Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic and/or diplomatic engagement with the People’s Republic of China
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Pan, 2014—School of International and Political Studies @ Deakin University (Chengxin, 2014, Asian Perspective, Vol. 38, No. 3, “Rethinking Chinese Power: A Conceptual Corrective to the “Power Shift” Narrative,” China may be the most complex and “paradoxical” rising power in modern international history, as reflected in various paradigms and lenses employed to try to make sense of it (Pan 2012). The powershift narrative is one such lens; it provides a seemingly convincing identity statement about a China that, while still lacking in superpower status, no longer quite fits into the category of developing countries. This narrative also allows us to reduce the many complex transnational issues and challenges that do not have a single national origin to the familiar problems associated with international power transition. Overall it reflects a particular spatial mindset and geopolitical imagination that keeps recycling the age-old metanarrative of a realist world where power struggle is a constant reality and where the rise and fall of great powers not only unset-tles the balance of power but more often than not results in “the tragedy of great power politics” (Mearsheimer 2001). In doing so, the power-shift narrative betrays the lack of serious reconceptualization of power. Given the inherently social and relational nature of power itself as well as the changing global political, economic, and normative structures, we must understand the alleged power shift from the United States to China through a more complex and nuanced perspective of power. By assuming that power continues to be attached to the state as measurable capabilities, and that today’s power shift necessarily resembles shifts of the past, we risk employing old tools to tackle new problems. Here it is appropriate to invoke Chinese history and recent US foreign policy to illustrate how a failure to reconceptualize power can lead to grave strategic calamities. For more than a millennium, Chinese rulers closely watched their interior continental frontiers for signs of a challenge to their power. The fact that such a challenge could come from a new direction (the coast) and in a different form (naval power) never occurred to them. Yet when that new form of power arrived on its shores, the Qing dynasty found itself vastly ill-equipped to cope with it. The rest is history. The recent example is the false “unipolar moment” assessment of US power and its attendant neoconservative policy during the George W. Bush period (Reus-Smit 2004). If the neoconservative faith in the unipolar moment of US power is misguided, the US decline and power-shift discourses may be equally mistaken. Yet, to the extent that power is socially constructed, the powerful conventional discourse of a classic power transition from the United States to China could have profound practical implications for this important relationship. As Breslin (2009, 818) notes, “A key source of Chinese power is the assumption by others that it either has it . . . or, maybe more correctly, that it will have this power and influence some time soon.” Whether this discursively constructed Chinese power matches reality is beside the point, for China and other powers both may act on the basis of such a projected power shift (Hagström 2012). In China, it might well play into popular nationalism or encourage arrogance and assertiveness in its foreign policy, or both. In the West, it would justify a policy of hedging against an ostensibly rising Chinese power, a policy that in turn could harden China’s resolve to further amass power. In this sense, the conventional construction of Chinese power could well create a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy Bilateral Investment Treaty/South China Sea Link
Pan, 2011—School of International and Political Studies @ Deakin University (Chengxin, 5/24/11, East Asia Forum, “Is the South China Sea a new ‘Dangerous Ground’ for US-China rivalry?,” http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2011/05/24/is-the-south-china-sea-a-new-dangerous-ground-for-us-china-rivalry/ Now boasting some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, this region — dubbed by some as ‘a new Persian Gulf’ and ‘a hydrocarbons Eldorado’ — is a focal point of ongoing sovereignty disputes among its adjacent countries. This vast sea may have shaken off its ‘Dangerous Ground’ reputation in a navigational sense, but it seems to be shaping up as precisely that strategically: a volatile flashpoint characterised by recurring tensions with profound geopolitical implications. Such tensions are visible in recent flare-ups between China and the Philippines over the latter’s oil exploration in disputed waters, as well as in Taiwan’s recent move, for the first time since 2000, to strengthen the defence capability of its coastguard troops stationed in the Spratly Islands. All this came after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared last July that the US had a ‘national interest’ in the South China Sea issue, followed by US-Vietnam naval exercises in the Sea one month later. This new stance from Washington marked not only the internationalisation of the South China Sea disputes, but also the opening of a potential new front in US-China rivalry. The Philippines’ more assertive moves in the Spratly Islands earlier this year cannot be divorced from this great power dynamic. Without some measure of US support, the Philippines would have been less likely to offend China, a country that has just overtaken the US as its second largest trading partner. That Washington has stepped in has created much alarm and trepidation within China. A quick glance at the Chinese press reveals the widespread sentiment warning against foreign intervention in the South China Sea. Immediately following Clinton’s remarks, an editorial from Global Times (a subsidiary of the official People’s Daily) asserted that ‘China’s long-term strategic plan should never be taken as a weak stand … [and] China will never waive its right to protect its core interest with military means.’ To some degree, Beijing has itself to blame for this new turn. For a long time it insisted on a bilateral approach to the South China Sea issue. Southeast Asian countries — with direct stakes in the disputes and fearing being outgunned by their powerful neighbour — understandably want to hedge their bets by looking to the US for support. But that is not the only factor. China and other claimants have adopted the 2002 Declaration on the Code of Conduct in the region and vowed to follow the formula of ‘shelving disagreement and joint development’, but thus far little progress has been made with these multilateral initiatives. Underlying the intractability of this problem are some more structural dilemmas faced by China and the US as well as other stakeholders in the region. For its part, China needs to constantly reassure its southern neighbours of its ‘peaceful rise’ intention; the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area was designed in part for this purpose through ‘win-win’ economic cooperation. But, on the other hand, securing control in the South China Sea is China’s best hope to become a great naval power — a goal which has become increasingly crucial in protecting its expanding economic and security interests. Eighty per cent of China’s energy imports pass through the South China Sea, and Beijing has agonised over its so-called ‘Malacca Dilemma’ — a term referring to the busy Malacca Strait: at one end of which is an American naval presence at the Changi naval base in Singapore and, at the other end, a US fleet (operating from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean). Yet, few countries appreciate this strategic vulnerability, and most are all too ready to view any Chinese ascendancy in the region with suspicion. Meanwhile, the US faces its so-called ‘China Dilemma’. While it needs Beijing to take more responsibility in jointly tackling common challenges — like nuclear non-proliferation, terrorism, climate change and global economic stability — Washington is fundamentally wary of China’s strategic intentions. Unsettled by China’s ‘charm offensive’ and the waning American influence in East Asia over the years, the Obama administration has made re-engaging Asia one of its foreign policy priorities. To that end, the South China Sea seems to be a perfect stepping stone. Whether by accident or design, these great power dilemmas have now converged on the South China Sea. This is of course not to predict a full-scale Cold War-style rivalry between the US and China. Unprecedented economic and strategic interdependence between the two will militate against such a trend. Moreover, the fear of further US involvement might well spur Beijing to recalibrate its approach to the South China Sea issue. Just last December China hosted a three-day meeting with ASEAN member states in Kunming to hammer out a more binding code of conduct in the region. Still, the apparently increasing commercial, strategic and symbolic value of the South China Sea to each of its claimants makes a lasting solution unlikely any time soon, and the structural dilemmas seem to run deep on both sides of the Pacific, with countries in the region, including Australia, potentially caught in the middle. Last month, US Pacific Commander Adm. Robert Willard told Congress that US access to the South China Sea might require increased levels of US military activities in Australia. Given the enormously high stakes, more far-sighted leadership and more creative thinking and diplomacy are urgently needed in order to prevent this ‘Dangerous Ground’ from sliding into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nuclear Weapon/North Korea Link
BondGraham & Parrish, 2009 (Darwin, sociologist, and Will, anti-imperialist scholar. 1/12 http://fpif.org/anti-nuclear_nuclearism/ The Obama administration is likely to continue a policy that we call “anti-nuclear nuclearism.” Anti-nuclear nuclearism is a foreign and military policy that relies upon overwhelming U.S. power, including the nuclear arsenal, but makes rhetorical and even some substantive commitments to disarmament, however vaguely defined. Anti-nuclear nuclearism thrives as a school of thought in several think tanks that have long influenced foreign policy choices related to global nuclear forces. Even the national nuclear weapons development labs in New Mexico and California have been avid supporters and crafters of it. As a policy, anti-nuclear nuclearism is designed to ensure U.S. nuclear and military dominance by rhetorically calling for what has long been derided as a naïve ideal: global nuclear disarmament. Unlike past forms of nuclearism, it de-emphasizes the offensive nature of the U.S. arsenal. Instead of promoting the U.S. stockpile as a strategic deterrence or umbrella for U.S. and allied forces, it prioritizes an aggressive diplomatic and military campaign of nonproliferation. Nonproliferation efforts are aimed entirely at other states, especially non-nuclear nations with suspected weapons programs, or states that can be coerced and attacked under the pretense that they possess nuclear weapons or a development program (e.g. Iraq in 2003). Effectively pursuing this kind of belligerent nonproliferation regime requires half-steps toward cutting the U.S. arsenal further, and at least rhetorically recommitting the United States to international treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It requires a fig leaf that the United States isn’t developing new nuclear weapons, and that it is slowly disarming and de-emphasizing its nuclear arsenal. By these means the United States has tried to avoid the charge of hypocrisy, even though it has designed and built newly modified weapons with qualitatively new capacities over the last decade and a half. Meanwhile, U.S. leaders have allowed for and even promoted a mass proliferation of nuclear energy and material, albeit under the firm control of the nuclear weapons states, with the United States at the top of this pile. Many disarmament proponents were elated last year when four extremely prominent cold warriors — George P. Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn — announced in a series of op-eds their commitment to "a world free of nuclear weapons." Strange bedfellows indeed for the cause. Yet the fine print of their plan, published by the Hoover Institute and others since then, represents the anti-nuclear nuclearist platform to a tee. It’s a conspicuous yet merely rhetorical commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. These four elder statesmen have said what many U.S. elites have rarely uttered: that abolition is both possible and desirable. However, the anti-nuclear posture in their policy proposal comes to bear only on preventing non-nuclear states from going nuclear, or else preventing international criminal conspiracies from proliferating weapons technologies and nuclear materials for use as instruments of non-state terror. In other words, it’s about other people's nuclear weapons, not the 99% of materials and arms possessed by the United States and other established nuclear powers. This position emphasizes an anti-nuclear politics entirely for what it means for the rest of the world — securing nuclear materials and preventing other states from going nuclear or further developing their existing arsenals. U.S. responsibility to disarm remains in the distant future, unaddressed as a present imperative. Exclusive Route around the CTBT Concerns about the nuclear programs of other states — mostly Islamic, East and South Asian nations (i.e., Iran, North Korea, etc.) — conveniently work to reinforce existing power relations embodied in U.S. military supremacy and neocolonial relationships of technological inequality and dependence. By invoking their commitment to a "world free of nuclear weapons," the ideologues behind the anti-nuclear nuclearist platform justify invasions, military strikes, economic sanctions, and perhaps even the use of nuclear weapons themselves against the "rogue states" and "terrorists" whose possession of weapons technologies vastly less advanced than those perpetually stockpiled by the United States is deemed by the anti-nuclear nuclearists the first and foremost problem of the nuclear age. Democracy Link
Ivie and Giner, 2004 [ROBERT L. IVIE professor emeritus of communications and culture & American studies at Indiana University, OSCAR GINER Professor in the Theater department at Arizona State University, December 2004, “Hunting the Devil: Democracy’s Rhetorical Impulse to War”, Presidential Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 pg 594-595 Overall, then, the diabolical incantations of presidential war rhetoric functioned as an inducement to evacuate the political content of democracy, leaving a largely empty signifier in its place. Although officially promoted, a narrowly circumscribed, truncated, distorted, and otherwise substantially purged simulacrum of democracy suspended ad infinitum was the diminished extent of its troubled symbolic import. Shriveled, shrunken, and emptied of meaning, democracy was relegated to the degraded role of a political cipher—a ready and reliable but badly disfigured vehicle for sublimating a heavy burden of anxious self-loathing and transferring that unwanted load to an external object of terror. Diluted democracy in the heroic guise of world liberator and protector and under the firm control of presidential order substituted for robust democratic deliberation and a full contestation of opinions. A failure to contain democracy implied a risk of chaos, an outbreak of violence, a loss of civilization, a reign of terror. Killing terrorists substituted for acknowledging and confronting the suppressed dark side of America’s political identity. The primal appeal of presidential war rhetoric, its patriarchal inducement to rescue a feminized and infantilized victim from the evil savagery of faceless tyranny, was to prove the nation’s virtue and virility. This was the essence of a rhetorical diabolism that purged democratic anxiety by channeling it into an impulse to war. If Americans have inherited the Christian worldview from their ancestors, they have also inherited a naïve susceptibility to believe in medieval villains, a language derived from an agonic cosmology which casts the devil as an eternal, ontological adversary, and a superstitious conviction in the power of scapegoating as a ritual means of cleansing one’s sins. The length of influence of old fears and the perpetuity of mental constructs are highlighted by the fact that the nation that chased devils in Salem in its infancy grows up to declare war on terror and darkness. President Bush is not an exception or even an extreme example of war mongering. What he is, as president, is the leading voice articulating the projection of a national shadow onto terrorist enemies—a shadow forged by Americans and created in the image of their fears and anxieties about democracy. Even the president himself is subject to becoming the target of such anxious projections, as in the case of Newsweek’s February 19, 2007, issue, which merged into a single, front-cover image the left half of Bush’s face with the right half of the demonized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s face, noting in an accompanying story that “the two countries are now led by men who deeply mistrust the intentions and indeed doubt the sanity of the other” (Hirsh and Bahari 2007, 30). As long as these projections go unrecognized, they distort the nation’s vision, delude it into making mistakes, and create an imaginary landscape that serves as a hideout for America’s enemies: “The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one” ( Jung 1951, 146). This fanciful terrain provides camouflage for the actual threat and is even a source of mistakes in battle. At the turn of the century, arguing for a more complex understanding of the social phenomenon of Russian anarchist terrorists, George Bernard Shaw (1952, 214) warned, “If a man cannot look evil in the face without illusion, he will not know what it really is, or combat it effectively.” The true danger to the nation that is posed by unexamined projections is twofold: first, unexamined projections leave us weak and vulnerable. Having cast our vital energy on others, we are left small and terrified before imagined external dragons (like in those dreams in which we are chased by our own monsters). Second, by branding others as evil—cruel and inhumane though they may be—we position ourselves as good, leaving our “evil spirit,” in the words of Robert Johnson, free to “catch a Greyhound bus and ride” ( Johnson 1990, 46). Because we are good, we believe ourselves justified in Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo, in violating the rights of American citizens and disregarding the Constitution. Also— somewhat inconsistently but nevertheless devilishly captivating—we are left free to deny that these events occur, that they are wrong (How could good people perpetrate wrongful acts?), and that we are complicitous in them. Thus the practical need, as well as the moral responsibility, to remove the “beam” from the nation’s collective eyes. Perhaps, if we gain the means and the moxie first to recognize and eventually to reclaim democracy’s projected shadow, we might then dare to move forward toward a less dehumanizing and more democratic future with a diminishing incentive for war. Human Rights Link
Kaplan, 2003 [Amy, “Violent belongings and the question of empire today presidential address to the American studies Association” American Quarterly, vol. 56, no.1, march 2004, muse, pg 4-5] Another dominant narrative about empire today, told by liberal interventionists, is that of the "reluctant imperialist."10 In this version, the United States never sought an empire and may even be constitutionally unsuited to rule one, but it had the burden thrust upon it by the fall of earlier empires and the failures of modern states, which abuse the human rights of their own people and spawn terrorism. The United States is the only power in the world with the capacity and the moral authority to act as military policeman and economic manager to bring order to the world. Benevolence and self-interest merge in this narrative; backed by unparalleled force, the United States can save the people of the world from their own anarchy, their descent into an uncivilized state. As Robert Kaplan writes-not reluctantly at all-in "Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World": "The purpose of power is not power itself; it is a fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world. Those characteristics include basic political stability, the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived; respect for property; economic freedom; and representative government, culturally understood. At this moment in time it is American power, and American power only, that can serve as an organizing principle for the worldwide expansion of liberal civil society."" This narrative does imagine limits to empire, yet primarily in the selfish refusal of U.S. citizens to sacrifice and shoulder the burden for others, as though sacrifices have not already been imposed on them by the state. The temporal dimension of this narrative entails the aborted effort of other nations and peoples to enter modernity, and its view of the future projects the end of empire only when the world is remade in our image. Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2015 2015 -> Police Militarization 2015 -> 2015 ihbb championships: hs history Bowl Round 4 – Prelims First Quarter 2015 -> Wrtp/big step · 3841 W. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, wi 53208 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 December 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Darton College 2015 -> Training Workshop on Planning and Implementation of Multi-Sectoral Development Programme (MsDP) in Bihar Date : 6th 2015 -> Rao bulletin 15 June 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 September 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 August 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Science, and transportation united states senate Download 2.62 Mb. Share with your friends:
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