Imperialism Kritik Index
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Imperialism Kritik SLUDL/NAUDL 2016-17 Varsity Only Imperialism Kritik IndexImperialism Kritik Index 1 Summary 2 Glossary 3 Imperialism K 1NC (1/3) 5 Link: Diplomatic Engagement 8 Link: North Korea 13 Link: South China Sea 17 Link: Global Warming 21 Link: Human Rights 23 Impact: Global Violence/Environmental Destruction 26 Impact: Regional Conflict 27 Impact: Resource Wars 28 Alternative Solves – Criticism Key 30 Alternative: Ethical Rejection 31 Alternative: Peaceful Decline from Power Good 32 Alternative: Withdrawal from Imperialism Possible 33 Alt: Academic Rejections Create Broader Change 34 Alt: Individual Rejections Break Down Imperialism 35 Discourse Key 37 Epistemology Key 38 AT: The Affirmative reduces imperialism (Link Turns) 40 ANSWER TO: Permutation 42 ANSWER TO: China is a Threat 43 ANSWER TO: Imperialism Sustainable 45 ANSWER TO: Imperialism Good 46 ANSWER TO: Transition Wars 48 ANSWER TO: American Dominance Good 49
SummaryThe thesis of this argument is that the United States uses its position as a global leader and hegemon to expand its control beyond its national borders. The Aff either aims to increase or at the very least sustains this system of imperialist domination. Even policies designed to maximize cooperation ultimately work to stabilize and preserve the status quo in which the US exerts control throughout the globe. For example, the Aff might argue that the South China Sea is the most likely scenario for escalation, and that cooperation and mutual understanding would prevent a major conflict with China. But that result means that US would still be able to send warships unimpeded through the South China Sea, which is part of the larger project of imperialism. This leads ongoing forms of structural violence and, if left unchecked, imperialism will eventually lead to large-scale conflicts with other major powers. The destructive effects on the environment also cannot be ignored which would end in planetary extinction. The alternative is to simply reject imperialism…our role as intellectuals means that we must constantly look for new ways to dismantle this violent and oppressive system. This can either be framed as an ethical choice, a question of pedagogy, or an attempt to build momentum with anti-imperial alliances throughout the globe (many of the cards mention certain struggles and movements that are intensifying now). There are three key arguments you should be making on the Neg: 1) Imperialism is unsustainable – much like Cap debates, if you win this argument then it severely undercuts any “Imperialism Good” offense. 2) Imperialism turns the Aff’s impacts or makes them inevitable – it would definitely make your argument more persuasive if you could articulate how the impact scenarios outlined by the Aff are the result of the United States’ attempt to exert and impose control over various regions in the world…this is why North Korea is developing nuclear weapons in the first place, and this is why tensions are high in the South China Sea. US imperialism is also responsible for environmental destruction, increased CO2 emissions, human rights violations, etc. 3) Ethics matter, so rejecting imperialism becomes an ethical obligation for the judge. Even if the alternative is unable to solve for the K a “linear” fashion, it doesn’t matter – imperialism is unethical! For the Aff, the two big arguments are: 1) Alternatives to US dominance are worse – other nations (like China) have imperial ambitions which would lead to many of the same impacts outlined by the Kritik. 2) Use the perm to shield yourself from the links, and talk about why the plan is still good. Many Aff’s won’t be necessarily committed to, say, continued US military presence. The Aff might sustain world in which the US exerts control over the world, but the perm could include the dismantling of bases while the US and China still cooperate to reduce CO2 emissions to stop global warming. So the perm would resolve enough of the impact to make voting for the plan beneficial
Imperialism K 1NC (1/3)LINK: The US is committed to a project of imperial hegemony. Engagement with China part of an overall strategy of containment to ensure our position as the unchallenged superpower.Smith, 2013 [Ashley Smith, member of the International Socialist Review editorial board. “US imperialism's pivot to Asia.” International Socialist Review. March, 2013. http://isreview.org/issue/88/us-imperialisms-pivot-asia] In his second inaugural address, President Obama announced that after he withdraws combat troops from Afghanistan, the United States will be “ending a decade of wars.” On the very same day, the United States conducted three drone strikes in Yemen. In reality, Washington is now in a permanent state of “low-intensity” drone wars all around the world and is preparing, through what has been called the Pivot to Asia, to contain China. Obama is no pacifist. In his second term, he intends not to retreat from American imperial assertion but to strengthen it.¶ Obama is just as committed as his predecessor George W. Bush to the grand strategy of global domination that has aimed to incorporate all the world’s states into a US-managed unipolar world order. Bush had hoped to lock in US supremacy by using 9/11 as an alibi to invade Afghanistan and Iraq on the way to further regime changes in Syria and Iran. His goal was to control what foreign policy wonks call the Greater Middle East, its energy reserves, and shipping and pipeline routes. The United States could thereby control potential peer competitors, like China, which rely heavily on fuel imports from that region. Bush also intended to establish permanent bases throughout Central Asia in order to encircle both China and Russia. The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan wrecked these plans. Instead of securing US hegemony, the occupations backfired and in turn precipitated an imperial crisis. The Great Recession further accelerated the decline of US power.¶ In the wake of these strategic and economic disasters, the unipolar world order is being replaced by an asymmetric, multipolar world order. The United States stands out as the world’s only superpower, but it now faces a major imperial rival in China and a host of regional ones including Russia, India, and Brazil among others.1¶ To address this predicament, Obama issued a new Defense Strategic Guidance in January 2012 entitled “Sustaining US Leadership: Priorities for the 21st Century Defense” that announced his “Pivot to Asia.” With this new policy, he is dramatically reorienting American imperialism on the region most experts predict will be the hub of twenty-first century capitalism—the Asia Pacific. Obama continues to promise engagement with China to lure it into an international order under American hegemony, but his actual policies demonstrate an unmistakable shift toward containment of China as its principal imperial rival. Imperialism K 1NC (2/3)B. IMPACT: This attempt to maintain military and economic dominance over China makes deterrence fail and war inevitable. The only alternative is for the US to give up its imperial ambitions in East Asia. Primacy is no longer necessary to preserve international stability.Glaser, 2015 [John, researcher in Washington, DC. He has been published in the Washington Times, Reason, Te Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, The American Conservative, and the Daily Caller, “The US and Chhina can avoid a collision course – if the US gives up its empire.” May 28, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/conflict-us-china-not-inevitable-empire] To avoid a violent militaristic clash with China, or another cold war rivalry, the United States should pursue a simple solution: give up its empire.¶ Americans fear that China’s rapid economic growth will slowly translate into a more expansive and assertive foreign policy that will inevitably result in a war with the US. Harvard Professor Graham Allison has found: “in 12 of 16 cases in the past 500 years when a rising power challenged a ruling power, the outcome was war.” Chicago University scholar John Mearsheimer has bluntly argued: “China cannot rise peacefully.”¶ But the apparently looming conflict between the US and China is not because of China’s rise per se, but rather because the US insists on maintaining military and economic dominance among China’s neighbors. Although Americans like to think of their massive overseas military presence as a benign force that’s inherently stabilizing, Beijing certainly doesn’t see it that way.¶ According to political scientists Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell, Beijing sees America as “the most intrusive outside actor in China’s internal affairs, the guarantor of the status quo in Taiwan, the largest naval presence in the East China and South China seas, [and] the formal or informal military ally of many of China’s neighbors.” (All of which is true.) They think that the US “seeks to curtail China’s political influence and harm China’s interests” with a “militaristic, offense-minded, expansionist, and selfish” foreign policy.¶ China’s regional ambitions are not uniquely pernicious or aggressive, but they do overlap with America’s ambition to be the dominant power in its own region, and in every region of the world.¶ Leaving aside caricatured debates about which nation should get to wave the big “Number 1” foam finger, it’s worth asking whether having 50,000 US troops permanently stationed in Japan actually serves US interests and what benefits we derive from keeping almost 30,000 US troops in South Korea and whether Americans will be any safer if the Obama administration manages to reestablish a US military presence in the Philippines to counter China’s maritime territorial claims in the South China Sea.¶ Many commentators say yes. Robert Kagan argues not only that US hegemony makes us safer and richer, but also that it bestows peace and prosperity on everybody else. If America doesn’t rule, goes his argument, the world becomes less free, less stable and less safe.¶ But a good chunk of the scholarly literature disputes these claims. “There are good theoretical and empirical reasons”, wrote political scientist Christopher Fettweis in his book Pathologies of Power, “to doubt that US hegemony is the primary cause of the current stability.” The international system, rather than cowering in obedience to American demands for peace, is far more “self-policing”, says Fettweis. A combination of economic development and the destructive power of modern militaries serves as a much more satisfying answer for why states increasingly see war as detrimental to their interests.¶ International relations theorist Robert Jervis has written that “the pursuit of primacy was what great power politics was all about in the past” but that, in a world of nuclear weapons with “low security threats and great common interests among the developed countries”, primacy does not have the strategic or economic benefits it once had.¶ Nor does US dominance reap much in the way of tangible rewards for most Americans: international relations theorist Daniel Drezner contends that “the economic benefits from military predominance alone seem, at a minimum, to have been exaggerated”; that “There is little evidence that military primacy yields appreciable geoeconomic gains”; and that, therefore, “an overreliance on military preponderance is badly misguided.”¶ The struggle for military and economic primacy in Asia is not really about our core national security interests; rather, it’s about preserving status, prestige and America’s neurotic image of itself. Those are pretty dumb reasons to risk war.¶ There are a host of reasons why the dire predictions of a coming US-China conflict may be wrong, of course. Maybe China’s economy will slow or even suffer crashes. Even if it continues to grow, the US’s economic and military advantage may remain intact for a few more decades, making China’s rise gradual and thus less dangerous.¶ Moreover, both countries are armed with nuclear weapons. And there’s little reason to think the mutually assured destruction paradigm that characterized the Cold War between the US and the USSR wouldn’t dominate this shift in power as well.¶ But why take the risk, when maintaining US primacy just isn’t that important to the safety or prosperity of Americans? Knowing that should at least make the idea of giving up empire a little easier. Imperialism K 1NC (3/3)C. ALTERNATIVE: Imperial ambitions will only promote further instability and risk nuclear conflict. This means we have an intellectual responsibility to confront the contradictions of imperialism and replace it with a multipolar, horizontal world orderFoster, 2015 [John Bellamy, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon “The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finance Capital.” Monthly Review, Volume 67, Issue 03. July-August 2015. http://monthlyreview.org/2015/07/01/the-new-imperialism-of-globalized-monopoly-finance-capital/#fn29] Today the threatened implosion of this system is everywhere apparent. U.S. hegemony in the military sphere—in which it retains the power to unleash untold destruction but has a diminishing power to control geopolitical events—is receding along with its economic hegemony. This is so well understood today within U.S. foreign policy circles that some of the sharpest establishment thinkers emphasize that U.S. global preeminence is giving way to an imperium based on the combined force (military, economic, and political) of the triad of the United States/Canada, Western Europe, and Japan. The United States, although still retaining global preeminence, is increasingly able to exercise its power as a “sheriff” only when backed up by the “posse” (represented by Western Europe and Japan)—as famously articulated by Haass in The Reluctant Sheriff and subsequent works.55 It is thus the U.S.-led triad, and not Washington itself directly, which increasingly seeks to establish itself as the new governing power, through such institutions as the G7 and NATO. The goal is to promote the interests of the old imperial powers of the capitalist core through political, economic, and military means, while containing threats to its rule by a rising China, a recovering Russia, emerging economies generally, and the global anti-neoliberal revolt based in Latin America’s movement toward socialism.¶ Haass describes the current world situation as “The Unraveling.” As evidence he points to the U.S. role in destabilizing the Middle East and North Africa, the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the growing conflicts of the United States with China over the South China Sea and Africa, the return of Russia as a world power (manifested in the dispute over the Crimea and the Ukraine), the misdirection (in his terms) of states such as “Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and Venezuela,” as well as a whole failed set of regime changes initiated by Washington. He concludes: “The question is not whether the world will continue to unravel but how fast and how far.”56¶ All of this highlights, as István Mészáros tells us, “the potentially deadliest phase of imperialism.”57 It is perhaps a reminder of the seriousness of the world situation today that Soviet and U.S. climatologists alerted the world in the 1980s to the fact that a full-scale nuclear war would generate a nuclear winter, reducing the temperatures of whole continents by several degrees and possibly several tens of degrees, destroying much of the biosphere itself and with it humanity. It was this type of scenario that E.P. Thompson had in mind in his “Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization.”58 A war between the great powers does not appear to be an imminent danger at present. However, the instability generated by the hyper-exploitative and expansionist imperialist world system of today, led by the United States, which is now engaged in simultaneous military interventions and drone warfare in a half dozen countries (and which is planning to spend $200 billion dollars in the next decade modernizing its massive nuclear arsenal), suggests any number of ways in which a deadly confrontation could emerge. Climate change itself, with the continuation of business as usual, is expected to destabilize civilization, heightening the threat of a world war, which would quickly lead to a planetary level of destruction.59¶ The responsibility of the left under these circumstances is to confront, in Lenin’s terms, the “contradictions, conflicts, and convulsions—not only economical, but also political, national, etc.”—that increasingly characterize our era. This means fostering a more “audacious” global movement from below in which the key challenge will be the dismantling of imperialism, understood as the entire basis of capitalism in our time—with the object of creating a more horizontal, egalitarian, peaceful, and sustainable social-metabolic order controlled by the associated producers.60 Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2012 2012 -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? 2012 -> Aa and na members Dying from Tobacco 2012 -> [Baby Crying] 01: 04 [Ching 2012 -> Unit Name / Nom de l’unité uic / ciu dates 2012 -> What We Owe Jehovah’s Witnesses 2012 -> Oceans Challenge Badge 2012 -> Canadian cycling olympians 2012 -> Greg landry, june olkowski and tom lysiak 2012 -> William goldman 2012 -> Does translocation and restocking confer any benefit to the European eel population? A review Download 258.11 Kb. Share with your friends:
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