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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Diplomatic Capital Disadvantage

Vocabulary

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, ISIL)—Sunni Muslim extremist group that believes in the spread of Islam across the world. They are a militant and spread their power through violence, kidnapping, and torture.


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Diplomatic Capital: Power to influence other countries through negotiations, incentives, or bargaining chips. The DA argues that Obama only has so much, so he has to spend it wisely.

Syria: A country in the Middle East where was has broken out between Assad, ISIS, and opposition groups. There are many different religious and political groups fighting for survival and power in the country. The death tolls are high and it is a serious crisis.

Bashar Al-Assad: (Bah-shar all-awss awd): President of Syria fighting for control of the country. He is described as authoritarian kind of like a dictator. He has used violence against those that oppose him.

Diplomatic Talks: These are conversations between countries to try to find peace in Syria. These include the US, Russia, Syria, Iran, and Turkey. However, each country has different opinions on how and what should be done.

South China Seas (SCS): Part of the Pacific Ocean just southeast of China. It is near Taiwan, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Vietnam. A great deal of goods are moved through the area and there’s supposedly a lot of oil in the sea bed. There are serious disputes about who actually owns it and thus many countries are fighting over it.


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Senkaku Islands: Islands in the East China sea that have no one living on them. The US gave them to Japan, but China disagrees. These islands, like the South China Sea, are areas where fighting might erupt.

Xi Jinping (She jin-PING): General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, the President of the People's Republic of China, and the Chairman of China's Central Military Commission. He’s like Obama, but even more powerful since China does not have the same political structure as the US. Essentially, he’s the president of China.

People’s Liberation Army (PLA): The Chinese armed forces. Basically the accumulation of all the Chinese military. It is the largest military in the world.


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AT=Answers To


1NC Diplomatic Capital Disadvantage Shell

  1. Uniqueness: Obama is using his limited diplomatic and political capital on containing ISIS



Washington Post, 2014 [“Mr. Obama lays out his strategy for combatting the Islamic State”, September 10, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mr-obama-lays-out-his-strategy-for-combatting-the-islamic-state/2014/09/10/80214a9e-3933-11e4-bdfb-de4104544a37_story.html]
President Obama’s reformulation of U.S. policy to accommodate that stubborn reality, articulated in his somber address to the nation Wednesday night, comes late — but not, we hope and trust, too late. There is still time to beat the Islamic State, to restore a unified (if federated) Iraqi state and to bring a measure of peace and humane governance to Syria. As the president convincingly emphasized, none of this can happen without a sustained, long-term engagement by the United States, to include both military force and a major investment of diplomatic capital. As the president also said, for the first time, U.S. strikes on the Islamic State cannot be limited to one side of the porous Iraq-Syria border; American drones and warplanes must pursue the Islamic State wherever it can be found, and that includes its havens in Syria. We hope Congress welcomes Mr. Obama’s renewed commitment and approves funds he will request to train and equip moderate forces in Syria, as well as to rebuild Kurdish, Sunni and government forces in Iraq. But we also believe that Congress has a duty to go beyond writing the check; it should debate the policy and vote to authorize this mission. Though he believes that he already has the authority to conduct this new campaign, Mr. Obama said Wednesday night that he would welcome congressional action, on the sound principle that “we are strongest as a nation when the president and Congress work together.” Congressional and public debate are especially necessary to help strengthen those parts of Mr. Obama’s strategy that remain open to question. He cited U.S. policy in Yemen and Somalia as a successful illustration of what’s in store for Iraq and Syria — a one-two punch of U.S. air power with local ground forces. But Somalia is a failed state and Yemen is hardly a healthy one; both remain incubators of dangerous terrorism. We think the president is right that the Islamic State problem cannot and should not be met with an invasion of U.S. ground troops. But it also cannot be solved without U.S. commitment on the ground, both for the military venture — for training, intelligence, and other missions, as Mr. Obama said — and for the larger goal of promoting inclusive governance so as to narrow the political space for terrorism. What will motivate political forces in the region to pursue the necessary compromises is the expectation of durable and multi-layered U.S. support.

  1. Link: Engaging China burns Obama’s diplomatic capital and ends diplomatic talks in Syria



Military Times, March 2016 [Leo Shane, “Obama pushes back at critics of his military, diplomacy moves”, 3/11, http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/capitol-hill/2016/03/10/obama-atlantic-foreign-policy/81594276/]
Obama attacked the narrative that former President Reagan’s tough talk during the Iranian hostage crisis led to freedom for those individuals — “Reagan’s posture, his rhetoric had nothing to do with their release” — and pushed back against “the machinery of our national-security apparatus” in escalating threats instead of diffusing them. “For me to press the pause button at that moment (in the Syrian conflict), I knew, would cost me politically,” he told the magazine. “The fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest … I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.” “There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. … Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.” Obama draws distinctions between his reluctance to commit U.S. troops to open-ended wars and his frequent use of drone strikes to target terrorist suspects, asserting the terrorist suspects present an immediate and substantial threat to the American homeland. He also argues that U.S. foreign policy needs to be “hardheaded at the same time as we’re big-hearted,” balancing security interests with basic humanitarian empathy. U.S. leaders need to “pick and choose our spots, and recognize that there are going to be times where the best that we can do is to shine a spotlight on something that’s terrible, but not believe that we can automatically solve it. “There are going to be times where our security interests conflict with our concerns about human rights. There are going to be times where we can do something about innocent people being killed, but there are going to be times where we can’t.” Obama lists China as the greatest foreign policy challenge in coming years, but not necessarily an adversary of the United States. “If we get that right and China continues on a peaceful rise, then we have a partner that is growing in capability and sharing with us the burdens and responsibilities of maintaining an international order.”

  1. Internal Link: Diplomatic talks contain ISIS—it causes agreements between major powers that will work together



Naiman, 2015 [Robert, Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Illinois http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/12/07/against-isis-syria-president-obamas-diplomacy-push-crucial]
Here was President Obama's bullet point on diplomacy: Fourth, with American leadership, the international community has begun to establish a process -- and timeline -- to pursue ceasefires and a political resolution to the Syrian war. Doing so will allow the Syrian people and every country, including our allies, but also countries like Russia, to focus on the common goal of destroying ISIL -- a group that threatens us all. The New York Times' main article on the speech did not even mention President Obama's bullet point on diplomacy. But U.S. diplomacy to end the Syrian civil war is crucial to confronting ISIS. In late September, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the UN General Assembly that five countries - the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran - were key to finding a political solution in Syria. On November 14, these five countries and others signed an agreement for talks to begin between the Syrian government and opposition representatives on a transition government by New Year's Day. According to the agreement, as soon as the talks on a transition government start, the five countries will support an immediate, UN-monitored ceasefire between everyone in Syria participating in the talks. No such agreement existed before between these five countries. How do we know that the five countries are taking the agreement seriously? They're arguing vigorously over the details of its implementation. If its details are worth arguing about, then the agreement must matter. In particular, the five powers must believe that it's likely that there's going to be a ceasefire between the Syrian government and its non-ISIS opposition, because they're arguing about which groups are going to be covered by the ceasefire. And the five powers must believe that the talks on a transition government matter, because they're arguing about which groups are going to be represented at the talks. If it matters that ISIS holds so much territory in Syria, then the November 14 Vienna agreement matters. If territory is going to be taken away from ISIS, then it has to be occupied by somebody else. The "somebody else" isn't going to be Western ground troops. That would be unsustainable - as President Obama said Sunday night - and Western publics won't support it. Even if Western publics would support it in the beginning, they wouldn't maintain their support when it becomes a quagmire. The "somebody else" has to be local. And for "local" to work, there has to be a diplomatic agreement between the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran. In the absence of a diplomatic agreement, any proposal for "local" to be the present Syrian government is likely to be undermined by Saudi Arabia and Turkey. In the absence of a diplomatic agreement, any proposal for "local" to be people currently fighting to overthrow the Syrian government is likely to be undermined by Russia and Iran. Without a diplomatic agreement, there can be no sustainable significant reduction in the territory controlled in Syria by ISIS. Diplomacy to end the Syrian civil war isn't just a nice idea. It's the only way out.

  1. Impact: ISIS will use nuclear weapons



Macdonald, March 2016 [Cheyenne, Writer for DailyMail, cites Harvard Study, “Harvard researcher warns ISIS may be on the brink of using nuclear weapons: Chilling report highlights risk of dirty bombs, power station sabotage and device detonation”, March 30, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3516207/Harvard-researcher-warns-ISIS-brink-using-nuclear-weapons.html]
The possibility of a nuclear-armed ISIS may not be as far-off as many experts suggest, a Harvard researcher has warned. In a recent report for Project on Managing the Atom from Harvard’s Belfer Center, Matthew Bunn explains how the threat of nuclear terrorism is rising as extremist groups continue to evolve. While there has not been any concrete indication that ISIS is pursuing nuclear materials, the researcher says that the actions and rhetoric of the group suggest its need for such powerful weapons. In recent years, there have been numerous occasions of suspicious events relating to nuclear facilities in Belgium, Defense One points out. While it would be difficult to ISIS or other terror groups to obtain the knowledge of security features and access nuclear materials, Bunn explains that the evidence of such intentions are growing. The report precedes the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, which will take place between March 31 and April 1. According to the authors, the summit will help to determine the feasibility of terrorist groups getting their hands on nuclear materials. The threats come from the possibility of three types of nuclear or radiological terrorism, the authors write: detonation of an actual nuclear bomb, sabotage of a nuclear facility, or use of a ‘dirty bomb’ to spread radioactive material. Each of these comes at a different level of risk, and the authors focus for the most part on the potential danger from the use of an actual nuclear bomb, as these results would be ‘most catastrophic.’ Still, the other types of threats do not come without consequences. ‘The radiation from a dirty bomb, by contrast, might not kill anyone—at least in the near term—but could impose billions of dollars in economic disruption and cleanup costs,’ the authors write. ‘The effects of sabotage of a nuclear facility would depend heavily on the specific nature of the attack, but would likely range between the other two types of attack in severity. 'The difficulty of achieving a successful sabotage is also intermediate between the other two.’


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