifies defensive realism – fully understanding their

intentions is impossible, but our use of concrete examples solves the downfalls of
Western securitization
Kopper and Peragovics, 18 – Akos Kopper is Department Head at the International Relations
Department, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE University, Hungary. His research focuses on questions of
diplomacy, sovereignty, the Far East, and ideas that define and constrain the way we are thinking about
IR. His publications have appeared in, among others, International Political Sociology, International
Studies Review, Journal of International Relations and Development, The Pacific Review, East European
Politics, and Alternatives. He is co-editor of the Journal of International Relations and Development.
Tamas Peragovics is a PhD candidate at Central European University, Hungary. His research interests
include Chinese international relations and foreign policy (Akos and Tamas, “Overcoming the poverty of
Western historical imagination: Alternative analogies for making sense of the South China Sea conflict”,
European Journal of International Relations, 2018,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354066118780996)//RCU

In the following sections, we argue that historical analogies from China’s recent past suggest that
conflicts over islands can be interpreted as parts of a strategy of border maintenance. That is to say,
they are best seen as fundamentally symbolic acts to send diplomatic, albeit aggressive, messages
seeking recognition of some underlying change in the status quo that China considers advantageous to
its interests. The argument we make is not that the examples introduced in the following necessarily
offer the “right” readings of China’s strategic objectives today, but that ignoring them as plausible
interpretations of what takes place in the South China Sea deprives Western policymakers of rich
historical resources through which relations with China could be carefully navigated to reduce the
chances of conflict. There is all the more reason to discuss these interpretations as they form part of
China’s own historical legacy and interaction with the West in the 20th century. Put differently, while
Western experiences talk and resonate to a Western audience17 and hence their use in the West is of
little surprise, from an analytical perspective, it is imperative to consider Chinese experiences in order to
avoid the most unfortunate of affairs: for the West to exacerbate the conflict by imposing its prevailing
security imaginary in its relations with China, an imaginary that may be at odds with China’s own
perspectives and motivations regarding the island conflicts.

China’s dealing with disputed islands: Two historical examples

If we’d occupied the islands, we would have lost the ability to cause him [Chiang Kai-shek] discomfort
any time we want. (Mao, quoted in, e.g., Gurtov, 1976: 93)

The fixation on avoiding appeasement discussed in the previous section appears somewhat paradoxical
when we look at Xi Jinping’s (quoted in China Daily, 2015) claim that “there is no such thing as the so-
called Thucydides trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of
strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.” Of course, this statement does
not, in itself, prove anything about China’s alleged pacifism when it comes to the South China Sea
conflicts. In order to argue that there is an alternative reading of China’s dealings with its surrounding
islands that differs from the previously discussed analogies, we present two examples from China’s past
experiences with the islands at its borders. We suggest that these examples offer possible alternative
analogies for grasping the meaning attached to the islands and the strategic objectives that guide China.
What these analogies share is the insight that China might not be aiming for “conquest,” but rather that
conflict over islands is just a mechanism for diplomatic signaling and should not be interpreted as the
first step in an expansionist military agenda. The first example is the 1954–1958 Taiwan crises in which
Mao bombarded some of the offshore islands. Crucially for our purposes, the point of doing so was not
for the PRC to occupy them, let alone initiate an expansive military campaign. By the same token, our
second example is the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict at Zhenbao Island, in which skirmishes initiated
primarily by Chinese troops at the border did not indicate the first phase of a war against the Soviet
Union, but were instead intended to send a diplomatic signal for various political reasons. Nevertheless,
as we will show, the risks of strategic miscalculation and military escalation were serious in both cases,
which should alert us all the more to the importance of tactful international diplomacy.
 ---Taiwan
Taiwan and the SCS are two sides of the same coin – their actions are defensive and
deeply tied to the desire for unifcation
Raditio, 19 – Klaus Heinrich Raditio received his PhD from the University of Sydney researching on
China and the South China Sea. His Masters of Law in International Relations was awarded by Tsinghua
University, Beijing. (KLAUS HEINRICH, “Understanding China’s Behaviour in the South China Sea: A
Defensive Realist Perspective”, Palgrave MacMillan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1283-0,
2019)//RCU

4.1.4 Taiwan Taiwan is of great significance to China in many aspects. General Douglas MacArthur perceived
Taiwan as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” from which external powers can project their forces along China’s maritime
boundary.64 Taiwan’s strategic position also enables outside powers to execute a strategic containment against China. The island served
the US intelligence operations against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during the Cold War, which underlines how
insecure China can be if Taiwan is dominated by a rival power . The failure to control Taiwan will be detrimental to
China’s ambition of dominating its near seas and becoming a global sea power.65 Beijing has asserted that Taiwan is one of its
core interests—which means it will not tolerate its independence from the PRC. Beijing is unsatisfied with the status
quo and is trying to change it in its favour. To accomplish this, China must dominate the SCS. The relationship between Taiwan
and the SCS is like two sides of a coin—China needs to control Taiwan to break the containment in the
first island chain. Concomitantly, China also needs to dominate the SCS to ensure Taiwan’s return to the
mainland. Securing of the first island chain, which is demarcated by an imaginary line stretching from southernmost Japan, Taiwan, and the
Philippines is China’s priority. If China cannot control Taiwan than it cannot realise its ambition to rule the seas within the first island chain,
which are the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, and the SCS. According to Lin Sixing, a professor at Jinan University, the fall of Taiwan to external
forces means two things: first, there is no security for the southeastern Chinese coastal region; second, China is denied access to the Pacific.66
China will be permanently restrained within the first island chain, and it will lose the opportunity to realise its ambition to be a sea power.67
The first island chain serves both as a defensive stronghold and as an offensive projection of China’s power, a posture which is meant to tackle
two main challenges.68 The first is resisting invasion from the maritime boundary with an advanced maritime defence system, including nuclear
arsenals. The second is securing the maritime routes and maritime interest in far seas. To cope with the latter, China’s strategy should include
“offshore defence”, “near seas defence”, and “far seas defence” simultaneously.69 In other words, China’s maritime strategy
cannot be properly executed as long as Taiwan is not under Beijing’s full control. Moreover, since
Taiwan is a core interest, China cannot exert its control over it if Beijing does not have significant power
in the SCS. The strategy in the SCS that China needs to apply to prevent Taiwan’s independence is sea denial. Sea denial is a strategy to
create the SCS as a no-go zone for external powers, especially the US. China is uneasy with the US military operations in the SCS for various
reasons. First, it sees the US military activities as an intelligence operation to collect data on China’s nuclear submarine base in Yulin, Hainan.
Second, China also sees these US activities as a means of containment. Third, since the US is bound by the Taiwan Relations
Act to resist any form of coercion that threatens Taiwan security , the US military activity in the SCS is seen by
Beijing as an impediment to realising its unification with the mainland . Thus, China perceives that limiting
access to US military activity in the SCS is crucial to distance Taiwan from the US and therefore increase
the possibility for the mainland to reunify the island .70 China perceives Taiwan as its legitimate territory and this position is
shared by most states including the US. Taiwanese reunification is also a priority in China’s defence and diplomatic agenda. From this
point of view, securing the SCS and Taiwanese reunification are inseparable. If China dominates the
SCS, it will be one step ahead in bringing back Taiwan. On the other hand, if Taiwan is reunified with
China, this also helps China to gain control of the SCS . Hence, from this perspective China’s interest in the
SCS is not offensive.
 ---Contain = Offensive
China is defensive realist – compliance with the Tribunal ruling, de-escalation in the
SCS, and self-defeating prophecy – but, American containment allows for offensive
circumstances
Raditio, 19 – Klaus Heinrich Raditio received his PhD from the University of Sydney researching on
China and the South China Sea. His Masters of Law in International Relations was awarded by Tsinghua
University, Beijing. (KLAUS HEINRICH, “Understanding China’s Behaviour in the South China Sea: A
Defensive Realist Perspective”, Palgrave MacMillan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1283-0,
2019)//RCU
In the aftermath of the Tribunal ruling, China shows a reversal from its offensive realism in two aspects. First is the new wording of its
statement of claim in the SCS as explained in Chap. 3. Second, China
granted access to the Philippine fishermen to the
Scarborough Shoal after the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte (who started his term in 30 June 2016) travelled to China.
These moves demonstrate that the UNCLOS Tribunal ruling has a constraining effect on China’s
behaviour to some extent. China’s future behaviour in the SCS depends on a combination of domestic and international factors. In brief,
domestic factors (leadership rivalry, the sense of exceptionalism, and victimhood) tend to propel China to act in an offensive realist manner as
was evident in the 2012 Scarborough Shoal incident and the 2014–2015 massive construction of artificial islands. China’s behaviour also
depends on international factors such as the US balancing activities against China . Since the Chinese
leadership is aware of some regional countries’ support for the US role, China is unlikely to adopt an
offensive realist approach against the US. However, the nature of the defensive realism world which is supported
by the prevalence of international law tends to motivate China to adopt a defensive realist strategy . 8.2
Significance for Theory and Policy The main findings of this thesis show strong support for defensive realism theory .
During the period of de-escalation (1995 until between 2007 and 2009), China had the most advanced military
power compared to other SCS claimants. However, instead of using force, China extended its cooperative
behaviour which was successful in de-escalating the SCS tension. China demonstrated its serious commitment to
stabilising the region by participating in several multilateral agreements: the 2002 DoC, the ASEAN TAC in 2003, and
the JMSU in 2005. This fact is at odds with the offensive realism assumption that suggests China will pursue
hegemonic ambition to resolve its dispute with other claimants.1 Furthermore, the development of the SCS tension
corresponds to the security dilemma continuum. Mounting evidence shows that instead of pre-meditated actions , the
development of the SCS security dilemma is a result of uncertainty and inadvertency between China
and other claimant states. The same applies to the tension between China and the US in the SCS. Uncertainty is
one of the key concepts of defensive realism.2 In contrast, offensive realism suggests that all states aim at power
maximisation and regional hegemony, which creates much less uncertainty.3 This assumption cannot stand
before the reality of the states concerned in the SCS. Evidence in this research also suggests that China is
experiencing a selfdefeating phenomenon . Self-defeating behaviour is one of the basic tenets of defensive realism which
suggests that a state’s attempt to enhance its power does not necessarily lead to its increased security. This is particularly apparent
in the case of China’s Yulin naval base and the US surveillance activities. China’s building of the Yulin naval base in Hainan
Island is driven by defensive motivation. However, this has raised concerns for the US since the base can be
used to launch a nuclear submarine, which in turn threatens US naval ships in the region, leading to the growing
frequency of surveillance and intelligence gathering on flights and ships, which is perceived by China as a threat by
the US. Having confirmed the nature of China’s defensive realist behaviour in the SCS, this research concludes that China has defected to
offensive realism. Chinese defection behaviours show that a state could change from one form of realist strategy to the other. By contrast,
offensive realism argues that all states are offensive realist and offensive realism is the only strategy to guarantee a state’s survival. This
presupposition is not in alignment with China’s SCS behaviour. With regard to China’s relations with the US in the SCS, this research finds that
China’s involvement in the US-led rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) since 2014 dismisses the offensive realist argument that China will expel the US
from the first and second island chains. Offensive realism cannot explain China’s participation in enhancing the US-
led maritime order in the Pacific. However, according to defensive realism, it is logical for China to accept the existing US-led order.
In terms of policy, this research suggests that China should be given the opportunity to reverse its policy
towards other claimants to defensive realism . Dealing with China using the offensive realism perspective
will not help to stabilise the region. Evidence shows that China is fundamentally a defensive realist state.
However, it can adopt offensive realist measures under some circumstances . This research finds that domestic
factors, that is, political rivalry within the CCP’s leadership, plays a significant role in China’s offensive realist behaviour. In addition, the
Chinese population and its leadership maintain a sense of exceptionalism and superiority towards other countries. This means that they
are very sensitive about their own reputation and dignity (mianzi). China’s sensitivity about its dignity should be
accommodated politically but not legally. The rapprochement initiative by the newly installed Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte
has proved to be effective in de-escalating the SCS tension. However, the Philippines should not withdraw its submission to the UNCLOS
Tribunal or undermine the tribunal ruling on 12 July 2016. This ruling has given legal certainty on a maritime rights dispute in the SCS and the
future of the SCS should be shaped based on the ruling of the UNCLOS Tribunal.
 ---SCS
China’s defensive realist – behavior in the SCS goes our way
Slenter, 18 – Fleur Slenter is a recent graduate of the MA International Relations with a specialization
in Global Order in Historical Perspective at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Previously, she studied
at Maastricht University, obtaining a BA in European Studies. She took part in the ERASMUS+
programme at Essex University, where she studied the many actors and complexities involved in security
issues. (Fleur, “Chinese Behaviour in the South China Sea: An Offensive and Defensive Realist Case
Study”, 8/30/2018, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/65387/Fleur%20Slenter
%20MA%20Thesis%20China%20South%20China%20Sea%20Offensive%20Defensive%20Realism.pdf?
sequence=1)//RCU

Throughout its white papers, China reaffirms its commitment to a peaceful and stable region . The
country strongly believes in cooperation with other actors involved in the area. Indeed, it is a shared responsibility to
keep the region peaceful and stable, and it should be kept this way through dialogue, negotiations and other peaceful means. Throughout
these statements flows a defensive realist narrative that is committed to keep the status quo and balance
together with other states. Furthermore, peaceful means are prioritized above aggressive ones . Nevertheless,
when other countries provoke China and overstep territorial boundaries, international and judicial tools are deemed irrelevant. The country
thereby implies that a breach in its security will be matched in response. The proportion or the means of this response is unclear, yet it clearly
implies that China will defend itself however possible. If
its security is breached, it will consider all options, or so it
signals to potential provocative states. Although the tone is more aggressive, it still pursues security and
not power. It does not seek expansion of power in its statements. Indeed, it is seen in practice that when China clashes with another
country it is clear on the boundaries of its territory and that its neighbours are not welcome within them. Nevertheless, it is also clear that
while China is rather aggressive in such instances, it does not take the opportunity to escalate the situation. It
does not conquer additional territory and it does not send its fleet to attack the neighbouring country .
Nevertheless, one must remain critical. If its statements would be aggressive and violent, its neighbouring countries would oppose China
together. Furthermore, they would not cooperate and leverage would be little. One should expect that the statements do not fully match
China’s intentions. A country will never fully enclose its interests and intensions. This is where its actual behaviour on the waters of the South
China Sea fill in certain gaps. China claims the majority of the South China Sea to be theirs and acts upon it when foreign vessels infringe upon
their claimed sovereignty. In its statements, however, it seems to forget its own possibly provocative behaviour. Indeed, it built military
capabilities on disputed islands, and expanded them by dredging islands in disputed areas to strengthen its claim. When other countries do this,
it is classified as provocative. In public, China keeps the narrative running that it wants to built mutual beneficial relationships with its
neighbours, yet out on the sea one could argue that its behaviour is at times more befitting offensive realism. Should we then disconnect
strengthening military capabilities and building islands from offensive behaviours? China has claimed the territories in which it has been
building islands for the past few years. Its neighbouring countries, although in a lesser capacity, have done the same. China has been consistent
by defending the territory it claims. Having many countries in the area that cannot be considered allies , as well as their
backing by the US, it is rational behaviour to strengthen military capabilities when this is possible and defend ones
own territory when this is necessary. To consider the opposite, China has not used any military capabilities aggressively outside
the territories it lays claim to. Furthermore, it responds to other countries in a consistent manner. It does so by clearly stating what
they believe their territory is and by actively defending it . The country thereby does not take the opportunity to escalate.
Rather, it remains open to possible solutions that are agreeable for all parties involved. Some observers argue that the current behaviour of
China, being cooperative and more cautious of escalation, presenting itself to be willing to work on solutions on fora such as ASEAN, is simply a
phase. They argue that China is taking its time to grow economically, and to build ways to make other countries dependant on it for loans and
trade. Furthermore, they argue that China is taking its time to strengthen and expand its military. China has been developing and building new
weapons, ships and other material to expand its military capabilities. Indeed, in this they all find arguments that this perceived defensive
behaviour is solely a smokescreen for what happens next. Nevertheless, the analysis cannot know what happens next. We are unable to predict
the future. The author can only say that it is fairly possible that China continues to behave the way it does. However, it might also be possible it
does not. The future is a whole other research question. One that cannot be examined at the moment, but simply when the future is at present.
5. Conclusion This thesis has examined China’s behaviour in the South China Sea. The research question was the following. To what extent can
Chinese activity in the South China Sea be explained by both offensive and defensive realism? It has thereby aimed to remain critical of the
motivations of this behaviour, through employing both theories that regard behaviour in a different manner. These lenses have been employed
on the domestic politics, the 9 dash line and the activities on and around the islands in question. China’s attempts to accomplish peaceful
settlements have thereby taken into account. By doing so this thesis has found that China’s behaviour is largely
defensive. It is clear that China does not allow others to question its territory even if it is disputed and claimed by others as well. All
territory China claimed to be theirs is fiercely protected. It has done so for decades. Nevertheless, it has
been open to solutions and has remained cautious in situations that had the possibility to escalate, and
thereby repeatedly prevented potential war . Indeed, in any situation that could escalated it clearly stated it wishes not to and
seek solutions that would be suitable for all parties involved. China has preferred to do this through bilateral channels ,
which is more characteristic for offensive countries, as they then have the ability to be dominant and intimidating. Indeed, China has not been
very keen on intense cooperation with ASEAN, however it did on multiple occasions accept the opportunity to do so. It must be remembered
that in the ASEAN forum, it is China against a whole group of other countries, which are often backed by the US. The latter country often gets
itself involved in the region, strengthening military alliances with neighbouring countries of China and at times even actively proclaiming that is
does not agree with what China is doing, especially with regards to the South China Sea. One might be sceptical due to China’s
assertive
responses to other countries coming into disputed territory . However, this is in line with defensive realism,
which holds that a country will always try to protect itself. This includes other countries invading their
territory and thereby disrespecting their sovereignty, albeit in territory that is claimed by others as well .

China has a historical basis for their SCS claims – they’re not an offensive realist
Raditio, 19 – Klaus Heinrich Raditio received his PhD from the University of Sydney researching on
China and the South China Sea. His Masters of Law in International Relations was awarded by Tsinghua
University, Beijing. (KLAUS HEINRICH, “Understanding China’s Behaviour in the South China Sea: A
Defensive Realist Perspective”, Palgrave MacMillan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1283-0,
2019)//RCU

This chapter highlighted the importance of a territorial or jurisdictional claim (or both) in deciding
whether a country is an expansionist or not. If a country, because of its growing power, harbours an
ambition to conquer a territory for which this has no historical or legal basis, then it should be
considered expansionist. This chapter finds that China’s SCS claim precedes the founding of the PRC and
thus is not directly due to its rising power. China has strong links with the SCS and has grounds to
dispute its rights in it. Even though China has the right to dispute its rights in the SCS, in terms of
exercising sovereignty according to international law, its claim is not indisputable. Its activities, as well as
those of other claimants, have been sporadic and inconsistent.

Theoretically, the above points show that China is not an offensive realist nor expansionist. An offensive
realist seeks to maximise its power by conquest and expansion.74 This position resembles that of Nazi
Germany. However, the behaviour of China in the SCS is a far cry from that of Nazi Germany.75 Germany
had no right to dispute the territory it invaded in the World War II and its claim over the newly occupied
territory was purely based on military conquest. Furthermore, Germany had no strong historical
presence to the invaded territory. In contrast, China has had a strong historical presence in the SCS and
has inherited the territorial claim from the previous regime. As such, a country like PRC—which has had
a strong historical presence in the SCS and has inherited the claim from the previous regime—cannot be
characterised as that of an offensive realist or expansionist.
China’s SCS expansion isn’t for global domination, it’s for oil and fish
Raditio, 19 – Klaus Heinrich Raditio received his PhD from the University of Sydney researching on
China and the South China Sea. His Masters of Law in International Relations was awarded by Tsinghua
University, Beijing. (KLAUS HEINRICH, “Understanding China’s Behaviour in the South China Sea: A
Defensive Realist Perspective”, Palgrave MacMillan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1283-0,
2019)//RCU

The presence of natural resources, primarily hydrocarbons and fisheries, is undoubtedly a factor,
contributing to the strategic importance of the SCS . However, the strategic value of these resources depends on their exact
extent, their ease of recovery, and their direct significance to China’s (or any other proximal nation’s) needs. In China, coal is the primary energy
source, accounting for about 70% of total energy consumption. However, oil and gas are also important. In 1993, China became a net oil
importer when its crude oil imports exceeded its export. By 1996, China was experiencing a decrease in oil production and the demand growth
was 5.8% annually, compared to output growth of 2.8%.1 The International Energy Agency predicted that by 2030, China would
supersede the US as the biggest consumer of oil , and its gas market would be bigger than the countries of the European
Union combined.2 China became a net importer of natural gas in 2007, and the demand for such imports is expected to rise significantly after
2020.3 The growth of its population and its modernisation agenda will render energy and food resources
(including fish and seafood) as important for China’s sustainable development . The US Energy Information
Administration estimates that within the SCS there can be found 11 billion barrels (1.7 billion tonnes) of oil and 190
trillion cubic feet (5.4 trillion cubic metres) of natural gas hydrocarbon reserves.4 China’s Ministry of Land and Resources
has more optimistic data, calculating 23–30 billion tonnes of petroleum resources and 16 trillion cubic metres of natural gas deposits
within the nine-dash line. This latter estimate would mean the total hydrocarbon deposits in the SCS comprise
one-third of China’s total oil and gas resources and account for 12% of global hydrocarbon resources .5 In
brief, there is a considerable gap regarding the estimation of the hydrocarbon resources between China and other countries. Accordingly, the
SCS should not be considered simply as having the potential to provide a panacea for China’s energy security problem for at least two reasons.
First, it is important to distinguish between resources and reserves. A resource estimate indicates the whole quantity of hydrocarbons on site.
Reserves are an element of the resources that may be extractable at the actual market price. It has been suggested that the recovery factor for
the SCS is 10%—which is lower than the conventional rate of 35%—while the recovery factor for natural gas is assessed to be about 75%.6 The
hydrocarbon resources in the SCS can only help to alleviate China’s energy security problem if it is assessed in terms of production, instead of
the quantity of resources on site. Second, China’s energy security challenge should focus more on managing domestic demand, that is,
increasing its efficiency and encouraging energy conservation.7 The capacity of the SCS reserves in compensating for the gap between expected
demand and supply is insignificant. It is misleading to posit that the hydrocarbon reserves in the SCS could alleviate energy security issues in
China or any claimant state.8 In terms of fishery resources, the SCS represents 12% of the world’s fish catch , and
this resource keeps depleting.9 China’s fish consumption grew annually at 6% from 1990 to 2010, and its population
consumes 34% of the world’s fish food supply —almost three times that of Central Asia and Europe combined and over five
times that of North America.10 According to the World Bank’s estimation, China’s fish consumption per capita will reach 41 kg by 2030—which
is more than double world’s average.11 The
majority of maritime fishing activities (78%) take place in China’s
disputed waters, including the SCS.12 Moreover, about 15 million people work in the Chinese fishery industry .13
This makes China’s effort to secure its purported “traditional fishing ground” for its fishermen extremely
urgent.
 ---Arctic
China’s “lay-low” behavior in the Arctic proves it has no global aims – if it did, they
would be equally aggressive in the North
Ng, 18 – Ph.D. in Politics and International Relations from the University of Queensland and Professor,
Faculty of International Studies and Regional Development, University of Niigata Prefecture; citing Leng
Tse-kang, Research Fellow of Institute of Political Science of Academia Sinica (IPSAS) and Professor of
Political Science at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. Professor Leng received his Ph.D. in
Government and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 1995. Dr. Leng was a Professor and
Chair of Political Science Department of National Chengchi University. He served as Section Chief of R &
D Office , and Research Fellow of Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University. (Ka
Po, “Decoding the rise of China: Taiwanese and Japanese perspectives”, Journal of Contemporary East
Asia Studies, 10/23/2018,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24761028.2018.1535295)//RCU

The last chapter by Leng Tse-kang serves to compensate for the deficiency in existing discussion of
Chinese geopolitics. The shift of attention to the Arctic reflects China’s changing global views and its
adoption of a proactive foreign policy. The aspiration to pursue “relational governance” and the need for
energy resources to fuel economic growth all point to the north. In that region, China takes a stance in
stark contrast to its behavior in both the East China Sea and the South China Sea, urging cooperation
and observation of international norms and laws. This thus far fails to allay suspicions of Artic countries.
Leng, however, argues that Chinese Arctic diplomacy has not deviated from the course of “lay-low”
policy and is far from any hint of pursuing hegemony. On the contrary, he suggests, it will promote their
image as a “law-abiding” member of the international community. Successful exploitation of Arctic
policy to overcome suspicion of China rise will facilitate smooth transition of Chinese diplomacy.
 SCS No Link
Link turn – the aff is a recognition that SCS behavior isn’t aggression, but responsive to
the West
Johnson, 18 – Honorary Fellow in the School of History, Politics and International Relations at the
University of Leicester (James, “Conceptualizing the United States–China Security Dilemma”, The US-
China Military and Defense Relationship during the Obama Presidency, 4/29/2018,
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-75838-1_2)//RCU

A good case in point was the U.S. think-tank community’s’ analysis of China’s alleged ‘militarization’ of
the South China Sea.54 Specifically, suppositions inferred from Chinese construction projects that
deployments of military assets (e.g. combat aircraft and mobile missile launchers) to the disputed
islands (especially the Spratly Islands) could be expected in the near future, which implied that Beijing
intended to use these strategic outposts as a means to extend its anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) zone
(or exclusive zone) to achieve aggressive and expansionist ends. In his congressional testimony,
U.S. Pacific Command’s Commander Admiral Harry Harris asserted: ‘China has fundamentally altered the
physical and political landscape in the South China Sea through large-scale land reclamation and by
militarizing these reclaimed features.’55 For China did not consider deployments of ‘defensive’ military
installations as ‘militarization’, but rather a necessary response to U.S. naval Freedom of Navigation
(FONOPs) exercises, and other provocative intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) activities
close to China’s coastline. In short, the amplification of United States–China divergences over what was
meant by ‘militarization’ caused both sides to perceive the other as engaging in ‘militarizing’ activities,
which in turn increased regional strategic instability and intensified the United States–China security
dilemma.
 Perm: Don’t Reject IR

Permutation do both – mainstream IR shouldn’t be rejected on-face if it’s not perfect –

critically working inside of them and recognizing it’s not Truth generates reflexivity
and solves its shortcomings
Cho and Hwang, 19 – Young Chul Cho is Associate Professor in the School of International Studies at
Chonbuk National University in South Korea. He is Vice Dean of Global Frontier College in the same
university. His primary research and teaching interests are theories of international relations, critical &
popular geopolitics, philosophy of social science, and Asian studies. His articles have been published in
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, International
Journal, Japanese Journal of Political Science, Korea Observer, Pacific Focus, and so on. Yih-Jye Hwang
(PhD, Aberystwyth) is University Lecturer (Universitair Docent 1) of International Relations at Leiden
University. He completed his PhD in International Politics from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He
served as Convener for Leiden University College’s Major in World Politics between 2010 and
Mainstream IR Theoretical Perspectives and Rising China Vis-À-Vis... 2016. He has published widely on
politics and international relations in the Asia-Pacific region. He is also coeditor of Global Challenges:
Peace and War (Brill 2103). His research interests include post-structuralism, nationalism, peace and
conflict studies, cultural governance, critical human security, post-Western IR, China’s strategic thinking,
and the international relations of East Asia. (Young Chul and Yih-Jye, “Mainstream IR Theoretical
Perspectives and Rising China Vis-À-Vis the West: The Logic of Conquest, Conversion and Socialisation”,
Journal of Chinese Political Science, 4/13/2019, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11366-019-
09620-3)//RCU

When Orientalist IR meets Occidental IR, hatred and conflict are inevitable and will become perpetual
practices in world politics. In that context, the mainstream IR perspectives contribute to a culture of
insecurity between rising China and the West while they close down the creative space needed to
imagine a different way of engagement. In the dualistic circuit of mainstream IR perspectives, the Self’s
epistemological violence toward the Other is often justified in practice. This way of thinking conditions
everyone to regard the relationship between the Self and the Other as an inevitable clash and obscures
the process of learning that has led both the West and China to transform themselves. There is no need
to discard mainstream IR perspectives altogether, but neither is it useful to remain boxed inside them
when thinking about international affairs. Rather, we need to use mainstream IR thought-patterns
critically, rather than treating them as purely objective standpoints that produce Truths . IR knowledge
needs to be produced in a reflective spirit. Critical knowledge consumption and reflective knowledge
production create the possibility of imagining different modes of the Self/Other nexus in IR that are less
conflictual, more democratic, and truly global. Through such processes we can gain a deeper
understanding of IR scholarship, introduce greater reflexivity into its debates, and identify ways in which
its neo-imperialist lacunas might be addressed.
The permutation is best – Chinese scholarship draws from Western IR and seeks to
supplement, not supplant it
Qin, 18 – Professor of International Relations at China Foreign Affairs University (Yaqing, “A Multiverse
of Knowledge: Cultures and IR Theories”, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2018,
https://academic.oup.com/cjip/article-abstract/11/4/415/5162675)//RCU

In addition, these efforts purposefully aim to engage IR communities the world over, especially
mainstream Western IR theory, for dialog, discussion, and debate. There is no intent to establish a small
fiefdom. Chinese theorists have learned from Western IR theories and been inspired during this learning
process. Although critical of Western IR theories, they, at the same time, integrate them into their own
discourses and narratives. They publish in English in order to communicate directly with their
counterparts in other parts of the world, especially in the West, and to enrich, rather than replace or
displace, the existing IR literature. Some style themselves as non-Western and use a national label. This
stems largely from their perceived need to articulate what is marginalized, represent what is neglected,
and emphatically accent multiplicity and plurality, so to make it more conspicuously meaningful in the
sociology of knowledge.
 China Reps Good

Chinese scholarship isn’t mutually exclusive with realism – moral realism proves the
same core assumptions are shared when describing China’s intentions
Qin, 18 – Professor of International Relations at China Foreign Affairs University; citing Yan Xuetong,
distinguished professor and the Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University
(Yaqing, “A Multiverse of Knowledge: Cultures and IR Theories”, The Chinese Journal of International
Politics, 2018, https://academic.oup.com/cjip/article-abstract/11/4/415/5162675)//RCU

Yan Xuetong has developed ‘moral realism’. Like Carr, Morgenthau, and Waltz, Yan places particular
emphasis on power. His moral realism takes power as its central concept and accepts the basic
assumptions of realism, recognizing that anarchy is the nature of the international system, that national
interest is the prime mover of state action, and that struggle for power and world leadership is the
inevitable reality of world politics. At the same time, however, it argues that morality plays an important
role in both constituting and exercising power. ‘Moral realism’ seems to be an oxymoron. Carr takes
morality as something in an entirely different category from power, 31 Morgenthau dismisses morality
as an insignificant factor in international politics and defines it bluntly in terms of national interests,32
and Waltz leaves no room for morality in his structural realism.33 By specifically using this key concept
of morality and forcing it into the realist narrative, Yan expands the horizon of both classical and
structural realism alike.

It is obvious that Yan turns to traditional Chinese cultural resources for information, especially to China’s
ancient thinkers of the pre-Qin period (before 221 BCE) such as Guanzi, Confucius, Laozi, Mencius, Mozi,
Xunzi, and Hanfeizi, who wrote about power, political authority, and governance. Drawing on their
works, Yan develops a realism that centers around world leadership. Inspired mainly by Xunzi, Yan holds
that the international system is hierarchical and that major powers naturally struggle for world
leadership in such a hierarchical order. Leadership, however, is not composed of mere material
elements. Although economic and military capabilities are important, power of and for leadership
should contain strong nonmaterial or ideational elements. Morality is, thus, the key to the power of
leadership. As Yan interprets Guanzi, ‘... to maintain a stable international order both material power
and moral thought are necessary’.34 In other words, material power is important but can be significant
only when paired with morality if political leadership is involved and to be sustained.

Yan tries to interpret the relationship between power and leadership to answer a key question in politics
—what power is most effective in the successful competition for and sustainable maintenance of world
leadership. For him, ideal power is both material and moral, and the ideal leadership is Wangdao or
humane authority, which combines power and morality. Although these were the thoughts of ancient
Chinese philosophers, they are highly relevant in today’s world wherein humane authority is more
effective in the competition for world leadership than hegemony, which can neither be sustained nor
endure. Yan Xuetong published his book entitled Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power, in
which he discusses in detail his moral realism, in 2011.35
Our defensive reading of China is in line with the Tianxia system – they prioritize
coexistence instead of self-interest
Qin, 18 – Professor of International Relations at China Foreign Affairs University; citing Zhao Tingyang,
professor and member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a senior fellow of Peking
University Berggruen Research Institute. His theory of the Tianxia System (All-Under-Heaven), a theory
of world order, tries to transcend Huntington’s “clashes of civilizations,” and advances an alternative to
the Kantian conception of perpetual peace. He has published many books including The Tianxia System:
Reimaging Visions of Global Order from the Past and for the Future, and The Whirlpool that Produced
China: Stag Hunting on the Central Plains of China. (Yaqing, “A Multiverse of Knowledge: Cultures and IR
Theories”, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2018, https://academic.oup.com/cjip/article-
abstract/11/4/415/5162675)//RCU

Zhao Tingyang’s theory of the ‘all-under-heaven system’, or a genuine worldism, is mainly unfolded in
two of his books, Tianxia System in 2005 and A Possible World of All-under-heaven System in 2016.36
Zhao’s main concern is order or an order of perpetual peace throughout the world. Zhao models his
Tianxia system on that of the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BCE), which Confucius himself highly
commended. Under the supreme rule of the Zhou Court and a few semi-sovereign city-states which,
although ostensibly independent, acknowledged and accepted Zhou governance, the Zhou thus
governed what was known as Tianxia, meaning ‘all-under-heaven’, meaning, at least theoretically and
conceptually, the world as a whole. As Zhou institutions governed all the states, the people, as subjects
of the Zhou Court, were, therefore, at liberty to travel to all other states.

Zhao argues that the Zhou system is truly a world system because it had no concept of aliens and its
institutions served the system in its entirety. The world today is governed by the state system
established by the Westphalian peace treaties, wherein all states regard one another as alien. Since
today’s world has no monolithic institution governing all, or that has political aspirations to cover the
whole world, it is a world without a ‘worldview’ and without institutions that are of and for all nations
and peoples. Simply put, it is a ‘non-world’. Conflict is then difficult to resolve and transnational issues
are hard to deal with through joint efforts. Furthermore, the Westphalian international system is based
on individual states that are independent of one another and on interstate institutions which, by nature
and by design, cannot solve transnational problems and global issues. The Confucian ‘all-under-heaven
system’ is inclusive and eliminates the self-other boundary. It is, therefore, all-inclusive or nonexclusive;
a constitution in the genuinely global sense, rather than one that only regulates individual nation-states.

Zhao’s key concept in his ideal narration of the Zhou Dynasty and the Tianxia system is nonexclusivity
which, according to Zhao, is far preferable to Kant’s path to genuine perpetual peace, successful
governance, and a stable order the world over. Related to nonexclusivity, Zhao’s Tianxia system theory
rests on the ontology of coexistence rather than self-existence and on family-ship rather than on
individuality. He criticizes the existing Western international theories for their overemphasis on the
exclusive existence of the self and holds that Western social theory is mistaken in taking that ontological
position, explicitly or implicitly, to interpret the world, because this renders it a fragmented non-world.

The ontology of coexistence differs. It gives priority to coexistence, arguing that coexistence comes
before self-existence, to the extent of constituting the prerequisite of self-existence. Coexistence
requires inclusiveness of Ego and Alter as reflected in a family. Institutions designed and established for
such a nonexclusive system of coexistence are global in the real sense. They, hence, constitute the
prerequisite ontological position for establishing a truly global system and solving global problems. The
world order, therefore, must be based upon genuine world institutions as embodied in the Confucian
worldview and practiced by the ancient Chinese Western Zhou Dynasty in its Tianxia system.
 Coop Solves

A relational view of Chinese behavior is best – replace Western dualisms with mutual
cooperation
Qin, 18 – Professor of International Relations at China Foreign Affairs University (Yaqing, “A Multiverse
of Knowledge: Cultures and IR Theories”, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2018,
https://academic.oup.com/cjip/article-abstract/11/4/415/5162675)//RCU

Qin Yaqing has developed a relational theory of world politics around the central concept of
‘relationality’. On the basis of the Confucian cultural community over millennia, it provides a different
approach to understanding relationships in an increasingly complex world. It conceives the world of IR
as one composed of ongoing relations rather than discrete individual entities, assumes international
actors as actors-in-relations, and takes processes defined in terms of relations in motion as ontologically
significant. A world of relations works in a considerably different way from a world of atoms. It is one
where dynamic relations define the identities and activities of actors and where actors relate and are
related as they practice. It is also a world where politics is more about relations than power and wherein
governance of relations is its most skilful art. Furthermore, the relational ontology requires that
relations among actors, rather than individual actors per se, should be the pivot unit of analysis for
social studies.

Qin’s relational theory uses as its epistemological schema the Chinese zhongyong dialectics and believes
that the yin-yang relationship is the meta relationship that represents all relationships in the universe. It
assumes that harmony is the state of nature and that polarities are immanently inclusive and mutually
complementary; they, hence, rely on each other for life and work together to generate a new life. It
denies thus any dualistic structure and dichotomous binary, using the ‘both-and’ logic to negate the
‘either-or’ way of thinking.37 Although it does place emphasis on coexistence, it, at the same time, fully
recognizes the existence of the self, denying any pretext through which to subjugate the self in the
name of the collective. Thus, it argues for the simultaneity of self-existence and other-existence, and of
self-existence and coexistence, as with a drop of water and the sea. Neither one comes before the
other. Ego and Alter are always found in a relational entanglement and simultaneous mutuality. Such
entanglement and simultaneity of the self and the other, of self-existence and coexistence, and of self-
interest and cointerest represent our global life. We accordingly need to reconceptualize certain key
concepts of world politics, for example, the ability to coempower rather than to impose coercively as
the optimal expression of power, and amity rather than enmity as the most meaningful, but often
neglected, practice and relationship in world politics.

On the basis of relational ontology, it puts forward the logic of relationality, arguing that social actors
base their actions on relations in the first place. The United States’ adoption of different policies toward
Britain and North Korea’s nuclear weapons is entirely attributable to the nature of its relationships with
the two countries. It is only to be expected that a state treats an ally, a neutral state, and an enemy
quite differently over the same issue.38 Actors are rational to do so owing to the different nature of
relationships. Qin’s relational theory does not deny rationality but argues that rationality is defined in
terms of relationality, for without considering the nature of a relationship, it would be impossible to
define a rational action. A social actor needs first to define the relationship between her and the related
other and is then able to decide what action toward the latter is rational. As Pouliot argues, while it
makes sense for a Westerner to be rational when planning investment in the economic field, ‘it is quite
nonsensical (and socially reprehensible) to constantly calculate means and ends with family and
friends’.39 People are rational but relationally rational. Human rationality in a social setting is always
socially defined and relationally expressed. It is what we may call relational rationality.
Militarism/Security
 1AC/2AC Taiwan = Center of U.S. Imperialism

Taiwan exists in a liminal space between danger and opportunity – this frontier is
emblematic of both spaces of exception and exceptionalist framing of China that is
part in parcel with American imperial projects that further genocidal violence
Wang and Cho 17 – Associate Professor English; Global and Intercultural Studies (Women's, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies; Asian/Asian American Studies affiliate), [Wang, C. & Cho, Y. (2017). Introduction:
The Chinese Factor and American Studies, Here and Now. American Quarterly 69(3), 443-463. Johns
Hopkins University Press. Retrieved July 18, 2019, from Project MUSE database.] mp

On December 2, 2016, US president-elect Donald Trump tweeted that he received a call of congratulations from the president of
Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, and when questioned, defended himself with these wry complaints: “Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of
dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call” and “Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their

currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our projects going into …”1 Whether the call was a calculated stunt or

a diplomatic gaffe, Trump’s tweets unwittingly reveal Taiwan to be “an American frontier,” to borrow the words of the
long-forgotten George Kerr, US diplomat and military adviser posted there in the 1940s, who proposed to restructure Taiwan under

US guidance, in effect creating an “accidental state” on the island. 2 Wedged between the United States and China, since the Cold
War days this Pacific island-nation has been positioned as a bargaining chip in the great power politics :

released from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, it has since been un/willingly framed as a keystone in the western Pacific

anticommunist front, acting as the opposite of the “subhuman, inhuman, and humanly unthinkable
China” that allegedly threatens American happiness and greatness.3 As a US–China frontier and a military borderland emerging out of Han-
Chinese settler colonialism, Japan’s colonial scheme for advancing to Southeast Asia, and US Pacific imperial cartography,4 Taiwan’s modern

formations are deeply embedded in these transpacific entanglements , yet its significance has been
disavowed and absented—indeed, it serves a space of exception that, as US media are quick to acknowledge,
is “perhaps the most militarily vulnerable US partner anywhere in the world” despite being a top market for
US arms sales in Asia.5 Our reason for invoking Taiwan here is manifold. As a central “problem” in US–China relations, Taiwan represents not
just a political concern but, more important for American studies scholars, a methodological and conceptual inspiration for grappling with

the complexities of “China” in the US global imagination .6 On the one hand, the reign of Trumpolitics has
rendered Taiwan [End Page 443] more visible, both domestically and internationally, as a space of exception
structurally linked to Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Okinawa that are subjected to the regime of
extraterritoriality, which is the norm—not exception—to postwar American empire.7 While Taiwan is neither an incarceral space nor a host
of a US military base now, its reliance on US protection and increasing economic integration with China has locked itself in a state of

“in/dependence,” a conundrum that pessimists have predicted would be resolved only by war.8 On the other hand,
the way Taiwan has been fronted by Trump as a bargaining chip reveals how large China looms in the US
global imaginary now and how central maintaining and managing the Pacific and other frontiers still is to the project of US
imperialism. On a more personal level, as two Americanists with roots in Taiwan, we hope to better comprehend these entangled, conflicting spaces and
politics, with Japan, Korea, the Pacific islands, and Southeast Asia deeply implicated in complex transpacific dynamism. Against the tired tropes of

orientalism and Cold War divisions, we hope to initiate dialogue between the rich field of transpacific studies and inter-
Asia critique as we strive to imagine more capacious and self-critical approaches to the “global” in American
studies. Today, US–China relations are increasingly characterized by competition, collusion, complicity, and
even collaboration on the global scale rather than simply domination and resistance on the Pacific front. Through
rearticulating frontier spaces as critical borderlands in their disparate forms and modalities in this new
context, we seek to highlight critical visions and practices that reorient America’s global imaginary about
China as a relational comparativist project toward decolonization and de-imperialization. Reconsidering
Frontier Today In his statements about Taiwan, Kerr characterizes Taiwan as “a trouble spot” where the “two frontiers
[American and Chinese] meet and overlap,” and considered its national formation similar to the American experience, as a frontier nation

settled by “hardy pioneers, bold and adventurous.”9 Kerr’s allusion to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, especially the analogous
relation that he draws between Taiwan and the U nited States, urges us to consider state formations , including

postcolonial ones in Taiwan and elsewhere, as inherently settler colonial projects. As both Turner’s thesis and growing
scholarship on US settler colonialism make clear, Euro-American settlement, made possible by the genocide and dispossession of

indigenous peoples, created the conditions for racial capitalism and liberal democracy .10 In this context, frontier
operates as a space of exception where “lax business honor, inflated paper currency and [End Page 444] wild-cat banking” go
hand in hand with racism, war, genocide, and the dispossession of native land. 11 The frontier in the
American mind is thus also a space of danger and opportunity that elicits excitement , caution, and opportunistic
calculation: it is something to annex or maintain control when profitable, and to leave behind if the costs
outweigh benefits. As the playground of imperial white masculinity and supremacy, the frontier is inherently a precarious
space; it is also a liminal and impossible space that is haunted, potentially assimilable, and always disavowed by the imperial
power.12 In the contemporary context, the metaphor of frontier helps us identify nodes of contention and spaces of
exception obscured by dominant knowledge . Equally important, it urges us to move beyond its conventional
usage by activating critical visions and practices that put pressure against such occlusion, rearticulating frontiers as borderlands where
political and cultural contestations against imperial rivalries and collaborations point to different political possibilities.13
 2AC Perm: Securitization = Reflex

Securitization especially in the context of Taiwan forces reflexivity about American

supremacy’s role in global conflict – only the permutation embraces that reflexivity
and reverses problematic domestic policies
Wang and Cho 17 – Associate Professor English; Global and Intercultural Studies (Women's, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies; Asian/Asian American Studies affiliate), [Wang, C. & Cho, Y. (2017). Introduction:
The Chinese Factor and American Studies, Here and Now. American Quarterly 69(3), 443-463. Johns
Hopkins University Press. Retrieved July 18, 2019, from Project MUSE database.] mp

We invoke the frontier thesis here not to reinstate the problematic masculinist, land-based territorial logic and the assumption of uniform imperialistic
impulse by identifying its locations and functions in relation to the US Empire or the Chinese Empire.14 Rather, as
an analytic, it enables us to
recontextualize the here and now of American studies at this critical juncture of global emergencies,
where refugee crisis, populist sentiments, threats of war, and assaults on human rights urge us to grapple with the ongoing and

imminent violences and their entanglements : from the nuclear tension in the Korean peninsula, the woes of intensifying
militarization in Okinawa and other Pacific islands, the worries of Taiwanese over an upcoming war, the conflicts in the Middle
East and Southeast Asia regarding uncertain futures, not to mention the scenes of torture, imprisonment, and destruction in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Fallujah, and
most recently Syria. These unfolding
crises not only foreground frontier as exceptional and extraterritorial, overdetermined
by military conflicts, but also suggest the importance of linking domestic US concerns with social
inequality, racial violence, and populist nationalism to these crises that, despite being located outside US
official territory, are caused by and evidence of America’s supremacy. As Asian American and indigenous Pacific critiques have
illuminated, the effects of US militarism far exceed its continental borders, manifesting in the nightmares of refugee

crisis, sexual violence, adoption, immigration, and the displacements endured by the populations we now refer to as Asian
American and Pacific Islander beyond the grasp of ordinary Americans.15 The 2016 American Quarterly special issue, “Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure,” coedited
by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Jana Lipman, and Teresia Teaiwa, moreover, suggests that militarism
and tourism have “inform[ed] each
other” [End Page 445] past and present in multiple ways that crystallized the ideas of security and mobility , duty and leisure, into the
contradictions of empire.16 Such critical attention to the crossovers of warfare, leisure, violence, liberty, and

humanitarianism, or what Ann Stoler in other contexts calls the “tense and tender ties” of colonialism ,17 offers important
insights into the United States’ deep-seated obsession with the frontier as “the meeting point of savagery
and civilization” as well as the outer limit of freedom.18 The frontier—imagined and real—is a space to be policed,
controlled, and settled for the security of US democracy and business interests.