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- Heg Impact-A2: Overstretch
Heg Impact-A2: IraqFour reasons Iraq doesn’t take out primacy Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London, 2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 266-8 In the context of American primacy, it is worth recalling William Wohlforth’s observations on measuring power. Four points argue that the days of American primacy and a unipolar world are not yet over. First, power as a relational concept and power as resources are quite different concepts. That is, the ability to achieve certain stated international ends or global public goods need not, of itself, reveal the relative power of a state. The stalemate reached in Korea in the early 1950s, for instance, did not negate America’s superpower position in the First Cold War. Similarly, America’s failed counterinsurgency in Vietnam did not bring into being a multipolar world. Whether or when America “fails” in Iraq, that intervention is equally unlikely to usher in a new multipolarity. America remains the world’s leading power “after Iraq.” It spends roughly as much on defense as the rest of the world put together. The Pentagon’s budget bid for fiscal year 2008, of $578 billion, represented approximately 4 percent of GDP, a low proportion by historical standards. Of course, the ability to use those resources and the need to do so are contingent matters. American power has not been able to establish a secure constitutional democracy in Iraq any more than it could decisively quell the communist subversion of South Vietnam. But the fact of American primacy endures even in the face of a campaign that did not secure its original objectives. The cardinal indicators of a challenge to that unipolar world – a balancing of other powers against the superpower or a meaningful increase in rival powers’ defense spending – have simply not occurred. Second, shifting the goalposts—evaluating US power by its ability to resolve global problems from drug proliferation to climate change—does not offer a solid perspective. The US did not cease to be superpower after the Bay of Pigs fiasco or on being ejected from the UN Commission on Human Rights. The failure to intervene in Darfur will come to be regarded as a global abdication of responsibility to international actors, just as Rwanda was previously. But it was not authored by Washington and it affects American power not a jot. Third, relying on a single indicator is typically unreliable in evaluating national power. To be sure, analysis of budget and trade deficits highlights possible weaknesses in the American economy. But the economy is, on other indicators—growth, inflation, unemployment—in robust health. Moreover, even in terms of the financial position of the US, growing interdependence means that those states (notably China and Japan) that hold most in terms of dollar reserves are themselves exposed should they abandon them. There exist few states with a relationship with the US (and all developed states have one) that would not be materially disadvantaged if America suffered a serious economic downturn. Fourth, analysts often overlook latent power – the degree to which resources can or could be mobilized by a government. Despite America waging a global campaign since 9/11, it has been the military rather than the nation as a whole that has been at war. The public has not been asked or required to make serious material sacrifices either to secure the homeland or to assist the struggle against jihadism abroad. Taxes remain low, America has an exclusively volunteer army, and fatalities in Iraq – while tragic—do not remotely brook comparison with those of Vietnam, Korea, or the Second World War. In sum, America possesses ample reserves with which to defend its global role and primacy, if needed. Heg Impact-A2: OverstretchThis theory is flawed-it doesn’t account for potential resources and can’t apply independent of counterbalancing Stephen G. Brooks & William C. Wohlforth, Professors of Government- Dartmouth, 2008, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy, p. 210-1 Imperial Overstretch. Paul Kennedy coined the term imperial overstretch to describe the fate of past leading states whose “global interests and obligations” became “far too large for the country to be able to defend them all simultaneously.” Mounting budget deficits, increased foreign indebtedness, and armed forces stretched thin in Iraq led many analysts to warn that the United States was in danger of following suit. But these first two strains are chiefly the result of domestic choices to cut taxes while increasing spending, while the latter can largely be traced to the priority placed on the Pentagon’s force modernization plan over a significant increase in the size of the army. Analysts who argue that the United States now suffers, or soon will suffer, from imperial overstretch invariably fail to distinguish between latent power (the level of resources that could be mobilized from society) and actual power (the level of resources a government actually chooses to mobilize). In his original formulation of imperial overstretch, Kennedy had in mind a situation in which a state’s actual and latent capabilities cannot cope with its existing foreign policy commitments. To date, there is virtually no research on whether the United States faces this prospect. Part of the problem is that because the Bush administration made no attempt to ask the public for greater sacrifice, there is no observable evidence of whether it would be possible to extract more resources for advancing US foreign policy interests. The Cold War experience indicates that the US public is capable of supporting, over long periods, significantly higher spending on foreign policy than current levels. Yet this does not necessarily mean that the US public would be willing to support a dramatic increase in foreign policy spending now if policymakers called for it. The larger issue is that though IR scholars use the term, they have not theorized or researched imperial overstretch as a constraint independent of counterbalancing. In the historical cases highlighted by Kennedy and others, leading states suffered from imperial overstretch in significant part because they faced counterbalancing that demanded more resources than they were able to extract domestically. As chapters 2 and 3 showed, the United States does not face a counterbalancing constraint. This raises a key question of whether there are limits to the US polity’s capacity to generate power in the absence of the threat posed by a geopolitical peer rival. Lacking a focused research effort, scholars can now only answer with speculation.
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