Disclosure – Niles – Round 2

1AC
 1AC – Russia
US sales to Ukraine cause an escalatory spiral of commitments with zero
battlefield benefit – only a prohibition on lethal arms sales solves.
Chrzanowski 18 – graduate student in the NYU Global Affairs graduate program, works as
a researcher focusing on conflict in Russia and Eastern Europe, featured in The Strategy Bridge
and Global Affairs Review (Brendan, “Arming Ukraine: Practicalities and Implications,” Real
Clear Defense,
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/09/05/arming_ukraine_practicalities_and_i
mplications_113769.html)//BB
America’s recent decision to authorize the sale and delivery of Javelin anti-tank missile systems to Ukraine was shortsighted and
dangerous to all parties involved.[1] The provision of the Javelin weapons system, in particular, serves as little more than a symbolic
gesture. In the end, the authorization will likely prove a maneuver in optics, not strategy. Furthermore, recent developments
suggest the Ukrainian government, in an effort to secure the deal, may have interfered with the ongoing special counsel
investigation in the United States.[2] The following delineates the reasoning behind this conclusion, puts forward some of the
stronger arguments in favor of the authorization, and describes why they are misguided. Amid the fraught U.S.-Russia
relations of late, it is vital for American policymakers to consider each geopolitical decision with
the utmost care, ensuring the best interests of the United States and her allies are always kept in mind.[3] An
appropriate policy would include forgoing any further sale of lethal weaponry, replacing it
instead with increased funds and non-lethal materiel such as counter-electronic warfare (EW) technology and the
deployment of additional troops on a strictly train-and-advise basis . The conflict in Eastern Ukraine has claimed
over 10,000 lives and forced over a million more to flee their homes.[4] Taking these figures into consideration, it is evident that
decisive action is necessary; thus far, however, the United States has taken the wrong approach. Arming Ukraine with Javelin
anti-tank missiles runs the risk of reigniting what has become a relatively static engagement between
the Ukrainian Army and Russian-backed separatists.[5] Skirmishes occur on a daily basis, and casualties
continue to accrue, but a sudden injection of Western munitions into the hands of the Ukrainian Army
is likely to prompt a disproportionate response from the side of the Russians, a reaction not
without historical precedence.[6] Assuming the Russians respond not in kind, but with asymmetric force, where does
that leave the United States? Is the United States to perpetually provide bigger and better arms as the process persists in
some sort of vicious iteration of Robert Jervis’s spiral model?[7] For now, Russia has far more at stake in this conflict. With
his population’s support and at least six more years at the helm, Vladimir Putin can and will broaden his country’s
efforts in the region if need be.[8] Even if the United States were committed to meet every
response with more firepower, the Russians have the overwhelming advantage of geography.
Russia’s shared border with Ukraine, one that is reportedly near-impossible to effectively monitor, enables expedited resupplies.[9]
Putin’s relative autonomy in terms of foreign policy decisions also adds to the potential for a rapid response. Furthermore, it
is
prudent to consider how Ukrainians may interpret the signaling of receiving lethal arms from
America. Inspired by the renewed and augmented support of the Americans, this move could
embolden Ukrainians to begin launching assaults, thus producing an avoidable escalation
scenario. Many like to frame the conversation as providing so-called defensive weapons rather than offensive, but in reality,
there is no logical distinction between the two.[10] The Ukrainians using these weapons to go on an offensive,
making the U.S. an indirect accomplice in violating the Minsk Agreement, remains a real
possibility and a real concern of those monitoring the situation closely.[11] From a purely practical
standpoint, providing Ukraine with Javelins makes little sense. While the provision of such weapons would
certainly generate substantial repercussions due to the symbolism of the action, their usefulness on the battlefield would be
virtually imperceptible. In fact, former commander of U.S. Army Europe remarked in 2015 that the Ukrainian Army having Javelin
missiles “would not change the situation strategically in a positive way.”[12] Ukraine has no need for Javelin missiles, as it already
produces its own comparable varieties of anti-tank weaponry.[13] The
Ukrainian Army is well-equipped for
situations that require anti-tank capabilities, thus it is redundant to provide them with more.
Furthermore, the conflict has largely steered away from tank warfare , further highlighting the superfluity
of Javelin sales.[14] The provision of other lethal arms in general is similarly excessive. Since the outbreak
of the conflict, the Ukrainian Army has improved its capabilities in almost every aspect of warfare by orders of magnitude.
Ukraine’s current air, land, and sea means are unrecognizable in comparison to those of 2014.[15] If anything, the United States
should be increasing support to help Ukraine counter the innovative electronic warfare the Russian-backed separatists are waging
in the east.[16] An electronic warfare package would be immensely more advantageous to the effort in Ukraine. The package could
include products such as the THOR III, CREW jammer, or MODI II systems, as well as a contingent of U.S. electronic warfare
specialists to train Ukrainian soldiers using a strategy akin to the one released by the Pentagon in 2017.[17] This recent Department
of Defense approach lays emphasis on the integration of burgeoning electronic warfare capabilities throughout the gamut of
military operations, the use of cost-effective technology in lieu of conventional arms, and the coordination of preparedness training
for the rigors of conflict in the electromagnetic spectrum.[18] These systems, among others, could make a genuine difference in an
electronic warfare space currently dominated by the Russians.[19] As an added benefit, Ukrainian troops could later be debriefed by
their American counterparts on how the technology fared in real-world application against the current leader in electronic warfare
tactics, providing valuable insight to be used in future strategic planning. To further assist, the United States could take the advice
of a February 2018 Carnegie report, which suggests the problem the Ukrainian Army faces now is not one of hardware, but of
structure, and a key component of successful reform is the expansion of Western training efforts.[20] It is also imperative to
acknowledge the likelihood of American-made weapons systems winding up in the hands other than those for whom they were
intended. Time and again, U.S.-supplied weapons are either stolen from the anticipated beneficiary or never make it there in the
first place. In just the last decade, this happened in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Mexico.[21] In Ukraine, the
worry would be that the Javelins provided by America could make their way into the arms of either some sort of extremist
Ukrainian militia such as the Azov Battalion or the very same Russian-backed separatists the weapons were meant to combat.[22]
The Ukrainian Army has lost control of countless weapons that have then found their way onto the streets and online marketplaces.
[23] In one instance, Ukrainian Army vehicles were taken by separatists in broad daylight and subsequently paraded about.[24]
More importantly, non-lethal U.S. military equipment, such as mortar-tracking radar technology given to Ukraine in 2015, was
stolen by the separatists not long after delivery.[25] Assuming such a risk with lethal weaponry is needless and should, under
present circumstances, be avoided. Theadvocates of arming Ukraine cite a number of well-intentioned,
yet nebulous and, in some cases, erroneous motives for their position. The primary argument is that the
United States must support the independence of a democratic, potential future NATO member .
[26] The problem with this particular belief is that the United States is and has been supporting
the independence of Ukraine for years.[27] Since the outset of the conflict, the United States has
provided over $1.3 billion in monetary assistance, training, and non-lethal materiel such as
radar, surveillance, and vehicles.[28] As argued above, there is no practical need for the provision of
lethal arms, so the support for Ukrainian independence is, in effect, being realized . Another
argument for arming Ukraine is that doing so strengthens NATO; however, one can argue
persuasively that Ukraine is doing just fine without American anti-tank missiles.[29] In the same
vein as the strengthening NATO argument, champions for the arming of Ukraine insist that
lethal arms from America will enhance European security. European allies of the United States
tend to have a different opinion.[30] Representatives of countries located within Europe, such as
the former president of France, Francois Hollande; German Chancellor, Angela Merkel; and U.K. national security official, Mark
Sedwell, have
publicly stated their qualms with a U.S.-provided lethal arms package, echoing the
concerns outlined above.[31] Also coming from within Europe, the European Council on Foreign Relations
has published objections to the idea.[32] In a broader sense, current French president Emmanuel Macron has recently
called for Europe to achieve greater defense autonomy and rely less on the United States. In his remarks, he suggested a move
towards security cooperation with the Russian Federation if the situation in Donbas deescalates.[33] There
is no rational
basis for providing Ukraine with Javelin missile systems, or any other lethal weaponry. Such a move has
no positive effect for the Ukrainians on the battlefield. Instead, the United States is undertaking
several wholly preventable risks with the prospect of realizing zero strategic ends. The
Ukrainian armed forces are capable of sustaining their mission domestically. Arming Ukraine is
symbolically moral, but chances an increase in hostilities that could devolve into a tit-for-tat
proxy war, or worse.
Putin will escalate with heightened aggression – goes nuclear.
Saradzhyan 15 – founding director of the Russia Matters Project at Harvard Kennedy
School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Mr. Saradzhyan also helps advance
the center’s U.S.-Russia Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism. His research interests include
international arms control, counterterrorism, and foreign, defense, and security policies of
Russia and other post-Soviet states and their relations with great powers (Simon, “Arming
Ukraine a Risky Escalation,” Belfer Center, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/arming-
ukraine-risky-escalation)//BB
The last several days have seen the once dormant debate—whether or not the U.S. should start supplying weapons to Ukraine—
reignite. The debate was revived by the release of a joint report by a group of ex-U.S. officials affiliated with three
prominent
American think tanks, which recommended that Washington urgently supply anti-tank missiles, counter-
battery radars, and other military hardware to the Ukrainian armed forces so that the latter can deter
Russia from escalating the conflict in Donbass. I don’t dispute that the Ukrainian army would become
stronger if the U.S. delivers the recommended weapons. But the truth is, these weapons would not
end the conflict. Moreover, these deliveries may actually prompt Russia to increase its involvement
in the conflict, dragging the U.S. into a vicious cycle of escalating commitments. Chances that
the U.S. would prevail in such an escalation are quite low. Whatever U.S. authorities would be
realistically willing to do to help Ukraine militarily can be matched, if not exceeded, by Russia, which is
much more interested in the outcome of the current stand-off and has resources on the ground. In addition to escalating in Ukraine,
Russia could also respond to the U.S. arming of Ukraine by adopting a more aggressive posture
vis-à-vis the U.S. in the realm of strategic nuclear deterrence, as well as acting as a spoiler to undermine U.S.
vital interests in such spheres as countering proliferation of nuclear weapons and managing China’s rise. Even some of
Putin’s critics in Western Europe admit that the consequences of arming Ukraine will not be limited
to the conflict there. “It could lead to a nuclear war,” Polish statesman Lech Walesa said last year when asked whether
the Europeans should send weapons to Ukrainians. The report now argues that a better-armed Ukrainian army
would be able to inflict greater casualties on Russian “volunteers” in Ukraine and that prospects of
such casualties should help to deter Russia. Not really. Yes, Vladimir Putin remains sensitive to casualties
among active-duty Russian personnel in the conflict, but only as long as he maintains that Russia is not a party to the conflict. The
delivery of U.S. arms could give Putin a pretext to either order a preemptive strike to destroy the
delivered weapons, or even to send troops to Ukraine openly in order to accomplish what the Kremlin would
describe as a just cause of protecting ethnic Russian compatriots from the Ukrainian army that the Russian president has already
described as a “NATO legion.” Once (and if) the Russian army gets officially involved in the conflict, the
Russian population will become more tolerant toward casualties, and so will Putin . The experience of
the second Chechen war shows that while the Russian public’s tolerance for casualties is not limitless, it can be
quite high as long the Russians believe their army is fighting to defend the country’s interests and stands a fair chance of
prevailing in the conflict. That the Russian army will be able to win the military phase of the conflict in Ukraine with relative ease is
clear from Ukrainian commanders’ own confessions that they took a beating when Russian regular forces allegedly moved in.
Ukraine will be destroyed militarily if the West supplies weapons to Kiev, according to an article
penned by a member of Russia’s Security Council Advisory Board for the next issue of the Russia in Global Affairs journal. I should
also note that the U.S. government has already supplied counter-battery radars that the report recommends sending to Ukrainian
armed forces, but that those supplies didn’t lead to significant changes on the ground. It is also unclear to me why a country which
designs and manufactures an entire line of armored vehicles, including APCs and MBTs, would need Humvees, which do not really
offer much protection from artillery or tank guns. Among ex-Soviet republics, Ukraine’s defense industry is second only to Russia’s,
producing not only tanks, but also missiles and planes. Post-Soviet Ukraine also has had such a surplus of arms that
it has been selling them actively to Georgia and other countries, netting more than $1 billion a year from exports of both used and
new weaponry. If
the U.S. really wanted to significantly alter the Russian-Ukrainian military
balance, it would have to supply game-changing systems. But we all know Washington is not
going to deliver the most advanced of its weaponry systems, and even if it did, it would take a
long time to train Ukrainians to operate those, giving Russia time to carry out a preemptive
strike. What Ukraine needs more than any weapons is greater quantities of professionally trained soldiers. Helping Ukraine to
train and maintain a larger professional army would accomplish much more in enhancing its deterrence and combat capabilities
than supplies of UAVs or Humvees ever would. Only after such a professional army is formed can one think start thinking about
arming them with state-of-the-art weapons and systems, the mastering of which would require a high level of basic knowledge that
conscripts lack. But again, Ukraine cannot afford such an army and I have very strong doubts that the U.S. government will be
willing to spend the billions of dollars that would be needed to train, arm, and maintain a force that would be armed and numerous
enough to fight Russian armed forces to a standstill. Such core members of NATO as Germany and France have already stated they
have no plans to participate in arming Ukraine. When weighing whether to accept the report’s recommendations, U.S.
policymakers should not lose sight of the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that integration of Ukraine,
which is located thousands of miles away from the U.S. and which 84% Americans cannot locate on the map, into the Western
economic and military architecture doesn’t represent a U.S. vital interest. America
has somehow survived without a
Western-integrated Ukraine, and it can easily continue to prosper without becoming a de-facto
military-technical ally of Ukraine, which is what the U.S. would become if the report’s recommendations are fulfilled.
In comparison, even if we were to acknowledge that Ukraine occupies a special place in Russian history, it is in contemporary
Russia’s vital interest to ensure that that its Slav neighbor is at least neutral, if not friendly, to Russia. Yes, the conflict in
Ukraine has done serious damage to the non-proliferation regime, given that Russia has violated its Budapest
Memorandum obligation. But that damage has already been done and should be treated as what
economists describe as “sunken costs.” It is also extremely important for the U.S. to ensure the
alliance’s ability to defend itself. But deterring Russia from challenging NATO’s Article V
obligation, covertly or overtly, requires strengthening the alliance itself rather than arming a
neighbor that is bound to lose, no matter how many arms it gets, if Russia decides to stage an open
military intervention.

Arms sales cause Russian revisionists to win the internal Kremlin debate –
nuclear war.
Pond 15 – analyst @ Foreign Affairs and Brookings (Elizabeth, “Do not arm Ukraine,” Women
in International Security, https://www.wiisglobal.org/do-not-arm-ukraine/)//BB, sex edited

Hawks in Washington are arguing that the West should deliver lethal defensive weapons to the
Ukrainian armed forces. At a moment of political uncertainty in Moscow, their view is that the NATO
alliance should show the Kremlin it is not feckless when faced with Vladimir Putin’s aggression .
Such a policy would certainly make the congressional Rambos feel good. But flooding Ukraine
with advanced weapons which its troops have not been trained to use would be dangerous and
almost certainly lead to an escalation that would play to Russia’s local military superiority while
failing to bolster Ukraine’s capabilities. There are three reasons for this. First, sending lethal
weapons to Ukraine could sleepwalk the world into its first nuclear war , at a time when the
rules of restraint worked out by the superpowers in the original Cold War have expired . Second,
it ignores the fact that Ukraine, once the war smithy of the Soviet Union, is the world’s tenth largest arms
exporter. It would be far cheaper to send ten executives on sabbatical from Boeing to Kyiv to advise Ukraine on modernizing its
own heavy weapons production. Third, given Ukraine’s history of corruption, deliveries of billions of
dollars of weaponry could tempt Ukrainian oligarchs to revert to business as usual as the shock of
Russia’s year-old attack wears off. Western arms injections could hardly save Ukraine from further
dismemberment, given the ratio of Ukraine’s 121,000 active servicemen to Russia’s 771,000 and just over 2,000 Ukrainian
tanks to Russia’s 20,000. Indeed, a demonstrative influx of western arms into Ukraine would simply
force any risk-averse demurrers in the Kremlin to join in common defiance of the American
bogey[person]man with the ultranationalists whom Putin has empowered. Hawks in the West
tacitly admit that Moscow holds ‘escalation dominance’ in its own backyard by barring any
western boots on the ground. As Antony Blinken, the US deputy secretary of state, explained in defending Barack
Obama’s scepticism about funnelling weapons to Kyiv: ‘Anything we did as countries in terms of military
support for Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled, tripled and quadrupled by Russia.’
Russia, the regional military giant, can instantly trump each western military initiative in any
upward spiral. Its claim to an existential geopolitical interest in neighbouring Ukraine also
trumps the distant West’s half-hearted, peripheral interest. Where western hawks fail the
sobriety test is in their refusal to specify how they would respond in the next weeks if a game of
chicken proceeds on Russian rules and Moscow keeps raising the stakes all the way up to the
nuclear level. This is not idle speculation. Putin has said that he was ready to put nuclear
forces on alert to defend his original takeover of Crimea a year ago.

This conflict goes nuclear, even if neither side initially intends to.
Mearsheimer 15 - professor of political science at the University of Chicago (John, “Don't
Arm Ukraine,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/dont-arm-
ukraine.html)//BB
The Ukraine crisis is almost a year old and Russia is winning. The separatists in eastern Ukraine are gaining ground and Russia’s
president, Vladimir V. Putin, shows no signs of backing down in the face of Western economic sanctions. Unsurprisingly, a
growing chorus of voices in the United States is calling for arming Ukraine. A recent report from three
leading American think tanks endorses sending Kiev advanced weaponry, and the White House’s nominee for secretary of defense,
Ashton B. Carter, said last week to the Senate armed services committee, “I very much incline in that direction.” They
are
wrong. Going down that road would be a huge mistake for the United States, NATO and
Ukraine itself. Sending weapons to Ukraine will not rescue its army and will instead lead to an
escalation in the fighting. Such a step is especially dangerous because Russia has thousands of
nuclear weapons and is seeking to defend a vital strategic interest. There is no question that Ukraine’s
military is badly outgunned by the separatists, who have Russian troops and weapons on their side. Because the balance of
power decisively favors Moscow, Washington would have to send large amounts of equipment
for Ukraine’s army to have a fighting chance. But the conflict will not end there. Russia would
counter-escalate, taking away any temporary benefit Kiev might get from American arms. The
authors of the think tank study concede this, noting that “even with enormous support from the West, the Ukrainian Army will not
be able to defeat a determined attack by the Russian military.” In short, the
United States cannot win an arms race
with Russia over Ukraine and thereby ensure Russia’s defeat on the battlefield . Proponents of
arming Ukraine have a second line of argument. The key to success, they maintain, is not to defeat Russia
militarily, but to raise the costs of fighting to the point where Mr. Putin will cave . The pain will
supposedly compel Moscow to withdraw its troops from Ukraine and allow it to join the European Union and NATO and become
an ally of the West. This coercive strategy is also unlikely to work, no matter how much punishment
the West inflicts. What advocates of arming Ukraine fail to understand is that Russian leaders
believe their country’s core strategic interests are at stake in Ukraine; they are unlikely to give ground,
even if it means absorbing huge costs. Great powers react harshly when distant rivals project military
power into their neighborhood, much less attempt to make a country on their border an ally. This is why the
United States has the Monroe Doctrine, and today no American leader would ever tolerate
Canada or Mexico joining a military alliance headed by another great power. Russia is no
exception in this regard. Thus Mr. Putin has not budged in the face of sanctions and is unlikely to make
meaningful concessions if the costs of the fighting in Ukraine increase. Upping the ante in
Ukraine also risks unwanted escalation. Not only would the fighting in eastern Ukraine be sure
to intensify, but it could also spread to other areas. The consequences for Ukraine, which already faces
profound economic and social problems, would be disastrous. The possibility that Mr. Putin might end up making nuclear
threats may seem remote, but if the goal of arming Ukraine is to drive up the costs of Russian
interference and eventually put Moscow in an acute situation , it cannot be ruled out. If Western pressure
succeeded and Mr. Putin felt desperate, he would have a powerful incentive to try to rescue the situation
by rattling the nuclear saber. Our understanding of the mechanisms of escalation in crises and war is limited at best,
although we know the risks are considerable. Pushing a nuclear-armed Russia into a corner would be
playing with fire. Advocates of arming Ukraine recognize the escalation problem, which is why they stress giving Kiev
“defensive,” not “offensive,” weapons. Unfortunately, there is no useful distinction between these categories: All weapons can be
used for attacking and defending. The West can be sure, though, that Moscow will not see those American weapons as “defensive,”
given that Washington is determined to reverse the status quo in eastern Ukraine. The only way to solve the Ukraine
crisis is diplomatically, not militarily. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, seems to recognize that fact, as she has
said Germany will not ship arms to Kiev. Her problem, however, is that she does not know how to bring the crisis to an end.

Deterrence fails – Russia is motivated by fear, not ambition.

Walt 15 – PhD, Professor of International Affairs @ Harvard (Stephen, “Why Arming Kiev Is a
Really, Really Bad Idea: Washington pundits are jumping on a proposal to send weapons to
Ukraine. Here's why they all need to take a deep breath.,” Foreign Policy,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/09/how-not-to-save-ukraine-arming-kiev-is-a-bad-
idea/)//BB

Should the United States start arming Ukraine, so it can better resist and maybe even defeat the Russian-backed
rebels in its eastern provinces? A lot of seasoned American diplomats and foreign policy experts seem to think so; a task force
assembled by the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs wants the United States to
send Ukraine $1 billion in military assistance as soon as possible, with more to come. The Obama administration is rethinking its
earlier reluctance, and secretary of defense nominee Ash Carter told a Senate hearing he was “very much inclined” to favor this
course as well. Unless cooler heads prevail, therefore, the
United States seems to be moving toward raising the
stakes in Ukraine. This decision is somewhat surprising, however, because few experts think this bankrupt and
divided country is a vital strategic interest and no one is talking about sending U.S. troops to
fight on Kiev’s behalf. So the question is: does sending Ukraine a bunch of advanced weaponry make
sense? The answer is no. One reason to be skeptical of the report from the three think tanks is the
track record of its like-minded members. The task force wasn’t made up of a diverse set of
experts seeking to explore a wide range of options and find some creative common ground . On
the contrary, its members were all people who have long backed NATO expansion and have an
obvious desire to defend that policy, which has played a central role in creating the present
crisis. After all, these are the same people who have been telling us since the late 1990s that
expanding NATO eastwards posed no threat to Russia and would instead create a vast and
enduring zone of peace in Europe. That prediction is now in tatters, alas, but these experts are
now doubling down to defend a policy that was questionable from the beginning and clearly
taken much too far. As the critics warned it would, open-ended NATO expansion has done more to
poison relations with Russia than any other single Western policy. Those who favor arming
Ukraine are also applying “deterrence model” remedies to what is almost certainly a “spiral
model” situation. In his classic book Perception and Misperception in International Politics, political scientist Robert Jervis
pointed out that states may undertake what appear to be threatening actions for two very different reasons. Sometimes states
act aggressively because their leaders are greedy, seeking some sort of personal glory, or ideologically driven
to expand, and are not reacting to perceived threats from others. The classic example, of course, is Adolf Hitler and Nazi
Germany, and in such cases accommodation won’t work. Here the “deterrence model” applies: the only thing
to do is issue warnings and credible threats so that the potential aggressor is deterred from pursuing its irrevocably
revisionist aims. By contrast, the “spiral model” applies when a state’s seemingly aggressive policy
is motivated primarily by fear or insecurity. Making threats and trying to deter or coerce them
will only reinforce their fears and make them even more aggressive, in effect triggering an
action-reaction spiral of growing hostility. When insecurity is the taproot of a state’s revisionist
actions, making threats just makes the situation worse. When the “spiral model” applies, the
proper response is a diplomatic process of accommodation and appeasement (yes, appeasement) to
allay the insecure state’s concerns. Such efforts do not require giving an opponent everything it might want or
removing every one of its worries, but it does require a serious effort to address the insecurities that are motivating
the other side’s objectionable behavior. The problem, of course, is that responses that work well in one situation
tend to fail badly in the other. Applying the deterrence model to an insecure adversary will heighten its paranoia and
fuel its defensive reactions, while appeasing an incorrigible aggressor is likely to whet its appetite and make it harder to deter it in
the future. Those
who now favor arming Ukraine clearly believe the “deterrence model” is the
right way to think about this problem. In this view, Vladimir Putin is a relentless aggressor who is trying to recreate
something akin to the old Soviet empire, and thus not confronting him over Ukraine will lead him to take aggressive actions
elsewhere. The only thing to do, therefore, is increase the costs until Russia backs down and leaves Ukraine free to pursue its own
foreign policy. This is precisely the course of action the report from the three think tanks recommends: in addition to “bolstering
deterrence,” its authors believe arming Ukraine will help “produce conditions in which Moscow decides to negotiate a genuine
settlement that allows Ukraine to reestablish full sovereignty.” In addition to bolstering deterrence, in short, giving arms to Kiev is
intended to coerce Moscow into doing what we want. Yet the evidence in this case suggests the spiral model is
far more applicable. Russia is not an ambitious rising power like Nazi Germany or
contemporary China; it is an aging, depopulating, and declining great power trying to cling to
whatever international influence it still possesses and preserve a modest sphere of influence near its
borders, so that stronger states — and especially the United States — cannot take advantage of its growing vulnerabilities. Putin
& Co. are also genuinely worried about America’s efforts to promote “regime change” around
the world — including Ukraine — a policy that could eventually threaten their own positions. It is lingering fear,
rather than relentless ambition, that underpins Russia’s response in Ukraine. Moreover, the Ukraine
crisis did not begin with a bold Russian move or even a series of illegitimate Russian demands; it began when the United States and
European Union tried to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and into the West’s sphere of influence. That objective may be desirable
in the abstract, but Moscow made it abundantly clear it would fight this process tooth and nail. U.S. leaders blithely ignored these
warnings — which clearly stemmed from Russian insecurity rather than territorial greed — and not surprisingly they have been
blindsided by Moscow’s reaction. The failure of U.S. diplomats to anticipate Putin’s heavy-handed response was an act of
remarkable diplomatic incompetence, and one can only wonder why the individuals who helped produce this train wreck still have
their jobs. If we are in a “spiral model” situation, arming
Ukraine will only make things worse. It certainly
will not enable Ukraine to defeat the far stronger Russian army; it will simply intensify the
conflict and add to the suffering of the Ukrainian people. Nor is arming Ukraine likely to
convince Putin to cave in and give Washington what it wants. Ukraine is historically linked to Russia, they
are right next door to each other, Russian intelligence has long-standing links inside Ukraine’s own security institutions, and Russia
is far stronger militarily. Even massive arms shipments from the United States won’t tip the balance in
Kiev’s favor, and Moscow can always escalate if the fighting turns against the rebels , as it did last summer.
Most importantly, Ukraine’s fate is much more important to Moscow than it is to us, which means
that Putin and Russia will be willing to pay a bigger price to achieve their aims than we will. The balance of resolve as
well as the local balance of power strongly favors Moscow in this conflict. Before starting down
an escalatory path, therefore, Americans should ask themselves just how far they are willing to
go. If Moscow has more options, is willing to endure more pain, and run more risks than we
are, then it makes no sense to begin a competition in resolve we are unlikely to win . And no, that
doesn’t show the West is irresolute, craven, or spineless; it simply means Ukraine is a vital
strategic interest for Russia but not for us. Efforts to resolve this crisis are also handicapped by the U.S. tendency to
indulge in “take-it-or-leave it” diplomacy. Efforts to resolve this crisis are also handicapped by the U.S. tendency to indulge in
“take-it-or-leave it” diplomacy. Instead of engaging in genuine bargaining, American officials tend to tell others what to do and
then ramp up the pressure if they do not comply. Today, those who want to arm Ukraine are demanding that
Russia cease all of its activities in Ukraine, withdraw from Crimea, and let Ukraine join the EU and/or NATO if it wants and if it
meets the membership requirements. In other words, they expect Moscow to abandon its own interests in Ukraine,
full stop. It would be wonderful if Western diplomacy could pull off this miracle, but how likely is it? Given Russia’s
history, its proximity to Ukraine, and its long-term security concerns, it is hard to imagine Putin capitulating to
our demands without a long and costly struggle that will do enormous additional damage to
Ukraine. And let’s not forget the broader costs of this feckless policy. We are pushing Russia
closer to China, which is not in the long-term U.S. interest. We have brought cooperation on nuclear security with Russia to an
end, even though there are still large quantities of inadequately secured nuclear material on Russian soil. And we are surely
prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian people. The solution to this crisis is for the United States and its allies to abandon the
dangerous and unnecessary goal of endless NATO expansion and do whatever it takes to convince Russia that we want Ukraine to
be a neutral buffer state in perpetuity. We should then work with Russia, the EU, and the IMF to develop an economic program that
puts that unfortunate country back on its feet. Arming
Ukraine, on the other hand, is a recipe for a longer and
more destructive conflict. It’s easy to prescribe such actions when you’re safely located in a
Washington think tank, but destroying Ukraine in order to save it is hardly smart or morally
correct diplomacy.

Minor conflicts escalate – no de-escalation measures and both leaders are

conflict-prone.
Wood 17 - senior military correspondent for The Huffington Post. His second book, What
Have We Done: the Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars, based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning
reporting on veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, was published by Little, Brown in November
2016. (David, “THIS IS HOW THE NEXT WORLD WAR STARTS,”
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/trump-russia-putin-military-crisis/)//BB

Putin’s favored tactic, intelligence officials say, is known as “escalation dominance.” The idea is to push the
other side until you win, a senior officer based in Europe explained—to “escalate to the point where the adversary
stops, won’t go farther. It’s a very destabilizing strategy.” Stavridis cast it in the terms of an old Russian proverb:
“Probe with a bayonet; when you hit steel withdraw, when you hit mush, proceed.” Right now, he added, “the Russians keep
pushing out and hitting mush.” This mindset is basically the opposite of how both American and Soviet leaders approached each
other during the Cold War, even during periods of exceptional stress such as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Having endured the
devastation of World War II, they understood the horror that lurked on the far side of a crisis. “When things started to get too close,
they would back off,” said Miller, the retired Pentagon official. The term of art for this constant recalibration of risk is “crisis
management”—the “most demanding form of diplomacy,” writes Sir Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at
King’s College London. Leaders had to make delicate judgments about when to push their opponent and when to create face-saving
off-ramps. Perhaps most critically, they had to possess the confidence to de-escalate when necessary. Skilled crisis management,
Freedman writes, requires “an ability to match deeds with words, to convey threats without appearing reckless, and to offer
concessions without appearing soft, often while under intense media scrutiny and facing severe time pressures.” A recent textbook
example came in January 2016, when Iran seized those 10 U.S. Navy sailors, claiming that they had been spying in Iranian waters in
the eastern Persian Gulf. President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, immediately opened communications with his
counterpart in Tehran, using channels established for negotiating the nuclear deal with Iran. By the next morning, the sailors had
been released. The U.S. acknowledged the sailors had strayed into Iranian waters but did not apologize, asserting that the
transgression had been an innocent error. Iran, meanwhile, acknowledged that the sailors had not been spying. (The peaceful
resolution was not applauded by Breitbart News, headed at the time by Stephen Bannon, who is now Trump’s chief White House
strategist. Obama, a Breitbart writer sneered, has been “castrated on the world stage by Iran.”) Neither
Putin nor Trump,
it’s safe to say, are crisis managers by nature. Both are notoriously thin-skinned, operate on
instinct, and have a tendency to shun expert advice. (These days, Putin is said to surround himself
not with seasoned diplomats but cronies from his old spy days.) Both are unafraid of brazenly
lying, fueling an atmosphere of extreme distrust on both sides. Stavridis, who has studied both
Putin and Trump and who met with Trump in December, concluded that the two leaders “are not risk-
averse. They are risk-affectionate.” Aron, the Russia expert, said, “I think there is a much more cavalier
attitude by Putin toward war in general and the threat of nuclear weapons. He continued, “He is not a
madman, but he is much more inclined to use the threat of nuclear weapons in conventional [military]
and political confrontation with the West.” Perhaps the most significant difference between the two is that Putin is
far more calculating than Trump. In direct negotiations, he is said to rely on videotaped analysis of the facial expressions of foreign
leaders that signal when the person is bluffing, confused or lying. At times, Trump has been surprisingly quick to
lash out at a perceived slight from Putin, although these moments have been overshadowed by his effusive praise for
the Russian leader. On December 22, Putin promised to strengthen Russia’s strategic nuclear forces in his traditional year-end
speech to his officer corps. Hours later, Trump vowed, via Twitter, to “greatly strengthen and expand” the U.S. nuclear weapons
arsenal. On Morning Joe the following day, host Mika Brzezinski said that Trump had told her on a phone call, “Let it be an arms
race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” And in late March, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump
was becoming increasingly frustrated with Russia, throwing up his hands in exasperation when informed that Russia may have
violated an arms treaty. Some in national security circles see Trump’s impulsiveness as a cause for concern but not for panic. “He
can always overreact,” said Anthony Cordesman, senior strategic analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and
a veteran of many national security posts throughout the U.S. government. “[But] there are a lot of people [around the
president] to prevent an overreaction with serious consequences.” Let’s say that Trump acted upon his impulse to tell
a fighter pilot to shoot a jet that barrel-rolled an American plane. Such a response would still have to be carried out by the Pentagon,
Cordesman said—a process with lots of room for senior officers to say, “Look, boss, this is a great idea but can we talk about the
repercussions?” And yet
that process is no longer as robust as it once was. Many senior
policymaking positions at the Pentagon and State Department remain unfilled. A small cabal in the
White House, including Bannon, Jared Kushner and a few others, has asserted a role in foreign policy decisions outside the normal
NSC process. It’s not yet clear how much influence is wielded by Trump’s widely respected national security adviser, Lieutenant
General H.R. McMaster. When lines of authority and influence are so murky, it increases the risk that a
minor incident could boil up into an unintended clash, said retired Marine Corps General John Allen, who has
served in senior military and diplomatic posts. To complicate matters further, the relentless pace of
information in the social media age has destroyed the one precious factor that helped former
leaders safely navigate perilous situations: time. It’s hard to believe now, but during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis,
for instance, President Kennedy and his advisers deliberated for a full 10 weeks before announcing a naval quarantine of the island.
In 1969, a U.S. spy plane was shot down by North Korean jets over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 Americans on board. It took 26
hours for the Pentagon and State Department to recommend courses of action to President Richard Nixon, according to a
declassified secret assessment. (Nixon eventually decided not to respond.) Today, thanks to real-time video and data streaming, the
men in the Kremlin and White House can know—or think they know—as much as the guy in the cockpit of a plane or on the bridge
of a warship. The president no longer needs to rely on reports from military leaders that have been filtered through their expertise
and deeper knowledge of the situation on the ground. Instead, he can watch a crisis unfold on a screen and react in real time.
Once news of an incident hits the internet, the pressure to respond becomes even harder to
withstand. “The ability to recover from early missteps is greatly reduced,” Marine Corps General Joseph
Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has written. “The speed of war has changed, and the nature of
these changes makes the global security environment even more unpredictable, dangerous, and
unforgiving.” And so in the end, no matter how cool and unflappable the instincts of military men
and women like Kevin Webster, what will smother the inevitable spark is steady, thoughtful
leadership from within the White House and the Kremlin. A recognition that first reports may
be wrong; a willingness to absorb new and perhaps unwelcome information; a thick skin to
ward off insults and accusations; an acknowledgment of the limited value of threats and bluffs; and a willingness
to recognize the core interests of the other side and a willingness to accept a face-saving solution. These
qualities are not notably on display in either capital.
It's the only scenario for extinction.
Owen Cotton-Barratt et al. 17 - PhD in Pure Mathematics, Oxford, Lecturer in Mathematics
at Oxford, Research Associate at the Future of Humanity Institute; “Existential Risk: Diplomacy
and Governance,” https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Existential-Risks-2017-01-
23.pdf
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the unprecedented destructive power of nuclear weapons. However,
even in an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia, despite horrific casualties, neither
country’s population is likely to be completely destroyed by the direct effects of the blast, fire,
and radiation.8 The aftermath could be much worse: the burning of flammable materials could send
massive amounts of smoke into the atmosphere, which would absorb sunlight and cause sustained global cooling,
severe ozone loss, and agricultural disruption – a nuclear winter. According to one model 9 , an all-out exchange of
4,000 weapons10 could lead to a drop in global temperatures of around 8°C, making it
impossible to grow food for 4 to 5 years. This could leave some survivors in parts of Australia and New
Zealand, but they would be in a very precarious situation and the threat of extinction from other
sources would be great. An exchange on this scale is only possible between the US and
Russia who have more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, with stockpiles of around 4,500
warheads each, although many are not operationally deployed.11 Some models suggest that even a small regional nuclear
war involving 100 nuclear weapons would produce a nuclear winter serious enough to put two billion people
at risk of starvation,12 though this estimate might be pessimistic.13 Wars on this scale are unlikely to
lead to outright human extinction, but this does suggest that conflicts which are around an order of magnitude larger may
be likely to threaten civilisation. It should be emphasised that there is very large uncertainty about the effects of a large nuclear war
on global climate. This remains an area where increased academic research work, including more detailed climate modelling and a
better understanding of how survivors might be able to cope and adapt, would have high returns. It
is very difficult to
precisely estimate the probability of existential risk from nuclear war over the next century, and existing
attempts leave very large confidence intervals. According to many experts, the most likely nuclear war at present is
between India and Pakistan.14 However, given the relatively modest size of their arsenals, the
risk of human extinction is plausibly greater from a conflict between the United States and Russia.
Tensions between these countries have increased in recent years and it seems unreasonable to rule out the possibility of them rising
further in the future.

Ending arms sales caps the conflict – they should not be used for negotiation
or pressure.
Semchuk 3-27-2019 – MPhil in Comparative Government @ Oxford, PhD Candidate in
Politics, University of Oxford (Liana, “Ukraine: US arms sales making big business money
while ordinary people pay the price,” The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/ukraine-
us-arms-sales-making-big-business-money-while-ordinary-people-pay-the-price-114238)//BB

Selling lethal weapons to Ukraine is the equivalent of pouring kerosene onto a flame. But ongoing
hostilities between Ukraine and Russia – including the Kerch strait crisis, which began late last year when Russia intercepted
three Ukrainian vessels and took 24 crew members captive – are also a major business opportunity for the world’s
largest defence contractors. Despite the risk of serious escalation, these companies continue to
provide Ukraine with lethal aid so it can defend itself against Russia – for a price, of course. The US special
representative for Ukraine negotiations, Kurt Volker, stated recently that Washington remains committed to providing
support to Ukraine and its military, including anti-tank systems. He even hinted that the US is considering expanding
the types of lethal aid that it could begin selling to Ukraine, saying: “We also need to be looking
at things like air defence and coastal defence.” This is a troubling prospect. In March, US army general
Curtis Scaparrotti said that the US could also bolster the Ukrainian military’s sniper capabilities. Speaking to the Senate Armed
Services Committee, he said: There are other systems, sniper systems, ammunition and, perhaps looking at the Kerch Strait, perhaps
consideration for naval systems, as well, here in the future as we move forward. This comment has been widely underreported
and has
not received nearly as much attention as it deserves considering the potential
consequences. At worst, more lethal aid could escalate the conflict further. At best, it will continue to keep
alive a conflict that has already claimed more than 10,000 lives. Finding a straightforward policy alternative is difficult, but
sending more lethal aid to achieve the unattainable goal of Ukraine defeating Russia is certainly
no solution. Impact Despite attempts by Volker and Scaparrotti to market the proposition as a way to help Ukraine defend
itself against Russia, the immediate benefits seem clearer to America’s weapons manufacturing sector than to Ukrainian civilians,
who will undoubtedly get caught in the crossfire. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that the US is
home to five of the world’s ten largest defence contractors. Lockheed Martin, by far the largest in the field, in 2017 had an estimated
US$44.9 billion in arms contracts globally. *image removed, caption kept* Moreweapons will likely only inflame the
conflict. Shutterstock The company was also contracted (with Raytheon) in 2018 to provide Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank
missiles. The US Pentagon said: “The Javelin system will help Ukraine build its long-term defense capacity to defend its sovereignty
and territorial integrity in order to meet its national defense requirements.” But Lockheed Martin likely profited handsomely from
the deal. Meanwhile, the company’s financial reports showed fourth quarter 2018 net sales of US$14.4 billion, compared to US$13.8
billion in the fourth quarter of 2017. This year, the company is expecting sales to grow by as much as 6%. This is unlikely to be the
case if the number of conflicts around the world declines. It’s clear why Washington wants to sell more weapons to Ukraine. But
whether Ukraine remains receptive and willing to continue buying them may hinge on the outcome of the upcoming presidential
election, which is scheduled for March 31. Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky, who is currently leading in the polls, seems
to offer hope that Ukraine may change its current strategy. This is reflected in a statement Zelensky made in March in which he
emphasised the need to negotiate with Russia in order to “save people’s lives”. Is there a solution? As well as better diplomacy,
Zelensky also sees direct democracy as a way to resolve the crisis . Rather than pursuing the same
ineffective policy, which has achieved absolutely nothing except for a greater death toll and growing human misery, he
proposed a referendum on the outcome of his negotiations with Russia on the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
This approach might not lead to a quick fix or immediately restore peace in the region – but it is more
likely to succeed than simply supplying more weapons with which to prolong the fighting. The
West should not abandon its rhetoric of support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. But
policymakers and society more broadly should be careful not to assume that simply selling
more weapons to Ukraine will yield a definitive victory over Russia and its separatist allies. While the ongoing
war in the eastern Donbas region and the recent Kerch incident offer an opportunity for big businesses to make a profit, it’s
ordinary people who will pay the price. The
current approach to deescalating the conflict needs to be
dramatically reevaluated – and lethal weapons must be taken off the negotiating table.

Aff causes effective diplomacy and stabilizes Ukraine so they can fend off
Russian aggression.
Graham 17 – PhD in Politics @ Harvard, Senior Fellow, Yale Jackson Institute for Global
Affairs (Thomas, “It’s not Time to Arm Ukraine,” European Leadership Network,
https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/commentary/its-not-time-to-arm-
ukraine/)//BB
Why is the United States once again considering the provision of lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine? We last had this debate in
2015, when the struggle between Kyiv and Russian-supported separatists was raging with Russian forces themselves directly
engaged, including on the ground in the Donbas. It was uncertain how far Moscow wanted to push into Ukraine, whether there was
substance behind the talk of Novorossiya or a land bridge to Crimea. Supplying lethal weapons, proponents
argued, would cause Moscow to reconsider and pull back from its aggressive designs . President
Obama ultimately decided against supplying the weapons, convinced that Ukraine was a top priority for
Moscow and thus arming Ukraine was needlessly provocative. It would only lead Moscow to escalate the
conflict to Ukraine’s loss – even the best-equipped Ukrainian forces would have been no match for the Russians – and
neither the United States nor its European allies had any attention of inserting their own forces into the fray. Obama’s was the
right decision. It remains the right decision now, for if anything the situation has changed in
ways that make the provision of lethal weapons only more provocative and less relevant to the
struggle in the East and the future of Russia’s relations with the West and Ukraine. The conflict
is for all practical purposes frozen, despite constant skirmishing along the line of contact. No significant amount of
territory has changed hands since the battle for Debaltseve in February 2015. Moscow appears disinclined
to raise the temperature today. Putin’s proposal for inserting UN peacekeepers along the line of contact may be
unacceptable. But at worst it would reinforce the status quo, and the West might yet be able to reshape it in ways
that advance a satisfactory resolution of the crisis. At the same time, Ukraine remains a high priority for Moscow,
much higher than it is for the West. So what purpose is supplying lethal defensive weapons supposed to serve? Advocates
offer two broad reasons. First, as argued before, the provision of arms would change Moscow’s
calculus, eroding its position in the Donbas and making it more amenable to serious
negotiations to end the conflict. It is hard, however, to see why that would be so, unless, contrary to
all evidence, Moscow intends to push further militarily into Ukraine or an emboldened Kyiv
decides to launch an offensive against the separatists, whom Moscow has no intention of abandoning. Why else
would Ukraine need to use the weapons? But Russian forces would easily outclass the Ukrainians. It is not
even clear that Russian casualties would mount, as the advocates insist, and certainly not to
levels that would give Moscow pause, given the stakes. Second, advocates now also argue that
the provision of weapons would help build up Ukraine’s capabilities against a continuing
Russian threat over the longer term. This is undoubtedly true. Ukraine does need to raise a better trained and
equipped military to deal with Russia and other threats. But it does not necessarily need US weapons for that
purpose. Ukraine has one of the largest defense-industrial sectors in the world, a legacy of the Soviet
period, and it ranks among the world’s top ten arms exporters today . What the sector needs is investment to
enhance its efficiency and expand the range of equipment it manufactures. Under the circumstances, it would make more sense –
and prove less provocative – to help Ukraine expand and modernize the defense-industrial sector so that it could supply the
military with most of what it requires from domestic sources. In
short, the reasons for arming Ukraine are not
compelling. And if the issue has emerged again it has less to do with the situation in Ukraine than with the growing anti-
Russian animosity in the United States, fueled by Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and concern about President
Trump’s fondness for President Putin. Along with the harsher sanctions regime passed by Congress this past summer over Trump’s
objections, the
provision of lethal arms is intended to inflict more severe punishment on Russia for
its aggression and violation of international norms. Whether it helps change Russia’s calculus enough to bring
the Ukraine crisis to a satisfactory resolution is a secondary question for the many who believe that punishing Russia a moral
obligation. The
practical task, however, remains solving the West’s and Ukraine’s Russia problem.
The immediate challenge is negotiating a resolution of the Donbas conflict that restores Ukraine’s sovereignty
over that region and reintegrates it into Ukraine. The Minsk Agreement provides the elements of a resolution, but by all accounts it
is unimplementable in its current form. This situation calls for a different diplomatic approach, not one that necessarily abandons
Minsk, but rather one that disaggregates its elements and provides for an easing of sanctions in parallel with each concrete step
Moscow takes to fulfill its part of the agreement. The diplomatic approach should also consider a politically-binding long-term
moratorium on Ukraine’s membership in NATO or the EU to dampen the geopolitical contest over Ukraine. As
tensions in
the East ease, more attention could then be focused building a competent and efficient
Ukrainian state, which is, as history demonstrates, the best long-term guarantee against any
aggressive Russian designs. Much progress has been made since the Revolution of Dignity four years ago, but much
more remains to be done. In particular, the oligarchic-clan system that has dominated politics since reemergence of an independent
Ukraine in 1991 needs to be replaced by a more open and less corrupt system. Needlessly
arming Ukraine only
escalates tension in the region and distracts attention from the tasks that are indeed critical to
Ukraine’s future.
Prefer defensive realism – Russia’s actions are responses to US attempts to
upset the balance of power.
Golovics 17 (József Golovics, PhD student, Corvinus University of Budapest, International
Relations, Multidisciplinary Doctoral School. “Contemporary Realism in Theory and Practice.
The Case of the Ukrainian Crisis,” Polgári Szemle, https://polgariszemle.hu/aktualis-
szam/142-nemzetkozi-gazdasag-es-tarsadalom/907-contemporary-realism-in-theory-and-
practice-the-case-of-the-ukrainian-crisis)SEM

Summary This paper analyzes the Ukrainian crisis through the lenses of the contemporary realist
schools of the theory of international relations. One the one hand, it is claimed that Russian responses were
motivated by the logic of the balance of powers, upset by actions taken by the West. On the other
hand, we prove that realism still has significant explanatory power in the context of 21st century. The

significance of realist thinking in international relations is unquestionable. Realism has been the predominant theory after

the emergence of international relations as an academic discipline, and despite harsh criticism it has
considerable relevance in the globalized world of the 21st century (Dunne–Schmidt, 2014:99–112). Nevertheless, it cannot be regarded as
the sole theory, as several schools of realism exist parallel to one another. Nowadays, and especially after the end of the Cold War, three different
schools predominate the realist way of thinking: defensive realism, offensive realism and neo-classical realism. In this paper it is claimed that realism
undoubtedly has a significant explanatory power in the field of international relations, however, different schools of realism emphasize different
aspects of practical phenomena. As a result, a weakness of one theory can be the strength of the other, but at the end of the day, realism as a bunch of
different theories suitable for explaining and interpreting the events of world politics. To prove the above claims, the recent Ukrainian crisis is
analyzed. Theorists and analysts interpret this crisis differently. One may claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin's
aggressive personality and antidemocratic attitude is responsible for the recent events, while
others might blame Western intelligence services for the ouster of pro-Russian Ukrainian
President Viktor Yanukovych. In this paper, we claim that the outbreak of the military conflict is rooted
in the structure of the international system and its features made Russia to act aggressively. To
argue for this view, we use the analytical framework of offensive realism. In addition, we also invoke a defensive realist

approach (the other significant branch of structural realism) and neo-classical realist ideas to make a comparison with and supplement the
offensive realist way of thinking. The paper is structured as follows: the main characteristics of the three schools of contemporary realism are
described, then they are applied to the Ukrainian case. Finally, we conclude the main findings of the paper. Contemporary Theories of Realism
Although this paper focuses on contemporary realist theories, it is unavoidable to spare some words on their background. Although the description of
classical realism – influenced by the Thukydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes – falls beyond the scope of this study, it is worth noting that Morgenthau's
classical realism was the predominant school after WWII. Based on a pessimistic view of man, this unit-level approach deduced its findings from
human nature. Classical realists claimed that since states are led by people, they also act like people: one state is a wolf to another state and this is the
reason why they pursue power.1 Structural realists also view international politics as a dangerous game led by pursuit of power but their approach is
quite different. Instead of classical realists' state-level angle, structural realists (also called neo-realists) claim for a systemic approach and deduct their
findings from the structure of international system. This tradition – inspired by natural sciences and economic theories of industrial organizations –
was started by Waltz's seminal works and has been followed by others in the recent decades (Waltz, 1959; 1979). Nowadays, the Waltzian way of
structural realism is often called “defensive realism”, while another notable branch, offensive realism also plays an important role in contemporary
structural realist thinking (Mearsheimer, 2013, 77–93). In spite of this, structural realism has often been criticized for not being able to explain new
global phenomena of the 21st century. Therefore a new school of thoughts, neo-classical realism has emerged. In certain respects it reaches back to the
roots of classical realism to supplement the presumed incompleteness of neo-realism ( Jackson–Sorensen, 2013). In the following subsections the main
features of the three latter theories are characterized. Since our further analysis is primarily based on offensive realism, the description begins with its
characteristics including the overview of basic properties of structural realism in the broader sense. Then the differentiating attributes of the other two
schools are analyzed. Offensive Realism Mearsheimer is considered to be the leading scholar in offensive realism. The description below about the
nature of offensive realism is based on his seminal book – The Tragedy of Great Power Politics – and his other works (Mearsheimer, 2001).
Offensive realism is built on five bedrock assumptions: 1.) The international system is anarchic. In
this respect, anarchy is not equal to chaos but refers to the lack of hierarchy . It means that there is no central
authority, “no night watchman” that states could turn to for help in the case of emergency (Mearsheimer, 2010:387). 2.) Realism traditionally focuses on
states but offensive realism emphasizes that great powers are the major players of international
politics and each of them possesses some offensive military capacity . It implies that “states are potentially
dangerous to each other” (Mearsheimer, 2001:30). 3.) “States can never be certain about other states' intentions ”

(Mearsheimer, 2001:31). This assumption does not refer to the necessity of hostile intentions but emphasizes the danger of uncertainty. 4.) The

primary goal of states is survival. They may have further objectives but they cannot seek them without securing their own existence.
Therefore, survival is more important than any other motive. 5.) States are rational actors. This assumption does not
exclude the possibility of miscalculation but claims that states think strategically and act
intentionally and rationally in their best interest (Mearsheimer, 2009:241–256). Mearsheimer emphasizes that none of
these assumptions alone implies that states will act aggressively towards each other, but the “marriage” between these five assumptions create a
dangerous world. Under these circumstances states are afraid of each other and the only way to secure their own survival is to gain as much power as
possible. However, this intensifies the sense of insecurity in other states that also make efforts at acting similarly. In this respect, power is a tool to
guarantee survival. In the realist school of international politics, power is usually measured by military capacities, but Mearsheimer claims that
military power is based on the socio-economic background of countries. As a result, wealth and the population – as the basis of latent power – also
matter. Nevertheless, the
pursuit of power leads to security competition – or a security dilemma, in Herzian terms –
where “most steps a great power takes to enhance its own security decrease the security of
other states” (Mearsheimer, 2013:80). Under these circumstances, the best way for a state to survive is reaching hegemony, in other words,
ruling the system. However, Mearsheimer claims that achieving global hegemony is unattainable because of the large bodies of water on the globe.
Since offensive realism argues for the primacy of conventional military forces (i.e. nuclear weapons only serve defensive goals), oceans prevent great
powers from obtaining and sustaining dominance over distant continents. As a consequence, great
powers seek to gain regional
hegemony and preempt other states “in other regions from duplicating their feat” (Mearsheimer,
2006:160). Nonetheless, this behavior always generates conflicts between states. The pursuit of regional

hegemony affects the interest of neighboring states because it upsets the balance of powers in
favour of the emerging great power. According to the theory of offensive realism, the affected states can respond in either of two
ways: they may form a balancing coalition against the potential hegemon, or choose a 'buck-passing'2 strategy. In addition, the prevention of the
emergence of another regional hegemon (in another region) is also a conflictual process. In as much as the existing regional hegemon wants other
regions to be divided it has to contain aspiring hegemons by forming balancing coalition against them. As a consequence, the rise of a great power –
which is encoded in the logic of the security competition under anarchy – always leads to conflicts and aggressive strategies. At the end of the day, this
is the reason why “international politics is a nasty and dangerous business” and according to Mearsheimer “that is the tragedy of great power politics”
(Mearsheimer, 2006:162). Defensive Realism Waltz's theory of international politics (Waltz, 1979) represented the “original” way of structural realist
thinking, but after the emergence of Mearsheimer's offensive realism, it has often been labelled as “defensive realism” ( Jackson–Sorensen, 2013;
Mearsheimer, 2013). Nowadays, prominent scholars like Posen, Snyder and Van Evera belong to this school of thought. Since offensive realism is built
on Waltz's systemlevel approach in many respects, the general features of structural realism are not repeated here. However, the following description
provides an overview of those ideas of defensive realism which differ from those of offensive realism. The main debate between the two schools of
structural realism concerns the “adequate amount” of power. Contrary to offensive realism, defensive
realists do not think that
states want as much power as possible (Mearsheimer, 2013). Instead, they are considered to strive only
for the appropriate amount of power (Waltz, 1989:39–52) to maintain the existing balance of powers
and to prevent the trigger of a counterbalancing coalition against them (Dunne–Schmidt, 2014).
Furthermore, defensive realists claim that the costs of conquest often exceed its benefits . In other words, the
“balance between offense and defence” – which is an important subject of investigation among defensive realists – favours the defensive strategy on
many occasions (Van Evera, 1998:5–43). Therefore, rational actor states prefer the maintenance of balance of powers to acting aggressively towards
others. In sum, “defensive realism presents a slightly more optimistic view of international politics ”
(Taliaferro, 2000:159). Although defensive realists also claim that great powers seek to guarantee their survival in the anarchic structure of international
relations, they emphasize that since the pursuit of power can easily backfire, states “temper their appetite for power”
(Mearsheimer, 2013:82). Neo-Classical Realism The end of the Cold War basically changed the international system. New phenomena emerged that
challenged structural realism too. It also provoked the emergence of a new school of realism: neo-classical realism. Neo-classical realists (e.g. Rose,
Schweller, Zakaria) built their theories mostly on Waltz's structural realism, however, they also reached back to the roots of classical realism.
Moreover, they were also inspired by liberal approaches that dominated international relations theory at the turn of the millenium ( Jackson–Sorensen,
2013). Neo-classical realists attempt to include additional – individual and domestic factors – in their analysis in order to move beyond the
parsimonous assumptions of neo-realism (Dunne–Schmidt, 2014). Although they aknowledge the structural realist argument about the importance of
the international anarchy, they claim that the structure of the international system only provides incentives for states but it does not predetermine their
behavior. The outcome of foreign policy is influenced by internal characteristics of state and political leadership, as well as by domestic societal actors,
like interest groups too (Lobell–Ripsman–Taliaferro, 2009; Rose, 1998:144–172). As Rose claims, this approach has much in common with historical that
of institutionalist too. Nonetheless, in this regard, states are not treated as “like units”, and foreign policy becomes an important tool that may help
scholars to explain different strategies among nations (Dunne–Schmidt, 2014). The Ukrainian Crisis In
2014, several revolutionary
events took place in the Ukraine that provoked the Russian annexation of the Crimea.
However, the outbreak of a military crisis was preceded by actions taken by Western
countries. In the current section the analytical framework of offensive realism (with further
additions) is used to claim that the outbreak of the crisis was encoded in the international
structure and the aggressive Russian response was inevitable under the current circumstances.
According to the offensive realist arguments, the NATO expansion and the European Union association process

are two major factors that must not be neglected in relation to the Ukrainian crisis (Mearsheimer,
2014:1–12). Firstly, the 2008 NATO summit held in Bucharest made an attempt at getting the Ukraine closer to the West. The Summit Declaration
stated that “NATO welcomes Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO” and “these countries will become members
of NATO”.3 Although further virtual steps were not taken for the military incorporation of Ukraine into the Western alliance, the declaration of intent
above may be considered as a direct threat from the Russian point of view. The expansion of the European Union had a similar but more direct effects
on the conflict. Following the launch of its Eastern Partnership Programme in 2008, the
European Union planned to sign an
association agreement with the Ukraine, which was declined by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich at the end of 2013. This
association would have meant the economic integration of Ukraine in the West. However, this act would have been a hostile action

to Russia's interest. Nevertheless, this veto provoked serious protests in the Ukraine that led to the overthrow of President Yanukovich and
finally made Russia to respond by military intervention in Ukraine. Anyway, the structural realist (both offensive and defensive realist)

interpretation of the events is straightforward: the Ukraine's incorporation into the Western –
either economic or military – institutions would have upset the balance of powers, and Russia could

not let that happen. The reason why Putin answered aggressively was not of his personal
attitude or irrationality but since the structure of international system made him to act so. As
Western actions attempted to alter the status quo of the relative power which would reduce
Russia's sense of security, the principles of realists' self-help world forced Putin to react by
military means. In this respect, Russian military intervention in the Crimea and Eastern
Ukraine served as a radical step towards the recuperation of the balance of powers. Nevertheless,
the explanations given for the Western strategy may differ among – and even within – different realist approaches. The fact that the virtual actor
behind the term “West” is not straightforward also complicates interpretation. Although the United States can be considered as a major actor in the
conflict, officially it has nothing to do with the European Union's association agreement. Considering the European Union as the main Western actor is
also problematic: according to structural realism, states are the only significant players in international politics, moreover, the European Union does
not even have an effective common foreign policy. Nonetheless, we ignore these counterarguments and consider that the US (as the leading country of
NATO) and the European Union as such were the main actors within the Western alliances. Regarding NATO expansion, a regular offensive realist
argument could suggest that the United States – as a regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere – wanted to prevent the emergence of another
potential regional hegemon. However, Russia
cannot be considered as an aspiring hegemon. In spite of Europe's
dependence on Russian energy, Russia is not a prosperous country. Although it has remarkable military capacities, their

technology is quite old-fashioned and the country's latent power – based on its economic
potential – is also weak. Thus as Mearsheimer claims (Mearsheimer, 2014), Russia is a declining power which
implies that the United States need not have to make attempts at containing it by expanding
NATO's sphere of interest. Accepting the above argument, offensive realists might also claim that a miscalculation or simply mistaken
decisions were made both in the US and in the European Union. Such actions are more common if the security of the state is not in danger, as then they
can pursue further goals besides survival. In this respect, one might claim that overconfidence about their own security made the US and the European
The Ukraine's Western integration
Union to move into Russia's backyard without thinking through the consequences of this act.

does not fit into the defensive realist theory either. According to them, rational actors temper
their appetite for power in order to prevent conflicts. Nonetheless, this did not happen to the
West in the case of the Ukrainian crisis, and as a result, instead of maintaining the balance of
powers, they upset it. However, neo-classical realism may provide explanations for these strategically wrong
actions. They might claim that American and European decision-makers were influenced by domestic

factors (e.g. need for vote-maximization in domestic politics; pressure from the proponents of democracy export and from business interest groups
etc.). According to this interpretation, constraints on the anarchic international system were ineffective on

Western politicians, who subjected their foreign policy to secondary goals (instead of taking care of the
balance of powers). Though, neo-classical arguments provide a plausible explanation for the behaviour of Western countries, it may shed new light on
the idea about a rough
Russian strategy too. Namely, domestic factors might have influenced Russian President Putin too. Although

Putin who wants to show strength to his own people, come from the liberal schools of international relations, it might be
compatible with neo-classical realism too. Nevertheless, this view cannot overwrite the fact – which is a recognized one

in neo-classical realism too – that aggressive response was mainly motivated by the crude
logic of balance of power. Conclusions This paper aims to overview the main characteristics of contemporary realist theories and
intended to show their applicability in the globalized world of 21st century. As presented in the case study about the

Ukrainian crisis, realism has not lost its explanatory power after the Cold War: the world has
not changed and international relations are still governed by great power politics. We also showed that
different schools of contemporary realism may perform differently in interpreting distinct
aspects of international events but at the end of the day, realism as a bunch of several theories
is completely able to explain them. In the case of the Ukrainian crisis , we claimed that Russian
response was primarily motivated by the logic of the balance of powers. Since the West
moved into Russia's sphere of interest, Putin was forced to apply his own version of the
“Monroe Doctrine” (Mearsheimer, 2014). In this respect, Russia was not driven by “evil intentions”,
but by the everlasting logic of great power politics.
 1AC – Plan
The United States federal government should substantially reduce Direct
Commercial Sales and Foreign Military Sales of lethal arms from the United
States to Ukraine.
 1AC – North Korea
Arms sales to Ukraine cause Russia to play spoiler in a diversionary crisis in
North Korea – diplomatic cover, sanctions relief, and military aid prove.
Jackson 15 (Van, Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in residence at the
Center for a New American Security. He recently served in the Office of the Secretary of
Defense as a strategist and senior country director for Korea. "Putin and the Hermit Country,"
Foreign Affairs, 2/22/2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/east-asia/2015-02-
22/putin-and-hermit-kingdom?
utm_campaign=reg_conf_email&utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=fa_registration)// ssl
If the rumors are true, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will visit Russia in May during a commemoration of World War II in
Moscow. Russian Ambassador to North Korea Alexander Matsegora also recently confirmed that “Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin
exchange messages on a regular basis.” On the surface it seems that a revitalized Russian–North Korean
alliance could be in the offing. Observing this trend, many strategists have argued that Russia’s interests in North Korea
are overwhelmingly economic, including a transcontinental railroad and gas pipeline that would run through the nation. But
Russia’s dalliance with North Korea also fits a geopolitical pattern reminiscent of the Cold
War’s early days: Great power competition with the United States drives Russia’s North Korea
strategy, and diplomatic niceties between these former communist allies disguise Russia’s true
motivations. When U.S.–Russian relations are hostile and confrontational, Russia moves closer to North Korea. During
amicable periods in U.S.–Russian relations, Moscow maintains a healthy distance from Pyongyang. U.S. policymakers
interested in imposing costs on Russia for its expansionist behaviors by sending arms to
Ukraine must thus recognize that Russia’s geopolitical chessboard is neither limited to the
Ukrainian conflict, nor to Europe at large. Russia will not go to war to defend North Korea in the face of military
escalation, but if U.S.–Russian relations remain on hostile footing—which seems likely— Russia may return to its old
Cold War tactics on the Korean Peninsula. Russia can (and has) frustrated the United States there before, and could
easily do so again in the wake of current economic sanctions. VINTAGE POWER POLITICS In 1968 U.S.–Soviet relations were
confrontational, yet stable. By that time, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson was several years into a strategy of building bridges to the
Soviet Union’s Eastern European client states through economic and cultural programs intending to sever Soviet influence. In
January that year, North Korean naval forces seized the USS Pueblo, a U.S. intelligence
collection vessel, along with its surviving 81-man crew. When Secretary of State Dean Rusk approached his
Soviet counterpart to request Soviet mediation to resolve the crisis, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko rebuffed his request. When
the United States brought the Pueblo’s seizure to the UN Security Council for action, the Soviet
Union used its veto power to block any resolution. And as the United States sent military
reinforcements into the Korean arena, including the USS Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, the
Soviet Union complicated matters by responding with the mobilization of Soviet warships into
the Sea of Japan, compelling Johnson to withdraw the Enterprise . The United States would eventually
resolve the Pueblo crisis, but only after a year of direct negotiations with North Korea in which it conceded to the demands that
Pyongyang had laid out at the beginning of the affair. Against
the backdrop of the Cold War rivalry, the
Soviets seemed to take a certain glee in U.S. frustrations with North Korea. By contrast, as U.S.–Soviet
relations started to thaw in the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union became a crucial partner in U.S. policy toward the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea joined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1985 only because the Soviet Union, at the United States’ request,
pressured it to do so. Following improved U.S.–Soviet relations in the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began improving
relations with South Korea, eventually denouncing the Soviet Union’s 1961 alliance treaty with the North. By 1991, it was evident
that North Korea was operating a clandestine nuclear program, which pushed Russia to become a tacit ally with the United States,
even threatening to place its own sanctions on North Korea if the nation did not cooperate with International Atomic Energy
Agency inspectors. During the George W. Bush administration, a period when U.S.–Russian relations were steady and generally
positive, Russia played a constructive—if peripheral—role in the various configurations of regional dialogue to denuclearize North
Korea. As U.S. and Russian interests increasingly diverged—from Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia to conflicts in Libya, Syria, and
now Crimea—pragmatic cooperation eventually gave way to strategic competition and renewed rivalry. A NEW “GREAT GAME”
The United States again finds itself
U.S.–Russian relations are more hostile today than at any time since the Cold War.
debating whether and how to confront Russian aggression, imposing economic sanctions on
Russia for its invasion of Crimea, and seeking to reinvigorate NATO. A public debate has
ensued about whether the United States should send arms to Ukraine. U.S. defense intellectuals, and
some within the Obama administration, have become vocal advocates of this option. It is within this context that
Russia is suddenly expressing an economic interest in North Korea, increasing political
exchanges between the two nations, and planning military exercises with the North for the first
time in decades. Yet again, great power dynamics are driving Russian calculations on the Korean Peninsula. Russian
strategy toward Asia—and especially North Korea—is not predetermined but contingent upon
the country’s larger relationship with the United States. Put simply, the Cold War rivalry pattern has been
renewed: Russian relations with North Korea are good because relations with the United States are bad. Arguments suggesting
Russia’s current posture toward North Korea is driven by economic incentives alone overlook this pattern, as economic relations
with North Korea have only flourished during periods of U.S.–Russian hostility. At any rate, North Korea’s deadbeat debtor
reputation, moribund economy, and low-skill labor pool—to say nothing of political risk and horror stories of Chinese investments
gone awry—all cast a shadow of doubt on claims that Russia’s motivations in North Korea are purely economic . As the United
States invests time and political capital in isolating North Korea internationally, Russian debt
forgiveness, currency exchange, and trade give Pyongyang a lifeline that alleviates
international pressure. North Korea has an interest in diversifying its external relations too, since Beijing has started to
grow weary of the nation’s irresponsible international behavior. Putin has extended an invitation to Kim Jong Un
to visit Russia and cancelled $10 billion of North Korean debt, as the logic of Russia’s
geopolitical rivalry with the United States demands. As North Korea’s conventional military
capabilities have gradually rusted away, Russian military aid offers the prospect of
rejuvenation. Russia may even see potential for North Korea to open up a new front of crisis or
limited conflict that draws U.S. attention away from what it does on its European periphery .
Should the United States be concerned over a renewed Russian–North Korean friendship? Yes and no. Russia’s interests in Korea
are purely instrumental, and are not driven by Russia’s insecurity or ethno-historical claims to Crimea and other parts of its near
abroad. We should therefore expect a rational limit to Russia’s willingness to spend blood and treasure on North Korea. Even if
Russia formally rekindles an alliance with North Korea, which seems unlikely, Russia can offer no credible extended deterrence
because North Korea’s significance to Russia is mostly limited to being a thorn in the United States’ side. A Putin promise to fight
Still, Russia does not have to
the United States on behalf of the North would be laughable under current circumstances.
risk much in order to play the role of spoiler in U.S. strategy toward Asia, of which North
Korea is a major part. Russia’s position in Asia, both geographically and politically, provides it
opportunities to oppose and even undermine the region’s precarious liberal order. On the
Korean Peninsula, Russia has a long history of disruption through economic aid, the provision
of military arms, and the training and deployment of foreign military forces throughout the
Cold War—minor costs if the result is a humbled, restrained adversary. As U.S. policymakers weigh
whether to arm Ukraine, Russian–North Korean history urges them to judge the benefits and risks not simply in terms of NATO,
the European theater, or the costs that Russia may pay in diplomatic and financial capital for its actions in Crimea. Russia’s
borders are not limited to Europe, and neither are its abilities to hamper U.S. interests, which
are arguably greater in Asia than in Ukraine. Putin might be using North Korea to distract and
stoke the ire of Washington, but given the success of this strategy in the past, it would be
unwise to underestimate its significance.

Playing spoiler in the peninsula is far more likely than Russia backing down.
Menon and Ruger 17 – *PhD, Professor of Political Science @ CUNY, **PhD in Politics @
Brandeis (Rajan and William, “The Trouble With Arming UkraineL Sending Lethal Weapons
Would Backfire,” Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2017-10-
11/trouble-arming-ukraine)//BB
“It’s long past time for the United States to provide Ukraine the lethal defensive assistance it needs to deter and defend against
further Russian aggression,” said Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) in August—and not for the first time. McCain is arguably the most
influential person in Congress on national security matters, so his words carry weight. But his is hardly a lone voice. Others,
including John Herbst, who was U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from mid-2003 to mid-2006, and Alexander Vershbow, an experienced
American diplomat and deputy general secretary of NATO from early 2012 until October 2016, agree with McCain. So do former
President Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, and a cluster of diplomatic and national security luminaries, who
came out of the gate early on this issue in a report released in 2015. The efforts of these individuals haven’t been in vain. U.S.
President Donald Trump will soon decide whether to implement their proposal, and key members of his national security and
military team favor doing so, according to recent statements from General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
Kurt Volker, Trump’s top negotiator on the Ukraine crisis. Defense Secretary James Mattis has confirmed that the option was being
“actively reviewed.” Those who call for sending lethal arms to Ukraine (the United States and some of
its NATO allies already train Ukrainian troops, and the United States has been providing
nonlethal arms to Ukraine to the tune of $300 million in 2016 alone) claim that American weaponry will
strengthen Kiev’s hand and compel Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a just political
settlement that ends the war in Ukraine’s Donbas region. They’re misguided. Worse, their proposal could be
dangerous, for Ukraine and the United States. Arming Ukraine won’t make Putin cry uncle. Past
experience—notably Moscow’s stepped-up intervention to save its Donbas clients in the battles for Ilovaisk and Novoazovsk in
2014 and 2015 and Debaltseve in 2015—suggests that Putin will continue to reinforce Russia’s proxies,
especially if they suffer setbacks at the hands of better-armed Ukrainian troops . Because Russia and
Ukraine share a border, Putin can send forces and weapons to the battlefield far faster than the United
States can resupply Ukraine. Most importantly, Ukraine matters far more to Russia than to the
United States. Indeed, even the advocates for arming Ukraine disavow any intention to send American troops to fight for the
Ukrainians, knowing full well that such a recommendation would doom their efforts. By contrast, Putin hasn’t hesitated to order
Russian troops into battle in the Donbas, where many have been killed. His popularity ratings nevertheless remain sky-high.
Eighty-seven percent of Russians support his handling of foreign affairs—about the same as did in 2014. Thereis no
evidence that the war in Ukraine has dented Putin’s popularity, let alone enabled opposition
leaders to mobilize support against his government. Yet proponents of providing Ukraine lethal
arms suggest that because of the bite of Western sanctions and Russians’ mounting unhappiness with the war, Putin
desperately wants to escape what they portray as the Donbas quagmire. In fact, although Russia has
now endured political isolation and Western economic penalties for over three years as a
consequence of Putin’s annexation of Crimea and instigation of the war in eastern Ukraine, he has not made a single
significant concession or shown any inclination to sacrifice the Donbas insurgents. Instead, he has
stuck by them and, as his military escalations in 2014 and 2015 show, bailed them out when necessary. The proposition that
Putin won’t be provoked by a U.S. decision to send lethal arms to Ukraine amounts to a hunch.
It’s not supported by evidence, and Putin’s past behavior contradicts it. This is not a minor point: if he
does ramp up the war and the Ukrainian army is forced into retreat, the United States will face three bad choices. First, Washington
could pour even more arms into Ukraine in hopes of concentrating Putin’s mind; but he can easily provide additional firepower to
the Donbas insurgents. Second, it could deepen its military involvement by sending American military advisers, or even troops, to
the frontline to bolster the Ukrainian army; but then Russia could call America’s bluff. Third, the United States could decide not to
respond to Russia’s escalation given the geographical disadvantage and the limited strategic interests at stake. That would amount
to backing down, abandoning Ukraine, and shredding the oft-repeated argument that American and European security hinges on
the outcome of the Donbas war. Proponents of arming Ukraine say that things will never reach this point because their goal is
merely to force a political settlement that’s acceptable to Ukrainians and ends a war that has killed some 10,000 people. The point,
they insist, isn’t to empower Kiev to crush the Donbas rebels, and they dismiss the possibility that an American-armed Ukraine
might be emboldened to attempt just that. Yet in a speech at West Point in September, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko
declared that his intent was precisely to retake the Donbas (a point that he also made earlier in July and again in October), and he
noted that American weapons would help him succeed. Surely, Poroshenko’s words matter more than breezy assurances from those
pushing to arm Ukraine. The supporters of arming Ukraine also shortchange that country's military capabilities. The Ukrainian
army has nearly doubled in size, from 130,000 in 2014 to 250,000 today, and is now one of Europe’s largest. In 2018, Ukraine’s
military spending will increase by a quarter to $6.3 billion (or five percent of GDP), more than double the 2014 figure. In addition to
the increases in defense spending and the size of its army, Kiev has taken other steps to beef up its security. The draft was
reinstituted in 2014. Ukraine has been improving its command, control, surveillance, and intelligence network and acquiring more,
and better trained, special operations forces. With help from NATO’s Comprehensive Assistance Package, which was adopted in
2016, it is revamping the administration of its armed forces. True, there are many obstacles to transforming Ukraine’s military,
corruption among them. The goal of bringing it up to NATO standards by 2020 may amount to wishful thinking. And progress will
be slow under the best of circumstances. Yet the Ukrainian army of today is certainly not what it was in 2014—a shell. What’s more,
Ukraine is no slouch in building weapons. Ukroboronprom, the state weapons manufacturer, employs 80,000 people and oversees
21 affiliates, and there are some 36 private Ukrainian defense firms besides. Ukraine makes advanced tanks, armored amphibious
vehicles, aerial refueling tankers, transport aircraft, laser-guided anti-tank missiles (which get top billing in proposals to arm
Ukraine, never mind that Ukraine makes the Corsar and Stugna-P laser-guided ATGMs), and long-range early-warning radars.
Moreover, Ukraine was the world’s ninth-largest arms exporter from 2012 to 2016. It earned over $500 million selling arms last year
and a total of $11 billion since it became an independent country. In short, the clamor to arm Ukraine may have less to do with its
dire need for weapons than with drawing the United States deeper into the conflict. Supporters of arming Ukraine insist that this
move is also essential for reassuring NATO and preserving Europe’s peace. Yet the proposition that the United States should risk
getting enmeshed in a war on Russia’s doorstep to soothe its skittish NATO states makes no sense. Article V of the pact’s treaty
already provides that a member that comes under attack will be defended, with military force if needed. Moreover, although Trump
declared NATO “obsolete,” he later reversed himself, and there is every reason to believe that his administration remains
committed to the transatlantic alliance. If NATO truly seeks to become stronger and Europe is indeed so vulnerable and edgy, the
alliance’s wealthy European members should take some big steps at home, such as boosting defense spending. Although some
have, many have not. The alliance’s figures show that only five of its 27 European states now spend two percent or more of their
GDP on defense, the target accepted in 2006. NATO’s European members also have much work to do on other fronts. These include
reducing duplication in the production of major armaments and increasing inter-operability and the capabilities for the rapid
deployment of forces to the battlefield. Substantial progress in these areas, not reassurances about Washington’s dependability as
demonstrated by the dispatch of American arms to Ukraine, are what the alliance needs. Thecase for arming Ukraine
also tends to be made in a vacuum, never mind that what the United States does in Ukraine
could determine what Russia does elsewhere. Moscow could respond by putting more pressure on the
Baltics, acting as a spoiler in North Korea or Iran, or even arming the Taliban (that would be an ironic turn: in the
1980s, the United States bled the Soviets by arming the Afghan mujahideen). If these outcomes seem impossible,
consider the United States’ awful record in foreseeing the effects of its military moves. In
Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, adversaries didn’t respond the way
Washington anticipated, or there were dangerous unintended consequences . Russia, for its part,
surprised the United States by sending its troops into Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and Syria
in 2015. All in all, the plan to pressure Putin by providing Ukraine lethal arms is strategically
flawed. Worse, it could prove reckless.

Russia has unique leverage over North Korea.

Lukin 16 (Artyom Lukin is Deputy Director for Research at the School of Regional and
International Studies, Far Eastern Federal University (Vladivostok, Russia). He is also Associate
Professor at the Department of International Relations., 3-4-2016, "Russia’s Role in the North
Korea Conundrum: Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?" Foreign Policy Research
Institute, https://www.fpri.org/article/2016/03/russias-role-in-the-north-korea-conundrum-
part-of-the-problem-or-part-of-the-solution/)//SSL

Moscow saw an opportunity to heighten Russia’s international influence and prestige by

reinserting itself into Korean Peninsula politics through restoring links with the DPRK. The
Putin administration judged – correctly – that rebuilding ties with Pyongyang, while preserving
good relations with Seoul, would again make Russia a player to be reckoned with in Northeast
Asia. The new policy manifested itself in the highest level visits. Putin went to Pyongyang in 2000, becoming the first Russian leader to visit North
Korea, while Kim Jong-il traveled to Russia in 2001, 2002 and 2011. In 2003 Russia also became the founding member of the Six Party Talks, reportedly
at the insistence of Pyongyang, thus institutionalizing and legitimizing Moscow’s role on the Korean Peninsula. During
that period
Russia was careful to pursue equidistance – or equal closeness – in political relations with Seoul
and Pyongyang. Recognizing the South’s concerns about the North’s development of nuclear and ballistic weapons and disapproving of
Pyongyang’s provocative statements and actions, Moscow
simultaneously pointed to the need to safeguard the
DPRK’s “legitimate” security interests. Russia supported the United Nations Security Council
(UNSC) sanctions punishing North Korea for its nuclear and ballistic missile program, but
Moscow, along with Beijing, worked to take the edge off the sanctions and opposed harsher
measures backed by the United States and Japan.[6] The Ukraine crisis, that started to unfold in
2013 and culminated in 2014, profoundly transformed Russia’s foreign policy. The
competition with the United States that hitherto had been tempered by a significant amount of
bilateral engagement and cooperation turned into bitter enmity. This has had considerable
repercussions for Russia’s approaches to the Korean Peninsula, visible in the rapid
improvement of Russia-North Korea ties. During 2014 and 2015, Russian-North Korean relations
have remarkably grown in intensity. There has been a flurry of high-level exchanges, with Russia becoming the country most
frequently visited by North Korean senior officials. Since February 2014, the DPRK Supreme People’s Assembly Presidium Chairman Kim Yong-nam,
Minister of Foreign Trade Lee Ren-Nam, Foreign Minister Lee Soo-Young, Kim Jong-un’s special envoy Choe Ryong Hae, Supreme People`s Assembly
Chairman Choi Thae Baek and other senior leaders traveled Russia.[7] Russia reciprocated by sending to Pyongyang multiple delegations. Although
the expected visit of the DPRK’s supreme leader Kim Jong-un to Moscow for the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany did
not materialize (Pyongyang was instead represented by Kim Yong-nam, the number two in the DPRK state hierarchy), this did not slow the
momentum of Russia-North Korea ties, with 2015 designated as the Year of Friendship of Russia and the DPRK. In November 2015, Moscow and
Pyongyang signed an agreement on “preventing dangerous military activity.” The agreement, concluded at the level of the two countries’ general
staffs, was an indication of increased military contacts between Russia and the DPRK.[8] In February 2016, Moscow and Pyongyang concluded an
agreement on the transfer of illegal migrants, which will facilitate the deportation of North Korean defectors back to the DPRK.[9] This sensitive
document was signed just a few weeks after the North’s nuclear test and a few days before the planned long-range missile launch, suggesting that,
even under such inauspicious circumstances, Russia
was keen to pursue political cooperation with the North
Korean regime. On the economic front, too, there have been a number of significant
developments. The issue of North Korea’s debt to Russia (inherited from the Soviet era) was
finally settled in May 2014, with Russia agreeing to write off 90% of the $11 billion debt. In order to
promote bilateral commerce, the Russian-North Korean Business Council was set up, while North Korea agreed to relax visa regulations for Russian
businesspeople and facilitate their work activities in the DPRK. Russia and the DPRK have made steps to use rubles in their commercial transactions.
[10] Apart
from facilitating bilateral trade, the shift to rubles may help reduce North Korea’s
vulnerability to the US financial sanctions that target dollar-denominated transactions .[11] Tentative
agreements on several large-scale projects have been reached. The biggest among them, named “Pobeda” (“Victory”), calls for Russia to make
substantial investments, to the tune of $25 billion over 20 years, in North Korea’s mining industry and industrial infrastructure in exchange for gaining
privileged access to the DPRK’s mineral wealth. Negotiations are underway to lease vast tracts of agricultural land in the RFE for North Koreans to
cultivate. These and other developments indicate that Russia-North Korea ties are now at their highest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Both being ostracized by the West and subjected to sanctions, Russia and the DPRK now evidently feel more empathy with each other. In particular,
North Korea expressed support for Russia over Crimea. In turn, Moscow defended the DPRK at the UNSC when it voted, along with China, against
the inclusion of the issue of human rights in North Korea on the UNSC agenda.[12] Moscow
also probably wants to use its
increased support for North Korea as additional leverage in the dealings with the West, Seoul
and Tokyo, while North Korea needs Russia to reduce its extreme dependence on China. Russia
and China: Exchanging Korea for Ukraine? Moscow has always stressed the need to seek “peaceful political and diplomatic solutions” to the North
Korean issue. In effect, this means conservation of the existing geopolitical realities and preservation of the DPRK as a sovereign entity. Nonetheless,
until recently Moscow’s commitment to Pyongyang was not without serious reservations. It seemed quite likely that Moscow would at some point
judge that continuation of the erratic North Korean regime was not in its interests, leading to Russian acceptance of a swift Korean reunification, even
if it should have been carried out as absorption of the North by South Korea. Even if US troops were to be stationed in the northern part of the
Peninsula after reunification, they would be of much more concern to China than Russia, if only because China shares a much longer border with
North Korea (China’s frontier with North Korea is 1,416 kilometers long while Russia’s is only 19 kilometers). Unlike Beijing, the Kremlin did not
worry much about the prospect of North Korea disappearing from the political map since Pyongyang served as a protective buffer for China rather
than Russia.[13] One also had to consider the economic gains that Russia was well positioned to reap as a result of Korean reunification. Major projects
that were stalled due to the inter-Korean conflict, such as a gas pipeline from Russia to Korea and the linking of Korean railways to the Russian Trans-
Siberian Railway, would go ahead if the North Korean problem was finally resolved. More generally, North Korea is basically an economic wasteland,
with very little commercial opportunities for the neighboring Russian Far East. To make things worse, the DPRK separates Russia from the
powerhouse of the South Korean economy. Korean reunification would give the RFE direct access to a single market of 75 million people with high
demand for Russian commodities. Moscow was, and remains, unhappy with North Korea’s steady progress in the development of nuclear warheads
and ballistic missiles both for reasons of principle, Russia being one of the guarantors of the NPT regime, and out of security concerns. Pyongyang’s
nuclear aspirations pose immediate safety and security risks to the RFE and, in the longer term, could result in an arms race in Northeast Asia, a
scenario extremely undesirable for Russia. Russia’s preferred geopolitical vision for Northeast Asia has been one of rules-based multi-polar balance of
power – a concert or powers in which Moscow would be one of the participants, with the Six Party Talks as a possible institutional prototype for such
an arrangement. Prior
to the Ukraine crisis, a unified Korea, with reduced security dependence on
Washington and more clout vis-à-vis Beijing and Tokyo, was seen by many in Moscow as
instrumental in establishing a power equilibrium in Northeast Asia that would be resistant to
the dominance of any single actor, be it the United States or China. That constituted one more reason for Russia’s
potential interest in Korean reunification. Perhaps even a unified Korea that retained some form of security ties with the United States could have been
acceptable to Moscow, as long as Russia’s relations with Washington were reasonably tolerable – just the way they stood in the 2000s. This contrasted
with China’s stance: Beijing obviously preferred to keep Korea divided rather than seeing a united, strong and possibly pro-US country on China’s
Russia’s
borders, unless, of course, a unified Korea recognized itself as part of the Chinese strategic sphere of influence, a very unlikely prospect.

mounting conflict with the West that culminated in the Ukraine crisis changed Moscow’s
calculus. First, the Ukraine mess has distracted Russia’s attention and resources from East Asia,
including the Korean Peninsula. Second, emotional anti-Americanism has permeated Russian
foreign policy, making Washington’s enemies Moscow’s friends and poisoning Russia’s
relations with US allies like South Korea and Japan. Third, and perhaps most important,
Russia’s growing reliance on China is making Russia more receptive to Beijing’s interests in the
Asia-Pacific. To be sure, the Asia-Pacific, and especially the Korean Peninsula, is important to Moscow in many respects but its significance
cannot be compared to Russian stakes in Ukraine and other post-Soviet regions – the places Russia is literally prepared to fight for. At the same time,
China has fundamental interests in the Korean Peninsula and views Eastern Europe as a peripheral concern. This makes possible, and logical, a sort of
geopolitical deal-making between Moscow and Beijing, with Russia showing deference to Beijing in East Asian affairs in return for China’s tacit
support, or at least benevolent neutrality, in the Kremlin’s confrontation with the US-led West over Ukraine. One indication of Russia’s growing
strategic collaboration with China on the Peninsula issue has been the two countries’ joint opposition to the THAAD missile defense system’s
prospective deployment in South Korea. In April 2015, Russia and China held the first round of the bilateral dialogue on security in Northeast Asia in
which the THAAD issue was one of the main agenda items.[14] It may be expected that Moscow and Beijing will
increasingly coordinate their positions on security issues in Northeast Asia and the Peninsula,
including the provision of diplomatic cover for the North Korean regime. This will resurrect a Cold War-
era division of Northeast Asia into the US-Japan-ROK trio versus the China-Russia-DPRK axis.[15] The true importance of Sino-

Russian collaboration on the Penisula may be revealed in case of a North Korean implosion.
Although the collapse of the DPRK’s current regime is by no means imminent, the situation in the North is basically unpredictable. The regime may
continue for another fifty years, but it is almost as likely that it will start falling apart tomorrow. The two players that would have the highest stakes in
the event of a North Korean implosion are obviously the ROK and China. They will seek to control the process of the regime’s collapse and shape its
outcome in order to secure their own interests in the northern part of the Peninsula. Even though China admittedly has a substantial leverage over
North Korea, it may need Russian backing, if and when the DPRK begins to crumble. Apart from China and the ROK, Russia is the only country
neighboring North Korea. Moreover, unlike the DMZ, Russia’s border with the North is not heavily militarized. This could make it easier for Russia to
intervene, jointly with China, in the DPRK. Russia’s rich experience in carrying out military and hybrid warfare operations in recent years – from
Chechnya to Crimea – will certainly be an extra asset for China that has not tested its armed force since 1979 (when it launched an offensive against
Vietnam). Putin’s bold intervention in Syria underscored Russia’s increased willingness – and capacity – to undertake military gambles in foreign
countries. Last but not least, Russia’s diplomatic support as a major power and permanent UNSC member will give more international legitimacy to
the intervention, allowing Beijing to avoid isolation. Swift coordinated actions by China and Russia will guarantee that the outcome of a North Korean
contingency will be in accordance with their geopolitical interests. Beijing would aim for the stabilization of the North and installment of a new regime
loyal to China while preventing the absorption of the DPRK by the US-allied South. Russia will back Beijing’s game, especially if China allows Moscow
to retain some degree of influence over North Korea. If China and Russia act in lockstep in a North Korean crisis, Seoul’s chances to achieve
reunification with the North on its own terms are reduced to near zero. What
is Russia’s Leverage with North Korea? The
conventional view is that Russia’s influence over North Korea is mostly political, predicated on
Russia’s permanent membership in the UNSC and participation in the Six Party Talks. Often
overlooked is the fact that Russia maintains a range of commercial and other links with the
DPRK. Taken together, they constitute quite a substantial leverage that Russia can exercise over
North Korea, when and if it chooses to do so. Arguably, among North Korea’s neighbors Russia now ranks second, after
China, in terms of its potential capability to cause intense economic pain to the North Korean regime. This became especially true in recent years after
Japan and South Korea discontinued virtually all economic contacts with the DPRK. Trade.
In 2014, Russia’s trade with North
Korea totaled $92 million, with Russian exports accounting for 90% of the turnover. Russia ranks as the
DPRK’s third biggest partner in terms of imports. This, to a large extent, reflects the reality that North Korea has to offer mostly raw materials, like coal
and iron ore, that Russia itself has in abundance. The top items that Russia sells to the North are oil and fuel, transport vehicles, and grain .

Moreover, according to minister for the development of the Far East Alexander Galushka, about
one third of China’s exports to North Korea (roughly $900 mln) is actually made up of Russian-
originated goods.[16] He did not specify which Russian goods China re-exports to North Korea, but this is most likely oil. Galushka
suggested that the involvement of “third countries” in Russia-North Korea commerce should be minimized in order to reduce the prices and raise the
quality of the traded merchandise. North Korean labor. The imbalance in trade in goods, in which Russia
has an overwhelming surplus, is partly compensated by the export of North Korean labor to
Russia. Sending labor overseas is an important source of hard currency for the North Korean
regime. The North Korean government takes at least 50 percent of what its workers earn in
foreign countries. North Korean guest workers first came to the Russian (then – Soviet) Far East in the late 1940s under inter-governmental
agreements. There has long been a natural complementarity between the RFE’s constant shortage of manpower and North Korea’s surplus labor.
Varying from year to year, there are approximately 20-26 thousand North Korean migrants in
Russia, most of them contract guest laborers. According to some estimates, Russia is the world’s
biggest recipient of North Korean contract labor.[17] Labor migrants from the DPRK are mostly males, involved in
construction, agriculture and timbering. Most North Korean workers enter Russia under a contract with a Russian company, which acts as their formal
employer. However, they often end up on the free job market. For example, in Vladivostok most of North Koreans find jobs in construction, renovating
apartments and houses etc. They are organized in teams led by “captains.” The captains are persons who have lived in Russia for a relatively long
time, can speak Russian and are familiar with the local market. Teams are responsible for finding their employment. In fact, they act as free market
agents – looking for jobs and offering their services, which they often advertise in local mass media.[18] In Vladivostok, North Korean construction and
renovation teams are highly competitive, offering a very attractive price-quality tradeoff. One can often see large groups of North Koreans in the
Vladivostok airport boarding Air Koryo flights back to Pyongyang. Most of them carry a lot of baggage, indicating that they bring commercial stuff
from Russia to be resold in North Korea, thus acting as another informal conduit for Russian-North Korean trade. The North Korean migrants are
considered law-abiding and do not give much trouble to the authorities in the RFE. Back in the 1990s, there were several cases of North Koreans
engaged in currency counterfeiting and drugs trafficking, but this problem does not exist any more.[19] One peculiar fixture of North Korea’s presence
in Russia is its restaurants. There are North Korean restaurants in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk and Moscow. They are part North Korea’s global network
of state-run restaurants, not only earning money for the government in Pyongyang but also apparently serving as sites of intelligence operations.[20]
Investment. The bulk of Russia’s direct investment in North Korea is related to the Khasan-
Rajin project. The state-owned Russian Railways spent roughly $300 mln on the upgrade of the
54-kilometer cross-border railway link from Russia’s Khasan to the North Korean port of Rajin.
This was accompanied with the modernization of the Rajin port facilities,

where Russia was granted a long-term lease of one of the piers . To implement the project, a joint venture,
Rasonkontrans, was established, with Russia holding 70% of the shares and North Korea 30%. Apart from the South Korean-funded Kaesong
industrial complex, the Khasan-Rajin venture may well be the largest single foreign investment in North Korea. The upgraded railway, which became
operational in 2013, allows the use of the port of Rajin for transshipment of cargos coming via the Trans-Siberian from Russia bound for Asia-Pacific
countries. So far the cargos coming via the Khasan-Rajin route have mainly been destined for China. In 2014-2015, there were three successful
shipments of Siberian coal via Rajin to South Korea’s Pohang, raising hopes that the route can be eventually used as another inter-Korean business
project. Russia views the Khasan-Rajin project as the first stage of the grand design to link up the Russian Trans-Siberian mainline with the prospective
Trans-Korean Railway. Finance.
Russia is one of the few countries whose financial institutions carry out
regular transactions with North Korea. These are mostly private banks located in the RFE. Tellingly,
in 2007 the RFE’s Khabarovsk-based Dalcombank became the only bank in the world that agreed to perform a delicate mission of mediating the
transfer to North Korea of $25 mln of the Kim regime’s assets that had been previously frozen in Macao-based Banco Delta Asia by the US financial
sanctions.[21] Fishing.
Russia’s exclusive economic zone is an important source of fish catches for
North Korea. North Korean fishing boats, mostly catching squid, operate in Russian waters in accordance with intergovernmental agreements
between Russia and the DPRK that regulate the species and the amount allowed for catch. Apart from legal fishing, there have been repeated incidents
Aircraft. North
of North Korean poaching in Russia’s seas, even though Russian authorities are generally reluctant to make them public.

Korean national flag carrier Air Koryo’s fleet entirely consists of Russian-made aircraft –
Tupolevs, Ilyushins, and Antonovs. This means dependence on spare parts and some
maintenance services imported from Russia. The DPRK’s air force also operates a large number
of Soviet- and Russian-made jets, though most of them are grounded due to shortages of fuel
and poor maintenance. Transportation links. With the exception of China, Russia is the only country that maintains overland
transportation communications with the DPRK. Russia and North Korea are connected by a railway bridge across Tumangan (Tumannaya) River. In
addition to the existing railway link, the two sides recently decided to build an automobile bridge, although it is unclear when the construction will
actually begin.[22] Russia’s Vladivostok is among the handful of airports that have permanent scheduled air service to Pyongyang[23] (all the other
airports with scheduled year-round service to North Korea are China’s Beijing, Shenyang and Shanghai).[24] Regular overland and air links make
Russia an indispensable gateway for North Korea. If Russia curtails or terminates the functioning of these routes, North Korea will only have to rely on
Chinese options. Education.
Russia is one of the very few countries where North Korea sends its
students, even though their number is relatively limited.
Support is the only way to make NoKo diplomacy effective – it’s key to
effectively mitigate further NoKo development.
Samore 17 – PhD, executive director for research at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs and former presidential advisor on arms control and nonproliferation
(Gary, “On Russia's Role in Resolving the North Korea Crisis: Q&A with Gary Samore,”
https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/russias-role-resolving-north-korea-crisis-qa-gary-
samore)//BB

RM: Let’s start by “zooming out”: There’s

been plenty of debate in the pundit class about responses to North
Korea’s latest tests related to nuclear weapons. What are the main reasonable lines of thought in the U.S.
policymaking establishment about what should be done? How close is this establishment to consensus? GS: I think there is general
agreement that eliminating
North Korea’s nuclear weapons is not a realistic goal for the time being, perhaps
as long as the Kim dynasty rules in Pyongyang. Military
options to destroy North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile force
are impractical and run a high risk of sparking a broader conflict, which would be very costly and
dangerous to the U.S. and its Asian allies. Regime change is not possible without Chinese cooperation and Beijing is deeply
reluctant to apply economic pressures that could destabilize North Korea. Hence, diplomacy (backed by sanctions) is the
only option to limit and delay North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs in the near term, even though it will not result in
denuclearization. Because prospects for diplomacy are so uncertain, there is general agreement in Washington on the need to
enhance military cooperation with South Korea and Japan to strengthen deterrence and defense, including missile defense. RM: Is
Russia critical to this effort? Does it, for example, have sufficient leverage vis-à-vis North Korea to convince it to abandon or freeze
its nuclear or missile program? GS: Compared to the U.S. and China, Russia is a relatively secondary player because it has little
leverage with North Korea since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of large-scale aid and military assistance to
Pyongyang. Nonetheless, Russian
cooperation is necessary to make the diplomatic option effective. In
particular, Moscow can play the spoiler and reduce pressure on North Korea to negotiate if it
blocks U.N. Security Council sanctions resolutions or expands trade with North Korea to
replace trade between North Korea and China.

Noko development causes Korean war – no deterrence.

Robert Kelly 15 – [he is an associate professor of international relations in the Department of
Political Science and Diplomacy at Pusan National University in South Korea, “Will South
Korea Eventually Feel Compelled to Bomb NK Missile Sites?,” Asian Security Blog, 3/17/15,
https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2015/03/17/will-south-korea-eventually-feel-
compelled-to-bomb-nk-missile-sites/] //Lex RA

My growing concern for years now is that the

more nuclear missiles North Korea acquires (read this on just how
many and when), the more they threaten South Korea’s very existence. To date, North Korea’s missile and nukes have
generally been understood as a tool for regime security – to prevent an American ‘regime change’ attack – or as a gangsterish way
for NK to shake-down SK, Japan, and the US for concessions. As Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton both noted, the Norks are great at
selling and re-selling their nuclear program for aid. But, if NK gets dozens, or even hundreds, of nuclear
warheads and missiles, then the NK nuclear program is no longer about regime security or blackmail. It
would then have grown into an existential threat to SK as a state and society. This is why I am such a strong
supporter of THAAD. NK is moving from being a frightening rogue state obsessed with survival, to a
major threat to the constitutional order and even physical survival of the ROK (and Japan). To be sure, the USSR and US
were that to each other in the Cold War, but both developed technologies (SLBMs mostly) that
allowed them to survive (or ‘ride out’ in nuclear parlance) even a massive first strike and still retaliate.
This ‘assured second strike’ capability dramatically reduced the incentive for either side to strike first, so
stabilizing the nuclear competition despite the huge size of the arsenals. By contrast, neither NK nor SK have
assured second strike (SK might because of the American alliance, but that’s not entirely clear) which therefore
incentives attacking first. Further, both NK and SK are very vulnerable to a first strike, so again the
incentives to move first are high. NK cannot hide its nuclear weapons; it is too small and US satellite
coverage too intrusive. Nuclear facilities are big and vulnerable, and a obvious temptation for an allied
preemptive strike. This creates a ‘use-them-or-lose-them’ dilemma for Pyongyang. And this
dilemma worsens as Pyongyang builds more and more, and spends more and more. The more nukes
North Korea deploys, the greater the allied temptation to destroy them before they could be
used (this was American thinking during the Cuban Missile Crisis too). This vulnerability, in turn, incentivizes
NK to use them before they’re struck. It’s a nasty spiral of paranoia. SK too is vulnerable,
which again incentivizes moving first. SK cannot ride out a serious nuclear assault, because it is a
small, highly centralized state with a highly concentrated population defenseless against missile attack. It would not take
many nuclear strikes to destabilize the Republic (unlike the US or USSR in the Cold War). As Nork nukes
move from a few for security, to many as a state- and society-breaking threat to SK (and even Japan), the
incentives to preemptively destroy them first will grow also. This is a classic nuclear security dilemma,
straight out of the Cold War in the 1950s. The best way out of this nasty, worsening game would be nuclear restraint on the NK part
(a pipe-dream, that), and/or robust missile defense on the SK side. THAAD is really, really important to slow the security dilemma
paranoia that accompanies arms build-ups, especially nuclear ones. The Chinese ought to think about that before they come out so
strongly against THAAD: If South Korea is entirely ‘naked’ or ‘roof-less’ against missile attack, when NK has 100+ nuclear missiles
– a capability that could destroy South Korea in just a few minutes – what does Beijing think will happen? That Seoul will just sit
back and do nothing because of trade with China? I doubt it. No
SK president could tolerate such a stark,
asymmetric threat to the ROK’s very existence just to keep the Chinese mollified. That would border on
dereliction of duty. Even if SK did not want to strike North Korea’s nuclear sites (which I don’t think it does), it
might feel compelled to out of sheer fear. These ideas were first fleshed out at The Diplomat here. That essay is re-
posted below and repeats the above discussion: “As North Korea continues to develop both nuclear weapons and the missile
technology to carry them, the pressure on South Korea to take preemptive military action will gradually rise. At some point, North
Korea may have so many missiles and warheads, that South Korea considers that capability to be an existential threat to Southern
security. This
is the greatest long-term risk to security and stability in Korea, arguably more
destabilizing than a North Korean collapse. If North Korea does not arrest its nuclear and missile programs at a
reasonably small, defensively-minded deterrent, then Southern elites will increasingly see those weapons as threats to Southern
survival, not just tools of defense or gangsterish blackmail. During the Cold War, the extraordinary speed and power of nuclear
missiles created a bizarre and frightening ‘balance of terror.’ Both the Americans and Soviets had these weapons, but they were
enormously vulnerable to a first strike. Under the logic ‘use them or lose them,’ there were enormous incentives to launch first: if A
did not get its missiles out of the silos quickly enough, they might be destroyed by B’s first strike. One superpower could then hold
the other’s cities hostage to nuclear annihilation and demand concessions. This countervalue, ‘city busting’ temptation was
eventually alleviated by ‘assured second strike’ technologies, particularly submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM). SLBMs
ensured the survivability of nuclear forces; hard-to-find submarines could ride out an enemy first strike and still retaliate. So the
military value of launching first declined dramatically. By the 1970s, both the US and the USSR had achieved enough survivability
through various ‘hardening’ efforts that nuclear bipolarity was relatively stable despite the huge number of weapons in the arms
race. The Korean nuclear race does not have this stability and is unlikely to ever achieve it. Nuclear Korea today is more like the
cold war of the 1950s, when nuclear weapons were new and destabilizing, than in the 1970s when they had been strategically
integrated, and bipolarity was mature. Specifically, North
Korea will never been able to harden its locations
well enough to achieve assured second strike. North Korea is too small to pursue the geographic
dispersion strategies the Soviets tried, and too poor to build a reliable SLBM force or effective air defense. Further
US satellite coverage makes very hard for the North to conceal anything of great importance.
North Korea’s nuclear weapons will always be highly vulnerable. So North Korea will always
face the ‘use it or lose it’ logic that incentives a first strike. On the Southern side, its small size and extreme
demographic concentration in a few large cities makes the Republic of Korea an easy target for a nuclear strike. More than half of
South Korea’s population lives in greater Seoul alone (more than 20 million people), and Seoul’s suburbs begin just thirty miles
from the demilitarized zone. This again raises the temptation value of a Northern strike. Both the Soviet Union and the United
States were so large, that only a massive first strike would have led to national collapse. In South Korea by contrast, nuking only
about five large cities would likely be enough to push South Korea toward national-constitutional breakdown. Given its extreme
urbanization and centralization, South Korea is extremely vulnerable to a WMD and/or decapitation strike. While large-scale
North Korean offensive action is highly unlikely – Pyongyang’s elites most likely just want to survive to enjoy
their gangster high life – nuclear weapons do offer a conceivable route to Northern military victory for
the first time in decades: a first-strike mix of counterforce detonations to throw the Southern military into
disarray; limited counter-value city strikes to spur social and constitutional break-down in the South; followed
by an invasion and occupation before the US military could arrive in force; and a standing threat to nuke Japan or
the United States as well should they intervene. Again, this is unlikely, and I still strongly believe an allied
victory is likely even if the North were to use nuclear weapons. But the more nukes the North
builds, the more this threat, and the ‘use it or lose it’ first strike incentives, grow. It is for this reason
that the US has pushed South Korea so hard on missile defense. Not only would missile defense save lives, but it would
dramatically improve Southern national-constitutional survivability. (Decentralization would also help enormously, and I have
argued for that repeatedly in conferences in Korea, but it is unlikely.) A missile shield would lessen the military-offensive value of
North Korea’s nuclear weapons, so reducing both first-strike temptations in Pyongyang and preemptive air-strike pressure in Seoul.
Unfortunately South Korea is not hardened meaningfully to ride-out Northern nuclear strikes. Missile defense in South Korea has
become politicized as a US plot to dominate South Korean foreign policy (yes, really) and provoke China. (Although opinion may,
at last, be changing on this.) Air drills are routinely ignored. And no one I know in South Korea knows where their shelters are or
what to do in case of nuclear strike. Ideally North Korea would de-nuclearize. And we should always keep talking to North Korea.
Pyongyang is so dangerous that freezing it out is a bad idea. Talking does not mean we must be taken advantage of by the North’s
regular bargaining gimmicks. But we must admit that North Korea seems unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons. The program
goes back decades, to the 1960s. Rumor has it that Pyongyang devoted more than 5% of GDP in the last two decades to developing
these weapons. The program continued through the 1990s, even as more than a million North Koreans starved to death in a famine
resulting from post-Cold War economic breakdown. The North has repeatedly lied and flim-flammed to outsiders like the ROK
government and the IAEA to keep its programs alive clandestinely. Recently Kim Jong Un has referred to nuclear weapons as the
“nation’s life.” We could even go a step further and admit that a few Northern nuclear missiles are
tolerable. If we put ourselves in Pyongyang’s shoes, a limited nuclear deterrent makes sense. Conventionally,
North Korea is falling further and further behind. No matter how big the North Korean army gets quantitatively,
it is an increasingly weak shield against high-tech opponents. US regime change in the Middle East has clearly
incentivized despots everywhere in the world to consider the ultimate security which nuclear
weapons provide. The North Koreans have openly said that nuclear weapons ensure their post-9/11 regime security. As
distasteful as it may be to us, there is a logic to that. A small, defensive-minded deterrent – say five to ten warhead-
tipped missiles that could threaten limited retaliation against Southern cities – would be an objectively rational hedge
against offensive action by the US or South Korea. Indeed, this is almost certainly what Pyongyang says to Beijing to defend its
program to its unhappy patron. But
this is the absolute limit of responsible Northern nuclear deployment and probably
where the DPRK is right now. Further
nuclear and missile development would exceed even the most
expansive definition of North Korean security and takes us into the realm of nuclear blackmail,
highly dangerous proliferation, and an offensive first-strike capability. Pyongyang does not need, for
example, the ICBM it is supposedly working on. In this context, my greatest fear for Korean security in the next two decades is
North Korean nuclearization continuing apace, generating dozens, perhaps hundreds of missile and warheads, coupled to rising
South Korean paranoia and pressure to preemptively strike. There
is no possible national security rationale for
Pyongyang to keep deploying beyond what it has now, and if they do, expect South Korean planners to
increasingly consider preemptive airstrikes. North Korea with five or ten missiles (some of which would fail or be destroyed in
combat) is terrible humanitarian threat, but not an existential one to South Korea (and Japan). South Korea could ride out, perhaps,
five urban strikes, and Japan even more. But
a North Korea with dozens of nuclear missiles, possibly one
hundred, some of them on submarines, would constitute a state- and society-breaking,
constitutional threat to South Korea and Japan in case of conflict. That in turn will incentivize pre-emptive airstrikes. This
spiral of paranoia between North Korea nuclearization, and pressure on Seoul (or even Tokyo) to preemptively defang
North Korea before it can threaten state-destruction, is entirely predictable – and the reason why everyone, even China and Russia,
wants North Korea to stop building. Let’s hope they listen (but they won’t).”

Causes nuclear winter.

Hayes 09 (Peter; Professor of International Relations – RMIT University AND Michael
HAMEL-GREEN ; Dean and Professor of Arts, Education and Human Development – Victoria
University, “The Path Not Taken, The Way Still Open: Denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula
and Northeast Asia,” http://www.nautilus.org/projects/A-J-disarm/research-
workshop/drafts/hayes-hamel-green.pdf)

The consequences of failing to address the proliferation threat posed by the North Korea developments, and related political
and economic issues, are serious, not only for the Northeast Asian region but also for the whole international community. At worst,
there is the possibility of nuclear next-use1 or even an actual nuclear exchange, whether by intention, miscalculation, or merely
accident. On the Korean Peninsula itself, key population centres are relatively close, well within short or medium range missiles.
The whole of Japan is likely to come within North Korean missile range. Pyongyang has a population of over 2 million, Seoul (close
to the North Korean border) 11 million, and Japan over 130 million. Even a limited nuclear exchange would result in a holocaust of
unprecedented proportions. But the catastrophe within the region would not be the only outcome. New research is indicating that
even a limited nuclear war in the region would rearrange our global climate far more quickly
than global warming. Westberg draws attention to new studies modelling the effects of even a limited nuclear exchange
involving approximately 100 Hiroshima-sized 15 kt bombs2 (by comparison it should be noted that the United States currently
deploys warheads in the range 100 to 477 kt, that is, individual warheads equivalent in yield to a range of 6 to 32 Hiroshimas).The
studies indicate that the soot from the fires produced would lead to a decrease in global temperature by 1.25 degrees Celsius for a
period of 6-8 years.3 In Westberg’s view: That is not global winter, but the nuclear
darkness will cause a deeper
drop in temperature than at any time during the last 1000 years. The temperature over the continents would
decrease substantially more than the global average. A decrease in rainfall over the continents would also follow…The period of
nuclear darkness will cause much greater decrease in grain production than 5% and it will continue for many years... hundreds
of millions of people will die from hunger…To make matters even worse, such amounts of smoke injected into the
stratosphere would cause a huge reduction in the Earth’s protective ozone.4 These, of course, are not the only consequences.
Whoever uses nuclear weapons in Korea, and especially the first-user, is doomed to possibly win a battle but will certainly lose the
political and psychological war, especially among Koreans. Reactors might also be targeted, causing further mayhem and
downwind radiation effects, superimposed on a smoking, radiating ruin left by nuclear next-use. Millions
of refugees
would flee the affected regions. The direct impacts, and the follow-on impacts on the global
economy via ecological and food insecurity, could make the present global financial crisis pale
by comparison. How the great powers, especially the nuclear weapons states respond to such a crisis, and in particular,
whether nuclear weapons are used in response to nuclear first-use, could make or break the global non proliferation and
disarmament regimes. There could be many unanticipated impacts on regional and global security
relationships5, with subsequent nuclear breakout and geopolitical turbulence, including possible loss-
of-control over fissile material or warheads in the chaos of nuclear war, and aftermath chain-reaction affects
involving other potential proliferant states. The Korean nuclear proliferation issue is not just a regional threat but a
global one that warrants priority consideration from the international community.

The internal link is reverse causal – Russia can either spoil or facilitate
negotiations.
Economy 18 – PhD @ U Michigan, Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies @ CFR
(Elizabeth, “Russia’s Role on North Korea: More Important than You Might Think,” Council on
Foreign Relations, https://www.cfr.org/blog/russias-role-north-korea-more-important-you-
might-think)//BB

In the context of resolving the North Korean nuclear challenge, Russia rarely makes the news. South Korea is
the reverse image; China is the enabler; the United States is the tough guy; and Japan is a one-man band seeking the return of its
abductees. What role, then, does Russia play? In fact, Russia plays a critical role as a behind-the-scenes
negotiator, spoiler, and unholy ally. It is not front and center, but it is central. The Negotiator: Moscow’s
greatest strength is its relatively equal relationship with both North Korea and South Korea .
While the United States, Japan, and China maintain closer ties with one side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) or the other, Russia
has maintained steady economic and political relations with both sides of the DMZ . Over the years,
as journalist Samuel Ramani has noted, Moscow has sought to carve out its own unique role in the
negotiation process, encouraging inter-Korean diplomacy as the primary means of resolving the
conflict. Like China, Russia has called on South Korea to downgrade its military relations with the United States, advocating that
Seoul reject deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile system and referring to it as a threat to Russian
security. At the same time Putin has publicly proclaimed North Korea’s nuclear program a “threat to security in North-east Asia”
and has urged the DPRK to refrain from provocative actions. While there is no evidence that Russia’s negotiation efforts have
proved decisive at any juncture, at the very least, it appears to have the ear of both parties. The Spoiler: Its efforts to
help bring about resolution through inter-Korean diplomacy notwithstanding, Russia also pursues its own interests, even when
they are at odds with other major actors. It has been a relatively unenthusiastic participant in sanctioning North Korea. As President
Trump pushed ever-tougher sanctions through the United Nations Security Council, he accused Russia of violating the sanctions to
aid North Korea. Russia watered down UN sanctions that sought to repatriate North Korean workers in order to shut down the
flow of money back to the DRPK; and some of its companies have been sanctioned for attempting to evade sanctions on the
provision of energy to Pyongyang. Russia’s aversion to sanctioning North Korea likely has several sources: it does not believe that
the sanctions will produce change in the DPRK’s behavior; it does not want to be seen as simply following the lead of the United
States; and, as the target of international sanctions itself, it does not want to support sanctions as matter of policy. The Unholy Ally:
Ultimately, Russia’s most important and often overlooked role with regard to North Korea may be its shared willingness to use
chemical weapons. While the United States and the rest of the world have focused attention on addressing the nuclear threat posed
by North Korea, North Korea’s stockpile of chemical weapons and failure to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention also pose a
significant threat to global security. In what was widely suspected to be a DRPK government plot, VX nerve agent was used in the
killing of Kim Jong-un’s half-brother in Malaysia; and Russia, itself, stands accused of using chemical weapons as a means of
individual assassinations (despite being a signatory to the treaty). In addition, over the past two years, Russia has backed the Syrian
government in its denials of chemical weapons use, and worked assiduously to prevent UN condemnations or western military
action in response. As President Trump and Chairman Kim meet in Singapore, Russia is unlikely to be leading cheers from the
sidelines. Like China, it has its own set of complicated interests with regard to North Korea that do not align fully with those of the
United States. Yet Moscow
cannot be ignored. Despite its relatively low public profile as a player in
the North Korea negotiations, Russia’s behind-the-scenes ability to throw a wrench in the
process should not be underestimated. And perhaps even more important, it will be an essential player in any future
discussions around North Korea’s chemical weapons stock.
2AC
2AC – Russia
 2AC – AT: Russia War Good
They’d retaliate to a US strike.
Dallas Boyd 16, Program Analyst, National Nuclear Security Administration, Spring 2016,
“Revealed Preference and the Minimum Requirements of Nuclear Deterrence,” Strategic
Studies Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1, p. 43-73

Central to the question of the minimum requirements of nuclear deterrence are the criteria for a
deterrent force to be considered “credible.” Conventional wisdom holds that several characteristics are
necessary to apply this label, among them survivable second-strike weapons and command and control
facilities. However, the definition of a secondstrike weapon is somewhat nebulous. At the most basic level, a
state is “nuclear capable” if it has sufficient fissile material and expertise to build a nuclear
explosive device. The next level is achieved when a state actually builds said device. More credible still is a confirmation to
that effect in the form of an explosive test, along with a demonstrated means of delivery such as a ballistic missile.41 Finally, a state
may take measures to place its weapons beyond the reach of an enemy attack, usually by deploying them on mobile launchers or
submarines or within hardened missile silos. Victor Cha, who served as a policy adviser on the National Security Council during
the George W. Bush administration, presents two additional criteria in an analysis of North Korea’s deterrent: a proven missile
reentry capability and evidence of warhead miniaturization. Without these capabilities, he writes, Pyongyang’s small arsenal “does
not come close to a credible nuclear deterrent,” and the regime “gets no added security from these weapons.”42

If the United States’ anxiety over nuclear terrorism is any guide, these requirements vastly overstate
the threshold for credibility. After all, the fear that North Korea might transfer a nuclear weapon to
terrorists has been central to the case for reversing its nuclear program . If these weapons pose a
catastrophic threat in the hands of extremists, on what basis should they be considered less threatening
when deployed by their original owners? In truth, Pyongyang can have confidence in its minimalist posture for two
reasons. First, contrary to the emphasis placed on strategic delivery vehicles, such platforms are not necessary for
nuclear retaliation. In extreme circumstances, a variety of unconventional delivery means can be used.
As the late political scientist Kenneth Waltz observed, “Everybody seems to believe that terrorists are capable
of hiding bombs. Why should states be unable to do what terrorist gangs are thought to be
capable of?”43 Second, no arbitrary deadline exists for a state to respond to a nuclear attack.
Retaliation may come weeks or even months after a first strike, providing ample time to prepare
nondeployed warheads or even construct a makeshift weapon from available nuclear material. Together
these concepts call into question the key assumption on which nuclear primacy rests: that a
nuclear counterstrike must come immediately and in the form of ballistic missile attacks, or not
at all. This questionable premise permits US leaders to entertain first strike scenarios that are wildly
at odds with their apparent tolerance for risk.

Russia will strike first.

Arbatov et al. 17 (Dr. Alexey Arbatov, PhD, full member of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, Head of the Center for International Security at the Institute of World Economy and
International Relations, and scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center; Maj.Gen.
Vladimir Dvorkin (retired), chief researcher at the Center for International Security at the
Institute of Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International
Relations, former director of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Fourth Central Research Institute;
and Dr. Petr Topychkanov, Senior Researcher in the SIPRI Nuclear Disarmament, Arms Control
and Non-proliferation Programme, former Senior Researcher at the Center for International
Security at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International
Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences; “Entanglement as a New Security Threat: A
Russian Perspective,” 11-8-2017, https://carnegie.ru/2017/11/08/entanglement-as-new-
security-threat-russian-perspective-pub-73163)//KMM
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF NON-NUCLEAR DISARMING STRIKES This threat of a non-nuclear disarming strike is a central topic
of discussion among Russian experts and government officials. The key bone of contention is whether the United
States might attempt a massive conventional counterforce attack against Russia (which would
inevitably be less effective than a nuclear counterforce strike), assuming that Moscow would be
reluctant to respond with nuclear weapons given the certainty of follow-on nuclear retaliation
by the United States. A particular issue of concern is that Russia’s emphasis on the threat of a conventional disarming strike
could be perceived in the United States as evidence of Moscow’s unwillingness to use nuclear arms to counter such a strike,
prompting the United States to start precisely this kind of conventional air campaign to attain escalation dominance in a local or
regional conflict. In
reality, however, and in contrast to such strategic calculations, Moscow might
retaliate early with a limited strategic nuclear strike in the event that the United States launched a
conventional counterforce operation against Russia’s nuclear forces (in accordance with
Russia’s launch-under-attack doctrine). Alternatively, Moscow might even preempt the United States
with selective strategic nuclear strikes to thwart U.S. naval and air forces that were engaged in
a conventional conflict and perceived as conducting a conventional counterforce offensive by
launching attacks against airfields, naval bases, and their C3I facilities. In the latter case,
Moscow would count on the United States’ responding selectively with “tailored strategic options”
even after nuclear explosions had occurred on its territory . In reality, the U.S. response might be
a large-scale nuclear attack against Russia, provoking a massive nuclear exchange. In any case, the
more concerned that Moscow is about the survivability of its nuclear forces, the more likely escalation becomes. Targets for a non-
nuclear disarming strike might include super-hardened command centers at various echelons, ICBM silos, light shelters for land-
based mobile missiles, exposed mobile ICBM launchers in the field, ballistic missile submarines at their bases, heavy bombers at
main and reserve airfields, communication sites on land, early-warning radars, command centers for the missile early-warning
system, and storage depots for nuclear weapons. The vulnerability of these targets depends on how well they are defended and
concealed, and on the effectiveness of countermeasures against incoming weapons. Early-warning radars, light shelters for mobile
ICBM launchers, missile submarines at their bases, and heavy bombers at airfields, as well as C3I centers and sites that are not
In the
deeply buried, can be incapacitated relatively easily if the attacking weapons have sufficient range and good targeting.
event of a local or regional conventional conflict between Russia and NATO in Eastern Europe
or the Arctic, airstrikes and cruise missile attacks against these sites would most likely cause
rapid escalation to a nuclear war. In particular, early U.S. strikes against such targets might
not be deliberate since Russian strategic submarines and bombers are kept at the same bases as
general-purpose naval vessels and aircraft, and strikes designed to target the latter might
inadvertently destroy the former. Unlike the logic that may be behind Chinese policies, the co-location of nuclear and
general-purpose forces in the USSR and now in Russia was and is prompted by economic and administrative considerations, not by
the strategic goal of trying to deter U.S. non-nuclear strikes against Russian general-purpose forces through the threat of nuclear
escalation. The
interception of heavy and medium dual-use bombers in flight during a
conventional conflict also makes entanglement virtually inevitable. These bombers might take part in
conventional missions, but might also be sent out on patrol with nuclear weapons to decrease their vulnerability in case the conflict
escalates. If these aircraft were destroyed while carrying nuclear weapons, there would be a real risk of escalation. A similar risk
could arise from conventional threats to Russian nuclear-armed ballistic and cruise missile submarines in the Arctic, North Atlantic,
and Pacific Oceans.

Either strikes fail or they’ll be nuclear.

Lieber and Press 16 (Keir A. Lieber, Associate Professor, Edmund A. Walsh School of
Foreign Service, Georgetown University; and Daryl G. Press, Associate Professor of
Government, Dartmouth College, Coordinator of War and Peace Studies at the John Sloan
Dickey Center; “The New Era of Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence, and Conflict,” Strategic Studies
Quarterly , 10(5), 2016, JSTOR)//KMM
“Nuclear weapons are unnecessary; conventional weapons can do the job.” A second criticism is that
retaining (or improving) specific US nuclear weapons for the counterforce mission is unnecessary. The idea is that modern
delivery systems are now so accurate that even conventional weapons can reliably destroy
hardened targets. The key, according to this argument, is simply knowing the location of the target: if you know where it is,
you can kill it with conventional weapons; if you do not, even nuclear weapons will not help. The implication is that even though
counterforce capabilities are crucial, nuclear weapons are not needed for this mission. This criticism is
wrong, because
there is a substantial difference between the expected effectiveness of conventional strikes and
the expected effectiveness of nuclear strikes against a range of plausible counterforce targets.
Even the most powerful conventional weapons—for example, the GBU-57 “Massive Ordnance Penetrator”—have an explosive
power comparable to “only” 3–5 tons of TNT. By comparison, the least-powerful (according to open sources) nuclear weapon in the
US arsenal explodes with the equivalent power of roughly 300 tons of TNT.10 The higher yield of nuclear weapons translates to
greater destructive radius and higher likelihood of target destruction.11 Against
ordinary targets, the accuracy and
destructive power of conventional weapons is sufficient. Against nuclear targets—if success is
defined by the ability to destroy every weapon targeted—the much greater destructive radius of
nuclear weapons provides a critical margin of error. Furthermore, in real-world circumstances
delivery systems may not achieve their usual levels of accuracy. Jammers that degrade the
effectiveness of guidance systems and active defenses that impede aircraft crews or deflect
incoming missiles can undermine accuracy. Even mundane things like bad weather can degrade
wartime accuracy. Against hardened targets, conventional weapons must score a direct hit,
whereas close is good enough when it comes to nuclear weapons . Lastly, many key
counterforce targets are mobile. In those cases, nuclear weapons allow for greater “target
location uncertainty” (when the target has moved since being observed) compared to their
conventional counterparts.12 It is true that modern guidance systems have given conventional
weapons far greater counterforce capabilities than ever before, but there is still a sizable gap
between what nuclear and conventional weapons can accomplish.

Even minimal nuclear use would cause extinction.

Toon et al. 07 (Owen B. Toon and Charles Bardeen, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic
Sciences, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder; Alan
Robock, Luke Oman, and Stenchikov, Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers
University; Richard P. Turco, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of
California, Los Angeles, “NUCLEAR WAR: Consequences of Regional-Scale Nuclear Conflicts,”
Science, Vol. 315. no. 5816, 3-2-2007, p.1224-1225, HighWire)//KMM

The world may no longer face a serious threat of global nuclear warfare, but regional conflicts
continue. Within this milieu, acquiring nuclear weapons has been considered a potent political,
military, and social tool (1-3). National ownership of nuclear weapons offers perceived
international status and insurance against aggression at a modest financial cost. Against this backdrop,
we provide a quantitative assessment of the potential for casualties in a regional-scale nuclear conflict, or a terrorist attack, and the associated
environmental impacts (4, 5). Eight nations are known to have nuclear weapons. In addition, North Korea may have a small, but growing, arsenal. Iran
Of great concern,
appears to be seeking nuclear weapons capability, but it probably needs several years to obtain enough fissionable material.

32 other nations--including Brazil, Argentina, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan--have sufficient fissionable materials to
produce weapons (1, 6). A de facto nuclear arms race has emerged in Asia between China, India, and Pakistan, which could expand to
include North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan (1). In the Middle East, a nuclear confrontation between Israel and Iran would be fearful. Saudi
Arabia and Egypt could also seek nuclear weapons to balance Iran and Israel. Nuclear arms programs in South America,
notably in Brazil and Argentina, were ended by several treaties in the 1990s (6). We can hope
that these agreements will hold and will serve as a model for other regions, despite Brazil's new,
large uranium enrichment facilities. Nuclear arsenals containing 50 or more weapons of low yield [15 kilotons (kt), equivalent to
the Hiroshima bomb] are relatively easy to build (1, 6). India and Pakistan, the smallest nuclear powers, probably have such arsenals, although no
nuclear state has ever disclosed its inventory of warheads (7). Modern weapons are compact and lightweight and are readily transported (by car, truck,
missile, plane, or boat) (8). The basic concepts of weapons design can be found on of the Internet. The only serious obstacle to constructing a bomb is
the limited availability of purified fissionable fuels. There
are many political, economic, and social factors that
could trigger a regional-scale nuclear conflict, plus many scenarios for the conduct of the
ensuing war. We assumed (4) that the densest population centers in each country--usually in megacities--are attacked. We did not evaluate
specific military targets and related casualties. We considered a nuclear exchange involving 100 weapons of 15-kt yield each, that is, ~0.3% of the total
number of existing weapons (4). India and Pakistan, for instance, have previously tested nuclear weapons and are now thought to have between 109
and 172 weapons of unknown yield (9). Fatalities were estimated by means of a standard population database for a number of countries that might be
targeted in a regional conflict (see figure, above). For instance, such an exchange between India and Pakistan (10) could produce about 21 million
fatalities--about half as many as occurred globally during World War II. The
direct effects of thermal radiation and nuclear
blasts, as well as gamma-ray and neutron radiation within the first few minutes of the blast, would cause most casualties.
Extensive damage to infrastructure, contamination by long-lived radionuclides, and
psychological trauma would likely result in the indefinite abandonment of large areas leading
to severe economic and social repercussions. Fires ignited by nuclear bursts would release
copious amounts of light-absorbing smoke into the upper atmosphere. If 100 small nuclear weapons were
detonated within cities, they could generate 1 to 5 million tons of carbonaceous smoke particles (4), darkening the sky and affecting the atmosphere
more than major volcanic eruptions like Mt. Pinatubo (1991) or Tambora (1815) (5). Carbonaceous smoke particles are transported by winds
throughout the atmosphere but also induce circulations in response to solar heating. Simulations (5) predict that such radiative-dynamical interactions
Smoke
would loft and stabilize the smoke aerosol, which would allow it to persist in the middle and upper atmosphere for a decade.

emissions of 100 low-yield urban explosions in a regional nuclear conflict would generate
substantial global-scale climate anomalies, although not as large as in previous "nuclear
winter" scenarios for a full-scale war (11, 12). However, indirect effects on surface land temperatures,
precipitation rates, and growing season lengths (see figure, below) would be likely to degrade
agricultural productivity to an extent that historically has led to famines in Africa, India, and Japan after the
1783-1784 Laki eruption (13) or in the northeastern United States and Europe after the Tambora eruption of 1815 (5). Climatic anomalies

could persist for a decade or more because of smoke stabilization, far longer than in previous
nuclear winter calculations or after volcanic eruptions. Studies of the consequences of full-scale nuclear war show that
indirect effects of the war could cause more casualties than direct ones, perhaps eliminating the
majority of the world's population (11, 12). Indirect effects such as damage to transportation,
energy, medical, political, and social infrastructure could be limited to the combatant nations in
a regional war. However, climate anomalies would threaten the world outside the combat zone.
The predicted smoke emissions and fatalities per kiloton of explosive yield are roughly 100
times those expected from estimates for full-scale nuclear attacks with high-yield weapons (4).
Unfortunately, the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has failed to prevent the expansion of nuclear states. A bipartisan group including
two former U.S. secretaries of state, a former secretary of defense, and a former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee has recently pointed out
that nuclear deterrence is no longer effective and may become dangerous (3). Terrorists, for instance, are outside the bounds of deterrence strategies.
Mutually assured destruction may not function in a world with large numbers of nuclear states
with widely varying political goals and philosophies. New nuclear states may not have well-
developed safeguards and controls to prevent nuclear accidents or unauthorized launches . This
bipartisan group detailed numerous steps to inhibit or prevent the spread of nuclear weapons (3). Its list, with which we concur, includes removing
nuclear weapons from alert status to reduce the danger of an accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon; reducing the size of nuclear forces in
all states; eliminating tactical nuclear weapons; ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty worldwide; securing all stocks of weapons, weapons-
usable plutonium, and highly enriched uranium everywhere in the world; controlling uranium enrichment along with guaranteeing that uranium for
nuclear power reactors could be obtained from controlled international reserves; safeguarding spent fuel from reactors producing electricity; halting
the production of fissile material for weapons globally; phasing out the use of highly enriched uranium in civil commerce and research facilities and
rendering the materials safe; and resolving regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers. The analysis summarized here
shows that the
world has reached a crossroads. Having survived the threat of global nuclear war
between the superpowers so far, the world is increasingly threatened by the prospects of
regional nuclear war. The consequences of regional-scale nuclear conflicts are unexpectedly
large, with the potential to become global catastrophes. The combination of nuclear
proliferation, political instability, and urban demographics may constitute one of the greatest
dangers to the stability of society since the dawn of humans .

Strikes fail.
Bill Gertz 18, senior editor and reporter for Washington Beacon and the Washington Post,
9/6/18, “U.S. Lacks Nuclear Weapon for Hardened Underground Targets,”
https://freebeacon.com/national-security/u-s-lacks-nuclear-weapon-hardened-underground-
targets/

Trump administration plans

to upgrade the military's aging nuclear arsenal do not include a new weapon
that experts say is needed to blast deeply buried, hardened targets used by Russia, China,
North Korea, and Iran to house their leaders and weapons. The Air Force announced recently
that a B-2 bomber at Nellis Air Force Base conducted a simulated test of the modernized B61
nuclear gravity bomb that the Pentagon says will have some earth-penetrating capability. However, the B61 Mod 12
will not be capable of exploding through hundreds of feet of rock or concrete that protects
Russia's Kasvinsky Mountain nuclear command post, or key underground command centers in
the 3,000-mile-long Great Underground Wall complex that houses China's nuclear forces and
leaders. North Korea and Iran also have dug deep underground bunkers to hide leaders and
protect weapons systems from precision aircraft and missile strikes.

No AI impact.
Andrew J. Lohn 18, Ph.D. in electrical engineering, University of California Santa Cruz,
engineer at the RAND Corporation and a professor of public policy at the Pardee RAND
Graduate School, et al., 4/30/18, “Will artificial intelligence undermine nuclear stability?”
https://thebulletin.org/2018/04/will-artificial-intelligence-undermine-nuclear-stability/

Artificial intelligence and nuclear war have been fiction clichés for decades. Today’s AI is
impressive to be sure, but specialized, and remains a far cry from computers that become self-
aware and turn against their creators. At the same time, popular culture does not do justice to the threats that
modern AI indeed presents, such as its potential to make nuclear war more likely even if it never exerts direct control over nuclear
weapons.¶ Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the military significance of AI when he declared
in September that the country that leads in artificial intelligence will eventually rule the world.
He may be the only leader to have put it so bluntly, but other world powers appear to be thinking similarly. Both China and
the United States have announced ambitious efforts to harness AI for military applications,
stoking fears of an incipient arms race.¶ In the same September speech, Putin said that AI comes with “colossal opportunities” as
well as “threats that are difficult to predict.” The gravest of those threats may involve nuclear stability—as we describe in a new
RAND publication that outlines a few of the ways in which stability could be strained. ¶ Strategic stability exists when
governments aren’t tempted to use nuclear threats or coercion against their adversaries. It involves
more than just maintaining a credible ability to retaliate after an enemy attack. In addition to that deterrent, nuclear stability
requires assurance and reassurance. When a nation extends a nuclear security guarantee to allies, the allies must be
assured that nukes will be launched in their defense even if the nation extending the guarantee must put its own cities at risk.
Adversaries need to be reassured that forces built up for deterrence and to protect allies will not be used without provocation.
Deterrence, assurance, and reassurance are often at odds with each other, making nuclear stability difficult to maintain even when
governments have no interest in attacking each other.¶ In a world where increasing numbers of rival states are nuclear-armed, the
situation becomes almost unmanageable. In the 1970s, four of the five declared nuclear powers primarily targeted their weapons on
the fifth, the Soviet Union (Beijing, after its 1969 border clashes with the Soviet Union, feared Moscow much more than
Washington). It was a relatively simple bilateral stand-off between the Bolsheviks and their many adversaries. Today, nine nuclear
powers are entangled in overlapping strategic rivalries—including Israel, which has not declared the nuclear arsenal that it is
widely believed to possess. While the United States, the United Kingdom, and France still worry about Russia, they also fret about
an increasingly potent China. Beijing’s rivals include not just the United States and Russia but India as well. India fears China too,
but primarily frets about Pakistan. And everyone is worried about North Korea.¶ In
such a complex and dynamic
environment, teams of strategists are required to navigate conflict situations—to identify options and
understand their ramifications. Could AI make this job easier? With AI now beating human professionals in the ancient Chinese
strategy game Go, as well as in games of bluffing such as poker, countries
may be tempted to build machines that
could “sit” at the table amid nuclear conflicts and act as strategists.¶ Artificially intelligent
machines may prove to be less error-prone than humans in many contexts. But for tasks such as
navigating conflict situations, that moment is still far off in the future. Much effort must be expended
before machines can—or should—be relied on for consistent performance of the extraordinary task of helping the world avoid
nuclear war. Recent research
suggests that it is surprisingly simple to trick an AI system into
reaching incorrect conclusions when an adversary gets to control some of the inputs , such as how a
vehicle is painted before it is photographed.
2AC – USML Procedural
 2AC – DSCA
Here’s evidence – Javelin was an FMS.
DSCA 18 (https://www.dsca.mil/major-arms-sales/ukraine-javelin-missiles-and-command-
launch-units)

WASHINGTON, Mar. 1, 2018 - The

State Department has made a determination approving a possible
Foreign Military Sale to Ukraine of Javelin Missiles and Javelin Command Launch Units (CLUs) for
an estimated cost of $47 million. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency delivered the required certification notifying Congress
of this possible sale today. The Government of Ukraine has requested to buy two hundred ten (210) Javelin Missiles and thirty-
seven (37) Javelin Command Launch Units (CLUs) (includes two (2) Javelin CLUs to be used as spares). Also included are Basic
Skill Trainers (BST); United States Government and contractor technical assistance, transportation, training and other related
elements of logistics and program support. The total estimated cost is not to exceed $47 million. This proposed sale will contribute
to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by improving the security of Ukraine. The Javelin system will help
Ukraine build its long-term defense capacity to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity in order to meet its national defense
requirements. Ukraine will have no difficulty absorbing this system into its armed forces. The proposed sale of this equipment and
support will not alter the basic military balance in the region. The prime contractors will be Raytheon/Lockheed Martin Javelin
Joint Venture of Orlando, Florida and Tucson, Arizona. However, these missiles are being provided from U.S. Army stocks and the
CLUs will be obtained from on-hand Special Defense Acquisition Fund (SDAF)-purchased stocks. There are no known offset
agreements proposed in conjunction with this potential sale. Implementation of this proposed sale will require U.S. Government
and/or contractor representatives to travel to Ukraine temporarily in order to conduct training. There will be no adverse impact on
U.S. defense readiness as a result of this proposed sale. This notice of a potential sale is required by law and does not mean the sale
has been concluded. All questions regarding this proposed Foreign Military Sale should be directed to the State Department's
Bureau of Political Military Affairs, Office of Congressional and Public Affairs, pm-cpa@state.gov.
2AC – K
 2AC – Utilitarianism
Extinction outweighs – any risk is a reason to err aff.
Seth D. Baum and Anthony M. Barrett 18. Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. 2018. “Global Catastrophes: The Most
Extreme Risks.” Risk in Extreme Environments: Preparing, Avoiding, Mitigating, and Managing, edited by Vicki Bier, Routledge,
pp. 174–184.

2. What Is GCR And Why Is It Important? Taken

literally, a global catastrophe can be any event that is in some
way catastrophic across the globe. This suggests a rather low threshold for what counts as a global catastrophe.
An event causing just one death on each continent (say, from a jet-setting assassin) could rate as a global catastrophe, because surely these deaths
would be catastrophic for the deceased and their loved ones. However,
in common usage, a global catastrophe would
be catastrophic for a significant portion of the globe. Minimum thresholds have variously been set around ten thousand
to ten million deaths or $10 billion to $10 trillion in damages (Bostrom and Ćirković 2008), or death of one quarter of the human population (Atkinson
1999; Hempsell 2004). Others
have emphasized catastrophes that cause long-term declines in the
trajectory of human civilization (Beckstead 2013), that human civilization does not recover from (Maher
and Baum 2013), that drastically reduce humanity’s potential for future achievements (Bostrom 2002,

using the term “existential risk”), or that result in human extinction (Matheny 2007; Posner 2004). A
common theme across all these treatments of GCR is that some catastrophes are vastly more
important than others. Carl Sagan was perhaps the first to recognize this, in his commentary on nuclear winter (Sagan 1983).
Without nuclear winter, a global nuclear war might kill several hundred million people. This is
obviously a major catastrophe, but humanity would presumably carry on. However, with
nuclear winter, per Sagan, humanity could go extinct. The loss would be not just an additional four
billion or so deaths, but the loss of all future generations. To paraphrase Sagan, the loss would be
billions and billions of lives, or even more. Sagan estimated 500 trillion lives, assuming
humanity would continue for ten million more years, which he cited as typical for a successful
species. Sagan’s 500 trillion number may even be an underestimate. The analysis here takes an adventurous
turn, hinging on the evolution of the human species and the long-term fate of the universe. On these long time scales, the descendants of contemporary
humans may no longer be recognizably “human”. The issue then is whether the descendants are still worth caring about, whatever they are. If they
are, then it begs the question of how many of them there will be. Barring major global catastrophe, Earth will remain habitable for about one billion
more years 2 until the Sun gets too warm and large. The rest of the Solar System, Milky Way galaxy, universe, and (if it exists) the multiverse will
An open
remain habitable for a lot longer than that (Adams and Laughlin 1997), should our descendants gain the capacity to migrate there.

question in astronomy is whether it is possible for the descendants of humanity to continue

living for an infinite length of time or instead merely an astronomically large but finite length
of time (see e.g. Ćirković 2002; Kaku 2005). Either way, the stakes with global catastrophes could be much larger
than the loss of 500 trillion lives. Debates about the infinite vs. the merely astronomical are of
theoretical interest (Ng 1991; Bossert et al. 2007), but they have limited practical significance. This can be
seen when evaluating GCRs from a standard risk-equals-probability-times-magnitude
framework. Using Sagan’s 500 trillion lives estimate, it follows that reducing the probability of
global catastrophe by a mere one-in-500-trillion chance is of the same significance as saving one
human life. Phrased differently, society should try 500 trillion times harder to prevent a global
catastrophe than it should to save a person’s life. Or, preventing one million deaths is
equivalent to a one-in500-million reduction in the probability of global catastrophe. This
suggests society should make extremely large investment in GCR reduction, at the expense of
virtually all other objectives. Judge and legal scholar Richard Posner made a similar point in monetary terms (Posner 2004). Posner
used $50,000 as the value of a statistical human life (VSL) and 12 billion humans as the total loss of life (double the 2004 world population); he
describes both figures as significant underestimates. Multiplying them gives $600 trillion as an underestimate of the value of preventing global
catastrophe. For comparison, the United States government typically uses a VSL of around one to ten million dollars (Robinson 2007). Multiplying a
society
$10 million VSL with 500 trillion lives gives $5x1021 as the value of preventing global catastrophe. But even using “just" $600 trillion,

should be willing to spend at least that much to prevent a global catastrophe, which converts to being willing to spend at least $1
million for a one-in-500-million reduction in the probability of global catastrophe. Thus while
reasonable disagreement exists on how large of a VSL to use and how much to count future
generations, even low-end positions suggest vast resource allocations should be redirected to
reducing GCR. This conclusion is only strengthened when considering the astronomical size of
the stakes, but the same point holds either way. The bottom line is that, as long as something along the lines of the
standard riskequals-probability-times-magnitude framework is being used, then even tiny
GCR reductions merit significant effort. This point holds especially strongly for risks of
catastrophes that would cause permanent harm to global human civilization. The discussion
thus far has assumed that all human lives are valued equally. This assumption is not
universally held. People often value some people more than others, favoring themselves, their family and
friends, their compatriots, their generation, or others whom they identify with. Great debates rage on across moral

philosophy, economics, and other fields about how much people should value others who are distant
in space, time, or social relation, as well as the unborn members of future generations. This debate is crucial for all valuations of risk,
including GCR. Indeed, if each of us only cares about our immediate selves, then global catastrophes may not be especially important, and we
probably have better things to do with our time than worry about them. While everyone has the right to their own views
and feelings, we find that the strongest arguments are for the widely held position that all human
lives should be valued equally. This position is succinctly stated in the United States Declaration of Independence, updated in the
1848 Declaration of Sentiments: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and 3 women are created equal”. Philosophers speak

of an agent-neutral, objective “view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986) or a “veil of ignorance” (Rawls 1971) in
which each person considers what is best for society irrespective of which member of society
they happen to be. Such a perspective suggests valuing everyone equally, regardless of who
they are or where or when they live. This in turn suggests a very high value for reducing GCR,
or a high degree of priority for GCR reduction efforts.
 2AC – Bleiker
Root cause explanations of international politics don’t exist – methodological
pluralism is necessary to reclaim IR as emancipatory praxis and avoid endless
political violence.
Bleiker 14 [Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland,
“International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique,” International Studies
Review, Volume 16, Issue 2, 2014, pages 325–327]
This book is part of an increasing trend of scholarly works that have embraced poststructural critique but want to ground it in more
positive political foundations, while retaining a reluctance to return to the positivist tendencies that implicitly underpin much of
constructivist research. The path that Daniel Levine has carved out is innovative, sophisticated, and convincing. A superb scholarly
achievement. For Levine, the
key challenge in international relations (IR) scholarship is what he calls “unchecked
reification”: the widespread and dangerous process of forgetting “the distinction between
theoretical concepts and the real-world things they mean to describe or to which they refer” (p. 15). The
dangers are real, Levine stresses, because IR deals with some of the most difficult issues, from
genocides to war. Upholding one subjective position without critical scrutiny can thus have far-
reaching consequences. Following Theodor Adorno—who is the key theoretical influence on this book—Levine takes a
post-positive position and assumes that the world cannot be known outside of our human perceptions and the values that are
inevitably intertwined with them. His ultimate goal is to overcome reification, or, to be more precise, to recognize it as an inevitable
aspect of thought so that its dangerous consequences can be mitigated. Levine proceeds in three stages: First he reviews several
decades of IR theories to resurrect critical moments when scholars displayed an acute awareness of the dangers of reification. He
refreshingly breaks down distinctions between conventional and progressive scholarship, for he detects
self-reflective and
critical moments in scholars that are usually associated with straightforward positivist positions (such as E.H.
Carr, Hans Morgenthau, or Graham Allison). But Levine also shows how these moments of self-reflexivity never lasted long and
were driven out by the compulsion to offer systematic and scientific knowledge. The second stage of Levine's inquiry outlines
why IR scholars regularly closed down critique. Here, he points to a range of factors and phenomena, from peer review processes
to the speed at which academics are meant to publish. And here too, he eschews conventional wisdom, showing that work
conducted in the wake of the third debate, whileexplicitly post-positivist and critiquing the reifying tendencies of
existing IR scholarship, often lacked critical self-awareness. As a result, Levine believes that many of the
respective authors failed to appreciate sufficiently that “reification is a consequence of all
thinking—including itself” (p. 68). The third objective of Levine's book is also the most interesting one. Here, he outlines the
path toward what he calls “sustainable critique”: a form of self-reflection that can counter the dangers of reification. Critique,
for him, is not just something that is directed outwards, against particular theories or theorists . It is
also inward-oriented, ongoing, and sensitive to the “limitations of thought itself” (p. 12). The
challenges that such a sustainable critique faces are formidable. Two stand out: First, if the natural tendency to forget the origins
and values of our concepts are as strong as Levine and other Adorno-inspired theorists believe they are, then how can we actually
recognize our own reifying tendencies? Are we not all inevitably and subconsciously caught in a web of meanings from which we
cannot escape? Second, if one constantly questions one's own perspective, does one not fall into a relativism that loses the ability to
establish the kind of stable foundations that are necessary for political action? Adorno has, of course, been critiqued as relentlessly
negative, even by his second-generation Frankfurt School successors (from Jürgen Habermas to his IR interpreters, such as Andrew
Linklater and Ken Booth). The response that Levine has to these two sets of legitimate criticisms are, in my view, both convincing
and useful at a practical level. He
starts off with depicting reification not as a flaw that is meant to be
expunged, but as an a priori condition for scholarship. The challenge then is not to let it go unchecked.
Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine's sustainable critique. He borrows from what
Adorno calls a “constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine
advocates multiple methods to understand the same event or phenomena . He writes of the need
to validate “multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101–102). In this model,
a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms , trying to
understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method can ever
adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand. But each should, in a way,
recognize and capture details or perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms,
this means combining a range of methods even when—or, rather, precisely when—they are
deemed incompatible. They can range from poststructual deconstruction to the tools pioneered
and championed by positivist social sciences. The benefit of such a methodological polyphony
is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives . Once the false hope of a
smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives
can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification
may be “checked at the source” and this is how a “critically reflexive moment might thus be
rendered sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine's approach is not really post-foundational
but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels
here with arguments advanced by assemblage thinking and complexity theory—links that could have been explored in more detail.
 2AC – AT: Reps Shape Reality
Impact is a slippery slope – justifying something is empirically not the same as
causing it.
Stacie E. Goddard & Ronald R. Krebs 15, Goddard, Jane Bishop Associate Professor of Political Science at
Wellesley College; Krebs, Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in the Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of Political
Science at the University of Minnesota, “Securitization Forum: The Transatlantic Divide: Why Securitization Has Not
Secured a Place in American IR, Why It Should, and How It Can,” Duck of Minerva, 9-18-2015,
http://duckofminerva.com/2015/09/securitization-forum-the-transatlantic-divide-why-securitization-has-not-
secured-a-place-in-american-ir-why-it-should-and-how-it-can.html
Securitization theory has rightly garnered much attention among European scholars of international relations. Its basic claims are powerful: that security threats are not given,
but require active construction; that the boundaries of “security” are malleable; that the declaration that a certain problem lies within the realm of security is itself a productive
political act; and that “security” issues hold a trump card, demanding disproportionate resources and silencing alternative perspectives. Securitization thus highlights a
familiar, even ubiquitous, political process that had received little attention in the international relations or comparative foreign policy literatures. It gave scholars a theoretical
language, if not quite a set of coherent theoretical tools, with which to make sense of how a diverse set of issues, from migration to narcotics flows to global climate change,
sometimes came to be treated as matters of national and global security and thereby—and this is where securitization’s critical edge came to the fore—impeded reasoned
political debate. No surprise that, as Jarrod and Eric observe, securitization has been the focus of so many articles in the EJIR—and even more in such journals as the Review of

International Studies and Security Dialogue. But there are (good) substantive and (not so good) sociological reasons that
securitization has failed to gain traction in North America. First, and most important, securitization
describes a process but leaves us well short of (a) a fully specified causal theory that (b) takes
proper account of the politics of rhetorical contestation. According to the foundational theorists of the Copenhagen School, actors,
usually elites, transform the social order from one of normal, everyday politics into a Schmittian world of crisis by identifying a dire threat to the political community. They

conceive of this “securitizing move” in linguistic terms, as a speech act . As Ole Waever (1995: 55) argues, “By saying
it [security], something is done (as in betting, a promise, naming a ship). . . . [T]he word ‘security’ is the act . . .” [emphasis added]. Securitization is a powerful discursive

Securitization
process that constitutes social reality. Countless articles and books have traced this process, and its consequences, in particular policy domains.

presents itself as a causal account. But its mechanisms remain obscure, as do the conditions
under which it operates. Why is speaking security so powerful? How do mere words twist and transform the
social order? Does the invocation of security prompt a visceral emotional response? Are speech
acts persuasive, by using well-known tropes to convince audiences that they must seek
protection? Or does securitization operate through the politics of rhetorical coercion, silencing
potential opponents? In securitization accounts, speech acts often seem to be magical
incantations that upend normal politics through pathways shrouded in mystery. Equally
unclear is why some securitizing moves resonate, while others [are ignored] fall on deaf ears. Certainly
not all attempts to construct threats succeed, and this is true of both traditional military concerns as well as “new” security issues. Both
neoconservatives and structural realists in the United States have long insisted that conflict with
China is inevitable, yet China has over the last 25 years been more opportunity than threat in
US political discourse—despite these vigorous and persistent securitizing moves. In very
recent years, the balance has shifted, and the China threat has started to catch on: linguistic
processes alone cannot account for this change. The US military has repeatedly declared that global climate change has profound
implications for national security—but that has hardly cast aside climate change deniers, many of whom are ironically foreign policy hawks supposedly deferential to the
uniformed military. Authoritative speakers have varied in the efficacy of their securitizing moves. While George W. Bush powerfully framed the events of 9/11 as a global war
against American values, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a more gifted orator, struggled to convince a skeptical public that Germany presented an imminent threat to the United

After thirty years as an active research program, securitization theory has hardly begun to
States.

offer acceptable answers to these questions. Brief references to “facilitating conditions” won’t
cut it. You don’t have to subscribe to a covering-law conception of theory to find these
questions important or to find securitization’s answers unsatisfying . A large part of the problem, we believe, lies in
securitization’s silence on the politics of security. Its foundations in speech act theory have yielded an oddly apolitical theoretical framework. In its seminal formulation, the

by
Copenhagen school emphasized the internal linguistic rules that must be followed for a speech act to be recognized as competent. Yet as Thierry Balzacq argues,

treating securitization as a purely rule-driven process, the Copenhagen school ignores the politics of
securitization, reducing “security to a conventional procedure such as marriage or betting in which the ‘felicity circumstances’ (conditions of success) must fully
 Absent from this picture are fierce rhetorical battles, where coalitions
prevail for the act to go through” (2005:172).

counter securitizing moves with their own appeals that strike more or less deeply at underlying
narratives. Absent as well are the public intellectuals and media, who question and critique
securitizing moves sometimes (and not others), sometimes to good effect (and sometimes with little impact).
The audience itself—whether the mass public or a narrower elite stratum— is stripped of all
agency. Speaking security, even when the performance is competent, does not sweep this
politics away. Only by delving into this politics can we shed light on the mysteries of securitization. We see rhetorical politics as constituted less by singular
“securitizing moves” than by “contentious conversation”—to use Charles Tilly’s phrase. To this end, we would urge securitization theorists, as we recently have elsewhere, to
move towards a “pragmatic” model that rests on four analytical wagers: that actors are both strategic and social; that legitimation works by imparting meaning to political
action; that legitimation is laced through with contestation; and that the power of language emerges through contentious dialogue. We are heartened that our ambivalence
about securitization—the ways in which we find it by turns appealing and dissatisfying—and our vision for how to move forward have in the last decade been echoed by
(mostly) European colleagues. These critics have laid out a research agenda that would, if taken up, produce more satisfying, and more deeply political, theoretical accounts. In
our own work, both individual and collective, we have tried to advance that research agenda. So long as securitization theorists resist defining the theory’s scope and

Second,
mechanisms, and so long as it remains wedded to apolitical underpinnings, we think it unlikely to gain a broad following on this side of the pond.

securitization has been held back by another way in which it is apolitical—this time thanks to its Schmittian
commitments and political vision. Successful securitization, in seminal accounts, replaces normal patterns of

politics with the world of the exception, in which contest has no place. They imagine security as the ultimate
trump card. But, in reality, the divide is not nearly so stark. Security does not crowd out all
other spending priorities—or states would spend on nothing but defense and “securitized”
issues. Nor does simply declaring something a matter of national security guarantee its
funding—or global climate change counter-measures, including research on renewable energies, would be well-funded. Nor are security issues
somehow aloof from politics: politics has never truly stopped “at the water’s edge.”
Securitization considers only the politics of security. Its strangely dichotomous optic cannot see
or make sense of the politics within security. In ignoring the politics within security, securitization is of course in good company. Realists of
all stripes have paid little attention to domestic political contest, except as a distraction from structural imperatives. But while realism is unquestionably a powerful first-cut,

this inattention to the politics within security is also among the reasons so many have found it
wanting. As Arnold Wolfers long ago observed, some degree of insecurity is the normal state of affairs. But “some may find the danger to which they are exposed
entirely normal and in line with their modest security expectations while others consider it unbearable to live with these same dangers.” And states, he further argues, do not
actually maximize security—almost ever. “Even when there has been no question that armaments would mean more security, the cost in taxes, the reduction in social benefits,

A securitization perspective renders all

or the sheer discomfort involved have militated effectively against further effort” (1962:151, 153).

this politics within security inexplicable. And yet, as Wolfers saw half a century ago, it is crucial.

Reps don’t shape reality.

Thierry Balzacq o5, 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 – AT: Intervention
The age of intervention is over – budget constraints, declining approval, and
geopolitical shifts make offensive military operations obsolete – the debate is
only about modelling.
Traub 12. (James Traub is a columnist at foreignpolicy.com, a fellow at the Center on
International Cooperation and the author of “The Freedom Agenda.” The End of American
Intervention. February 18, 2012. www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-
american-intervention.html?mcubz=0)

FOR the last 20 years we have lived amid the furious clangor of war — and debates over how to wage it.
The intense and urgent clashes in the 1990s over “humanitarian intervention” gave way to pitched battles over “regime
change” and “democracy promotion” after 9/11, and then to arguments over “counterinsurgency strategy,” a new battle for hearts
and minds, as Barack Obama ramped up the war in Afghanistan. The foreign policy debate has often felt like an
ideological cockfight. And now, although we have not yet realized it, that era has come to an
end. For proof, you need look no further than the Pentagon’s new “strategic guidance” document,
issued last month in the wake of Mr. Obama’s pledge to cut $485 billion from the defense
budget over the coming decade. It repeats many of the core objectives of recent American national security strategy:
defeat Al Qaeda, deter traditional aggressors, counter the threat from unconventional weapons. But it also states, “In the
aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States will emphasize nonmilitary
means and military-to-military cooperation to address instability and reduce the demand for
significant U.S. force commitments to stability operations.” It goes on to note that “U.S. forces will
no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.” With this paragraph
military planners signaled an abrupt end to the post-9/11 era of intervention. Only a few years
ago the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — wars of occupation, nation-building and counterinsurgency — looked
like the face of modern conflict. Now they don’t. Americans don’t believe in them and can’t
afford them anymore. The strategic guidance hit one other very new note: While American forces will continue to maintain
a significant presence in the Middle East, the planners wrote, “We will of necessity rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific region.” This
is bureaucratic code for “we will stand up to China,” which, the Obama administration has concluded, has superseded Al Qaeda as
the chief future threat to American national security. To say this is not merely to assert that one region has taken precedence over
another but that the traditional threat of the expansionist state has supplanted the threat of the stateless actor that emerged after
9/11. Of course, global problems like climate change, epidemic disease, nuclear proliferation and terrorism won’t go away. But in
matters of war and peace, we seem to be returning to a more familiar world in which great powers maneuver for advantage. We left
that world behind, or so we thought, with the end of the cold war, which deprived America of its traditional enemy and thus raised
the question of whether and when we would resort to force. The answer came in the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration
felt compelled to respond to political chaos in Haiti and mass violence in the Balkans. Force could be used in the pursuit of justice.
During the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush vowed to put an end to these moralistic enterprises and to focus instead on
great-power relations. But 9/11 turned those plans upside down. Indeed, the Bush administration’s 2002 national security strategy
asserted that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.” Mr. Bush, far more than Mr.
Clinton, yoked the use of force to a transcendent principle, insisting that America “must defend liberty and justice because these
principles are right and true for all people everywhere.” Those were fighting words, and not just abroad. The debate over the war in
Iraq revived many of the old debates from the Clinton era. Liberal internationalists like the British prime minister, Tony Blair, joined
American neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan in arguing for the use of force to bring about transformative
political change, while “realists” on the left and right warned of the danger of reckless adventures. The
era we have now
entered will be a less ideologically charged one. The questions raised by China’s growing
ambitions are categorically different from those provoked by 9/11. China is an emerging
power, and once having found their footing, emerging powers usually seek to expand at the
expense of their neighbors. The world is accustomed to dealing with this kind of problem,
which involves persuading the bumptious power that its interests lie in cooperation rather
than in confrontation. And there is a fair amount of consensus in policy circles about how to deal
with it. Conservatives have been sounding alarms about China’s military ambitions for several years, and the Obama
administration has now begun to execute a “pivot” to Asia. On a visit to the region, President Obama announced that America
would station 2,500 Marines in Australia, even as it decreased military commitments elsewhere. WHATEVER
policy the
Obama administration or its successor adopts toward China, the broader East Asian region,
unlike the Middle East, is filled with stable, and largely democratic, states. The United States
does not have to defend liberty and justice there. Regime change, democracy promotion and
nation-building will be off the table. So, for that matter, will war. America is not about to go
to war with China, or with anyone else in Asia. The struggle to balance Chinese ambition will be left mostly to
the Navy and Air Force, and our allies in the region. And it will not be a metaphysical one: the very complicated relationship with
China is much less a clash of worldviews than of interests. Finally, there is the elemental fact that America can
no longer afford its own ambitions. The failure of last year’s bipartisan effort to solve the deficit crisis triggered
automatic cuts that are supposed to double the half-trillion dollars already scheduled to be sliced from the Pentagon budget. In his
2010 book, “The Frugal Superpower,” Michael Mandelbaum argued that the contraction of the American economy meant that “ the
defining fact of foreign policy in the second decade of the 21st century and beyond will be ‘less.’
” Mr. Mandelbaum, himself a leading realist, suggested that the chief victim of the new austerity will be
“intervention.” It may be so, though the NATO air campaign in Libya shows that humanitarian intervention is neither
defunct nor doomed to failure. Such ventures, however, will be very rare, as the current stalemate over Syria implies. The
coming years may well be a period of at least relative austerity, modesty and realism. Should we
feel relieved? It is easy enough to say that the United States should no longer fight wars of occupation in the Middle East, or seek to
promote democracy through regime change, or undertake counterinsurgency campaigns on a massive scale. But
in a world
of weak and failing states, are we also to abandon ambitious hopes to help build stable and
democratic institutions abroad? Is foreign aid to wind up on the junk heap of failed dreams? America has been
and can continue to be a force for good in the world. But those of us who have championed an
idealistic foreign policy have been deeply chastened by the failure of so many fine hopes and
have been forced to recognize both how much harm the United States can do with the best of
intentions and how very hard it is to shape good outcomes inside other countries . So we must accept,
if uneasily, the future which now seems to lie before us: We will do less good in the world, but also less harm.
 2AC – Scenario Planning Good
Scenario analysis is pedagogically valuable – enhances creativity and self-
reflexivity, deconstructs cognitive biases and flawed ontological assumptions,
and enables the imagination and creation of alternative futures.
Barma et al. 16 – (May 2016, [Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15], Naazneen Barma,
PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at
the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley,
Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political
Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from
GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International
Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard,
“‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies
Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19,
http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_s
cience_isp_2015.pdf)

Over the past decade, the “cult of irrelevance” in political science scholarship has been lamented by
a growing chorus (Putnam 2003; Nye 2009; Walt 2009). Prominent scholars of international affairs have
diagnosed the roots of the gap between academia and policymaking, made the case for why political science
research is valuable for policymaking, and offered a number of ideas for enhancing the policy relevance of
scholarship in international relations and comparative politics (Walt 2005,2011; Mead 2010; Van Evera 2010; Jentleson and Ratner
2011; Gallucci 2012; Avey and Desch 2014). Building on these insights, several
initiatives have been formed in the
attempt to “bridge the gap.”2 Many of the specific efforts put in place by these projects focus
on providing scholars
with the skills, platforms, and networks to better communicate the findings and implications of
their research to the policymaking community, a necessary and worthwhile objective for a field in which theoretical
debates, methodological training, and publishing norms tend more and more toward the abstract and esoteric. Yet enhancing
communication between scholars and policymakers is only one component of bridging the gap between international
affairs theory and practice. Another crucial component of this bridge is the generation of substantive research
programs that are actually policy relevant—a challenge to which less concerted attention has been paid. The dual
challenges of bridging the gap are especially acute for graduate students, a particular irony since many enter the discipline with the
explicit hope of informing policy. In
a field that has an admirable devotion to pedagogical self-reflection ,
strikingly little attention is paid to techniques for generating policy-relevant ideas for
dissertation and other research topics. Although numerous articles and conference workshops are devoted to the importance
of experiential and problem-based learning, especially through techniques of simulation that emulate policymaking processes
(Loggins 2009; Butcher 2012; Glasgow 2012; Rothman 2012; DiCicco 2014), little has been written about the use of such techniques
for generating and developing innovative research ideas. This
article outlines an experiential and problem-
based approach to developing a political science research program using scenario analysis. It focuses
especially on illuminating the research generation and pedagogical benefits of this technique by describing the use of scenarios in
the annual New Era Foreign Policy Conference (NEFPC), which brings together doctoral students of international and comparative
affairs who share a demonstrated interest in policy-relevant scholarship.3 In the introductory section, the article outlines the
practice of scenario analysis and considers the utility of the technique in political science. We argue that scenario analysis should be
viewed as a tool to stimulate problem-based learning for doctoral students and discuss the broader scholarly benefits of using
scenarios to help generate research ideas. The second section details the manner in which NEFPC deploys scenario analysis. The
third section reflects upon some of the concrete scholarly benefits that have been realized from the scenario format. The fourth
section offers insights on the pedagogical potential associated with using scenarios in the classroom across levels of study. A brief
conclusion reflects on the importance of developing specific techniques to aid those who wish to generate political science
scholarship of relevance to the policy world. What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is
perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in
future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends , preparing them to
take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous
shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering
“what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the
purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision
making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses . This section provides a brief
overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility
of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were
created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current
trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures,
often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections
based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based
expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as
functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead,
they are depictions of possible future states of the world,

offered together
with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could
lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are
plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the
dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United
States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all
recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came
together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War,
the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et
al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting
techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985;
Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for
anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate
planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking,
Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major
disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking
tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined
analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance
challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series
of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These
reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of
emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As
with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as
well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall
Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German
Marshall Fund 2013). Severalfeatures make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5
Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental,
economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges . Yet the
ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is
constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-
known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982;
Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of
conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends
and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future . Imagining alternative future
worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby
adapt to something altogether different from the known present . Designing Scenarios for Political
Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping
political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios
are essentially textured,
plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be
different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations
are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and
reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that
diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising
ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and
limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the
potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify
crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so
prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very
simply, scenario analysis
can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that
demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a
political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of
the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured
experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first
step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs.
Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change
(e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of
these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story
with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible
pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts
of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink
went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions
themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological
approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered,
structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The
use
of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given
situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are
traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our
scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that
could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift
the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-
looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual
constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We
see scenarios as a complementary resource for
exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual
analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios
are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces”
which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis
process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused
investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In
essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a
framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves
as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research
agendas. The
scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some
guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively
unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial
articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby
students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their
advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996).
Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding.
Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent
past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the
absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The
scenario approach to
generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be
complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real
world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear
extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that
could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues
scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin
thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the
present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem
like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn
strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent
scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in
international affairs.