ANSWER TO: Imperialism Sustainable

ANSWER TO: Imperialism Sustainable

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( ) Imperial decline inevitable – fiscal outlook and weakening dollar. Plan alone is insufficient to solve…and this evidence is comparative – it says economic future is BIGGEST factor of decline.

Layne, 2012

[Christopher Layne, professor at Texas A & M School of Government and Public Service. “The End of Pax Americana: How Western Decline Became Inevitable.” The Atlantic. April 26, 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/the-end-of-pax-americana-how-western-decline-became-inevitable/256388/]

Indeed, looking forward a decade, the two biggest domestic threats to U.S. power are the country's bleak fiscal outlook and deepening doubts about the dollar's future role as the international economy's reserve currency. Economists regard a 100 percent debt-to-GDP ratio as a flashing warning light that a country is at risk of defaulting on its financial obligations. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has warned that the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio could exceed that level by 2020--and swell to 190 percent by 2035. Worse, the CBO recently warned of the possibility of a "sudden credit event" triggered by foreign investors' loss of confidence in U.S. fiscal probity. In such an event, foreign investors could reduce their purchases of Treasury bonds, which would force the United States to borrow at higher interest rates. This, in turn, would drive up the national debt even more. America's geopolitical preeminence hinges on the dollar's role as reserve currency. If the dollar loses that status, U.S. primacy would be literally unaffordable. There are reasons to be concerned about the dollar's fate over the next two decades. U.S. political gridlock casts doubt on the nation's ability to address its fiscal woes; China is beginning to internationalize the renminbi, thus laying the foundation for it to challenge the dollar in the future; and history suggests that the dominant international currency is that of the nation with the largest economy. (In his piece on the global financial structure in this issue, Christopher Whalen offers a contending perspective, acknowledging the dangers posed to the dollar as reserve currency but suggesting such a change in the dollar's status is remote in the current global environment.)¶ Leaving aside the fate of the dollar, however, it is clear the United States must address its financial challenge and restore the nation's fiscal health in order to reassure foreign lenders that their investments remain sound. This will require some combination of budget cuts, entitlement reductions, tax increases and interest-rate hikes. That, in turn, will surely curtail the amount of spending available for defense and national security--further eroding America's ability to play its traditional, post-World War II global role.

ANSWER TO: Imperialism Good

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( ) Any claim of benevolence of “imperialism lite” is possible only through the erasure of historical precedent.

Zinn, 2008

[Howard Zinn, historian and former professor of political science at Boston University. “Empire or humanity?” April 2, 2008. http://www.countercurrents.org/zinn020408.htm]

The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for the United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit." We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design. It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this "influence" is benign, that the "purposes" -- whether in Luce's formulation or more recent ones -- are noble, that this is an "imperialism lite." As George Bush said in his second inaugural address: "Spreading liberty around the world… is the calling of our time." The New York Times called that speech "striking for its idealism." The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project -- Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her army... as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned here… will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world." For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes -- in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta. Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense -- that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization -- begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?

ANSWER TO: Imperialism is Benign

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( ) There are no “good intentions” behind American hegemony – imperial violence is always self-serving, it’s only packaged in humanitarian rhetoric.

Morefield, 2008

[Jeanne Morefield is an Associate Professor of Politics and Garrett Fellow at Whitman College. “Empire, Tragedy, and the Liberal State in the Writings of Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff.” Theory and Event, Vol. 11, Iss. 3. 2008]

There is, I argue, a deeply perfomative quality to the relentless reiteration of these questions in Ignatieff’s work. One is always aware as one reads that Ignatieff has already reached his reluctant conclusions, conclusions apparent from the very titles of the works themselves. A “burden” implies something that must be shouldered. A “lesser evil” suggests that the other option is unacceptable. Thus, the overall effect of this tortured line of questioning is cathartic rather than critical. The liberal subject of the western democratic state (Ignatieff’s intended audience) can feel both as though they have done hard thinking on empire and that, given this hard thinking, can support the imperial actions of their state. At the same time, we know the state is well meaning in its imperial actions because of the fact that its citizens pose difficult questions. These questions are all about “us” (how will imperialism hurt our democracy?), and “our” ethics (should we be involved in this endeavor?) but never about the relationship between “our” liberal state and the history of formal and informal imperialism more generally. Self-justification, for Ignatieff, thus never goes so far as to question the “self” that is justifying but only works to reinforce the liberal identity of the state. ¶

But, as James Tully has recently argued, liberal political identity itself was forged in the shadow of empire. Thus, modern forms of liberal citizenship and understandings of democratic governance in Europe emerged, Tully maintains, within the context of eighteenth and nineteenth century states that were both liberal and imperializing. In this “co-creation” of the west and the non-west we see the discursive and practical fixing of global economic practices, governmentalities, and political assumptions about citizenship structured around the relationship between modern and pre-modern, developed and developing, first and third world, that continues well into the “postcolonial” era through the exercise of American and European economic and military “hegemony.”54 Likewise, Thomas Pogge’s work examines the implications of this bipolar hegemony for emerging democracies in the contemporary world, precisely those dangerous, “stateless” societies that Ignatieff places beyond the pale of liberal order. Pogge argues that the desire of western, liberal, democratic states for cheap natural resources, coupled with an international monetary system that rewards authoritarian and corrupt governments who can deliver these resources, contribute to state failure. Hence, there is a relationship, Pogge argues, between what he terms the “international resource privilege” and the “international borrowing privilege” that encourages the proliferation of undemocratic and corrupt regimes in resource rich but “undeveloped” states.55¶

ANSWER TO: Transition Wars

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( ) No transition wars. Retrenchment does not embolden rising power and challengers, so US intervention isn’t inevitable. (This means we DO get our impact turns)

MacDonald and Parent, 2011

[Paul MacDonald, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College, and Joseph Parent, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami. "Graceful Decline?" International Security, Volume 35, No. 4, Spring 2011, pp. 7-44]

In this article, we question the logic and evidence of the retrenchment pessimists. To date there has been neither a comprehensive study of great power retrenchment nor a study that lays out the case for retrenchment as a practical or probable policy. This article fills these gaps by systematically examining the relationship between acute relative decline and the responses of great powers. We examine eighteen cases of acute relative decline since 1870 and advance three main arguments. ¶ First, we challenge the retrenchment pessimists’ claim that domestic or international constraints inhibit the ability of declining great powers to retrench. In fact, when states fall in the hierarchy of great powers, peaceful retrenchment is the most common response, even over short time spans. Based on the empirical record, we find that great powers retrenched in no less than eleven and no more than fifteen of the eighteen cases, a range of 61–83 percent. When international conditions demand it, states renounce risky ties, increase reliance on allies or adversaries, draw down their military obligations, and impose adjustments on domestic populations.¶ Second, we find that the magnitude of relative decline helps explain the extent of great power retrenchment. Following the dictates of neorealist theory, great powers retrench for the same reason they expand: the rigors of great power politics compel them to do so.12 Retrenchment is by no means easy, but necessity is the mother of invention, and declining great powers face powerful incentives to contract their interests in a prompt and proportionate manner. Knowing only a state’s rate of relative economic decline explains its corresponding degree of retrenchment in as much as 61 percent of the cases we examined.¶ Third, we argue that the rate of decline helps explain what forms great power retrenchment will take. How fast great powers fall contributes to whether these retrenching states will internally reform, seek new allies or rely more heavily on old ones, and make diplomatic overtures to enemies. Further, our analysis suggests that great powers facing acute decline are less likely to initiate or escalate militarized interstate disputes. Faced with diminishing resources, great powers moderate their foreign policy ambitions and offer concessions in areas of lesser strategic value. Contrary to the pessimistic conclusions of critics, retrenchment neither requires aggression nor invites predation. Great powers are able to rebalance their commitments through compromise, rather than conflict. In these ways, states respond to penury the same way they do to plenty: they seek to adopt policies that maximize security given available means. Far from being a hazardous policy, retrenchment can be successful. States that retrench often regain their position in the hierarchy of great powers. Of the fifteen great powers that adopted retrenchment in response to acute relative decline, 40 percent managed to recover their ordinal rank. In contrast, none of the declining powers that failed to retrench recovered their relative position. Pg. 9-10¶

ANSWER TO: American Dominance Good

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( ) Intentions don’t matter – American primacy is viewed as a threat and creates the conditions which make conflict possible.

Glaser, 2015

[John Glaser, researcher in Washington, DC. He has been published in the Washington Times, Reason, The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, The American Conservative, and the Daily Caller, among other outlets.. “Avoiding War With China: Revisited.” December 31, 2015. http://nationalinterest.org/feature/avoiding-war-china-revisited-14769]

Kazianis quotes former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman, who says U.S. primacy “provide[s] the collective public goods that have upheld the security of the international system and enabled a period of dramatically increased global economic activity and prosperity.” That’s not obvious. According to Michael D. Swaine, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “the notion that unequivocal U.S. predominance in the Western Pacific constitutes the only basis for long-term stability and prosperity across the Asia-Pacific is a dangerous, increasingly obsolete concept” that is “deeply rooted in both American exceptionalism and beliefs about the benefits of hegemonic power in the international order” that do not stand up to scrutiny.¶ Insisting on the indefinite perpetuation of U.S. primacy in Asia can be explained in part by this dubious belief that American power is inherently benign and, if other states don’t see it that way, that’s their failing. However benevolent Kazianis believes U.S. hegemony to be, when such formidable power is concentrated in a single state, it is difficult to reassure potential adversaries of its benign intentions.¶ As Robert Jervis wrote, “The inability to recognize that one’s own actions could be seen as menacing and the concomitant belief that the other’s hostility can only be explained by its aggressiveness help explain how conflicts can easily expand beyond that which an analysis of the objective situation would indicate is necessary.” U.S. statesmen in the postwar era, Jervis explains, “have displayed a similar inability to see that their country’s huge power, even if used for others’ good, represents a standing threat to much of the rest of the world.”

ANSWER TO: American Dominance Good

( ) Defenses of imperialism ignore a history of coercive state power, slavery, and mass murder.

Morefield, 2008
[Jeanne Morefield is an Associate Professor of Politics and Garrett Fellow at Whitman College. “Empire, Tragedy, and the Liberal State in the Writings of Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff.” Theory and Event, Vol. 11, Iss. 3. 2008]

Ferguson’s imperial narrative is thus rife with contemporary iterations of the kinds of contradictions that have so often haunted the liberal imagination. On the one hand, he proclaims his commitment to freedom, that is, freedom of movement, freedom of trade, freedom of speech, and free political practices embodied in parliamentary institutions.11 On the other hand, as the above quotation suggests, the free movement of capital also requires the imposition of order on an otherwise chaotic world so as to uphold “the conditions without which markets cannot function.” This in turn necessitates the coercive power of a political entity like the state (or trans-state association like empire) capable of enforcing this “peace and order” and “the rule of law.” Without such an entity, all hard working individuals would be subject to the perennial harassment of what Locke described as the “quarrelsome and contentious,” those who have, with their actions, put themselves outside of the liberal order. For Ferguson, the modern group equivalents of these un-reformable renegades are “stateless” societies, terrorist movements, and third world governments who “no matter how persuasive the arguments for economic openness” continue to “cling to their tariffs.”12¶ Early proponents of economic liberalism like Smith were perfectly willing to admit that governments were instituted for the express purpose of containing the “quarrelsome and contentious,” the un-propertied rabble.13 Governments could do good, according to Smith, they could promote the public welfare and make the commonwealth safe for commerce, but he was always clear eyed about the original purpose of government; to make the commonwealth safe for those with capital stock from those who had none. Ferguson, however, for all he positions himself as a cleareyed, economic realist, is never willing to make this admission. The purpose of Empire (and by this he means “Anglo” Empire, first British, then American) is always to spread fair and secure forms of governance and economic organization based on universal principles of liberty. The Anglophone imperial state is always, in its essence according to Ferguson, grounded on liberal values even when it appeared to be violating these values. This of course poses a problem for Ferguson’s reading of imperial history. The history of the British Empire is as rife with abuses of state power, with support for slavery and policies of racial discrimination, as it was with the spread of “western norms of law, order, and governance around the world.”14 Thus, Ferguson’s narration of imperial history must consistently confront the obdurate presence of the un-liberal in a way that simultaneously acknowledges these moments and smoothes them back into the unruffled sheen of the liberal endeavor. ¶

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