Terror Defense No Al Qaida Terror

Leadership (Generic)

High Now

U.S. global leadership will remain for decades – strong soft power and large military mean that Russia and China can’t catch up.

The frequent chatter about the inevitable decline of the United States has become almost an unchallenged shibboleth. Every week more bad news about the United States seems to confirm this notion. The country seems ungovernable with a hyper-partisanized Congress, a 16-day government shutdown, the weak economic recovery and the vast NSA spy scandal. In an international study, Americans ranked 11th in happiness and a discouraging 24th in economy. Another study of 8th graders found only 7 percent of American students rated advanced in mathematics compared to 47 and 48 percent in Singapore and South Korea. Our President, according to a Forbes power rating, even comes in second behind Vladimir Putin.

It is still the world’s leader for FDI at 180 billion dollars, almost twice its nearest competitor. The United States, spending 560 billion dollars a year, has the most powerful military in the world. Its GDP (16 trillion dollars) is more than twice the size of China’s GDP. As the first new nation, it has the world’s longest functioning democracy in a world filled with semi-democratic or non-democratic countries. Its stock market, at an all time high, still reflects American leadership of the global economy.

Furthermore, who is going to challenge the United States for global leadership? The Europeans? The Japanese? The Russians? The EU today has 12 percent unemployment – reaching 26 percent in Greece and Spain – almost zero economic growth, a declining population in many of its member states. The Japanese are suffering from a declining and rapidly aging population, lack of immigration, a Nikkei Index that is still more than 20,000 points below the level of 1988 and debt that equals 240 percent of GNP. Not to mention a weak economic growth in a last two decades. While Russia may have grabbed the headlines for hosing the forthcoming Olympics and Edward Snowden, it’s no super power. Russia has a trade profile of a Third World country, a GNP the size of Canada, which is less than 15 percent of the United States GDP, no soft power, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street or highly rated universities.

What about China or India? While both have made great strides in the last several decades, they also suffer from serious problems. China has 650 million people in the often-impoverished countryside and a GDP/capita ($6,100) in 87th place in the world that is barely 12 percent of American GDP/capita. China suffers from massive official corruption, one party Communist rule, lack of creativity and grotesque social stratification. Its massive air, water and soil pollution problems kill 1.2 Chinese a year. It will likely be 2050, as its leaders often admit, before China becomes a thoroughly modern country.

Science Diplomacy

High Now

Status quo solves – diplomatic efforts are incorporating science now.

Turekian 6/30 (Vaughan C. Turekian, Editor-in Chief of Science & Diplomacy with a PhD in Environmental Science from University of Virginia, “Evolving Instutitions for Twenty-First Century (Science) Diplomacy,” Science & Diplomacy, 30 June 2015, *fc)

These two recent reports highlight the importance of foreign ministries as vital instruments of science diplomacy. These agencies of foreign affairs, like their counterparts around the world, are often viewed as conservative and somewhat inflexible institutions focused on stability rather than transformation. However, they are adjusting to a world in which developments in science and technology move rapidly and affect relationships and interactions at bilateral, regional, and global scales.

At the same time that some traditional national instruments of diplomacy are evolving to better incorporate science, international science institutions are also evolving to meet the diplomatic and foreign policy drivers of this more technical century. Over the past few months, I have had the opportunity to visit some of these institutions, and I have observed their own transitions during this period. A common theme for each is that they are moving beyond the Cold War issues that defined the second half of the twentieth century, and they are more focused on the large, global challenges facing our multipolar world.

This past April, during the inaugural science diplomacy conference organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, publisher of Science & Diplomacy) Center for Science Diplomacy, there were discussions about some of the twentieth century institutions that have been working in the new twenty-first century science diplomacy space. The conference heard from Flavia Schlegel, the current assistant director-general for natural sciences at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), about the nearly seventy-year commitment of the multilateral organization to build science cooperation throughout the world in an effort to promote peace and prosperity. UNESCO has served as an important platform for science cooperation between the North and South, but a recent diplomatic row involving the United States and Palestinian membership in UNESCO has severely limited the budget for the organization. How the institution responds to the budget difficulties will be an important consideration for its future science diplomacy efforts.

Doesn’t Work

Science and politics are incompatible – uncertainties mean that stakeholders can exaggerate evidence and impose bad policies.

Millstone 5/19 (Eric Millstone, Professor of Science Policy at the Science Policy Research Unit of the University of Sussex, “Why science is not enough for good policy,” SciDevNet, 19 May 2015, http://www.scidev.net/global/policy/opinion/science-good-policy-knowledge-sussex.html, *fc)

Why is the science not sufficient? The answer has a lot to do with scientific uncertainties. Some of these uncertainties arise when risk assessments are not based on studies directly on people or relevant features of our environment, but using models. Chemicals are often tested on rodents rather than people, for example, and climate change is studied using computer models rather than by experimenting on the atmosphere.

But the relevance of such models is more often assumed than it is demonstrated. In the case of climate change, some computer models of the impact of greenhouse gases on climate might usefully approximate to global realities. In the case of chemical toxicity testing, the reliability of rats and mice as models of the effects on people has yet to be established.

Such nuances are rarely acknowledged in scientific advice to policymakers. Science advisers often ignore or conceal key uncertainties when offering judgements, perhaps catering to policymakers’ preference for reassuring oversimplifications — because when expert panels highlight uncertainties, policymakers then have to take responsibility for subsequent decisions.

Secrecy protects from scrutiny

Uncertainties mean there can be no single authoritative answer, and this creates a space for a range of possible but competing scientific assertions.

In response, some stakeholders might claim a uniquely authoritative understanding of an issue based on evidence, while others might emphasise or exaggerate uncertainties. Institutions without clear accountability mechanisms or transparency can then impose policies that selectively acknowledge or conceal uncertainties (both their prevalence and significance). Conducting deliberations in this way amounts to secrecy — or as they prefer to call it ‘confidentiality’ — that protects them from scrutiny.

Authorities in governments, commerce and industry may then offer misleading reassurances that a product or process is entirely safe. And they may claim that sustainability concerns can be addressed uniquely well with their preferred technological solutions: genetically engineered crops as a solution to chronic hunger or nuclear power as a solution to carbon-based electricity generation.

However, research into regulatory disputes has shed light on why expert advisors reach different conclusions about the safety of products and practices. It suggests that they often do so not because only one side is doing good science, or because they are reaching contrary interpretations of shared and agreed evidence — but because they are asking and answering different questions, and consequently gathering and analysing different bodies of evidence.

Directory: file -> view
view -> Western Europe after wwii
view -> Author study: paul fleischman
view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide
view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg
view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh
view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce
view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy
view -> Table of Contents Lesson #
view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad

Download 2.62 Mb.

Share with your friends: