Gonzaga Debate Institute 13 Hegemony Core Brovero/Verney/Hurwitz

Free trade is used to boost US hegemony

[Anders, Spring of 1996, “Comparing GATT and GATS: Regime Creation under and after Hegemony”, Review of the International Economy, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 65-94]

In this context the area of services was seen as one of great prospects, not the least since services trade grew substantially faster than trade in goods. Between 1970 and 1980 the annual rate of growth for trade in services was 19 percent compared with 5.4 percent for trade in goods. Furthermore, in the late 1980s, services accounted for approximately 70 percent of US gross national product. The latter led American policy makers to assume that the United States had a comparative advantage in the field of services, which could, and indeed ought to, be further exploited through liberalization of services markets in other countries. Thus, the quest for GATS was orchestrated.

The considerations behind the interest in an international regime for trade in services were very different from those that were instrumental in the US promotion of the creation of GAIT. Nationally, US business interests played a more pronounced role in starting negotiations on GATS, than they did in the prelude to GATT. The American impetus for negotiations on services arose primarily as insurance, financial services, travel and tourism, and information-based service sectors began to press for negotiations aimed at removing restrictions that impeded trade with other countries. According to Balassa: 'the fact that US political and business groups were in the vanguard in introducing services issues in the trade negotiations reflects the belief that liberalizing trade in services would benefit the United States' The negotiations on a services agreement were seen as a promise of 'new economic vitality and balance-of-trade surpluses in an era of declining competitiveness and excess capacity in traditional industries'.24T his was important for Congress when it gave the executive branch the mandate to pursue negotiations in the area of services within the auspices of GATT.25

Proliferation

Proliferation Undercuts Hegemony

(Michael Lind, June 2007, “Beyond American Hegemony”, http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2007/beyond_american_hegemony_5381, Accessed 7-6-13, DAG)

The Cold War officially ended in Paris in 1990, but the United States has continued to pursue a dual containment strategy based on three principles: dissuasion, reassurance and coercive non-proliferation.

Dissuasion -- directed at actual or potential challengers to the United States -- commits the United States to outspend all other great military powers, whether friend or foe. This policy’s goal -- in the words of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance draft leaked from then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s Pentagon -- is the dissuasion or "deterring [of] potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."

By the end of the 1990s, as Charles Krauthammer noted in these pages four years ago:

"The result is the dominance of a single power unlike anything ever seen. Even at its height Britain could always be seriously challenged by the next greatest powers. Britain had a smaller army than the land powers of Europe and its navy was equaled by the next two navies combined. Today, American military spending exceeds that of the next twenty countries combined. Its navy, air force and space power are unrivaled."

This approach flies in the face of the strategy usually adopted by traditional status quo great powers, which sought to ensure that they belonged to alliances with resources that exceeded those of potential challengers. It is no surprise that, despite the absence of any threat to the United States equivalent to that of the Soviet Union, our defense spending today, as a share of our total GDP, is nearly at the Cold War average.

High levels of defense expenditures are not merely to overawe potential challengers. (In outlining possible competitors, Krauthammer noted, "Only China grew in strength, but coming from so far behind it will be decades before it can challenge American primacy -- and that assumes that its current growth continues unabated.") To again quote from the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, "we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order." Reassurance, the second prong of the hegemonic strategy, entails convincing major powers not to build up their military capabilities, allowing the United States to assume the burdens of ensuring their security instead.

In other words, while outspending allies like Germany and Japan on defense, the United States should be prepared to fight wars on behalf of Germany and Japan, sparing them the necessity of re-arming -- for fear that these countries, having "renationalized" their defense policies and rearmed, might become hostile to the United States at some future date. For example, even though the threats emanating from the spillover of the Balkan conflicts affected Germany and its neighbors far more than a geographically far-removed United States, Washington took the lead in waging the 1999 Kosovo war -- in part to forestall the emergence of a Germany prepared to act independently. And the Persian Gulf War was, among other things, a reassurance war on behalf of Japan -- far more dependent on Persian Gulf oil than the United States -- confirmed by the fact that Japan paid a substantial portion of the United States’ costs in that conflict. Today, the great question is whether or not two other Asian giants -- India and China -- will eschew the development of true blue-water navies and continue to allow the United States to take responsibility for keeping the Gulf open.

Finally, the global hegemony strategy insists that America’s safety depends not on the absence of a hostile hegemon in Europe, Asia and the Middle East -- the traditional American approach -- but on the permanent presence of the United States itself as the military hegemon of Europe, the military hegemon of Asia and the military hegemon of the Middle East. In each of these areas, the regional powers would consent to perpetual U.S. domination either voluntarily, because the United States assumed their defense burdens (reassurance), or involuntarily, because the superior U.S. military intimidated them into acquiescence (dissuasion).

American military hegemony in Europe, Asia and the Middle East depends on the ability of the U.S. military to threaten and, if necessary, to use military force to defeat any regional challenge-but at a relatively low cost. This is because the American public is not prepared to pay the costs necessary if the United States is to be a "hyperpower."

Given this premise, the obsession with the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and other Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) makes perfect sense. WMD are defensive weapons that offer poor states a possible defensive shield against the sword of unexcelled U.S. conventional military superiority. The success of the United States in using superior conventional force to defeat Serbia and Iraq (twice) may have accelerated the efforts of India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran to obtain nuclear deterrents. As an Indian admiral observed after the Gulf War, "The lesson is that you should not go to war with the United States unless you have nuclear weapons." Moreover, it is clear that the United States treats countries that possess WMD quite differently from those that do not.

So proliferation undermines American regional hegemony in two ways. First, it forces the U.S. military to adopt costly and awkward strategies in wartime. Second, it discourages intimidated neighbors of the nuclear state from allowing American bases and military build-ups on its soil.

With this in mind, proponents of the hegemony strategy often advocate a policy of preventive war to keep countries deemed to be hostile to the United States from obtaining nuclear weapons or WMD. Preventive war (as distinguished from pre-emptive attack to avert an impending strike) is not only a violation of international law but also a repudiation of America’s own traditions. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson all ruled out preventive wars against the Soviet Union and China to cripple or destroy their nuclear programs, and President Ronald Reagan, along with Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, denounced Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak. Yet, by 2002, a bipartisan majority in the Congress authorized President George W. Bush to wage the first -- and to date the only -- preventive war in American history against Iraq. Although it turned out to be a disaster, it was perfectly consistent with the radical neoconservative variant of U.S. global hegemony strategy.