1AC----Round 1---Dartmouth RR

Crisis Stability---1AC
Advantage 1---CRISIS STABILITY:
Threats of first use generate unsustainable commitment traps.
Fetter ’18 [Steve and Jon Wolfsthal; 2018; professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of
Maryland; director of the Nuclear Crisis Group, a Global Zero initiative to prevent the use of nuclear
weapons, and a nonresident fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard University; Journal for Peace and
Nuclear Disarmament, “No First Use and Credible Deterrence,” vol. 1]
Most analysts consider “sole purpose” to be essentially equivalent to no-first-use, because if the only purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter
the use of nuclear weapons by others, then there is no reason to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons first.10 Deterrence is no longer the
core mission, but the only mission. With a policy of n o- f irst- u se or sole-purpose, the U nited S tates would use or
threaten to use nuclear weapons only in retaliation to a nuclear attack on the U nited S tates or its
allies , such as Japan.

If the threat to use nuclear weapons first is not necessary, it is less than fully credible . As such, making
incredible threats weakens the credibility of other commitments . Abandoning incredible threats
should make the remaining nuclear use scenarios, and therefore deterrence , more credible .

U nited
Deeply related to this discussion are the concepts of “extended deterrence” and “nuclear umbrella.” In both cases, the idea is that

S tates can extend the protection of its nuclear arsenal to allies, such as Japan , So uth Ko rea, and NATO :
that the United States can deter attacks on its allies by threating to retaliate with nuclear weapons. But there are two

kinds of extended deterrence or nuclear umbrellas, and much of the confusion about n o- f irst- u se arises because of
a failure to clearly distinguish between the two.

The first type of extended deterrence is deterrence of nuclear attack . In this case, the United States deters nuclear
attack on Japan and other allies by threatening to use its own nuclear weapons in retaliation . In essence,
America declares that an attack on Japan is no different than an attack on America itself. This commitment would not be

undermined in any way by n o- f irst- u se because the United States would use nuclear weapons only after an
adversary had already used nuclear against an ally. The US nuclear umbrella would continue to protect Japan against
nuclear attack by North Korea, China, or Russia.

The second type of extended deterrence seeks to use nuclear capabilities to deter nonnuclear or conventional
attacks. This was the version of extended deterrence practiced by the United States during the Cold War, in which the United States
attempted to deter Soviet invasion of western Europe (or a North Korean invasion of South Korea) by threatening to respond with nuclear
weapons. This form of extended deterrence is much less credible , particularly with regard to Russia or China, because the
United States would be threatening to start a nuclear war with a country that had the capacity to retaliate with nuclear
weapons and destroy US cities. To convince itself that its threat was seen by the other side as credible, NATO and the United States had to go to
enormous lengths in the face of a nuclear-armed Warsaw Pact, including steps like the deployment of ground-based intermediate-range cruise
and ballistic missiles in the 1980s that severely tested alliance cohesion and stability.

There have been serious concerns about how the potential use by an adversary of either c hemical or advanced
b iological w eapons would enter into this equation. To be sure, the future threat of biological weapons was such a concern that the 2010
NPR made clear that the negative security assurances offered could be modified in the future if nonnuclear states were to develop and use
biological weapons that could approximate the impact of nuclear weapons. But it is far from clear that threatening to use
nuclear weapons in response to a biological attack would be credible or have military utility (Sagan,
2000). In the case of states currently pursuing advanced biological weapons, there appears to be a similar calculation as with nuclear weapons –
a conventional or security imbalance leads states to seek some way to counter America’s conventional capabilities. Threatening nuclear
weapons use appear uncertain to alter this calculation because it does not address the underlying driver for
proliferation . While the use of an extremely virulent and deadly biological weapon agent might hypothetically lead to casualties as large
or even larger than nuclear use, a nuclear response is not likely to be effective or necessary , and thus is

unlikely to be effective as a deterrent .

NFU and Japan

That brings us to today. It is clear that Japan is rightly concerned about its security in the face of an aggressive North Korea with increasingly advanced nuclear and missile capabilities. Japan also has reason to be concerned about
the possibility, however remote, of nuclear attack by China or Russia. However, the US strategic nuclear arsenal is a highly effective deterrent against such an attack. America has over 4000 nuclear weapons in its active stockpile,
and the entire US strategic nuclear force is undergoing modernization. This aspect of the nuclear umbrella would not be diminished in any way if the United States adopted a policy of no first use. US threats to use nuclear weapons
in retaliation for nuclear attacks on Japan are highly credible, because Japan is a very close ally and the US has military bases and over 100,000 troops and dependents based in Japan.

Japan’s opposition to no first use is not compatible with its rhetorical support for eventual nuclear disarmament. As noted above, no-first-use is equivalent a “sole purpose” declaration. If the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to
deter to use of nuclear weapons by others, then it follows logically that a country would be willing to give up its nuclear weapons if it could be sure that all other countries had done so. If no other countries had nuclear weapons,
there would be no need to have nuclear weapons to deter their use by others. But if Japan believes that the United States must be willing to threaten the first-use of nuclear weapons, it is saying that nuclear weapons are needed
to deter more than nuclear attack. Even if nuclear weapons were eliminated, these other reasons would still exist. In opposing no first use, Japan is opposing the principle of nuclear disarmament.

Some might say this is not true because there are other conditions for nuclear disarmament, such as Japan facing no security threats. But saying that we can have nuclear disarmament when all countries are content to live in peace
is the same as saying that nuclear disarmament is impossible.

US and Japanese opposition to no first use weakens nonproliferation. The United States and its allies are by far the strongest military alliance in the world. The United States alone spends four times more than China and 10 times
more than Russia on defense; the US and its allies together account for over 70 percent of world military spending, over four times more than all adversaries and potential adversaries combined (International Institute for Strategic
Studies, Citation2017). Because Japan is an island nation, it is easier defend than was Germany during the Cold War. If Japan believes that the United States must resort to the first-use or threat of first-use of nuclear weapons to
defend it against a nonnuclear attack, what message does this send to all other countries – particularly those that are not US allies? Countries that are weaker and harder to defend would have even more need of nuclear weapons.
A policy of no first use would strengthen nonproliferation efforts; opposing no first use weakens those efforts.

The Government of Japan no doubt believes that maintaining the option of nuclear first use by the United States provides some measure of deterrence against conventional attack on Japan. The key question is how much
deterrence it provides and whether these deterrence benefits are worth the price. Nuclear deterrence of conventional attack is not cost-free because such threats lack credibility. As we saw in Europe during the Cold War, actions
to increase the credibility of nuclear threats have consequences, such as increasing the likelihood of nuclear war. It would be far better to strengthen conventional defenses so that there was no reason to resort to nuclear use, and
to provide for a more credible deterrent.

Scenarios for first use

What is most lacking in discussions about no first use is consideration of specific scenarios. What, exactly, are the scenarios for which Japan believes that the threat of first use of nuclear weapons would be a powerful deterrent, or
actual first use of nuclear weapons would be necessary to defend Japan?

The most plausible scenario today is an attack by North Korea. As we have already noted, a US nuclear response to a nuclear attack by North Korea on Japan would not be affected by a policy of no first use, and the likelihood of
nuclear retaliation by the United States should deter a nuclear attack by North Korea, because it is a highly credible threat. But North Korea might launch other attacks – attacks with conventionally armed missiles or special
operations forces against air bases or ports necessary for the defense of South Korea, or cyberattacks that cripple Japan’s economy. How does Japan imagine that the United States could use nuclear weapons in such a scenario?

Nuclear weapons are not needed to destroy the North Korean bases from which these attacks are being launched and thereby prevent further attacks on Japan. If the United States decided to use nuclear weapons first against
North Korea, it would have to be supremely confident that it could destroy all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and its capacity to deliver them against South Korea or Japan. Japan almost certainly would resist any proposal by the
United States to use nuclear weapons first against North Korea, knowing that it might prompt a North Korean nuclear attack against Tokyo or other Japanese cities, with horrible consequences. But if the United States and Japan do
not believe that it would make sense to use nuclear weapons first, the threat to do so cannot be a credible deterrent to nonnuclear aggression by North Korea.

Perhaps most likely conflict scenario with China is in the Senkaku Islands. Both sides might send warships and fighter aircraft, fire warning shots, followed by armed conflict. What role does Japan imagine that US nuclear weapons
might have in deterring or responding to such a conflict? Certainly, Japan does not imagine that the United States would actually use nuclear weapons to defend Japanese claims to uninhabited pieces of rock – for example, to
attack Chinese ships or airbases involved in the conflict. This would be so obviously unnecessary and disproportionate as to consolidate world opinion against the United States and Japan. And if the United States and Japan believe
– as they should – that there is no meaningful use for nuclear weapons in such a conflict, then how can the threat to use nuclear weapons in defense of the Senkaku Islands be credible? But if the threat is not credible, it cannot be
an effective deterrent.

As a final scenario, Japan might get drawn into a conflict between the United States and China, perhaps over the defense of Taiwan or in response to Chinese actions in the South China Sea. Because the United States would use air
and naval bases in Japan to support its military operations against China, China might attack these bases with conventionally armed missiles. Would Japan want the United States to use nuclear weapons first in this scenario? If so,
on what targets? Several Chinese missile bases deploy both, nuclear and conventionally-armed missiles; a US nuclear attack on a Chinese nuclear base could be interpreted by China as the leading edge of a first-strike designed to
eliminate China’s nuclear capability. China has pledged not to use nuclear weapons first – a pledge that most analysts believe China takes seriously. But they have also promised to retaliate in the event of a nuclear attack. Would
Japan want the United States to respond to a conventional Chinese attack on bases in Japan with nuclear weapons, possibly triggering Chinese nuclear retaliation against Japan? If the answer is “no,” then threats to do so are not
credible and they have little deterrent value.

The commitment trap

We are witnessing in real time how statements and veiled threats of nuclear use – “fire and fury such as the world has
lasting consequences . Statements by President Trump suggesting a
never seen” (Baker and Choe 2017) – can have

willingness to use nuclear weapons first in a crisis with North Korea has exacerbated the risks of accidental
nuclear escalation . But in even calmer times, such vague threats are ill advised . For example, US officials apparently
believe that repeatedly stating or demonstrating America’s willingness and ability to use nuclear weapons in response to many kinds of
nonnuclear threats can be reassuring. Japan might imagine that references to nuclear weapons use, such as an American president announcing
that “all options are on the table” in response to nonnuclear options might deter China or North Korea from initiating a conventional attack and
make war less likely. But China and North Korea are well aware that the US has nuclear weapons; there is no need to make explicit threats.
Anything that would be interpreted by them – or by Japan – as a direct commitment to make a nuclear
threat in response to anything but the use of nuclear weapons create what has been called “a commitment
trap ” (Sagan, 2000). In these cases, the United States and Japan may feel compelled to follow through with a nuclear
response, even if they believe it was unwise and might trigger a catastrophic an otherwise avoidable

response . If we are fighting and likely to prevail in a conventional war on the Korean peninsula, using nuclear weapons could
lead to a move devastating nuclear attack by the North on South Korea and stalemate any conventional
conflict . Yet, failing to respond could expose past commitments to use nuclear weapons as a bluff and the
call into question the credibility of the United States on all security and military matters.

That is why President Obama and many past presidents have sought to limit the conditions under which the United
States might use nuclear weapons so as to not create a commitment trap that may force it into an
unnecessary use of nuclear weapons.

This concern, however, extends to the stated willingness to use nuclear weapons first in most scenarios. Suggesting that the U nited
S tates might want or need to use nuclear weapons first in response to a conventional or some other
nonnuclear threat undermines the credibility of our commitment to nuclear retaliation. It is not

supported by the nature of the threat facing the alliance today, nor is it likely to in the future. Nuclear threats
also do not address the driver for the pursuit of nuclear or biological weapons in the first place, since
North Korea and likely China although the later to a lesser degree as time goes on, faces a conventional inferiority that drives their need to
threat for the United States as the conventional superior to use nuclear weapons first
consider nonnuclear options. The

also calls into question US conventional capabilities , because full confidence in those would

eliminate the need to threaten the use of nuclear weapons in response to anything but a nuclear attack.

Externally, ambiguity forces miscalculated wars.

Gower ’18 [John; March 6; retired rear admiral from the Royal Navy with thirty-six years’ service;
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “The Dangerous Illogic of Twenty-First-Century
Deterrence Through Planning for Nuclear Warfighting,”
https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/03/06/dangerous-illogic-of-twenty-first-century-deterrence-
through-planning-for-nuclear-warfighting-pub-75717]
MISCALCULATION

One of the greatest risks to strategic stability is miscalc ulation in the nuclear weapons domain. Calculated
acts can be deterred directly. Miscalculation, however, cannot be deterred ; its likelihood can only be reduced.

The risk of miscalculation increases proportionally with the complexity and range of nuclear capabilities and
associateddeclaratory policies and postures. A nuclear posture and capability derived from the assumption that
there is a need to conduct limited nuclear war at some stage during a major conflict, and the philosophy that there is an
unbroken spectrum of conflict between low-end conventional and high-end nuclear warfighting, requires the most ambiguous

declaratory policies and security assurances. While ambiguity brings some deterrence benefits, it also feeds the risk of
miscalc ulation.
 fog of crisis (or of conflict) will likely be made more impenetrable by
In the twenty-first century, the

misinformation and cyber activities. Inflammatory rhetoric and the multiplicity of potentially confusing messages
emanating from one of the nations involved will exacerbate the situation. This is a perfect setting for miscalculation.

The fear of suffering a first decapitating or disabling nuclear strike is pervasive in a crisis. It is likely that elements of
less than strategic nuclear capabilities will be delivered by dual-use platforms or missiles. The possession of systems and mindsets capable of
limited, less-than-strategic battlefield nuclear employment multiplies this fear through mirroring of one’s own options. The chance that a
conventional attack by a dual-capable system is perceived to be a nuclear first strike increases significantly
during a conflict between nuclear-capable states. Indeed, retaining dual-capable aircraft or air- or ground-launched nuclear
cruise missiles, while also possessing a conventional equivalent, raises the likelihood of miscalculation in such circumstances from quite possible
to near probable. If dual-capable weapons systems become stealthier, the certainty of their detection and classification would be reduced
further. Doubt further increases the risk of miscalculation. Thus, of all the current and potential nuclear capabilities, the introduction of stealthy
nuclear cruise missiles that can be launched from dual-capable platforms offer the greatest risk of miscalculation.

AI integration only magnifies the risk.

Johnson ’23 [James; February 2023; PhD, Assistant Professor in Strategic Studies in the Department of
Politics & International Relations at the University of Aberdeen; AI and the Bomb: Nuclear Strategy and
Risk in the Digital Age, “Strategic stability: A perfect storm of nuclear risk?” Ch. 1]

Two existing conditions for nuclear instability , likely to be exacerbated by AI, are nuclear multipolarity
and differing escalation risk tolerance between military powers. The coalescing of these conditions, in the
presence of the inherently destabilizing military AI systems described earlier, will lead to an interplay of forces
ripe for miscalc ulations and misperceptions between nuclear-armed states—increasing the dangers of
escalation and deterrence failure under the nuclear shadow.
Nuclear multipolarity

The emergence of nuclear multipolarity in the “second nuclear age” has created multifaceted escalation
pathways to a nuclear confrontation involving an expanding number of nuclear-armed poles, compared
with bipolarity during the Cold War era.116 This multipolarity is important precisely because each state will choose a
different response to the new choices emerging in the digital age. Motivated states could eschew
the limitations of AI, compromis ing safety and verification standards to protect or capture the upper
hand (the first-mover advantage) on the future digitized battlefield (see Chapter 4).117 The historical record attests
that strategic competition—motivation to control warfare—tends to be ratcheted up because of the complexity
of military tech nology and operations over time.118 Thus, the pursuit of AI technology by great powers—especially
China, the US, and Russia—will likely compound the destabilizing effects of AI in increasing great-power
competition.

Against this inopportune geopolitical backdrop, perceived strategic benefits of AI-enhanced weapons generate risks
to nuclear security and stability— the greatest of which today is the premature adoption of unsafe,
unverified, and unreliable AI tech nology in the context of decisions to use nuclear weapons, which could be
catastrophic. For example, the proliferation of low-risk and low-cost AI-augmented autonomous weapons such as drone swarms—with
ambiguous rules of engagement—will become an increasingly enticing asymmetric option to undermine an adversary’s military readiness,
deterrence, and resolve.119 For example, in the private sector, competitive first-mover advantage pressures have created inflated and
unrealistic expectations that impel companies (e.g., driverless cars) to rapidly transition AI-infused applications to production before maturity;
this has been a common trend for many Silicon Valley-backed innovations—known as the “fake-it-’til-you-make-it” culture.120 History is
replete with examples of promises of operational readiness ending in costly system failure and these cases should serve as a warning to those
in the defense and nuclear communities who overlook the limitations of AI technology described in the introduction, for ephemeral (and
possibly illusory) tactical and operational gains.121

Competing states making decisions under the nuclear shadow will be more inclined to assume the worst of
others’ intentions, especially in situations where the legitimacy of the status quo is contested (e.g., maritime Asia). According to scholar
John Mearsheimer, “as long as the system remains anarchic, states will be tempted to use force to alter an
unacceptable status quo .”122 Thus, efforts by one state to enhance the survivability of its strategic
forces with state-of-the-art dual-use technology like AI could easily be perceived by the other side as a potential
threat to its ability to survive, and respond to, a nuclear first strike —or second-strike capability.123

In a world of revisionist and dissatisfied nuclear-armed states, it seems improbable that improvements in intelligence
collection and analysis derived from advances in AI would have a stabilizing impact .124 For this to happen,
equal access to intelligence and shared confidence in the accuracy and credibility of these systems
would be required. Furthermore, the intentions of all parties would need to be benign for any reassurances or
confidence-building efforts to succeed. Because nuclear interactions increasingly involve the complex interplay
of nuclear and non-nuclear (and state and non-state) actors, the leveraging of AI in this multipolar context will
increasingly place destabilizing pressures on nuclear states. Taken together, these interactions will likely
complicate escalation management efforts during future crises or conflict—especially involving China and the
US.

Only restricting declaratory posture can offset miscalculation.

Johnson ’20 [James; Spring 2020; postdoctoral research fellow at the James Martin Center for
Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, Monterey. He holds
a PhD in politics and international relations from the University of Leicester, where he is also an
honorary visiting fellow with the School of History and International Relations; Strategic Studies
Quarterly, “Artificial Intelligence: A Threat to Strategic Stability,” vol. 14]

A new generation of AI -augmented advanced conventional capabilities will exacerbate the risk of
inadvertent escalation caused by the commingling of nuclear and strategic nonnuclear weapons (or
conventional counterforce weapons) and the increasing speed of warfare, thereby undermining strategic stability and

increasing the risk of nuclear confrontation . This conclusion is grounded in the overarching findings that relate to how and
why AI could affect strategic stability between great military powers— especially China and the United States.

If a state perceives that the survivability of its nuclear forces were at risk , advanced conventional
capabilities (e.g., autonomous drone swarms and hypersonic weapons) augmented with AI machine learning techniques
will have a destabilizing impact at a strategic level of conflict. AI’s effect on strategic stability will likely be determined by states’
perceptions of its operational utility rather than actual capability. If an adversary underestimated the potential threat posed by nascent and
especially poorly conceptualized accident-prone autonomous systems, the consequences would be severely destabilizing.

Despite the speed , diverse data pools , and processing power of algorithms compared to humans,
complex AI-augmented systems will still depend on the assumptions encoded into them by human
engineers to simply extrapolate inferences—potentially erroneous or biased—from complexity, resulting in
unintended outcomes . One of the most significant escalatory risks caused by AI is likely to be,
therefore, the perceived pressure exerted on nuclear powers in the use of AI-augmented conventional capabilities to adopt
unstable nuclear postures (such as launch on warning, rescinding n o- f irst- u se pledges, or nuclear war fighting), or even
to exercise a preemptive first nuclear strike during a crisis. In extremis, human commanders might lose
control of the outbreak, course, and termination of warfare.
Further, a competitive and contested multipolar nuclear environment will likely exacerbate the potentially destabilizing influence of AI,
increasing that risk of inadvertent escalation to a nuclear level of conflict between great military powers. In today’s multipolar geopolitical
order, therefore, relatively low-risk and low-cost AI-augmented AWS capability—with ambiguous rules of engagement and absent a robust
normative and legal framework—will become an increasingly enticing asymmetric option to erode an advanced military’s deterrence and
resolve. By disrupting effective and reliable flows of information and communication between adversaries and allies and within military
organizations, AI-augmented conventional weapon systems (i.e., C3I, early warning systems, and ISR) could complicate escalation management
during future crisis or conflict— especially involving China and the United States.

A prominent theme that runs through the scenarios in this article—and central to understanding the potential impact of
AI for strategic stability and nuclear security—is the concern that AI systems operating at machine speed will push
the pace of combat to a point where machine actions surpass the cognitive and physical ability of human decision-
makers to control or even comprehend events. Effective deterrence depends on the clear communication of
credible threats and consequence of violation between adversaries, which assumes the sender and recipient of
these signals share a common context allowing for mutual interpretation.103

For now, it remains axiomatic that human decisions escalate a situation; however, military technology like AI that enables offensive
capabilities to operate at higher speed , range , and lethality will move a situation more quickly up the
escalation rungs , crossing thresholds that can lead to a strategic level of conflict. These escalatory dynamics would be
greatly amplified by the development and deployment of AI-augmented tools functioning at machine speed .
Military AI could potentially push the pace of combat to a point where the actions of machines surpass the cognitive and
physical ability of human decision-makers to control (or even fully understand ) future warfare. Thus,
until experts can unravel some of the unpredictable, brittle, inflexible, unexplainable features of AI, this technology will continue to outpace
strategy, and human error and machine error will likely compound one another—with erratic and
unintended effects .

Absent stability, multiple hotspots escalate into nuclear war.

Donatz ’22 [Koen; September 14; MSc, LLM, Financial Trainee at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
Student Think Tank for Europe Asia Relations, “7 Eurasian Hotspots That Could Lead to Major (Nuclear)
Wars,” https://www.stearthinktank.com/post/7-eurasian-hotspots-risking-nuclear-war]

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of conflicts in Eurasia (Council on Foreign Relations, n.d.). There are conflicts
with a high intensity , such as the Ukraine War, and there are conflicts that are at a much lower intensity, which have been going on
for decades, such as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Additionally, there are tense situations that are not conflicts yet,
but might turn into armed conflicts in the (near) future, such as the tensions between China and Taiwan. Some of such
conflicts, like the civil war in Myanmar, notwithstanding their tragic consequences, are relatively local affairs. However, there are a

number of (potential) conflict hotspots that could turn into major regional or even global wars . This article
will discuss seven of those hotspots. Six of the seven hotspots involve at least one nuclear power, and three of those hotspots directly involve
China.
To be clear, the argument of this article is not that the start of a major war in these hotspots is inevitable or even likely. These hotspots may
never evolve into a major war, and some may never become an armed conflict at all. Yet, because the implications of a major war developing
from these hotspots are so grave, it is still relevant to discuss them. For the sake of peace and security in Eurasia, and the world at large, it is
essential that all necessary measures are taken to decrease the odds of escalated conflict in these hotspots as much as possible.

1. The Ukraine War

This war needs no introduction. Six months after Russia’s invasion, the war has fortunately not spread to other
countries. NATO has made it clear that it will not send troops to Ukraine or enforce a no-fly zone above Ukraine, to avoid a military
confrontation with Russia and to avoid the conflict from spreading beyond Ukraine (NATO, 7 July 2022). Russia has so far not sought a direct
confrontation with NATO either. However,in the fog of war things are messy, and in this fog events can unfold
that no one intended. Russia has fired missiles as close as ten miles from Poland’s (a NATO member) border
(Lau, 13 March 2022). What if the next Russian missile misses its target (as seems to be common for Russian missiles) and

lands across the border in Poland? This hypothetical, but not implausible situation has the potential to bring a
nuclear-armed Russia in direct confrontation with NATO and its nuclear powers (the United States, the United
Kingdom and France).

2. Cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran

Saudi Arabia and Iran have been in something akin to a cold war since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Although the two rivals have
not fought each other directly, they have been involved in proxy wars in Syria and Yemen (Gater-Smith,
2020, p.160-162). As usual, nuclear weapons complicate the situation. Iran has been developing a nuclear
program since the 1980s and may have the capabilities to develop a nuclear weapon in just a few weeks if it wants to, according to
one estimation (Samore, 2022). Saudi Arabia for its part has been developing its own nuclear infrastructure in

response to Iran, in what may be an unfolding nuclear arms race (Shay, 2018). Meanwhile, the negotiations about the Iran Nuclear Deal
between the US and Iran have come to a standstill, and president Biden has made clear he will do what is necessary to prevent Iran from
becoming a nuclear power (Council on Foreign Relations, 2022). With a potential nuclear arms race , violent proxy wars
and a confrontational US , this situation possess all the necessary elements to escalate into a major
war .
3. Tensions between India and Pakistan

India and Pakistan have been enemies from the very moment both states gained independence from the UK in 1947. Since then, the two
countries have fought three wars (in 1947, 1965 and 1999) over, among other things, disputed territory in the Kashmir region (Council on
Foreign Relations, 12 May 2022). The most recent war, in 1999, was fought when both countries were in possession of nuclear weapons. This
was the first and one of only a few times in history that two nuclear weapons states have come into direct military confrontation (Roblin, 14
June 2021). Fortunately, both countries refrained from using their nuclear arsenal, but past results offer no guarantees for the future. India-
Pakistan relations remain very tricky. For instance, in March 2022 India accidentally fired a missile that is capable of carrying nuclear weapons
at Pakistan (BBC, 24 August 2022). Such accidents, combined with the hostility between the two countries and their nuclear capabilities offer
ample opportunity for military escalations. If things do escalate, it is conceivable that China, as a close ally of Pakistan and a strong rival of India,
gets involved as well. This would open up the possibility of a much broader conflict.

4. Border dispute between China and India

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China 1949, the country has had a dispute with India over their shared border in the Himalaya.
The two Asian giants fought a war over this border in 1962 (Richards, 2015, p.3-5). In June 2020, border skirmishes led to the death of 20 India
soldiers and an unknown number of China soldiers, another rare occasion of direct military confrontation between two nuclear powers
(Westscott, 2021, p.8). With 60.000 troops on both sides of what is called the Line of Actual Control between China and India, another armed
clash is a realistic scenario (Rajagopalan, 2 August 2022). Both China and India have barely any formal allies due to their non-alignment policies,
which limits the potential of a Sino-India conflict to spill over to other countries (Scobell & Nathan, 2012, p.140; The Hindu, 21 July 2020) . Still,
it is unlikely that other nuclear powers would remain completely on the side lines in such a conflict. The US, France and Israel are close to India,
while Pakistan is close to China. Russia is close to both countries (Bhattacharya, 2004; Browne, 2017; Bharti, 2022). The hostile Sino-India
relations thus continue to be very risky.

5. Tensions between China and Taiwan

China sees the self-governed island of Taiwan as a part of its own territory that should at some point be brought under Beijing’s control.
Thereby, China explicitly keeps the option of taking the island by force open. Furthermore, China claims the
Taiwan issue should not “be passed down from one generation to the next” (Xinhua, 10 August 2022). Read: Beijing’s patience is running out
somewhere in the foreseeable future. Yet, in Taiwan the public support for unification with China is according to a recent survey only 6.5%
(Election Study Center National Chengchi University, 12 July 2022), hence Taiwan is not voluntarily going to submit to Beijing’s control. Thus,
the only way for China to get control over Taiwan is to impose it by military force. In May 2022,
president Biden stated unambiguously that the US would militarily intervene to defend Taiwan
were China to attack (Wong, 23 May 2022). It is debatable whether this is now the official US Taiwan policy or
not, but in any case the US would seriously consider responding militarily to a Chinese attack on Taiwan. This

makes the Taiwan Strait a potential location for a Sino-US war .

6. Maritime disputes in the S outh C hina S ea

In the South China Sea, China has maritime disputes with countries such as Indonesia , Vietnam and the
Philippines over who gets to economically exploit which parts of the sea and who can claim sovereignty where (Council on Foreign
Relations, 4 May 2022). The US has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines (The Avalon Project, 30 August 1951),

meaning that if China gets into an armed clash with the Philippines in the South China Sea, the US is legally
obliged to militarily come to the Philippines’ aid. However, China could also directly clash with the US ,
since the US regularly sends navy ships through the South China Sea to show that the sea is open to use by everyone (the
F reedom o f N avigation Op eration s ). This could for instance lead to a collision between a Chinese and a US
so-called

ship that spins out of control militarily (Panter, 6 April 2021).

7. War between North and South Korea

Ever since Korea has been split in a North and a South in 1945, the two Koreas have been in conflict with each other,
making it one of the longest-running conflicts in Eurasia. The 1950-1953 Korean War has also never formally ended,
since no peace treaty has been signed (Kelly, 20 September 2021). Although there is no actual fighting between the two

Koreas, the relations remain hostile . In the first half of 2022, No rth Ko rea conducted 31 missile
tests , much more than the 8 missile tests it did throughout the whole of 2021 (Green, 14 June 2022). North Korea’s possession of
nuclear weapons makes the situation quite dangerous. Moreover, North Korea is a formal military ally
of China (China’s only formal alliance), while the US has an alliance with both South Korea and Japan (Lee,
Alexandrova & Zhao, 2020, p.587-590). Thus, if an armed conflict were to materialize between both Koreas, this would
result in a Sino-US military conflict too.

Costs of first strike massively outweigh its benefits---only a NFU can dampen
miscalculation AND guarantee stability.
Sethi ’22 [Manpreet; June 2022; distinguished fellow at the Centre for Air Power Studies in New Delhi;
Arms Control Today, “Nuclear Overtones in the Russia-Ukraine War,” vol. 52]
Norm-Affirming Opportunities
Incidences of direct military engagement between nuclear-armed adversaries and the manner in which they
have been conducted also illuminate another interesting issue pertaining to the perceived military utility of
nuclear weapons. Nuclear strategists and practitioners understand well that nuclear deterrence is a game of psychological manipulation.
Nuclear bluster and brinkmanship are an important dimension of nuclear deterrence, especially by weaker conventional powers. Like

nuclear saber-rattling to deter its adversary from the large-scale

Pakistan or North Korea, Russia appears to have used

use of conventional forces . Despite all the noise that must accompany strategies of first use of nuclear weapons or
those premised on the notion of "escalate to deescalate," it is never easy to find the appropriate

military use for nuclear weapons. The nature of the armament as a weapon of mass destruction and the attendant risk of
retaliation after first use make it a blunt instrument , at least from the point of view of war-fighting.

Therefore, in all crises between nuclear-armed states, nuclear weapons have not shown themselves to be useful for
achieving any worthwhile political or military objectives through premeditated first use . This is particularly the case
when both sides have assured second-strike capabilities, thereby raising the risk of an exchange that would cause unacceptable damage to both
sides.

Once this logic is understood, it is possible to envision some opportunities that can be exploited to strengthen
the norm of nonuse of nuclear weapons and reinforce the basics of nuclear deterrence . What needs to be underscored
is the fact that nuclear weapons are distinct from conventional weapons. The instantaneous release of large amounts of energy in the form of
blast and thermal heat, ionizing radiation, and the long-term radioactivity from nuclear fallout are unavoidable with nuclear detonations.5 The
empirical data from the destruction wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by, respectively, 15-kiloton and 20-kiloton nuclear warheads are
widely available. Today's warheads are even more powerful and destructive. Although lower yields have been experimented with as one way of
reducing the deleterious effects of nuclear explosions, a 2001 report concluded that even a ground burst of a nuclear yield as small as 1 percent
of the Hiroshima weapon would "simply blow out a massive crater of radioactive dirt, which rains down on the local region with especially
intense and deadly fallout."6

Given that this is the true nature of the weapon, there hardly can be any credible scenarios where it could be used
effectively to achieve an objective. Could any war aim be worth this cost to the adversary and to one's own self given the
retaliation that would likely follow? Over time, Washington and Moscow accumulated large stockpiles of varying yields in the hope of gaining
an advantage in nuclear exchanges. Yet, neither country has been seriously inclined to test this hypothesis in real-life situations.

Nations cannot defend themselves by using nuclear weapons. They can only do so by deterring the adversary's use of a nuclear weapon by the
threat of retaliation. In fact, the threat of using these weapons in any scenario other than retaliation, such as against terrorists, conventional
offensives, and cyberattacks or space attacks, could only be counterproductive by escalating hostilities. Clearly, these weapons are most
effective for only a narrow role.

Embracing this simple reality could make it possible for nations to agree to accept n o f irst u se of nuclear weapons
as a doctrinal precept. If deterrence is the only function that nuclear weapons can credibly
perform , then a no-first-use doctrine does not put nuclear-armed states at a disadvantage. Rather, it brings many
benefits. For one, it allows countries to retain their nuclear weapons for the sense of notional security derived
from their presence until such time as nuclear-armed states begin to see them as useless. At the same time, the no-first-use policy
liberates nations from the need to build and maintain large arsenals with first-strike capabilities ,
which bring their own risks of safety and security.

Moreover, the policy releases national leaders from having to make the momentous decision to breach the
nuclear taboo , which can never be easy because the act will provoke retaliation. It also frees adversaries from the use-
it-or-lose-it dilemma, which could trigger nuclear preemption . Thus, a no-first-use policy offers crisis and
arms race stability even in the presence of nuclear weapons.7 Because nuclear weapons possessors are unwilling to relinquish their
arsenals until conditions are "right," a no-first-use policy can help create those conditions by constricting possibilities for using the weapon, thus
making them useless over time.

Backing Off the Nuclear Precipice

Six decades after the Cuban missile crisis, the Russian-Ukrainian war has brought nations yet again to the nuclear
precipice . Talk of World War III is in the air. Of course, the United States and NATO have taken adequate precautions to avoid any move
that could propel the world toward nuclear escalation. Some Russian ministers have announced that their country has no reason to use nuclear
weapons except to defend against an existential threat. These efforts contribute toward minimizing the chance of intentional nuclear use.
Nevertheless, the inadvertent use of the weapons due to miscalculation , misperception , or accident
should not be overlooked. Given that tensions are high and information warfare well in progress, one cannot dismiss the
presence of a thick fog of war that could make countries stumble into nuclear use.

As a result, it is imperative that this moment be seized by all those who believe that living with nuclear weapons is too risky
to drive home the dangers of nuclear weapons and the alarming challenges that they pose for states with
nuclear weapons and those without. The very existence of these armaments adds to the risk of escalation to the
nuclear level in every war. Additionally, these weapons trigger anxieties about nuclear blackmail and coercion
among nonpossessor states.

The war raging in Ukraine offers an important opportunity to sensitize nations and their populations to nuclear risks. All could do with a stiff
dose of nuclear learning. The fate of future generations will rest on the world's behavior today.

Incremental steps like the plan reduce nuclear risks and are comparatively more
effective.
Gareth Evans 21. Distinguished Honorary Professor at the Australian National University, former
Foreign Minister of Australia and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group. “Revisiting the
case for no first use of nuclear weapons.” https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/revisiting-the-case-for-no-
first-use-of-nuclear-weapons/.

Why not no use instead of no first use? There will always be those in the peace movement for whom any talk
of no first use of nuclear weapons is unconscionable. It’s not no first use they want, but no use at all ,
under any circumstances. Those who take this position argue that campaign energy and resources should be
totally directed to getting the Nuclear Weapons Prohibition Treaty, which is already supported by the great majority of states,
universally embraced. They reject halfway measures which contemplate the possibility of something happening that must
remain forever unthinkable. In principle, this is a compelling argument. Nuclear weapons are not only the most indiscriminately inhumane ever
devised, but any use of them is an existential risk to life on this planet as we know it. No one should waver for an instant in settling, as an
endpoint, for anything less than global zero—the total elimination of nuclear weapons from the face of this planet. But honesty demands
acknowledgement that, right now, that end point is as far away as it has ever been . The Nuclear Weapons
Prohibition Treaty has huge moral and emotional appeal and remains very important in building and reinforcing the
has, however, no buy-in whatsoever from any of the
normative case against the legitimacy of nuclear weapons. It
nuclear-armed states or those that think they benefit from their protection. Nor will it have buy-in for
the foreseeable future , for reasons which are not just ideological , geopolitical , and psychological , but
go to verification and, above all, enforcement . As unpalatable as this will be to some, and as overcautious as it will be to
others, the only way forward, toward a nuclear-weapon free world—in this world as we find it, not what
we would want it to be—is incremental . The process needs to be broken into manageable steps,
focusing in the first instance on serious nuclear risk reduction, decreasing the salience of nuclear weapons in countries’
defense planning, and creating doubts in policymakers’ minds about not only the legitimacy but the utility of nuclear deterrence. If one

wants real-world progress , one should never make the best the enemy of the good . That is, we
should not take the view that settling for anything less than perfection is not necessary compromise
but capitulation . The priority now, as stated in the report of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and
Disarmament, which I co-chaired with former Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi in 2009, is to direct immediate advocacy

energy not into elimination , but rather minimization . In such a risk reduction agenda, achieving universal buy-in
by the nuclear-armed states to n o f irst u se would be one of the four highest priorities .
 Plan---1AC
The United States should adopt a nuclear no-first use policy.
 Solvency---1AC
Finally, SOLVENCY:
NFU is the single most important factor in avoiding nuclear war.
Quiggin ’22 [John; October 20; Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland; Independent
Australia, “A 'no first use' U.S. nuclear policy could save the world,”
https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/a-no-first-use-us-nuclear-policy-could-save-the-
world,16881]

THE RISKS of nuclear war are greater than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not only is Vladimir
Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons to stave off defeat in Ukraine , but the No rth Ko rean
Government has continued to develop and test both missiles and nuclear warheads .
U.S. President Joe Biden has responded to Putin’s threats with admirable calm so far, playing down the risk that Putin will use nuclear weapons
and avoiding any threat of escalation.

Leaks from the U.S. Administration have indicated that the response to a tactical nuclear weapon would be massive but confined to
conventional weapons.

Yet theofficial doctrine of the U.S. would call for the use of nuclear weapons in exactly the situation faced
by Putin today: a conventional war going badly .

Unlike Russia and China, the U.S. military maintains the right to a " flexible response " in which nuclear
weapons may be use d against an adversary who hasn’t used nuclear weapons and doesn’t pose an existential
threat to the U.S. itself.

If Putin is threatened with massive retaliation for breaking a supposed taboo on nuclear weapons, the U.S. should commit itself to
" n o f irst u se" of nuclear weapons. But why hasn’t this happened already?

planning was based on the assumption that the Soviet Union would
Throughout the Cold War, U.S. military

have a massive advantage in conventional weaponry, most notably because of its tens of thousands of tanks and
other armoured vehicles, not to mention millions of artillery shells.

In the scenario favoured by Pentagon planners, these forces would pour the Fulda Gap, on the border between East and West Germany, rapidly
overwhelming North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces.

Only the use of " t actical" n uclear w eapons would even the balance . The term "tactical" might sound moderately
comforting, but some of these weapons would have many times the explosive power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
They would obliterate the advancing forces.

The end of the Cold War shifted the frontier hundreds of kilometres to the east, but the planners found another
"gap" to worry about near Suwałki in Poland. And, as Putin rebuilt the crumbling armed forces he had inherited, it
seemed that he still had at least 3,000 modern tanks, with another 10,000 in reserve.

But the failed invasion of Ukraine has shown Putin’s army to be a paper tiger . More than half of Russia’s front-
line tanks have already been destroyed or captured by Ukraine. Indeed, Russia has been the biggest single supplier of
tanks and armoured vehicles to the Ukrainian armed forces.
Meanwhile, the vast reserves turned out to be largely illusory . Thousands of tanks had been left to rust
in the open air or pillaged for parts to be sold on the black market. By June, Russia was reduced to deploying

ancient T-62 tanks , first produced in the 1960s and then updated in the 1980s. These have already been destroyed in large numbers.

After failing to conquer its near neighbour, there is no prospect that Russia could launch a successful
conventional attack on NATO. There is, therefore, no need for t actical n uclear w eapons. The same is
true of a hypothetical invasion of Taiwan by China.

By adopting a " n o f irst u se" policy, the U.S. could greatly reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear war
or an unintended process of escalation . Such a policy would certainly face resistance from the U.S. military, which never saw
a weapons system it didn’t find essential — as it would from the Republican party.

The U.S. is one of a handful of countries that don’t ban the use of landmines. The Trump Administration revoked restrictions on the use of
landmines and sought to develop new ones.

Still, there is hope. Richard Nixon, of all people, committed the U.S. to ban chemical weapons and stocks were finally destroyed under George
W Bush.

And the Biden Administration has moved towards a ban on landmines. A " n o f irst u se" commitment once made, would be
difficult to roll back , even for a future Trump Administration.

Maintaining any first strike capabilities decimates solvency.

Cirincione ’22 [Joseph; February 7; national security analyst and author with over 35 years of
experience working these issues in Washington, D.C.; Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft,
“Achieving a Safer U.S. Nuclear Posture,” https://quincyinst.org/report/achieving-a-safer-u-s-nuclear-
posture/#the-beginnings-an-unconstrained-arms-race]
Towards a safer nuclear posture

We do not have to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can and must return to policies that preserved deterrence, reduced the
risk of nuclear war, shrank global arsenals, effectively halted nuclear testing by the major powers, and ended or curtailed nuclear programs in
dozens of countries. Current trend lines are a major departure from the policies of nuclear reductions that began under President Reagan and
continued until recently. These policies worked; we abandon them at our peril.

Carnegie Endowment scholars Toby Dalton and Ariel Levite warn that “ stalled progress toward nuclear disarmament by
states with nuclear weapons,” and the spread of sensitive nuclear materials and technologies, have pushed
the global nonproliferation regime to the breaking point .26 Biden’s AUKUS deal, announced simultaneously in
Canberra, London, and Washington last September, sets a dangerous precedent, allowing Australia for the first time to enrich uranium to near-
bomb levels of purity to fuel nuclear reactors in new attack submarines it will now acquire, thus opening the door to future proliferation.27
Urgent steps are needed , argue Dalton and Levite, “to restore the nonproliferation regime’s role as a
bulwark of global stability .”

Restoring the regime will require policies that reduce the role and number of U.S. nuclear weapons , that
recognize the profound moral questions raised by the use of these weapons (and the consequent civilian toll), and that seek to avoid

risky or dangerous doctrines and postures that can trigger nuclear war , as Kennedy put it, “by accident ,
miscalc ulation, or madness .” Nuclear weapons may be a means of deterrence in some cases, but they
are never a tool for waging war .
In sum, the United States does not need its current arsenal of 5,550 hydrogen bombs to protect the American people.28

The nuclear doctrine and posture adopted in the fearsome days of the Cold War — including “massive retaliation,” the first
use of nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict , the sole authority of the president to fire these weapons, and
keeping more than a thousand missiles ready to launch in minutes — combine now to present an unacceptable risk of

nuclear disaster .29 Deterrence can be preserved by means of a much smaller arsenal and a shift to a lower-
risk nuclear posture.
Nuclear pivot point

Regrettably, the president and Congress appear unwilling to slow or reverse plans to replace the nuclear weapons constructed during the Carter and Reagan presidencies, which are now reaching the end of their operational life.
Those weapons were built, in turn, to replace those constructed during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations.30

In 2017, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that this third wave of nuclear modernization would cost at least $1.2 trillion over 30 years, or $1.7 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars. Since then, costs have risen and new
programs have been added. The total burden now is certainly more than $2 trillion. Worse, these weapons will carry a nuclear posture developed during the terrors of the Cold War almost to the end of the 21st century.

These expansive, expensive programs are justified at the strategic level by arguments indistinguishable from those advanced to counter the Soviet threat decades ago. Now as then, nuclear hawks say the new weapons are needed
to dominate the escalatory ladder at every level, from battlefield nukes to globe-spanning missiles. Now as then, they argue that arms competition, not arms control, will keep the peace. Deterrence “depends on maintaining a
large, modern and calibrated arsenal that contains no gaps in a potential escalation cycle,” argues New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.31

Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican, agrees. “It is very expensive and hard work to win an arms race, but it is much better to win an arms race than to lose a war,” he said last year.32 China must be stopped from
increasing its arsenal lest it lead to “nuclear overmatch” against the United States, Cotton also asserted.33 These absurd comparisons — even if China quadrupled its arsenal it would still be one-fifth the size of the U.S. force —
demonstrate how easily the pathology of U.S. primacy leads to wasteful spending and dangerous military postures.34

Similar arguments have been made at every stage of the nuclear buildups and drawdowns. At every fork in the nuclear road, weapon proponents insisted that the current forces were the bare minimum necessary for security, and
many such advocates claimed more were needed. Often, this meant many more. When Gen. Thomas Power was head of the Strategic Air Command in 1961, for example, he insisted to President Kennedy and Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara that he needed 10,000 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs, to safeguard America.35 They instead settled on 1,000 because, McNamara said, “that was a nice round number.”36

Scores of scholarly studies refute the specious theoretical claims of nuclear-warfare advocates. They have also detailed how security can be maintained and increased through a major shift in nuclear policy. Indeed, the majority of
independent experts believe that U.S. national security objectives can be met at far lower levels and with a safer nuclear posture.37

Among the most authoritative of these reports is a 2013 study by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which concluded that the number of deployed nuclear warheads “could be cut by at least a third without harming national security.”38 A
force of 1,000 to 1,100 deployed strategic warheads could “deter attack or protect American interests by targeting fewer, but more important, military or political sites in Russia, China and several other nations.” These reductions
could be implemented unilaterally, the military research study concluded, no matter what Russia decided to do. Lt. Gen. James Kowalski, then head of the Global Strike Command, said that only after cutting below 1,000 strategic
warheads would the military require “major structural changes in how we do this business.” Complementary reductions in short– and medium-range nuclear forces could bring the total arsenal down to 3,500, or perhaps as low as
2,500 warheads, the study found.

Media reporting about the U.S. programs is rare, and congressional hearings even rarer, though these systems will consume more than $634 billion in this decade alone, far more than most hotly debated domestic programs.39
There is more political space to make dramatic changes, however, than many imagine. If the issue has low salience among the American public, then responsible change carries few political risks.

Change must come. Experience shows that even historically high spending on military systems cannot be sustained indefinitely, despite the desire of many in Congress to do so. Pentagon budgets have soared from the $300 billion
allocated in the year before the September 11, 2001, attacks to $778 billion in the budget recently approved. Nuclear-weapons and related missile-defense programs account for almost one-tenth of this spending, at $64 billion for
the 2022 fiscal year and growing.40 During the peak years of procurement, this amount will double, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded. In that report, issued in 2017, the CBO outlined seven different proposals for
preserving deterrence while saving from $27 billion to $139 billion.41 The three options that would reduce the force to 1,000 deployed strategic warheads would save the most, from $66 billion to $139 billion.

Rather than protecting America, these distorted budgets threaten the viability of the nation. “Defense spending crowds out funds for everything else a prosperous economy and a healthy society need,” says former Carnegie
Endowment President Jessica Tuchman Mathews. It is “indefensible.”42 Once the nation is through the current pandemic and the associated economic crisis, a reckoning may come. A president could and should articulate a long-
term investment strategy aligned with the imperatives of the new challenges we face, not the needs of the nuclear-industrial complex.

Nuclear-weapons budgets should be the first on the chopping block for reductions, being relatively the least-necessary outlays and enjoying the least support among the service chiefs. When military budgets are growing, the
emphasis is on unity, and each service branch gets a share. But when budgets contract, the chiefs tend to favor force posture and weapons they actually use, and their support for nuclear-weapons and missile defenses decline.

What a president can do

It is not too late for Biden to overcome the limitations of the expected Pentagon’s posture review . The game is
not over. That is, there are still several ways that a president can change U.S. policy greatly to lower the risk of nuclear war and achieve cost
reductions while not compromising national security.

The first and easiest, says Adam Mount of the Federation of American Scientists, is for the undersecretary of defense for policy or the national
security adviser to “rewrite the NPR material or make significant amendments at the 11th hour” as the document comes to the White House
for the president’s approval.43 They may be reluctant to make major changes, but they, or the president himself, might intervene on the one
issue that has attracted the most press attention: the policy of no first use.

In one of his last speeches as vice-president, Biden said, “Given our nonnuclear capabilities and the nature of today’s threats, it’s hard to
envision a plausible scenario in which the first use of nuclear weapons by the United States would be
necessary or make sense .” Several times during the 2020 campaign, Biden said that “ deterring , and, if necessary, retaliating

against a nuclear attack should be the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”44
A president can declare on his or her authority that henceforth it will be the policy of the United States never to
initiate a nuclear war . This is the essence of legislation introduced in 2019 and again in 2021 by House Armed Services Committee
Chairman Adam Smith and Senator Elizabeth Warren. “Threatening to use nuclear weapons first makes America less safe

because it increases the chances of a miscalc ulation or an accident ,” says Smith.45 The proposed legislation effectively
makes any first-use order to use nuclear weapons illegal, thus requiring military officers to refuse to implement such a command.

A “sole purpose” doctrine is similar and related to “ n o f irst u se.” It is the commitment to use nuclear weapons only to
deter or respond to a nuclear attack. Thus, U.S. nuclear weapons would not be used to deter or respond
to chemical , biological , cyber , or conventional attacks, as Trump-era nuclear policies allow.46

The United States could adopt some variation of these concepts. The sooner the better, says Jon Wolfsthal, a former senior director for
arms control and nonproliferation at the National Security Council and former special adviser to Biden during his vice-presidency. “ The risk

of a nuclear conflict erupting between the United States and Russia , and increasingly between the United States and
China , is dangerously high,” he writes. “Tensions over Ukraine or Taiwan could get out of hand quickly,
with uncertain outcomes… Declaratory policy can be a powerful tool in reducing nuclear risks .”47

Even after the NPR is finalized, says Mount, “It is still possible that the administration could adjust
declaratory policy through other means.”48 Biden and his advisers can make significant changes over the next year or so as
they develop the administration’s nuclear-employment guidance, the mechanism by which the recommendations of the NPR are translated into
government actions.49 This process is actually the more important component for setting U.S. policy. “It is in the implementation that the true
strategy evolves,” observed Adm. Gerald Miller, former deputy director of the Joint Chiefs Strategic Targeting Planning Staff, “regardless of
what is generated in the political and policy meeting rooms of any Administration.50

Here, Biden can take two steps that could prevent a repeat of the nightmare scenario envisioned during the Trump administration — that is,
the fear, real or perceived, that an unstable president could launch a nuclear war. Deepening domestic divisions in the United States during the
2020 election crisis led Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to take extraordinary and possibly unconstitutional steps to
ensure that military commanders checked with him before implementing a Trump order to launch nuclear weapons.51

Milley is not in the chain of command for launching nuclear weapons. Nor is any other senior official. Because of procedures adopted during the
Cold War, a president of the United States has the sole, unfettered ability to order a nuclear strike at any time and for any reason. “I can go into
my office and pick up a telephone,” President Nixon told visiting lawmakers during his impeachment hearings, “and in 25 minutes, 70 million
people would be dead.”52

Nixon was right. A president, on his or her own, can choose any of the pre-approved, legal attack options carried by a military aide who follows
the president 24 hours a day and transmit his orders directly to the National Military Command Center, which will then transmit them to launch
officers. Approximately 1,000 weapons are kept on high-alert, ready to launch within five minutes of an order. No one, under present rules, can
counter the president’s order.

A president on his or her own can change this dangerous and obsolete arrangement. It was created by presidential directives; it can be changed
by presidential directives. Biden could announce that, henceforth, two people would be required to approve a decision to launch nuclear
weapons. Various proposals have suggested the second authority be the vice-president, the secretary of defense, the speaker of the House, or,
a variant, the Congress.53

Biden could also decide — the second step available to him now — that since there is virtually no risk of a massive “bolt-out-of-the-blue”
attack, he no longer requires that nuclear-armed missiles be on hair-trigger alert. Lengthening the launch time to hours or days would give
more time for deliberation and consultation.54

Modernizing employment policies to prevent first use , requiring two people to authorize any use, and lengthening
launch times would greatly improve the safety and security of U.S. nuclear weapons without
engendering the fierce opposition triggered by cuts to major programs. The necessary cuts, of course, should also
be pursued.
Nearly 700 scientists, including 21 Nobel laureates, recently wrote in favor of just these policies. Ending the sole authority of the president to
clear that the U nited S tates will never start a nuclear war , they wrote, “ reduces
launch weapons and making

the likelihood that a conflict will escalate to nuclear war .”55 The group also recommended reducing the national
inventory to 1,000 deployed strategic warheads and canceling the ICBM program accelerated during the Trump administration’s final months.

Finally, should Biden decide that he wants to pursue his hope “to reimagine national security,” he has ample opportunity in his budgets for the
2023 fiscal year and beyond to shift funds from obsolete weapons to the real dangers facing America. To pave the way, he or any future
president could, on sole authority, require serious review of the rationale for these delivery systems, warhead modernization, and the
production of new plutonium cores for weapons. They could encourage congressional leaders to conduct hearings where alternatives could be
examined. They could urge the directors of the national laboratories to diversify away from nuclear weapons research to research on
pandemics, climate change, renewable energy, and other areas that would increase American competitiveness and innovation.

The imminent Nuclear Posture Review, while important, does not have to be the last word. In many ways, it could be seen as just an opening
act in a drama that twists and turns to a much more satisfying and ultimately safer conclusion.

Fiat is good---it positions debaters and judges as budding social critics, while
maintaining the format of debate as a game.
McGee ’97 [Brian and David Romanelli; 1997; Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at Texas
Tech AND Director of Debate at Loyola University of Chicago; Contemporary Argumentation and Debate,
“Policy Debate as Fiction: In Defense of Utopian Fiat,” vol. 18 p. 23-35; DML] [ableist language
modifications denoted by brackets]

Snider argued several years ago that a suitable paradigm should address “something we can ACTUALLY DO”
as opposed to something we can MAKE BELIEVE ABOUT ” (“Fantasy as Reality” 14). A utopian literature metaphor is
beneficial precisely because it is within the power of debaters to perform the desired action suggested by the metaphor, if not always to
demonstrate that the desired action is politically feasible.

Instead of debaters playing to an audience of those who make public policy , debaters should
understand themselves as budding social critics in search of an optimal practical and cultural
politics . While few of us will ever hold a formal policy-making position , nearly all of us grow up
with the social and political criticism of the newspaper editorial page, the high school civics class, and, at
least in homes that do not ban the juxtaposition of food and politics, the lively dinner table conversation. We complain about high income
taxes, declining state subsidies for public education, and crumbling interstate highways. We worry about the rising cost of health care and
wonder if we will have access to high-quality medical assistance when we need it. Finally, we bemoan the decline of moral consensus, rising
rates of divorce, drug use among high school students, and disturbing numbers of pregnant teen-agers. From childhood on, we are told that
good citizenship demands that we educate ourselves on political matters and vote to protect the polis; the success of democracy allegedly
demands no less. For those who accept this challenge instead of embracing the political alienation of Generation X and becoming devotees of
Beavis and Butthead, social criticism is what good citizens do.

Debate differs from other species of social criticism because debate is a game played by students
who want to win. However, conceiving of debate as a kind of social criticism has considerable merit. Social criticism is not
restricted to a technocratic elite or group of elected officials . Moreover, social criticism is not necessarily idle or
wholly deconstructive. Instead, such criticism necessarily is a prerequisite to any effort to create policy change,
whether that criticism is articulated by an elected official or by a mother of six whose primary workplace is
the home. When one challenges the status quo, one normally implies that a better alternative course of
action exists. Given that intercollegiate debate frequently involves exchanges over a proposition of policy by student advocates who are
relatively unlikely ever to debate before Congress, envisioning intercollegiate debate as a specialized extension of ordinary citizen inquiry and
advocacy in the public sphere seems attractive. Thinking of debate as a variety of social criticism gives debate an added dimension of public
relevance.
One way to understand the distinction between debate as policy-making and debate as social criticism is to examine Roger W. Cobb and Charles
D. Elder’s agenda-building theory.5 Cobb and Elder are well known for their analytic split of the formal agenda for policy change, which includes
legislation or other action proposed by policy makers with formal power (e.g., government bureaucrats, U.S. Senators), from the public agenda
for policy change, which is composed of all those who work outside formal policy-making circles to exert influence on the formal agenda. Social
movements, lobbyists, political action committees, mass media outlets, and public opinion polls all constitute the public agenda, which, in turn,
has an effect on what issues come to the forefront on the formal agenda. From the agenda-building perspective, one cannot understand the
making of public policy in the United States without comprehending the confluence of the formal and public agenda.

In intercollegiate debate, the policy-making metaphor has given primacy to formal agenda functions at the expense of the public agenda.
Debaters are encouraged to bypass thinking about the public agenda in outlining policy alternatives; appeals for policy change frequently are
made by debaters under the strange pretense that they and/or their judges are members of the formal agenda elite. Even arguments about the
role of the public in framing public policy are typically issued by debaters as if those debaters were working within the confines of the formal
agenda for their own, instrumental advantage. (For example, one thinks of various social movement “backlash” disadvantage arguments, which
advocate a temporary policy paralysis in order to stir up public outrage and mobilize social movements whose leaders will demand the formal
adoption of a presumably superior policy alternative.) The policy-making metaphor concentrates on the formal agenda to the near exclusion of
the public agenda, as the focus of a Katsulas or a Dempsey on the “real-world” limitations for making policy indicates.

Debate as social criticism does not entail exclusion of formal agenda concerns from
intercollegiate debate . The specified agent of action in typical policy resolutions makes ignoring
the formal agenda of the United States government an impossibility . However, one need not be able to
influence the formal agenda directly in order to discuss what it is that the United States government
should do. Undergraduate debaters and their judges usually are far removed —both physically and
functionally—from the arena of formal-agenda deliberation . What the disputation of student debaters most closely
resembles, to the extent that it resembles any real-world analog, is public-agenda social criticism. What students are doing is something they
really CAN do as students and ordinary citizens; they are working in their own modest way to shape the public agenda.

While “social criticism” is the best explanation for what debaters do, this essay goes a step further. The mode of criticism in which debaters
Strictly speaking , debaters engage in the creation of fictions and
operate is the production of utopian literature.

the compar ison of fictions to one another. How else does one explain the affirmative advocacy of a
plan , a counterfactual world that, by definition, does not exist? Indeed, traditional inherency burdens
demand that such plans be utopian , in the sense that current attitudes or structures make the
immediate enactments of such plans unlikely in the “real world” of the formal agenda. Intercollegiate
debate is utopian because plan and/or counterplan enactment is improbable . While one can
distinguish between incremental and radical policy change proposals , the distinction makes no
difference in the utopian practice of intercollegiate debate .

More importantly, intercollegiate debate is utopian in another sense. Policy change is considered because such change, it is
hoped, will facilitate the pursuit of the good life. For decades , intercollegiate debaters have used fiat or the

authority of the word “ should ” to propose radical changes in the social order , in addition to advocacy of
the incremental policy changes typical of the U.S. formal agenda. This wide range of policy alternatives discussed in contemporary
intercollegiate debate is the sign of a healthy public sphere, where thorough consideration of all policy alternatives is a possibility. Utopian
fiction, in which the good place that is no place is envisioned, makes possible the instantiation of a rhetorical vision prerequisite to building that
good place in our tiny corner of the universe. Even Lewis Mumford, a critic of utopian thought, concedes that we “can never reach the points of
the compass; and so no doubt we shall never live in utopia; but without the magnetic needle we should not be able to travel intelligently at all”
(Mumford 24-25).

An objection to this guiding metaphor is that it encourages debaters to do precisely that to which Snider would object, which is to “make
These students already are writers of
believe” that utopia is possible. This objection misunderstands the argument.

utopian fiction from the moment they construct their first plan or counterplan text . Debaters who
advocate policy change announce their commitment to changing the organization of society in pursuit of the good life, even though they have
no formal power to call this counterfactual world into being. Any proposed change, no matter how small, is a repudiation of policy paralysis and
the maintenance of the status quo. As already practiced, debate revolves around utopian proposals, at least in the sense that debaters and
judges lack the formal authority to enact their proposals. Even those negatives who defend the current social order frequently do so by pointing
to the potential dystopic consequences of accepting such proposals for change.

Understanding debate as utopian literature would not eliminate references to the vagaries of making public policy, including debates over the
advantageousness of plans and counterplans. As noted above, talking about public policy is not making public
policy , and a retreat from the policy-making metaphor would have relatively little effect on the contemporary practice of intercollegiate
debate.6 For example, while space constraints prevent a thorough discussion of this point, the utopian literature metaphor would not
necessitate the removal of all constraints on fiat, although some utopian proposals will tax the imagination where formal-agenda policy change
is concerned.

The utopian literature metaphor does not ineluctably divorce debate from the problems and concerns of ordinary people and everyday life.
There will continue to be debates focused on incremental policy changes as steps along the path to utopia. What the utopian literature
metaphor does is to position debaters, coaches, and judges as the unapologetic social critics that they are and have always been, without the
confining influence of a guiding metaphor that limits their ability to search for the good life. Further, this metaphor does not encourage the
debaters to carry the utopian literature metaphor to extremes by imagining that they are sitting in a corner and penning the next great
American novel. The metaphor is useful because it orients debaters to their role as social critics , without
the suggestion that debate is anything other than an educational game played by undergraduate
students .

Discussing the global effects of nuclear conflict is valuable.

Cordle ’17 [Daniel; 2017; Professor in English and American Literature at Nottingham Trent University,
specializing in nuclear culture; Rob Latham Science Fiction Studies, “Late Cold War Literature and
Culture,” vol. 46 no. 2]

The possibility of an earth scarred by nuclear “ desolations ”, toxic effects of fallout and disruption to
the ecology and climate might suggest a vulnerability , of humans and of the planet , to nuclear technology that could
not be endured, particularly in the context of a powerful Cold War machine that seemed to brook no resistance. Yet, a countermovement can
be detected in nuclear literature. Frequently it functions not by denying vulnerability, but—like the feminist politics described
embracing and exploiting it. In this more progressive environmental politics of vulnerability, shared
in the previous chapter—by

peril becomes an opportunity to build new alliances and contest ways of thinking endemic to the
late Cold War nuclear establishment . It is important to reemphasise that this was not a passive vulnerability (or not
necessarily so): it could be impassioned and confrontational.

Perhaps the most important dimension of 1980s nuclear environmental peril was that, with the potential for global
thermonuclear war meaning that no-one was exempt from the planet’s nuclear fate , there emerged
also the necessity of thinking how our humanity was held in common , above and beyond political and
national difference. By demonstrating the tendency of nuc lear material s and consequences to pass
beyond geographical and political borders , nuclear literature could ask its readers to conceive of nuclear war as an
attack not so much on particular countries as on the whole planet and on all people .61 It could even
sometimes offer glimmers of non-human perspectives, challenging people to look beyond the tracery of political and other boundaries around
the globe, dividing one human society from another. We will see later in the chapter, for instance, how the migrations of birds in Terry Tempest
Williams’s Refuge transcend human boundaries, weaving places together in different ways and revealing both the fragility of the ecosystem (as
vectors of transmission span the planet) and the ephemerality and partiality of human conceptions of the world.
As the human species seemed to be imperilled , nuclear literature sometimes also called up shared notions of
human identity . If such a human identity was opposed to anything it was to those who threatened nuclear war, and thus, as I have
argued elsewhere, there was a shift in some antinuclear discourses from “horizontal” conceptions of conflict (West against East) to “vertical”
ones (in which ordinary people in different countries were collectively threatened by their leaders and the nuclear military machine).62 Such
globalised constructions of humanity are not unproblematic—they might, for instance, efface cultural differences whose starting points for
understanding what it is to be human are at odds with one another; we may instinctively react to them as naïvely utopian; we may even
disagree that it is nuclear bombs per se which are the problem —but they represent an innervating
and exhilarating attempt to challenge and reach beyond destructive forms of nationalism .
The politics of vulnerability is important to the activism of 1980s nuclear literature as a means of acknowledging, indeed celebrating, the small
and the vulnerable whose fates would otherwise be passed over as insignificant. It was not merely that the lives of individuals
were threatened by nuclear technology, it was that the effects of those technologies were to
problematize the conceptual categories by which the human was understood . Physical bodily
boundaries separating self from world seemed to dissolve , for instance, in the face of radiation or the ingestion
of radioactive fallout . Even if free of dangerous physiological contamination (as most surely were), the mind could be penetrated and
haunted by nuclear anxieties. The natural world through which human subjects moved seemed also to be compromised, its ecosystems
permeated by a nuclear presence. All these things meant that the coherence of the self, the integrity of body and mind, seemed to be subject
to malign forces moving across and through it.

Debating nuclear risk is necessary.

Bernstein ’18 [Aron; September 21; Professor, Physics, MIT; The Bulletin, “Reducing the risk of
nuclear war begins in the classroom,” https://thebulletin.org/2018/09/reducing-the-risk-of-nuclear-war-
begins-in-the-classroom/]

The need for education on nuclear weapons. When it comes to nuc lear weapon s , the students of today have less
lived experience to draw on than older generations. Today’s typical college student was born after the end of
the Cold War and has no memory of a time when most Americans were deeply afraid of nuclear war (excluding, to an extent, the fiery
exchange of threats between President Trump and Kim Jong-un last year). Perhaps as a result, these students also have very limited knowledge
about nuclear weapons. The majority do not have a strong understand ing of what nuclear weapons are, their
destructive power , or their role in the international order , and even fewer have a sense of how many nuclear
weapons exist. They are not aware of the $1.2 trillion nuclear modernization program, in which the majority of costs
come from modernizing and improving delivery systems rather than performing the technically necessary maintenance of the nuclear
warheads. History education on the Cold War often addresses the US-Soviet arms race of that time, but nuclear weapons issues in other regions
—such as the tense situation between India and Pakistan—are rarely ever mentioned. The distant, but persistent , possibility of
an unintentional nuclear launch due to unauthorized access, technical failure , or a cyberattack on warning systems, is
also overlooked , as is general information about which states possess nuclear weapons today.
In short, students in the United States (and likely elsewhere) typically graduate from high school having received almost no information on
nuclear weapons. It is generally assumed that today’s American public simply doesn’t care about the
complicated and somewhat abstract issues of nuclear weapons and deterrence because they rarely
affect people’s lives directly . However , an alternative explanation exists: The American public doesn’t know enough about
nuclear weapons to have much political opinion on them, but if they had more knowledge , that could change . If so,

educating students on nuclear weapons on a large scale could have the long-term effec t of creating
an American public that is politically engaged on the nuclear issue and motivated to hold its elected
leaders accountable for implementing nuclear policy that reduces the risk of nuclear war .
For some students, education on nuclear issues may have an impact beyond just putting nuclear weapons on their radar (pun intended).
Today’s students are the next politicians, scientists, and journalists, and some of them will inevitably be tasked with addressing the nuclear
exposure to the issues of nuclear weapons in an educational
issue in their careers. For these students, early

context could be useful preparation for grappling with those issues professionally. Indeed, for some students,
learning about nuclear weapons could have a decisive impact on their career trajectory and inspire
them to dedicate themselves to solving these problems.

Change must be material.

Visoka, 19—Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Dublin City University (Gëzim,
“Critique and Alternativity in International Relations,” International Studies Review, Volume 21, Issue 4,
December 2019, 678-704, dml)
Critical IR theory needs to make more space for self-reflexivity and to open up to an epistemic transformation. The preceding discussion
demonstrated that although peace and conflict studies are more pluralist than other critical
IR branches, they are still affected by
paradigmatic and disciplinary divides within IR. They operate in a conflictual theorizing logic that
disregards certain ontological, methodological, and epistemological alternatives in order to remain
loyal to one particular disciplinarity. For Laura Sjoberg (2017, 163–67), “disciplinarity has a narrowing effect,” suggesting that “an
undisciplined IR would free space for more radical critique and more radical experimentation.” Disciplinary encampment among
suffocated the search for achievable emancipatory possibilities across
different branches of critical IR has

a different range of cases. Endorsing alternativity requires a fluid onto-epistemology that would
make it possible to bypass the epistemological entrapments caused by rigid academic rules of
thought and of knowledge production and by the academic research process. Nonconflictual pathways of research would be
beneficial for overcoming paradigmatic contempt, bypassing methodological holism and individualism, and making space for

conciliatory heuristics and reality-congruent inquires (see Archer 1995; Hamati-Ataya 2018). Searching for
nonconflictual critiques that are embedded in postparadigmatic logic means generating conceptually novel and reality-congruent knowledge
about conflict-affected societies and the broader politics of international interventions. This should not be seen as an attempt to discipline the
discipline of peacebuilding studies. On the contrary, it would be an attempt to break away from disciplinary entrenchments that have impeded
a better understanding of complexity in postconflict societies. It would also be an attempt to avoid the normalization of entrenched research
programs and open up the politics of knowledge production on peace, conflict, security, justice, and development.

More broadly, alternativity in critical IR theory needs to be rescued from never-ending conceptual
reifications , which have ended up making ontological assentation about the world become
completely detached from the world. In this regard, there is a growing realization in IR that “critique is a
necessary but secondary task; the priority is to return to practical theory as quickly as possible ”
(Levine 2012, 69). Recalibrating the purpose of alternativity in critical theory requires recalibrating knowledge
production, not only to unmask power relations and the dynamics of dominance and to create space
for a politics of resistance but also to generate practical knowledge for political action that
challenges, confronts, and disrupts existing power relations and offers alternative solutions for
reshuffling social relations on more emancipatory and inclusive terms (see Duvall and Varadarajan 2003, 85; Murdie
2017; Deiana and McDonagh 2018). A feature of critical peace and conflict studies is a congruence between the emancipatory and problem-
solving perspectives, which should be predicated on the conciliation of knowledge, the expansion of onto-politics of peace, and the pluralization
of epistemological and methodological approaches. The recent methodological work by J. Samuel Barkin and Laura Sjoberg (2017) on
interpretive quantification is a promising move toward this much-needed pluralist fertilization within critical theory. In particular, a stronger
linkage between criticality, alternativity, and practicality could help critical security, peace, and conflict theories to
offer alternatives that would maintain critical impetus while simultaneously strengthening ties to
practical and societal problem-addressing solutions. Genealogical studies would blend well with a critical
analysis of conceptual and policy alternatives (see Milliken 1999). Statistical analysis with an emancipatory hypothesis coupled
with critical analysis would contribute to subverting policy practices and would normalize alternative knowledge about peace, justice, and
emancipation.

The recent practice-turn in IR offers new bridges between scholars and practitioners, making it possible to translate
critical knowledge into practice without compromising the normativity and criticality of scholarly
works (see Bigo 2011). A forum on pragmatism published in this journal has implicitly highlighted the importance of
alternativity in understanding global politics and generating impactful knowledge beyond the existing epistemological and
methodological divides (see Hellmann 2009). Friedrichs and Kratochwil (2009, 701) have argued for “the orientation of research
toward the generation of useful knowledge .” Practicality is essential for generating alternatives. For
instance, Jonna Nyman (2016, 142) argues that “a pragmatic , practice-centred approach . . . can help us gain
practical knowledge of how security works and understand the value of security better, as well as help
us to suggest alternative possibilities.” Similarly, Navnita Chadha Behera (2016, 154) argues: “theorizing in IR needs to
step out of the rarefied atmosphere of its academe, develop a healthy scepticism toward its canonical
frames, and open up to the possibilities of learning from everyday life and experiences of people and their living
traditions and practices.” Practicality shifts the focus from abstract criticality and normativity to contextual critiques that account for everyday
practices and interactions. This would be essential for rescuing critique from becoming a postempirical endeavor.

Critical knowledge that engages with policy alternatives “is not only pragmatic , it is also
politically enabling : it forces us away from instrumental problem-solving perspectives towards
a wider framework of pragmatic thought where narrow instrumental goals are overridden by wider
normative and political concerns” (Kurki 2013, 260). Such grounded critiques are crucial in order to expand
non-prescriptive alternativity and exploring practical possibilities for social emancipation and
change. For Steve Smith (2002: 202), “the acid test for the success of alternative and critical approaches is
the extent to which they have led to empirically grounded work that explores the range and
variety of world politics.” This would also be congruent with Daniel Levine's (2012, 30) concept of sustainable critique, which
entails thinking in both practical and critical terms at once so that “IR could create a sustainably
critical perspective on global politics that might then be turned back onto , and made to inform ,
ongoing policy debates and discourses.” Behera (2016, 154) further maintains that the “state-centric ontology of IR has effectively
ended up dehumanizing the discipline in a way so that normally it has little to do with human relations, human needs, and the larger
imperatives of humanity.” Generating practical alternatives would therefore require endorsing situated knowledge as an epistemological and
methodological basis for any engagement with the real world. The work of feminists such as Donna Haraway (1988, 584) on situated
standpoints is also relevant here because they offer “more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world.” Situated
knowledge is, mostly, nonrepresentational knowledge, in that it is not firmly mediated through preexisting discourses. In this regard, promoting
subjugated knowledge discourses and practices could be central to rejuvenating the emancipatory commitment of critical theory (see Doty
1996).

Situated alternatives could derive from emplaced and embodied knowledge and could have a more emancipatory character as they “bring forth
the importance of recognizing, valuing, and employing marginalized voices by working from this perspective, as well as by reshaping research to
include marginalized communities as part of knowledge production” (McHugh 2015, 62). For Robson and McCartan (2016, 3), “ real world
research looks to examine personal experience, social life and social systems, as well as related
policies and initiatives . It endeavours to understand the lived in reality of people in society and its
consequences .” Milja Kurki's (2013, 245) recent study of democracy promotion has approached alternativity from the perspective of
policy provocations, which focus “on not prioritising one or another perspective, but rather on
encouraging self-reflection by all practitioners, which in turn is considered as a key condition of seeking adequately
pluralism-fostering reforms in concrete policy frameworks .” Kurki (2013, 248–51) further maintains that “instead of
relying on objective knowledge and criteria, policy process can and should be attuned to the logic of interpretive, politicised and participatory
judgements.” Her study is an excellent example of pragmatic congruence between criticality and alternativity, whereby policy

alternatives are not geared toward totally improving or enhancing the current system but openly
promote more pluralistic, reflexive, and emancipatory policies for democratization and peacebuilding.
Moreover, for these new grounds of critical alternativity to be introduced in practice, knowledge production should be decentered,
decolonized, and “de-methodolised” (see Lisle 2014). R. B. J. Walker (2002, 265) has argued that “the key achievement of supposedly
alternative and critical literatures over the past two decades has been to open up at least some possibility of asking questions about the
location and character of the political.” As elaborated in this study, knowledge production in peace and conflict studies is predominantly based
on Western epistemologies, which are shaped by specific cultures of thought, self-perpetuated epistemological superiority, and codified
academic practices. Most of the international scholarship on postconflict societies derives from an unrepresentative body of knowledge, which
tries to mediate, deviate, reinterpret, and, consequently, construct a different social reality that is interpreted through different measurements,
reference points, and analytical concepts (see Latour 2005). This has greatly limited the possibility for proposing realizable alternatives. Due to
these epistemological anomalies, there are growing calls in scholarship to decolonize knowledge from Eurocentric and Western dominance and
instead to pursue more pluralist and particularist modes of knowledge (Smith 2012). For instance, Acharya and Buzan (2010, 2) have argued
that IR theory should be “an open domain into which it is not unreasonable to expect non-Westerners to make a contribution at least
proportional to the degree that they are involved in its practice.” Similarly, Andrew Hurrell (2016, 151) has proposed that “the pathway to a
global IR will need to look beyond ‘IR’ and is likely to require new models for organizing social science research and knowledge production.”
Decolonized epistemologies of peace would reverse the order of knowledge, placing the local first and then the regional and international as
spatial and ontological scales for understanding peace processes (Visoka 2017). They would not operate in isolation but would engage in
shaping global IR knowledge. Therefore, a genuine search for achievable alternatives should try to decolonize peace knowledge from Western
and Eurocentric frameworks, interrogate decolonized knowledge and agencies, and explore the joint constitution of international intervention
and local resistance (see Smith 2012; Memmi 2006). Local scholars often have rich knowledge, but the primary usage of it is not for
instrumental purposes or for transferring and sharing with audiences of outsiders. Local knowledge is very much used to respond to narrow
practical and everyday interests and needs and, as such, is embedded in the logic of generating sufficient knowledge to respond to specific
circumstances.

In the context of peacebuilding, as examined in this article, generating alternatives from the ground up has the potential to bring about more
sustainable forms of peace and reconciliation for groups and societies affected by violent conflict. Situated alternatives for emancipatory peace
are more prone to avoiding co-optation by positivist and problem-solving epistemic predators, resulting thus in developing pluriversal political
and peace orders beyond liberal peacebuilding and other Eurocentric impositions. From this situated perspective, emancipation could take the
shape of “the transformation of structures and relationships of vulnerability through localized political action, aimed at the creation of spaces in
people's lives so that they are enabled to make decisions and act beyond mere survival” (Basu and Nunes 2013, 69). Emancipatory

alternatives would not be universal in their applications because such an attempt is not viable . Rather
the focus should be on searching for practical emancipatory possibilities within a given context ,
time, space, and place (see Fierke 2007, 24). In other words, critiques with an adequate dose of alternativity are more

likely to generate globally understandable and locally impactful knowledge . Nevertheless,

alternativity does not necessarily have to be predicated on representative views of the world—it can also
be a by-product of performing hope and imagined possibilities in global politics. Shapiro (2013, xiv) argues that
critical thinking helps to “create the conditions of possibility for imaging alternative worlds.” That said, as the purpose of critical theory is
emancipatory change, any alternative theoretical and empirical observation in service of improving the human conditions should generate a
morally and practically acceptable standpoint. Because any attempt to establish an alternative interpretation inevitably “empowers a particular
social and political standpoint” (Price and Reus-Smit 1998, 261). According to Ní Mhurchú and Shindo (2016, 5), “critique can help us to develop
different ways of talking about, evaluating, doing and interrogating the changing nature of politics, relations and experiences of the
international in a globalising world.” Hence, critique is inevitably implicated in world-making and, with a much clearer understanding of
alternativity, can steer the thrust for world-changing in a more emancipatory, just, and inclusive direction.
Conclusion

Emancipation is a central feature of critical IR debates, but scholars often fail to develop alternatives
or solutions achieving emancipation in practice. This article has examined the relationship between criticality and
alternativity in IR in order to shed light on some of the most contested issues of critical theory, namely, the epistemological pathways for
identifying the inconsistencies and flaws in existing knowledge and practices and the extent to which critical knowledge should generate
alternative emancipatory possibilities. The article has argued that alternativity provides an opportunity for critical scholars to remain relevant
without being affiliated with positivist logics of inquiry. In unpacking the conceptual contours, the article first explored how different branches
of critical IR engage with the episteme of alternativity. The analysis found that although alternativity is often affiliated with problem-solving
epistemologies, it has played a major role in shaping critical knowledge in IR. While this is acknowledged and endorsed at the epistemological
level by a branch of critical scholars who engage in normative and reconstructive modes of critique, other scholars embedded in deconstructive
modes of critique have disregarded the merits of alternativity in IR. The article has argued that, contrary to what is often
assumed, alternativity is not incompatible with deconstructive or reconstructive critiques across different
subdisciplines of IR. Yet critical IR debates, which have now become the new mainstream in IR, have failed to engage
with the episteme of alternativity in a more empirical and practical sense. They preach emancipation but
fail to develop tangible emancipatory alternatives .

As a result, there is a growing realization that, without tangible alternativity, critical theory risks losing its
normative impetus and its ethical and emancipatory commitment , potentially becoming a post-
epistemological vocation without politics . Critical knowledge without a dose of alternativity may
examine the causes and consequences of subject matters but could fall short of reaching out to
the wider policy community and the affected subjects where power relations reside, thus missing the
opportunity to transform the structural, discursive, and performative practices that reproduce violence,
inequality, and injustice on human and nonhuman ecology. To bridge this epistemological gap, the analysis in the second part of this
article examined how alternativity features in peace and conflict studies, a disciplinary field known for adding normative, empirical, and
practical substance to critical IR debates. The analysis offered a conceptual scoping of three modes of critique and alternativity in peace and
conflict studies. The three modes of critique showed that a conjunction between criticality and alternativity is possible
and that it is necessary to renew the practical and emancipatory potential of critical theory in IR. The three modes of alternativity in peace and
conflict studies expose a spectrum of different critiques, ranging from those perspectives that disengage completely from conceptual and
empirical alternatives, to more pragmatic and prescriptive approaches.

Critique-without-alternative represents one strand, which tends to avoid offering normative and practical
alternatives to their critical reflections aimed at maintaining the conservative and radical impetus of
critical theory and dissociating from problem-solving and policy-relevant methods of inquiry. This
mode of critique is committed to revealing the weaknesses of peacebuilding interventions but refuses to offer any
emancipatory and practical alternative on how to build sustainable peace after violent conflict. If the end goal of critical
perspectives is achieving emancipation, then critique should not only be directed toward problematizing dominant
discourses, practices, and policies but also needs to envisage political and practical alternatives
rooted in ideational and material elements. In turn, the lack of an explicit emancipatory agenda limits
their social and political impact and unintentionally validates the existing order. In response to this
challenge, a new mode of critique has emerged, namely, critique-as-alternative, which exemplifies the optimal approach. Proponents
of critique-as-alternative have remained committee to critical analysis, but most importantly, they have
taken up the challenge of
offering emancipatory knowledge that has practical relevance for vulnerable societies in global politics. Their main flaw, however,

has been their inability to elaborate sufficiently their practical and emancipatory alternatives—a flaw
that has opened up space for epistemic contestation and policy co-optation. Finally, the third mode of critique—critique-with-alternative—
which is embedded in a positivist, problem-solving, and policy-driven logic of inquiry, offers alternatives that seek either to verify existing
knowledge and the existing interventionary order or to reject other critical alternatives.

Looking at different modes of critique through the lens of alternativity in IR's subdiscipline of peace and conflict studies has provided interesting
insights on the promise and limits of critical IR in shaping global politics. The analysis found that existing modes of critique have failed to
develop elaborative emancipatory alternatives at both the conceptual and the practical levels. To infuse critique-with-alternative with
emancipatory elements, expand the epistemological scope of critique-without-alternative, and operationalize further the practical solutions
offered by this mode of critique, substantial changes are needed. This article has suggested exploring postparadigmatic approaches of inquiry in
order to avoid existing epistemological entrapments and limitations, reclaiming the practical relevance of critical theory through pragmatic,
reflexive, and situated alternatives—across the conceptual, normative, and empirical spectrums—and promoting decolonized, bottom-up
methods of knowledge production. The existing modes of critique require pursuing more nonconflictual and postparadigmatic epistemologies,
embracing situated knowledge and reclaiming and expanding its practical relevance, breaking away from geo-epistemological hierarchies, and
opening up to post-Western IR. To conclude, promoting alternativity has the potential to rejuvenate critical
scholarship embedded in the ethos of impactful engagement with the world without being co-
opted by the policy world. The next challenge for scholars should not be whether alternativity and criticality are
congruent but how emancipatory alternatives can renew the social and political purpose of critical theory and make an impact
in the real world.

Nuclear risk is created by contingent, political judgements not psychological

disassociation.
Gusterson 90 [Hugh. Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age (Harvard) & Center for
International Studies (MIT). Fall 1990. Nuclear Texts and Contexts. No. 5.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/ntc/NTC5.pdf]

The authors obviously have a point here, but their inability to really address the logic (as well as the illogic) of the “decent nuclearist” position
reveals the limitations of their own perspective. In brushing aside any opposition which does not oppose the entire nuclear system, they fail to acknowledge that
such “decent nuclearists” as Herbert York and Richard Garwin, even if they do am- biguously legitimate the system, are loathed by many in the nuclear

establishment. And, because the authors themselves see nuc lear weapon s as unambiguously evil , they
ignore the distinction between stabilizing and destabilizing weapons which lies at the heart of
the “decent nuclearists’” moral thinking. We cannot understand the “decent nuclearists’” sense of their own decency unless we at least look
some nuclear weapons and doctrines are worse than others and that, given
into their anguished arguments that

the hostile character of international relations, nuclear weapons can protect us against the danger
in the world as well as making the world a dangerous place . The authors never quite grasp this. Yet the
connection between dissociation and weapons work is more opaque than the authors suggest. Their
argument that Robert MacNamara and Henry Kissinger became more psychologically whole as they moved away from war-fighting doctrines rests on
assumptions unsustained by any plausible evidence . Also there are people with dissociative ways of
being anti-nuclear, and there are weapons professionals who are deeply, painfully aware of the
paradoxes of deterrence discourse. For many the threats to fight wars are bluffs to make deterrence
more credible: the issue is conscious political dissimulation, not unconscious psychological
dissociation . In truth the nuclearist world is more psychologically heterogeneous than Lifton and
Markusen allow, and they confuse this issue by casting political judgments in terms of mental hygiene .

Reject root cause---the international order is contingently constructed.

Wilhelm ’19 [Fränze; 2019; Research Group on International Political Sociology at the Institute of
Social Sciences, Christian Albrechts University, Kiel, Germany; New Political Science, “An Ontology of
Global Order? Heidegger, Laclau, and Political Difference,” vol. 41 no. 2]
Secondly, with regard to the question of global order, there can be no such thing as a universal , all-
encompassing order which has ontological primacy over all other order s . However, the implications of the
Global
originary nothing do not end with postulating a particularistic pluralism of contingent orders next to or opposed to each other.

order denotes an order of a group of particular things which humans structure through their specific
political actions . Hence, to ground being on the foundational nothing helps to arrive at the ontological principle of ordering. The
ordering of order – or the ordering function of order – denotes a gap that can never be rationally closed , for if
both sides of the difference were to overlap exactly, the very need for what Laclau has called investment – and
what we might also call the incentive for action and even thinking in the first place – would dissolve.

This last aspect also brings about the scope of implications which a postfoundational approach presents for both further research in the field of
international political theory as well as global politics. The understanding of particular ontic orders as representations
of a contingent ontological investment into a necessary universal ordering function is simply nothing
else than to presuppose an always already failing structuration. And yet, this does not need to
mean failure in its negative connotation. Rather, the impossibility of political and social closure , in
spite of a human desire for ontological certainty, is the positive impetus for generating both a
theoretical and applied practice of global order . Regarding epistemological and methodological
aspects of interpretation and analysis, postfoundational thinking in the Heideggerian-Laclauian orientation presents a critique of
positivist logics of explanation. The social sciences in general and therefore classic theories of social and political order presuppose a particular
ontology which structures their explanations by way of deduction and causation. Postfoundationalism, instead, stresses the ontological aspect
of explanation based on the ontological difference. The logic of investigation changes from deduction to retroduction, that is, to inferring the
conclusion for a phenomenon indeed in a definite logical form – but only ever problematically as one of many possible explanations. This is
exemplified in research and discourse analyses of the so-called Essex School. The critical-explanatory concepts developed and
applied by its members “are explicitly linked to the radical contingency at the heart of Being , or
more particularly the ‘lack’ or ‘void’ in any given symbolic order .” 84 It becomes clear in this context, that a
postfoundational political ontology is not a positive ontology in the sense of basic concepts in any normative or empirical investigation. Rather,
the ontological premise of the dislocation and contingency of all and any ontological foundation stems from the nature of being itself – from
global order needs to be a political
the ontological difference which discloses being as both no-thing and possibility. An ontology of

ontology in this postfoundational sense. As such, it will be able to come to terms with challenges of politicization ,

possible politics and decisions , responsibility and the need for political contestation which go
beyond the confines of ontological fixity in traditional explanations of social order. Ultimately, the
postfoundational condition both explains and increases our experiences of paradox and wonderment, dislocation and conflict in the global
order(s).
2AC---Round 1---DRR
Case
 Solvency---2AC
Debates over fiated proposals are more effective at reducing passivity than focusing
on personal narratives.
Eijkman ’12 [Henk; May 2012; PhD from University of Canberra, a visiting Fellow at the UNSW
Canberra Campus and visiting Professor of Academic Development at ADCET Engineering College, India;
“The role of simulations in the authentic learning for national security policy development,” Australian
National University National Security College Occasional Paper, no. 4]
Policy simulations enable the seeking of Consensus

Games are popular because historically people seek and enjoy the tension of competition , positive
rivalry and the procedural justice of impartiality in safe and regulated environments . As in games, simulations
temporarily remove the participants from their daily routines , political pressures , and the
restrictions of real-life protocols.
In consensus building, participants engage in extensive debate and need to act on a shared set of meanings and beliefs to guide the policy
process in the desired direction, yet without sacrificing critique and creativity . During the joint experimental actions of
simulation, value debates become focused, sharpened, and placed into operational contexts that allow participants to negotiate value trade-
offs. Participants work holistically, from the perspective of the entire system, in order to reach a joint definition of the problem. Most
importantly, role-playing takes the attention away from the individual (Geurts et al. 2007). To cite one case,
Geurts et al. (2007: 549) note that the ‘ impersonal (in-role) presentation of some of the difficult
messages was a very important factor in the success of the game . When people play roles, they
defend a perspective, not their own position: what they say in the game, they say because their role
forces them to do so’. Consequently, policy simulations make it possible for participants to become ( safely )
caught up and to learn powerful lessons from conflict-ridden simulations rather than from conflict-
ridden real-life policy processes (Geurts et al. 2007).

Policy simulations promote Commitment to action

When participants engage collaboratively in a well-designed policy simulation and work towards the
assessment of possible impacts of major decision alternatives, they tend to become involved ,
reassured and committed . However , participating in a simulation about one’s own organisation
or professional arena can also be a disquieting experience. The process of objectification that takes place in a well-
designed and well-run simulation helps to reinforce memory, stimulate doubt, raise issues,

disagreements and further discussions , and acts to control the delegation of judgement (those who are
affected can check the logic of action). Good simulations engage participants in the exploration of possible futures and foster the power
of ‘exercises in explicitness’ to question and prevent unrealistic over- commitment to one idea or course of action and critically explore

situations and conditions where a chosen strategy deviates , fails , or backfires .

simulations are, of course, not free from the problem of participant passivity . However , a
Policy

well-planned process of participatory modelling, a strictly balanced distribution of tasks , and

transparent activity of all participants acts as a safeguard against abstention from involvement. Good
simulations:

Despite ongoing violence, scholars should consider existential risks.

Tutton 22 [Richard Tutton is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, and co-editor of
Genetic Databases: Socio-Ethical Issues in the Collection and Use of DNA. "The Sociology of
Futurelessness." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385221122420]

Sociologists also need to recognise the cultural and social specificities of affective futurities, including
futurelessness . Any claims that this regime of feeling is one experienced across diverse societies
should be regarded with caution . While there is a temptation to consider that people everywhere experience the same sense of
‘no future’, Mitchell and Chaudhury’s (2020) critique of ‘new catastrophist’ (Urry, 2016) writing reminds us that affective futurities are a part of
larger cultural and historical formations. Their reading of this literature shows that while the focus is on future catastrophes that could bring
about civilisational collapse, for many Black, Indigenous and Peoples of Colour, the catastrophe is not in the future but has already unfolded
over the past five centuries. For many such groups, their futures were foreclosed by the actions of white
settlers and colonisers in pursuit of their own desired futures. After all, the imagined futures of European modernity
told through stories of progress and utopia were inextricably linked to imperial conquests. While ostensibly addressing the fate of humanity in
its entirety, (Mitchell and Chaudhury (2020: 319) argue that this ‘new catastrophist’ literature consists of ‘white apocalyptic narratives’
primarily concerned with preserving European ways of life and commitments to Eurocentric notions of progress. As Savransky (2021: 4)
observes: ‘the End of the World is always the end of some world in this world [. . .] the Euro-American extractive mode of living through which
“civilization developed,” is not the end of everything as such’.

Accordingly, sociologists should understand that futurelessness is always the foreclosing of some futures among other possible futures in this
world, and we need always to ask for whom are those futures foreclosing and how is this made to matter. I have addressed a particular
European (or perhaps Euro-North American) kind of futurelessness expressed by writers on the political left. But, as Mitchell and Chaudhury
(2020: 322) show, there are other futures available, which they explore through Afrofuturist, Desi-futures and myriad other non-European
futurisms that ‘open space for futures beyond (the) apocalypse (of whiteness)’.

Battistoni (2013) asks how scholars and activists can translate the ‘ urgency and outrage of the “ no
future” sensibility’ to something more than what Horvat (2019: 55) calls ‘‘ fetishist apocalypticism ’ . If we
have arrived, as she argues, at the end of the future inherited from modernity, the challenge is to build a ‘new
present’ out of the ‘wreckage of old futures’, reimagining what we mean by progress and that the kinds of utopia possible that
are no longer ‘lands of endless plenty’ (Battistoni, 2013). Only by addressing the ‘ urgencies of now’ , do societies stand
a chance of working towards ‘ new futures’ that could avoid or better face up to the coming
catastrophes . This opens space for engaging with ‘ counterfutures’ (Eshun, 2003: 288) of the kind Mitchell
and Chaudhury (2020) discuss in their work . Such ‘counterfutures’ attest to how Black, Indigenous and
Peoples of Colour are living with the ‘ wreckage of old futures’ (Battistoni, 2013) and open new and different ways of
imagining possible futures. As Battistoni (2013) observes, climate change is the unintended outcome of a ‘brighter future’ that generations in
Europe and North America and more recently elsewhere invested in to bring them and their children better lives. Now it appears that there is
no future in this future any more, what new stories can and must be told?
Kritik
 Kritik---2AC
Pragmatic solutions, even when imperfect, are necessary for activism.
Jarvis ’0 [Darryl; 2000; Former Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of
Sydney; International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism, University of South Carolina Press,
“Continental Drift,” p. 128-129]
More is the pity that such irrational and obviously abstruse debate should so occupy us at a time of great global turmoil. That it does and
continues to do so reflect our lack of judicious criteria for evaluating theory and, more importantly, the lack of attachment theorists have to the
epistemological and
real world. Certainly, it is right and proper that we ponder the depths of our theoretical imaginations, engage in

ontological debate , and analyze the sociology of our knowledge. But to support that this is the only task of
international theory, let alone the most important one, smacks of intellectual elitism and displays a certain
contempt for those who search for guidance in their daily struggle as actors in international politics. What does
Ashley’s project, his deconstructive efforts , or valiant fight against positivism say to the truly marginalized,
oppressed , and destitute ? How does it help solve the plight of the poor, the displaced refugees, the casualties of
war , or the émigrés of death squads ? Does it in any way speak to those whose actions and thoughts comprise
the policy and practice of international relations?

On all these questions one must answer no . This is not to say, of course, that all theory should be judged by its technical rationality and
problem-solving capacity as Ashley forcefully argues. But to support that problem-solving technical theory is not necessary—

or in some way bad—is a contemptuous position that abrogates any hope of solving some of the

nightmarish realities that millions confront daily . As Holsti argues, we need ask of these theorists and their theories
the ultimate question, “So what?” To what purpose do they deconstruct, problematize, destabilize, undermine, ridicule, and belittle modernist
and rationalist approaches? Does this get us any further, make the world any better, or enhance the human condition? In what sense can
this “debate toward [a] bottomless pit of epistemology and metaphysics” be judged pertinent, relevant,
helpful , or cogent to anyone other than those foolish enough to be scholastically excited by abstract and
recondite debate.

Survival is a precondition to the alt---disavowal of life flattens difference and devolves

into fatalist, anti-black apathy.
Syedullah ’18 [Jasmine; 2018; Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vassar College;
Contemporary Political Theory, “Afro-pessimism: Critical Exchange,” vol. 17 no. 1]
Given that the endgame of Afro-pessimism as an academic enterprise is limited by its location within the neoliberal university (see Fred Moten
and Stephano Harney’s ‘‘The University and the UnderCommons,’’), the most generative aspects of its analysis of anti-blackness and Western
civilization are indebted to knowledge about black life and liberation produced outside the academy and on the ground of struggles for
freedom. The pessimism of conventional philosophical concern presses on the ontological foundations of a person’s individual sense of agency
and purpose, throwing one’s will to live into question. Prophetic despair, such as that which Baldwin expresses in an often quoted interview
between James Baldwin Dr. Kenneth Clark in May of 1963, presses on the material cohesion of our moral infrastructure. In the interview
Baldwin professes to remaining pessimistic with regard to his own life when he says, ‘‘It doesn’t matter any longer what you do to me; you can
put me in jail, you can kill me. By the time I was 17, you’d done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is, how are you going to
save yourselves?’’ He goes on a bit later to refuse , in no uncertain term, pessimism as a politics of the future. When Clark
asks, ‘‘Jim, what do you see deep in the recesses of your own mind as the future of our nation, … I think that the future of the Negro and the

future of the nation are linked … What do you see?,’’ Baldwin replies, ‘‘I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive . To be a
pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter , so I’m forced to be an
optimist . I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as
bright or as dark as the future of the country (Clark et al., 1963). I want to savor the tensions of Baldwin’s response. I want to hold them, not
resolve them, and observe how they situate pedestrian personal pessimism outside the movement for black
life , while calling out the limits of a political process propelled and legitimated by white supremacy. Even insofar as pessimism is a
social expression of the affective limits of social death , a feeling that brings us back to life, out of isolation, and into
conversation with each other the promise of pessimism is clearly far more than an academic matter . The antithesis

of pessimism in this instance is not optimism but apathy, willful passive acceptance of the untenable
conditions of a people systemically and forcibly made to understand that there are some whose
existence is at best immaterial and at worst a clear and present danger , and then there are those lives that do
matter . What we have been witnessing in the activist and academic movements for black life is the
implosion of identity politics and the failure of its possessive claims to liberal demands for rights and
protection . The abolition of whiteness demands a kind of justice the state may not yet know how to sanction. As Patrisse
Cullors (2015), one of three original founders of #BLM, argues, ‘‘I believe we can’t wait on the State to take care of our Black lives.

We have to show up now to build the world we want to see .’’ Thinking the purchase of the pessimistic prophetically
then, as a residual, inevitable, yet generative practice of the black prophetic tradition with reparative properties that precede and exceed Afro-
pessimism’s formal incorporation into scholarly journals and conferences, I find myself constantly reminding my students that while we can
take the analysis of power Afro-pessimism offers and run with it, academic enunciations of pessimism run the risk of remaining loyal to the
limits of legibility and respectability of politics as usual. As Nick Mitchell (forthcoming, p. 10) writes: ‘‘When the intellectual becomes
interchangeable with the slave, it is perhaps too easy … to smooth over the fact that black intellectuals have interests as intellectuals that can
and do diverge from those of the people for whom they might want justice. Without an acknowledgement (not a confession) of this divergence
… the project of race theorization risks deploying the generalizing force of theory and the moralizing tendency of critique to
generalize a class perspective.’’ What we are dealing with here is more than occidental anxiety of ontological

uncertainty . It is an ethical imperative to engage in a struggle to change the meaning of rights and
protection from the ground up (or suffer senselessly at the altar of the state ’s right to defend itself by any means
necessary). As Baldwin (in Clark et al., 1963) suggested in the interview with Kenneth Clark, the pessimism of antiblack racism is not just a black
problem, it presses on the condition of whites and upon the country as a whole: ‘‘These people have deluded themselves for so long, that they
really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say, and this means that they have become, in themselves, moral
monsters.’’ The predicament of the pessimist is not a personal problem that is easily selfcontained. It presses upon the body, moving it to
unrest, unleashing a rage that cannot stand to be at home in moral monstrosity. It just wants to burn it all down. ‘‘Now, we are talking about
human beings, there’s not such a thing as a monolithic wall or some abstraction called the Negro problem, these are Negro boys and girls, who
at 16 and 17 don’t believe the country means anything that it says and don’t feel they have any place here, on the basis of the performance of
the entire country.’’ The question Afro-pessimism poses as a practice of prophetic desire then, turns away from a politics of recognition and
respectability toward an abolitionist praxis of fugitive reparation to ask, ‘‘Will you run with me?’’ Does my pessimism press on your sense of
superiority, exception, perfection enough for you to forfeit your status and help us move the country, force the nation to believe there is
freedom beyond this world, a more prophetic imagination of difference, identity, and inclusion? ‘‘What white people have to do,’’ Baldwin (in
Clark et al., 1963) reminds us, ‘‘is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I’m not a
nigger, I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it.’’ In the present moment Black Lives Matter ( BLM ) is advancing the

cause for the abolition of white supremacy in local ways in chapters throughout the world. They call us to account for the material
consequences of the unfinished work of antislavery abolition and reconstruction . They are part of an underground
lineage of fugitive communities that emerged from the marshes, swamps, and hiding spaces of the plantation South. Their message is
does not reproduce old antagonisms . It does not pit moral suasion against direct
decentralized. It is not uniform. It

confrontation. It does not ask that we choose to remain either optimistic or pessimistic . It exercises a
practice of the political that harnesses both . In this last section then I turn to a speech against apathy by Patrisse Cullors, a
beacon in a leader-full movement who has been animating pessimism as a protocol of self-care and prophetic political organizing powerful
enough to propel activist and intellectual movements from isolated places of loss into collective liberation, out of abstractions into objections,
subjecting the logics of antiblack racism to the collective force of intersecting fugitive communities of abolitionist movement against

nihilism and toward an affirmation of life . We Can Survive? At age 25 on 19 April 2015 Freddie Gray died from injuries
sustained while shackled by his feet in a Baltimore Police Department van where he was being held in custody following his arrest. Baltimore
stood up, rose up, died in, and rolled out. We all bore witness. His death was deemed a murder by the medical examiner a few weeks later.
That Sunday morning, May 3, 2015, I, a Buddhist, found my way to church, to All Saints in Pasadena, CA, into the strikingly upper-class
congregation of post-service attendees who piled in along with an unlikely mix of young greater Los Angeles activists-of-color and their white
hipster allies. It would be my first time hearing our speaker in person. The whole room stood and cheered as she entered – the woman who
helped coin the hashtag, the longtime activist organizer, Patrisse Cullors greeted us like family, all knowing eyes, bright smiles, and then began a
talk she called ‘‘Abolition Theology.’’ Her voice was clear and certain, free of the cross-bearing affect of black suffering that often accompanies
talk of state-sponsored antiblack violence in predominately white spaces. Cullors gave us a speech that touched us, that moved us – mourning,
rage and all – into a mood for collective action. She impressed upon us the fact that the movement for black lives was a call to action for all
black life, not just the names we could recite, not just cisgendered young men, not just ‘‘innocent’’ ‘‘children,’’ not just Americans. She let us
know there had been recent formations of #Black Lives Matter chapters beyond U.S. borders. There were Afro-Latino chapters, chapters
forming in Haiti, and in Ghana. She reminded us that the concept of blackness that resonates across the globe called on us to broaden the
scope of our movements and to build alliances, to build with Latino communities in particular. It was a call for #BLM without borders. We were
being enlisted in a movement that began, she reminded us, with the movement to abolish the institution of slavery. We were being reeducated
as she drew connection between the hard-won efforts of formerly fugitive abolitionists to build resilient communities out of the so-called
contraband during and following the Civil War through to the present-day ‘‘leader-full’’ movement of #BLM. ‘‘Isn’t this a great time to
be alive ?’’ Cullors asked in closing. Is she joking I wondered? I found not one drop of cynicism in her question. Without missing a beat, she
proceeded to relay the names, the facts, the numbers, the bodies felled by police, by gun, by force. As she listed the lives taken a wave of loss
flooded the room and we were still, breathless. ‘‘Protest is about disrupting apathy ,’’ she continued. She left us eager to join
her in this twenty-first century revival of reconstruction, in a fight for food , for access to housing , for access to education ,
and for a kind of justice for black lives that will not come without our willingness to show up, stand up, and
throw down. In the streets, in solidarity , we will find the power to change people, she said, to change policy . She echoed
the words of civil rights organizer Ella Baker, ‘‘the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed… It means facing a system
that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system .’’ For Cullors that
‘‘means’’ came by way of waves grief, rage, despair, the loss of family, the loss of hope, bearing witness, heartbreak, and the will to return to
face it all again. She closed us out with the rallying chant of the movement for black lives, the recitation of a prayer by Twentieth century
fugitive slave Assata Shakur, ‘‘It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and protect each other. We
have nothing to lose but our chains.’’ The congregation’s joy burst through the siren of her words and bound us toward another way of sitting
with the litany of loss. We Must Survive What Baldwin and Cullors make clear is that pessimism is most powerful as an unrelenting political
process of coming back to life, beginning to feel one another’s humanity. What my students who are taking up the work of Afro-pessimism are
in most need of are new ways to put their pessimism to work, to come together and collectively counteract the mind-numbing soul-crushing
isolation centuries of antiblack racism have waged on our humanity. We need not fear falling short. The more we ‘‘fail,’’ the stronger we rise to
try again armed with the alchemy of despair. What we need are stories and speeches, and spaces that moves us from abjection toward that
fertile ground of self-transformation one can only find in the witness of another. What might we give up in a move from critique to healing and
reparation, generative of the choice to be fearless in the face of the impossibilities of freedom? What might the audacity to ‘‘lean on each

other,’’ as Jasmine Abdullah Richards says in the epigraph, and imagine a future for black life otherwise, add to the
pursuits of the pessimist?

NFU is in line with anti-colonial struggle---otherwise, violent war is inevitable.

Neff-Hickman ’21 [Bridgett; September 9; MA in Political Science from Colorado State University;
Inkstick, “ Decolonizing US Policy toward Iran,” https://inkstickmedia.com/decolonizing-us-policy-
toward-iran/]
The US must extend its first olive branch to Iran by committing to a mutual desire to prevent nuclear
war . Biden’s track record on nuclear engagement makes clear his view that a nuclear exchange would have no “winners.” Scientists have
projected that even “limited” nuclear conflict would put the lives of up to two billion people at risk due to global climate disruption and famine.
Given the catastrophic effects of nuclear war — not only for Iran and the US, but the entire international
community — it should be relatively easy to concede that nuclear war is in the interest of neither state
and should be avoided at all costs. However, it is possible — and highly likely — that the Islamic Republic may rebuff a

gesture of non-commitment as a further attempt to manipulate Iran’s behavior and public perception surrounding
Iran’s nuclear program. Thus, Biden’s best course of action should be something radical : A written commitment

to nuclear non-violence that is not contingent upon mutual adoption . In other words, the US makes a blanket commitment
to nuclear non-violence, regardless of Iran’s course of action.

Ideally, this kind of nuclear non-violence commitment would be geared toward the international
community as a whole. However, given the US belief that nuclear weapons are vital to its national security, it is unlikely that
President Biden would extend this commitment beyond Iran. Yet, a non-violence commitment toward Iran would still
represent a significant and meaningful departure from the imperial pathology that has
characterized US foreign policy toward Iran. This step would represent a sign of good faith by the Biden
administration, as well as an indication of US values that nuclear conflict poses too many risks to be worth any serious consideration.

Step Two: Sanctions Relief

Second, President Biden should lift sanctions on Iran. While the Biden administration has already proposed sanctions relief as part of recent negotiations with Iran,
Biden should relieve sanctions throughout the negotiation process as well. Historically, sanctions have been historically used against Iran as a form of economic
imperialism. Being the stronger economic power and the chief bulwark of the international economy, the US is in a much better position to assert dominance over
Iran economically, and has done so for the past 40 years. While US economic hostility toward Iran is often justified as a necessary response to Iran’s support for
terrorist proxies throughout the region, its nuclear program, domestic human rights abuses, and ballistic missile development, Iran’s decolonial and anti-imperial
rhetoric provides a lens understand US sanctions as another form of imperialism.

While it could be argued that sanctions were an appropriate response to Iran’s rhetorical and physical attacks against the United States, on some level, US sanctions
represent frustration and an imperial desire to control what was once under the influence of the US. This imperial mentality is clear from the sanctions regime it has
imposed on Iran over the past several decades. The sanctions, however, have not worked. According to the Congressional Research Service, each additional sanction
on Iran has “adversely affected Iran’s economy” but has not “altered Iran’s pursuit of core strategic objectives.” In other words, sanctions have not altered the
Iranian government’s strategic calculus or behavior, and instead has hurt the Iranian people.

Further, economic sanctions have been routinely shown to have adverse effects, such as increasing anti-American sentiments, regressing democracy, bolstering
authoritarian power, increasing human rights violations, afflicting innocents more than political elites, and shifting focus from the regime’s problematic behavior to
demonizing the imposing state. Thus, US economic strategy toward Iran should not be painted as purely a medium to communicate its frustrations with Iran’s
regional activities, but rather a method of imperialism and neocolonialism that is aimed at exerting dominance over the Islamic Republic. However, by relieving the
imperial pressures that Iran has repeatedly resisted, sanctions relief presents a path toward renewed US–Iran relations, and ultimately Iranian nonproliferation.

Step Three: Commit to “ N o F irst- U se”

Third, and most important in the immediate term, President Biden should advocate for Congress to pass the
recently reintroduced “ N o F irst U se” policy as a commitment to lowering the risk of accidental nuclear conflict.
President Biden has indicated his desire to avoid nuclear engagement by committing to reducing US reliance on nuclear weapons, as well as
using America’s nuclear arsenal primarily for deterrence purposes. Additionally, Biden has stated his intentions to revisit current US policy that
reserves the right to use nuclear weapons first, signaling his willingness to make this a priority in his nuclear agenda.

N o F irst U se policy has major implications for the colonial politics that have driven tensions
Pledging to a

between the US and Iran . The threat of nuclear conflict has often been connected to imperialism and colonialism as a
tool of coercion wielded by powerful international actors. Not only does the US have a deep history with using nuclear
weapons to threaten dissident states, it is the only country to have actually used nuclear weapons on an enemy during war. The Korean and
Vietnam Wars are examples of how the United States came dangerously close to employing nuclear weapons to achieve victory against
“subversive” non-white countries. While the relatively weaker Korea and Vietnam were unable to deter US intervention, the Cuban Missile
Crisis showcases the ways in which nuc lear weapon s can act as a powerful tools of legitimacy and sovereignty for
non-Western states. With Cuba able to use nuclear-armed missiles as a means for protection and deterrence from US

invasion — as well as the backing of the nuclear-armed Soviet Union — President John F. Kennedy was forced to recognize

Cuba as a nuclear equal , which ultimately led to diplomatic negotiations rather than a unilateral show of force. This same logic is
evident in the nuclear conflict between the US and Iran: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is part of a deterrence strategy

to ensure the will of the US is not imposed on it. With a No First Use policy in place, the Biden administration would
begin to diffuse global nuclear tensions , recover its status as a leader in international peace and security, and lay the
groundwork for a relationship built on mutual trust with Iran.
By committing to prevent nuclear war, sanctions relief for Iran, and support for a No First Use policy, the US would signal a major recalculation
of its nuclear policy and reassert itself as a leader in maintaining international security. Additionally, these steps would open the door for
President Biden to explore long-term options for dismantling the nuclear arsenal, which the US previously committed to through the Treaty on
the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). These moves would signal Biden’s commitment to pursuing a more broadly progressive,
inclusive, and equitable justice-oriented foreign policy, thus encouraging peace and cooperation in an environment where concerns of social
justice and reconciliation are increasingly becoming part of international politics.

Nuclear first use is a forcefield that dictates the terms of any successful resisance.
Davis, 82—one of the most famous Marxists of the 20th century (Mike, “Nuclear Imperialism and
Extended Deterrence,” https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3350-nuclear-imperialism-and-
extended-deterrence, dml)

As a first approximation let me propose that the strategic arms race must be conceived as a complex, regulative instance of the
global class struggle. As I have tried to argue, every modern revolution has taken place within an organized system of
international constraints and counter-revolutionary violence. With the pacification of inter-imperialist military rivalries,
permanent mobilization for " total war " acts as a force-field which defines the terms of contestation
between capitalist and post-capitalist social systems. Within the Cold War's aggregate balance of economic, geo-political, ideological and military power, the

nuclear build-up plays the double role of preserving the structural cohesion of each bloc and of
regulating the conflict between them.
Illustrative of the first function has been the "alliance-building" role of nuclear weapons deployment in Western Europe. As Thompson's essay makes clear,
"exterminism" has always been an implicit cornerstone of Atlantic unity, and devotion to the Bomb and NATO has been a fundamental precondition for a party's
admission to governmental power in the major Western parliamentary states. Thompson exaggerates, however, in imputing a neo-colonial or captive-nation status
to Britain or other NATO countries. The "American yoke" has been worn willingly by European capitalism precisely because it has served its needs so well. American
hegemony is exactly that — not mere usurpation or dictation: and the NATO states have derived major benefits from its maintenance. The availability of
the American strategic deterrent , together with the stationing of a large American garrison to act as "tripwire," has allowed the European
allies to devote a minimum of their budgets to support of conventional armies; although, with a population equal to that of the USSR and GNP more than twice as
large, they are clearly capable of "balancing" Soviet conventional forces if they so wished. This has greatly redounded to the competitive advantage of European
capital. It has also allowed significantly higher levels of welfare expenditure to contain its more combative working class. At the same time, European and Japanese
capital have been able to participate as virtual "free riders" in the hi-tech spinoffs of the mammoth American military research programme — the primary engine for
the generation of applied science in the postwar world. All in all, Atlanticism — as a kind of contemporary Concert of the Powers — has made possible
an unprecedented concentration of military might against both international revolution and any
potential surge by a domestic far left, while at the same time allowing a more flexible and rational international division of labour amongst the
advanced countries, based on the relatively unhindered diffusion of advanced technologies. It has, thus, been the precondition , not just for the
survival of European capitalism, but specifically for the reconstruction of European imperialism , with its major interests in the
Mediterranean , Africa , and the Middle East .
The situation on the other side of the Cold War divide is far from symmetrical. The Soviet Union, unlike the United States, has stubbornly refused to permit any
proliferation of its nuclear capability amongst other members of the "Socialist Commonwealth" — a position which played no small part in precipitating the original
Sino-Soviet split of 1959-60. At the same time, however, the survival of every revolutionary regime since October has depended at some critical stage upon the

primary , although by no means exclusive ,

countervailing military and economic support of the USSR and its industrial allies. The

function of the Bomb, therefore, has been to regulate the parameters of Soviet intervention in and support for global
class struggles, anti-colonial revolts and nationalist movements. Since 1945 the United States has attempted to exert this
extended deterrence against the USSR in at least four different ways:

First, by maintaining the strategic arms race as a form of economic siege warfare against the social system of the USSR and the Comecon bloc. Although this aspect
of the bipolar conflict has all too often been ignored or underestimated, it has increasingly become the focus of long-range American hopes for "rolling back" or
internally disrupting Soviet and allied regimes. Arms competition, grain exports, and strict control of Western technological patents all form components of a grand
strategy. The projected one-and-a-half-trillion dollar Carter/Reagan defence budget for 1981-85 is ominously the first military build-up in American history to have
economic warfare as an overt objective. In a sarcastic but serious play upon the words of Khrushchev's famous 'We Will Bury You" speech, Reagan has recently
warned the Russians: "We Will Bust You."

Secondly, by forestalling any possibility of Soviet actions in Western Europe comparable to those in the Third World through NATO's strategy of responding to a

Soviet conventional campaign with a nuclear blitz. It should be remembered that first use of nuclear weapons has been the pillar of
NATO's strategy since the formation of the Alliance in 1949, and that the European allies have been its most zealous guardians. (Thus the French and Germans,

believing that the Kennedy Administration's commitment to nuclear first use might be weakening, forced it to deploy an extravagant
number of new, "tactical" nukes in Europe as additional collateral.) Furthermore, the current US campaign to make Europeans "think the unthinkable" in accepting
the strategy of "limited" nuclear war is not so much a sudden descent into the "theatre of the apocalypse" as a return to the status quo ante. From 1949 (when the
USSR first acquired the atomic bomb) until 1965-68 (when it first acquired a credible capability to strike the continental United States with solid-fuel ICBMs), the
United States enjoyed sanctuary while Western Europe was mortgaged against the USSR's medium-range bombers and missiles.

Thirdly, by threatening nuclear retaliation against all Soviet attempts to achieve "forward basing" — either as an attempt to redress the American strategic
advantage or to extend a regional shield to new revolutionary regimes. (Soviet motives in installing missiles in Cuba in 1962 undoubtedly involved both goals.) In the
endless debate about the nuclear numbers game, the Russians have always insisted that it is essential to take into account the unequal geo-military positions of the
USSR and the United States. What underlies the claim is the fundamentally assymmetrical character of the overall balance of military power. The United States has
immense forward-based nuclear striking capacity, the Soviet Union has none. The USSR is surrounded by thousands of miles of hostile borderlands, from Turkey to
Japan, while the United States enjoys the security of three oceans and the largest of all satellite blocs, the Western hemisphere. Finally the United States has twice
attempted to bomb "established" socialist states — Korea and Vietnam — "back into the stone age," while virtually every important American ally is defended
against Soviet intervention not only by forward-based US nuclear weapons, but also by the tripwire of American soldiery directly connected to the so-called "ladder
of escalation" and the strategic arsenal.

Fourthly, by constantly buttressing its qualitative strategic-nuclear superiority to limit conventional Soviet military and economic aid to Third World struggles, and to
prevent a Soviet response to the potential usage of tactical American nuclear weapons against a Third World foe. Ideally, as Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
head Eugene Rostow (a leading war criminal of early Vietnam days) recently testified, American strategic nuclear superiority should "permit us to use military force
in defence of our interests with comparative freedom if it should become necessary."8 The concept of extended deterrence that can be seen at work here is

rosetta stone for understanding the underlying logic of the complex of weapons systems
something of a

and their deployment in a range of modes. For example, the ceaseless accumulation of nuclear overkill has
entirely different implications if we conceive "deterrence" in a defensive or offensive sense. In the first
case — understanding deterrence as simply the most effective disincentive to an enemy first-strike — the growth of the nuclear arsenal beyond the "counter-
society" threshold appears absurdly redundant, and Thompson seems more than justified in seeking irrationalist forces and autonomous drives within the weapons
systems themselves. In the second case, however — when the strategic systems (ICBM, submarine, bomber) are conceived as the basis of extended deterrence in
support of conventional or tactical-nuclear engagement in a subsidiary theatre — the acquisition of "counter-force" and first-strike capacities assumes quite a
different meaning: for what are now projected are disincentives against interference in the "dominant" side's offensive actions. Limited Nuclear War, "Flexible
Response" or "Ladder of Escalation" can then become functional deterrents in their very obscurity or absurdity. As a leading New Right strategist has emphasized,
"Much of the deterrent effect of our nuclear force is, in the final analysis, the result of forcing the Soviet Union to live with uncertainty. . . . Ultimately the Soviet
Union will see the wisdom of accepting serious constraints in their military efforts, both in force deployments (nuclear and conventional) and in geopolitical
expansion.”9

Racial progress is statistically proven---pessimism is demobilizing and undermines

health.
Hochschild ’17 [Jennifer L.; March 15; Jayne Professor of Government, and Professor of African and
African American Studies, Harvard University; Perspectives on Politics, “Left Pessimism and Political
Science,” vol. 15 no. 1]
Is Pessimism the Only Sensible or Empirically Warranted Response in these Two Arenas?

It is easy to find evidence to support pessimism about American racial dynamics or the societal deployment of genomic science. The United
States is notorious for its racially- and ethnically-inflected poverty and excessive levels of incarceration; undocumented migrants live in legal
limbo; new genomics techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 tempt humankind into hubristic manipulation of nature, and scientists’ promises to cure
cancer through genetics knowledge ring hollow to many. The question for this article is whether there are also strong
grounds for optimism in my two illustrative realms, such that one could plausibly and persuasively choose to be “centered on
advancement concerns” rather than “centered on security concerns.”

The answer is yes . Again I can point only to illustrative, suggestive evidence. First, the gap between [black people’s] blacks’
and whites’ life expectancy declined from seven years in 1990 to 3.4 years in 2014. That is an
astonishing , perhaps unprecedented , rate of change given the usual slow pace of demographic
transformation. It is important in itself, of course, and also as a summary statement about an array of other social phenomena in which
racial disparities are declining. [black people] blacks are living longer mainly because of declining rates of
homicides , HIV mortality , infant mortality , cancer and heart disease , and suicide among black men.
Footnote19 A lot of things have to go right for a group’s life expectancy to rise rapidly .

Second, applications for U.S. citizenship rose from the previous year in ten of the fifteen years from 2000 to 2015, while declining in four (and
remaining stable in one). That is an important indicator of immigrant incorporation, and especially relevant to political scientists because
“Hispanics and Asians who are naturalized citizens tend to have higher voter turnout rates than their U.S.-born counterparts.” Footnote20

Third, non-white Americans themselves tend to feel pretty good about their lives. Gallup Poll asked in 2016, “Where do you expect your life
satisfaction to be in five years?” If whites’ response is standardized at 1, then blacks are at 2.97, and Hispanics at 1.29. Only Asian Americans, at
0.97, were less optimistic than whites. Gallup also asked about one’s level of stress in the previous day. If whites are again standardized at 1,
then blacks are at 0.48; Hispanics at 0.53; and Asian Americans at 0.75. Middle-class blacks were half as likely as middle class whites to report
stress during the previous day. Footnote21

In the arena of genomics also, one can point to grounds for optimism rather than pessimism. The Innocence
Project, “dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and reforming the
c riminal j ustice s ystem to prevent future injustice,” has enabled about 350 people to be released from prison. (Not
so parenthetically, seven out of ten are African American or Latino, mostly poor men.) More extensive DNA testing might lead

to many more exonerations; one careful analysis of serious crime convictions found that “in five percent of homicide and sexual
assault cases DNA testing eliminated the convicted offender as the source of incriminating physical evidence.” Previous estimates had pegged
the share of wrongful convictions at no more than one to two percent. Footnote22 More generally, “ DNA profiling [of convicted felons]
reduces the probability of future convictions by 17% for serious violent offenders and by 6% for serious property offenders
…. These are likely underestimates of the true deterrent effect of DNA profiling.” Footnote23

Genomic scientists can point to impressive successes with regard to Mendelian (single-gene) diseases, and they focus even more on diagnoses
and cures yet to come. Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute, likens the trajectory of genomic medicine to the development of medicine
based on the germ theory of disease, which “took about 75 years. With genomics, we’re maybe halfway through that cycle.” In his view, “the
rate of progress is just stunning . As costs continue to come down, we are entering a period where we are going to be able to
get the complete catalogue of disease genes.” Cancer is a prime target, almost in sight: “If you understand that this is a game of probability, and
there is only a finite number of cancer cells and each has only a certain chance of mutating, and if we can put together two or three
independent attacks on the cancer cell, we win. If we invest vigorously in this and we attract the best young people into this field, we get it
done in a generation. If we don’t, it takes two generations.” Lander is “not Pollyanna …. [I]t’s not for next year. We play for the long game. I
don’t want to overpromise in the short term, but it is incredibly exciting if you take the 25-year view.” Footnote24

This is a classic statement of optimism , or being centered on advancement concerns. It begins with expertise and
perspective, sees dangers and weaknesses, and nonetheless asserts empirical grounds for faith. President Obama’s insistence
that “if you had to choose a moment in human history to live … you’d choose now” has the same quality. My point is not that left pessimism is
wrong—only that there are grounds, perhaps equally strong, for left optimism . One can choose either, and then find good
evidence for that choice.

Why Is Left Pessimism Problematic ?

That wily politician, Barney Frank, offers the best answer from the vantage point of the public arena: “ When you tell your supporters
that nothing has gotten better, and that any concessions you’ve received are mere tokenism , you take
away their incentive to stay mobilized . As for those you’re negotiating with, if you denigrate anything they
concede as worthless, they will soon realize they can obtain the same response by giving nothing at all.”
Footnote25

One can offer the same type of answer from the vantage point of a teacher. Many of us have had the experience of teaching a course—about
civil war, inequality and politics, environmental policy, or the meaning of liberty—only to have our students politely request on the last day of
class some idea or piece of information about which they can feel good or which they can use in their public engagement. We need to
offer answers . Optimism may also be associated with academic success; one careful study found that “although achievement in
mathematics was most strongly related to prior achievement and grade level, optimism and pessimism were significant factors. In particular,
students with a more generally pessimistic outlook on life had a lower level of achievement in mathematics over time.” Footnote26 A study of
college students similarly found that “dispositional and academic optimism were associated with less chance of dropping out of college, as well
as better motivation and adjustment. Academic optimism was also associated with higher grade point average.” Footnote27

And for those of us of a certain age, it is heartening to discover that “after adjusting for covariates , the results
suggested that greater optimism [among middle-aged, predominantly white Americans] was associated with greater
high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and lower triglycerides …. In conclusion, … optimism is associated
with a healthy lipid profile ; moreover, these associations can be explained, in part, by the presence of healthier
behaviors and a lower body mass index.” Footnote28

Racial biases are malleable and shaped by institutional change.

Payne ’21 [B. Keith; November; PhD, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, UNC; Trends in
Cognitive Sciences, “Implicit bias reflects systemic racism,” vol. 25 no. 11 p. 927-936]
Persistent disparities amid changing attitudes

Protests against racism , sparked in part by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, may be the largest social
movement in US history. As of this writing, tens of millions have participated [1]. This massive movement has increased
recognition of systemic racism , long limited to mostly academic discourse. With the wider use of this concept, more people are
realizing that discrimination does not result only from prejudiced individuals, but also from structures or

procedures that systematically disadvantage marginalized groups. In this paper we argue that implicit racial bias,

long considered an individual attitude, may be a better indicator of systemic racism than individual prejudice .

Scholarship focusing on individual prejudice has generally supported a narrative of progress. Survey data suggest that racial attitudes have gradually trended more egalitarian for decades. For example, between 1990 and 2017 the
percentage of White respondents saying that Black people work less hard than White people declined from 65% to 31%, and the proportion saying that White people are more intelligent than Black people declined from 56% to
20% [2]. Many people still endorse these stereotypes, but the trend is often interpreted as progress.

Scholarship on systemic racism supports a less optimistic view. Segregation in housing and education declined in the 1960s and 1970s, but have remained stable since then [3]. Large racial gaps in chronic diseases and life
expectancy have remained steady since at least the 1980s [4]. Disparities in income and wealth have grown since 1979 (https://files.epi.org/pdf/101972.pdf).

Understanding the persistence of systemic racism in the context of changing individual attitudes has set the agenda for a great deal of research across the social sciences. One of the most important contributions from psychological
science is the concept of implicit bias. Implicit bias refers to positive or negative mental associations cued spontaneously by social groups. It is measured using cognitive tasks that test how those associations facilitate, interfere
with, or otherwise bias task performance [5,6]. Many studies suggest that implicit bias is widespread, even among people who explicitly endorse egalitarian attitudes [7,8]. Psychologists have often looked to implicit bias to explain
persistent discrimination and disparities in the face of declining explicit prejudice. Although it has often been treated as an individual attitude, we argue that implicit bias can best be seen as a cognitive reflection of systemic racism
in the environment. In this opinion article, we argue that implicit bias is a byproduct of a mind that draws inferences based on statistical regularities, when that mind is immersed in an environment of systemic racism.

Implicit bias as an individual attitude

Much early research treated implicit bias as an individual attitude internalized through early social learning [9., 10., 11., 12.]. Once learned, implicit bias in this view is considered difficult to change. For example, when interventions
fail to show lasting changes in implicit bias, those failures are often interpreted as evidence for the tenacity of individual attitudes [13,14]. According to the individual attitude perspective, individual differences in implicit bias are
important because individuals who have high bias are more likely to discriminate than those with low bias [15]. Reducing discrimination thus requires understanding who has high levels of implicit bias, and how their attitudes can
be changed [16]. In summary, the individual view assumes that implicit biases are stable attitudes that differ from one person to another, and these individual differences are associated with biased behavior.

The individual attitude view has been questioned because accumulating evidence suggests that it is neither strongly associated with individual behavior nor stable over time. Meta-analytic summaries of associations with behavior
range from r = 0.24 [17] to r = 0.14 [18] for the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and to r = 0.28 for sequential priming measures [19]. A correlation of 0.28 implies that only 8% of variance in behavior measures can be explained by
implicit test scores. Some researchers suggest that small correlations in this range are typical for behavioral sciences, and can be important even if numerically small [15,20]. However, even if an individual difference is weakly
related to behavior, most researchers agree it should be stable over time.

Test–retest stability for implicit bias is quite low. In a meta-analysis, the average test–retest stability for the IAT was r = 0.42 [21]. Temporal stability appears to be similar for the Affect Misattribution Procedure [21,22]. Both tests
show much higher internal consistency, which suggests that implicit biases can be reliably measured at a given moment, but they are unstable over time [19,21]. Although there are no objective standards for how reliable is reliable
enough, researchers often consider a test–retest correlation of 0.70 or higher to be acceptable as a rule of thumb [23]. A test–retest correlation of 0.42 suggests that only 18% of the variance in test scores can be explained by the
same participants’ previous scores.

However, reliability and validity look dramatically different when examining average levels of implicit bias rather than individual differences. The test–retest correlation for state-level IAT scores is r = 0.76 from one year to the next,
and r = 0.69 across a decade [24]. Average levels of implicit bias are also strongly correlated with racial disparities in consequential outcomes. For example, countries with stronger average associations between males and science
had greater gender-based achievement gaps in eighth grade science (β = 0.55) and math scores (β = 0.67) [25]. Metropolitan regions in the USA with higher levels of implicit race bias have greater racial disparities in police
shootings, β = 0.39 [26]. County-level implicit bias is associated with health disparities [27,28]. State-level implicit bias is strongly associated with the frequency of internet searches for racial slurs, r = 0.78 [29]. This type of evidence
led us to shift from thinking about implicit bias as a feature of individuals to thinking about it as a feature of contexts.

The Bias of Crowds

The Bias of Crowds model [24] reconceptualizes implicit bias in terms of contexts and systems. Most theories agree that implicit bias reflects the accessibility of mental associations [30]. Concept accessibility refers to the readiness
with which information (including attitudes and stereotypes) can be retrieved and used in cognitive processing [31,32]. Like other theories, the model assumes that when we use one concept, other related concepts and
information become more likely to be accessed for use and that this process happens spontaneously and involuntarily. The accessibility of thoughts and evaluations associated with social categories such as Black, White, male, or
female is what implicit tests measure.

The accessibility of information in memory tracks statistical regularities in the environment [33]. The frequency with which a word occurs in the language, for example, determines how easily retrieved that word is. The frequency
with which two words co-occur determines how likely one associate is to come to mind when the other is presented. That is why Mississippi cues river more than rifle, and why, when it comes to stereotypes in US culture, Islamic
cues terrorism more than terrarium.

To be clear, the idea that concept accessibility tracks statistical regularities does not imply that stereotypes are accurate or that prejudices are based in reality. Most White Americans’ experience with Black Americans is largely
indirect, through media that are themselves riddled with stereotypic biases [34,35]. The ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’ principle applies: a cognitive system that forms associations based on statistical regularities will be systematically
biased, so long as it operates in an environment that is characterized by pre-existing stereotypes and inequalities [36].

It is uncontroversial that accessibility can vary both chronically [37] and situationally [38]. For example, one person may have a link between the category of Black Americans and a negative stereotype that is more chronically
accessible than that same link is for another person. This notion of a chronically accessible link maps onto what most theorists mean by implicit attitudes: relatively stable dispositions based on learned associations.

Accessibility can also vary temporarily, as a function of the context. Two decades of experiments demonstrate that average levels of implicit bias are malleable in response to manipulations of the situation. For example, average
racial bias scores can be reduced by activating counter-stereotypical associations, interacting with an African American experimenter, reading a counter-stereotypical story, or thinking about positive exemplars like Martin Luther
King Jr or Denzel Washington [39,40]. Scores can be increased by reading a story, listening to music, or thinking about examples that confirm racial stereotypes [41,42] (for reviews see [43,44]).

More recent studies suggest that implicit evaluations can be eliminated or even reversed based on changes
of context. For example, taking the perspective of a defense attorney led to more positive (or at least less negative) implicit evaluations of Adolf
implicit evaluations can be reversed by leading participants to
Hitler [45., 46., 47.]. Other studies suggest that

reinterpret information about a person [48]. These studies suggest that changing what information is
situationally available can alter implicit bias scores.

These demonstrations of situation-based malleability are well-established , but researchers disagree about what they
mean for the nature of implicit bias. Some researchers interpret context effects as changing only test performance, but not affecting ‘true’
implicit bias, understood as an individual attitude [49]. Others argue that implicit bias is a stable trait-like construct, and that context effects or
temporal fluctuations reflect only measurement error [50,51]. We argue, by contrast, that effects of the context on aggregated scores are
interesting and important for understanding the nature of implicit bias itself.

How do unstable individual scores add up to stable and valid measures of the social context? Research on ‘the wisdom of crowds’ finds that, for
many kinds of questions, the collective judgment of a group tends to be closer to the true answer than any one individual’s answer [52,53].
Crowds are ‘wise’ because each individual is likely to have partial true knowledge as well as errors that are largely random. When independent
judgments are averaged, the random variations are aggregated away, leaving the true knowledge to emerge as the central tendency of the
distribution. In the same way, the statistical benefits of aggregation allow average implicit bias scores to produce an accurate estimate of the
most widely shared implicit biases in that context.

Contexts that cue biases are partially overlapping (Figure 1). For example, one’s work and social environment may partially overlap, because
people often socialize with co-workers. Both likely fall mostly within the city, state, and country in which one lives. Each context has a
theoretical distribution of implicit bias. Implicit test scores in a sample of participants can therefore potentially measure implicit bias at multiple
levels at once. When aggregated, average bias scores will reflect the accessible knowledge that is shared in common across that context.
Averaging across cities, for example, will estimate the most widely accessible biases in each city, whereas averaging across universities will
estimate the most widely accessible biases in each university. Contexts can also be virtual, such as social media networks or mass media
markets. For this reason, aggregated implicit bias scores can be considered a measure of systemic racism, defined at any given level of the
‘system’.

The Bias of Crowds model is consistent with other frameworks that emphasize the role of context. Research on bias as a regional construct [54]
has treated cities, counties, or states, as the units of analysis. By establishing the construct validity of implicit and explicit biases at these
regional levels, this research focuses on regions rather than individuals. It makes no claims, however, about psychological differences between
person and regional level measures. The Prejudice in Places model [55,56] also highlights the role of contexts. It does not distinguish between
implicit and explicit bias, but shares the emphasis on the role of social environments such as norms, policies, and procedures, in creating
implicit
advantages and disadvantages. From the Bias of Crowds perspective, implicit bias operates differently than explicit bias because

bias is less stable and trait-like, and hence more easily tracks changes in contexts. Nevertheless, all of
these frameworks redirect attention to systemic sources of bias and systemic solutions .
Nearly any measure can be examined as a function of both persons and contexts. However, the effects of aggregating person variables to
measure contexts has different effects, depending on the properties of individual-level observations. For highly stable traits, properties of the
aggregate measure can be fully reduced to properties of the individuals. Aggregation has a different effect for characteristics that are highly
malleable, such as implicit bias. Stable aggregate bias is an emergent property in that it cannot be reduced to stable individual scores. A city
might have the same mean year after year, although the rank orders of the individuals composing that mean vary dramatically from one day to
the next. The stability that emerges from aggregating implicit bias scores resembles the constant surface tension of a balloon, produced by
billions of randomly moving air molecules.

This emergent stability is interesting because the mean level of implicit bias in a context can reveal information about the context that may not
be reflected in any individual’s stable attitude. Consider the way that ‘the wave’ moves through a crowded sports stadium. The wave travels
through the crowd with a stable velocity of about 20 seats per second [57]. Once the wave has begun in one section, we can accurately predict
when a given section of fans will stand up. Although the wave is composed of individuals, it does not matter much which individuals make up
implicit bias , like the wave , is a social phenomenon that passes
the crowd. The Bias of Crowds model suggests that

through individuals rather than only residing inside them. Importantly, this implies that one could largely exchange
individuals, but the average of the crowd would remain the same.
Although many authors (including ourselves) acknowledge that implicit bias scores are influenced by both person and context factors [58,59], the Bias of Crowds takes a further step that other perspectives have not. We argue that
to the extent that contexts lead to reliably different aggregate scores, the best interpretation of those aggregate scores is about features of those contexts. When a sample of people displays bias on an implicit test, the most apt
conclusion is not that they are biased people, but that they are in a biased context. This interpretation raises questions about what in the context cues biases, as opposed to what kind of person holds biases. Once implicit bias is
reconceptualized as a property of contexts, it changes both the ways that implicit bias is measured, and the nature of the psychological phenomenon we are trying to explain, as we elaborate next.

Implications for measurement

A practical implication of the model is that implicit bias can be measured more reliably by aggregating scores. We argue that this is an advantage that researchers should utilize whenever possible. It is good science to measure at
the level where one can measure reliably.

One critique of the Bias of Crowds argues that the low stability and small associations with behavior result only from error variance in the measurement of stable individual attitudes [60]. However, it would be a mistake to equate
situational malleability with measurement error, because that malleability reflects, in part, meaningful variation across contexts. Error variance refers to variance that is unrelated to the construct of interest. How researchers
define error variance therefore depends on the researchers’ interests.

From a person-focused perspective, changes across time and contexts are error variance. However, from a context-focused view they are the true score of interest (for a detailed discussion see [61]). Separating these sources of
variance requires longitudinal and/or multi-level study designs that have rarely been used in studying implicit bias. Such designs can separate true score and error variance at the levels of persons, contexts, time, and so on.

Implications for the psychology of implicit bias

The person versus situation debate is common across many topics in psychology. However, the substantive psychological meaning of person and situation factors varies depending on whether the topic is altruism, emotion,
obedience, implicit bias, and so on. Person-based theories of implicit bias have focused on explaining attitudes as a function of learning histories [12].

We do not dispute that person effects (chronic accessibility) exist, but we argue that situational accessibility effects have a distinct psychological meaning. Situational accessibility effects highlight the transient activation of
concepts. Cognitively, this is more akin to semantic priming rather than attitudes or beliefs. Analyzing implicit bias as a priming effect rather than a static attitude leads to different questions and different explanations. The person-
based view leads to explanations of implicit bas in terms of childhood experiences [62] and the qualities that differentiate one person from another [50]. The situationist view prompts entirely different explanations that do not
involve childhood experiences, early learning, or slow-learning memory systems. Instead, explanations are about what environmental cues activate bias, how cognitive systems form real-time inferences based on regularities in the
environment, and how momentarily accessible concepts influence behavior.

Aggregating scores at the college campus level, for example, affords questions such as what features of the faculty, the student body, or the built campus environment might contribute to different levels of bias [63]? Aggregating at
the state or country level afford still other questions. These questions are not only different, but often the questions asked at one level would not make sense at another level (Box 1). The individual-level questions outlined in Box 1
have been studied extensively. The context-level questions are only beginning to be addressed.

Implications for systemic racism and systemic change

Efforts to reduce implicit bias have often focused on the individual . Guided by the individual attitude model, implicit
bias training tries to change attitudes by education or persuasion. The context-centered view of implicit bias suggests that changing

contexts will be more effective [56,64].

Many strategies apply to organizations or institutions . For example, one way to change an organizational
context is to change local norms , such as workplace expectations that communicate that discriminatory behavior or prejudiced
comments are unacceptable. A second way to change contexts is to increase visible representation of minority employees, especially in
positions of power. One study, for example, found that universities with more racially diverse faculties displayed lower implicit race bias among
the undergraduates [63]. A third way is to revise policies and procedures , such as hiring, employee evaluation, and reward
policies that may disadvantage some groups, even if unintentionally. Training efforts should focus not on
changing individuals’ attitudes , but on learning how policies and procedures can decrease bias .

Other strategies for systemic change involve large scale political policies . The research reviewed above suggests
that changing social norms are important for changing both implicit bias and behavior [65,66]. Much of
the intense debate over ‘political correctness’, ‘wokeness’, and ‘cancel culture’ are about changing norms and reactions against those changes.
Recent protests are another attempt to focus public attention on racial injustice and to motivate change. Policies that reduce
inequalities directly, such as legalizing same-sex marriage, are another potent approach . Likewise, policies that directly
increase racial equality and participation, such as voting rights legislation and affirmative action policies, are likely to
have more impact than chang ing attitudes .

IR isn't racialized---it's a minimalist theory to explain the occurrence of interstate war.

Wæver & Buzan ’20 [Ole and Barry; May 15th; Professor of International Relations at the University
of Copenhagen; Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics; KU,
“Racism and Responsibility -- The Critical Limits of Deep-Fake Methodology in Security Studies: A reply
to Howell and Richter-Montpetit,” Racism and Responsibility -- The Critical Limits of Deep-Fake
Methodology in Security Studies: A reply to Howell and Richter-Montpetit]
Racism is a powerful, malignant force in world politics, and our discipline, IR, has deeply problematic entanglements with it. It is a serious
matter both to come intellectually to grips with this and to find the most effective strategies to act on it. We worry that more serious
problems and possibilities are marginalised by an ultimately very inward-looking and scholastic
exercise where a particular definition of racism and a specific theoretical perspective makes it possible to
deem the vast majority of scholarship in IR ‘racist’, ‘methodologically white’ and ‘antiblack’- every work
that does not explicitly follow one exact version of anti-racist scholarship . Especially, the role played in
H&RM’s argumentation by our sins of omission does ultimately seem to rest on the premise that only their
distinct form of scholarship can be redeemed, because even post-colonial scholarship and critiques of euro-centrism are not
enough; you are a racist if you do not follow exactly this particular route. It is not important whether your scholarship
actually supports or hinders anti-racist analysis or political engagement; it is all about who you cite and what
declarations you make . Here , a theory is not judged by what can be done with it , but by the
question whether self-appointed anti-racists can find supposedly problematic sentences
somewhere in its key texts. In this section, we will first point out that the H&RM article is a personal attack on us for racism, despite
their reassurances about the opposite. Then, we discuss what an analysis of structural racism (systems of power) could amount to, given that
they claim to do one but utterly fail to do so, resorting instead to a pretend examination of the foundations of ST. Next, we discuss what could
be methodological guidelines for actually proving whether or not a theory like ST is racist.

H&RM’s usage of the term racism for all scholarship that does not foreground race as the primary
theme, means that 99% of IR will be ‘racist’ . There will be no room for any other scholarship (unless
you will live with the moniker of being racist). Not only does this seem very unproductive in terms of disciplinary
conversations, not to talk of diversity and pluralism , it also means that it becomes very hard to use
the category of ‘racism’ for critical purposes for those cases where it actually is at stake in a sense closer
has been watered down by the fact that
to what the rest of the discipline, and indeed the public discourse, means by it. It
everyone but those in critical whiteness studies have been deemed racist, one by one, where we just happened to
get the special honour of being among the first. H&RM might protest that this is not their plan, but we fail to see
how this can be avoided when the logic they apply is that the term racist can be based primarily on
sins of omission in the sense of a theory being focused around other categories.
As documented above, they claim numerous times that ST ‘occludes’ or ‘refuses’ various dynamics relating to race that they find important, but
they never offer any basis for concluding that the theory makes it harder to see these things, only that it does not as such zoom in on them. This
does not have to do with a choice particularly regarding race but the structure and nature of the theory as a general analytical apparatus that
can be applied to all instances where actors try to securitize or desecuritize something, and the user is free then to include race more or less in
this analysis, just as the theory is not deciding how important nationalism is or gender51, but it enables the analysis of the way different
categories and distinctions become politically mobilised in security struggles.

H&RM will probably argue that if you do not mention race in these contexts, you ‘ hide’ it . Three
answers : 1) no , there is a difference between not mentioning and hiding , it takes a step more of
the critic to show that the theory prevents something from being articulated or that it uses abstractions that
stand in the way of articulating race; that certainly is the case for some theories, so it is a legitimate avenue of critique, but they haven’t shown
this, 2) the theory is intentionally (as we have explained numerous times) minimalist in having a clear conceptual core and
then not putting all kinds of factors like the role of media or populism into the theory -- not because we
haven’t noticed these factors but because they belong in applications , and the theory exactly allows
you to study these phenomena, 3) we are very explicit that one of the advantages of a minimalist
theory is the ability to combine it with other theories especially general theories about the nature and
structures of society; one should not build out ST to become a general theory of society or international relations, better in any specific
usage of the theory combine it with the theories one finds productive for the particular research project. (Wæver 2011, 2015) The latter point
has come up in replies to the ‘sociological’ version of ST (Balzacq), which has more of a tendency to add all relevant factors to the theory, while
the classical Copenhagen version is tight and invites combination with theories that complement it, which could exactly be theories of race and
racism. Our ultimate concern here is: how do we actually get to study racism in world politics in a practically and politically helpful way?

Agathangelou’s reading of IR as a discipline and structure reproduces totalizing racial

politics and undermines effective resistance
Christopher Murray 20, PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations at the London
School of Economics, “Imperial dialectics and epistemic mapping: From decolonisation to anti-
Eurocentric IR,” European Journal of International Relations 2020, Vol. 26(2) 419–442.

Then there are definitions of epistemic difference based on ‘ lived experience’ . Although an
improvement on territorial or raciological accounts, the ascription of cultural difference to a generic
lived experience or social subjectivity can also reduce groups of people to stereotypes and
monolithic value sets . This is evident in the work of some scholars who take Fanon primarily as a
source of ‘epistemic blackness’ , without fully addressing his concerns about racialisation and the
geopolitical dimensions of decolonisation . For example, the philosopher Lewis R. Gordon writes
that ‘Fanon’s body. . . is a subtext of all his writings. ... Anxiety over embodiment is a dimension of
Western civilization against which Fanon was in constant battle. The body, he laments, is a denied
presence, and black people are a denied people’ (Gordon, 2015: 8). Even in as sophisticated an analysis
of Fanon as Gordon’s, there is a danger of essentialism through the association of black identity
with a particular way of thinking . For Fanon, black people were not so much universally ‘denied’
as relegated to certain roles within a social hierarchy – the French empire most specifically.
Blacks could be of higher or lower status, but race was the basis for social relegation , which
alienated the subject from a full , dynamic humanity . For Fanon, every particular experience is
an instantiation of the universal , and his analysis of his own experience is a demand to be
recognised as a fellow human with an equal stake in humanity. Blackness is not a generalisable
perspective from which we can derive a non-Western knowledge , but a reminder to pay attention
to the social and historical specificity of relation.9

Embodiment arguments are usually the vehicle for Fanon’s presence in IR, and are often
accompanied with the claim that non-Westerners have profoundly different ways of practising
politics or being modern . For example, Vivienne Jabri (2014) invokes Fanon to theorise the
‘ embodied presence’ of non-Western agency within international order. Anna Agathangelou (2016)
links different aspects of Fanon’s revolutionary dialectics to his conception of the subjugated black
body. She is particularly interested in how Fanon’s conception of racial experience might present
alternatives or ‘different’ ways of doing politics (Agathangelou, 2016: 111; cf. Sekyi-Otu, 2009). In a
similar argument, John M. Hobson contrasts the ‘different critique’ of ‘African-American Marxists’,
including Du Bois, with ‘white Eurocentric institutional thinkers’ like Leonard Woolf (Hobson, 2012: 17,
n. 20). However, the difference is not as stark as Hobson might hope. It is true that Woolf’s anti-racism
was qualified by a belief in elite institutional development, but so was Du Bois’s anti-imperialism.10
Areas of overlap are, thus, obscured by the assumption that there are ‘ black’ and ‘ white’ ideas ,
which can be mapped onto generic ‘black’ and ‘white’ social realities.

Aside from its dubious reliability , the problem with epistemic mapping is essentially the same as the
problem with the ethnicised counter claims of Du Bois or Senghor: it is too amenable to the
purposes of imperial ordering and elite representation . It creates and services the two worlds of
Said’s orientalist divide , rather than building an agenda based on analytical approaches that
constructively problematise the divide.

Anticipating nuclear extinction breeds empathy and care – distancing ourselves from
considering extinction reifies detached elitism.
Offord, 17—Faculty of Humanities, School of Humanities Research and Graduate Studies, Bentley
Campus (Baden, “BEYOND OUR NUCLEAR ENTANGLEMENT,” Angelaki, 22:3, 17-25, dml) [ableist
language modifications denoted by brackets]

You are steered towards overwhelming and inexplicable pain when you consider the nuclear
entanglement that the species Homo sapiens finds itself in. This is because the fact of living in the nuclear age
presents an existential , aesthetic , ethical and psychological challenge that defines human
consciousness. Although an immanent threat and ever-present danger to the very existence of
the human species, living with the possibility of nuclear war has infiltrated the matrix of modernity
so profoundly as to paralyse [ shut down ] our mind-set to respond adequately. We have chosen to
ignore the facts at the heart of the nuclear program with its dangerous algorithm; we have chosen to live
with the capacity and possibility of a collective , pervasive and even planetary-scale suicide ;
and the techno-industrial-national powers that claim there is “ no immediate danger ” ad infinitum.8
This has led to one of the key logics of modernity's insanity. As Harari writes: “Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into a
mad act of collective suicide, and therefore forced the most powerful nations on earth to find alternative and peaceful ways to resolve
conflicts.”9 This is the nuclear algorithm at work, a methodology of madness. In revisiting Jacques Derrida in “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full
Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),”10 who described nuclear war as a “non-event,” it is clear that the pathology of the “non-event”
remains as active as ever even in the time of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un with their stichomythic nuclear posturing. The question of
our times is whether we have an equal or more compelling capacity and willingness to end this
impoverished but ever-present logic of pain and uncertainty. How not simply to bring about
disarmament , but to go beyond this politically charged, as well as mythological and psychological nuclear
algorithm ? How to find love amidst the nuclear entanglement; the antidote to this entanglement? Is it possible to end the pathology of
power that exists with nuclear capacity? Sadly, the last lines of Nitin Sawhney's “Broken Skin” underscore this entanglement: Just 5 miles from
India's nuclear test site Children play in the shade of the village water tank Here in the Rajasthan desert people say They're proud their country
showed their nuclear capability.11 As an activist scholar working in the fields of human rights and cultural studies, responding to the
nuclear algorithm is an imperative . Your politics , ethics and scholarship are indivisible in this
cause. An acute sense of care for the world , informed by pacifist and non-violent , de-colonialist
approaches to knowledge and practice, pervades your concern . You are aware that there are
other ways of knowing than those you are familiar and credentialed with. You are aware that you are complicit
in the prisons that you choose to live inside,12 and that there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. You use your scholarship to
shake up the world from its paralysis, abjection and amnesia; to unsettle the epistemic and structural
violence that is ubiquitous to neoliberalism and its machinery; to create dialogic and learning
spaces for the work of critical human rights and critical justice to take place. All this, and to enable an
ethics of intervention through understanding what is at the very heart of the critical human rights impulse,
creating a “dialogue for being, because I am not without the other.”13 Furthermore, as a critical human rights advocate living in a nuclear
armed world, your challenge is to reconceptualise the human community as Ashis Nandy has argued, to
see how we can learn to co-exist with others in conviviality and also learn to co-survive with the
non-human , even to flourish . A dialogue for being requires a leap into a human rights frame that includes a deep ecological
dimension, where the planet itself is inherently involved as a participant in its future. This requires scholarship
that “thinks like a mountain.”14 A critical human rights approach understands that it cannot be simply human-centric. It requires a nuanced and
arresting clarity to present perspectives on co-existence and co-survival that are from human and non-human viewpoints.15 Ultimately, you

realise that your struggle is not confined to declarations, treaties, legislation , and law , though they
have their role . It must go further to produce “ creative intellectual exchange that might release
new ethical energies for mutually assured survival .”16 Taking an anti-nuclear stance and
enabling a post-nuclear activism demands a revolution within the field of human rights work. Recognising the
entanglement of nuclearism with the Anthropocene, for one thing, requires a profound shift in focus from
the human-centric to a more-than-human co-survival . It also requires a fundamental shift in understanding our
human culture, in which the very epistemic and rational acts of sundering from co-survival with the planet and environment takes place. In
the end, you realise, as Raimon Panikkar has articulated, “it is not realistic to toil for peace if we do not proceed to
a disarmament of the bellicose culture in which we live.”17 Or, as Geshe Lhakdor suggests, there must be “inner
disarmament for external disarmament.”18 In this sense, it is within the cultural arena, our human society, where the entanglement of
subjective meaning making, nature and politics occurs, that we need to disarm. It is 1982, and you are reading Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the
Earth on a Sydney bus. Sleeping has not been easy over the past few nights as you reluctantly but compulsively read about the consequences of
nuclear war. For some critics, Schell's account is high polemic, but for you it is more like Rabindranath Tagore: it expresses the suffering we
make for ourselves. What you find noteworthy is that although Schell's scenario of widespread destruction of the planet through nuclear
weaponry, of immeasurable harm to the bio-sphere through radiation, is powerfully laid out, the horror and scale of nuclear obliteration also
seems surreal and far away as the bus makes its way through the suburban streets. A few years later, you read a statement from an interview
with Paul Tibbets, the pilot of “Enola Gay,” the plane that bombed Hiroshima. He says, “The morality of dropping that bomb was not my
business.”19 This abstraction from moral responsibility – the denial of the implications on human life and the consequences of engagement
through the machinery of war – together with the sweeping amnesia that came afterwards from thinking about the bombing of Hiroshima, are
makes the nuclear algorithm
what make you become an environmental and human rights activist. You realise that what

work involves a politically engineered and deeply embedded insecurity-based recipe to elide the
nuclear threat from everyday life . The spectre of nuclear obliteration, like the idea of human rights, can
appear abstract and distant , not our everyday business . You realise that within this recipe is the
creation of a moral tyranny of distance , an abnegation of myself with the other. One of modernity's
greatest and earliest achievements was the mediation of the self with the world. How this became a
project assisted and shaped through the military-industrial-technological-capitalist complex is fraught
and hard to untangle. But as a critical human rights scholar you have come to see through that complex ,
and you put energies into challenging that tyranny of distance , to activate a politics , ethics and
scholarship that recognises the other as integral to yourself . Ultimately, even, to see that the other is also
within.20

Existential risk debating is valuable and doesn’t tradeoff.

Tutton 22 [Richard Tutton is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, and co-editor of
Genetic Databases: Socio-Ethical Issues in the Collection and Use of DNA. "The Sociology of
Futurelessness." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385221122420]

Sociologists also need to recognise the cultural and social specificities of affective futurities, including
futurelessness . Any claims that this regime of feeling is one experienced across diverse societies
should be regarded with caution . While there is a temptation to consider that people everywhere experience the same sense of
‘no future’, Mitchell and Chaudhury’s (2020) critique of ‘new catastrophist’ (Urry, 2016) writing reminds us that affective futurities are a part of
larger cultural and historical formations. Their reading of this literature shows that while the focus is on future catastrophes that could bring
about civilisational collapse, for many Black, Indigenous and Peoples of Colour, the catastrophe is not in the future but has already unfolded
over the past five centuries. For many such groups, their futures were foreclosed by the actions of white
settlers and colonisers in pursuit of their own desired futures. After all, the imagined futures of European modernity
told through stories of progress and utopia were inextricably linked to imperial conquests. While ostensibly addressing the fate of humanity in
its entirety, (Mitchell and Chaudhury (2020: 319) argue that this ‘new catastrophist’ literature consists of ‘white apocalyptic narratives’
primarily concerned with preserving European ways of life and commitments to Eurocentric notions of progress. As Savransky (2021: 4)
observes: ‘the End of the World is always the end of some world in this world [. . .] the Euro-American extractive mode of living through which
“civilization developed,” is not the end of everything as such’.

Accordingly, sociologists should understand that futurelessness is always the foreclosing of some futures among other possible futures in this
world, and we need always to ask for whom are those futures foreclosing and how is this made to matter. I have addressed a particular
European (or perhaps Euro-North American) kind of futurelessness expressed by writers on the political left. But, as Mitchell and Chaudhury
(2020: 322) show, there are other futures available, which they explore through Afrofuturist, Desi-futures and myriad other non-European
futurisms that ‘open space for futures beyond (the) apocalypse (of whiteness)’.
Battistoni (2013) asks how scholars and activists can translate the ‘ urgency and outrage of the “ no
future” sensibility’ to something more than what Horvat (2019: 55) calls ‘‘ fetishist apocalypticism ’ . If we
have arrived, as she argues, at the end of the future inherited from modernity, the challenge is to build a ‘new
present’ out of the ‘wreckage of old futures’, reimagining what we mean by progress and that the kinds of utopia possible that
are no longer ‘lands of endless plenty’ (Battistoni, 2013). Only by addressing the ‘ urgencies of now’ , do societies stand
a chance of working towards ‘ new futures’ that could avoid or better face up to the coming
catastrophes . This opens space for engaging with ‘ counterfutures’ (Eshun, 2003: 288) of the kind Mitchell
and Chaudhury (2020) discuss in their work . Such ‘counterfutures’ attest to how Black, Indigenous and
Peoples of Colour are living with the ‘ wreckage of old futures’ (Battistoni, 2013) and open new and different ways of
imagining possible futures. As Battistoni (2013) observes, climate change is the unintended outcome of a ‘brighter future’ that generations in
Europe and North America and more recently elsewhere invested in to bring them and their children better lives. Now it appears that there is
no future in this future any more, what new stories can and must be told?

It ends mod.
Nina Tannenwald 19. Director of the International Relations Program at Brown University’s Watson
Institute for International Studies and a senior lecturer in political science. Franklin Fellow in the Bureau
of International Security and Nonproliferation in the U.S. State Department. She holds a Master’s degree
from the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs and a Ph.D. in international relations from
Cornell University. “It’s Time for a U.S. No-First-Use Nuclear Policy.” https://tnsr.org/roundtable/its-
time-for-a-u-s-no-first-use-nuclear-policy/.

As Kingston Reif and Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association have argued, “a clear U.S. no-first-use
policy would reduce the risk of Russian or Chinese nuclear miscalculation during a crisis by alleviating
concerns about a devastating U.S. nuclear first-strike.”24 This would mean that the United States would
rely on nuclear weapons only to deter nuclear attacks. Adopting this approach would involve more than
“cheap talk,” for it would require meaningful doctrinal and operational changes .25 Specifically, it
would allow the United States to adopt a less threatening nuclear posture. It would eliminate first-
strike postures , preemptive capabilities , and other types of destabilizing warfighting
strategies . It would emphasize restraint in targeting, launch-on-warning, alert levels of deployed
systems, procurement, and modernization plans.
The plan doesn’t cause it.
Sethi ’18 [Manpreet; March 22; Senior Fellow, Centre for Air Power Studies, New Delhi where she
leads the project on Nuclear Security; Asia-Pacific Leadership Network, “Towards a Nuclear Restraint
Regime: From a Normative Ban Treaty to a Substantive Agenda,” https://cms.apln.network/wp-
content/uploads/2020/12/Policy-Brief-No-60-Towards-a-Nuclear-Restraint-Regime_From-a-Normative-
Ban-Treaty-to-a-Substantive-Agenda.pdf]

28. One question, however, needs examination when one considers the decision to accept no first use of nuclear weapons. Would a
decision/treaty that bans the first use of nuc lear weapon s lead to an arms race in conventional
armaments in order to bridge a perceived security deficit? While there are no empirical studies on the subject, it well might
be the case that in the short term, countries divesting themselves of nuclear weapons might lean towards greater conventional acquisitions.
However, this trend is unlikely to last if nuclear disarmament is either the result of or results in more cooperative and
secure inter-state relations . Hence, the possible spurt in conventional modernization could subside over a
period of time. This trend could be further encouraged by a parallel process of conventional arms control akin to the Treaty on
Conventional Armed Forces in Europe model.9

The case outweighs and solves the impact.

Chappell ’21 [John; joint J.D. and M.S. in Foreign Service candidate; American University National
Security Law Brief, “President of the United States, Destroyer of Worlds: Considering Congress's
Authority to Enact a Nuclear No-First-Use Law,” vol. 12]

While the nuclear-conventional firebreak has eroded , it remains robust enough such that the
destructive effects of nuc lear weapon s are still far greater than those of conventional arms. In terms of
yield alone, there has been some convergence between nuclear and conventional armaments.142 Since the Manhattan Project created the first
nuclear weapons, scientists have developed conventional explosives with increased yields and nuclear explosives with yields both higher and
lower than early atomic bombs.

The Trump administration deployed W-76 nuclear warheads, which may have yields under ten kilotons, on submarines for Trident II
missiles.143 The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had yields of sixteen and twenty-one kilotons.144 By comparison, the

most powerful conventional explosive in the U.S. arsenal has a yield of about ten tons, or one-tenth of
one percent of the W-76 ’s yield.145 The United States began developing its lowest yield nuclear weapon, a ten-ton tactical
warhead,146 in the late 1950s,147 but the weapon is not currently in use.148

Even if conventional and nuclear weapons had equal yields, the strategic consequences of using even a low-yield
nuc lear weapon are momentous . The strategic consequences are also more constitutionally relevant than destructive power alone
because the likelihood of escalation and retaliation speaks to how using of nuclear weapons enters the United States into a war.149 The use
of low-yield nuclear weapons in war would prompt the use of strategic nuclear weapons in retaliation .150 A limited nuclear
war is implausible . Senior policymakers have long recognized that the use against a nuclear-weapons state of any nuclear weapon,
regardless of yield, could precipitate a full-scale nuclear exchange.151

The first use of nuc lear weapon s transforms conventional wars into a qualitatively different type of
conflict.152 As Senator Fulbright observed, “the conversion of any conventional conflict into a nuclear conflict cannot be considered a mere
change of tactics in a continuing conflict.”153 While a conventional war abroad may cost lives and resources, a nuclear war poses an immediate
and existential threat to millions of civilians in the United States.154

Total disarmament is impossible---it causes rapid wars and would fall apart instantly.
But NFU limits the risk while maintaining room for escalation control.
Sinan Ulgen 15. Chairman of the Istanbul-based think tank the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy
Studies (EDAM) and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe.

“Is “Zero” the Right Target for Disarmament? A Turkish Response.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
2015, Vol. 71(1) 95–97. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0096340214563688

Complete nuclear disarmament is a dangerous chimera . For three fundamental reasons, pursuing this
theoretically laudable goal would likely produce a more dangerous world . First, as a means for maintaining
security, it is difficult to identify a credible alternative to nuclear deterrence . Simply put, nuclear deterrence has
worked. Even at the height of the Cold War’s ideological polarization, the world never witnessed the sort of large-scale wars that, in the absence of a nuclear
deterrent, were fought in the first half of the 20th century. Policy makers fully recognize the destructive capability of nuclear weapons and have come to understand
 m utual a ssured d estruction has provided, and continues to provide, a
the complexities inherent in a nuclear world. The concept of

sound basis for limiting the scope and scale of confrontations between nuclear weapon states.

Devoid of a nuclear deterrent, the world would immediately become more dangerous . If military
assets were limited to conventional weapons , nations would experience fewer inhibitions against
armed conflict. This would hold true even for the major powers. With disincentives to conflict reduced, the renewal of
conventional arms races would likely be unstoppable . This would have an important effect on, among other things,
national budgets. Today, at least for nuclear weapon states, the existence of a nuclear deterrent allows for drastic
reductions in defense spending during times of austerity . In a similar vein, countries that fall under
another nation’s extended nuclear deterrence can spend less on conventional military capabilities
than they otherwise would ; they benefit from a nuclear dividend. So overall, though it may sound paradoxical,
nuclear weapons are a force for stability . It is hard to imagine how similar levels of stability could
be achieved through any means other than nuc lear weapon s .

Second, how would a world without nuclear weapons be managed? If the world were essentially one
big “ peace cartel ,” this cartel would be very fragile indeed . Economic theory indicates that members of a cartel
become more likely to engage in cartel-busting behavior as the rewards for doing so increase and the penalties decrease. A similar logic would
pertain where nuclear weapons are concerned. In a world without nuclear weapons, breaking one’s cartel commitments by
developing a nuclear deterrent would seem to have enormous security benefits . As for penalties, nothing short
of a sanctioned military attack intended to destroy the country in question would change the calculus of
a rogue regime intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. In other words, ensuring that the world remained free of nuclear
weapons would require the establishment of a universal regime devoted to that purpose , backed
by the unambiguously credible use of force. The world has never witnessed the emergence of such an
institution , and likely never will .

When the first rogue state went nuclear, the nonproliferation regime would likely fall apart
completely . Today, though the regime is not universal, it remains effective in constraining the nuclear ambitions
of nations such as Iran. But in a world without the security that nuclear weapons provide, a single episode of
noncompliance would likely cause many nations to seek their own deterrents. The result would be a collapse
of the regime and a cascade of proliferation. It is a dangerous fallacy to believe that rogue states could be prevented from reintroducing nuclear
weapons to a world from which these weapons had been eliminated.

The third factor agitating against total disarmament is the difficulty of effecting a transition to a nuclear-free world. States have developed
nuclear deterrents for a variety of reasons, but chief among these whether for the great powers, or for middle powers such as India, Pakistan,
and Israel has been threat perception. Until the threats that have led these powers to acquire nuclear weapons are
permanently eliminated, it is difficult to envision them agreeing to disarm completely . For example,
Pakistan’s security and policy establishment will never agree to total disarmament until Pakistan feels secure vis-ˆ-vis India, its more powerful
neighbor and its geopolitical rival. A similar argument could be made about Israel. The world will have to become much more adept at
peacefully solving or at least managing its regional conflicts, whether through a universal security architecture or a multiplicity of regional
architectures, for the middle powers in particular to perceive complete disarmament as safe.

Eliminating nuclear weapons, though a lofty goal, is a difficult proposition. But this is not to say that disarmament efforts
should be abandoned . To the contrary, the nuclear weapon states (with the United States and Russia in the lead) should
move forward with reducing their arsenals. Otherwise, the consensus that underlies the entire nonproliferation regime will be
increasingly open to challenge. But there is a limit to what nuclear disarmament can accomplish without introducing new security risks.

Here's something that can be achieved : gaining a universal commitment by nuclear

weapon states not to use these weapons first . Today, China espouses a no-first-use policy. The
United States forswears first use against non-nuclear weapon states that are parties to the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty and are in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations—though Washington places
some restrictions on that commitment (Defense Department, 2010). Russia does not maintain a no-first-use policy. This is a complicated
picture, and prevailing on all nuclear weapon states to adopt no-first-use policies would be challenging. Ultimately, though, the
goal is achievable . If every nuclear-armed state adopted an unconditional no-first-use policy, the risk
of nuclear war would be greatly reduced .
The world came to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that was more than 50 years ago. Nuclear weapons haven’t
been used in conflict since 1945. By now, the record suggests that nations have learned to manage these terrible weapons. They have adapted
their security concepts to the realities of the nuclear era, developing first the doctrine of nuclear deterrence and then extended deterrence.
The system that exists may not be desirable—a residual risk of nuclear warfare persists—but the system has proven itself to work. Nuclear
deterrence has served the world well for many decades and would continue doing so even if arsenals were much smaller. Stability could
be maintained if arsenals approached but did not reach zero . Indeed, that should be the goal of
the global nuclear community .

Any ‘terrorism’ is blocked.

Flaherty ’5 [Kevin; 2005; B.A. in International Relations from the University of South
California; Cryptogon, “Militant Electronic Piracy:
Non-Violent Insurgency Tactics Against the American Corporate State,”
http://cryptogon.com/docs/pirate_insurgency.html/]

Any violent insurgency against the American Corporate State is sure to fail and will only serve to
enhance the state's power . The major flaw of violent insurgencies, both cell based (Weathermen Underground, Black Panthers, Aryan
Nations etc.) and leaderless (Earth Liberation Front, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, etc.) is that they are attempting to attack the
system using the same tactics the American Corporate State has already mastered : terror and
psychological operations . The American Corporate State attained primacy through the effective application of terror and
psychological operations. Therefore, it has far more skill and experience in the use of these tactics than any upstart

could ever hope to attain. This makes the American Corporate State impervious to traditional
insurgency tactics .
- Political Activism and the ACS Counterinsurgency Apparatus

The American Corporate State employs a full-time counterinsurgency infrastructure with resources
that are unimaginable to most would be insurgents. Quite simply, violent insurgents have no idea of just
how powerful the foe actually is. Violent insurgents typically start out as peaceful, idealistic, political activists. Whether or not
political activists know it, even with very mundane levels of political activity, they are engaging in low intensity conflict with the ACS.

The U.S. military classifies political activism as “low intensity conflict.” The scale of warfare (in terms of intensity) begins with individuals distributing anti-
government handbills and public gatherings with anti-government/anti-corporate themes. In the middle of the conflict intensity scale are what the military refers to
as Operations Other than War; an example would be the situation the U.S. is facing in Iraq. At the upper right hand side of the graph is global thermonuclear war.
What is important to remember is that the military is concerned with ALL points along this scale because they represent different types of threats to the ACS.
Making distinctions between civilian law enforcement and military forces, and foreign and domestic intelligence services is no longer necessary. After September 11,

2001, all national security assets would be brought to bear against any U.S. insurgency movement .
Additionally, the U.S. military established NORTHCOM which designated the U.S. as an active military operational area . Crimes involving the loss of

corporate profits will increasingly be treated as acts of terrorism and could garner anything from a local law
enforcement response to activation of regular military forces .
Most of what is commonly referred to as “political activism” is viewed by the corporate state's counterinsurgency apparatus as a useful and necessary component of
political control.

Letters-to-the-editor...

Calls-to-elected-representatives...

Waving banners...

“Third” party political activities...

Taking beatings, rubber bullets and tear gas from riot police in free speech zones...

Political activism amounts to an utterly useless waste of time, in terms of tangible power, which is all the ACS understands. Political activism is a cruel guise that is
sold to people who are dissatisfied, but who have no concept of the nature of tangible power. Counterinsurgency teams routinely monitor these activities, attend
the meetings, join the groups and take on leadership roles in the organizations.

It's only a matter of time before some individuals determine that political activism is a honeypot that accomplishes nothing and wastes their time. The corporate
state knows that some small percentage of the peaceful, idealistic, political activists will eventually figure out the game. At this point, the clued-in activists will
probably do one of two things; drop out or move to escalate the struggle in other ways.

If the clued-in activist drops his or her political activities, the ACS wins.

But what if the clued-in activist refuses to give up the struggle? Feeling powerless, desperation could set in and these individuals might become increasingly

radicalized. Because the corporate state's counterinsurgency operatives have infiltrated most political
activism groups, the radicalized members will be easily identified , monitored and eventually
compromised/turned, arrested or executed . The ACS wins again.

The alt’s rigid ideological rejection precludes any serious attempt at anti-militaristic
politics---engagement is crucial to successful political pressure
Schulman 18, Deputy Director of Studies and Leon E. Panetta Senior Fellow at the Center for a New
American Security, co-host of the national security podcast Bombshell, held senior staff positions at the
National Security Council and Department of Defense (Loren DeJonge Schulman, 12-4-2018, "Policy
Roundtable: The Future of Progressive Foreign Policy — Progressives Should Embrace the Politics of
Defense," Texas National Security Review, https://tnsr.org/roundtable/policy-roundtable-the-future-of-
progressive-foreign-policy/)

These policy positions require little analytical effort or p olitical c apital, and let Democrats occasionally
posture as morally superior by emphasizing “non-military tools” of foreign policy. The opposite
alt ernative of a more rigid pacifism and anti-militarism , though common in the grassroots
progressive community, has no consistently organized political presence on the Hill and thus also escapes
thorough interrogation .75 For those outside the Beltway, opposition to all things military offers the refuge of
principle without critical justification or analysis . For many Democrats, the Obama model was a strangely tolerable middle ground: a bipartisan
budget mess made while a “responsible” president ramped up security interventions in enough secrecy to avoid nagging scrutiny or self-examination. Re-Politicizing Defense
Despite the valiant efforts of some individuals, there is no political home for responsible defense
debate , oversight, and accountability.76 Yet, with determination, the left might find a real foothold in defense policy —
without compromising progressive values . To be clear: There is substantial work to be done on
figuring out what cohesive view of America’s role in the world the left can tolerate and advance. There is
even greater work to be done on determining how to renew , reuse , and reform international
institutions .77 But any such agendas would be well served by embracing a set of principles that
make clear-eyed debate and evaluation of defense policy and execution an asset , not an unforgiveable sin.
Critical analysis of defense affairs is too often left to the technocratic and comparatively
powerless “blob,” which can write a mean op-ed or tweet , but has limited ability to engage
the American people on its will and interests . And although Congress has willfully declawed itself so
that it cannot maintain meaningful oversight of national security,78 its ability to stage and amplify
policy debate for the American people is without parallel, and it has tremendous latent potential to
restore greater balance in c ivil- m ilitary r elations. Congress’s absence and the associated de-
politicization of national security affairs is costly . For instance, the American public is deeply ambivalent
about the 17-year conflict in Afghanistan and generally ignorant of the widespread activities of the
war on terror.79 This is unsurprising : Congress, too, is disaffected, often ignorant of where the U.S.
military is even engaged,80 and has made little headway into questioning or shaping this intervention. The
most substantive and serious debate about executive war authorities and the effectiveness of U.S.
counterterrorism strategy has resulted in little more than a reauthorization proposal that still failed to move forward.81
Too many examples of political leaders’ stand-off or superficial approach to defense policy and
execution abound. Military superiority is generally viewed as sacrosanct, placed on “so high a pedestal
as to render real debate meaningless .”82 That reverence infantilizes defense budget debates .
Thanking troops for their service is a politicized ritual that divorces politicians and their constituents from the intent and costs of that service. With decisions on the needs of the U.S. military
and sustaining legacy systems openly linked to the economies of congressional districts, it’s understandable that skeptics of utilizing military tools have been unwilling to evaluate their merits.

These must all change . While, at its worst, the political right treats the use of force abroad as a metric of
patriotism and the size of the force as the measure of one’s love of America, the political left ought to
draw from its skepticism toward intervention and its faith in institutions to advance a more rational and
accountable approach to national security. For years, Robert Farley has highlighted that “progressives consistently underestimate the importance of
discussions about military doctrine and technology,”83 taking what Michael Walzer calls “shortcuts”84 in their critiques of defense policy that relieve

them from contributing to key debates. Instead of excusing themselves , the left should instead
propose legitimate questions about major shifts in force employment and development : Will
it work? What are its goals? What is the U.S. national security apparatus learning? Why didn’t it work?
Were U.S. objectives wrong? What did America change when it didn’t work? Will America do it again?
What could be improved? What should America do now? Joining the Conversation Jackson’s notion of what a
progressive “wager” on national security might look like in practice is useful, filling the gap between the “Republican-lite” default and the stubbornness of anti-militarism. But the left’s

A true pacifist movement on the

diversity of thought can accommodate a wider playing field of potential alternative approaches to security than even he proposes.

Hill and on the campaign trail, dedicated to the advancement of non-military approaches but premised
on analysis and logical arg ument s , would be a serious advancement in national security and
should be welcomed by the most ardent military advocates . Likewise, a more prudent middle
ground approach — one that is skeptical of, but open to, military might and intervention and demands a
better return on investment of national security tools — should play a more prominent political role .
The full range of the left’s national security spectrum should forcefully engage in oversight of the
rationale for and quality of American forces and interventions abroad. The left should therefore consider
adopting a series of principles on defense matters — including criteria for the use of force — that apply to
the military-friendly and anti-militarist left alike. In practice, this means acknowledging that there are valid
political positions on matters of defense that lie somewhere in between “yes, and” and “no
never” and that trivializing them is harmful to America’s national security. There are alternatives to today’s counterterror
strategy and it would not be an insult to the military to debate them. It’s entirely legitimate to study whether the military is equipped to face today’s threats without being accused of
retreating from the world or starting with an artificial budget cut. It’s sensible to consider whether the planned growth of ground forces, a 350-ship Navy, or a 386-squadron Air Force are the

right investments or political benchmarks.85 These questions involve choices and values and should not be avoided under
the umbrella of a supposed technocratic bipartisan agreement. Just as important, it’s essential that the left
avoid becoming a caricature of itself that promotes simplistic and superficial positions that set
rigid , unserious standards . The left may not agree on the size or purpose of the military, but it can
agree America should strive for informed oversight and accountability .