Aff document Map

NSA metadata surveillance is highly criticized internationally as a human rights violation, the aff remedies that

NSA Surveillance Notably, the UN report denounced the NSA's mass surveillance "both within and outside the United States through the bulk phone metadata program (Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act) and, in particular, the surveillance under Section 702 of Amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) conducted through PRISM (collection of the contents of communications from US-based companies) and UPSTREAM (tapping of fiber-optic cables in the country that carry internet traffic) programs and their adverse impact on the right to privacy. "The report also criticized the secrecy of "judicial interpretations of FISA and rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)," which prevent the public from knowing the laws and legal interpretations that impact them. Promises of "oversight" obviously did not persuade the committee, either, as it said "the current system of oversight of the activities of the NSA fails to effectively protect the rights of those affected," and "those affected have no access to effective remedies in case of abuse." Continuing NSA leaks, provided by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden last year, have revealed the depth of the United States' massive surveillance system. The bulk collection of phone metadata is probably the most well-known program. Recently, President Obama proposed ending the bulk phone metadata collection program. But the NSA's surveillance system extends far beyond phone metadata. In a program called PRISM, the NSA collects user data, such as search history and message content, sent through internet communication services like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and Skype. Major tech companies have denied knowledge of the program, but the NSA claims those companies knew and provided full assistance. The NSA uses a back door in surveillance law to monitor the communications of American citizens without a warrant. As mentioned earlier, the NSA is also involved in the drone program through the collection of signals intelligence. Additionally, much of NSA surveillance is used for economic espionage. With the help of Australian intelligence, the NSA spied on communications between the Indonesian government and an American law firm representing it during trade talks. Indonesia and the United States have long been in trade disputes, such as over Indonesia's shrimp exports and a US ban on the sale of Indonesian clove cigarettes. It is highly unlikely Obama's reforms will curb these abuses.

Ext. HR k2 soft power

U.S. human rights credibility is key to its global influence.

Griffey 11 — Brian Griffey, human rights consultant who has worked for the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA and as an investigative journalist, 2011 (“U.S. leadership on human rights essential to strengthen democracy abroad,” The Hill, March 18^th, Available Online at http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/150667-us-leadership-on-human-rights-essential-to-strengthen-democracy-abroad#ixzz2sB8JqAUc, Accessed 02-02-2014)

Nonetheless, U.S. leadership on human rights offers clear opportunities to advance not only international peace and security – a fundamental purpose of the U.N. – but also conjoined US political and economic interests at home and abroad.

The U.S. is presently demonstrating exactly how crucial such involvement is as an elected member of the Human Rights Council, participating in vital negotiations on how best to mitigate widespread abuses responding to ongoing unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, including by strategic US allies in global security and trade.

As Secretary Clinton expressed en route to Geneva to participate in recent talks on human rights violations in Libya, joining the Council has “proven to be a good decision, because we’ve been able to influence a number of actions that we otherwise would have been on the outside looking in.”

In its first submission to the body, the U.S. likewise recognized that participation in the Council’s peer-review system allows the U.S. not only to lead by example and “encourage others to strengthen their commitments to human rights,” but also to address domestic human rights shortcomings.

By leading international discourse on human rights, the U.S. will be in a better position both to advance observation of human rights abroad, and to take on new treaty commitments that demonstrate adherence of our own system to the vaulting principles we identify with our democracy.

Soft Power Good—Terrorism

Soft power key to solve terrorism

Nye 06 (Joseph S. Jr., University distinguished service professor at Harvard University and author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, “Think Again: Soft Power,” Foreign Policy, 2/23/06, http://foreignpolicy.com/2006/02/23/think-again-soft-power/)//kjz

Soft Power Is Irrelevant to the Current Terrorist Threat False. There is a small likelihood that the West will ever attract such people as Mohammed Atta or Osama bin Laden. We need hard power to deal with people like them. But the current terrorist threat is not Samuel Huntingtons clash of civilizations. It is a civil war within Islam between a majority of moderates and a small minority who want to coerce others into an extremist and oversimplified version of their religion. The United States cannot win unless the moderates win. We cannot win unless the number of people the extremists are recruiting is lower than the number we are killing and deterring. Rumsfeld himself asked in a 2003 memo: Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrasas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us? That equation will be very hard to balance without a strategy to win hearts and minds. Soft power is more relevant than ever.

[Insert terrorism impact]

Exts. Soft Power Solves Terrorism

Soft power key to effective hard power and fighting terrorism

Nye 04 (Joseph S.,University distinguished service professor at Harvard University , “Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics—Edited Transcript,”4/13/04, https://www.academia.edu/2517747/Soft_power_The_means_to_success_in_world_politics)//kjz

New threats are arising from the bottom board of transnational relations. While military power can be of some use occasionally on the bottom board, more often you will need other forms of power, particularly soft power. The trouble is that a group of people within the Administration, who came into power and looked at American military preeminence, devised the view that Charles Krauthammer has called “the new unilateralism:” that the United States is so powerful that we can do as we wish and others have no choice but to follow. They have used that view as a way of applying American military power to all sorts of problems. The problem is that this is a one-dimensional view in a three-dimensional world. If you play one-dimensional chess on one board only and it’s a three-dimensional game, in the long run you will lose. That is my great fear about the way in which we have implemented the strategy. What about soft power? The basic concept of power is the ability to influence others to get them to do what you want. There are three major ways to do that: one is to threaten them with sticks; the second is to pay them with carrots; the third is to attract them or co-opt them, so that they want what you want. If you can get others to be attracted, to want what you want, it costs you much less in carrots and sticks. The Bush Administration has neglected using our American soft power. In this new world of transnational threats and the information age, it is not just whose army wins, it’s whose story wins. They have not been very attentive to the question of whose story wins. If you look at the results of their strategy, the polls are quite chilling. Not only do you find situations like Europe, where the United States has lost on average thirty points of attractiveness in all European capitals, including countries that supported us in the Iraq war, but if you go beyond that to the Islamic world, the decline of American attraction is quite appalling. In 2000, in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country, three-quarters of the people said they were attracted to the United States. By May 2003, that had dropped to 15 percent. And yet these are the people that we will need for cooperation against organizations like al-Gama’a at-al-Islamiyya and other offshoots of al Qaeda in the region. If you look at trends in polls in countries like Jordan or Pakistan, which are allegedly somewhat more friendly towards the United States, we see that larger majorities are attracted to Osama bin Laden than to George Bush or Tony Blair. Again, this is a bit chastening when those are the people whose cooperation we will need to deal with this new type of threat. The new unilateralists’ reaction is: “Not to worry. You should never base foreign policy on polls. Popularity is ephemeral. We have been unpopular in the past -- look how unpopular the Americans were during the Vietnam War, and yet we recovered. We should keep on track and decide what we think is right, pursue it, and then let the chips fall as they may.” This skepticism about the role of soft power, quite frequent among neo-conservatives, is a very powerful view. The great danger is that it sells short the importance of being able to attract others. And it ignores the fact that a country’s soft power can affect its hard power. If you take the example of Turkey a year ago, the Americans wanted to persuade the Turkish government to send the Fourth Infantry Division across Turkey to enter Iraq from the north. The Turkish government might have been willing to concede, but the Turkish parliament said, “No,” because the United States had become so unpopular, its policies perceived as so illegitimate, that they were not willing to allow this transfer of troops across the country. The net effect was that the Fourth Infantry Division had to go down through the Canal, up through the Gulf, and arrived late to the war, which made a difference in the number of troops on the ground in areas like the Sunni Triangle. Neglect of soft power had a definite negative effect on hard power. The question is sometimes further rebutted by the skeptics who say: “Yes, that may all be well and good, and it may also be true that the Americans and the West used soft power to prevail in the Cold War, but it has nothing to do with the current situation of terrorism. Terrorists are a new type of threat and are not attractable. The idea that we will defeat bin Laden or al Qaeda by attracting them is sticking your head in the sand.” To some extent that is true. If you ask, “Are we going to attract bin Laden or people like Mohamed Atta, who flew into the World Trade Towers?” No. You do need hard power to defeat these people who are irreconcilable. But the important role for soft power is to be found in the larger context. If you think of the war on terrorism as a clash between Islam and the West -- Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” -- you are mischaracterizing the situation. It’s a clash within Islamic civilization, between a group of people at the extreme who are trying to use force to impose their view of a pure version of their religion on others, a majority who want things that are similar to what we want: a better life, education, health care, opportunities, and a sense of dignity. The key question is: how do you prevent those extremists from prevailing as they try to radicalize the majority, the moderates? Soft power is essential to be able to attract the majorities to the values that I just described -- not necessarily to being Americans, but in a diverse and pluralistic world to better opportunities, education, health care, and a sense of dignity. We can appeal to these values and try to inoculate them against the appeal of the extremists. We will not prevail in this struggle against terrorism unless the majority wins, unless the moderates win. And we will not prevail against extremists unless we are able to attract that majority, those moderates. That is the role of soft power. In addition, even when you need to use hard power against the hard-core terrorist, you will need cooperation from other governments in a civilian matter. You will not solve this by bombs alone. You will need close civilian cooperation -- intelligence sharing, policy work across borders, tracing financial flows. To some extent other governments will share information to deal with terrorists out of their self-interest, but the degree of sharing you get depends upon the degree to which you are attractive to other countries. For example, if being pro-American or sympathetic to the Americans or being seen to cooperate with the Americans is the kiss of death in domestic politics, you will get less cooperation from those governments -- witness the Turkish example I just gave. So for both reasons, both to attract the moderate majority and to reach a context or setting in which governments can cooperate more fully with us to deal with the hard core, soft power is key to being able to wage this struggle against terrorism. How are we doing? Not well. We are not doing well for several reasons. One is the style and substance of our policies. Soft power grows out of a country’s culture; it grows out of our values -- democracy and human rights, when we live up to them; it grows out of our policies. When our policies are formulated in ways which are consultative, which involve the views and interests of others, we are far more likely to be seen as legitimate and to attract others. And certainly the style of the new unilateralists in the Bush Administration has decreased the legitimacy of American policy. So to restore our soft power, we need to change both the substance and style of our foreign policy. We also need to find better ways to present this policy. This country, the leader in the information age, supposedly the greatest communicating country in the world, is being out-communicated by people in caves. This is a bizarre situation. With the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, we wanted a peace dividend not only in military expenditures but also in our public diplomacy, and so we cut back dramatically. The U.S. Information Agency had half the number of people that it had at the height of the Cold War when it was folded into the State Department, itself a big mistake. International exchange programs were cut by a third. Look at how poorly we do in broadcasting -- for example if you take Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan, the Voice of America broadcasts two hours a day in Urdu, and yet Pakistan is allegedly a frontline country in this struggle against terrorism. Ambassador Djerejian, who chaired a bipartisan panel on Public Diplomacy in the Islamic World, argued that the United States spent $150 million on public diplomacy for the whole Islamic world last year, and that is about the equal of two hours of the defense budget, an extraordinary imbalance. The United States spends 400 times more on its hard power than on its soft power, if you take all the exchange programs and broadcasting programs and lump them together as a measure of soft power. If we were to spend just 1 percent of the military budget on soft power, it would mean quadrupling our public diplomacy programs. There is something wrong with our approach. In short, the challenge that we face in dealing with this new threat of terrorism, particularly the danger of their obtaining weapons of mass destruction, is a challenge which is very new and real in American foreign policy. But beyond the United States, it is a challenge for all of modern urban civilization. If this spreads, and we find that people will no longer live in cities because of fear, we will live in a very different and less favorable world. At the same time, our approach to the problem has relied much too heavily on one dimension of a three-dimensional world, one instrument between hard and soft power. The answer is not to pretend that hard power doesn’t matter -- it does and we will need to continue to use it -- but realise that to use hard power without combining it with soft power, which has all too often been the practice in the last few years, is a serious mistake. The good news is that in the past the United States has, as in the Cold War, combined hard and soft power. The bad news is that we are not doing it yet. But since we have done it once, presumably we can do it again. When we learn how to better combine hard and soft power, then we will be what I call a smart power.

Soft power fosters more positive opinions of the US—helps deter suicide bombings

Chiozza 14 (Giacomo, associate professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, “Does U.S. Soft Power Have Consequences for U.S. Security? Evidence from Popular Support for Suicide Bombing,” The Korean Journal of International Studies, 9/3/14, http://www.kjis.org/journal/view.html?uid=154&&vmd=Full)//kjz

In Figure 4, I present four CART models, a pooled model for all the three coun- tries, and three disaggregate models for each country. The major finding at the aggregate level, in the upper left panel of Figure 4, is that, positive attitudes towards the United States was the most discriminating factor accounting for opposition to suicide bombing. The probability that someone who had a good opinion of the United States would support suicide attacks was between 4.3% and 9.1%, a large drop over the unconditional probability of support which ranged from 41.5% to 46.2%. As a first result, therefore, the analysis in Figure 4 indicates 11 Theprobabilitythatagivenindividualwouldsupportsuicidebombing(π)canbemodeledasa binomial distribution where n is the number of subjects in the sample and x is the number of subjects who hold such a belief. I use a non-informative reference prior distribution to derive the posterior dis- tribution and, from that, the probability that the parameter of interest πlies in an interval with 95% probability. I use Jeffrey’s reference prior distribution, which has the property of being invariant to scale transformations. In the case of binomial likelihood functions, Jeffrey’s prior takes the form of a Beta distribution, π~ Beta(1/2,1/2). 12 I report the logistic regression models in the on-line Appendix. 77). I use a validation set approach, by split-  The Korean Journal of International Studies 13-1  222 that U.S. soft power provided a “disabling environment,” as Nye (2011)’s soft power theory predicts. LEGEND: AMERICANS PRO.AL.QAEDA PRO.FRANCE PRO.US RELIGION.VERY.IMPORTANT SAFER.SADDAM.CONE THREATS.TO.ISLAM Dslk=Respondent dislikes the American people; Like=Repondent likes the American people Does respondent have any confidence, or no confidence at all, in Usama bin Laden? Does respondent have a favorable opinion of France? Does respondent have a favorable opinion of the United States? Is religion very important in respondent’s life? Does respondent believe that the world is safer anfter the removal of Saddam Hussein from power? Does respondent believe that there are serious threats to Islam? Figure 4. Attitudinal Profile of the Support for Suicide Bombing against Americans and Westerners Note: Data analysis is based on the 2005 wave of the Pew Global Attitudes Survey. The labels below the final branches indicate the most common response: “No” indicates that the most common response was disap- proval of suicide bombing; “Yes” indicates that the most common response was approval suicide bombing. The numbers underneath measure the 95% Bayesian confidence intervals around the conditional probability of approval of suicide bombing. “CI” stands for Confidence Interval. After that, the model splits the sample separating Turkey, on the one hand, and Jordan and Lebanon, on the other. This split indicates that the patterns in Turkey Does U.S. Soft Power Have Consequences for U.S. Security? 223 differed from those found in Jordan and Lebanon not just quantitatively, as illus- trated in Figures 2 and 3, but also qualitatively. The second substantive factor accounting for patterns of opinion towards suicide attacks was another soft power indicator, i.e. attitudes towards the American people. For the Jordanians and the Lebanese who disliked the United States, a negative view of the American people increased the probability of approval of suicide attacks against Americans and Westerners to a range between 74.5% and 81%. For the Jordanians and Lebanese who disliked the United States and liked the Americans, the probability of support for suicide attacks dropped substantially, but not enough to clear the baseline confidence interval. The country-by-country analysis further validates the aggregate findings. In both the Jordanian and the Lebanese cases, U.S. soft power emerges as the strongest predictor of support for suicide bombing against Americans and Westerners. Overwhelmingly, the Jordanians who had a positive opinion of Americans did not find suicide bombing against them legitimate; the probability interval for the support of suicide attacks ranges from 5.4% to 12.6%. Among the Lebanese, no one among those who liked the United States was also willing to jus- tify suicide attacks against them, which yields a probability of support between 0% and 2%. With such a discriminating power, U.S. soft power emerged as a key factor in structuring opinion towards suicide bombing. Importantly for the theory of soft power, however, its policy component  i.e., the endorsement that foreign publics might give to specific U.S. policies, such as the U.S.-led war on terror  does not emerge as a relevant explanatory parameter. For the people of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, it was the (lack of) normative and personal standing of the United States and its people that would mostly shape their views on anti-American vio- lence.

Soft Power Good—Democracy

Soft power is influenced by policies and uniquely promotes democracy

Nye 09 (Joseph S., University distinguished service professor at Harvard University, “Obama’s Soft Power,” New Perspectives Quarterly, 2009, https://onlinelibrarystatic.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1540-5842.2009.01057.x/asset/j.1540-5842.2009.01057.x.pdf?v=1&t=ib5e5swr&s=278fd5621bdb8284abc7f132a1d586979bf9117b)//kjz

cambridge, mass—In her confirmation hearings to become secretary of state, Hillary Clinton said: “America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America. . . . We must use what has been called ‘smart power,’ the full range of tools at our disposal.” Smart power is the combination of hard and soft power. Soft power is the ability to obtain preferred outcomes through attraction rather than coercion or payments. Public opinion polls show a serious decline in American attractiveness in Europe, Latin America and, most dramatically, across the entire Muslim world. The resources that produce soft power for a country include its culture (where it is attractive to others), its values (where they are attractive and not undercut by inconsistent practices) and policies (where they are seen as inclusive and legitimate in the eyes of others). When poll respondents are asked why they report a decline in American soft power, they cite American policies more than American culture or values. Since it is easier for a country to change its policies than its culture, this implies that President Barack Obama will be able to choose policies that could help to recover some of America’s soft power. Of course, soft power is not the solution to all problems. Even though North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il likes to watch Hollywood movies, that is unlikely to affect his nuclear weapons program. And soft power got nowhere in attracting the Taliban government away from its support for al-Qaida in the 1990s. It took hard military power in 2001 to end that. But other goals—such as the promotion of democracy and human rights—are better achieved by soft power.

Soft power is a successful tool in democracy promotion

Kroenig, McAdam, and Weber 10 (Matthew, Associate Professor and International Relations Field Chair in the Department of Government and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at The Atlantic Council; Melissa, Visiting Scholar at George Washington University’s Elliott School, in the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies; Steven, Professor at the Information School , University of California, Berkeley, “Taking Soft Power Seriously,” Comparative Strategy, 12/13/10, http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ucst20)//kjz

The United States has also attempted to use soft power to promote the spread of democracy around the globe. Unlike in the other two issue areas, the U.S. democracy promotion campaigns met with some success as evidenced by a spate of electoral revolutions in the postcommunist region. We argue that the successful influence of these U.S. democracy promotion efforts is due to the presence of the necessary conditions for an effective soft power campaign. In the countries that experienced electoral revolutions, there was a functioning marketplace of ideas, the United States identified and supported credible messengers to transmit ideas about democratization, and ideas about the best practices for bringing down authoritarian regimes could significantly impact the outcome. In recent years, the United States has devoted a disproportionate amount of its democracy promotion attention to the postcommunist region. The proportion of countries receiving USAID democracy assistance, and the duration of time over which the countries receive assistance, are higher in the postcommunist region than in other world regions. A survey of USAID funding from 1990–2003 “reveals that the postcommunist region stands out as a clear priority for USAID with respect to democracy assistance.”73 Other U.S. government-funded democracy promotion organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy have similarly concentrated their resources on the postcommunist region. The U.S.’s soft power strategies aimed at promoting democracy in the postcommunist world since the end of the Cold War have met with notable success. The rate of electoral revolutions in this region has been staggering. According to a recent study, “pivotal elections that have either enhanced or introduced democracy have taken place in eight countries, or 40 percent of the twenty postcommunist countries that remained eligible for such revolutions.”74 The well-publicized “color revolutions” swept through Georgia (The Rose Revolution, 2003), Ukraine (The Orange Revolution, 2004), and Kyrgyzstan (The Tulip Revolution, 2005). Downloaded by [Georgetown University] at 11:08 23 June 2015 Taking Soft Power Seriously 423

Soft Power Good—Peace/Proliferation

American soft power is crucial to a stable international order—slows proliferation and bolsters trade

Nye 15 - Joseph Nye is university distinguished service professor and former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He has served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, chair of the National Intelligence Council, and deputy under secretary of state for security assistance, science, and technology. (Is the American Century Over? pp. 153-158 e-book, 2015) STRYKER

The problem of leadership in such a world is how to get everyone into the act and still get action. And the American role in galvanizing institutions and organizing informal networks remains crucial to answering that puzzle. As we saw earlier, there has often been self-serving exaggeration about the American provision of public goods in the past, but a case can be made for Goliath. As Michael Mandelbaum describes the American role, other countries will criticize it, but “they will miss it when it is gone.”11 More important, it is not yet gone. Even in issues where its pre-eminence in resources has diminished, American leadership often remains critical to global collective action. Take trade and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons as two examples of important economic and security issues where American dominance is not what it once was. In trade, the United States was by far the largest trading nation when the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) was created in 1947, and the United States deliberately accepted trade discrimination by Europe and Japan as part of its Cold War strategy. After those countries recovered, they joined the United States in a club of like-minded nations within the GATT.12 In the 1990s, as other states’ shares of global trade increased, the United States supported the expansion of GATT into the World Trade Organization and the club model became obsolete. The United States supported Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization and China passed the United States as the world’s largest trading nation. While global rounds of trade negotiations became more difficult to accomplish and various free trade agreements proliferated, the rules of the World Trade Organization continued to provide a general structure wherein the norm of most favored nation status and reciprocity created a framework in which particular club deals could be generalized to a larger number of countries. Moreover, new entrants like China found it in their interests to observe even adverse judgments of the World Trade Organization dispute settlement process. Similarly with the non-proliferation regime: in the 1940s, when the United States had a nuclear monopoly, it proposed the Baruch plan for UN control, which the Soviet Union rejected in order to pursue its own nuclear weapons program. In the 1950s, the United States used the Atoms for Peace program, coupled with inspections by a new International Atomic Energy Agency, to try to separate the peaceful from the weapons purposes of nuclear technology as it spread. In the 1960s, the five states with nuclear weapons negotiated the non-proliferation treaty, which promised peaceful assistance to states that accepted a legal status of non-weapons states. In the 1970s, after India’s explosion of a nuclear device and the further spread of technology for enrichment and reprocessing of fissile materials, the United States and like-minded states created a Nuclear Suppliers Group, which agreed “to exercise restraint” in the export of sensitive technologies, as well as an International National Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation, which called into question the optimistic projections about the use of plutonium fuels. While none of these institutional adaptations was perfect, and problems persist with North Korea and Iran today, the net effect of the normative structure and American leadership was to slow the growth in the number of nuclear weapons states from the 25 expected in the 1960s to the 9 that exist today.13 In 2003, the US launched the Proliferation Security Initiative, a loosely structured grouping of countries that shares information and coordinates efforts to stop trafficking in nuclear proliferation related materials. Similar questions arise today about the governance of the internet and cyber activities. In its early days, the internet was largely American, but today China has twice as many users as the United States. Where once only Roman alphabet characters were used on the internet, now there are top-level domain names in Chinese, Arabic, and Cyrillic scripts, with more alphabets expected. And in 2014, the United States announced that it would relax the Commerce Department’s supervision of the internet’s “address book,” the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Some observers worried that this would open the way for authoritarian states to try to exert control and censor the addresses of opponents. Such fears seem exaggerated both on technical grounds and in their underlying premises. Not only would such censorship be difficult, but there are self-interested grounds for states to avoid such fragmentation of the internet. In addition, the descriptions in the decline in American power in the cyber issue are overstated. Not only does the United States remain the second largest user of the internet, but it is the home of eight of the ten largest global information companies.14 Moreover, when one looks at the composition of important non-state voluntary communities (like the Internet Engineering Task Force), one sees a disproportionate number of Americans participating because of their expertise. The loosening of US government influence over ICANN could be seen as a strategy for strengthening the institution and reinforcing the American multistakeholder philosophy rather than as a sign of defeat.15 Some cyber stability now exists, but the fact that cyber insecurity creates inherent risks for both the United States and its opponents provides a basis for possible agreements.16 In short, projections based on theories of hegemonic decline can be misleading about the realities of American leadership in international institutions and networks. Even with diminishing power resources, American leadership remains essential in creating public goods.

Proliferation causes extinction

Kroenig 12 – Matthew Kroenig is the Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University and a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. ("The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have A Future? Prepared for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center,” May 26, 2012, http://www.npolicy.org/article.php?aid=1182&tid=30)

Nuclear War. The greatest threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons is nuclear war. The more states in possession of nuclear weapons, the greater the probability that somewhere, someday, there is a catastrophic nuclear war. A nuclear exchange between the two superpowers during the Cold War could have arguably resulted in human extinction and a nuclear exchange between states with smaller nuclear arsenals, such as India and Pakistan, could still result in millions of deaths and casualties, billions of dollars of economic devastation, environmental degradation, and a parade of other horrors. To date, nuclear weapons have only been used in warfare once. In 1945, the United States used one nuclear weapon each on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a close. Many analysts point to sixty-five-plus-year tradition of nuclear non-use as evidence that nuclear weapons are unusable, but it would be naïve to think that nuclear weapons will never be used again. After all, analysts in the 1990s argued that worldwide economic downturns like the Great Depression were a thing of the past, only to be surprised by the dot-com bubble bursting in the later 1990s and the Great Recession of the late Naughts.[53] This author, for one, would be surprised if nuclear weapons are not used in my lifetime. Before reaching a state of MAD, new nuclear states go through a transition period in which they lack a secure second-strike capability. In this context, one or both states might believe that it has an incentive to use nuclear weapons first. For example, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons neither Iran, nor its nuclear-armed rival, Israel, will have a secure, second-strike capability. Even though it is believed to have a large arsenal, given its small size and lack of strategic depth, Israel might not be confident that it could absorb a nuclear strike and respond with a devastating counterstrike. Similarly, Iran might eventually be able to build a large and survivable nuclear arsenal, but, when it first crosses the nuclear threshold, Tehran will have a small and vulnerable nuclear force. In these pre-MAD situations, there are at least three ways that nuclear war could occur. First, the state with the nuclear advantage might believe it has a splendid first strike capability. In a crisis, Israel might, therefore, decide to launch a preemptive nuclear strike to disarm Iran’s nuclear capabilities and eliminate the threat of nuclear war against Israel. Indeed, this incentive might be further increased by Israel’s aggressive strategic culture that emphasizes preemptive action. Second, the state with a small and vulnerable nuclear arsenal, in this case Iran, might feel use ‘em or loose ‘em pressures. That is, if Tehran believes that Israel might launch a preemptive strike, Iran might decide to strike first rather than risk having its entire nuclear arsenal destroyed. Third, as Thomas Schelling has argued, nuclear war could result due to the reciprocal fear of surprise attack. If there are advantages to striking first, one state might start a nuclear war in the belief that war is inevitable and that it would be better to go first than to go second. In a future Israeli-Iranian crisis, for example, Israel and Iran might both prefer to avoid a nuclear war, but decide to strike first rather than suffer a devastating first attack from an opponent. Even in a world of MAD, there is a risk of nuclear war. Rational deterrence theory assumes nuclear-armed states are governed by rational leaders that would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. This assumption appears to have applied to past and current nuclear powers, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to hold in the future. For example, Iran’s theocratic government, despite its inflammatory rhetoric, has followed a fairly pragmatic foreign policy since 1979, but it contains leaders who genuinely hold millenarian religious worldviews who could one day ascend to power and have their finger on the nuclear trigger. We cannot rule out the possibility that, as nuclear weapons continue to spread, one leader will choose to launch a nuclear war, knowing full well that it could result in self-destruction. One does not need to resort to irrationality, however, to imagine a nuclear war under MAD. Nuclear weapons may deter leaders from intentionally launching full-scale wars, but they do not mean the end of international politics. As was discussed above, nuclear-armed states still have conflicts of interest and leaders still seek to coerce nuclear-armed adversaries. This leads to the credibility problem that is at the heart of modern deterrence theory: how can you threaten to launch a suicidal nuclear war? Deterrence theorists have devised at least two answers to this question. First, as stated above, leaders can choose to launch a limited nuclear war. This strategy might be especially attractive to states in a position of conventional military inferiority that might have an incentive to escalate a crisis quickly. During the Cold War, the United States was willing to use nuclear weapons first to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe given NATO’s conventional inferiority in continental Europe. As Russia’s conventional military power has deteriorated since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has come to rely more heavily on nuclear use in its strategic doctrine. Indeed, Russian strategy calls for the use of nuclear weapons early in a conflict (something that most Western strategists would consider to be escalatory) as a way to de-escalate a crisis. Similarly, Pakistan’s military plans for nuclear use in the event of an invasion from conventionally stronger India. And finally, Chinese generals openly talk about the possibility of nuclear use against a U.S. superpower in a possible East Asia contingency. Second, as was also discussed above, leaders can make a “threat that leaves something to chance.” They can initiate a nuclear crisis. By playing these risky games of nuclear brinkmanship, states can increase the risk of nuclear war in an attempt to force a less resolved adversary to back down. Historical crises have not resulted in nuclear war, but many of them, including the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, have come close. And scholars have documented historical incidents when accidents could have led to war.[57] When we think about future nuclear crisis dyads, such as India and Pakistan and Iran and Israel, there are fewer sources of stability that existed during the Cold War, meaning that there is a very real risk that a future Middle East crisis could result in a devastating nuclear exchange.

Exts. Peace

Soft power resolves a laundry list of impacts—reestablishing values is specifically key to projection

Lagon 11 Mark P. Lagon is the International Relations and Security Chair at Georgetown University's Master of Science in Foreign Service Program and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the former US Ambassador-at-Large to Combat Trafficking in Persons at the US Department of State. “The Value of Values: Soft Power Under Obama,” SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011, http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/value-values-soft-power-under-obama

What he hasn’t accomplished to any great degree is what most observers assumed would be the hallmark of his approach to foreign affairs—a full assertion of the soft power that makes hard power more effective. His 2008 campaign centered on a critique of President Bush’s overreliance on hard power. Obama suggested he would rehabilitate the damaged image of America created by these excesses and show that the United States was not a cowboy nation. Upon taking office, he made fresh-start statements, such as his June 2009 remarks in Cairo, and embraced political means like dialogue, respectful multilateralism, and the use of new media, suggesting that he felt the soft power to change minds, build legitimacy, and advance interests was the key element missing from the recent US approach to the world—and that he would quickly remedy that defect. Yet President Obama’s conception of soft power has curiously lacked the very quality that has made it most efficacious in the past—the values dimension . This may seem odd for a leader who is seen worldwide as an icon of morality, known for the motto “the audacity of hope” and his deployment of soaring rhetoric. Yet his governance has virtually ignored the values dimension of soft power, which goes beyond the tradecraft of diplomacy and multilateral consultation to aggressively assert the ideals of freedom in practical initiatives. The excision of this values dimension renders soft power a hollow concept. Related Essay Boxed In? The Women of Libya’s Revolution Ann Marlowe | ESSAY Libya’s leading women are eager to join in forming a new, post-Qaddafi government, but thus far they have been given seats on the sidelines. The Obama presidency has regularly avoided asserting meaningful soft power, particularly in its relations with three countries—Iran, Russia, and Egypt—where it might have made a difference not only for those countries but for American interests as well. His reaction to the challenges these countries have posed to the US suggest that it is not soft power itself that Obama doubts, but America’s moral standing to project it. Perhaps the most striking example of a lost opportunity to use moral soft power was in Iran. In March 2009, President Obama made an appeal in a video to Iran for a “new beginning” of diplomatic engagement. In April 2009, he said in an address in Prague that in trying to stem Iran’s nuclear arms efforts, his administration would “seek engagement with Iran based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” Two months later questions arose about President Ahmadinejad claiming victory over Mir Hussein Moussavi in the presidential election on June 12th. Within three days, there were large demonstrations in Tehran, Rasht, Orumiyeh, Zahedan, and Tabriz. As Iranians took to the streets, Obama had to choose whether to associate the US with the protestors or preserve what he appeared to believe was a possible channel of dialogue with Ahmadinejad on Iran’s nuclear program. For several days, the American president deliberately refused to embrace the Green Movement swelling in Iran’s streets to protest a stolen election—reaching up to three million in Tehran alone. Temporizing, he said, “It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be. We respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran.” But it was inevitable that the US would be scapegoated by Iranian leaders for meddling, even if it chose moral inaction. As Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass wrote in Newsweek seven months later: “I am a card-carrying realist on the grounds that ousting regimes and replacing them with something better is easier said than done. . . . Critics will say promoting regime change will encourage Iranian authorities to tar the opposition as pawns of the West. But the regime is already doing so. Outsiders should act to strengthen the opposition and to deepen rifts among the rulers. This process is underway . . . . Even a realist should recognize that it’s an opportunity not to be missed.” Eventually, probably as a result of the influence of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose opposition to Iran’s leadership she established as a senator, administration policy became more forthright. A year after the protests began, the president signed into law targeted sanctions on the Revolutionary Guard. Yet failing to clearly side with Ahmadinejad’s opponents in 2009 represented a serious loss of US credibility. It also failed to encourage the moral “change” that Obama had appeared to invoke during his campaign. Soft power and its ability to strengthen the protest movement was squandered. Early and active US backing for a more unified opposition might have buoyed and strengthened the Green opposition and helped it to better take advantage of subsequent divisions in the regime: parliamentarians petitioning to investigate payoffs to millions of people to vote for Ahmadinejad, friction between Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and efforts by the Revolutionary Guard to assert prevalence over politics. By supporting the opposition in Iran through soft power, the administration would not only have associated the US with the aspirations of the people in the streets of Tehran but also advanced the objective of dislodging a potentially nuclear rogue state. I t is particularly ironic that Obama policy toward Russia should have eschewed the projection of soft power given that the NSC’s senior director for Russia and Eurasia, Michael McFaul, is the administration official most closely identified in his career with the cause of democracy promotion. In Advancing Democracy Abroad , published just last year, he writes, “The American president must continue to speak out in support of democracy and human rights. Shying away from the ‘d’ word . . . would send a terrible signal to the activists around the world fighting for human rights and democratic change. . . . American diplomats must not check their values at the door.” In the book, McFaul offers an ambitious vision linking values to stability for Russia and Eurasia: “In Eurasia, a democratic Russia could become a force for regional stability . . . not unlike the role that Russia played in the beginning of the 1990s. A democratic Russia seeking once again to integrate into Western institutions also would cooperate more closely with the United States and Europe on international security issues.” But in its haste to “hit the reset button” on bilateral relations, the Obama White House ignored McFaul’s counsel. Instead of approaching the Russians with a set of firm moral expectations, the administration has courted President Medvedev as a counterweight to Putinism (missing the fact that rather than a countervailing force, Medvedev was, as noted in a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, Robin to Putin’s Batman). As events would show, Medvedev offered no real obstacle to Putin’s resumption of the presidency after a hiatus as prime minister to satisfy term limit laws. Nor, for that matter, is there any significant difference in policy between the Medvedev era and that which preceded it in terms of issues such as the occupation of Georgian territory, internal corruption, or silencing remaining independent media or business figures. Instead of establishing a foundation of clear principles in his reset of relations with the Putin regime, President Obama has seen relations with Russia in terms of a larger picture of strategic arms control. He believes proliferators like Iran and North Korea can be restrained if the major nuclear powers reduce their stockpiles, in fealty to the premises of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Hence, the New START Treaty was his singular focus with Russia and the grounds for his appeasement of Putinism. He seems never to have considered asserting a soft power that would have signaled to Russian opposition figures like Boris Nemtsov—badly beaten in December 2010 after flying home from speaking in the US—that the US places little trust in bargains with leaders shredding the rule of law in their daily governance. The Russian security state has chosen to cooperate with the US in a few areas it has concluded are in its own interest. It allowed passage of a watered-down UN Security Council resolution 1929, imposing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program, and cancelled plans to sell the S-300 air defense system to the Ahmadinejad regime. It has also cooperated on counterterrorism and US military access to Afghanistan. Yet would the United States have been unable to secure this discrete cooperation without “checking our values at the door,” in Michael McFaul’s phrase? The United States has achieved no cooperation from Russian leaders on issues such as the rule of law and an end to systematic intimidation and the arrests of opposition, press, and business figures, and indeed threats to American businesses’ private property rights and safety. Leaders of the Solidarity opposition movement continue to be detained, environmental nonprofits continue to be raided for trumped-up tax and software piracy irregularities, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in detention, and journalist Oleg Kashin was, like Boris Nemtsov, beaten. There is no evidence of concerted bilateral pressure by the Obama administration to protest Russian unwillingness to protect freedoms for its citizens. The lack of linkage between “realist” hard-power issues (such as nonproliferation) and domestic values (such as the rule of law) has limited rather than increased US influence with Russia. The Carnegie Endowment’s Matthew Rojansky and James Collins rightly conclude: “If the United States erects an impenetrable wall between bilateral cooperation and Russia’s domestic politics, the Kremlin will simply conclude Washington is willing to give ground on transparency, democracy, and rule of law in order to gain Russian cooperation on nonproliferation, Afghanistan, and other challenges.” Indeed, in June 2011, the undeterred Russian regime barred Nemtsov’s People’s Freedom Party from running in the December 2011 parliamentary elections. President Obama has selected Michael McFaul to be his ambassador to Russia. Sadly, dispatching the first non-diplomat in that role in three decades, not to mention a man whose vision of a just Russian policy for the US is at odds with the administration’s own practice, is unlikely to dislodge this values-free approach. The underwriting of Hosni Mubarak long predates the Obama administration. The unconditional gift of massive annual aid for the 1979 Camp David Accords lasted thirty-one years, spanning the administrations of six US presidents. It left Mubarak to squash democracy initiatives at home and force a binary choice on American policymakers between the Egyptian ruler and Muslim Brotherhood Islamists. Yet both before and after Egyptians took to the streets early this year to call for Mubarak’s ouster, President Obama lost chances to exercise soft power in a way that might have conditioned the eventual outcome in Egypt. The United States would have been much better poised to shape a transition and assist non-Islamist democrats in 2011 if the Obama administration had not cut democracy and governance aid in Egypt from $50 million in 2008 to $20 million in 2009 (to which Congress later restored $5 million). The outgoing Bush administration had cut economic aid for Egypt in the 2009 budget, but sustained democracy and governance programs. Urged by US ambassador to Egypt Margaret Scobey, the Obama administration cut those programs too. Cuts for civil society and NGOs were sharpest, from $32 million to $7 million in 2009. These steps made a mockery of Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech offering to “turn a page” in US-Muslim engagement. When the Egyptian people took to the streets to reject their leader as Tunisians just had, President Obama picked former ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner as special crisis envoy. Reflecting what was actually the president’s position at the outset, Wisner said to an annual conference in Munich, “We need to get a national consensus around the pre-conditions for the next step forward. The president [Mubarak] must stay in office to steer those changes.” He also opined, “I believe President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical—it’s his chance to write his own legacy.” This legacy was not a pretty thing as the Mubarak regime tried to resist the will of the Egyptian public with lethal force. Echoing his response nineteen months earlier in Iran, President Obama asserted only that the United States was determined not to be central to the Egyptian story, however it evolved. When he saw which way the truth was blowing on the streets of Cairo, the president recalibrated. Watching these developments, which had far more to do with image than policy, Financial Times correspondent Daniel Dombey surmised: “So when the demonstrations began, the White House struggled to catch up, changing its message day by day until it eventually sided with the protesters against the government of Hosni Mubarak . . . Now, US officials suggest, the president has finally embraced his ‘inner Obama’ . . . The White House has also indulged in a little spinning, depicting the president as a decisive leader who broke with the status quo view of state department Arabists.” In the March 2011 referendum on amendments to the Egyptian Constitution, forty-one percent of the Egyptian public turned out and backed the amendments by a seventy-seven percent tally. The leaders of the anti-Mubarak protests and leading presidential candidates Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa had urged Egyptians to turn out and reject the amendments, drafted by lawyers and judges picked by Egypt’s military rulers, in favor of a whole new constitution limiting expansive presidential powers. The Muslim Brotherhood backed the amendments, perhaps hoping to benefit from winning strong executive power. The “inner Obama” failed to place America squarely behind the relatively weak non-Islamist forces in Egyptian civil society when it would have counted. Despite large economic challenges, two protracted military expeditions, and the rise of China, India, Brazil, and other new players on the international scene, the United States still has an unrivaled ability to confront terrorism, nuclear proliferation, financial instability, pandemic disease, mass atrocity, or tyranny. Although far from omnipotent, the United States is still, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called it, “the indispensible nation.” Soft power is crucial to sustaining and best leveraging this role as catalyst. That President Obama should have excluded it from his vision of America’s foreign policy assets—particularly in the key cases of Iran, Russia, and Egypt—suggests that he feels the country has so declined, not only in real power but in the power of example, that it lacks the moral authority to project soft power. In the 1970s, many also considered the US in decline as it grappled with counterinsurgency in faraway lands, a crisis due to economic stagnation, and reliance on foreign oil. Like Obama, Henry Kissinger tried to manage decline in what he saw as a multipolar world, dressing up prescriptions for policy as descriptions of immutable reality. In the 1980s, however, soft power played a crucial part in a turnaround for US foreign policy. Applying it, President Reagan sought to transcend a nuclear balance of terror with defensive technologies, pushed allies in the Cold War (e.g., El Salvador, Chile, Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines) to liberalize for their own good, backed labor movements opposed to Communists in Poland and Central America, and called for the Berlin Wall to be torn down—over Foggy Bottom objections. This symbolism not only boosted the perception and the reality of US influence, but also hastened the demise of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. For Barack Obama, this was the path not taken. Even the Arab Spring has not cured his acute allergy to soft power. His May 20, 2011, speech on the Middle East and Northern Africa came four months after the Jasmine Revolution emerged. His emphasis on 1967 borders as the basis for Israeli-Palestinian peace managed to eclipse even his broad words (vice deeds) on democracy in the Middle East. Further, those words failed to explain his deeds in continuing to support some Arab autocracies (e.g., Bahrain’s, backed by Saudi forces) even as he gives tardy rhetorical support for popular forces casting aside other ones. To use soft power without hard power is to be Sweden. To use hard power without soft power is to be China. Even France, with its long commitment to realpolitik, has overtaken the United States as proponent and implementer of humanitarian intervention in Libya and Ivory Coast. When the American president has no problem with France combining hard and soft power better than the United States, something is seriously amiss.

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