Wiki Card doc round 1

1NC
 1NC – T Reduce
Reduce makes something smaller.
Lexico no date https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/reduce
TRANSITIVE VERB

[WITH OBJECT]

1Make smaller or less in amount, degree, or size.

Violation -- Alliance commitments refer to obligations to assist member states

in the event of armed conflict. No such obligation exists with Ukraine.
Leeds, Brett Ashley, Jeffrey M. Ritter, Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, and Andrew G. Long. 2002.
Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions, 1815-1944. International Interactions 28: 237-260.

Most of our attention in designing the ATOP coding scheme was directed toward
collecting information about two aspects of alliance agreements. First, we wanted to
specify precisely the obligations undertaken by alliance members . We wanted to be able
to describe (and ultimately explain) what states promise to do under what conditions. Second,
we wanted to identify provisions of alliances designed to manage cooperation among the
allies. For example: Do leaders include discussion of burden sharing? Do they create
organizations to manage the alliance? Do they require peacetime military contacts? Do they
combine military alliance agreements with agreements on other aspects of international
cooperation, for instance economic relations or territorial settlements? Do they commit to
alliances of long duration, or do they provide frequent opportunities for renegotiation? The
ATOP data provide detailed descriptions of the obligations accepted by alliance
members, the conditions under which these obligations are activated , and the provisions
related to institutional design and alliance management.
Below we describe the process by which we collected and coded the data, defining key terms as
necessary. In section 2, we describe the varying forms in which we release ATOP data and
provide explanations of the coding of each variable included in the dataset. A copy of the ATOP
codesheet and a summary of the values each variable can take are provided as appendixes.

1.2 Defining “Alliance”

We conceive of our key concept, alliance, in the following way: An alliance is a formal
agreement among independent states to cooperate militarily in the face of potential or realized
military conflict. There are several parts of this conceptual definition that deserve further
elaboration.

First, we require alliances to be formal agreements . Toscano (1966: 21) defines formal
international agreements as follows: “those acts which authorized organs of the respective
states exchange with each other in their reciprocal contacts in the name of, and on behalf of,
the states as members of the international community.” Alliances must be written
agreements with legal force. We thus distinguish alliances from alignments; while any states
that share policy positions and coordinate their actions might be called aligned, only those
who have formalized their commitments with a written agreement may be called
allied. 3
Alliances are most commonly formed through treaties, but there are less formal written
agreements that also qualify as legal documents binding upon states; we accept these as well.
Examples of such agreements are official exchanges of notes (see Toscano, 1966: 22),
conventions, executive agreements, and statements verbales if they have been signed by all
parties.

Second, alliances are agreements among independent states . At least two states must sign
the agreement, and each member must retain its sovereignty and independence. Unilateral
guarantees (e.g., the Monroe Doctrine), even if they are in writing, do not qualify as
alliances under this definition. Empires and other colonial relationships also do not qualify (see
section 1.3 below regarding the identification of independent states). This requirement in no
way suggests that the member states must accept equal obligations, or even that all states must
commit to specific obligations; commitments may be asymmetric. What is crucial, however, is
that the alliance is negotiated and agreed upon formally by at least two legally independent
states.

Third, we are concerned with military alliances, specifically those that promise
cooperation in addressing military threats . The promised cooperation must extend beyond
simply providing supplies, leasing territory, or sharing information; there must be a
commitment for cooperative action in the event of conflict. Thus, arms sales agreements,
military aid agreements, basing agreements, border delimitation agreements, intelligence
sharing agreements, etc., do not meet the definition of alliances unless they include additional
obligations requiring cooperation in the event of military conflict.

From this conceptual definition, we develop the following operational definition: alliances are
“written agreements, signed by official representatives of at least two independent states,
that include promises to aid a partner in the event of military conflict , to remain neutral in the
event of conflict, to refrain from military conflict with one another, or to consult/cooperate in
the event of international crises that create a potential for military conflict” (Leeds, Ritter,
Mitchell, and Long, 2002: 238).

Key to limits – the number of potential additions explodes neg research burden.
 1NC – Expansion DA
Deterrence high now –article five key
John Andreas Olsen, PhD @ Demontfort University, Colonel in the Royal Norwegian Air
Force, 6-22-20, “Understanding NATO,” RUSI Journal, June 2020.

Alliance cohesion derives from NATO’s raison d’être, captured in the ‘Three
Musketeers’ principle’ of ‘all for one, one for all’. Thus, the primary task to
ensure the Alliance’s future relevance is to maintain political unity based on the
common values that underpin the commitment to Article 5. Ultimately, this is
NATO’s core strength, but these values are under constant pressure from autocratic,
populist and nationalist movements in several member states. Consequently, NATO must
seek to ensure that its own members do not fall short of the treaty’s
democratic standards. If a member drifts away from liberal democratic norms, as some
have done, the rest must encourage a return to the central values while exhibiting strategic
patience and offering constructive advice rather than undertake rash and possibly
irreversible action. Maintaining Alliance cohesion, ‘for better or worse … in
sickness and in health’, is NATO’s collective vow.21
Revitalise US Leadership and Transatlantic Unity

Strong US leadership remains crucial in almost all aspects of NATO decision-

making. US commitment to the Alliance, including its military presence in
Europe, is critical for credible collective deterrence and defence. NATO was and
is designed for US leadership . In the words of Ambassadors Douglas Lute and Nicholas
Burns, ‘with American leadership anything is possible within the Alliance; absent American
leadership, progress will be slow at best’.22 Although Alliance-wide consultation and
consensus are all-important principles, the US must remain primus inter pares politically as
well as militarily. Simply put, without the US there is no NATO .

Ukraine/Georgia key to prevent Russian expansion into the middle

east
Jakub Grygiel, associate professor of politics at The Catholic University of America, 12-
12-2019, "Russia’s Return To The Middle East," Hoover Institution,
https://www.hoover.org/research/russias-return-middle-east
Both anomalies, however, are puzzling only if we think that Russia’s objectives are
analogous to ours: to instill order and maintain effective political control in a state or a
region. But Russia is not interested in these goals. Moscow is not eager to rebuild Syria or to
ameliorate the humanitarian disaster caused by Assad and the Islamist terrorist groups –
but it merely seeks bases from which it can exercise some influence over the Eastern
Mediterranean. Moreover, Putin’s approach is to destabilize a region, creating a problem to
which he can then offer a solution. This is a time-tested strategy that Russia has employed
since its rise in the early 18th century: sowing instability in order to be able then to reorder
the area according to its interests. Thus, Russia has presented itself to European
leaders as a staunch defender of Christians against the depredations of Islamist terrorists
and, to the more secular politicians in Western Europe, as a force to limit the flow of
refugees – while at the same time doing little to fight ISIS and aiding Assad in his
gruesome suppression of the opposition.
The outcome of Russia’s return to the region is unknown, of course. But so far Putin has
achieved two goals. First, Russia has maximized its strategic possibilities by
inserting itself into a cauldron of great power competition. Second, the war in
Syria is seen by Russian public opinion as a good war, with low casualties and a
dramatic improvement in Russia’s image as a world-class great power. More than 70% of
Russians support policies that are deemed to enhance the international status
of their country. Russia nourishes vast imperial ambitions , matched by Putin’s
personal aspirations of proto-tsarist grandeur. It is unlikely, therefore, that Putin will
withdraw from the Middle East on his own, as was the hope of many in the Obama
administration.

How, then, can Russia be pushed back from the Middle East? How can it be induced to stop
destabilizing the region ? The answer may be in Ukraine.

Now, as in the past, Russia has three main frontiers and lines of expansion. The
Eastern frontier in Asia is currently dormant because China is too powerful and
Moscow has no means to oppose it, choosing to accept Beijing’s economic predominance in
exchange for Russian security hegemony. The second front is the European or Western
one, perhaps the most examined and important because this is where a lot of bloody
clashes have occurred since the 17th century. Russia’s westward push has met here
the greatest opponents, from Poland and Sweden in the 17th century, to Prussia and Austria
in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Atlantic alliance in the second half of the 20th
century. And it is the front that has attracted the most attention in the past decade, since
Putin has used military force to oppose the westward leaning posture of two countries:
Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. Russia’s wars against these two states were clear
attempts to oppose the West, seen as encroaching upon states that Moscow deems part of
its own empire or hegemony. And these conflicts have achieved the most important
strategic objective pursued by Moscow: the effective end of Western enlargement.

But these military operations against Georgia and Ukraine are also part of
Russia’s efforts to extend influence toward her Southern frontier. This is the
third vector of Russian expansion, toward the Black Sea , the Eastern
Mediterranean and the Middle East . It is a turbulent frontier that is constantly
fluctuating, with constantly changing and often ambiguous alignments.

Ukraine, in particular, is Russia’s door to Europe but also to the Black Sea and thus,
farther out, to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Without Ukraine, Russia is an
Asian power, left to face China on a lengthy steppe frontier. With Ukraine, Russia is an
empire that forces itself into Europe’s power dynamics. Paris and Berlin, not to
mention capitals closer to Russia, will have to take Russia seriously (albeit responding with
strategies that are often very different; Paris, for instance, seeks a rapprochement with
Moscow while Warsaw arms and pursues stronger bilateral relations with the U.S.) in the
moment Moscow has a foot in Ukraine.
In the past three centuries, Russia’s control over Crimea and the mouths of the Don and
Dnieper signaled a conflict with the Ottoman power to the south, as Muscovite forces moved
to project influence over the Black Sea and the push their way to the Bosphorus. As a
Prussian military leader of the tsarist army said after taking over a key fortress near Crimea
in the early 18th century, Russia’s presence there was a “splinter in the enemy’s foot.”2
Such a description continues to be applicable. In the moment Russia solidifies its
presence on the shores of the Black Sea, Turkey, and any other great power situated
in the Middle East has to deal with Moscow. To put it differently, over the past few
years, after Russia’s wars in Ukraine and Georgia, and then with her military
deployment in Syria, Turkey realized that Russia is not a land power locked in
the distant Muscovite core, but a Black Sea potentate that had to be taken into account.
The current problems in the U.S.-Turkey relationship are, therefore, caused by Erdogan’s
Islamic authoritarian ways as much as by Russia’s move into the Middle East which has
forced Ankara to seek a friendly modus vivendi with Moscow.

From this, it follows that to check Russia’s ability to insert herself into Middle
Eastern dynamics and to further disrupt an already volatile region, the U.S. and
its allies should strengthen Ukrainian geopolitical independence and weaken Russia’s
hold over Crimea and eastern Ukraine. A strong independent Ukraine limits Russian
destabilizing southward push. To avoid a highly unpredictable and costly great
power competition in the Middle East – a situation that would distract the
United States from its more pressing Pacific and European challenges – it is thus
best to consider how to push Russia out of it. And the path to that goal runs through
Ukraine.

Russia uses A2AD to accomplish objectives in the middle east – causes conflict
to escalate into a hot war.
Dr. Aziz Erdogan, PhD, Former Head of Air Policy and Strategy, ’18, “Russian A2AD
Strategy and Its Implications for NATO” Beyond the Horizon ISSG.
5. The Implications of Russian A2AD Strategy for NATO and Potential Measures

Russia uses A2AD strategy as part of a comprehensive approach for deterrence,

and it would employ it to neutralise NATO’s military advantage during time of
peace, crisis and war:
a. In the peacetime; Russia’s A2AD capabilities, given their coverage of NATO’s territory,
becomes a potential threat and limit Alliance’s freedom of movement even
within own territory.

b. During a crisis; Russia could attempt to deter Alliance military activities through show off
its A2AD capability, with concurrent snap exercises and military preparations. Moreover, it
would probably use its cyber/electronic warfare capabilities to reduce NATO’s situational
awareness and strategic anticipation, through blinding Alliance’s ISR, radars and
communications. More importantly, prolonged A2AD bubbles created by Russia
outside of its territory -such as Syria-, would enable Russia to have a constant
justification to project its forces and blur the distinction between force movements
for exercises or a real preparation to escalate tension leading to hot conflict .
This also enables Russia to seize the initiative to determine the course of an emerging crisis.
Crisis such as Syria provides Russia with the opportunity to test its newly developed long-
range weapon systems and associated technics, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) in order to
advance its warfighting capabilities versus NATO.

c. In a conflict, Russia would try to isolate the theatre of operations from NATO’s
forces while dislocating threatened nation’s defence forces and those already
forward deployed. Given the NATO’s system of responsive reinforcement, it would be clear
that the Russian A2AD strategy is specifically developed to prevent establishment of initial
NATO forces on the theatre and to threaten follow-on forces. Even if NATO forces could be
deployed to the theatre of operations, they will face these advanced systems within area of
operations. With its advanced A2AD capabilities; Russia could attempt to[15];

Threaten all NATO bases/troops/assets close to the Russia,

Deny NATO force deployment to the area of operations,
Disrupt NATO Navy surface and submarine operations and threaten them out to an
extent where they may not operate effectively to target Russian forces by deployment of
sophisticated sensors and weapons in littoral waters and narrows,

Challenge NATO air operations with its air force and integrated air and missile defense
(IAMD) systems,

Impede NATO to use space effectively for ISR, command and control (C2),
communications and for the purpose of targeting,
Infiltrate to the NATO members close to Russia with its special forces or paramilitary units
to foment hostilities against ruling authorities and other subversive purposes,
Carry out electronic and cyberattacks against NATO battle networks to impair effective
logistics, C2, fires, ISR, combat service support (CSS) and etc.

Russian A2AD strategy would cause dramatic changes in Freedom of Action

(FoA). As abovementioned; in the event of conflict, Russia would attempt to restrict NATO’s
FoM to deploy its initial, enhanced response and following forces to the theatre of
operations and have a relative advantage to shape the battlefield. Possible effects of A2AD
on FoM are;
– Situational awareness and strategic anticipation is sine qua non and should be enhanced
by advanced joint ISR systems to a rapid political and military decision making.
– In order to negate the A2AD systems and to provide required FoM for NATO forces to
deploy, there would be a need for entry operations against A2AD systems at the outset.
– The level of threat emanating from A2AD challenge would affect the type of deployment.
While Russia would attempt to prevent any NATO deployment, NATO’s main effort would
be to concentrate its forces to the battlefield. In this regard; developing alternative
deployment methods and protection of the Lines of Communications (LoCs) would be very
critical.
– In order to reduce the need for responsive reinforcement and have more force and
capability close to Russia, an appropriate balance of forward presence and responsive
reinforcement should be considered. While forward presence is an essential issue, the
assured reinforcement would be crucial as well.
– A more geographically comprehensive approach for military plans would be required to
overcome complex and sophisticated A2AD challenges. Moreover, these plans should be
exercised to develop required level cooperation and collaboration within the allies and
forces (Land, maritime, air and space, special forces). Especially, deployment and
manoeuvre of forces in an A2AD environment should be the top two items that must be
included in NATO exercises. These exercises would be very crucial to detect shortfalls and
provide valuable feedback to create high-level competencies.
– NATO and member nations should develop new capabilities to demonstrate its ability and
decisiveness to deter, deny, degrade and defeat A2AD threat whenever required. After the
Cold War, NATO Nations cut the defence expenditures and gave priorities to the
conventional capabilities, which may prove ineffective against such an advanced threat.
NATO and member nations should take A2AD challenges into account thoroughly and
reformulate their defence budgets prioritising the acquisition of weapon systems to
confront dangerously evolving Russian A2AD zones in NATO`s area of interest.
– Current assurance measures may need to be modified accordingly.
– Overall effects of A2AD challenges on the battlefield functions should be examined in
consideration with operational functions. Although these functions (manoeuvre, fire
support, air defence, survivability, intelligence, combat service support (CSS), engineering
and command, control, communication, computer and cyberwar (C5)) are mostly for army
land operations, they are also very important for the other domains.

Indeed, means such as A2AD will enable further actions for Russia . According to
Gerasimov ‘Each war does present itself as a unique case, demanding the comprehension of
its particular logic, its uniqueness. It is why the character of a war that Russia or its allies
might be drawn into is very hard to predict. Nonetheless, we must’.

In regard to NATO, under the negligible risk of response, i.e. staying under the
threshold of Article 5, Russia achieves its objectives in Near Abroad, zone of
privileged interests, Middle East and wherever they deem necessary. From
NATO side, Corrosion in Cohesion of Alliance, confusion in seeking countermeasures were
the results of the recent new generation warfare activities which may potentially
undermine NATO’s collective security without a single shot[16].
 1NC – Article Five PIC
The USFG should end its open-door policy of nato enlargement by rejecting all
new members to NATO.

Solves encroachment.
William Ruger, Professor of IR @ CUNY, and Rajan Menon War and Peace Studies @
Columbia, 5-11-20, “NATO enlargement and US grand strategy: a net assessment,”
International Politics, Vol 57, Iss 3. Springer.

NATO enlargement created a new dividing line between Russia and the West in post-
Cold War Europe. It helped increase the security dilemma between Russia and the USA while
contributing to the emergence of what many commentators refer to as a second Cold War.
Both countries have missed the benefts of cooperating to solve global challenges. They
could also have worked together to balance a rising China, with which Russia has aligned
as its relationship with the USA has deteriorated. Further, as NATO has opened its doors to
several states that are hard to defend, the USA has assumed still more obligations even as
new challenges arise. That in turn has revealed or exacerbated some of the problems built
into its primacist grand strategy. NATO enlargement has, in short, been an unforced error.
To mitigate the consequences of this error, the USA and NATO should shut the alliance’s
open door. Doing so would be safe and benefcial, especially given that Russia’s status as a
great power competitor has been overblown (Menon 2020).
 1NC – EU prolif DA
Assurance high now.
John Andreas Olsen, PhD @ Demontfort University, Colonel in the Royal Norwegian Air
Force, 6-22-20, “Understanding NATO,” RUSI Journal, June 2020.

Europeans have been concerned about President Donald Trump’s ambivalent

commitment to NATO, but facts are more encouraging than rhetoric : the Trump
administration is spending more money on defence in Europe than its predecessor
did.25 In the immediate run-up to the Brussels Summit, the Senate voted 97 to
2 to reaffirm the US commitment to collective defence and in January 2019 the
House of Representatives passed the NATO Support Act by 357 to 22,26 rejecting
‘any efforts to withdraw the United States from NATO’.27 The future of NATO
depends on continued American commitment and leadership, but the US also needs
European allies in order to remain a global superpower. Europe in turn must take on far
greater international responsibility, acting as a unified and capable partner of North
America within the scope of a renewed ‘transatlantic bargain’.28

Article five key to alliance credibility.

Rich Lowry, ed. National Review, ‘18, "Why the US must defend ‘faraway’ countries like
Montenegro," New York Post, https://nypost.com/2018/07/20/why-the-us-must-defend-
faraway-countries-like-montenegro/
With the end of the Cold War, the Baltics managed a miracle journey from captive nations to
members of NATO, joining every international organization they could and putting their
trust in Western norms and credibility. They have all become vibrant, multiparty
democracies.

They are small, yes, and far away, yes. But the line has to be drawn somewhere. If not
at Tallinn, how about Helsinki? If not in Vilnius, in Warsaw? If in none of those
places, in Prague or Berlin?

Russia must have a westernmost boundary, enforced by a defensive alliance of

like-minded Western democracies, otherwise Putin will be tempted to act yet
again on his open musings about creating a greater Russia.
And if the US simply turns its back on its signed-and-sealed Article 5 commitment to
mutual self-defense under the NATO treaty, what is to become of the credibility of
its alliances and assurances for everyone else? If the Baltics ever fall, it will be very
bad news for Taiwan and the effort to check Chinese expansionism.

The marvelous speech that Trump gave last year in Warsaw praised the persistence of the
Polish nation. Exactly the same thing could be said of the peoples of the Baltics, who, despite
calamity after calamity, stayed true to their national culture and independence, and have
revived them under the auspices of the Western alliance.
Alliance cred key to stop german prolif.
Kühn, Ulrich; and Volpe, Tristan, Fellows in the Nuclear Policy Program at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ’17, “Keine Atombombe, Bitte: Why Germany
Should Not Go Nuclear” Foreign Affairs; July/August.

Those fears have given new life to an old idea: a European nuclear deterrent. Just
days after Trump's election, Roderich Kiesewetter, a senior member of Chancellor
Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, said that if the United States no
longer wanted to provide a nuclear shield, France and the United Kingdom
should combine their nuclear arsenals into an eu deterrent , financed through a joint
eu military budget. Then, in February, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland's ruling
Law and Justice party, spoke out in favor of the idea of the eu as a "nuclear
superpower," as long as any eu deterrent matched Russian capabilities.
Some German commentators even suggested that those proposing a British-French
deterrent under the auspices of the eu didn't go far enough. Berthold Kohler, one of the
publishers of the influential conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
argued that the British and French arsenals were too weak to take on Russia. He suggested
that Germany consider "an indigenous nuclear deterrent which could ward off
doubts about America's guarantees ." Other German analysts, such as Thorsten
Benner, head of the Global Public Policy Institute, in Berlin, and Maximilian
Terhalle, a scholar of international relations, have come to the same conclusion.
"Germany needs nuclear weapons," Terhalle wrote in Foreign Policy in April.
For now, those calling for a German bomb are a fringe minority. For decades, Germany has
stood as one of the world's staunchest supporters of nuclear nonproliferation and global
disarmament. In February, a spokesperson for Merkel told the press, "There are no plans for
nuclear armament in Europe involving the federal government." She and others evidently
recognize that such plans are a bad idea: a German arsenal would destabilize Eu-Russian
relations and heighten the risk that other countries would attempt to go nuclear.

But even though Germany's current nuclear flirtation may reflect nothing more
than a passing reaction to Trump's presidency, it reveals a deeper problem:
insecurity in Berlin, caused by years of meandering U.S. policy toward Russia
and Europe. To solve this problem, Germany and the United States must work together.
Merkel's government should encourage the eu to coordinate more effectively on defense.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, should double down on the U.S.
commitment to the success of the eu and nato while also pushing for broader
negotiations with Russia over the future of European security.
THE SHADOW OF THE PAST
Over the last decade, Europe has experienced a series of intensifying crises, culminating in
Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. Each time, Germany, as the Eu's largest country, has
led the response. In 2015, for example, Germany led the negotiations between Russia and
Ukraine that resulted in a shaky cease-fire. But every time Germany takes the lead, its
neighbors recall history and grow nervous about German hegemony over Europe.
Such fears go back at least as far as the creation of the modern German state in 1871. From
then until the country's partition after World War II, European leaders confronted "the
German question," a simple but unsolvable dilemma. Germany's size meant that no single
European country could ever balance its economic or military power. Yet Germany was
never powerful enough to rule over Europe alone. Part of the problem stemmed from the
country's so-called Mittellage, its location at the center of Europe, surrounded by potentially
hostile coalitions. Germany responded to external threats by pursuing what historians
have called its Sonderweg, or "special path," a term used to describe the country's
affinity for authoritarian rule and attempts to impose that rule throughout Europe.
Whenever it did that, the resulting wars devastated the continent.
Germany's partition-after Hitler led the country's last and most disastrous attempt to rule
over Europe-temporarily solved these problems. West Germany could not dominate Europe
during the Cold War since the struggle between the East and the West subsumed European
rivalries. And after reunification, in 1990, the institutional bonds of the eu and nato
prevented _ the question from recurring. Surrounded only by friends, Germany did
not have to worry about its Mittellage. At the same time, the U.S. military retained a
limited presence in Europe (including Germany), and the former western Allies
successfully transformed Germany into a peaceful and democratic nation, making the
pursuit of Sonderweg unthinkable. The U.S. security guarantee also allowed Germans to
maintain their largely antimilitaristic stance , reap the economic benefits of peace, and,
at times, claim the moral high ground over Washington for its overreliance on military
power.

This halcyon era for Germany ended abruptly in 2009 . The Great Recession and the
subsequent eu debt crisis led many eu countries to demand German leadership.
But when Germany imposed its solutions on the rest of the continent-for example, by
insisting that southern European countries follow austere economic policies -it triggered
accusations of rising German hegemony. In 2015, for example, the ruling Greek
Syriza party claimed that Germany had threatened "immediate financial strangulation" and
"annihilation" of Greece if the Greek government rejected the harsh terms of the proposed
eu bailout.

The first major shock to European security came in 2014, when Russia invaded
Ukraine. Merkel's once pragmatic relationship with Russian President
Vladimir Putin deteriorated rapidly. Sidelining the United States, Germany joined
France in brokering a shaky truce in eastern Ukraine, led eu efforts to impose sanctions
on Russia, and sent German forces to reassure nervous Baltic nato allies. Years of mercurial
U.S. policy toward Moscow that veered back and forth between efforts to repel Russian
influence in eastern Europe and attempts to "reset" the strained relationship left Germany
with little choice but to take the lead.
Against this backdrop, Trump's election heightened the tensions among competing
factors: the need for German leadership, the limits of German power, and
Europe's intolerance of German dominance. During the campaign, Trump
displayed indifference to the possible breakup of the eu and praised nationalist
political movements such as the Brexit campaign, a stance that threatened Germany's
core political identity as the heart of the eu and put pressure on Berlin to defend the
union. Worse still, by declaring nato "obsolete," Trump undermined the system that has
kept Europe safe and Germany restrained for over half a century.

But worst of all, by appearing to cozy up to Putin, Trump put Germany in a new
Mittellage-this time between the White House and the Kremlin. The effect was
not confined to Germany; the prospect of a rapprochement between Putin and Trump has
left the entire eu in an uncomfortable position. In January, when Donald Tusk,
the president of the European Council, ranked the threats facing the eu, he
highlighted not just the traditional menaces of jihadism and Russian aggression but also
"worrying declarations by the new American administration." Across the
continent, leaders feared that Trump would support populist forces seeking to
break up the eu or trade away the U.S. nuclear guarantee of European security in a
grand bargain with Russia.
A DANGEROUS IDEA

Should Europe find itself caught between a hostile Russia and an indifferent
United States, Berlin would feel pressure to defend Europe militarily rather than
just politically. But then it would face the problem of how to guarantee European security
without reviving fears of German hegemony. And if Germany boosted its military
power without integrating it into the European project, that might well lead to
German isolation and the breakup of the eu.

Nuclear weapons seem to offer Germany a way out of this impasse. In the eyes of
their proponents, they would deter existential threats and reduce European
dependence on the United States without raising fears of German dominance. " Nuclear
power projection on the part of Berlin would be accepted as legitimate,"
Terhalle wrote, because "World War II has no real political weight in today's
relations." Instead, it is the " perception of threat from Russia " that determines policy
in central and eastern European countries. This claim rests on a shaky foundation.
Russia's actions in eastern Ukraine may be driving European nations together, but the fear
of a German resurgence has not gone away entirely. If Germany built nuclear
weapons, the Eu's current unity would quickly fracture .

German prolif cascades, causes Russia and Europe war.

Ischinger 18 (Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador to the United States, is
chairman of the Munich Security Conference and professor for security policy and
diplomatic practice at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, August 10, 2018.
“Acquiring nuclear weapons could blow up in Germany’s face.”
https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/views/analysis/acquiring-nuclear-
weapons-could-blow-up-in-germanys-face-861223.html)
Supporters of a nuclear-armed Germany contend that Nato’s nuclear umbrella has lost all credibility, because of statements
made by US president, Donald Trump. There
are at least three good reasons why a nuclear
option would be foolhardy for Germany . For starters, Germany has repeatedly renounced it, first in 1969
by signing (and later ratifying) the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and then in 1990, by signing
the so-called Two Plus Four Treaty, which paved the way for German reunification. Casting doubt on these commitments
would severely damage Germany’s reputation and reliability, worldwide. Germany
would call into question the credibility of Nato’s nuclear deterrence , and thus the alliance
itself, along with the entire nuclear non-proliferation regime . Since its creation, in 1949, Nato has been
one of the world’s most successful instruments of proliferation-prevention. Not a single Nato member state — apart from the
United States, the United Kingdom, and France — has found it necessary to acquire nuclear weapons of its own. If Germany
were now to break out of its non-nuclear power status, what would keep Turkey or Poland, for instance,
from following suit? Germany as a gravedigger of the international non-proliferation regime — who could want that?
Second, a German nuclear bomb would damage the strategic environment in
Europe, to Germany’s disadvantage. Russia would interpret German steps toward a
nuclear arsenal as a direct threat to its own national security and would likely adopt military
countermeasures . That, in turn, would make it even harder to pursue the vision of a pan-
European order of peace and security, a core foreign-policy goal of all German governments since that of Konrad
Adenauer. Moreover, a German nuclear ambition might jeopardise the delicate
balance of power in Europe — including between Germany and France, for
example — with incalculable consequences for the long-term cohesion of the
European Union. Finally, the pursuit of nuclear weapons would draw significant public opposition, especially given
that such a move would be a complete about-face for German chancellor, Angela Merkel’s government, which, just a few years
ago, moved to phase out nuclear energy altogether. It is difficult to imagine a greater fiasco for German foreign and security
policy than proposing a nuclear strategy and then failing to obtain parliamentary approval. There are smarter, long-term ways
to bolster Europe’s nuclear defence than introducing a German bomb. For example, France might be willing to consider
playing an extended nuclear-deterrence role, along with the US and the UK within Nato. While this would require a
fundamental reorientation and Europeanisation of France’s nuclear strategy, Germany and other European partners could
offer financial contributions to such an initiative, in the context of a future European defence union with a nuclear component.
But these are, at best, long-term options. In short, no matter what Trump says, Germany will remain dependent on the US
nuclear umbrella for the foreseeable future. The best way to maintain Nato’s credibility , and be taken
seriously by the US, is to work assiduously toward the alliance’s 2% of GDP target for defence spending and to invest more
heavily in conventional military capabilities — not to satisfy US demands, but to protect our own security and defence
interests. But this is not simply about spending more; it is about spending more intelligently, particularly by pooling and
sharing capabilities, and by systematic joint procurement with France and other European partners, including through the
recently established EU Defence Fund. None of this will work if Germany will not start defining military strategy, security, and
defence as top political priorities. Only then will the Bundestag be able to give the Bundeswehr — often referred to as a
‘parliamentary army’ — what it needs to do its job. The alternative — considering the development of nuclear
weapons — would be a game-losing move .
 1NC – QPQ
The USFG should condition the activation of its defense pact in Ukraine only if
Russia agrees to cease its campaign of domestic interference.

Russia says yes.

Jennifer Lind and Daryl G. Press, Professors of Government @ Dartmouth College, 3-9-20,
“Reality Check” Foreign Affairs March/April, 2020.

One source of geopolitical change is Russia. The country is in many ways an unlikely impediment
to U.S. primacy. It is neither a thriving society nor a rising power. On the contrary, it is a country
with an aging, shrinking population; it is rife with corruption; and it is almost totally reliant on oil
revenues—hardly markers of innovation and growth. And yet Moscow has found clever and
effective ways to push back against an international order that Russian President Vladimir
Putin correctly views as hostile to his country’s interests. Through wars against Georgia and
Ukraine, Russia has managed to not only halt those countries’ movements toward integration
with the U.S.-backed order but also create divisions between Washington and its European
allies. And by spreading disinformation via government-funded media outlets and
bankrolling extremist European parties, Russia has exploited vulnerabilities in the open
political systems of its adversaries and has sown polarization and division within their
electorates.
As a result, Washington and Moscow are now locked in a dangerous cycle of escalation .
The United States and Europe continue to expand their political and military influence
into Russia’s near abroad. (Bosnia, Georgia, North Macedonia, and Ukraine all are queuing up
for entry into NATO, for example.) Russia, in turn, has launched covert military interventions
in Ukraine, carried out dramatic assassination attempts in the United Kingdom, and
conducted political interference campaigns across the West.

To de-escalate this conflict, the two sides should strike a bargain : Western nonexpansion for
Russian noninterference. The West would cease any further enlargement of NATO and
the EU in eastern Europe. In return, Russia would agree to cease its campaign of
domestic political interference. (The degree of U.S. government interference in Russia’s
domestic politics is unclear, but Washington would also need to disavow such methods.)

Whatever the specifics of the deal, its goal would be mutual accommodation . Let the
Russians come forth and list whatever they see as the most egregious Western
encroachments on their interests—perhaps it is indeed the expansion of NATO and the EU,
perhaps some other policy . Western governments can do the same, and the two sides can
negotiate with the goal of removing the worst irritants. S uch an understanding, even if it
leaves both sides dissatisfied on the margins, would offer a clear path forward.
Prohibitions on info weapons key to stabilize deterrence.
Stephen J. Cimbala, Political Science @ Penn State, ’20, The United States, Russia and Nuclear
Peace, Springer, ISBN 978-3-030-38088-5

First, the information age will change how we think about deterrence , but the velocity
and direction of those changes are not entirely clear. In the abstract, cyber war and nuclear
deterrence seem to be polar opposites.

Nuclear war is the ultimate in mass destruction, whereas most cyber war does not have
immediate physical effects (based on experience—although the future may be different). In
addition, the problem of attribution means that the unambiguous identification of the source for
an attack on computer software or networks is not always possible. On the other hand, any state
that launches a nuclear attack against another state territory will be revealed as the culprit by
the United States and by other intelligence sources. (Terrorist uses of a bomb are another
matter and identification may be more challenging, although not impossible). A third difference
between cyber war and nuclear deterrence is that the tools for cyberattack are widely
available and comparatively inexpensive for state and non-state actors: including
criminals, hackers, IT entrepreneurs, Internet buccaneers, and others . Almost anyone
can play at Internet mischief, although how skillfully and for how long will vary as among
players. A nuclear weapons capability, on the other hand, requires an industrial infrastructure,
research and development expenses and telltale signatures of preparations for nuclear test
launches and the fabrication of nuclear materials (enriched uranium and reprocessed
plutonium).

This impression that nuclear and cyber activities are polar opposites in some ways does not
mean that their points of conjunction are insignificant. The use of information weapons
before or during a nuclear crisis could complicate the efforts of heads of state to
resolve the crisis without war.3 We know that cyberattacks have already been used
against the nuclear infrastructure of at least one state (centrifuges in Iran) and against
the missile launch control systems of another (North Korea). We also know that hackers
assumed to be Russians have penetrated US industrial control systems, including those
related to the national and regional power grids. An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack
caused by one or more nuclear detonations could disrupt US electric power and
telecommunications infrastructures, medical services and transportation on a regional or
national basis. Despite warnings from federal agencies and technical experts, few American
states have developed any EMP attack emergency response plan.
In addition to these possible physical effects on infrastructure and communications,
cyberattacks by one state can create confusion and polarization within another country.
Russian interference in the US presidential election of 2016, according to US intelligence
agencies, was designed not only to assist one candidate against another, but also to create
additional political polarization and distrust within the wider community of America n
politicians, media and voters. Russian trolls on social media were accompanied by hacks against
the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, seeking to sow discord
within the national Democratic Party and to influence its primary voters against the Democratic
front-runner. Russia’s omnivorous information campaign included some tried and true
former Soviet instruments of influence, now aided by modern technology: active measures;
disinformation; reflexive control; strategic deception; and, of course, masking of the
actual identities of digital dirigistes by imposter addresses and fake names. Even these
information operations had some physical effects, if you count the efforts by trolls to create fake
demonstrations by crowdsourcing in various US cities.4 If Russian hackers will go this far to
influence an American election in peacetime, what efforts might be undertaken during a
nuclear crisis or in advance of a Russian military move against the Baltics or other NATO
member states? Expert military analyst Michael Kofman has suggested:

Buttressed by a growing conventional and nuclear deterrent, Moscow is more

confident in pursuing indirect competition via hacking, political warfare, and
other forms of coercion against the United States, in the hope of imposing costs over
time. This is both a form of retaliation for Western sanctions, and a more “medieval”
approach to great power contests, leveraging the ability to reach in and directly affect
political cohesion among Western states.5
 1NC - Fem
Technostrategic war-making discourse is steeped in gendered notions of
vulnerability – control must be instrumentalized by the masculine, rational
actor at all costs because to be vulnerable is to be feminized, irrational, and
open for exploitation.
Cohn 14—Carol Cohn, founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human
Rights, Lecturer in Women's Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston, PhD at the Union
Graduate School (“‘Maternal thinking”’ and the concept of ‘vulnerability’ in security paradigms,
policies, and practices,” Journal of International Political Theory, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2014, p46-69)
Vulnerability: Denials and displacements Ruddick writes that three demands—for preservation, growth, and social acceptability—
constitute maternal work: “to be a mother is to be committing to meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance,
and training” (Ruddick, 1989: 17). Of these three demands, the one that most obviously is an equally central demand of state
security practice would be preservation, classically in the form of preservation of the (one’s own) state. (It would be very interesting
and potentially fruitful, though, to imagine what it might mean to security practice if preservation and growth of “Other” states, and
social acceptability of one’s own state, were included among the central demands of security work.) The demand for preservation
stems from the fact of vulnerability, and indeed, vulnerability is implicitly one of the concepts at the
core of both maternal thinking and security thinking, although how and where it does
or does not make its appearance, and what counts as a “rational” response to it, is
strikingly differently in each. A foundational contrast is found in the object of preservation, that is, in who or what is
seen as vulnerable and in need of preservation. Clearly, in maternal thinking, it is the human child. In contrast, in the
technostrategic discourse of nuclear strategists, human vulnerability is entirely
absent, literally unspeakable; when the word “vulnerable” appears, it is in discussion
of the “vulnerability” of both weapon systems themselves and the technological communication
systems which are central to the “command and control” of those weapons (Cohn, 1987). In broader US national
security discourse, the vulnerability of humans is also effaced, and it is the
vulnerability of the state to penetration of its physical boundaries that is of concern,
as well as the vulnerability of its stability and its “interests.” (“Interests” can be understood as an
extremely plastic concept that has allowed US security practice to extend far beyond the state’s own borders and into the territory
or political affairs of many other state whose activities have been labeled as threatening to what the state has broadly defined as its
“interests.”) Two things are striking in this contrast between who or what is seen as vulnerable in maternal thinking, on the one
hand, and in these security discourses, on the other. The first is that while maternal practice and thought is centered on and
responsive to the vulnerability of the mother’s Other—the child—in
national security discourses the
vulnerability of the state’s Other—other states—goes either unimagined or imagined only
as weaknesses to be exploited; certainly, it is rarely if ever imagined as requiring or
evoking a preservative response (the very limited exception might be among states deemed as close allies,
extensions of the Self). The second, perhaps even more fundamental, issue which emerges in this contrast is
the invisibility of human vulnerability in nuclear and national security discourses, and its
displacement onto weapons and states. So in nuclear technostrategic discourse, for example, when human
death must be referred to, it is euphemized and abstracted into “collateral damage,” and this construction “makes sense” because
human suffering is in this discourse collateral to the only vulnerability which matters—that of the discourse’ subject, which is
weapons (Cohn, 1987). Similarly, in US discourses
on conventional warfare, the death and injury of
civilians is also referred to as “collateral damage.” So while human vulnerability is at the
center of maternal thinking, it is beyond the margins of national security discourse s,
the reality of its inexorability unaddressed, while anxieties about vulnerability are
displaced elsewhere. Although this article’s focus is the way vulnerability is treated in security discourses, it is worth
briefly noting that human vulnerability’s absence, denial, and displacement have characterized much of Western social and political
theory, as well as the institutions and policy frameworks to which they have given rise. It is only in recent years that this lacuna is
starting to be named and explored, and that vulnerability has started to be more attentively theorized. Martha Fineman (2008,
2010), for example, argues that the
rational, autonomous, instrumentalist subject posited by
political and legal theorizing in the liberal tradition fundamentally denies the
vulnerable and interdependent nature of human beings, and that “the vulnerable subject,” rather than
the “liberal subject,” should be at the heart of our theoretical and political projects. Her interest is in moving beyond discrimination-
based models to more substantive equality, and she argues that the understanding that vulnerability is “universal and constant,
inherent in the human condition” can and should become the basis for “a more responsive state and egalitarian society” (Fineman,
2008: 8). Moving from the state to interstate relations, Beattie and Schick (2013) bring the idea of the vulnerable subject to a
rethinking of international relations (IR) theory; their starting point is that IR’s
rationalism denies vulnerability
as anything other than a problem to be solved. Judith Butler (2004, 2009) finds in universal human
vulnerability not a problem rather a potential basis for community and a nonviolent ethics; a central concern is the way in which
some people are made more vulnerable than others and their lives less grievable. Erinn Gilson (2011), too, sees vulnerability as “not
just a condition that limits us but one that can enable us” as “a condition of openness, openness to being affected and affecting in
turn” (p. 310). The emphasis on the relational aspect of vulnerability found in Butler’s and Gilson’s work is also found in Peadar
Kirby’s (2006a, 2006b) work on the value of the concept of vulnerability in theorizing globalization’s social impact. Kirby (2006a)
argues that the
inherent relationality in the concept of vulnerability makes it a “surer
concept” than human security, as human security lends itself to the methodological individualism, militarism, and
commodification characteristic of the concept of state security, from which it is derived (p. 646). These and other authors who have
been engaged in the retheorization of vulnerability take the universal, inexorable vulnerability of humans, rescue it from its denial
and displacement in rationalist liberal social and political theory, and make it a cornerstone of their theorizing, instead.3 There has
been, in the last few decades, another, more common, albeit more partial, form in which vulnerability has appeared in theory and
policy, and that is in the concept of “vulnerable groups” or “vulnerable populations.”4 Vulnerable groups is a concept used in
discourses ranging from human rights to humanitarian assistance, development assistance, bioethics, research ethics, ethics of care,
public and global health policy, and environmental policy. In contrast to the centering of vulnerability as a universal defining feature
of human life in the work of the theorists above, “vulnerable groups” discourses focus on defining which human subgroups are
especially vulnerable, at risk and in need of protection. The literature variously locates the sources of a group’s vulnerability in
multiple factors, including physiological frailty or dependency; limited capacity or freedom (Macklin, 2012); the violation of human
rights (Reichert, 2006; Turner, 2006); the ways that people are positioned in economic, political, and social structures and processes
(Aoláin, 2011; Ben-Ishai, 2012; Luna, 2009; Rogers et al., 212); warfare (Turner, 2006); globalization and neoliberalism (Kirby, 2006);
the physical and social conditions that facilitate the spread of disease (Bluhm, 2012; Edström, 2007; Onuoha et al., 2009); the ways
that people’s geographic location and livelihoods have made them susceptible to humanly—and/or naturally produced
environmental change or disaster (Alaimo, 2012; Kirby, 2006) or environmental conflict (Perry et al., 2010); and the myriad factors
that lead to human displacement and statelessness (Butler, 2004; Hanafi, 2009). Logically, there should be no intrinsic
incompatibility between a universal human vulnerability approach and a focus on vulnerable populations—that is, between
understanding all humans as vulnerable, and then exploring the specific factors that make some more so than others (e.g. at
particular moments in a life cycle or within specific political and economic relationships). Indeed, most universal human vulnerability
approaches tend not only to acknowledge but also to give serious attention to the latter. Yet, in both theory and practice, the
concept of “vulnerable groups” has in many ways been at odds with an approach which apprehends vulnerability as a defining
aspect of the human condition; instead, it tends to treat vulnerability as the property of some groups, not all (more on this below).
Human vulnerability is then, in a sense, displaced onto a subset of humans. I believe that the reasons for the various denials and
displacements of vulnerability referenced above (as well as later in this article) are multiple and complex, and require a thoroughly
multidisciplinary treatment that is far beyond the scope of this piece. For the moment, however, I want to briefly address what I
think is one important piece of the puzzle—the ways in which vulnerability
is intensely gendered at a
symbolic level. It seems noteworthy, and not coincidental, that the majority of
theorists who have focused on the implications of human vulnerability have been
women, and many of them feminists. Prevailing Western gendered meaning systems
associate vulnerability with femininity, weakness, dependency, passivity, lack of
control, emotionality, and victimhood; at the same time, they associate invulnerability
with masculinity, power, autonomy, agency, control, cool rationality, and stoicism. As I
have argued elsewhere, this means that in national security discourses, there is an extremely
high premium on avoiding thinking about human fallibility, vulnerability, and
suffering. To admit those things not only threatens the constructions of rationalist
hegemonic masculinity that are built into the entire intellectual project; they also tend
to threaten the legitimacy and identity of the speaker who brings them up, because in
speaking about them, one assumes the “feminine” (and thus devalued) position in the
discourse (Cohn 1987, 1993). Although my own empirical research has been only in national and international security
communities, my experience in those locations suggests that vulnerability’s symbolic gender coding as
feminine would make it hard to put the inevitability of universal human vulnerability
at the center of other masculinist projects of theory or policy as well. Whatever the range of
motivations and mechanisms that underlie the denial and displacement of vulnerability, I think the phenomenon itself should be of
grave concern. When theorists and policymakers are not grounded in an apprehension of their own bodily contingency and frailty,
and their own physical and social dependence, a host of consequences follow. When
it is only the “Other” who is
vulnerable, it is much easier to cut or destroy social safety nets, to support violently
repressive rulers in the name of “stability” or of protecting one’s own interests, to
start and prolong wars, or to put profit over the health of the planet’s ecosystems . At the
very least, this suggests that we should be wary of any security discourses which
invisibilize the universality of human vulnerabilitys, and try to imagine security
practices which center it, instead. Hence, we return to Ruddick.

The impact is hypermasculine war-making – claims of objectivity are patently

flawed because they are based in gendered decision-making
Sjoberg 13 (Laura, associate professor of Political Science @ University of Florida, University of
Chicago; Ph.D., University of Southern California School of International Relations; J.D. Boston
College Law School, “Relations International and War(s),” Gendered Lenses Look at War(s),
online book, CMR)

Rationality in Interaction This skew is particularly evident in the assumption of rationality." The rationality
assumption
implies that the knower/actor can separate himself/herself from the “other” in
interactions with that other. Feminists have argued that knowledge is always perspectival and
political ; therefore, states and their leaders’ decisions about how to interact with others are not
rational, but informed by their situational and political biases . In this view, the rationality
assumption may be seen as at once itself a political bias and obscuring other political
biases. As Naomi Scheman argues, perceived rational cost-benefit analysis about war-making and war-fighting
should “always be seen as especially problematical when... constructed only by those in
positions of privilege... [which provide] only distorted views about the world .”78 In this view,
rational calculation is not an objective , attainable, and desirable end, but a partial representation of
both interest and actors’ representation of those interests. In this way, through gender lenses, rationality has been seen as
importantly incomplete, leaving out significant (if not the most significant) factors that go into decision-making.79 In addition to
understanding the rationality assumption as partial (and therefore unrepresentative), feminist research has pointed out links
between rationality and mascuIinism.8° As Karen Jones notes, advocates of rationality as a guide for interstate interactions“ assume:
1. Available... conceptions of rationality and reason represent genuinely human norms and ideals; 2. The list of norms and ideals
contained within available conceptions of rationality and reason are sufficiently complete; and 3. The external normative functions
assigned to reason and rationality are unproblematic.82 Looking through gender lenses shows problems with each of these
assumptions. Feminists have argued that “the
identity of the modern subject-in models of human
nature, citizenship, the rational actor, the knowing subject, economic man, and
political agency-is not gender-neutral but masculine (and typically European and heterosexua|).”83
This impacts not only how we see the rational subject, but how we predict and
understand his decisions , at the state level as well as at the individual level. According to Margaret Atherton, the
possibility of rationality has “been used in a disturbing fashion to mark a gender distinction. We have, for example, on the one hand,
the man of reason, and, on the other, the woman of passion.”84 In rationality assumptions, traits associated with
masculinity are normalized and traits associated with femininity are excluded . The impact is
compounded because (masculinized) rationality and its (feminized) alternatives are not on equal playing fields. As a result, Karen
Jones notes that “women’s assumed deficiency in rationality” has been used to exclude both women and knowledge associated with
femininity from accepted views of the world.85 The alleged gender neutrality of rationality, then, “is often a covert form of
privileging maleness”85 and omission of “what has traditionally counted as ‘feminine.’”87 Still, adding women and values
associated with femininity to current concepts of rationality is unlikely to create a gender-neutral concept of rationality.88 This is
because, epistemologically, the sovereign rational subject constructs artificial gendered
boundaries between rationality and emotion, male and female, and knower and
known.89 Among states, those boundaries are not benign. Instead, they breed competition and
domination that inspire and foster war(s) and conflict(s) .90 This competition frequently relies on
contrasting the state’s own masculinity to the enemy’s (actual or perceived) femininity. This cycle
of genderings is not a series of events but a social continuum. In these gendered relationships, as Zillah Eisenstein argues,
“ gender differentiation will be mobilized for war and peace ,” especially moving forward into the
age of an American empire focused on manliness.9‘ Feminists have long argued that competitions
between hegemonic masculinities and subordinate masculinities play a role in causing
war(s).92 Hidden beneath the assumed independence, rationality, and unity of state
interaction leading to war are gendered interstate interactions that cause, constitute,
and relate to war and wars. Feminist scholars have recognized the extent to which the preeminence of masculine
values dominates (particularly conflictual) accounts of interstate interactions, wherein “rational” interactions often
become “a self-reproducing discourse of fear, suspicion, anticipated violence, and
violence” in which “force is used to checkmate force.”93 Interstate interactions leading
to wars often show the gendered nature of war narratives, war logics, and war languages,
which produce (and reproduce) gendered cycles of violence .

The alternative is a maternal thinking that situates the rational strategist as its
object of critique. We embrace vulnerability and recognize the impossibility of
perfecting control for protection.
Cohn 14—Carol Cohn, founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human
Rights, Lecturer in Women's Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston, PhD at the Union
Graduate School (“‘Maternal thinking”’ and the concept of ‘vulnerability’ in security paradigms,
policies, and practices,” Journal of International Political Theory, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2014, p46-69)
Vulnerability: Contrasting conceptions Ruddick’s work on maternal thinking offers us more than a prompt to focus on the question of
“whose vulnerability?” is acknowledged in a security discourse and whose is denied,
displaced, and effaced. Attention to the metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities and
habits, and identification of virtues that are part of maternal thinking about
vulnerability, when contrasted with those that are part of security thinking, help to make
the strangeness and dysfunction of security thinking more evident and to make
alternatives to its logic more imaginable. In other words, even putting aside the question of whose vulnerability
is acknowledged in a security discourse, I would argue that in, for example, the most state-centric conception of
national security, the conventional assumptions about and logics of how to best
respond to the demand for preservation of the state can be thrown into relief, and
rethought, by attending to the ways of thinking that Ruddick described as arising out of
maternal practice. So in this section, I will consider some of the metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities/habits, and
identification of virtues that Ruddick wrote about as characterizing preservative love, and have a look at what they make especially
strange about national security thinking. “To give birth is to create a life that cannot be kept safe, whose unfolding cannot be
controlled and whose eventual death is certain” (Ruddick, 1989: 72). Clearly, Ruddick is talking about a human life here, which, as we
have already established, is not the principal referent of either nuclear or national security discourse. Nonetheless, it is fascinating to
use this sentence as a heuristic for thinking about the state, and the moment that we do, the contrast with US national security
thinking could not be more apparent. In
maternal thinking, we find the acknowledgement of the
impossibility of creating perfect safety or invulnerability, the impossibility of control,
and the inevitability of decline. US national security policy, in contrast, seems to be
based in denial of each of these, as vast human, financial, and natural resources are
spent in the effort to make the US militarily invulnerable, to control the United States’
own fate via controlling the actions and regimes of other states, and to maintain the
belief that “We’re Number One” and that we can and must continue to be so far into
the future. In a sense, US national security policy might best be metaphorized by President Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense
Initiative” (SDI), also popularly known as “Star Wars”—the vision of erecting an impermeable shield around the United States to
protect it from a possible attack by strategic nuclear missiles; that is, to try make the United States invulnerable at all costs, even
though most scientists agreed it was technologically impossible, and the financial cost would have been extraordinary (Cohn, 1989).
But while SDI may work as a metaphor of the quest for invulnerability and the denial of its impossibility, there is at least one way in
which the metaphor falls short. Reagan’s protective dome was to cover only the territory within US borders; in contrast, US
national security policy has characteristically sought invulnerability, control, and
supremacy by taking military action far outside its own borders . In the so-called GWOT, for
example, the United States uses drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan,
and Yemen to kill individuals whose actions are seen to make the United States
vulnerable. What maternal thinking can open to us, then, is the question: what kind of
national security policy would be recognized as rational if we acknowledged that
vulnerability is inevitable, that control has limits, and that ultimately decline is
unavoidable? What alternative policies would be crafted? How would we think about
security, and about preservation of the state, as well as of human beings and the
planet? What kinds of military, foreign, and economic policies might appear most
rational, if we acknowledged those realities? Exploration of these questions has typically
been foreclosed in security policy circles by the symbolic association of vulnerability
with the “feminine”; that which is associated with the feminine, or inadequate
masculinity, is not only devalued in national security discourse, it is also excluded
from deliberation as inherently inadequate (Cohn, 1993). However, admitting irreducible
vulnerability does not, despite policymakers’ apparent fears, equate with giving up,
passivity, or powerlessness. Ruddick describes one response to vulnerability as the
development of a “mental habit or cognitive style” that she calls “scrutinizing”: “mothers are on
the lookout for dangers before they appear” (Ruddick, 1989: 71–72). At first, this cognitive habit might sound just like US security
thinking, but inmaternal thinking, this habit is tempered in several ways . First, in Ruddick’s account,
both scrutinizing and protective love involve a kind of double focus—furtive glances at
potential dangers even while one goes about normal events, and simultaneous
awareness of the near and the eternal (Ruddick, 1989: 78). In contrast, the capacity for a split
focus, for a complex rather than singular attention that can take in both short- and
long-term dangers and values sounds like something that is too often missing in US
security practice. “Furtive glances at potential dangers even while one goes about normal events” describes a state of
being aware of potential dangers, but not letting them dominate your decision
making, not letting fear of them reorient your priorities, not giving up or diverting
resources from the sustaining activities and projects of daily life, all of which is
arguably not a description of the balance between US attention to and investments in
countering potential military threats, and its attention to and investments in the
projects and practices that sustain daily life and long-term societal growth, from
health care and education to public utilities and transportation infrastructure . Similarly, a
split focus that attends to both short- and long-term dangers at times seems notably
absent from US security policy; an example can be seen during the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan, when the United States decided to encourage Islamic groups from around
the world to come to Afghanistan and to provide billions in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
funding for building those groups up, despite warnings from Afghan experts that this would
have disastrous longer term consequences (Hartman, 2002). Ruddick also warns that scrutinizing is a
watchful gaze that can become “obsessive or intrusive”; however, at its best, it is tempered
by a kind of metaphysical humility about what one can actually control (Ruddick, 1989: 72).
Writing just a few weeks after the leaked revelations about the US National Security Agency’s “PRISM” program of covert electronic
surveillance and mass data collection, focusing on the danger of “scrutinizing” within national security practice becoming “obsessive
or intrusive” would seem gratuitous. And, in fact, I think it is the “metaphysical humility” that is of deeper interest here. Ruddick
does not see this metaphysical humility as either automatic or unique to mothers or
mothering practices; instead, it is an attitude that the drive toward preservation will
have to cultivate if it is done with some reflective awareness . “Thus this wise attitude about the
limits of control is not innate to the practice, but emerging from a thoughtful engagement in the practice” (Ruddick, 1989).
Untempered scrutinizing, being on the lookout for dangers before they appear
without the benefit of metaphysical humility, is many ways a perfect description of a
cornerstone of US national security practices of assessment and planning, known as “worst-case
thinking.” A prominent part of Cold War thinking, and still exemplified today in new doctrines such as AirSea Battle, the
strategist imagines the very worst thing that could possibly happen and then plans
backward from there, assuming that the only way to prevent it is the development
and deployment of weapons (Wass de Czege, 2012); through worst-case planning, gargantuan
investments of energy, research capacity, and money in weapons technologies come
to appear rational or justifiable, even though they most likely will never be needed or used. Critically, in worst-case
thinking, the question of how likely it is that a particular hypothetical threat will
materialize is ruled out of bounds; if in a strategist’s wildest imagination a threat can
be conjured as possible, how probable it is is considered irrelevant . Similarly, although there
might be means other than military ones to forestall the hypothetical threat, such as diplomacy, alliance building, or disarmament
(and these could affect probability), worst-case thinking abjures these considerations. For all that worst-case thinking
is justified in the name of “realism,” when viewed through the lens of maternal thinking, the scrutinizing of
worst-case thinking can be seen to be obsessive, as well as lacking a realistic metaphysical humility about
the limits of control—and the moderation which would follow from that humility . In
Ruddick’s account, “although protecting work is never finished, there are no perfectly protected children and … the best control
provides for the limits of that control” (Ruddick, 1989: 73). According to Ruddick, maternal
thinking develops
distinctive ways of thinking about control; the task of preserving a growing, changing,
and self-directing being within a tumultuous, complex, and dangerous environment
engenders distinctive attitudes about the recalcitrance of the given, and the
“recalcitrant givens” include both complex human beings and complex and dangerous
environments. In other words, although a mother recognizes the dangers that threaten her or his5 child, and might wish to
perfectly protect the child from hunger, disease, accident, failure, self-harm, violence or heartbreak, she or he knows that this
perfect protection is not possible. Instead, a reflective maternal practice will include acts of preservative love,
nurturance, and training designed to equip the child with resources for avoiding dangers when possible and for otherwise dealing
with the consequences of dangers that neither mother nor child will be able to perfectly control. Metaphysical
humility
about the limits of control and the recalcitrance of the given, then, can lead to more rational thinking about
responses to threats. The mother in the United States who recognizes her or his daughter’s vulnerability to sexual
violence might decide to send her daughter to self-defense classes but will recognize that attempting to identify all the men who
might ever assault her and to target them with drones would not only be illegal and immoral, but also not the use of resources most
conducive to family health and happiness. Taking maternal thinking as heuristic, we would need to
ask whether worst-case thinking, untempered by metaphysical humility, is any better
for the state than it is for the family. And if unbridled worst-case thinking were
renounced as a basis for national security strategy, how might policymakers within the state
(including but not restricted to the military branch) think in new ways about both avoiding dangers and
dealing with their consequences?
 ADV - Elites
1. No diversionary war – too many empirical shortcomings.
Elias Götz, Post-Doctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, ’17, Putin, the State, and
War: The Causes of Russia’s Near Abroad Assertion Revisited, International Studies Review,
19:2

Both explanations share the assumption that the imperative of regime survival is
the motivating force behind Russia’s actions. This view finds broad appeal among
many Western officials and commentators. After all, it resonates with their liberal outlook,
according to which Russian authoritarianism is the main source of Moscow’s assertive
behavior. The logical upshot is that if Russia becomes more liberal and democratic, it will
act differently toward neighboring states. Moreover, the approach links to a well-
established tradition in IR, which emphasizes the importance of domestic political
arrangements in the formation of foreign policy (see, e.g., Moravcsik 1997; Rosecrance and
Stein 1993; Russett 1993). Finally, it finds a lot of prima facie support in empirical terms. It
is easy to point to numerous instances in which Russia backed autocratic governments in
the region. Think, for example, of Russia’s long-standing support of the Lukashenka regime
in Belarus (Ambrosio 2006; Vanderhill 2013, 64–87). Thus, the approach seems to have
much to offer in analyzing Russia’s near abroad assertion. Upon closer inspection, however,
it does not provide a fully persuasive account. To begin with, the argument that
Russia’s near abroad assertion is an attempt to divert attention from internal
challenges fails to convince, for four reasons. First, the political survival of the
present regime in Moscow was never acutely or seriously threatened. True,
there were anti-government protests after fraudtainted parliamentary elections in
December 2011 and prior to Putin’s return to the presidency in May 2012. Putin’s
popularity at that time was no doubt lower than during his first terms. Still, all
independent surveys show that Putin and his regime continue to enjoy broad
support from large swathes of the population (Smyth 2014). This is not to deny that
there is real discontent with the government in Moscow, but it is unlikely to pose a
significant challenge to the Kremlin in the short to medium term. There are three
reasons why. For one thing, there is no united opposition in Russia; for another, the
regime can use the state’s coercive apparatus to suppress domestic unrest;
and finally, and perhaps most important of all, the Kremlin can fall back on non-
democratic sources of legitimacy.
Alongside economic growth, which has slowed down in recent years, regime legitimacy is
created through the provision of internal order and the promotion of patriotic nationalism
within Russia, which is purposefully exploited by the Kremlin (Cannady and Kubicek 2014;
Lin~an 2010; Rose et al. 2011). In short, the absence of any immediate threat to the
Russian leadership casts doubt on the argument that its assertive approach in
the region is a case of diversionary foreign policy.
Second, almost all scholars agree that in the longer term, regime stability hinges
on economic performance (Treisman 2011). Thus, it seems shortsighted and self-
defeating for the Russian leadership to pursue overly assertive foreign
policies that lead to trade sanctions

from the West and economic isolation. Some observers may counter that the Kremlin
artificially creates conflicts precisely because it wants to sustain its popular legitimacy at a
time of economic crisis. Indeed, it is well documented that approval ratings of the
Russian regime have increased in response to high-level conflicts such as the
Georgian war in 2008 and the Ukraine crisis in 2014. However, as Daniel Treisman (2014,
386) has shown, “such rallies tend to be short-lived, dissipating within a few months.”
He concludes that “Putin’s surge during the Georgia war, which evaporated as the financial
crisis struck, can hardly have been worth the war’s economic costs” (Treisman 2014, 386).
Indeed, a large number of quantitative and qualitative studies have shown that
diversionary war rallies tend to be fleeting. As scholar Amy Oakes (2006, 439)
points out, “the hoped for rally-around-the-flag effect, when it arises, is generally
short-lived. If the war drags on and requires greater than anticipated sacrifices, the
mobilization process will aggravate the social fragmentation it was waged to ease” (see also
Fravel 2010, 338; Hetherington and Nelson 2003). Seen from a regime-security perspective,
the creation of foreign-policy crises by the Putin government thus appears
unhelpful and indeed counterproductive.

Third, and relatedly, it is noteworthy that several decades of research on

diversionary war theory has produced mixed results at best (see, e.g., Fravel 2010;
Hendrickson 2002; Levy 1989; Meernik and Waterman 1996). In particular, recent studies
have shown that countries with a basic level of state capacity—such as Russia
today—tend to forego diversionary uses of force and instead use a mixture of
coercion and cooptation to deal with domestic opposition (Oakes 2006). This finding
casts doubt on the hypothesized relationship between regime-security concerns, on the one
hand, and Russia’s near abroad assertion, on the other. Rather than pursuing belligerent
foreign policies (or initiating an external war), which entails great risks, the Kremlin could
try to buy off political opposition or simply resort to internal repression.

Fourth, and finally, the focus on diversionary motives cannot explain the
trajectory of Russia’s near abroad policy. As every close observer of Russian
foreign policy knows, Moscow began to adopt a more proactive and combative
approach in the region in around 2004. At that time, the Kremlin’s popularity
greatly increased on the back of a booming economy, mainly brought about by a rise in
world energy and commodity prices. In other words, just as the economy recovered,
which in turn boosted the Russian leadership’s popularity, Moscow assumed a
more assertive stance abroad. This pattern does not fit well with the argument that
Russia’s combative approach in the post-Soviet space is an attempt to deflect attention from
internal failures

2. No elite pressure---Putin is completely in control

Chotiner 20 – Isaac Chotiner, writer for the New Yorker, interviewing Masha Lipman, Moscow-
based political analyst, “How Putin Controls Russia,” 1/23/20,
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-putin-controls-russia

Last week, Vladimir Putin

announced sweeping changes to the Russian constitution. Shortly
afterward, the Prime Minister and his government resigned; there is no doubt that they
did so at Putin’s behest . (On Monday, Putin formally submitted the constitutional changes and fired the
country’s prosecutor general .)

Putin’s tenure as President is not supposed to extend beyond 2024, and the changes
were widely seen as an attempt to extend his hold on power for as long as he deems
fit. But, beyond that, no one really knows how he plans to reorganize the Russian state. To discuss Putin’s moves, I recently spoke
by phone with Masha Lipman, a Moscow-based political analyst who has written extensively on Putin’s regime. During our
conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Putin’s decision-making style, how his personality and
leadership have changed over the past two decades, and the differences between his rule and the later years of the Soviet Union.

Four years ago, you wrote a piece for The New Yorker in which you argued, in part, “The political environment in Russia is growing
more chaotic. Putin may be the Russian tsar, but it is less clear to what extent he is in control.” Is it more clear how much he is in
control today?

The issue of control is tricky. If one talks about whether government management is efficient in Russia, then no, it is not. And Putin
has repeatedly, over his very long time in office, spoken about the need to increase the productivity of labor and quite a few other
very important goals. I wouldn’t say he has delivered so well on those. But, if
we define control as control over
the élite , over making the decisions, of course Putin’s fully in control . And the
developments of the past few days are very clear and persuasive evidence of him
being in control of making decisions.
How do you understand his moves over the past few days?

This is a demonstration of how Putin is ultimately in charge and how he can make very important
decisions by himself in an atmosphere of complete secrecy . We still do not know who was aware of
what was in store for the country three or four days ago, and to what extent there is anyone who can actually challenge his
decisions, even verbally.

Putin rarely consults with anyone , and, even if he does, it is done in a totally opaque way. He’s rarely
explicit. Even if he consults with some people in his circle, people leave without having a clear idea of what his goal is and have
to guess. Sometimes they guess right. Sometimes they guess wrong. Sometimes they try to curry favor and succeed, sometimes not.
At the end of the day he is the ultimate decision-maker. And the strategy and the
grand plans that he has for Russia, in their entirety, exist only in his mind .
 ADV - Arms control
1. Enlargement doesn’t threaten Russian security.
Kimberly Marten, Professor of Polisci @ Barnard, 4-16-20, “NATO enlargement:
evaluating its consequences in Russia” International Politics, Vol 57, Iss 3. Springer.

Russian military planners knew that NATO enlargement did not create a threat
to Russian security. Annual military data that Russia provided to members of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe through the Vienna Document process
show that the numbers of troops and weaponry (including battle tanks, armored
personnel carriers, and artillery) deployed in Russia’s Western and Southern Military
Districts (those along NATO’s new borders) fell steeply from 2000 to 2010—years
that Putin was in ofce, and during which NATO enlargement both began and peaked. These
numbers continued to decline until Russia’s intervention in Ukraine caused a
sharp rise in 2014 (Vershbow 2017).1 This is exactly the opposite behavior from
what would be expected if Russia saw NATO enlargement as militarily
threatening. There is simply no evidence that Russian military planners were
concerned about NATO’s geographic expansion before Putin decided to invade
Crimea—20 years after the NATO enlargement process began.

2. Decreased relations don’t reduce security cooperation.

Kimberly Marten, Professor of Polisci @ Barnard, 4-16-20, “NATO enlargement:
evaluating its consequences in Russia” International Politics, Vol 57, Iss 3. Springer.

Even then, both of these Balkan cases had mixed, rather than completely negative,
effects on Russia–NATO relations. NATO’s geographic enlargement did not
derail security cooperation in either case. Former Russian Prime Minister Viktor
Chernomyrdin played an important role in 1999 in convincing Milošević to accept a peace
settlement as quickly as he did in the Kosovo case, even though the primary cause of
Serbian capitulation was the NATO bombing campaign (Hosmer 2001). Russia participated
(somewhat uncooperatively, even in Bosnia) (Atkinson 1996), in the NATO-led peace
enforcement operations that were established in both Bosnia and Kosovo after the worst
hostilities had ended. The Kosovo operation came close to sparking open confict between
Russian and NATO troops when Russia secretly entered the country and seized the airport
in Pristina before the joint operation was to start (Daalder and O’Hanlon 2001, 175; Clark
2002), and some analysts believe that Russia’s intention at the time was to partition the
country to create a Serbian-controlled northern region against NATO’s wishes (Brudenell
2008). Yet Russia stayed in both peace operations until 2003 (after the invitation
to the Baltic and Black Sea states to join NATO), working side by side with NATO
troops on the ground, acting with generally high levels of professionalism, and
achieving some real successes in maintaining stability (Cross 2002).
 3. Alt causes to US Russia relations – Air strikes, treaties, BMD
all mark russia’s declining status.
Kimberly Marten, Professor of Polisci @ Barnard, 4-16-20, “NATO enlargement:
evaluating its consequences in Russia” International Politics, Vol 57, Iss 3. Springer.
Analysis of how NATO’s post-Cold War enlargement per se afected Russia’s relations with
the West is further complicated because enlargement (which publicly began with a NATO
study in late 1994, peaked from 1997 through 2004 as states bordering Russia were invited
to join, and continues today) occurred alongside numerous other signifcant and
largely negative security interactions between Russia and the West. The efects
on Russian perceptions and planning of these various events are impossible to
disentangle from those caused by enlargement. The most signifcant of these
events include NATO airstrikes and NATO-led peace operations in Bosnia and
Kosovo, where Russian diplomats and soldiers played complex and sometimes
contradictory roles; US and British airstrikes against the Iraq i regime of Saddam
Hussein in 1998 and the eventual USled coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, both
of which occurred without United Nations Security Council (UNSC) approval
and in the face of what would have been Russian vetoes; US unilateral withdrawal from
the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia in 2001–2002, followed by US
bilateral agreements with Poland and Romania (with NATO support) to build
ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems on their territories against Russian wishes; and
the UNSCapproved NATO mission against Muammar Gaddaf’s Libya in 2011,
which morphed into a regime-change operation that Russia opposed. None of these
events depended on NATO enlargement—arguably not even the agreement to build
BMD sites in Romania and Poland, given that the USA also has bilateral BMD equipment
arrangements with a wide variety of non-NATO members (including Bahrain, Egypt, Israel,
Japan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates) (Reif
2019). Russia and the West also found themselves at odds during this fraught
time because Russian military forces remained in Georgia and Moldova against
the wishes of their UN-recognized sovereign governments, undermining the newly
signed Adapted Conventional Forces in Europe (A/CFE) Treaty of 1999. NATO
enlargement was not a discrete event in the panoply of Russia’s security relationships with
the West and cannot be treated as if it were.

There is no question that NATO’s geographic enlargement was a major irritant

to Russian leaders and contributed to the decline of the overall relationship between
Russia and the West—but there is little evidence that enlargement actually
threatened Russia. Instead, NATO enlargement was a marker for Russia’s
declining status and the growing infuence of the USA in the world; it reflected, rather
than caused, a shift in the relative global power balance. Given the long history of
Soviet-NATO confrontation during the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and
Russia’s weakness and instability in the 1990s, any action that showcased the growth of
relative US infuence, especially in Europe, would likely have raised Russian hackles.
4. Prolif inevitable and the impact is non-unque - INF, Noko expansion, and
India Pakistan conflict
5. No solvency – evidence not reverse causal. NATO expansion to NATO
thumps and not reversed after the plan.
 ADV - Ukraine
1. They don’t solve nationalism - their ev says the president
depends on anti-moscow rhetoricfor power
2. Russia knows they’ll never join – France and Germany will
block accession.
Kimberly Marten, Professor of Polisci @ Barnard, 4-16-20, “NATO enlargement:
evaluating its consequences in Russia” International Politics, Vol 57, Iss 3. Springer.

What about the claim (Mearsheimer 2014b) that Russia’s August 2008 war with
Georgia—and later seizure of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine—
were caused by NATO’s infamous April 2008 Bucharest summit statement that
Ukraine and Georgia ‘will become members of NATO’? Putin and other leading
Russian commentators certainly made it clear that NATO membership for Ukraine and
Georgia would be considered a direct military threat to Russia—and US ambassador
William J. Burns communicated that fact to the George W. Bush administration in a secret
March 2008 cable (Burns 2008). But news reports at the time also made it clear that the
Bucharest summit initiative lacked French and German support. The USA
(especially Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor) had wanted to ofer a MAP to
the two countries at that time, but the rest of NATO balked (BBC News 2008). A
Congressional Research Service report published the next month highlighted the divisions
within NATO over this issue:
Representatives of several allied governments criticized the Administration’s
handling of the MAP issue. They noted that several allies had clearly indicated
before the summit their opposition to Georgia and Ukraine joining the
MAP, and that President Bush’s campaign in Georgia and Ukraine, and then at the
summit, to persuade them to change their minds ignored their concerns. (Gallis
2008, 5)
The report notes: ‘The allies did not provide a time frame for eventual membership’ (6).
Indeed, there was a snide joke circulating in the European diplomatic
community at the time that rephrased the summit declaration as ‘Ukraine and
Georgia will become members of NATO…when hell freezes over.’
 3. No solvency – ceasefire fails because of structural economic reasons, not
because it’s not aggressive enough – their evidence.
4. NO expansion - their ev says Russian wants rebels in eastern Ukraine to
succed, the advantage is about western ukraine
5. Decisionmaking nonunique - Montenegro and turkey stall conversations
which the aff doesn’t solve beacse it desnt remove them from the
alliance

6. No US-Russia war.
Michael O'Hanlon, Senior Fellow of Foreign Policy at Brookings and Sean Zeigler, Fellow at
Brookings Institute, 7/13/19, No, we aren't on the brink of a new Cold War with Russia and
China, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/07/13/no-we-arent-on-the-
brink-of-a-new-cold-war-with-russia-and-china/

COLD WAR RHETORIC ABOUT RUSSIA IS MISCONCEIVED

The dangers and fallacies of thinking in Cold-War, zero-sum, and military-first policies towards
Russia are several-fold. First, today’s Russia, while both vindictive and ambitious, has nothing
like the global ambitions of the Soviet Union. While it expresses a sense of betrayal by the West,
it evinces no grandiose concept for worldwide conquest. As authors such as Timothy Snyder and
Robert Kagan rightly argue, there can be a sort of authoritarian contagion that leaders like Putin
could spread. But this is hardly akin to the Kremlin’s Marxist-Leninist ambitions for conquest
during the Cold War.

Second, a Cold-War-like attitude ignores how much we are still working with Russia on key
global security concerns. Russia’s role is especially important given its veto powers at the United
Nations Security Council, crucial for policies such as imposing sanctions on threatening nations .
If there is someday to be a new deal with Iran to supersede the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan
of Action, or if there is to be a negotiated denuclearization plan of some sort with North Korea,
Russia’s support will be crucial. Despite troubled relations in recent years, Moscow generally has
supported American policy at the United Nations in regard to these countries. Even in places
where Russian policy is distasteful, or even reprehensible, such as in Syria, it will be far easier to
solve problems if we can de-conflict our approaches with Moscow — and in fact, certain types of
military deconfliction have been taking place for some time there, making possible the defeat of
the ISIS caliphate.

Third, for all the debate about NATO’s lack of adequate seriousness when it comes to defense
burden-sharing, the alliance remains impressive . Although only 7 countriesmeet the official
goal of spending at least 2 percent of GDP on their armed forces, NATO collectively accounts for
more than half of all world military spending. Most members have significantly increased their
defense budgets since the Crimea crisis of 2014. NATO has also deployed enhanced forward
presence battalions to the Baltic states and Poland. They do not constitute a robust defensive
perimeter, but they at least represent a stronger tripwire than before. NATO would do well to
make its reinforcement capabilities for this region more robust, but it is hard to see Mr. Putin
really believing he could get away with an all-out invasion, even today. So far, he has cautiously
avoided any military excursions into NATO countries.

Fourth, European nations do not get enough credit for the sustaining their sanctions on Russia
as a result of its aggressions against Ukraine. Over the last half decade, largely as a result, the
Russian economy has essentially gone flat. Gross domestic product and foreign direct
investment in Russia have both declined since its Crimean invasion. Not only has this outcome
delivered a useful punitive blow against Putin and many of his cronies, it has quite possibly
helped dissuade any further Russian aggression, be it against Ukraine or Georgia or even a Baltic
state, adding another dimension of deterrence to what NATO is doing militarily. A greater
integration of economic and military measures of deterrence should be pursued in the United
States and NATO, as one of us has recently argued in a new book, The Senkaku Paradox. More
credible policies are needed in particular for limited and grey-area conflict zones. Such scenarios
do indeed remain worrisome, as Russia continues to engage in disinformation campaigning and
election meddling — but these efforts should not be confused with the existential risks of the
Cold War.

7. NO central Asian impact - Ukraine expansion would be like crimea, not

necessitate refuges AND no scenario for extinction
2NC
PIC
 Assurance
1. Faster – Russia preemptively attacks.
Kühn, Ulrich; and Volpe, Tristan, Fellows in the Nuclear Policy Program at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ’17, “Keine Atombombe, Bitte: Why Germany
Should Not Go Nuclear” Foreign Affairs; July/August.

Worst of all, the pursuit of a German nuclear arsenal, rather than deterring
aggression, could increase the risk of conflict in Europe, since Russia would likely
work to prevent Germany from acquiring the bomb. Moscow could assassinate
German nuclear scientists, use cyberattacks to sabotage German nuclear industrial
infrastructure, and perhaps go so far as to strike German nuclear facilities from the air.
Even covert operations could quickly spiral into outright confrontation .
Even if Germany managed to acquire nuclear weapons, it would then face the daunting task
of making sure they could survive a Russian attack. In recent years, Russia has moved its
missiles westward, targeting Germany and other nato members. Now that Russia has
allegedly deployed multiple cruise missiles in violation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty, under which the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to
abandon midrange missiles, its ability to destroy a fledgling German nuclear stockpile is
only growing. Unless Germany managed to conceal and protect its nuclear weapons almost
immediately, German leaders could, during a crisis with Russia, feel pressure to launch a
preemptive nuclear attack against Russia in order to avoid losing the arsenal to a Russian
first strike.

2. EU war – german conventional and nuclear rearm fractures

European unity, ends 70 years of continental peace and cause
nuclear war.
Lauren Fielder, Professor Fielder is Assistant Dean of Graduate and International
Programs and Director of the Institute for Transnational Law at the University of Texas at
Austin, ’18, “Is Nationalism the Most Serious Challenge to Human Rights? Warnings from
BREXIT and Lessons from History,” 53 Tex. Int'l L.J. 212 *

The political might of the EU is essential for peace and stability in the world. Brexit
"fractures the Western alliance and weakens NATO solidarity and resolve." 224 The politics
of scale and multilateralism foster peace and human rights with regard to third countries.
225 This can be seen in the work that the EU currently doing, albeit
imperfectly, in trying to de-escalate the tension between Iran and Saudi
Arabia, a source of the conflict brewing in Yemen. 226 The clearest example of these
politics of scale is the essential role of the EU in aiding the peaceful transition of former
Eastern Bloc states into largely democratic and open societies upon the end of the Cold
War. 227 The entry requirements into the EU reflected this European identity, including
democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for minorities. 228 However, the
transition to democracy is not finished: "It still could (with the enthusiastic support from
Moscow) go into reverse." 229 Putin's Russia has a vital interest in the breakup of
the EU, 230 and we see that the threat of nuclear war is not far behind us. 231 Further,
current destabilization in parts of the Balkans is reminiscent of past patterns that
preceded violence in the region. 232

The end of the European Union could return Europe to, as one writer describes, the
"dark days of poisonous tribal hatreds" in which destructive forces could unleash the
undoing of 70 years of statesmanship. 233 Indeed, the last seven decades, the [*234]
European Union has largely been a "place of peace, stability, prosperity, cooperation,
democracy, and social harmony." 234 However, "[we would] be wrong to assume the
permanence of European political and economic stability … . Across the grand sweep of
European history, countries and empires disintegrating into smaller governing units or
being violently subsumed into larger empires is the norm." 235

The EU is not just an international economic organization; it is an organization created

from the destruction brought about by two World Wars and designed to promote
peace and prevent conflict. 236 European integration is doubtless problematic but "the
alternative is so much worse." 237 The history of Europe is fraught with violent
conflict: "War, twice in the Twentieth Century and for ages previously, has plagued the
European continent." 238 Conflict stretches back across the entire history of Europe. There
has been an almost unbroken chain of war from the fifteenth century to World
War II fought over family rivalries, religion, deep hatreds, and territorial expansion. In the
fifteenth century, the War of the Roses was fought over a dispute over title to the English
throne. 239 In the sixteenth century, there were religious wars in Austria, Germany,
France, and Spain over Catholicism and Protestantism. 240 The seventeenth century
included the Thirty Years' War - a war that started over religion, but expanded to
include territorial acquisition - the English Civil War, France's Dutch wars that were
fought over frontiers, and the War of the League of Augsburg, which was
possibly the first war over the Alsace-Lorraine. 241 In the eighteenth century,
European countries fought to block the coalition of France and Spain in the War of Spanish
Succession; and, also fought in the War of Austrian Succession, the Seven Years' War, and
the French Revolution. 242 In the nineteenth century, there were the Napoleonic Wars to
build an Empire, the second and third French Revolutions, the Wars for Italian Unification,
the Crimean War - which was the first modern war, with massive casualty rates,
mechanized warfare, and modern weapons - and the wars for German unification.
243 Finally, in the twentieth century, there was the Russian Revolution, the First and
Second Balkan Wars, World War I, and World War II. 244

1. Article 5- Treaty commitments are sacrosanct – contravening Article V

unleashes a wave of proliferation.
Kupchan ’19 [Charles A; senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, professor of
international affairs at Georgetown University in the Walsh School of Foreign Service and
Department of Government; Winter 2019; “On Great Power Conflict: Entangled or Untangled
Alliances?”; https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Volume-13_Issue-4/
SSQWinter2019.pdf; Strategic Studies Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4; accessed 9/23/20; TV]
SSQ: Inthe case of NATO, is the alliance more likely to draw the US into a great power
conflict or prevent such a conflict?

CAK: NATO is more likely to prevent a conflict and preserve stability , at least for now. Russia has
been probing the gray zones such as Georgia and Ukraine but not NATO territory. The Russians
are not going to test Article 5 , which serves as an effective deterrent . It is also important not to
underestimate the political and social consequences of NATO. It remains the premier institution that binds

North America to Europe’s democracies at a time when democratic norms and institutions are
being tested by the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic. NATO plays an important role in
consolidating transatlantic solidarity and cooperation . That role is important today in light of illiberal
trends among Western democracies and the illiberal agenda of powers like Russia and China. Despite the
transatlantic tensions that have emerged during the Trump presidency, the alliance is actually in very
good shape. NATO militaries are working together closely, and European defense
spending is rising. Publics on both sides of the Atlantic continue to support the alliance. The
US Congress has repeatedly made clear its backing of NATO. These are all signs of the
health of the alliance at a time of political strain.

SSQ:If Russia violates Article 5 provisions of the NATO treaty, to what extent should the US
react?
CAK: Treaty
commitments are sacrosanct . One of the pillars of a rulesbased system is for
nations to live by their commitments . They do not cherry-pick . They don’t only show up
on a sunny day and disappear on a rainy day. The US should stand by its Article 5 commitments if
the Russians test those commitments whether it concerns Estonia , Latvia , Poland , or
any other member. We should lead a coalition to defend the territory of alliance members. If
the US were to fail to uphold its NATO commitments , it would raise doubts about US
commitments globally —in Asia , the Middle East , everywhere.

SSQ: Will
US alliances and agreements with Indo-Pacific nations precipitate or likely restrain a great power
conflict?
CAK: In the end, US commitments in the Indo-Pacific are a source of stability . The presence of
the US in South Korea, Japan, Guam, and other forward locations helps prevent the regional jockeying and
balancing that would otherwise occur. The Chinese may complain about the US presence;
however, in many respects they benefit from that presence because it helps prevent an arms
race in China’s neighborhood. Japan and South Korea could seek nuclear weapons in the absence
of a US commitment to their security. Over the long term, one would hope East Asia could pursue a self-sustaining
regional project of integration that would make it unnecessary for the US to remain the extra-regional guarantor. But this outcome
depends a great deal on how China exercises its growing power. If rapprochement and cooperation are to emerge among the
region’s nations, China’s neighbors need to believe that Beijing has benign strategic intentions. That is not now the case. However, it
is unlikely that the US will be the strategic guarantor of East Asia indefinitely. A key challenge of our time is managing the
relationship between the US and China. America has only one peer competitor on the horizon: China. That makes the USChina
relationship a defining one for the twenty-first century.

SSQ: Are some US alliance agreements in the Indo-Pacific more likely to create the conditions for great power conflict?
CAK: Taiwan has to be on the top of the list of territories in East Asia that could precipitate great power conflict. Some accidental
event could precipitate hostilities—for example, a collision between a Chinese vessel and a US vessel in the South China Sea. Of
course, there have been airborne incidents already. Other pathways to conflict are increased nationalist sentiment in Taiwan that
leads to a formal declaration of independence or events in China that ramp up nationalism and the pressure it exerts on Taiwan.
However, today, the likelihood of a deliberate war between China and Taiwan is less likely than hostilities stemming from an
inadvertent escalation.

SSQ: If China forcefully violates a US agreement with an Asian partner, to what extent should the US respond?
CAK: Just as I said with reference to NATO, treaty commitments are sacrosanct . If they start to
unravel, the rules-based international system starts to unravel. It is in the US interest to
facilitate conversations between China and Taiwan and to help de-escalate tensions as the two parties search for a
permanent settlement. Until that comes about, the US should stand by its commitments .

2. Scaling back Article 5 is perceived as an intentional move to undermine

NATO – research demonstrates that ripples globally and incites cascading
alliance collapse.
Dr. Mark S. Bell 18, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, and
Dr. Joshua D. Kertzer, Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University, “Trump,
Psychology, and the Future of U.S. Alliances”, in Assessing the U.S. Commitment to Allies in Asia
and Beyond, Ed. Stirling, German Marshall Fund of the United States Report, Number 11, p. 10-
13

These biases have important implications for alliance politics. Allies are likely to see U.S.
actions as the willful choices of the U.S. government, rather than attributing them to
domestic or international constraints. For example, foreign observers will tend to see
policymaking volatility as evidence of Trump administration deliberately cultivating uncertainty
rather than as the result of bureaucratic infighting or incompetence . Similarly, allies may
tend toward interpret ing any omission of efforts to reinforce an alliance as a deliberate

strategic choice to undermine an alliance such as with Trump’s reluctance to publicly

commit to NATO’s Article 5 . These dynamics only serve to decrease trust, and increase the damage that can be caused to
alliances, even by “cheap” talk.

Redefining the Norms of Exchange

Since the campaign trail, Trump has frequently indicated a desire to recast the U.S. relationship with its historical partners. He has
threatened to withdraw U.S. forces from Japan unless Japan started paying for all of the costs, has alleged that Germany owed NATO
“vast sums of money,” and so on. Although it is not unusual for U.S. officials to complain about free riding (which, as discussed
above, is a perennial concern within alliance relationships), American alliances seem to currently be understood in a more
transactional fashion than under previous administrations.

This shift matters because it suggests a shift in how the White House understands the norms governing its relationships with allies.
Alan Fiske, an anthropologist who studies the structure of social relationships, argues that there are four ideal-typical forms of
relationships, each of which is based on a different norm of exchange.14 Robust alliances are often governed by
what Fiske calls “communal sharing” norms: NATO’s Article 5, for example, enshrines the norm of collective defense, in
which an attack on one member of the alliance is understood as an attack on all members because of their common membership
within a group. Alliesare one and the same ; part of a broader community . Trump’s recent comments,
however, imply a shift away from communal sharing toward a different norm: “market pricing.” This form of
relationship is dictated by cost-benefit calculations . Countries must contribute proportional to what they have in
order to receive the benefits. Allies are business partners, rather than close friends.

Why does this shift matter? Psychological

research tells us that applying market-pricing
frameworks to relationships previously characterized by communal sharing leads to
conflict and contention .15 Actors subjected to these “taboo tradeoffs” often experience
negative reactions : when we have family over for Thanksgiving dinner, we rarely present them with the bill afterwards
because it violates the norm of exchange around which the relationship is based. The very act of monetizing the exchange seems
taboo, just as it seems taboo to offer to buy someone’s kidney.16 Reframing
alliances in purely transactional
terms may inherently undermine cohesion and generate distrust. It also undermines
their deterrent power , because communal sharing relationships are built around moral motives of unity: outgroup
members know that members of the ingroup are committed to unite automatically against outsiders who pose threats.17 In
contrast, ifan alliance is based solely on market pricing, outsiders know that with the proper
incentives alliance members can be bought off or wedged apart from one another.

Motivated Images: From Friend to Foe

Both leaders and mass publics in international

politics often have images or stereotypes of other countries,
cognitive schema that actors rely on to make sense of international relations hips.18 Images tend to
have common structures: the “enemy image,” popular during the Cold War, for example, was of another actor of similar relative
capabilities and cultural status, but with threatening intentions; the “colony image” was of actors with weaker relative capabilities
and of lower cultural status, who posed an opportunity rather than a threat. Because of this schematic structure, images lead to
routinized interaction: knowing what image a decision-maker has of their relationship with another country tells us a great deal
about the policy preferences that follow.

A decision-maker who has an enemy image of another country, for example, will tend to see that country as being driven by malign
and unlimited motives, led by a unified regime that nonetheless can be contained by a sufficient use of force. A decision-maker who
has a colony image of another country often tends to perceive it as being internally divided, between good forces (led by a
progressive, modernizing leader, but who needs external support) and bad ones (led by radical fanatics or local puppets of foreign
enemies), thereby legitimating intervention to prop up the former and quash the latter. Once images are embedded, they shape
both the kind of information we seek out, and how that information is interpreted.

Importantly, images are motivated; what we want affects the image we see. The ally image is undergirded by
perceived opportunities for mutual gain , while an enemy image presents itself when we see others as posing a
threat. As the international relations scholar Richard Herrmann notes, “as the feeling that another country has goals that threaten
one’s own increases, so does the inclination to construct a cognitive picture of that other country that features negative items.”19 In
other words, eventhough we often think of images as being deeply embedded and thus
resistant to change, they can flip quickly based on the presence or absence of conflicts
of interest . This means that the ally image that other countries have of the U nited S tates
can be overridden when facing American policy choices that violate allies’ interests in stability or a liberal,
rule-based international order. It matters even if these negative images of the United States are only held by foreign publics rather
than more pragmatic governing elites, since foreign leaders will find it harder to make concessions in negotiations with the United
States when doing so is deeply unpopular with their publics or domestic audiences.

Furthermore, the images we form of countries are not only built around narrow bilateral
interactions. Washington’s interactions with others will also shape its image with
allies. For example, German decision makers may draw inferences about the Trump administration’s
commitment to a liberal world order not only from their direct interactions with the administration but from

what they read and observe about his domestic rhetoric and policies, his appointees, his interactions
with other leaders and countries , and so on. As a result, U.S. actions in one domain may well
influence the judgments of statesmen on wholly distinct matters, amplifying their effect and
increasing the speed with which shifts in alliance credibility can occur.
Motivated Reasoning: Impressions Stick

Whether citizens or diplomats, psychologists tell us that humans are “goal-directed information processors” who tend to evaluate
information in a way that reinforces their pre-existing views.20 We tend to seek out information consistent with what we already
believe (what psychologists call a confirmation bias), and heavily discount information that challenges our priors (a disconfirmation
bias). Trump’s unpredictability and incendiary rhetoric during the campaign, transition, and first months of the administration has
created an image that will be hard to reverse. Even if Trump seeks to backtrack from his prior rhetoric and positions, the
salience of his original views risk s a self-reinforcing spiral , in which information that fits that image will be more easily
believed than information that contradicts it. Foreign
allies will seek out and place more weight on
information that confirms their initial impressions, and place a lower weight on
disconfirming evidence.
Motivated reasoning thus offers yet another mechanism through which alliances can erode once negative
impressions have been established. This reinforcing spiral, when combined with the other mechanisms listed
above, also shows how the effects we describe here have the potential to persist even if the Trump administration should be
succeeded by a more conventional presidential administration. The
greater the stressors the current administration
places on the alliance system — sending out mixed messages that undermine the
credibility of U.S. commitments , or carrying out actions that prompt allies to hedge and seek out alternate
arrangements — the harder it will be for future administrations to repair the damage .

Policy Implications

What does all of this mean for policymakers? We conclude by briefly summarizing some key implications and recommendations:

U.S. policymakers seeking to manage and maintain alliances should not place faith in their longevity being probable or automatic.
Tension and fragmentation is the historical norm in alliance relationships, and even U.S. alliances have the
potential to quickly weaken .

U.S. alliances rest both on the credibility of threats made to adversaries, and the credibility of promises
made to allies. The Trump administration has focused on the former, but neglected the latter. Because cred ibility is
ultimately a belief held in the mind of policymakers, it can change even in the absence of shifts in the
military balance, or in the legal terms of U.S. treaty commitments. Both allies’ and adversaries’ minds can be changed :

if allies and adversaries doubt U.S. commitments, they may dramatically alter their behavior
even in the absence of material changes on the ground. U.S. policymakers seeking to uphold U.S. alliances should therefore not
believe that material changes are the only ones that matter.

Psychological factors are likely to mean that allies do not treat statements or rhetoric by the Trump administration as merely “cheap
talk.” On the contrary, even rhetorical statements can rapidly change the way in which allies understand the nature of their
relationship with the United States. In general, these mechanisms are likely to exacerbate rather than lessen the impact of any shifts
that occur. Given the “bully pulpit” that the President enjoys, and President Trump’s willingness to make policy pronouncements via
Twitter, the President significant leverage to change the nature of the U.S. alliance system even if other cabinet members, parts of
the U.S. bureaucracy, or Congress seek to mitigate those effects.

Many of these mechanisms are self-reinforcing and interactive: they strengthen rather than counteract each other. Furthermore,
states men draw infer ences about the administration from the totality of its domestic and international
behavior, not simply from their own direct experiences of it. U.S. policymakers should
expect to find it difficult to prevent U.S. actions in one domain from influenc ing the
judgments of statesmen on other matters . Collectively, this has the potential to lead to
downward spirals of confidence in U.S. commitments, and to tipping points that lead to
sudden and dramatic shifts in alliance stability, instead of slow and steady degradations
in ally confidence in U.S. commitments. U.S. policymakers should therefore make preparations for
contingencies that may have previously seemed highly improbable or only plausible in the distant future such as a sudden collapse in
NATO’s credibility, or South Korean or Japanese willingness to pursue independent nuclear weapons, both of which seem much
more plausible today than would have been the case a year ago.

3. Strategic context – now is the worst time to inject doubt. INF, Russian
assertiveness and Trump put Germany on the brink of starting a nuclear
program.
Bruno Tertrais, Deputy Director of the Paris-based Fondation pour la recherche
stratégique, ’19, “Will Europe Get Its Own Bomb?” Washington Quarterly, 42:2, June 28,
2019, https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.gwu.edu/dist/1/2181/files/2019/06/
Tertrais.pdf
Over 20 years after the last French initiative, this field remains largely fallow. The French
are partly to blame: their 1995–1996 drive for a European discussion of nuclear deterrence
issues coincided with their final testing campaign, which was criticized by several European
Union partners. Paris learned the lesson and abandoned any appetite for major initiatives in
this area. French abstinence from the NATO Nuclear Planning Group (NPG), seen with
suspicion by EU members of the Alliance, has not helped; and as long as the NATO
common deterrent appeared solid, no one was really interested in a separate,
European discussion of deterrence, even less in rocking the boat by devising alternative
arrangements. Some also feared that a nuclear debate in the EU could complicate the task of
building up common conventional capabilities.

But the context is now changing . If one describes the nuclear deterrence question as a
matter of supply and demand, things have evolved on both ends:
– On the demand side, Russia’s new assertiveness and territorial aggression has
triggered a renewed interest in Europe about the means to guarantee their
existence and territorial integrity. This is true in particular not only for countries that
became members of NATO at the turn of the century (such as Poland and the Baltic States)
but also for EU members which are not members of NATO (Finland and Sweden) and thus
do not rely on a formal U.S. guarantee, but worry about Russia. The end of the
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, as well as uncertainties about the
future of the Iranian program, tensions in South Asia, and North Korean nuclear
progress are additional reasons for Europe to reconsider deterrence.

– On the supply side, doubts about the reliability of the American guarantee to Europe
have rarely been as strong as under the current U.S. administration. The brutality of
Donald Trump’s tweets, body language and policies is unprecedented in transatlantic
relations. This has led many in Europe, notably in Germany , to question the
wisdom of relying solely on U.S. protection.
In parallel, the European Union has consolidated its security and defense identity through
the Lisbon treaty of 2009, and also taken more recent steps which were made easier by the
prospect of Brexit. Also in 2009, France rejoined NATO’s military structure, a move which
alleviated the suspicions of some of its partners about an alleged French intention to build a
European security entity that would compete with NATO. Interestingly, while Paris was a
leader in the European nuclear debate of the 1990s, this time, voices in Germany have been
at the forefront.2

Thus, the time seems ripe for thinking anew about Europe’s nuclear role in securing
the continent. This paper seek to dispel a certain intellectual and political confusion when
one reads or hears about a “European deterrent,” a vague pression which covers a range
of scenarios ranging from a declared European role for French (and possibly British)
nuclear forces to a full-fledged “common Bomb” in the hands of Europe, and sometimes
including a German nuclear program. Not all of them are realistic. This depends
heavily on one key variable : will the current NATO nuclear arrangement
continue to exist? So this paper will proceed with two sections—first on what could
happen assuming the NATO arrangement continues and, second what could happen if it
were to break down.

4. Even if the plan itself doesn’t matter, it signals future abandonment.

Continuing trump’s pro-russia policy causes rearm.
Maximilian Terhalle, PhD, Associate Professor of Security Studies @ Winchester
University ’17, “Deutschland braucht Atomwaffen,” Tagesspiegel Causa, January 23, 2017,
https://causa.tagesspiegel.de/politik/europa-und-die-weltweiten-krisen/deutschland-
braucht-atomwaffen.html. [Translated to English by Ulrich Kü Hn, Tristan Volpe, Bert
Thompson, 3-5-2020, "Tracking the German Nuclear Debate," Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/08/15/tracking-german-
nuclear-debate-pub-72884]

“If Trump were to continue its pro-Russian course in office—and it all looks like
this—the central strategic basis of German security policy would be rattled , i.e.,
conventional and nuclear deterrence against Russia by NATO . The answer to the lack of
strategic protection for our national security must therefore be that Germany
needs nuclear weapons.”
Indeed, the threat posed by Putin's Russia comes from the strategic and conventional
imbalance that would arise when the [US] deterrence ceased. It is thus easy to see
that Putin would relentlessly exploit such a military imbalance to his political
advantage. . . .

“A Germany, which wants to limit the power of Putin's Russia in order to be

preserve Europe in an independent and unbending manner, thus preserving German
domestic and foreign political leeway, has to do that militarily and thus in a nuclear
way. . . .
 1. Demonstrated commitment to multilateralism key to shore up allies for
Biden agenda- first months are the litmus test
Bloomberg Editorial Board, 1/13,“The Right Way for the U.S. to Engage the World Again”
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2021-01-13/biden-must-rebuild-u-s-
alliances-nimbly-and-creatively

Joe Biden needs no reminder of the value of alliances. The incoming U.S. president, unlike his
predecessor, appreciates that America’s unparalleled network of partnerships
strengthens its defenses, invigorates its economy, constrains its rivals, and preserves a
world order friendly to U.S. values and interests. Biden has rightly declared that
rebuilding those relationships will be among his top priorities in office.

America’s friends will welcome a return to sober and principled U.S. statesmanship — but
few will simply embrace Biden’s agenda . Some will be content to see the U.S. bear the burden
of confronting rivals such as Russia and China. Others, scarred by four years of Donald Trump,
will look first to safeguard their own interests, as the European Union recently did in
signing an investment pact with Beijing. U.S. competitors will seek to widen every crack between
Washington and friendly capitals.

Biden’s national-security team can start, to quote Biden’s former boss, by not doing stupid
stuff. Tariffs imposed on allies are self-defeating; Biden should lift them and stop targeting
potential partners such as Vietnam for dubious trade violations. He should end pointless
haggling over the costs of basing U.S. troops in Japan and South Korea. And he should
listen — showing up at summits, and consulting allies on issues such as rejoining the Iran
nuclear agreement or restricting Chinese technology.

Next, the administration should seek some quick wins . Biden has already said the U.S. will
rejoin the Paris climate accord, renew the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, end
the so-called Muslim ban and resume U.S. cooperation with the World Health Organization. He
should swiftly pursue other openings. Helping to finance the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access
Facility (Covax) is one. Coordinating with Europe on a joint approach to taxing carbon is another.

To build support on tougher issues, Biden will have to demonstrate a new commitment to
multilateralism. Asian nations would be more likely to help contest China’s trading
practices if the U.S. opened its own markets as part of a new Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Washington’s push to rewrite World Trade Organization rules might gain more traction if the
U.S. wasn’t blocking the appointment of a new director-general and new appellate judges,
effectively paralyzing the body.

New coalitions will be needed to address specific challenges. Pressuring allies into
isolating China, for instance, won’t work. Countries that fear China’s military ambitions need
access to its markets; those that deplore its human-rights violations need its help to combat
climate change. Biden ought to be opportunistic, guiding like-minded groups to
cooperate on particular issues — one to focus on technology, say, another to advance
democratic norms, another devoted to trade reform.

Biden will have to open lines of communication to rivals as well as friends. The U.S. can’t
roll back the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs without support from Russia and
China. The same goes for new rules around space, cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, the Arctic
and a host of other issues.

Finally, where and how the U.S. disengages will be just as important as where it engages. Biden
should be far more deliberate than Trump in withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. He
should also work to maintain funding and international support to prevent the collapse of their
beleaguered governments.

To manage all this, the U.S. must invest in the right tools. Biden should revive and empower the
State Department — hiring competent diplomats and giving them the resources they need. He
should increase funding for agencies such as USAID and the U.S. International Development
Finance Corporation, offering developing countries a path to prosperity that doesn’t rely on
Chinese debt. He should think of diplomacy more holistically, too, reaching out not just to
presidents and prime ministers but to the mayors, business leaders and civic and
environmental activists who are critical to solving problems on the ground .

2. German troops are being redeployed further east. Makes the

alliance stronger.
Marc A. Theissen, Fellow @ AEI, 6-24-20, “Trump is right to withdraw troops from
Germany — as long as he sends them east”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/24/trump-is-right-withdraw-
troops-germany-long-he-sends-them-east/

There is simply no reason to station so many troops in Germany in the 21st century.
The Iron Curtain that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo patrolled as a young Army officer
came down three decades ago. Yet American troops are still stationed on the old Cold War
line of contact that separated East and West Germany. We no longer need to stop a
Soviet tank invasion across the Fulda Gap. Today, the threat from Moscow has
moved east, and the time has come for U.S. forces to move east with it.
Right now, the Trump administration is finalizing an agreement to move
thousands of American troops to permanent bases in Poland. The U.S. already
inaugurated a new divisional headquarters in Poznan that could soon be the home
of a U.S. armored brigade combat team. The Poles have even offered to name the facility
Fort Trump. Having Fort Trump on its border can’t make Russia happy.

They’ll do it in secret.
Bruno Tertrais, Deputy Director of the Paris-based Fondation pour la recherche
stratégique, ’19, “Will Europe Get Its Own Bomb?” Washington Quarterly, 42:2, June 28,
2019, https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.gwu.edu/dist/1/2181/files/2019/06/
Tertrais.pdf
Would the public support it?

One hardly sees why “any new German or other European nuclear activities
would have to be presented to the population” 58 as long as it remains within the
bounds of current international law and practice, including the NPT and nuclear
sharingtype arrangements as they exist in NATO. A bigger question—and one that has
always existed—is that of leadership: the coming to power of political forces with anti-
nuclear sympathies in several European capitals would be an obstacle to any meaningful
multilateral discussion about deterrence.

1. Germany doesn’t need to build nukes – they can pay to

station French nukes on German land.
Heather Hurlburt, Director of New Models of Policy Change, former Clinton White House
Advisor, ‘18, "Why We Should Be Unsettled that Germany Is Debating Acquiring Nuclear
Weapons," Intelligencer, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/08/why-germany-is-
talking-about-getting-its-own-nuclear-weapons.html

The state of their armed forces aside, Germans hate nuclear power so much that their
conservative government committed to getting rid of it after the Fukushima reactor
disaster in Japan. Nor would they be comfortable repealing or exiting the treaties Germany
has signed in which it explicitly forswore nuclear arms.

Neither of those factors discourage German strategic thinkers entirely, though.

Many commenters are tempted by the prospect of Germany buying a share, so
to speak, of the British or French nuclear forces to create a “European
deterrent.” But when the West German government tried this proposal out on France
during the heat of the Cold War, Charles de Gaulle responded with a statement that has now
become a maxim: nuclear weapons, he said, are “hard to share.”

2. That destroys europe.

Konrad Schuller, Award winning German Journalist, 30+ years experience, ’19, “Die
zö gernde Atommacht,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 1, 2019,
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/frankreich-in-der-eu-die-zoegernde-
atommacht-16512226.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_2. [Translated to English
by Ulrich Kü Hn, Tristan Volpe, Bert Thompson, 3-5-2020, "Tracking the German Nuclear
Debate," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/08/15/tracking-german-nuclear-debate-pub-
72884]
“‘Every help’ - that is a very far-reaching promise, and according to the laws of semantics it
includes nuclear protection. However, there are two problems with this formula. First,
France has never offered for its loyalty to the Alliance all the pawns that America has
deposited: neither the stationing of nuclear weapons on the ground of allies, nor a two
key system modelled on nuclear sharing. Secondly, even if the Aachen promise of protection
were meant seriously, it would only refer to Germany. From the point of view of the
other allies in the EU and NATO, the whole thing therefore looks like a special pact
in which two parties join forces to let the others down . This is something the Poles
and Balts, in particular, who feel threatened by Russia, fear. So if Germany were to
actually rely on France instead of America in the future, its reputation as a reliable
NATO partner would be ruined. The Eastern Europeans would then seek special alliances
with America, and NATO would finally be divided . If Trump really wanted to drop the
alliance one day, he would now have an additional reason. Putin could let the Crimean
sparkling wine get cold.”

3. Germany has weapons grade uranium

NTI, Nuclear Threat Initiative, ’19, Civilian HEU: Germany,
https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/civilian-heu-germany/

As of its 2018 declaration, Germany had 1270 kg of HEU, of which approximately 940
kg was irradiated, 320 kg was held in research reactors, and 10 kg was stored in several
locations: Germany’s Federal Storage Site in Hanau; Cadarache, France; Dounreay, Scotland;
and at German and European research centers and universities. All German HEU is the
property of the European Union. [1] The majority of Germany’s HEU is weapons-grade ,
and if chemically processed further would be directly usable for a nuclear
weapon.

4. Germany has experts, they’re just working on dismantling

reactors AND eastern europe checks.
Ralf Güldner, president of the German Atomic Forum (DAtF), ‘17, "Preserving and
developing Germany's nuclear expertise," No Publication, https://www.world-nuclear-
news.org/V-Preserving-and-developing-Germanys-nuclear-expertise-2605175.html

nuclear expertise, however, can only develop in collaboration with scientifically

Our

attractive partners in other countries. Winning them over for this purpose requires appropriate facilities and
experts who are able add scientific value. This applies to all topics, especially innovation and new design concepts. After all, we need to be able
knowledgeably to have a say too. Consider, for example, a development in fuel assemblies. In the long run, scepticism about research or even a
ban on research has never done an industrialised country any good. In practice, however, we see that teaching and research are being thinned
out, that university chairs are not being refilled and, under political pressure or for image reasons and in the spirit of anticipatory obedience,
whole institutes are withdrawing from those areas that are not assigned to waste management or dismantling. Centre of Expertise for Nuclear

the Federal Government wants and needs to access

Safety? The question here is: what can we do? On the one hand,

the appropriate expertise and it also has the funds for this. On the other hand, many federal state
governments want nothing more to do with the subject and are thus shaping the orientation of universities and research institutes. The solution
might lie in a new Centre of Expertise for Nuclear Safety where current issues could be dealt with without the burden of past conflicts. Here, it
may be possible to pool capacities, to network research, state and industry and to create an attractive hub for our international collaboration. A
new start such as this might provide young people who want to become involved in nuclear technology with credibly fascinating tasks, good
prospects, respect and appreciation. Perhaps such a project would not require a very broad general consensus but rather a viable coalition of

other countries are

people with insight. Nuclear energy - long-term reality in Europe Insight also includes the realisation that

not following our path. Now, after many years of delay, the new construction projects of
Olkiluoto and Flamanville have reached preparation for commissioning and are no longer merely a
mirage. The Hinkley Point C project has received its first partial permit . By the way, all

four reactors will be constructed using instrumentation and control equipment made in
Germany. In the UK, in addition to the EPR by Areva, the AP1000 by Westinghouse has also completed the Generic Design Assessment
and the ABWR by Hitachi will follow by the end of the year. Things are also happening east of Germany: a

few months ago unit 1 of the Novovoronezh II nuclear power plant went online – with

German instrumentation and control equipment and a planned operating period up to 2077. Unit 1 of the
Leningrad II nuclear power plant, which is set to replace the old Chernobyl-type plants, is in start-up commissioning.
Construction of the first nuclear power plant in Belarus is scheduled and the projects in Paks and Hanhikivi are
also being pushed forward consistently. Our Czech partners also have expansion plans, not least with a view to

preventing CO2. There will be no shortage of interested parties as no less than six reactor suppliers have already expressed an interest. In

Poland, the site selection process for the first nuclear power plant is progressing. If safety is also going to be a
concern for us in the coming decades then it must be Germany's goal to count permanently as a

partner in safety with recognised expertise. However, the repetition of demands for phase-out is not sufficient; what is needed in
fact is a constructive attitude. Nuclear technology for industry and science Let's not forget that Germany will also benefit from nuclear

research reactors in Munich, Berlin and Mainz are

technology in many respects and in the long term. The

not only used for basic research, they also do a great deal for applied research and industrial development. They
are also indispensable for direct applications in industry and medicine. Nuclear technology is also found elsewhere: such as in non-destructive
material testing, plant breeding, in medical diagnosis and therapy. Nuclear technology is directly linked to our status as a country of science and
technology. And let's not forget economic value creation. Many internationally recognised nuclear technology companies are both important
employers and taxpayers. This industrial value chain made up of manufacturers, suppliers and service providers also requires nuclear expertise,
especially in safety engineering. Germany has a good reputation in this field and German products and services related to nuclear safety are in
great demand. Obstructing export will not increase nuclear safety for Germany, for our neighbours or for the world. And vital expertise can only

develop while it's in use, i.e. in industry, and therefore in the medium term largely in exports. This also applies to
companies involved in the fuel cycle in Germany which are now frequently becoming the target of
political debate. These facilities are explicitly excluded from the phase-out of nuclear energy use and we reject any efforts to expand the phase-

out. The Federal Government may rightly say that uranium enrichment and fuel assembly manufacturing in Germany as centres of expertise .
When it comes to using the expertise of these companies for operational and waste management
safety, for the subject of non-proliferation and for security-policy risk assessments,

then it is not so distant. In this field too, Germany would like to have its own knowledge and it's the same here as with reactor
safety. Those who want to perfect the phase-out will also perfect the loss of expertise. This cannot and must not be our aim.
 Ukraine
1. No elite pressure---Putin is completely in control
Chotiner 20 – Isaac Chotiner, writer for the New Yorker, interviewing Masha Lipman, Moscow-
based political analyst, “How Putin Controls Russia,” 1/23/20,
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-putin-controls-russia

Last week, Vladimir Putin

announced sweeping changes to the Russian constitution. Shortly
afterward, the Prime Minister and his government resigned; there is no doubt that they
did so at Putin’s behest . (On Monday, Putin formally submitted the constitutional changes and fired the
country’s prosecutor general .)

Putin’s tenure as President is not supposed to extend beyond 2024, and the changes
were widely seen as an attempt to extend his hold on power for as long as he deems
fit. But, beyond that, no one really knows how he plans to reorganize the Russian state. To discuss Putin’s moves, I recently spoke
by phone with Masha Lipman, a Moscow-based political analyst who has written extensively on Putin’s regime. During our
conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Putin’s decision-making style, how his personality and
leadership have changed over the past two decades, and the differences between his rule and the later years of the Soviet Union.

Four years ago, you wrote a piece for The New Yorker in which you argued, in part, “The political environment in Russia is growing
more chaotic. Putin may be the Russian tsar, but it is less clear to what extent he is in control.” Is it more clear how much he is in
control today?

The issue of control is tricky. If one talks about whether government management is efficient in Russia, then no, it is not. And Putin
has repeatedly, over his very long time in office, spoken about the need to increase the productivity of labor and quite a few other
very important goals. I wouldn’t say he has delivered so well on those. But, if
we define control as control over
the élite , over making the decisions, of course Putin’s fully in control . And the
developments of the past few days are very clear and persuasive evidence of him
being in control of making decisions.
How do you understand his moves over the past few days?

This is a demonstration of how Putin is ultimately in charge and how he can make very important
decisions by himself in an atmosphere of complete secrecy . We still do not know who was aware of
what was in store for the country three or four days ago, and to what extent there is anyone who can actually challenge his
decisions, even verbally.

Putin rarely consults with anyone , and, even if he does, it is done in a totally opaque way. He’s rarely
explicit. Even if he consults with some people in his circle, people leave without having a clear idea of what his goal is and have
to guess. Sometimes they guess right. Sometimes they guess wrong. Sometimes they try to curry favor and succeed, sometimes not.
At the end of the day he is the ultimate decision-maker. And the strategy and the
grand plans that he has for Russia, in their entirety, exist only in his mind .
 Arms Control
1. Russian specialists do not see enlargement as a threat.
Kimberly Marten, Professor of Polisci @ Barnard, 4-16-20, “NATO enlargement:
evaluating its consequences in Russia” International Politics, Vol 57, Iss 3. Springer.

NATO force deployments, weaponry and equipment, like those of Russia, had
meanwhile rapidly declined throughout the 1990s because of both post-Cold War
strategic rebalancing and observation of the original limits set by the 1990 CFE Treaty. This
should have reassured Russia about the limits and defensive nature of NATO’s
future capabilities and intentions. As NATO added new member states, of course,
the absolute number of its overall active armed forces went up (Cottey et al. 2002). Yet
NATO retooled and reconfgured its forces away from largescale conventional
warfghting, to concentrate on stability operations frst in the Balkans and then in
the Middle East, leading to a decline of relative capability in Europe in comparison with
the Cold War era (Boston et al. 2018). Further, the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF)
Treaty, signed between the USA and the Soviet Union and enduring until 2019, efectively
prevented the deployment of any land-based US nuclear missiles in Europe, although it did
not limit either nuclear bomber rotations (which the USA stopped anyway until the 2014
Ukraine war) (NATO 2019) or naval ships or submarines armed with nuclear weapons.
It is impossible to map out exactly how NATO enlargement impacted overall NATO
deployments because there are so many confounding factors involved, including the huge
uptick in out-of-area operations by NATO and its member states (in Bosnia, Kosovo,
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, as well as smaller ones in Africa) that used European air bases
and other resources for temporary transport, resupply, and logistics. Although NATO
enlargement in theory made more airbases and logistics centers available for these
operations, longstanding NATO members with highly developed and alliance-ready
infrastructure provided most of these resources, alongside many non-NATO states. Even
Russia, in the case of the Afghanistan operation, lent out its rail infrastructure for NATO use
(Lobjakas 2008).

In fact, the addition of new members arguably made the NATO alliance weaker .
Enlargement posed challenges for force integration, communication, and
efectiveness, and as its membership expanded, NATO faced new sources of internal
political disagreement that would likely have negatively impacted its wartime decision-
making capabilities. One prominent Western expert argued in 2009 that enlargement had
actually ‘put in question the practical military utility of the organization so conceived’
(Michta 2009, 370). Russian specialists knew this . For example, Andrey Zagorsky, a
leading Russian security analyst, wrote in 2017, ‘The enlargement of NATO at
each step was accompanied not by an increase, but a decrease, of the
combined military potential of the alliance’ (Zagorsky 2017, 105).
 2. Russia attacked states that posed no security threats. The
argument that Russia is aggressive because of NATO lacks
any empirical support.
Kimberly Marten, Professor of Polisci @ Barnard, 4-16-20, “NATO enlargement:
evaluating its consequences in Russia” International Politics, Vol 57, Iss 3. Springer.

In any case, Putin’s sudden fury against NATO enlargement did not begin after
NATO’s Bucharest summit. Instead, it was launched to the Western community’s great
surprise, since it seemed to come out of the blue, at the Munich Security Conference more
than a year earlier, in February 2007. After criticizing US unipolarity and world domination,
the breakdown of international law, NATO’s turning away from UNSC authority, and the
deployment of ballistic missile defenses as creating a new arms race, Putin called NATO
enlargement ‘a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust,’ because of
‘fexible frontline American bases with up to fve thousand men in each,’ whereby NATO ‘put
its frontline forces on our borders’ and thereby violated a 1990 pledge not to move NATO
forces beyond Germany (Putin 2007).

But there were apparently not even any formal NATO military plans to defend
the Baltic states or Poland until 2010, because of internal NATO squabbling
(Traynor 2019), and there were certainly no new US military facilities there. Putin’s
concern at this time was apparently centered not on states directly bordering
Russia (despite his claims), but instead on the Eastern European Task Force framework,
with agreements signed in 2005–2006 that envisioned up to 1700 US personnel rotating
through Romania and 2500 through Bulgaria (together signifcantly less than the 5000
number Putin mentioned for each), alongside facilities upgrades in both countries
(Moldovan, Pantev, and Rhodes 2009, 19–20). Russia made strong public statements
against these arrangements, claiming that they violated both NATO promises from the 1997
NATO-Russia Founding Act and the CFE Treaty (14).2 Nonetheless, it is highly unlikely
that Russia would have seen these particular East European Task Force
agreements as threatening, given the relatively small numbers and limited facilities
construction involved, and the prolonged political difculties in negotiating the agreements
(with opposition coming both from socialist and far-right parties in Bulgaria and Romania)
(14). Despite Russian claims to the contrary, it is hard to see these cases as violations of the
NATO-Russia Founding Act pledge not to establish signifcant new combat forces in new
NATO member states.

But these deployments could have magnifed Putin’s concerns about events in
Georgia and Ukraine, given the location of all of these states on the Black Sea.
With Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey all NATO members, Georgia and Ukraine
are the only landmasses preventing Russia’s historical drive for warm-water
ports in the Black Sea (and out to the Mediterranean) from being completely boxed in
by NATO. It would take some degree of paranoia to believe that what NATO
was doing (indeed, what NATO was capable of doing) required invasions of Georgia
and Ukraine to protect Russian security interests from NATO expansion. But it is
possible that in the mind of Putin, the justifcation made sense—especially given his concern
that the Georgian and Ukrainian color revolutions might infect Russia.

This leads to a diferent question about possible Russian threat perceptions.

Putin continues to feel terribly threatened by US and Western eforts to foster
democratization in Russia, foreseeing the possibility that his own regime might fall victim to
the street protests and demands for democratization that swept through Georgia in 2003
and Ukraine in 2004. Indeed, it may have been events in Georgia and Ukraine at that time,
much more than NATO enlargement per se, that turned Putin so strongly against the West.
While NATO membership and the threat of color revolution may be confated in Putin’s
mind, nonetheless, NATO enlargement has not had any demonstrable efect on democratic
revolution. Indeed, though some analysts had hoped that it would encourage liberal
democratic consolidation in East-Central Europe, that hope was misplaced. The fact that
some of NATO’s member states have fallen victim to authoritarian backsliding in recent
years and that this might even endanger the cohesion of the alliance (Wallander 2018), is
perhaps the best evidence that membership in NATO did not cause democratic
institutionalization (Poast and Urpelainen 2018).

3. NATO isn’t the key factor-their advantage is megalomania

Sweeney 19
(Mike, fellow at Defense Priorities. He spent thirteen years as think tank analyst in Washington, DC, where he focused on U.S.
foreign policy and defense planning, undertaking research and studies, including for the Department of Defense.
https://warontherocks.com/2019/03/nato-expansion-got-some-big-things-right/ 3-7)

The argument that NATO expansion alone ( or even partially ), however, is to blame for the
current state of relations between the West and Russia is incomplete at best . First, there were

innumerable structural, political, and economic challenges facing Russia as it emerged

from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. These had nothing to do with NATO and we
over exaggerate our own importance if America blames itself wholly for the failing of
Russian democracy. Second, while Russian concerns and humiliation should be an
important strategic consideration, it can never be the only one. Should NATO have not intervened
to stop the carnage in Bosnia out of deference to fraternity between Moscow and Belgrade? Would European security really have
been better served by a series of unabated Srbrenica’s? Do all the states formerly under Moscow’s dominion during the Cold War
really have no say in their own security arrangements simply out of deference to Russian insecurity? Once again, other states
have agency and other factors beyond NATO must be taken into account in assessing why
Russia is where it is today.
 1NR
The aff takes the form of the benevolent masculine protector by allowing the
US to “impose costs” and “restore diplomacy” in the region.
Young 03 (Iris Marion, Department of Political Science University of Chicago, The Logic of
Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State, Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society 2003, vol. 29, no. 1], pgs 4-5, JKS)

The logic of masculinist protection contrasts with a model of masculinity assumed by

much feminist theory, of masculinity as self-consciously dominative . On the male domination
model, masculine men wish to mas- ter women sexually for the sake of their own gratification and to have the pleasures of
domination. They bond with other men in comradely male settings that give them specific benefits from which they exclude women,
and they harass women in order to enforce this exclusion and maintain their superiority (MacKinnon 1987; May 1998, chaps. 4–6). ¶
This image of the selfish, aggressive, dominative man who desires sexual capture of women corresponds to much about male-
dominated institutions and the behavior of many men within them. For my purposes in this essay, however, it
is important
to recall another apparently more benign image of masculinity, one more associated
with ideas of chivalry. In this latter image, real men are neither selfish nor do they seek to
enslave or overpower others for the sake of enhancing themselves. Instead, the
gallantly masculine man is loving and self-sacrificing, especially in relation to women.
He faces the world’s difficulties and dangers in order to shield women from harm and
allow them to pursue elevating and decorative arts. The role of this courageous,
responsible, and virtuous man is that of a protector. ¶ The “good” man is one who
keeps vigilant watch over the safety of his family and readily risks himself in the face
of threats from the outside in order to protect the subordinate members of his
household. The logic of masculinist protection, then, includes the image of the selfish
aggressor who wishes to invade the lord’s property and sexually conquer his women.
These are the bad men. Good men can only appear in their goodness if we assume
that lurking outside the warm familial walls are aggressors who wish to attack them .
The dominative masculinity in this way constitutes protective masculinity as its other. The world out there is
heartless and uncivilized, and the movements and motives of the men in it are
unpredictable and difficult to discern. The protector must therefore take all precautions
against these threats, remain watchful and suspicious, and be ready to fight and sacrifice for
the sake of his ones (Elshtain 1987, 1992 ). Masculine protection is needed to make a home a
haven.¶ Central to the logic of masculinist protection is the subordinate relation of
those in the protected position. In return for male protection, the woman concedes
critical distance from decision-making autonomy. When the household lives under a threat, there cannot
be divided wills andS I G N S Autumn 2003 ❙ 5¶ arguments about who will do what, or what is the best course of action. The
head of the household should decide what measures are necessary for the security of
the people and property, and he gives the orders that they must follow if they and
their relations are to remain safe. As Stiehm puts it: “The protector cannot achieve status
simply through his accom- plishment, then. Because he has dependents he is as
socially connected as one who is dependent. He is expected to provide for others.
Often a protector tries to get help from and also control the lives of those he protects
—in order to ‘better protect’ them” (1982, 372).¶ Feminine subordination, in this logic,
does not constitute submission to a violent and overbearing bully. The feminine
woman, rather, on this construction, adores her protector and happily defers to his
judgment in return for the promise of security that he offers. She looks up to him with
gratitude for his manliness and admiration for his willingness to face the dangers of
the world for her sake. That he finds her worthy of such risks gives substance to her
self. It is only fitting that she should minister to his needs and obey his dictates. ¶ Hobbes
is the great theorist of political power founded on a need and desire for protection. He depicts a state of nature in which people live
in small families where all believe some of the others envy them and desire to enlarge themselves by stealing from or conquering
them. As a conse- quence, everyone
in this state of nature must live in a state of fear and
insecurity, even when not immediately under attack. Households must live with the knowledge that
outsiders might wish to attack them, espe- cially if they appear weak and vulnerable, so each must construct defensive fortresses
and be on watch.
It is only sensible, moreover, to conduct preemptive strikes against those
who might wish to attack and to try to weaken them. But each knows that the others
are likely to make defensive raids, which only adds to fear and insecurity . In Hobbes’s state of
nature some people may be motivated by simple greed and desire for conquest and domination. In this state of nature everyone has
reason to feel in- secure, however, not because all have these dominative motives but be- cause he or she is uncertain