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***SCO advantage answersAT Russia-NATO ConflictNo competition over Arctic—NATO has accepted that it belongs to Russia Engdahl 10-BA in engineering and jurisprudence from Princeton University and graduate study in comparative economics at the University of Stockholm (3/20/10, Global Research, “Russia’s New Geopolitical Energy Calculus” by William Engdahl Russia also moves North to the Arctic Circle Completing Russia’s new geopolitical energy strategy, the remaining move is to the north, in the direction above the Arctic Circle. In August 2007, then-Russian President Vladimir Putin caught the notice of NATO and Washington when he announced that two Russian submarines had symbolically planted the Russian flag at a depth of over 4 kilometers on the Arctic Ocean floor, laying claim to the seabed resources. Then in March 2009 Russia announced that it would establish military bases along the northern coastline. New US NATO Supreme Commander Admiral James Stavridis expressed concern that Russian presence in the Arctic could pose serious problems for NATO.[29] In April 2009, the state-owned Russian news service RIA Novosti reported that the Russian Security Council had published an official policy paper on its Web site titled, "The fundamentals of Russian state policy in the Arctic up to 2020 and beyond." The paper described the principles guiding Russian policy in the arctic, saying it would involve establishing significant Russian army, border and coastal guard forces there "to guarantee Russia's military security in diverse military and political circumstances," according to the report.[30] In addition to staking claim to some of the world’s largest untapped oil and gas resources, Russia is clearly moving to pre-empt a further US expansion of its misleadingly named missile ‘defense’ to the Arctic Circle in echoes of the old Cold War era. Last September Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's envoy to NATO, told Vesti 24 television channel that the Northern Sea Route through the Arctic might provide the United States with an effective theater to position shipboard missile defenses to counter Russian weapons. His remarks followed the announcement by US President Barack Obama that the US would place such defenses on cruisers as a more technically advanced alternative.[31] A 2008 estimate by the US Government’s US Geological Survey (USGS) concluded that the area north of the Arctic Circle contains staggeringly large volumes of oil and natural gas. They estimated that more than 70% of the region’s undiscovered oil resources occur in five provinces: Arctic Alaska, Amerasia Basin, East Greenland Rift Basins, East Barents Basins, and West Greenland-East Canada. More than 70% of the undiscovered natural gas is believed located in three provinces, the West Siberian Basin, the East Barents Basins, and Arctic Alaska. Some 84% of the undiscovered oil and gas occurs offshore. The total undiscovered conventional oil and gas resources of the Arctic are estimated to be approximately 90 billion barrels of oil, 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids.[32] The main potential beneficiary is likely to be Russia which has the largest share of territory in the region. Contrary to widely held beliefs in the west, the Cold War did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 or the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, at least not for Washington. Seeing the opportunity to expand the reach of US military and political power, the Pentagon began a systematic modernization of its nuclear arsenal and a step-wise extension of NATO membership right to the doorstep of Moscow, something that then-Secretary of State James Baker III had pledged to Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev would not happen.[33] Washington lied. During the chaos of the Yeltsin years, Russia’s economy collapsed under IMF-mandated ‘shock therapy’ and systematic looting by western companies in cahoots with a handful of newly created Russian oligarchs. The re-emergence of Russia as a factor in world politics, however weakened from the economic shocks of the past two decades, has been based on a strategy that obviously has drawn from principles of asymetric warfare, economic as well as military. Russia’s present military preparedness is no match for the awesome Pentagon power projection. However, she still maintains the only nuclear strike force on the planet that is capable of posing a mortal threat to the military power of the Pentagon. In cooperation with China and its other Eurasian SCO partners, Russia is clearly using its energy as a geopolitical lever of the first order. The recent events in Ukraine and the rollback there of the ill-fated Washington Orange Revolution, in the context now of Moscow’s comprehensive energy politics, present Washington strategists with a grave challenge to their assumed global “Full Spectrum” dominance. The US debacle in Afghanistan and the uneasy state of affairs in US-occupied Iraq have done far more than any Russian military challenge to undermine the global influence of the United States as sole decision maker of a ‘unipolar world.’ Plan not key--Germany solves any risk of Arctic energy conflict Lin 09—their 1AC author- Visiting Fellow at American Institute for Contemporary German Studies and Researcher for Jane's Information Group (8/12/09, World Security Network, “NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: New Energy Geopolitics for the Transatlantic Alliance” Christina Lin, http://www.worldsecuritynetwork.com/showArticle3.cfm?article_id=17881) Territorial disputes in the Arctic, Caspian Sea, and elsewhere over energy resources and ensuing risks of military conflict are serious security challenges confronting the transatlantic alliance. How- ever, they present an opportunity for Germany to reassert its role as a partner in leadership in the triangulation of U.S.-German-SCO relations. In so doing, it will signal to the international community Germany’s ability as well as willingness to undertake global responsibilities, and eventually garner support for its long-term goal to have a proper place in the UN Security Council. History matters for Germany, and like Japan, postwar pacifist sentiments such as the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) are embedded in the constitution, whichlimits its use of force for defensive purposes. Any deployment of Bundeswehr for non-defensive purposes requires parliamentary approval. Nonetheless, over the past sixty years domestic pacifism and isolationism have slowly evolved with the changing times, and Germany has steadily asserted itself on the international stage in ways that commensurate with its growing power and status. It joined NATO in 1955; deployed armed forces outside of NATO territory in the 1990s in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia, Serbia-Montenegro, and Kosovo; and now it has the third largest troop contingent in NATO’s ISAF in Afghanistan. Like Japan in the 1980s, Germany in the 1990s experienced an awkward period with its U.S. partner of being an “economicgiant, military dwarf” when it comes to shouldering global security issues. However, the U.S.-Japan alliance is now the anchor of East Asian regional security architecture, and in many ways the U.S.- German partnership shows promises of being the anchor for transatlantic regional security architecture. Germany is now at the crossroads of making the choice to act as a global player, at a time when its U.S. friend and ally is being overburdened by its role as the world’s anchor of stability and over- stretched by two wars in the Middle East, as well as declining financial resources due to the eco- nomic crisis. Germany is a key partner in the EU and NATO to help the U.S. shoulder this burden, and it matters for the future of the alliance as well as for the West. As Clemens Wergin from Die Welt recently stated, if the U.S. one day becomes unable or unwilling to be the underpinning of a liberal democratic security architecture, “the world will either plunge into chaos—or autocratic regimes, like those in China and Russia, will take up that mission. This would not only be a heavy blow to the free world and what it stands for, but would probably also mean that the globe would be ruled by powers that define their global role in a much narrower and nationalistic sense than the U.S. and the West usually do.”In fact, on 30 July, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev met with Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Zardari, in Dusanbe, capital of Tajikistan, to discuss trade and energy ties and anti-terrorism in an attempt to bolster the Russian foothold in the “Af-Pak” theater in an increasing effort to counter-balance NATO operations.Timing is of the essence, and now is the time that Germany can and should step up as a partner in lead- ership to support the transatlantic alliance as the underpinning of a liberal democratic order. 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