Impact turns + answers – bfhmrs russia War Good
nc – XT Beckley/AT Entrapment
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Harbor Teacher Prep-subingsubing-Ho-Neg-Lamdl T1-Round3, Impact Turns Aff Neg - Michigan7 2019 BFHMRS
2nc – XT Beckley/AT EntrapmentBeckley uses the most comprehensive models, and every other empiric goes neg.Brooks and Wohlforth ’16 (Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, *Professor of Government in the Department of Government @ Dartmouth College; **the Daniel Webster Professor of Government in the Dartmouth College Department of Government, “America Abroad: Why the Sole Superpower Should Not Pull Back from the World,” Oxford University Press, 2016, Date Accessed: 7-17-2019, SB). Scholarship that has appeared in the three decades since the initial work on entrapment has in significant part rescued realism from these contradictions. Rational states might be expected to anticipate the danger of entrapment and seek to protect themselves from it. As it turns out, this is exactly what they do. Tongfi Kim, for example, shows that most alliance agreements are written to protect the allies from entrapment—a problem that is greater for the smaller partner whose bargaining leverage, as realism would expect, is general dwarfed by that of the great power patron. Given its huge power advantage, entrapment is just not a major problem for the United States, and certainly is not a persuasive rationale for retrenchment. As Kim observes, “Withdrawing from alliance commitments altogether would be a misguided policy, because these commitments are alone are not likely to drag the United States into a costly war. Additionally, these commitments enhance US influence on the allies and deterrence against potential enemies. Meanwhile, the United States has more power to entrap its allies, and other states have more reasons to accept entrapment in order to avoid abandonment by the sole super-ally. This helps to explain why it is hard to find a clear case of the United States being entrapped.38 Michael Beckley has undertaken the most comprehensive effort so far to find evidence for the broadest notion of entanglement, encompassing all the subtler mechanisms that might draw the United States into a conflict owing to an alliance commitment that is distinct from its national interest. He examined every militarized dispute involving the United States in the post-World War II era, asking simply whether entanglement mechanisms played a role. His conclusion: “Entrapment is rare.” Out of 188 disputes, he found entanglement only figured in five major episodes. “Even in these five cases, moreover, the extent of U.S entanglement is questionable, because there were other important drivers of American involvement, U.S. policymakers carefully limited support for allies, alliances restrained the United States from escalating its involvement, or all of the above.”39 The role that allies sometimes play in restraining escalatory impulses by the United States is noteworthy given its complete absence from the writings of retrenchment advocates. While advocates of retrenchment worry that allies will drag the United States into unnecessary wars, Beckley find that actually: The historical record shows that allies often help keep U.S. troops at home not only by bearing some of the burden for U.S. wars, but also by encouraging the United States to stay out of wars altogether. Large-scale retrenchment would sacrifice these and other benefits of alliances while doing little to compel U.S. leaders to define national interests modestly or choose military interventions selectively.40 Indeed, Beckley, Kim, and other researchers find that the best observable evidence of entrapment are cases that work in the opposite direction, with the United States dog wagging the allied tail, as analysts contend may have occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan.41 Many US allies contributed to those interventions less from a sense of immediate national interest than from a more long-term calculation about the value of the alliance or as part of a complex quid pro quo with Americans.42 For critics of these operations within many of those states, the notion of their country being the tail wagging the American dog would appear fantastical. More recent scholarship has also ratified Paul Schroeder’s analysis of alliances as not just power-aggregating mechanisms but also tools for controlling risks and exerting influence.43 As noted in chapter 6, empirical studies find strong support for the claim that defensive alliances work to deter war without making allied states more likely to initiate conflict.44 Much about the United States’ experience supplies evidence to support this view. Victor Cha shows how each post—World War II US-East Asian alliance was a “powerplay … designed to exert maximum control over the smaller ally’s actions,” where one key aim was “to constrain anticommunist allies in the region that might engage in aggressive behavior against adversaries that could entrap the United States in an unwanted larger war.”45 Recent developments in the US-Taiwan relationship—arguably the most salient entrapment concern for advocates of retrenchment—also constitute a case in point. After repeated cross-strait tensions in the 1990s and early 2000s, US officials became concerned that the policy of strategic ambiguity regarding support for Taiwan was leaving them exposed to the risk of entrapment. The George W. Bush administration adjusted the policy to clarify dual deterrence: deterring China from an unprovoked attack, but also deterring Taiwan from provocative moves toward independence that might give Beijing cause to resort to force.V Although it is impossible to rule out speculation that the United States might get dragged in no matter what, all the observable evidence is consistent with the view that major power patron can ward against entrapment and use their alliances to control risks. No entrapment – recent events prove Beckley’s thesis – BUT, disengaging alliances allows reckless U.S. intervention abroad.Download 0.83 Mb. Share with your friends:
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