Kritik Toolbox Supplement – bfhhr general

The alt fails - realism is a permanent part of the thinking of foreign policy actors

Therefore, in a third step, this chapter also claims that it is impossible just to heap realism onto the dustbin of history and start anew. This is a non-option. Although realism as a strictly causal theory has been a disappointment, various realist assumptions are well alive in the minds of many practitioners and observers of international affairs. Although it does not correspond to a theory which helps us understand real world with objective laws, it is a world-view which suggests thoughts about, and which permeates our daily language for making sense of it. Realism had been a rich, albeit very contestable, reservoir of lessons of the past, of metaphors and historical analogies, which, in the hards of its most gifted representatives, have been proposed, at times imposed, and reproduced as guides to a common understanding of international affairs. Realism is alive in the collective memory and self-understanding of our (i.e. Western) foreign policy elite and public, whether educated or not. Hence, we cannot but deal with it. For this reason, forgetting realims is also questionable. Of course, academic observers should not bow to the whims of daily politics. But staying at a distance, or being critical, does not mean that they should lose the capacity to understand the language of those who make significant decisions, not only in the government, but also in firms, NGOs, and other institutions. To the contrary this understanding as increasingly varied as it may be, is a prerequisite for their very profession. More particularly, it is a prerequisite for opposing the more irresponsible claims made in the name, although not always necessarily in the spirit, of realism.

Evolution proves

Studies and pragmatism illustrate that nations act in a realist manner

Mearsheimer 1 (John, professor of international relations at the University of Chicago. “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”. Accessed at http://www.irchina.org/xueke/fangfa/view.asp?id=114)

The optimists’ claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact, all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power and are destined to compete for power among themselves for the foreseeable future. Consequently, realism will offer the most powerful explanations of international politics over the next century, and this will be true even if the debates among academic and policy elites are dominated by non-realist theories. In short, the real world remains a realist world. States still fear each other and seek to gain power at each other’s expense, because international anarchy—the driving force behind great-power behavior—did not change with the end of the Cold War, and there are few signs that such change is likely any time soon. States remain the principal actors in world politics and there is still no night watchman standing above them. For sure, the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a major shift in the global distribution of power. But it did not give rise to a change in the anarchic structure of the system, and without that kind of profound change, there is no reason to expect the great powers to behave much differently in the new century than they did in previous centuries. Indeed, considerable evidence from the 1990s indicates that power politics has not disappeared from Europe and Northeast Asia, the regions in which there are two or more great powers, as well as possible great powers such as Germany and Japan. There is no question, however, that the competition for power over the past decade has been low-key. Still, there is potential for intense security competition among the great powers that might lead to a major war. Probably the best evidence of that possibility is the fact that the United States maintains about one hundred thousand troops each in Europe and in Northeast Asia for the explicit purpose of keeping the major states in each region at peace.

realism – uncertainty

Uncertainty justifies realism – even under a cooperative framework, the malleability of discourse proves that leaders will always calculate action based on capability

Copeland 6 (Associate Professor and Director Dept. of Government and Foreign Affairs @ University of Virginia (Dale, “The Constructivist Challenge to Structural Realism: A Review Essay”, Constructivism and International Relations, Alexander Wendt and His Critics)

Notwithstanding Wendt’s important contributions to international relations theory, his critique of structural realism has inherent flaws. Most important, it does not adequately address a critical aspect of the realist worldview: the problem of uncertainty. For structural realists, it is states’ uncertainty about the present and especially the future intentions of others that makes the levels and trends in relative power such fundamental causal variables. Contrary to Wendt’s claim that realism must smuggle in states with differently constituted interests to explain why systems sometimes fall into conflict, neorealists argue that uncertainty about the other’s present interests—whether the other is driven by security or nonsecurity motives—can be enough to lead security-seeking states to fight. This problem is exacerbated by the incentives that actors have to deceive one another, an issue Wendt does not address. Yet even when states are fairly sure that the other is also a security seeker, they know that it might change its spots later on. States must therefore worry about any decline in their power, lest the other turn aggressive after achieving superiority. Wendt’s building of a systemic constructivist theory—and his bracketing of unit-level processes—thus presents him with an ironic dilemma. It is the very mutability of polities as emphasized by domestic-level constructivists—that states may change because of domestic processes independent of international interaction—that makes prudent leaders so concerned about the future. If diplomacy can have only a limited effect on another’s character or regime type, then leaders must calculate the other’s potential to attack later should it acquire motives for expansion. In such an environment of future uncertainty, levels and trends in relative power will thus act as a key constraint on state behavior. The problem of uncertainty complicates Wendt’s efforts to show that anarchy has no particular logic, but only three different ideational instantiations in history—as Hobbesian, Lockean, or Kantian cultures, depending on the level of actor compliance to certain behavioral norms. By differentiating these cultures in terms of the degree of cooperative behavior exhibited by states, Wendt’s analysis reinforces the very dilemma underpinning the realist argument. If the other is acting cooperatively, how is one to know whether this reflects its peaceful character, or is just a façade masking aggressive desires? Wendt’s discussion of the different degrees of internalization of the three cultures only exacerbates the problem. What drives behavior at the lower levels of internalization is precisely what is not shared between actors—their private incentives to comply for short-term selfish reasons. This suggests that the neorealist and neoliberal paradigms, both of which emphasize the role of uncertainty when internalization is low or nonexistent, remain strong competitors to constructivism in explaining changing levels of cooperation through history. And because Wendt provides little empirical evidence to support his view in relation to these competitors, the debate over which paradigm possesses greater explanatory power is still an open one.

at: complexity

Predictions might be complex – but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. We should try to change the world.

Garrett 12 (Banning, director of the Asia Program and Strategic Foresight Initiative at the Atlantic Council, 01-23-12, “In Search of Sand Piles and Butterflies,” da 7-20-15, http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/careers/blogs/futuresource/in-search-of-sand-piles-and-butterflies, mee)

“Disruptive change” that produces “strategic shocks” has become an increasing concern for policymakers, shaken by momentous events of the last couple of decades that were not on their radar screens – from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the 2008 financial crisis and the “Arab Spring.” These were all shocks to the international system, predictable perhaps in retrospect but predicted by very few experts or officials on the eve of their occurrence. This “failure” to predict specific strategic shocks does not mean we should abandon efforts to foresee disruptive change or look at all possible shocks as equally plausible. Most strategic shocks do not “come out of the blue.” We can understand and project long-term global trends and foresee at least some of their potential effects, including potential shocks and disruptive change. We can construct alternative futures scenarios to envision potential change, including strategic shocks. Based on trends and scenarios, we can take actions to avert possible undesirable outcomes or limit the damage should they occur. We can also identify potential opportunities or at least more desirable futures that we seek to seize through policy course corrections. We should distinguish “strategic shocks” that are developments that could happen at any time and yet may never occur. This would include such plausible possibilities as use of a nuclear device by terrorists or the emergence of an airborne human-to-human virus that could kill millions. Such possible but not inevitable developments would not necessarily be the result of worsening long-term trends. Like possible terrorist attacks, governments need to try to prepare for such possible catastrophes though they may never happen. But there are other potential disruptive changes, including those that create strategic shocks to the international system, that can result from identifiable trends that make them more likely in the future—for example, growing demand for food, water, energy and other resources with supplies failing to keep pace. We need to look for the “sand piles” that the trends are building and are subject to collapse at some point with an additional but indeterminable additional “grain of sand” and identify the potential for the sudden appearance of “butterflies” that might flap their wings and set off hurricanes. Mohamed Bouazizi, who immolated himself December 17, 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, was the butterfly who flapped his wings and (with the “force multiplier” of social media) set off a hurricane that is still blowing throughout the Middle East. Perhaps the metaphors are mixed, but the butterfly’s delicate flapping destabilized the sand piles (of rising food prices, unemployed students, corrupt government, etc.) that had been building in Tunisia, Egypt, and much of the region. The result was a sudden collapse and disruptive change that has created a strategic shock that is still producing tremors throughout the region. But the collapse was due to cumulative effects of identifiable and converging trends. When and what form change will take may be difficult if not impossible to foresee, but the likelihood of a tipping point being reached—that linear continuation of the present into the future is increasingly unlikely—can be foreseen. Foreseeing the direction of change and the likelihood of discontinuities, both sudden and protracted, is thus not beyond our capabilities. While efforts to understand and project long-term global trends cannot provide accurate predictions, for example, of the GDPs of China, India, and the United States in 2030, looking at economic and GDP growth trends, can provide insights into a wide range of possible outcomes. For example, it is a useful to assess the implications if the GDPs of these three countries each grew at currently projected average rates – even if one understands that there are many factors that can and likely will alter their trajectories. The projected growth trends of the three countries suggest that at some point in the next few decades, perhaps between 2015 and 2030, China’s GDP will surpass that of the United States. And by adding consideration of the economic impact of demographic trends (China’s aging and India’s youth bulge), there is a possibility that India will surpass both China and the US, perhaps by 2040 or 2050, to become the world’s largest economy. These potential shifts of economic power from the United States to China then to India would likely prove strategically disruptive on a global scale. Although slowly developing, such disruptive change would likely have an even greater strategic impact than the Arab Spring. The “rise” of China has already proved strategically disruptive, creating a potential China-United States regional rivalry in Asia two decades after Americans fretted about an emerging US conflict with a then-rising Japan challenging American economic supremacy. Despite uncertainty surrounding projections, foreseeing the possibility (some would say high likelihood) that China and then India will replace the United States as the largest global economy has near-term policy implications for the US and Europe. The potential long-term shift in economic clout and concomitant shift in political power and strategic position away from the US and the West and toward the East has implications for near-term policy choices. Policymakers could conclude, for example, that the West should make greater efforts to bring the emerging (or re-emerging) great powers into close consultation on the “rules of the game” and global governance as the West’s influence in shaping institutions and behavior is likely to significantly diminish over the next few decades. The alternative to finding such a near-term accommodation could be increasing mutual suspicions and hostility rather than trust and growing cooperation between rising and established powers—especially between China and the United States—leading to a fragmented, zero-sum world in which major global challenges like climate change and resource scarcities are not addressed and conflict over dwindling resources and markets intensifies and even bleeds into the military realm among the major actors. Neither of these scenarios may play out, of course. Other global trends suggest that sometime in the next several decades, the world could encounter a “hard ceiling” on resources availability and that climate change could throw the global economy into a tailspin, harming China and India even more than the United States. In this case, perhaps India and China would falter economically leading to internal instability and crises of governance, significantly reducing their rates of economic growth and their ability to project power and play a significant international role than might otherwise have been expected. But this scenario has other implications for policymakers, including dangers posed to Western interests from “failure” of China and/or India, which could produce huge strategic shocks to the global system, including a prolonged economic downturn in the West as well as the East. Thus, looking at relatively slowly developing trends can provide foresight for necessary course corrections now to avert catastrophic disruptive change or prepare to be more resilient if foreseeable but unavoidable shocks occur. Policymakers and the public will press for predictions and criticize government officials and intelligence agencies when momentous events “catch us by surprise.” But unfortunately, as both Yogi Berra and Neils Bohr are credited with saying, “prediction is very hard, especially about the future.” One can predict with great accuracy many natural events such as sunrise and the boiling point of water at sea level. We can rely on the infallible predictability of the laws of physics to build airplanes and automobiles and iPhones. And we can calculate with great precision the destruction footprint of a given nuclear weapon. Yet even physical systems like the weather as they become more complex, become increasingly difficult and even inherently impossible to predict with precision. With human behavior, specific predictions are not just hard, but impossible as uncertainty is inherent in the human universe. As futurist Paul Saffo wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2007, “prediction is possible only in a world in which events are preordained and no amount of actions in the present can influence the future outcome.” One cannot know for certain what actions he or she will take in the future much less the actions of another person, a group of people or a nation state. This obvious point is made to dismiss any idea of trying to “predict” what will occur in the future with accuracy, especially the outcomes of the interplay of many complex factors, including the interaction of human and natural systems. More broadly, the human future is not predetermined but rather depends on human choices at every turning point, cumulatively leading to different alternative outcomes. This uncertainty about the future also means the future is amenable to human choice and leadership. Trends analyses—including foreseeing trends leading to disruptive change—are thus essential to provide individuals, organizations and political leaders with the strategic foresight to take steps mitigate the dangers ahead and seize the opportunities for shaping the human destiny. Peter Schwartz nearly a decade ago characterized the convergence of trends and disruptive change as “inevitable surprises.” He wrote in Inevitable Surprises that “in the coming decades we face many more inevitable surprises: major discontinuities in the economic, political and social spheres of our world, each one changing the ‘rules of the game’ as its played today. If anything, there will be more, no fewer, surprises in the future, and they will all be interconnected. Together, they will lead us into a world, ten to fifteen years hence, that is fundamentally different from the one we know today. Understanding these inevitable surprises in our future is critical for the decisions we have to make today …. We may not be able to prevent catastrophe (although sometimes we can), but we can certainly increase our ability to respond, and our ability to see opportunities that we would otherwise miss.”

at: structural violence

War turns structural violence but not the other way around

Joshua Goldstein, Int’l Rel Prof @ American U, 2001, War and Gender, p. 412

First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the approach, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.9 So,”if you want peace, work for peace.” Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most important way to “reverse women’s oppression.” The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this book’s evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.

at: intervetionism

No risk of heg bad---US engagement and reintervention are inevitable---it’s only a question of making it effective

Robert Kagan 11 is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. "The Price of Power" Jan 24 Vol 16 No18 www.weeklystandard.com/articles/price-power_533696.html?page=3

In theory, the United States could refrain from intervening abroad. But, in practice, will it? Many assume today that the American public has had it with interventions, and Alice Rivlin certainly reflects a strong current of opinion when she says that “much of the public does not believe that we need to go in and take over other people’s countries.” That sentiment has often been heard after interventions, especially those with mixed or dubious results. It was heard after the four-year-long war in the Philippines, which cost 4,000 American lives and untold Filipino casualties. It was heard after Korea and after Vietnam. It was heard after Somalia. Yet the reality has been that after each intervention, the sentiment against foreign involvement has faded, and the United States has intervened again. ¶ Depending on how one chooses to count, the United States has undertaken roughly 25 overseas interventions since 1898: Cuba, 1898 The Philippines, 1898-1902 China, 1900 Cuba, 1906 Nicaragua, 1910 & 1912 Mexico, 1914 Haiti, 1915 Dominican Republic, 1916 Mexico, 1917 World War I, 1917-1918 Nicaragua, 1927 World War II, 1941-1945 Korea, 1950-1953 Lebanon, 1958 Vietnam, 1963-1973 Dominican Republic, 1965 Grenada, 1983 Panama, 1989 First Persian Gulf war, 1991 Somalia, 1992 Haiti, 1994 Bosnia, 1995 Kosovo, 1999 Afghanistan, 2001-present Iraq, 2003-present¶ That is one intervention every 4.5 years on average. Overall, the United States has intervened or been engaged in combat somewhere in 52 out of the last 112 years, or roughly 47 percent of the time. Since the end of the Cold War, it is true, the rate of U.S. interventions has increased, with an intervention roughly once every 2.5 years and American troops intervening or engaged in combat in 16 out of 22 years, or over 70 percent of the time, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. ¶ The argument for returning to “normal” begs the question: What is normal for the United States? The historical record of the last century suggests that it is not a policy of nonintervention. This record ought to raise doubts about the theory that American behavior these past two decades is the product of certain unique ideological or doctrinal movements, whether “liberal imperialism” or “neoconservatism.” Allegedly “realist” presidents in this era have been just as likely to order interventions as their more idealistic colleagues. George H.W. Bush was as profligate an intervener as Bill Clinton. He invaded Panama in 1989, intervened in Somalia in 1992—both on primarily idealistic and humanitarian grounds—which along with the first Persian Gulf war in 1991 made for three interventions in a single four-year term. Since 1898 the list of presidents who ordered armed interventions abroad has included William McKinley, Theodore Roose-velt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. One would be hard-pressed to find a common ideological or doctrinal thread among them—unless it is the doctrine and ideology of a mainstream American foreign policy that leans more toward intervention than many imagine or would care to admit. ¶ Many don’t want to admit it, and the only thing as consistent as this pattern of American behavior has been the claim by contemporary critics that it is abnormal and a departure from American traditions. The anti-imperialists of the late 1890s, the isolationists of the 1920s and 1930s, the critics of Korea and Vietnam, and the critics of the first Persian Gulf war, the interventions in the Balkans, and the more recent wars of the Bush years have all insisted that the nation had in those instances behaved unusually or irrationally. And yet the behavior has continued.¶ To note this consistency is not the same as justifying it. The United States may have been wrong for much of the past 112 years. Some critics would endorse the sentiment expressed by the historian Howard K. Beale in the 1950s, that “the men of 1900” had steered the United States onto a disastrous course of world power which for the subsequent half-century had done the United States and the world no end of harm. But whether one lauds or condemns this past century of American foreign policy—and one can find reasons to do both—the fact of this consistency remains. It would require not just a modest reshaping of American foreign policy priorities but a sharp departure from this tradition to bring about the kinds of changes that would allow the United States to make do with a substantially smaller force structure. ¶ Is such a sharp departure in the offing? It is no doubt true that many Americans are unhappy with the on-going warfare in Afghanistan and to a lesser extent in Iraq, and that, if asked, a majority would say the United States should intervene less frequently in foreign nations, or perhaps not at all. It may also be true that the effect of long military involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan may cause Americans and their leaders to shun further interventions at least for a few years—as they did for nine years after World War I, five years after World War II, and a decade after Vietnam. This may be further reinforced by the difficult economic times in which Americans are currently suffering. The longest period of nonintervention in the past century was during the 1930s, when unhappy memories of World War I combined with the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression to constrain American interventionism to an unusual degree and produce the first and perhaps only genuinely isolationist period in American history. ¶ So are we back to the mentality of the 1930s? It wouldn’t appear so. There is no great wave of isolationism sweeping the country. There is not even the equivalent of a Patrick Buchanan, who received 3 million votes in the 1992 Republican primaries. Any isolationist tendencies that might exist are severely tempered by continuing fears of terrorist attacks that might be launched from overseas. Nor are the vast majority of Americans suffering from economic calamity to nearly the degree that they did in the Great Depression. ¶ Even if we were to repeat the policies of the 1930s, however, it is worth recalling that the unusual restraint of those years was not sufficient to keep the United States out of war. On the contrary, the United States took actions which ultimately led to the greatest and most costly foreign intervention in its history. Even the most determined and in those years powerful isolationists could not prevent it. ¶ Today there are a number of obvious possible contingencies that might lead the United States to substantial interventions overseas, notwithstanding the preference of the public and its political leaders to avoid them. Few Americans want a war with Iran, for instance. But it is not implausible that a president—indeed, this president—might find himself in a situation where military conflict at some level is hard to avoid. The continued success of the international sanctions regime that the Obama administration has so skillfully put into place, for instance, might eventually cause the Iranian government to lash out in some way—perhaps by attempting to close the Strait of Hormuz. Recall that Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor in no small part as a response to oil sanctions imposed by a Roosevelt administration that had not the slightest interest or intention of fighting a war against Japan but was merely expressing moral outrage at Japanese behavior on the Chinese mainland. Perhaps in an Iranian contingency, the military actions would stay limited. But perhaps, too, they would escalate. One could well imagine an American public, now so eager to avoid intervention, suddenly demanding that their president retaliate. Then there is the possibility that a military exchange between Israel and Iran, initiated by Israel, could drag the United States into conflict with Iran. Are such scenarios so farfetched that they can be ruled out by Pentagon planners? ¶ Other possible contingencies include a war on the Korean Peninsula, where the United States is bound by treaty to come to the aid of its South Korean ally; and possible interventions in Yemen or Somalia, should those states fail even more than they already have and become even more fertile ground for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. And what about those “humanitarian” interventions that are first on everyone’s list to be avoided? Should another earthquake or some other natural or man-made catastrophe strike, say, Haiti and present the looming prospect of mass starvation and disease and political anarchy just a few hundred miles off U.S. shores, with the possibility of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of refugees, can anyone be confident that an American president will not feel compelled to send an intervention force to help?¶ Some may hope that a smaller U.S. military, compelled by the necessity of budget constraints, would prevent a president from intervening. More likely, however, it would simply prevent a president from intervening effectively. This, after all, was the experience of the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both because of constraints and as a conscious strategic choice, the Bush administration sent too few troops to both countries. The results were lengthy, unsuccessful conflicts, burgeoning counterinsurgencies, and loss of confidence in American will and capacity, as well as large annual expenditures. Would it not have been better, and also cheaper, to have sent larger numbers of forces initially to both places and brought about a more rapid conclusion to the fighting? The point is, it may prove cheaper in the long run to have larger forces that can fight wars quickly and conclusively, as Colin Powell long ago suggested, than to have smaller forces that can’t. Would a defense planner trying to anticipate future American actions be wise to base planned force structure on the assumption that the United States is out of the intervention business? Or would that be the kind of penny-wise, pound-foolish calculation that, in matters of national security, can prove so unfortunate?¶ The debates over whether and how the United States should respond to the world’s strategic challenges will and should continue. Armed interventions overseas should be weighed carefully, as always, with an eye to whether the risk of inaction is greater than the risks of action. And as always, these judgments will be merely that: judgments, made with inadequate information and intelligence and no certainty about the outcomes. No foreign policy doctrine can avoid errors of omission and commission. But history has provided some lessons, and for the United States the lesson has been fairly clear: The world is better off, and the United States is better off, in the kind of international system that American power has built and defended.

at: structural violence

Heg decreases structural violence---any alt dooms humanity to deprivation

Thomas P.M. Barnett 11, Former Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College American military geostrategist and Chief Analyst at Wikistrat, worked as the Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation in the Department of Defense, September 12, 2011, “The New Rules: The Rise of the Rest Spells U.S. Strategic Victory,” World Politics Review, online: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/9973/the-new-rules-the-rise-of-the-rest-spells-u-s-strategic-victory

First the absurdity: A few of the most over-the-top Bush-Cheney neocons did indeed promote a vision of U.S. primacy by which America shouldn't be afraid to wage war to keep other rising powers at bay. It was a nutty concept then, and it remains a nutty concept today. But since it feeds a lot of major military weapons system purchases, especially for the China-centric Air Force and Navy, don't expect it to disappear so long as the Pentagon's internal budget fights are growing in intensity. ¶ Meanwhile, the Chinese do their stupid best to fuel this outdated logic by building a force designed to keep America out of East Asia just as their nation's dependency on resources flowing from unstable developing regions skyrockets. With America's fiscal constraints now abundantly clear, the world's primary policing force is pulling back, while that force's implied successor is nowhere close to being able to field a similar power-projection capacity -- and never will be. So with NATO clearly stretched to its limits by the combination of Afghanistan and Libya, a lot of future fires in developing regions will likely be left to burn on their own. We'll just have to wait and see how much foreign commentators delight in that G-Zero dynamic in the years ahead. ¶ That gets us to the original "insult": the U.S. did not lord it over the world in the 1990s. Yes, it did argue for and promote the most rapid spread of globalization possible. But the "evil" of the Washington Consensus only yielded the most rapid growth of a truly global middle class that the world has ever seen. Yes, we can, in our current economic funk, somehow cast that development as the "loss of U.S. hegemony," in that the American consumer is no longer the demand-center of globalization's universe. But this is without a doubt the most amazing achievement of U.S. foreign policy, surpassing even our role in World War II. ¶ Numerous world powers served as global or regional hegemons before we came along, and their record on economic development was painfully transparent: Elites got richer, and the masses got poorer. Then America showed up after World War II and engineered an international liberal trade order, one that was at first admittedly limited to the West. But within four decades it went virally global, and now for the first time in history, more than half of our planet's population lives in conditions of modest-to-mounting abundance -- after millennia of mere sustenance. ¶ You may choose to interpret this as some sort of cosmic coincidence, but the historical sequence is undeniable: With its unrivaled power, America made the world a far better place. ¶ That spreading wave of global abundance has reformatted all sorts of traditional societies that lay in its path. Some, like the Chinese, have adapted to it magnificently in an economic and social sense, with the political adaptation sure to follow eventually. Others, being already democracies, have done far better across the board, like Turkey, Indonesia and India. But there are also numerous traditional societies where that reformatting impulse from below has been met by both harsh repression from above and violent attempts by religious extremists to effect a "counterreformation" that firewalls the "faithful" from an "evil" outside world.¶ Does this violent blowback constitute the great threat of our age? Not really. As I've long argued, this "friction" from globalization's tectonic advance is merely what's left over now that great-power war has gone dormant for 66 years and counting, with interstate wars now so infrequent and so less lethal as to be dwarfed by the civil strife that plagues those developing regions still suffering weak connectivity to the global economy. ¶ Let's remember what the U.S. actually did across the 1990s after the Soviet threat disappeared. It went out of its way to police the world's poorly governed spaces, battling rogue regimes and answering the 9-1-1 call repeatedly when disaster and/or civil strife struck vulnerable societies. Yes, playing globalization's bodyguard made America public enemy No. 1 in the eyes of its most violent rejectionist movements, including al-Qaida, but we made the effort because, in our heart of hearts, we knew that this is what blessed powers are supposed to do. ¶ Some, like the Bush-Cheney neocons, were driven by more than that sense of moral responsibility. They saw a chance to remake the world so as to assure U.S. primacy deep into the future. The timing of their dream was cruelly ironic, for it blossomed just as America's decades-in-the-making grand strategy reached its apogee in the peaceful rise of so many great powers at once. Had Sept. 11 not intervened, the neocons would likely have eventually targeted rising China for strategic demonization. Instead, they locked in on Osama bin Laden. The rest, as they say, is history. ¶ The follow-on irony of the War on Terror is that its operational requirements actually revolutionized a major portion of the U.S. military -- specifically the Army, Marines and Special Forces -- in such a way as to redirect their strategic ethos from big wars to small ones. It also forged a new operational bond between the military's irregular elements and that portion of the Central Intelligence Agency that pursues direct action against transnational bad actors. The up-front costs of this transformation were far too high, largely because the Bush White House stubbornly refused to embrace counterinsurgency tactics until after the popular repudiation signaled by the 2006 midterm election. But the end result is clear: We now have the force we actually need to manage this global era.¶ But, of course, that can all be tossed into the dumpster if we convince ourselves that our "loss" of hegemony was somehow the result of our own misdeed, instead of being our most profound gift to world history. Again, we grabbed the reins of global leadership and patiently engineered not only the greatest redistribution -- and expansion -- of global wealth ever seen, but also the greatest consolidation of global peace ever seen. ¶ Now, if we can sensibly realign our strategic relationship with the one rising great power, China, whose growing strength upsets us so much, then in combination with the rest of the world's rising great powers we can collectively wield enough global policing power to manage what's yet to come. ¶ As always, the choice is ours.

at: liberalism bad

Their K of “liberalism” is asinine – they collapse a core difference between neoconservative militarism and liberalism

Arkedis 11 [Jim, director of the National Security Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and a principal fellow of the Truman National Security Project "Not All Interventions Are The Same" March 28, Foreign Policy]

"Liberal interventionists are just 'kinder, gentler' neocons, and neocons are just liberal interventionists on steroids," political scientist and blogger Stephen M. Walt, commenting on calls for U.S. involvement in Libya, asserted recently on this website, echoing a false equivalence that has sadly become a common conceit among foreign-policy thinkers. It was inevitable that pundits would compare the invasion of Iraq (an idea promoted by neoconservatives) to the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya (an idea promoted by liberal interventionists). Yet obscuring the difference between these two schools of thought threatens more than the vanity of a group of academics: It places the coherence and stability of the United States' long-term grand strategy in jeopardy. While Walt, a self-identified "realist," develops a more sophisticated version of this false equivalence, there are, of course, obvious fundamental differences between neocons' triumphal nationalism and liberals' conviction that America can best advance its interests and values in cooperation with other democracies. Walt concedes the distinction, only to accuse liberals of being more cunning than neocons about concealing their will to power: "[T]he former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance." In Walt's estimation, intervention is intervention, no matter the avowed motives behind a given mission, or the various circumstances that can justify the use of force. Because George W. Bush and Barack Obama have each initiated a military action, it follows for Walt that neocons and "liberal interventionists" see the world much the same way. This is bunk. Traumatized by U.S. blunders in Iraq, realists now misapply that war's lessons to Obama's decision to join international efforts to protect Libyans from the wrath of a mad dictator. While the president is being attacked by everyone from John Boehner to Dennis Kucinich, it is critical to set the record straight. Because Walt uses the terms "liberal interventionist" or "liberal hawk" pejoratively, I'll refer to "progressive internationalism" instead. Progressive internationalists aren't hard-core lefties, but rather progressives in the original sense of the word: pragmatic liberals. We are ideological moderates rooted in classically liberal understandings of individual liberty and equality of opportunity -- at home and abroad -- who believe the world's problems should be solved through tough-minded diplomacy and negotiation, whenever possible. Further, the terms "hawk" or "interventionist" imply an overreliance on the military. Walt accuses both neocons and progressive internationalists of looking at every problem as a nail to be pounded by the hammer of U.S. military might. While progressive internationalists certainly support a strong military as the bedrock of America's foreign policy, they also know that international affairs in the 21st century seldom present black-and-white binary decisions of the sort that Bush mistakenly sought to resolve with a good whack. This no doubt brings to mind Iraq, and I cannot go further without acknowledging the elephant in the room: Yes, many progressive internationalists did support the decision to invade Iraq. (In 2003, I was a civilian counterterrorism analyst at the Department of Defense and did not take a public position on that action.) In hindsight, I believe constructive critique of my colleagues is warranted and they have learned much in Iraq's wake. The only point I offer in their defense is this: It's just hard to imagine that an Al Gore administration -- which would have been stocked full of progressive internationalists -- would have ginned up that ideological charge to war. Progressive internationalists recognize that U.S. foreign policy is now a holistic enterprise that must first summon all sources of national power to deal with what goes on within states as well as between them -- direct and multilateral diplomacy, development aid to build infrastructure and civil society, trade to promote growth, intelligence collection, and law enforcement, to name a few -- and only then turn to force as the final guarantor of peace and stability. Neocons, however, disdain multilateral diplomacy and overestimate the efficacy of military force. Their lopsided preoccupation with "hard power" creates an imposing facade of strength, but in fact saps the economic, political, and moral sources of American influence. By overspending on the military and allowing the other levers of American power to atrophy, neocons misallocate precious U.S. national resources in two ways -- leaving the United States with too little of the "smart power" capacities desperately needed in war zones like Afghanistan and an overabundance of "hard power" capacities it will never use. The trick is to carefully cultivate both, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen have championed since Obama took power. Walt allows some daylight between neocons and progressive internationalists in their willingness to defer to international institutions, but he again misses the true difference. He rightly characterizes neocons' disdain for multilateral talking shops (see: John Bolton) but wrongly suggests progressives are insincere in embedding U.S. power in international institutions. The fact is that we do indeed believe that international institutions make the world a safer place for the United States and other democracies by entrenching liberal norms around the globe. Can it really be an accident that America is embroiled in conflicts across the Middle East, a region whose countries are least touched by liberal democracy and adherence to internationalism? Progressive internationalists believe the United States should be the unquestioned vanguard of democratic values, and that American leadership is strengthened when granted a sense of legitimacy that attracts others to our cause. Without a doubt, unilateral application of force in self-defense is a legitimate exercise of power, but legitimacy can evaporate under two circumstances: when America's actions betray its core values or when America acts offensively without an international mandate and the backing of close allies. My organization, the Progressive Policy Institute, in a 2003 manifesto on progressive internationalism, argued that "the way to keep America safe and strong is not to impose our will on others or pursue a narrow, selfish nationalism that betrays our best values, but to lead the world toward political and economic freedom." Neocons, by contrast, pursue security interests at the expense of American values and damage U.S. legitimacy while doing so. That was George W. Bush: He betrayed American values and alienated core international partners by torturing prisoners, denying them any sense of due process, and falsifying a threat to justify an effectively unilateral invasion of a Muslim country. He strove for the mere appearance of legitimacy, forging ham-fisted, bribed coalitions of the somewhat willing. The Obama administration's actions in Libya are surely legitimate. The president chose to intervene after securing active support from the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the Gulf Cooperation Council, not to mention the U.N. Security Council. The international community's near-unanimity is an acknowledgement of the "responsibility to protect" (or R2P), a U.N. norm that obliges the international community to defend innocents in the face of humanitarian atrocities. Realists like Walt disdain R2P because shielding other human beings from mass murder does not fit within the realists' narrow band of core American interests. To them, America's blood, attention, and treasure are not worth spending unless there is an immediate quid pro quo payoff in terms of national security. Ironically for Walt, realists are closer to neoconservatives on this score: Bush and Cheney meshed realism with neoconservatism when they sold the Iraq invasion as a quick and painless exercise of overwhelming American power that would render an immediate payoff in the form of a decapitated threat and an instantaneous "beacon of democracy" in the Middle East. Progressive internationalists, like neocons, would define R2P as a core national interest, and we would both advocate strongly for the protection of innocent civilians who yearn to express their individual freedoms. We believe protecting civilians from murderous dictators creates a more stable international community and a safer America while promoting universal human rights and values. But though our ends are similar, our thresholds for intervention, our military methodology, and our justifications for action could not be more different. Neoconservatives' disdain for smart power and realists' shortsighted interpretation of core U.S. interests are poor uses of national resources. In contrast, progressive internationalists seek to use all of America's might to shape an international environment more congenial to the country's true interests and democratic values. These differences are hardly trivial. Conflating them, as Walt does, is a transparent attempt to reframe U.S. foreign-policy debates around a choice between intervention and nonintervention. But time and again, the American people stubbornly refuse to make those choices in a moral vacuum. This leaves the United States with a messy, imprecise, unscientific approach to international politics, just like its approach to domestic politics. Yes, this pragmatic progressive tradition has sometimes proved chaotic in practice, but Obama should be commended, not chastised, for aligning American interests and values, seeking international legitimacy, and looking to shape the world as both more democratic and ultimately safer.

heg = epistemologically sound

Multiple independent fields support heg

Wohlforth 9 William, professor of government at Dartmouth College, “Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War”, Project Muse

Mainstream theories generally posit that states come to blows over an international status quo only when it has implications for their security or material well-being. The guiding assumption is that a state’s satisfaction [End Page 34] with its place in the existing order is a function of the material costs and benefits implied by that status.24 By that assumption, once a state’s status in an international order ceases to affect its material wellbeing, its relative standing will have no bearing on decisions for war or peace. But the assumption is undermined by cumulative research in disciplines ranging from neuroscience and evolutionary biology to economics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology that human beings are powerfully motivated by the desire for favorable social status comparisons. This research suggests that the preference for status is a basic disposition rather than merely a strategy for attaining other goals.25 People often seek tangibles not so much because of the welfare or security they bring but because of the social status they confer. Under certain conditions, the search for status will cause people to behave in ways that directly contradict their material interest in security and/or prosperity.

at: k of heg – baudrillard

Baudrillard has zero causality between his theories for hegemony and has no alternative for benevolent American power

Evre 7 --- PhD, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of International Relations, Near East University, North Cyprus (Bülent Evre, 7-1-2007, "Book Review: An Ontological Challenge To Baudrillard" International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 4, Number 2, 7-2-2016, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_2/v4-2-bevre.html)//jonah

In developing his argument – which can be traced back to the moment when he abandoned Marxism4 – that reality has been absorbed by the virtual which is created by technological mechanisms, he predominantly appeals to his personal opinion, values and speculation as evidence. Yet his position is problematic when he asserts that in a virtual world objects have disappeared, or that there is no possibility to make sense of politics, morality, or art, which are virtualizing. It is possible to interpret his assertion in terms of ontology and epistemology. Ontologically, if politics, morality or art disappeared or came to an end, then how could we still speak of them? If the things such as politics or morality, that we have been experiencing, have no longer any relevance to their origines, in this case, should we assert that the things have “disappeared” or “dislocated”? The term “dislocate” here seems to be more appropriate for highlighting the transference of things from one form into another. Otherwise Baudrillard’s insistence on the disappearence of objects in virtuality hints at a distinction between the objects before virtuality which have essentialist characteristics and the objects after virtuality which have accidental characteristics, and therefore he cannot help falling into an essentialist position which he himself seems to denounce. Epistemologically, on the other hand, the assertion that the objects have disappeared in a virtual world implies that the objects no longer have any meaning. In Baudrillard’s view, due to the proliferation of images and signs, it is no longer possible to make sense of politics, morality or art. He contends that signification is dependant on signs and that signs have disappeared in a virtual world. In that case, there is no possibility to identify which is real or imaginary. Following that contention, such questions may be posed: if the signs had disappeared which were necessary for signification, then how could Baudrillard come to identify whether the objects are real or not. Is he not living in what he calls a ”virtual world”? or has he found a way to keep out of that world where everything gets lost? If he has, why does he not share it with us? Baudrillard frequently refers to the concepts such as “integral reality”, “integral power” throughout the book in order to illustrate that the reality is produced virtually and that power is increasingly operated in a totalitarian way. However, he does not really have much to say on how integral reality or integral power is constituted, or the relationship between integral reality and integral power. He states that integral reality has been constructed by communicative technologies and that global power is an hegemonic formation without elaborating the processes of formation of integral reality or integral power. Baudrillard’s attempt to apply such concepts as “integral reality” and “integral power” to the current conflict between American hegemony and Islamic terror is, in fact, a creative one which may help us to analyze concrete cases. Nonetheless, the nature of relationship between the integral power and the logic of subversion seems to be ambiguous. He holds, on the one hand, that global terror is an outcome of the inner adversity of global power, and on the other, that there is no interaction between the oppositions. If there were no interaction between the opposition, then it would be impossible for Baudrillard to establish a relationship between American hegemony and Islamic terror. Besides, it is to be noted that the assertion that there is no interaction between the oppositions can be seen as contradicting his belief that there is a complicity between global power and global terror. Baudrillard’s challenge to integral reality or integral power is closely related to his understanding of the virtual world. The notion of individuality that involves being autonomous and free, is, for him, an outcome of modern civilization. Yet the subject has come to be the victim of itself. As Baudrillard considers that there is no need for the existence of identity in order to exist, he negates it. He explicitly demands a life in which people will not have to reduce their lives to an identity. And he calls for setting out from the concept of otherness. In this regard, prima facie, he seems to be espousing “the politics of difference”. However, his emphasis on the concept of “the other” suffers from a shortcoming and demands further elaboration. Baudrillard on the one hand negates the existence of identity, and on the other, he affirms the existence of other. His negation of the existence of identity in totality makes paradoxically no room for the existence of the other which he affirms. How could we identify the other if there were no identity? Even in order to affirm the other normatively, we have to set out from the existence of identity ontologically. If Baudrillard really keeps insisting on advocating the other, it will be more appropriate to (re)discover the other in the identity, not in ex nihilo. Baudrillard’s position is limited to a challenge to integral reality and integral power rather than to suggest an alternative. While he rejects virtual reality and global power, he does not seek to support global terror which has emerged as a resistence. He condemns both global power and global terror, namely American hegemony and Islamic terror which are, for him, accomplices. Although Baudrillard moves in a space of phantasmic speculation, he refrains from imagining an ethico-political horizon. According to him, what people do want and which ideals they are committed to, are of no consequence. Instead the point for him is how people’s lives are and what they have been doing. He believes that any object that is created has to be a representation, agonal, accidental, or surprising, which are essentially one dimensional. In this regard, he hopes latently for accidental and surprising formations which are not clear at all. Baudrillard offers us no blueprint for an alternative to integral reality.

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