SCFI 2011 - Hegemony Bad

SCFI 2011 Hegemony BadSilent Nihilists ___ of ___

IndexUniqueness..................................................................................................................................................... 2

Hegemony Collapse Now........................................................................................................................3Hegemony Not Sustainable...................................................................................................................10

A2: Hegemony Good.................................................................................................................................... 12Hegemony Not Stabilizing.....................................................................................................................13Hegemony Causes Backlash..................................................................................................................17

Hegemony Bad Turns...................................................................................................................................18Hegemony Causes Terrorism................................................................................................................19China-Russia Relations Bad Turn...........................................................................................................20US-China Relations Turn........................................................................................................................21

Multipolarity Good.........................................................................................................................................22Multipolarity Good – Economy..................................................................................................23Multipolarity Good - Conflict.................................................................................................................25

Offshore Balancing Good............................................................................................................................. 28Offshore Balancing Good – Foreign Policy.............................................................................................29Offshore Balancing Good - Conflict.......................................................................................................31Offshore Balancing Good – Middle East................................................................................................33Offshore Balancing Good – Iran............................................................................................................34Offshore Balancing Good – Terrorism...................................................................................................36

Aff................................................................................................................................................................. 38No China Challenger..............................................................................................................................39

“Business in the front, party in the back” 1


Uniqueness



Hegemony Collapse Now

Any large spending will wreck American Hegemony, only way to preserve is large cuts. Layne 3/28/2011 (Christopher Layne is Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A & M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service, http://theeuropean-magazine.com/223-layne-christopher/231-pax-americana)

Optimists contend that current worries about decline will fade once the U.S. recovers from the recession. After all, they say, the U.S. faced a larger debt/GDP ratio after World War II, and yet embarked on a sustained era of growth. But the post-war era was a golden age of U.S. industrial and financial dominance, trade

surpluses, and sustained high growth rates. Those days are gone forever. The United States of 2011 are different from 1945. Even in the best case, the United States will emerge from the current crisis facing a grave fiscal crisis. The looming fiscal results from the $1 trillion plus budget deficits that the U.S. will incur for at least a decade. When these are bundled with the entitlements overhang (the unfunded future liabilities of Medicare and Social Security) and the cost of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is reason to worry about United States’ long-term fiscal stability – and the role of the dollar. The dollar’s vulnerability is the United States’ real geopolitical

Achilles’ heel because the dollar’s role as the international economy’s reserve currency role underpins U.S. primacy. If the dollar loses that status America’s hegemony literally will be unaffordable. In coming years the U.S. will be pressured to defend the dollar by preventing runaway inflation. This will require fiscal self-discipline through a combination of tax increases and big spending cuts. Meaningful cuts in federal spending mean deep reductions in defense expenditures because discretionary non-defense –

domestic – spending accounts for only about 20% of annual federal outlays. Faced with these hard choices, Americans may contract hegemony fatigue. If so, the U.S. will be compelled to retrench strategically and the Pax Americana will end.The Pax Americana is already crumbling in slow motion The current international order is based on the economic and security structures that the U.S. created after World War II. The entire fabric of world

order that the United States established after 1945 – the Pax Americana – rested on the foundation of U.S. military and economic preponderance. The decline of American power means the end of U.S. dominance in world politics and the beginning of the transition to a new constellation of world power. Indeed, the Pax Americana is already is crumbling in slow motion.

The US is declining now, should focus on a more multipolar strategy.Layne 5/1/2010 (Christopher Layne is Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A & M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service, http://amconmag.com/article/2010/may/01/00030/)The United States emerged from World War II in a position of global dominance. From this unparalleled military and economic power came a Pax Americana that

has endured for more than six decades. It seemed the sun would never set on the U.S. empire. But America is increasingly unable to play the hegemon’s assigned role. Militarily, a hegemon is responsible for stabilizing key regions and guarding the global commons. Economically, it offers public goods by opening its domestic market to other states, supplying liquidity for the world economy, and providing the reserve currency. A hegemon is supposed to solve international crises, not cause them. It is supposed to be the lender of last resort, not the biggest borrower. Faced with wars it cannot win or quit and an economy begging rescue, the United States no longer fits the part. Still, many in the mainstream foreign-policy community see these as temporary setbacks and believe that U.S. primacy will endure for years to come. The American people are awakening to a new reality more quickly than the academy. According to a December 2009 Pew survey, 41 percent of the public believes that the U.S. plays a less important and powerful role as a world

leader than it did a decade ago. The epoch of American dominance is drawing to a close, and



international politics is entering a period of transition: no longer unipolar but not yet fully multipolar. President Barack Obama’s November 2009 trip to China provided both substantive and emblematic

evidence of the shift. As the Financial Times observed, “Coming at a moment when Chinese prestige is growing and the U.S. is facing enormous difficulties, Mr. Obama’s trip has symbolized the advent of a more multi-polar world where U.S. leadership has to co-exist with several rising powers, most notably China.” In the same Pew study, 44 percent of Americans polled said that China was the leading economic power; just 27 percent chose the United States. Much of America’s decline can be attributed to its own self-defeating policies, but as the U.S. stumbles, others—notably China, India, and Russia—are rising. This shift in the global balance of power will dramatically affect international politics: the likelihood of intense great-power security competitions—and even war—will increase; the current era of globalization will end; and the post-1945 Pax Americana will be replaced by an international order that reflects the interests, values, and norms of emerging powers. China’s economy has been growing much more rapidly than the United States’ over the last two decades and continues to do so, maintaining audacious 8 percent growth projections in the midst of a global recession. Leading economic forecasters predict that it will overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, measured by overall GDP, sometime around 2020. Already in 2008, China passed the U.S. as the world’s leading manufacturing nation—a title the United States had enjoyed for over a century—and this year China will displace Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. Everything we know about the trajectories of rising great powers tells us that China will use its increasing wealth to build formidable military power and that it will seek to become the dominant power in East Asia. Optimists contend that once the U.S. recovers from what historian Niall Ferguson calls the “Great Repression”—not quite a depression but more than a recession—we’ll be able to answer the Chinese challenge. The country, they remind us, faced a larger debt-GDP ratio after World War II yet embarked on an era of sustained growth. They forget that the postwar era was a golden age of U.S. industrial and financial dominance, trade surpluses, and persistent high growth rates. Those days are gone. The United States of 2010 and the world in which it lives are far different

from those of 1945. Weaknesses in the fundamentals of the American economy have been accumulating for more than three decades. In the 1980s, these problems were acutely diagnosed by a number of writers—notably David Calleo, Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Samuel Huntington, and James Chace—who predicted that these structural ills would ultimately erode the economic foundations of America’s global preeminence. A spirited late-1980s debate was cut short, when, in quick succession, the Soviet Union collapsed, Japan’s economic bubble burst, and the U.S. experienced an apparent economic revival during the Clinton administration. Now the delayed day

of reckoning is fast approaching. Even in the best case, the United States will emerge from the current crisis with fundamental handicaps. The Federal Reserve and Treasury have pumped massive amounts of dollars into circulation in hope of reviving the economy. Add to that the $1 trillion-plus budget deficits that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts the United States will incur for at least a decade. When the projected deficits are bundled with the persistent U.S. current-account deficit, the entitlements overhang (the

unfunded future liabilities of Medicare and Social Security), and the cost of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is reason to worry about the United States’ fiscal stability. As the CBO says, “Even if the recovery occurs as projected and the stimulus bill is allowed to expire, the country will face the highest debt/GDP ratio in 50 years and an increasingly unsustainable and urgent fiscal problem.” The dollar’s vulnerability is the United States’ geopolitical Achilles’ heel. Its role as the international economy’s reserve currency ensures American preeminence, and if it loses that status, hegemony will be literally unaffordable. As Cornell professor Jonathan Kirshner observes,

the dollar’s vulnerability “presents potentially significant and underappreciated restraints upon contemporary American political and military predominance.” Fears for the dollar’s long-term health predated the current financial and economic crisis. The meltdown has amplified them and highlighted two new factors that bode ill for continuing reserve-currency status. First, the other big financial players in the international economy are either military rivals (China) or ambiguous allies (Europe) that have their own ambitions and no longer require U.S. protection from the Soviet threat. Second, the dollar faces an uncertain future because of concerns that its value will diminish over time. Indeed, China, which has holdings estimated at nearly $2 trillion, is worried that America will leave it with huge piles of depreciated dollars. China’s vote of no confidence is reflected in its recent calls to create a new reserve currency. In coming years, the U.S. will be under increasing pressure to defend the dollar by preventing runaway inflation. This will require it to impose fiscal self-discipline through some combination of budget cuts, tax increases, and interest-rate hikes. Given that the last two options could choke off renewed growth, there is likely to be strong pressure to slash the federal budget. But it will be almost impossible to make meaningful cuts in federal spending without deep reductions in defense expenditures. Discretionary non-defense domestic spending accounts for only about 20 percent of annual federal outlays. So the United States will face obvious “guns or butter” choices. As Kirshner puts it, the absolute size of U.S. defense expenditures are “more likely to be decisive in

the future when the U.S. is under pressure to make real choices about taxes and spending. When borrowing becomes more difficult, and adjustment more difficult to postpone, choices must be made between raising taxes, cutting non-defense spending, and cutting defense spending.” Faced with these hard decisions, Americans will find themselves afflicted with hegemony fatigue. The United States will be compelled to overhaul its strategy dramatically, and rather than having this adjustment



forced upon it suddenly by a major crisis, the U.S. should get ahead of the curve by shifting its position in a gradual, orderly fashion. A new American global posture would involve strategic retrenchment, burden-shifting, and abandonment of the so-called “global counterinsurgency” being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As a first step, the U.S. will need to pull back from its current security commitments to NATO, Japan, and South Korea. This is not isolationism. The United States undertook the defense of these regions under conditions very different from those prevailing today. In the late 1940s, all were threatened by the Soviet Union—in the case of South Korea and Japan, by China as well—and were too weak to defend themselves. The U.S. did the right thing by extending its security umbrella and “drawing a line in the sand” to contain the Soviet Union.

But these commitments were never intended to be permanent. They were meant as a temporary shield to enable Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea to build up their own economic and military strength and assume responsibility for defending themselves. There are several explanations for why the U.S. did not follow through with this policy. Fundamentally, during the Pax Americana there was no need. As the U.S. declines, however, it will be compelled to return to its original intent. If we remember that an eventual pullback was the goal of U.S. policy, strategic retrenchment in the early 21st century looks less like a radical break than a fulfillment

of strategic goals adopted in the late 1940s. Burden-shifting—not burden-sharing—is the obvious corollary of strategic retrenchment. American policy should seek to compel our allies to assume responsibility for their own security and take the lead role in providing security in their regions. To implement this strategic devolution, the U.S. should disengage gradually from its current commitments in order to give an adequate transition period for its allies to step up to the plate. It should facilitate this transition by providing advanced weapons and military technology to friendly states in Europe and Asia.

US hegemony is declining.Hongmei 2/24/2009 (Li Hongmei is a columnist for People’s Daily Online, The U.S. Hegemony ends, the era of global multipolarity enters, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90002/96417/6599374.html)

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently published two graphics which struck people as odd by the stark juxtaposition: In 2003, GDP in the U.S accounted for 32 percent of the world total, while GDP of the emerging economies put together took up only 25 percent. In 2008, however, things just reversed with 25 percent for the U.S. and 32 percent going to the emerging economies. The two graphs show GDP as a percentage of total world output. However, what deserves

notice is that the dramatic reversal could take place in just five years, and how much more will it change in the next five or the next ten years? It is evident that the upshot of the shifting economic power signals a swift reduction of U.S. strength as a unipolar power. 'At best, America's unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift…So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing—and losing—in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world's other superpowers: the European Union and China,' citing an article in Saturday's New York Times Magazine titled 'Waving Goodbye to Hegemony' by Parag Khanna. In the post-Cold War period and with the decomposition of the former Soviet Union, the world scenario was generally subject to the U.S influence. And especially in the 1990s, it seemed conceivable and probable that the international power structure would be ended in the U.S. predominance in the political, economic and cultural systems, or simply and bluntly put, the U.S. would be 'King of the hill.' It would be that case if the U.S. were not hit by the

'9.11' terrorist attack. The U.S. used to rally the international support by launching a severe clampdown upon terror and acting as the global rescuer to keep the world free from the terrorist havoc. But quite soon, this noble campaign against terrorism, initiated by the U.S. Neo-Conservative elites, was interpreted by the international community as a camouflage used by the U.S. to hide its intention to regain monopoly over the entire globe. In 2008,

nevertheless, the U.S hegemony was pushed onto the brink of collapse, as a result of its inherent structural contradictions, which proved well-rooted in the



American society and far from conciliatory. A visible sign of the U.S. strength decline turned out to be the decline of its monolithic economic clout over the globe. The typically American liberal capitalist financial system, featuring the loopholes of effective monitoring and feeding greed and exploitation, sparked a swirl of Domino Effects last year and quickly sent the whole economy into plunging. The worst ever economic downturn since the Great Depression also helped the first African-American president Barack Obama take power in a backdrop that Americans are so dearly longing for a radical change. With the breakdown of the U.S.--dominated international power structure, the world attention would be focused on such an unavoidable question: Does the decline of U.S. geopolitical hegemony make multilateral global governance more likely? Perhaps it is still too early to rush any conclusion, but at least one

thing is certain: the U.S. strength is declining at a speed so fantastic that it is far beyond anticipation. The U.S. is no longer 'King of the hill,' as a new phase of multipolar world power structure will come into being in 2009, and the international order will be correspondingly reshuffled. Albeit, for now, the new international power structure is still indiscernible— In the Middle East, peace talks between Palestine and Israel have yet to see any fruit, and maybe not in prospect; Iran is rising as a regional power; Latin America is stepping up its efforts to break away from the U.S. orbit; the European Union cannot afford its increasing expansion; Leading players on the European Continent such as Britain, Germany and France are battling their own economic downtrend; and Russia also faces a tough job in reducing its heavy reliance on gas exports and building the modern manufacturing industry of its own. China has grown to be a new heavyweight player and stepped into the limelight on the world stage. And its role in salvaging the plummeting world economy from hitting bottom looms large and active, as the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during her just wrapped-up Asian tour, 'the U.S. appreciates the continued Chinese confidence in the U.S treasuries.' If the

Cold War was 'a tug of war' between East and West, and a showcase of hard power, what we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational and multipolar competition, and a display of smart power. To be the winner, one has to seek more cooperation rather than confrontation.

The United States is losing its hegemony in the Middle East. The US will not last long there.

Phillips ‘10 (Chris Phillips is a London-based writer and analyst of Middle Eastern Affairs, with particular focus on Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt. US hegemony in Middle East is ending: Talk of a Middle East cold war is inaccurate – Russia and Turkey are simply capitalising on the region's new power vacuum. guardian.co.uk, Monday 31 May 2010) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/31/us-hegemony-middle-east-ending

A recent arms deal between Russia and Syria has raised the prospect of a new cold war in the Middle East. Foreign Policy's Josh Landis, for example, suggests that unconditional US support for Israel will draw Moscow back into its pre-1989 role as supporter and arms supplier for the enemies of Tel Aviv and Washington. Yet Russia's return to Syria, whether it be the sale of MiG-29s or building a naval dock on the Syrian coast, is not the action of a superpower challenging US hegemony as it was in 1945-89 but rather an assertive regional power taking advantage of the emerging power vacuum in the region. Instead of a new bi-polar cold war, regional powers such as Russia and Turkey are increasing their influence at the United States' expense. The idea of a new cold war has gained currency in some quarters for the

wrong reasons. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad himself told La Repubblica last week that "Russia is reasserting itself. And the cold war is just a natural reaction to the attempt by America to dominate the world". In the same interview he asserted that there was a new triple alliance between Syria,



Turkey and Iran – part of a "northern alliance" that Damascus has been trying to construct against Israel and the US – with Russia now cast in the role as superpower benefactor. As leader of a small power attempting to defy the global hegemon, it is in Assad's interests to exaggerate the strength of such an alliance. Yet no such cohesive united bloc actually exists. Russia is pursuing a realist regional agenda, ensuring it can maximise its influence without unnecessarily confronting the US – a cornerstone of Dmitry Medvedev's foreign policy. A recent spat with Tehran over Russian support for Washington's new UN sanctions on Iran hardly suggests a united anti-American/anti-Israeli front. Turkey, too, is not tying itself to any camp. Damascus may regard Ankara's rekindled relationship with Iraq, Iran and Syria as crucial for any new alignment, but Turkey's "zero problems with neighbours" policy is not limited to those states on its southern border. Turkey is seeking influence and markets for its rapidly expanding economy across the region, including Israel. Though prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's rhetoric has been increasingly populist and anti-Israeli since the Gaza war of 2008-2009, the deep commercial, economic and military ties between the Turkish and Israeli establishments show no signs of receding. Like Russia, Turkey is pursuing its own interests by asserting its influence in the whole Middle East, not just as the lynchpin of an anti-America/Israel bloc. Yet even though the return to cold war bi-

polar blocs in the Middle East is unlikely, the region's international relations are changing. US power is waning. Though Washington remains the world's only superpower, the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan have exposed the limits of US ambitions, while the economic crisis has forced the Obama administration to focus energy elsewhere. While the Bush era saw the US hegemonic in the region, squeezing the

defiant few like Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, today's Middle East sees a power vacuum led by partial US retreat being filled by assertive regional and middle powers . Turkey and Brazil's recent nuclear deal with Iran typify this emerging new climate. Stephen Walt has highlighted that this shift in power is global, with Asia's share of

GDP already outstripping that of the US or Europe. As ever, it seems the Middle East could prove a microcosm of these international changes. If the age of American uni-polarity is coming to an end, perhaps hastened by unnecessary wars and economic shortsightedness, it is much more likely that international relations in the Middle East will come to reflect the multi-polar world that will follow rather than revert to a bi-polar cold war. In such circumstances, it won't just be Russia and Turkey expanding their reach in the region, but China, India and Brazil will all bid for a role, too – presumably having fewer demands than Washington about their clients pursuing democratic reforms and peace with Israel. Saudi Arabia's growing relationship with China might signify the shape of things to come. Not that this era is

yet upon us. The US remains the superpower and could still effect serious change in the region, should it desire. However, the recent actions of Russia and Turkey in the Middle East do show a new assertiveness from regional powers to pursue their own path in defiance of US will, whether through arms

deals, trade agreements or diplomatic coups. A new cold war is unlikely, but the age of unchallenged US hegemony in the Middle East could be ending.



US power is waning with other countries stepping upMichael Cecire ’11 (“American decline, multipolarity, apolarity, and hyper-polarity” http://www.evolutsia.net/american-decline-multipolarity-apolarity-and-hyper-polarity/, 2/19)

Wess Mitchell and Jakub Grygiel’s companion article in The American Interest should underscore this sense of doubt over

Russia’s actual intentions. As noted yesterday, their essay notes, how in the waning of American power, competitors are probing for American weaknesses at the frontiers of US hegemony , which they note as being Eastern Europe/Central Eurasia, the Middle East, and the Pacific Rim. Russian actions in Georgia, they point out, is only the most visible example of such ‘testing’ by Russia. One might also say that Turkey’s overtures to Iran and denigrating of onetime ally Israel also fall under this general rubric.



The coming of a multipolar world is evident. Thus, the United States hegemonic status is declining.



Hegemony Not Sustainable

American Primacy is not sustainable and causes conflict.Carl Conetta (co-directs the Project on Defense Alternatives, a defense-policy think tank. Earlier, he was a research fellow at the Institute for

Defense and Disarmament Studies)December 2008 “ Forceful Engagement: Rethinking the Role of Military Power in US Global Policy” http://www.comw.org/pda/081201FE-ExecSum.htm

For more than a dozen years, US policy has been ruled by the “primacy principle”. This is the notion that America’s present condition of distinct military primacy

is essential to the nation’s security—not just a fortuitous thing, but a necessary one. What recent practice shows, however, is that US leaders have dangerously overestimated the utility of America’s preponderance of military power. At fabulous expense, the efforts to extend primacy and put it to work have been overwhelmed by unwanted and inadvertent effects.Military primacy is not sustainable, at any rate. Indeed, the more it is exercised, the more it invites balancing behavior on the part of others. In this light, it is important to note that present global disparities in military power do not reflect the global distribution of human and material resources. Today, the United States devotes 70 percent more of its GDP to defense than do other nations, on average. This gap is much higher than the one prevailing in 1985. This means that other nations—China and Russia, among them—have considerable latent capacity to narrow the military gap between themselves and the United States, if they so choose. Something worth contemplating is that none, not even China, are doing all they might

to close the military gap—not yet, at least. Why not? Implicit in the “primacy principle” and in the expanded use of America’s armed forces is a wager about the nature of strategic competition today, and about the balance among the strategic challenges that face America and all nations. Most nations—including major US allies and potential competitors—are betting that the military sphere is not the key one. Potential competitors and adversaries, especially, are wagering that America has over-invested itself in the wrong contest, the wrong sphere. The current economic upheaval, which has done more to damage American power than Bin-Laden could ever hope, suggests that they are correct.

Hegemony is unsustainableKrastev March 2008 Ivan Chair Centre for Liberal Strategies http://pdc.ceu.hu/archive/00004892/01/1205760023__brussels-forum-2008-rusiia_euorder-krastev.pdf

Putin’s new assertive foreign policy, expressed most powerfully in the Russian President’s speech last February at the Munich Security Conference, rests on two key assumptions and one strategic calculation The first assumption is that the United States’ global hegemony is unsustainable and the decline of American power is irreversible Russians are tempted to view the current crisis of America’s global power as an analogy alongside the crisis of Soviet power of the 1980s The Russian media views the debacle in Iraq as “America’s Afghanistan ” Washington’s conflicts with its European allies in the aftermath of the American invasion in Iraq are conceptualized as the dismantling of the informal American empire in Europe The recent U S mortgage and banking crisis is seen as a signal of the fundamental weakness of the American economy


http://pdc.ceu.hu/archive/00004892/01/1205760023__brussels-forum-2008-rusiia_euorder-krastev.pdf


US hegemony decline inevitable Richard Haass ‘8 (President, Council on Foreign Relations “Ask the Expert: What Comes After Unipolarity?” http://www.cfr.org/us-strategy-and-politics/ask-expert-comes-after-unipolarity/p16063, 4/15 Financial Times)

The era of un precedented American foreign policy dominion is done, argues Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass in the the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs.

Oil consumption, the Iraq war and globalisation are just some of the factors driving the end of unipolarity. Power is no longer concentrated in a few hands, but distributed among diverse centres, from corporations to drug cartels and religious movements to

media outlets. What comes next? A multipolar world dominated by China, Europe, India, Japan, Russia and the US? Or, as Haass argues, will this be the age of non-polarity? Without a primary actor, how will a non-polar world address global problems like sectarian clashes, rising food prices and border disputes? And what will be the new face of diplomacy in a new, more collective age?



A2: Hegemony Good



Hegemony Not Stabilizing

American hegemony has not stabilized the world, It’s only made it worse.Carl Conetta (co-directs the Project on Defense Alternatives, a defense-policy think tank. Earlier, he was a research fellow at the Institute for


A key objective of the new administration will be to “rebalance” America’s foreign and security policy “tool kit”, giving greater prominence to diplomacy and other

elements of “soft power”. And it is easy to see why. The surge in US defense spending and military activity that began ten years ago, and then sharply accelerated after the 11 September 2001 attacks, has had disconcerting results—to say the least. But setting an effective alternative course for US policy will not be as easy to accomplish as some assume. Since 1998, defense spending has risen by 90 percent in real terms, bringing the national defense budget close to $700 billion annually, which represents about 46 percent of global defense expenditure (in purchasing power terms). All told, there are approximately 440,000 US military personnel presently overseas, which is close to the number that was overseas during the last decade of the Cold War. About 200,000 are currently engaged in combat operations and more than 38,000 have been wounded in action or killed since 2001.

Despite this prodigious and costly effort, the world today seems, on balance, to be less secure, stable, and friendly than eight years ago. Terrorist activity and anti-Americanism have increased. The nation’s military activity has unsettled its alliances and prompted balancing behavior on the part of potential big power competitors: China and Russia. And there remains no real end in sight for America’s consumptive commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, the scope of US military intervention is expanding. What the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown the world is that the United States, unimpeded by a peer competitor, cannot by its current methods reliably stabilize two impoverished nations comprising only one percent of the world’s population—despite the investment of nearly 5,000 American lives and more than

$850 billion. What General David Petreaus once asked of the Iraq war—“Tell me how this ends”—might be asked of the “war on terror” as a whole. The effort waxes and wanes, meandering into every corner of the earth, but shows no sure progress toward an end that might be called “victory.” No great wisdom is needed to suspect that a sea-change in method is due. Giving greater play to diplomacy and “soft power” is advisable, but not sufficient. More fundamental is the need to roll back America’s over-reliance on military instruments, which has proved both improvident and counter-productive. That the United States faces serious security challenges is not at question. Nor at question is the need for energetic

global engagement. The problem is that the United States is using its armed forces and military power well beyond the limit of their utility. It is now experiencing not just diminishing returns, but negative ones. Thus, America finds itself paying more and more for less and less security. Military moderation is also essential to the revival of America’s world reputation and leadership position. This, because what most divides the United States from those it proposes to lead is the issue of when, how, and how much to use force and the armed forces. This divide helped drive the Bush administration deeper into unilateralism. It was apparent during the

1990s as well, when the rise in anti- American sentiments first made headlines. Indeed, most post-Cold War US military interventions have involved considerable contention with key allies. Even when they join the United States on the battlefield, differences over the use of force re-emerge at the tactical level and with regard to “rules of engagement”.



Hegemony empirically leads the US to conflict.Carl Conetta (co-directs the Project on Defense Alternatives, a defense-policy think tank. Earlier, he was a research fellow at the Institute for


In 1991, General Colin Powell, who was then Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, had observed that the Pentagon was “running out of demons.” But as the scale of “clear and present” dangers receded, the Pentagon refocused defense preparation and action on unknown and prospective threats. Emphasizing “uncertainty,” planners relaxed their assumptions about America’s future interests and about the identity of potential foes, their capabilities, and their objectives . Planners lowered the bar on the plausibility of threat scenarios, brought ”worst case” possibilities to the fore, and boosted their estimates of what these might

require of our armed forces. Paradoxically, as the scale and stakes of security challenges declined, the Pentagon adopted more ambitious military objectives, seeking to deploy force ever faster and win wars more quickly and in more than one theater simultaneously. One aim was to be prepared to deal quickly and decisively with a very broad range of possible “surprises”. None of these were remotely as serious or immediate as the challenge that had once been posed by the Soviet bloc. And almost none involved attacks on the US homeland.

But hedging against the whole set of them worldwide substantially boosted putative defense requirements. Unfortunately, rather than immunizing the United States against unpleasant surprises, the effort to defeat uncertainty only dissipated America’s resources and attention. Thus, when Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the United States in 2001, America’s intelligence agencies and armed forces were mostly preoccupied with other concerns. Bioterrorism, missile defense, North Korea, and Chinese military power dominated security discourse in the months before 11 September. This effectively distracted from eight years of strategic warning—beginning with the 1993 World Trade Center attack—and eight months of more immediate warnings regarding Al Qaeda’s interest in attacking the US homeland. A few years later, the armed forces were similarly unprepared for the eventuality of protracted counter-insurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. These recent failures

point to a simple truth: Attempts to hedge against uncertainty by preparing in all directions for all scenarios will leave a nation’s defenses less sensitive to and prepared for what is actually emerging. In fact, the emphasis on “uncertainty” during the past decade has allowed each military service and branch to find some justification for continuing to do and buy what it has been doing and buying for years. Thus, despite years of talk about “transformation”, the US military entered the new century looking not much different than it did in 1990, albeit smaller. It is hubris that leads policy makers and planners to think that America can decisively trump surprise and attain complete security. A better approach to managing uncertainty is to invest more in intelligence, improve America’s capacity to quickly adapt its defenses to new circumstances as they arise, better protect those national assets that are most critical, and ensure that the nation has the fundamental strength to absorb unexpected blows and “bounce back”—as it did after Pearl Harbor.

Hegemony causes instabilityFLORIG 2000 DENNIS, 16 years teaching International Relations, English, and American Studies in South Korea and Japan 6 years teaching Political Science at American universities Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University, Summer 1983Professor Division of International Studies Hankuk (Korean) University of Foreign Studies Seoul, South Korea



The hegemon uses its military power to impose its will around the world, raising the level of violence associated with regional political conflicts. The economy of the hegemon sucks resources from less developed economies and twists development around the globe to fit its insatiable appetites rather than

benefit the peoples of the world. The alliance system of the hegemon virtually guarantees that peoples and states excluded from the hegemon’s councils will be forced into a series of counter-hegemonic alliances. Conflict between the hegemonic alliance system and the counter-hegemonic alliance system was the source of the two world wars and the Cold War. The military competition between the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic alliances turns many otherwise manageable political disputes into violent conflict. The rules and values of the international institutions constructed by the hegemon are blatantly unfair. The hegemon represents its own narrow national interests as the interests of global

society, while in fact global institutions serve to expand the power and wealth of the hegemon. Just as a dictator within a nation proclaims himself the protector and voice of the people while actually suppressing and exploiting the people, the hegemon claims to be the protector of international order and the driving force of global prosperity, but in truth the hegemon spreads disorder, repression, and exploitation.

American preemption, prevention and preclusion due to Primacy causes conflictCarl Conetta (co-directs the Project on Defense Alternatives, a defense-policy think tank. Earlier, he was a research fellow at the Institute for


The post-Cold War focus on potential worst case scenarios also increased the attraction of “jumping the

gun”—that is, taking action early. “Acting early” can refer to several stratagems—preemption, prevention, or preclusion—each more risk-averse than the one preceding. Preemption involves taking action to spoil an attack that is in its preparatory stages. Prevention, by contrast, involves acting forcefully now against an adversary who officials believe will attempt a serious, unavoidable aggression at some point in future years. Preclusion goes a step further, seeking to remove the possibility of a future aggression even when this eventuality does not seem certain or undeterrable. To appreciate the difference among these stratagems, it helps to dissect the notion of “threat”. A “real and present” threat of aggression minimally comprises a serious clash of interests and the intention, capability, and opportunity to do harm. When some of these elements are missing, there is still risk, but not an immediate threat of the type once posed by the Soviet Union. Even when all the constituent elements of “threat” converge to form a real and present danger, deterrence can often hold it in check—as it did during the Cold War—while diplomacy and other instruments work to defuse it. But it is the risks inherent in this path that the United States is today less willing to bear—despite (or perhaps because of) its distinct military predominance. Preventive and preclusive military operations imply treating adversaries (or potential adversaries) who do not pose an imminent threat of attack as though they do. Such actions target not aggression, per se, nor even the imminent danger of aggression but, instead, the capability to aggress—be it existing, emergent, or suspected. Prevention and preclusion also can target actors who security officials believe are predisposed, due to the nature of their governments or belief systems, to do America significant harm at some point in the future, although they presently lack the capability. Successive


SCFI 2011 Hegemony BadSilent Nihilists ___ of ___US administrations have marked such recalcitrant state actors as “rogue states” or“axis of evil” states—designations that tend to invite efforts at regime change. Similarly, the failure of some nations and social movements to integrate with the sphere of market democracy is seen as posing a military security problem of growing significance. While the second Bush administration clearly crossed a threshold in attacking Iraq, the notion of applying US military power more

proactively than during the Cold War was already well-established before George W. Bush took office. Key precursors and enablers of current policy ideas—such as offensive counter-proliferation, the “rogue state doctrine”, and regime change—were already evident in US policy toward Iraq and elsewhere during the late 1990s. Some of these ideas may survive the Bush administration—although in transmuted form as part of the new enthusiasm for armed nation-building. Does prevention work? Our recent experience

shows that treating potential threats as though they are imminent ones can exacerbate tensions and precipitate the outcome that “prevention” is meant to preclude. Thus, in addressing the nuclear programs of both North Korea and Iran, America’s coercive efforts spurred, rather than retarded, undesirable behavior. In the Iraq case, too, a confrontational approach in the run-up to the 2003 war fed the regime’s “bunker-mentality”, making war more likely, not less. Generally, the declaration of “regime change” objectives and the frequent resort to saber-rattling undermine diplomacy and help to precipitate and harden anti-American attitudes and coalitions. The Iraq case also suggests that preventive uses of military force rest on unrealistic assumptions about our capacity to control outcomes and a serious underestimation of the potential costs and consequences of going to war. Additionally, the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate the limits of military occupation as a means of advancing stability and democracy. In both cases, the dominant role of armed foreigners (and their too frequent resort to firepower) have fed and sustained rejectionist movements and sentiments.



Hegemony Causes Backlash

Further US attempts to boost hegemony will lead to the collapse of Pax Americana.Layne 5/1/2010 (Christopher Layne is Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A & M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service, http://amconmag.com/article/2010/may/01/00030/)

These assumptions invest American foreign policy with a tendency to see the world in terms of good versus evil. And because the U.S. looks through this prism, it believes it has the obligation to prevail in this global struggle. America’s security and way of life are purportedly endangered by the existence of hostile ideologies anywhere in the world because peace and freedom are allegedly indivisible. Intervention is thus the United States’ default in foreign policy. We attempt to tame the world by exporting democracy because—we are told—democracies do not fight each other. We export our model of free-market capitalism because—we are told—states that are economically interdependent do not fight each other. We work multilaterally through international institutions because—we are told—these promote cooperation and trust

among states. None of these propositions is self-evident. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that they are wrong. But they are illusions that “express the deepest beliefs which Americans, as a nation, hold about the world.” So we cling to the idea that our hegemony is necessary for our own and everyone else’s security. The consequence has been to contribute to the very imperial overstretch that is accelerating the United States’ decline. Because that U.S. enjoyed such vast superiority for such a long time, it had the luxury of acting on its delusions without paying too high a price. (That is, if you discount the 58,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial or the tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel who have suffered disfiguring wounds or been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.) But as my graduate school mentor, Kenneth Waltz, one of the towering figures in the study of international politics, used to tell us about

American foreign policy, “When you are big, strong, and powerful, you can afford to make the same dumb mistakes over and over again. But when your power declines, you begin to pay a price for repeating your mistakes.” U.S. decline means that in the 21st century, the United States will pay a high price if it endlessly repeats its mistakes. To change our foreign policy—to come to grips with the end of the Pax Americana—we first need to change the way we see the world.

US heg causes blowbackChristopher Layne ‘2 (Associate professor in the School of International Studies at the University of Miami “Offshore Balancing Revisited” The Washington Quarterly, Spring)If any doubt remained that U.S. hegemony would trigger a nasty geopolitical “blowback,” it surely was erased on September 11. The Middle East is an extraordinarily complex and volatile place in terms of its geopolitics, and the reaction there to U.S. hegemony is somewhat nuanced. Nothing, however, is subtle about the United States’ hegemonic role in the Persian Gulf, a role that flows inexorably from the strategy of U.S. primacy. With the onset of the Persian Gulf War, the United States began to manage the region’s security directly. The subsequent U.S. policy of “dual containment”—directed simultaneously against the region’s two strategic heavyweights, Iran and Iraq—underscored the U.S. commitment to maintaining its security interests through a hegemonic strategy, rather than a strategy of relying on local power balances to prevent a hostile state from dominating the region or relying on other great powers to stabilize the Gulf and Middle East.

Trying to keep US heg causes other countries to gang up against the USChristopher Layne ‘2 (Associate professor in the School of International Studies at the University of Miami “Offshore Balancing Revisited” The Washington Quarterly, Spring)Like primacy, offshore balancing is a strategy firmly rooted in the Realist tradition. Primacy adherents regard multipolarity—an international system comprised of three or more great powers—as a strategic threat to the United States, while offshore balancers see it as a strategic opportunity for the United States. Offshore balancing is predicated on the assumption that attempting to maintain U.S. hegemony is self-defeating because it will provoke other states to combine in opposition to the United States and result in the futile depletion of the United States’ relative power, thereby leaving it worse off than if it accommodated multipolarity. Offshore balancing accepts that the United States cannot prevent the rise of new great powers either within (the EU, Germany, and Japan) or outside



(China, a resurgent Russia) its sphere of influence. Offshore balancing would also relieve the United States of its burden of managing the security affairs of turbulent regions such as the Persian Gulf/Middle East and Southeast Europe



Hegemony Bad Turns



Hegemony Causes Terrorism

US heg causes terrorismChristopher Layne ‘2 (Associate professor in the School of International Studies at the University of Miami “Offshore Balancing Revisited” The Washington Quarterly, Spring)The terrorism of Osama bin Laden results in part from this cultural chasm, as well as from more traditional geopolitical grievances. In a real sense, bin Laden’s brand of terrorism—the most dramatic illustration of U.S. vulnerability to the kind of “asymmetric warfare” of which some defense experts have warned—is the counterhegemonic balancing of the very weak. For all of these reasons, the hegemonic role that the strategy of preponderance assigns to the United States as the Gulf’s stabilizer was bound to provoke a multilayered backlash against U.S. predominance in the region. Indeed, as Richard K. Betts, an acknowledged expert on strategy, presciently observed several years ago, “It is hardly likely that Middle Eastern radicals would be hatching schemes like the destruction of the World Trade Center if the United States had not been identified so long as the mainstay of Israel, the shah of Iran, and conservative Arab regimes and the source of a cultural assault on Islam.”15 (Betts was referring to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.)In the wake of U.S. diplomatic and battlefield success in the first phase of the war on terrorism, some doubtless will conclude that victory has erased the paradox of U.S. power. The United States, after all, stands at the zenith of its hegemonic power—militarily, diplomatically, economically, and culturally. When even potential rivals such as China and Russia have been folded into the U.S.-led coalition against terrorism, concluding that U.S. primacy is secure for a long, long time is tempting indeed. The outlook for U.S. primacy, however, may not be quite so rosy. Appearances can be deceiving, and the paradox of U.S. power remains.



China-Russia Relations Bad TurnUS heg causes improved China-Russia realtionsPaul Roberts ‘7 (“US Hegemony Spawns Russian-Chinese Military Alliance” http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts218.html)

This week the Russian and Chinese militaries are conducting a joint military exercise involving large numbers of troops and combat vehicles. The former Soviet Republics of Tajikistan, Kyrgkyzstan, and Kazakstan are participating. Other countries appear ready to join the military alliance. This new potent military alliance is a real world response to neoconservative delusions about US hegemony. Neocons believe that the US is supreme in the world and can dictate its course. The neoconservative idiots have actually written papers, read by Russians and Chinese, about why the US must use its military superiority to assert hegemony over Russia and China.

Increased China-Russia relations lead to cyber warfare against the USDr. Richard Weitz ’11 (“China-Russia relations and the United States: At a turning point?” http://en.rian.ru/valdai_op/20110414/163523421.html, 4/14)Chinese and Russian leaders also have developed shared perspectives and independent offensive capabilities regarding governmental activities in the cyber domain. The two governments have been developing their information warfare capabilities and now possess an extensive variety of offensive and defensive tools in this domain.Furthermore, recent revelations regarding Chinese cyber-espionage activities suggest the extent to which Chinese operatives have penetrated Western information networks. In Russia’s case, cyber attacks against Estonia, Georgia, and other countries illustrate the extensive offensive capabilities available to that country’s forces. Russia’s hybrid August 2008 campaign against Georgia was particularly effective in disabling Georgia’s infrastructure as well as demonstrating a potential capacity to inflict widespread physical damage. Both countries appear to have already conducted extensive surveying of U.S. digital vulnerabilities and to have prepared targeted campaign plans to exploit U.S. network vulnerabilities if necessary. Although these offensive and defensive preparations are being conducted independently, the Chinese and Russian governments are collaborating, along with other Eurasian allies in the SCO, to deny Internet resources to civil liberties groups and other opponents of their regimes.

Cyber warfare can cripple our infrastructure, and mess with our military and economyChris Nickson ’10 (“Cyber-warfare danger still on the rise and the authorities don’t know how to fight it” http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/cyber-warfare-danger-still-on-the-rise-668165, 2/4)Cyber-warfare is likely to become a major weapon in conflicts between states, according to a report from the International Institute of Strategic Studies. At present there are no international controls on the use of cyber weapons.The dire warning accompanied the Institute's release of its annual assessment of global military capabilities and defence economics, Military Balance 2010.According to director general John Chipman: "Cyber-warfare [may be used] to disable a country's infrastructure, meddle with the integrity of another country's internal military data, try to confuse its financial transactions or to accomplish any number of other possibly crippling aims." He said the problem is "we are now, in relation to the problem of cyber-warfare, at the same stage of intellectual development as we were in the 1950s in relation to possible nuclear war."



US-China Relations Turn

Loss of US heg solves US China relationsYong Deng ‘1 (“Hegemon on the Offensive: Chinese Perspectives on U.S. Global Strategy” http://www.cerium.ca/IMG/pdf/Hegemon_on_the_Offensive.pdf, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 116, No. 3, Autumn, Pgs 12-13)

What is life like under U.S. hegemony? For Chinese strategy analysts, it is not pleasant, to say the least. They

complain that Americans do not bother to appreciate China's concerns over domestic stability, economic growth, and national reunification. They are particularly frustrated by the apparent unfairness in American media reports on China, bordering on deliberate distortion, slandering or even demonizing of China.41 For many Chinese analysts, the record shows that America does not respect China's vital security interest, particularly on Taiwan. Chinese commentators believe that one critical consideration behind the growing U.S. support for Taiwan is the strategic importance that the United States attaches to it in containing China. The United States has played and will continue to play "the Taiwan

card."42 From the Chinese perspective, China has not challenged any U.S. critical interest, but this is not reciprocated with American sensitivity to China's vital security interests. At the international level, through

its treatments of Iraq and Yugoslavia, the United States has demonstrated a strong tendency to use force to impose its will on other sovereign countries. Based on their experiences, many Chinese analysts ask: How can they expect a benevolent peace under U.S. hegemony?

US China relations key to stability around the worldZhou Wenzhong ‘4 (PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs “Vigorously Pushing Forward the constructive and Cooperative Relationship Between China and the United States – In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of China-diplomatic relations” http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/t64286.htm, 2/7)

Both China and the US wield important influence in world affairs and shoulder major responsibility for peace and development of mankind. A sound China-US relationship will not only benefit the two peoples but also contribute to peace, stability and development around the world. Just as pointed out by

Chinese leaders on many occasions, China-US relations have never been purely bilateral and their implications have gone far beyond the bilateral scope . Given such, when called upon to

address bilateral ties, both sides must not limit themselves to the specific issue itself but bear in mind the larger picture, taking into account not only their bilateral ties but also possible implication or ramification to regional or global developments. The Chinese government has always attached importance to China-US relations. It has all along stood for a growing strategic and long-term relationship between the two countries that is consistent with the fundamental interests of the Chinese and

American peoples. In recent years, some people of insight in the US described China-US relationship as the world's most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century, and called US attention to put this relationship on a strategic plane. We believe that so long as the two sides view and conduct their relations with a strategic and long-term perspective and get a firm handle on the overall interests of the relationship, there should be no insurmountable obstacles in the years ahead.



Multipolarity Good



Multipolarity Good – Economy

Multipolarity helps the world economyWorld Bank ’10 (last date cited) (“Multipolarity to Bring Benefits and New Challenges to the Developing World” http://go.worldbank.org/GD54L0IXQ0)

A more multipolar global economy will, on balance, be positive for developing countries as a whole—though not necessarily for each of them individually. Growth spillovers—flowing from trade, finance, migration, and technology channels— will induce technological transfer, spur demand for exports, and improve the terms of trade in developing countries as well as enable them to develop their domestic agricultural and manufacturing industries . For example, since 1990, bilateral trade f lows between the least developed countries (LDCs) and the major emerging economies have increased threefold; trade wiThemerging economies now

accounts for a greater share of LDCs’ bilateral trade flows than their trade with major advanced economies. Moreover, a more diff use distribution of global growth will also create new external growth drivers, meaning that idiosyncratic shocks in individual growth pole economies will have less impact on the volatility of external demand in those countries than at present . This characteristic was evident in the aftermath of the 2008–09 financial crisis, when cross-border M&A originating in emerging economies accounted for more than a quarter of the value of all deals in 2009 and 2010. Greater multipolarity could also have a tangible effect on patterns of foreign aid, as increased aid disbursements by emerging economies push official development assistance to even greater shares of gross national income in LDCs.

US hegemony is facing opposition in the Middle East.Phillips ’10 (Chris, May 31, 2010, “US hegemony in Middle East is ending” The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/31/us-hegemony-middle-east-ending)

While the Bush era saw the US hegemonic in the region, squeezing the defiant few like Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, today's Middle East sees a power vacuum led by partial US retreat being filled by assertive regional and middle powers. Turkey and Brazil's recent nuclear deal with Iran typify this emerging new climate.Stephen Walt has highlighted that this shift in power is global, with Asia's share of GDP already outstrippin g that of

the US or Europe. As ever, it seems the Middle East could prove a microcosm of these international changes . If the age of American uni-polarity is coming to an end, perhaps hastened by unnecessary wars and economic shortsightedness, it is much more likely that international relations in the Middle East will come to reflect the multi-polar world that will follow rather than revert to a bi-polar cold war.The United States hegemony is not going to last very long. China is coming up from behind using its supplies of oil and coal. The United States will soon lose economically, leading to a loss in the United State’s hegemonic power as well.Hunt ’10 (Tam Hunt is an attorney, consultant and a lecturer on climate change law and policy at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. Tam Hunt: The Unipolar Moment Reconsidered. With U.S. domination of the world on the wane, the time is now to embark on a multilateral future. NoozHawk.com. 06.20.2010) http://www.noozhawk.com/tam_hunt/article/061810_tam_hunt/

The United States, fueled by coal and oil, which was first found in Titusville, Pa., in 1859, an expansive and ever-growing territory that spanned a whole continent, and a sense of “American exceptionalism,” was the successor to the British empire, reaching 19 percent of global economic output in 1913, at the

verge of World War I, and 35 percent at the height of World War II. The United States is now about 20 percent of the global economy, its share shrinking as other nations grow rapidly. The United States’ historical wealth of oil, coal and natural gas allowed it to grow to such a dominant economic and military position that it is truly deserving of being called an empire . As a global empire, the United States spends as much on its military as the rest of


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SCFI 2011 Hegemony BadSilent Nihilists ___ of ___the world combined. If Britain was the first global hegemon, the United States became the first hyper-hegemon. We keep about 800 military bases in 160 nations. There is no place immune from our power and, increasingly, no place immune from our surveillance. We are now expanding and enforcing our empire with increasingly inhumane robotic drone attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and other countries, creating a whole new generation of bitter enemies. There are chinks in our armor, however. Clearly. The neocon agenda was made real after the 9/11 attacks, with the Bush administration launching ill-fated invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Obama administration expanding the Afghanistan war into Pakistan. These military responses are exactly the wrong lesson to be

learned from history and will do nothing in the long run to improve humanity’s lot on a limited planet. The longer-term threat to U.S. dominance is economic. The United States is by far the largest economy today, although down to a “mere” 20 percent of

world economic output from its World War II peak. Economic threats loom not far over the horizon, however. China surpassed Germany as the third largest economy in the world in 2007 and will likely surpass Japan as the second largest this year. The United States

remains, however, almost three times as large as China and Japan in economic terms. But China is set to surpass the United States as the leading economy in 15 to 20 years, based on Goldman Sachs projections, and by 2050 the United States and India will probably be about half the size of the Chinese economy. With economic might comes military might . As Martin Jacques writes in When China Rules the World (2009), China is best described as a “civilization-state” because of its history as a unitary civilization in essentially the same borders for about 2,000 years and a 5,000-year cultural history going back even further. It has exercised its power beyond its borders, as a “tributary state” that collected tribute from surrounding nations without subjecting them to the same type of control that Western colonial powers

perfected. Until recent decades, however, China limited its influence to East Asia. More recently, China has become increasingly aggressive in securing the resources it needs to continue its rapid double-digit growth, using its largely state-controlled companies like

the China National Offshore Oil Corp. to snap up oil resources around the world. China knows full well the role that energy plays in economic growth and national power.


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Multipolarity Good - ConflictMultipolarity solves conflict by balancing powerChristopher Layne ‘2 (Associate professor in the School of International Studies at the University of Miami “Offshore Balancing Revisited” The Washington Quarterly, Spring)Offshore balancing is a grand strategy based on burden shifting, not burden sharing. It would transfer to others the task of maintaining regional power balances; checking the rise of potential global and regional hegemons; and stabilizing Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf/Middle East. In other words, other states would have to become responsible for providing their own security and for the security of the regions in which they live (and contiguous ones), rather than looking to the United States to do it for them. The events of September 11 make offshore balancing an attractive grand strategic alternative to primacy for two reasons. First, looking beyond the war on terrorism, the Persian Gulf/Middle East region is clearly, endemically unstable. If the United States attempts to perpetuate its hegemonic role in the region after having accomplished its immediate war aims, the probability of a serious geopolitical backlash within the region against the United States is high. Second, because the U.S. victory in the war on terrorism will underscore U.S. predominance in international politics, victory’s paradoxical effect will be to heighten European, Russian, and Chinese fears of U.S. power. By adopting an offshore balancing strategy once the war on terrorism ends, the United States would benefit in two ways.First, others have much greater intrinsic strategic interests in the region than does the United States. For example, Western Europe, Japan, and, increasingly, China are far more dependent on the region’s oil than the United States. Because they live next door, Russia, China, Iran, and India have a much greater long-term security interest in regional stability in the Persian Gulf/Middle East than the United States. By passing the mantle of regional stabilizer to these great and regional powers, the United States could extri- cate itself from the messy and dangerous geopolitics of the Persian Gulf/ Middle East and take itself out of radical Islam’s line of fire. Second, although a competitive component to U.S. relations with the other great powers in a multipolar world would be inescapable, multipolar politics have historically engendered periods of great-power cooperation. On the cooperative side, an offshore balancing strategy would be coupled with a policy of spheres of influence, which have always been an important item in the toolbox of great-power policymakers. By recognizing each other’s paramount interests in certain regions, great powers can avoid the kinds of misunder- standings that could trigger conflict. Moreover, the mere act of signaling that one country understands another’s larger security stake in a particular region, a stake that it will respect by noninterference, allows states to communicate a nonthreatening posture to one another. By recognizing the legitimacy of other interests, a great power also signals that it accepts them as equals. An offshore balancing strategy would immunize the United States against a post–war-on- terrorism backlash against U.S. hegemony in one other way. By accepting the emergence of new great powers and simultaneously pulling back from its primacy-driven military posture, the United States would reduce perception of a “U.S. threat,” thereby lowering the chances that others will view it as an overpowerful hegemon. In this sense, offshore balancing is a strategy of restraint that would allow the United States to minimize the risks of open confrontation with the new great powers.

Mulitpolarity is the best solution to a declining USYong Deng ‘1 (“Hegemon on the Offensive: Chinese Perspectives on U.S. Global Strategy” http://www.cerium.ca/IMG/pdf/Hegemon_on_the_Offensive.pdf, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 116, No. 3, Autumn, Pgs. 4-5)

Starting with the mid-1980s, Chinese policy elites began to believe that the evolution toward multipolarity had accelerated.9 This view was interrupted during the period of 1989-1991, as the Tiananmen incident and the collapse of communist regimes in East Europe heightened Chinese fear of strategic isolation. All other powers, including Russia, seemed to have joined the United States to gang up against China. Only after late 1991 and early 1992 did Chinese analysts breathe a sigh of relief as they witnessed President George Bush, Sr. abandon his attempt to translate the vision of a "new world order" into reality. China officially declared the end of its post-Tiananmen diplomatic isolation in 1993.10 Chinese analysts now argued

that having won the cold war, the United States had also been badly weakened by years of overextension and exhaustion. Rampant global turbulence and America's growing rifts with allies and Russia, persistent U.S. economic woes, debilitating social problems, and rising isolationist domestic public opinion all imposed important constraints on U.S. power. Chinese analysts began again to emphasize the irreversible decline of the U.S. relative influence and the inevitable trends of multipolarization . 11 From the Chinese perspective, c oncentrated power without counterbalancing is both dangerous and unnatural. A balance of power underpinned by the five principles of peaceful coexistence (mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual nonaggression, mutual noninterference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence) should represent the basis for a new world order . While


SCFI 2011 Hegemony BadSilent Nihilists ___ of ___American international relations literature posits that traditional sovereignty is responsible for competitive power politics, Chinese views ho5ld that a more rigid adherence to sovereignty actually constitutes the key ingredient for a truly new world order of equality, peace, and justice. They contend, unlike the Western concept of balance of power that presupposes monopoly among great powers, the Chinese notion of multipolar-ity entails an equally determining role of the Third World countries. It also means that China constitutes a pole with much freedom to act internationally.

A multipolar world is the only way to solveDavid G. Haglund ‘4 (“Western Europe and the Challenge of the “Unipolar Moment”: Is Multipolarity the Answer?” http://www.jmss.org/jmss/index.php/jmss/article/view/205, Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Summer, Vol. 6, Issue 4There have been few more controversial statements made in recent debates about American foreign policy than the assertion that America and the world have

been experiencing, since the ending of the Cold War, a "unipolar moment ." To some, this holds out

the prospect for a structuring of the international system according to American preferences for "ordered liberty." Others see in the mooted unipolar moment great peril, and little promise; for them, it simply constitutes a way of masking the dangers of "hegemony" and even "empire. " Some of the most vociferous of the critics are to be found among America's transatlantic allies, and above all, in France. It is often said in French circles that

"multipolarity" can be the only cure for the ailments of a unipolar system . This article examines that claim, and concludes that notwithstanding the rhetoric and logical implications of multipolarity, there is no evidence that the Western Europeans as a group are "balancing" against the United States, or even that they wish to balance against it.

Multipolarity leads to international security and creates peaceDeutsch, Singer 1964 Karl and David Czech social and political scientist & internationally renowned teacher, researcher and scholar of international politics "Multipolar Power Systems and International Stability," http://www.olivialau.org/ir/archive/deu2.pdf

Deutsch and Singer ("D&S") provide two arguments for a "diffusion-stability relationship," positing that the frequency and intensity of war should decrease with an increase in the number of states. The dependent variable of

political stability is defined probabilistically as "the probability that the system retains all of its essential characteristics; that if no single nation becomes dominant; that most of its members continue to survive; and that large-scale war does not occur". First, D&S observe that as the number of independent actors increases,

the number of possible dyads in the system increases. They argue that this increase in interaction opportunities has a stabilizing effect on the system by fostering social stability via cross-cutting cleavages and increasing the range of possible interactions. As the issue areas get more diverse, D&S argue that with "conflict-generating scarcities, each and every increase in opportunities for cooperation . . . will diminish the tendency to pursue a conflict up to, and over, the threshold of war. Alliances inhibit the opportunity for actors to interact with non-alliance nations and increase range and conflict with non-alliance actors, while

minimizing the range and intensity of conflict issues with alliance partners. Their second model focuses on the accelerated diminution in the allocation of attention. As the number of independent actors increases, the share of attention that any nation can devote to another actor decreases. D&S then use communication theory, which holds that below a certain signal-to-noise ratio the signal

itself is undetectable, to conclude that the increase in number of actors leads to stability. If some minimal attention is required to escalate conflict, the likelihood of conflicts is likely to decline as the average attention that each government can pay decreases. Stability may hence be contingent on the critical attention ratio (i.e., "the proneness of countries to enter into escalating conflicts even if only a small part of their government's attention is engaged")

Other powers will rise creating a multipolar worldKenneth Anderson ‘9 (“United Nations Collective Security and the United States Security Guarantee in an Age of Rising Multipolarity: The Security Council as the Talking Shop of the Nations” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1421999&http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1421999, Chicago Journal of International Law Vol. 10 No. 1 Summer, pg. 56)

By contrast, today’s second popular thesis is the rise of new powers : not of a new superpower, but of new Great Powers, new regional powers, new local powers and, as a result, the emergence of a “multipolar world.” The charter members of the club of rising new powers are, naturally, China and India . Later on this Article will describe them as “rising production powers.” They are supplemented by a group of rising new powers often described as the new petroleum autocracies, but more precisely as “resource extraction democratic authoritarians”—with much packed into each



descriptive term. The most important members are Russia and Venezuela. These rising new powers are, however, tightly bound to the existing Western powers, and to the superpower, through globalization and markets. The new “production powers” depend utterly upon American consumer demand, even as America depends upon their savings; and the “resource extraction powers” are tied to today’s notably volatile global commodities markets. This second thesis is one contrasting absolute and relative power. Although it implies less American power relative to the constellation of new rising powers, it does not commit itself to the claim of absolute American decline. American decline might or might not be true; what is true, the thesis says, is the rise of new powers. As a thesis emphasizing rise and agnostic on decline (and most persuasively laid out by Fareed Zakaria in his recent book, The Post-American World ), it is far more defensible than the thesis of American decline on the evidence actually available today .5 This Article will not review the evidence for either of these theses. Instead, it will take by assumption that the second, the rise of new powers, is strongly true. And it will take by assumption that the first, American decline, is at least weakly, and gradually becoming , true. The question is what follows from those assumptions, with respect to the interactions of three institutions—the US, the UN, and the UN Security Council. The Article is partly predictive of what the likely consequences of such changes will be—global security and the UN in a “multipolar world,” a world of rising new powers in competition with each other and with the US—with special emphasis on the role of the Security Council. It is also partly policy advice to the US government on how it should understand and address such possible—and in the case of rising powers, currently occurring— changes in the world security order with an emphasis on key institutions under international law. It is, in other words, an Article in unabashed futurism. Starting with the mid-1980s, Chinese policy elites began to believe that the evolution toward multipolarity had accelerated.9 This view was interrupted during the period of 1989-1991, as the Tiananmen incident and the collapse of communist regimes in East Europe heightened Chinese fear of strategic isolation. All other powers, including Russia, seemed to have joined the United States to gang up against China. Only after late 1991 and early 1992 did Chinese analysts breathe a sigh of relief as they witnessed President George Bush, Sr. abandon his attempt to translate the vision of a "new world order" into reality. China officially declared the end of its post-Tiananmen diplomatic isolation in 1993.10

Chinese analysts now argued that having won the cold war, the United States had also been badly weakened by years of overextension and exhaustion. Rampant global turbulence and America's growing rifts with allies and Russia, persistent U.S. economic woes, debilitating social problems, and rising isolationist domestic public opinion all imposed important constraints on U.S. power. Chinese analysts began again to emphasize the irreversible decline of the U.S. relative influence and the inevitable trends of multipolarization.11 From the Chinese

perspective, concentrated power without counterbalancing is both dangerous and unnatural. A balance of power underpinned by the five principles of peaceful coexistence (mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual nonaggression, mutual noninterference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence) should represent the basis for a new world order . While American international relations literature posits that traditional sovereignty is responsible for competitive power politics, Chinese views hold that a more rigid adherence to sovereignty actually constitutes the key ingredient for a truly new world order of equality, peace, and justice. They contend, unlike the Western concept of balance of power that presupposes monopoly among great powers, the Chinese notion of multipolar-ity entails an equally determining role of the Third World.



Offshore Balancing Good



Offshore Balancing Good – Foreign Policy

An Offshore balancing strategy will enhance American security and foreign policy objectives.Layne 9 (Christopher, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, literary and national editor of the Atlantic, Review of International Studies (2009), 5/25/9, “America’s Middle East grand strategy after Iraq: the moment for offshore balancing has arrived”, Cambridge Journals, DB)

Primacy’s neorealist critics have outlined an alternative grand strategy that increasingly resonates with the American public: offshore balancing.3 Its proponents

believe that offshore balancing can do a better job than primacy of enhancing American security and matching US foreign policy objectives with the resources available to support them. The driving factor behind offshore balancing is its proponents’ recognition that the US has a ‘hegemony’ problem. America’s strategy of primacy increases US vulnerability to a geopolitical backlash – whether in the guise of countervailing great power coalitions, or terrorist attacks – and alienates public opinion in large swaths of the globe, including Europe and the Middle East. Offshore balancing is based on the assumption that the most vital US interests are preventing the emergence of a dominant power in Europe and East Asia – a ‘Eurasian hegemon’ – and forestalling the emergence of a regional (‘oil’) hegemon in the Middle East. Only a Eurasian hegemon could pose an existential threat to the US. A regional hegemon in the Middle East could imperil the flow of oil upon which the US economy, and the economies of the advanced

industrial states depend. As an offshore balancer, the US would rely on the tried and true dynamics of the balance of power to thwart any states with hegemonic ambitions. An offshore balancing strategy would permit the US to withdraw its ground forces from Eurasia (including the Middle East) and assume an over-the-horizon military posture. If – and only if – regional power balances look to be failing would the US re-insert its troops into Eurasia. Offshore balancing contrasts sharply with primacy because primacists fear a world with independent, multiple poles of power.

Primacy is based on the belief that it is better for the US to defend its allies and clients than to have them defend themselves. Offshore balancers, on the other hand, believe for an insular great power like the US, the best strategy is to rely on a balance of power approach that devolves to other states the costs and risks of their defense. Offshore balancing is a realist strategy because it eschews the ideological crusading on behalf of democracy that is endemic to Wilsonianism, defines US interests in terms of what is vital rather than simply desirable, balances ends and means, and is based on prudence and self-restraint in the conduct of US strategy. Most of all it is a strategy that fits within the broad realist tradition because it recognises the difference between, on one hand, what the sociologist Max Weber called the ethic of conviction and, on the

other hand, the ethic of responsibility. In foreign policymaking the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and policies must be judged on their consequences, not on the intentions that underlie them. The Bush administration’s disastrous policies in Iraq and the Middle East are a much needed reminder that this is a test Wilsonianism too often fails. Although there are some nuanced differences among offshore balancing’s proponents, they

fundamentally agree on the strategy’s basic premises. First, offshore balancers recognise that one of the few

ironclad rules in international politics is that when one great power becomes too powerful – when it bids to achieve hegemony – it is defeated by the counter-balancing efforts of the other major powers in the international system. The


SCFI 2011 Hegemony BadSilent Nihilists ___ of ___history of the modern international state system (which dates back to about 1500) is littered with the wreckage of great powers that tried anfailed to achieve geopolitical primacy: the Hapsburg Empire under Charles V, Spain under Philip II, France under Louis XIV and Napoleon, and Germany under Hitler (and, some

would argue, under Kaiser Wilhelm II). Failure is the fate of hegemons. The reason is simple: the basic motivation of all major states is to survive, and when one among them threatens to gain preponderant power, the security of the others is threatened. Some primacists believe that the US is immune to being counter-balanced because, as the only great power in a ‘unipolar’ system, it is

so much more powerful than its nearest possible competitors.4 Yet, recent studies by the CIA offer compelling evidence that by 2020 the era of America’s unipolar ascendancy will be drawing to a close as new poles of power in the international system approach the US share of world power.5 And, of course, growing apprehensions about the military, as well as economic, implications of China’s rapid ascent are – at the very least – an implicit acknowledgment that the days of unchallenged US dominance in world affairs

are numbered. Offshore balancers believe the US must adjust to incipient multipolarity because they understand that – unless the US is prepared to fight an unending series of preventive wars – new great powers inevitably will emerge in the next decade or two.



Offshore Balancing Good - Conflict

Offshore balancing can be used as a “wedge strategy” which has empirically lowered conflicts between countries.Layne 9 (Christopher, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, literary and national editor of the Atlantic, Review of International Studies (2009), 5/25/9, “America’s Middle East grand strategy after Iraq: the moment for offshore balancing has arrived”, Cambridge Journals, DB)

Heretofore, proponents of offshore balancing have seen the strategy primarily as a means of shifting the costs and risks of opposing rising Eurasian, or regional, hegemons from the US to other states. Offshore balancing seeks to capitalize on the inherent strategic advantages that insular great powers possess. First, they can rely on regional power balances to contain rising powers.8 Second, if it should become necessary for them to become involved, because they are protected by geography and their own military

capabilities they can stand on the sidelines and wait for the most opportune moment to decide when, and on which side, to intervene. Moreover, by taking advantage of the freedom of action that allows them to enter conflicts later rather than sooner, they can extract the maximum concessions from their alliance partners as their price for entering a conflict.

However, beyond these traditional advantages of insularity, offshore balancing does – or can – have a wedge strategy dimension. Wedge strategies are the grand strategic equivalent of what the great baseball executive Branch Rickey

called ‘addition by subtraction’. A Timothy W. Crawford has pointed out, when discussing power relations among great powers, most security studies scholars focus on ‘addition’. Hence, they pay great attention to balancing behaviour – both internal and external – as a means by which great powers seek to increase their relative power. However, although often neglected, wedge strategies are way of accomplishing the same objective – increasing the state’s relative power – by a very different means: by subtracting potential opponents from the ranks of its adversaries.9 That is, wedge strategies are ‘a policy to increase a state’s relative power over external threats, by preventing the grouping or causing the dispersal of threatening alliances’.10 Great powers can improve their relative power position not only by forming coalitions and/or building up their own military capabilities, but also by

preventing other states that might be inclined to align against them from doing so, or by persuading an actual or potential ally of an adversary to drop out of the alliance and assume a posture of neutrality.11 Another aspect of wedge strategies is that they can, if used successfully, prevent others from taking balancing actions directed at the state. While not generally conceived of as a wedge strategy, offshore balancing is a way that an insular great power can neutralise threats to its security. By acting as an offshore balancer, an insular great power can accomplish two vital grand strategic tasks. First, because its would-be adversaries invariably live in dangerous neighbourhoods, by truly being ‘offshore’ and non-threatening, an insular great power can deflect the focus of other states’ security policies away

from itself. Simply put, if an offshore power stands on the sidelines, other great powers will compete against each other, not against it. It can thus enhance its security simply because the dynamics of balance-of-power politics invariably will draw would-be competitors in other regions into rivalries with each other. The fact that non-insular states must worry constantly about possible threats from nearby neighbours is a factor that historically has worked to increase the relative power position of insular states. Thus, as Paul Kennedy notes, after 1815 a major reason that Britain’s interests were not challenged by an overwhelming coalition was due to ‘the preoccupation of virtually all European statesman with continental power politics’ because it ‘was the moves of their

neighbors, not the usually discreet workings of British sea power, which interested them’.12 Of course, to capitalise on this dynamic, an insular great power must adopt a non-threatening posture toward other



regions, and not pursue hegemonic (or imperial) ambitions in those regions. It was, after all, not simply geography and naval power that enabled Britain to be a successful offshore balancer until World War I. A critical factor

underpinning the success of its offshore balancing strategy was that Britain had no positive geopolitical, territorial, or ideological aspirations on the continent

that would have provoked a countervailing coalition against it. Rather, England had only a negative interest in Europe: ensuring that no great power gained continental hegemony. England’s historic policy toward Europe also suggests another way that offshore balancing can function as a wedge strategy. One of the best ways a great power can avoid provoking the hostility – and counter-balancing efforts – of others is not to give them any reason to feel threatened.13 Insularity allows offshore great powers to choose policies of detachment. And policies of detachment, in turn, reduce the risk that others will view it as a dangerous rival. In other words, if one of the objects of wedge strategies is to prevent threatening alliances from forming, one of the best ways to accomplish this goal is for a state to mind its own business and not give others reason to feel menaced by it. Insular great powers have the luxury of

reducing threats to themselves by not intruding into the affairs of great powers in other regions. The US, of course, has not acted as an offshore balancer. Rather, for more than sixty years it consciously has sought extra-regional hegemony in Europe, East Asia and the Middle East.14 Rather than acting as a ‘wedge’ strategy, American primacy – especially now that the Cold War has ended – now threatens to act more like a kind of glue that unifies other states, and, increasingly, non-state actors like Al- Qaeda, in resistance to America’s expansive geopolitical and ideological ambitions. The operational differences between the strategies of primacy and offshore balancing can be illustrated by examining how each would deal with the most pressing foreign policy issue facing the US today: the Middle East.



Offshore Balancing Good – Middle East

An Offshore balancing strategy solves for Middle East conflict against the USLayne 9 (Christopher, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, literary and national editor of the Atlantic, Review of International Studies (2009), 5/25/9, “America’s Middle East grand strategy after Iraq: the moment for offshore balancing has arrived”, Cambridge Journals, DB)

The US has reached a watershed in Iraq and the Middle East. Washington needs to revamp its overall regional grand strategy because the current strategy is in shambles. Although the security situation in Iraq has improved since late 2006, the nation remains extremely fragile politically and its future is problematic. On the other hand, things are unravelling in Afghanistan, where the insurgency led by the revitalized Taliban is spreading. The US and Iran remain on a collision course over Tehran’s nuclear weapons programme – and its larger regional ambitions. Moreover, the summer 2006 fighting in Lebanon weakened US Middle Eastern policy in four ways. First, it enhanced Iran’s regional clout. Second, it intensified anti-American public opinion in the Middle East. Third, it fuelled a populist Islamic groundswell in the region that

threatens to undermine America’s key Middle East allies: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Fourth, American policy in the Middle East has increased the terrorist threat to the US. The Bush administration’s Middle East policy was a classic example of an anti-wedge ‘strategy’. Rather than preventing the coalescence of forces hostile to the US, or deflecting their attention from the US, the Bush strategy has had the effect of unifying diverse groups against American interests. Instead of viewing them as discrete conflicts, the Bush administration regarded the conflict in Iraq, the ‘war on terror’, unrest in Gaza and the West Bank, turmoil in Lebanon, and the confrontation with Iran as part of a single enterprise. This tendency to aggregate opponents rather than to peel them off was first evidenced in January 2002 when President Bush linked Iran and Iraq – and North Korea – as part of an ‘axis of evil’. Similarly, although Syria and Iran long have had an ambivalent relationship, the administration grouped them together rather than trying to split

them apart. Bush also lumped together Sunni Islamic radical groups like Al-Qaeda and

Hamas and Shiite fundamentalists like Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq, the Iranian regime, and Hezbollah – and regarded them as a single, unitary menace. As Bush put it, ‘The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat. Whatever slogans they chant, when they slaughter the innocent they have the same wicked purposes. They want to kill Americans, kill democracy in the Middle East, and gain the weapons to kill on an even more horrific scale.’15 Bush’s comments

manifested a vast ignorance of the cleavages in the Islamic world. Even worse, his policy of treating Sunni and Shiite radicals as a single threat may have acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy – a ‘glue strategy’ – that instead of dividing or neutralizing opponents of the US, unified them and created threats that either would not otherwise exist, or would be much less potent. In the Middle East, an offshore balancing strategy would break sharply with the Bush administration’s approach to the Middle East. As an offshore balancer, the US would redefine its regional interests, reduce its military role, and adopt a new regional diplomatic posture. It would seek to dampen the terrorist threat by removing the on-the ground US military presence in the region, and to quell rampant anti- Americanism in the Islamic world by pushing hard for a resolution of the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. The strategy would also avoid further destabilisation of the Middle East by abandoning the project of regional democratic transformation. Finally, as an offshore balancer, Washington would seek a diplomatic accommodation of its differences with Iran.



Offshore Balancing Good – Iran

Offshore balancing solves Iran nuclear program, hardline approaches only risk Middle East War.Layne 9 (Christopher, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, literary and national editor of the Atlantic, Review of International Studies (2009), 5/25/9, “America’s Middle East grand strategy after Iraq: the moment for offshore balancing has arrived”, Cambridge Journals, DB)

As an offshore balancer, rather than confronting Iran militarily over its nuclear programme and its regional ambitions, the US would follow a two-tracked strategy of deterrence and diplomacy. Diplomatically, the US should try to negotiate an arrangement with Iran that exchanges meaningful security guarantees, diplomatic recognition, and normal economic relations for a verifiable cessation of Tehran’s nuclear weapons programme. Given the deep mutual distrust between Washington and Tehran, and domestic political constraints in both the US and Iran, it is an open question whether such a deal can be struck. If it cannot, however, rather than attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities – or tacitly facilitating an Israeli attack on them –the US should be prepared to live with a nuclear armed Iran just as it did with China in the 1960s, when China was seen as far more dangerous a rogue

state than Iran is today.23 Of course, hard-line US neoconservatives reject this approach and argue that a nuclear-armed Iran would have three bad consequences: there could be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East; Iran might supply nuclear weapons to terrorists; and Tehran could use its nuclear weapons to blackmail other states in the region, or to engage in aggression. Each of these scenarios, however, is improbable.24 A nuclear Iran will not touch off a proliferation snowball in the Middle East. Israel, of course, already is a nuclear power. The other three states that might be tempted to go for a nuclear weapons capability are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. However, each of these states would be under strong pressure not to do so, and Saudi Arabia lacks the industrial and engineering capabilities to develop nuclear weapons indigenously. Notwithstanding the Bush administration’s hyperbolic rhetoric, Iran is not going to give nuclear weapons to terrorists. This is not to deny Tehran’s close links to groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. However,

there are good reasons that states – even those that have ties to terrorists – draw the line at giving them nuclear weapons (or other WMD): if the terrorists were to use these weapons against the US or its allies, the weapons could be traced back to the donor state, which would be at risk of annihilation by an American retaliatory strike.25

Iran’s leaders have too much at stake to run this risk. Even if one believes the administration’s claims that rogue state leaders are indifferent to the fate of their populations, they do care very much about the survival of their regimes, which means that they can be

deterred. For the same reason, Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons will not invest Tehran with options to attack, or intimidate its neighbours. Israel’s security with respect to Iran is guaranteed

by its own formidable nuclear deterrent capabilities. By the same token, just as it did in Europe during the Cold War, the US can extend its own deterrence umbrella to protect its clients in the region – Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Turkey. American security guarantees not only will dissuade Iran from acting recklessly, but also restrain proliferation by negating the incentives for states like Saudi Arabia and Turkey to acquire their own nuclear weapons. Given the overwhelming US advantage in both nuclear and conventional military capabilities, Iran is not going to risk national suicide by challenging America’s security commitments in the region. In short, while a nuclear-armed Iran hardly is desirable, neither is it ‘intolerable’, because it could be contained and deterred successfully by the US. For three reasons, a combination of containment, deterrence, and diplomacy is a far wiser policy than attacking Iran. First, outside the Bush administration, experts generally have agreed that, at best, US (or Israeli) attacks would only slow down Iran’s nuclear programme because these strikes would not



be able to destroy all of Tehran’s nuclear facilities. Second, if the US attacks Iran, Tehran has a number of retaliatory options. Iran can drive up oil prices (by attempting to close the Strait of Hormuz and/or embargoing its oil exports); it can act in concert with Iraq’s Shiites to attack American

forces in Iraq; it can cause trouble in Palestine and Lebanon by using Hamas and Hezbollah as proxies to pressure Israel; and it can support and conduct terrorist strikes on American targets in the Middle East and beyond. Finally, going to war with Iran would cause US political standing to collapse completely in the Middle East, and could ignite a true clash of civilisations pitting the US against the entire Islamic world.

A Offshore Balancing withdrawal will not improve Iranian power.Layne 9 (Christopher, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, literary and national editor of the Atlantic, Review of International Studies (2009), 5/25/9, “America’s Middle East grand strategy after Iraq: the moment for offshore balancing has arrived”, Cambridge Journals, DB)

The contention that American withdrawal from Iraq would enhance Iranian power in the Persian Gulf is simultaneously both true and misleading. Foreign policy

experts widely agree that Iran has been the biggest winner in the Iraq War.32 By invading Iraq and pursuing regime change there, the Bush administration set the table for the expansion of Iran’s power and regional influence. The US invasion of Iraq upset the prevailing geopolitical equilibrium in the region. Until March 2003, the balance of power in the Persian Gulf between Iraq and Iran prevented either from establishing regional dominance, but by toppling Saddam Hussein the US rendered Iraq incapable of acting as a viable counterpoise to Iranian power. The administration’s policy also upset the domestic balance of power within Iraq, which redounded to Tehran’s benefit. The democratisation policy adopted by the administration empowered Iraq’s long-suppressed Shiite majority. Predictably, the political ascendancy of Iraq’s Shiites worked to Iran’s advantage because of these close personal relations between leading Shiite leaders and Iranian clerics, and the religious bonds between the Shiite populations in both countries. Deepening economic ties between the two countries

have enabled Tehran to consolidate its influence in Iraq.33 During the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, most American foreign policy analysts foresaw that Iran would be the main beneficiary of the administration’s Iraq policy. Only the Bush administration and its neoconservative cheerleaders were oblivious to the probable consequences of their policies. Now – short of war, of course – it is too late to arrest Iranian’s growing power in the region. The damage already has been done.



Offshore Balancing Good – Terrorism

Offshore balancing solves Middle East terrorism, terrorism is caused by US hard line approaches in the Middle East.Layne 9 (Christopher, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, literary and national editor of the Atlantic, Review of International Studies (2009), 5/25/9, “America’s Middle East grand strategy after Iraq: the moment for offshore balancing has arrived”, Cambridge Journals, DB)

In two ways, the Bush administration fundamentally mis-diagnosed the causes of Islamic terrorism against the US. First, it believed that Islamic terrorism is caused by a lack of democracy in the Middle East. Secondly, it failed to recognise that American policies in the Middle East have fueled Islamic terrorism directed at the US and did not understand that the overbearing American politico-military presence in the region also galvanises Islamic terrorism. The

Bush administration added its own post-9/11 corollary to the ‘democratic peace theory’. It believed – as a matter of faith – that democratisation in the Middle East would ameliorate the terrorist threat to the US. Both President Bush and Secretary Rice made clear their belief that, while it is a formidable and prolonged challenge – a ‘generational commitment’ – the Middle East’s successful democratization as crucial to American security. As Bush put it: Rice argued that the Middle East suffers from a ‘freedom deficit’. Because of this, she said, ‘it is a region where hopelessness provides a fertile ground for ideologies that convince promising youths to aspire not to a university education, career, or family, but to blowing themselves up – taking as many innocent lives with them as possible. These ingredients are a recipe

for great instability, and pose a direct threat to American security’.35 There is, however, scant evidence to support the Bush administration’s claim that democratisation of the Middle East is remedy for terrorism. Robert Pape has demonstrated there is no empirical support for the Bush administration’s assertion that Islamic terrorism is caused by a lack of democracy in the Middle East. Consequently, promoting a ‘democratic transformation’ in the region is not a magic bullet panacea for reducing the terrorist threat to the US. As Pape says, ‘Spreading democracy at the barrel of a gun in the Persian Gulf is not likely to lead to a lasting solution against suicide terrorism’.36 Indeed, rather than eliminating the terrorist threat, the Bush administration’s democratisation policy in the Middle East actually has had the perverse consequence of exacerbating it. As Douglas Little observes, Islamic fundamentalist groups like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are a response to US attempts to modernise and westernise the Middle East, which are seen in the region as a form of cultural imperialism. Little notes that it is American policies of ‘political reform, social change, and economic development’ that have produced ‘a violent Islamic backlash’.37 Terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda are non-state actors, and as such, they are not, strictly speaking, engaged in ‘balancing’ the US (because balancing is a form of state behaviour). Yet, at the same time, the actions of groups like Al-Qaeda reflect some of the key attributes of balancing. After all, beyond connoting the idea of counterweight, balancing also signifies opposition,

or resistance, to a hegemon. Terrorists may not be able to balance against the US, but they can engage in a related form of activity aimed at undermining American primacy by raising its costs. Organisations like Al-Qaeda may be non-state actors, but their actions are of a kind frequently found in international politics: the use of violence against a state(s) to attain clearly defined political objectives. Indeed the use of violence for such purposes is the hallmark of terrorism. As Bruce Hoffman says, terrorism is ‘about power: the pursuit of power, the acquisition of power, and the use of power to achieve political change’.38 Terrorism, moreover, is fundamentally an asymmetric

form of conflict, because it is an instrument that the weak use against the strong.39 From this perspective, the 9/11 assault on the US was not a random, senseless, ‘irrational’ act of violence. In fact, the 9/11 attack was in keeping with the Clausewitzian paradigm of war: force was used against the US by its adversaries to advance their political objectives. As German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz himself observed, ‘War is not an act of senseless passion but is controlled by its political object’.40 Here,



President Bush’s endlessly reiterated claim that the US was attacked because Islamic radicals ‘hate us because of our freedom’ betrayed a complete misunderstanding of the dynamics that underpin the clash between the US and Middle Eastern terrorists. For sure, there are Islamic radicals who, indeed, do hate the

US for cultural, religious, and ideological reasons. But that is not why the US is a target for Islamic terrorists. 9/11 represented a violent counterreaction to America’s policies in the Middle East – especially its drive to dominate the region both geopolitically and culturally. As Michael Schuerer –

who headed the CIA analytical team monitoring Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda – says, it is dangerous for the US to base its strategy for combating terrorism on the belief ‘that Muslims hate and attack us for what we are and think rather than for what we do’.41 In a similar

vein, Richard K. Betts observed following the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center that, ‘It is hardly likely that Middle Eastern radicals would be hatching schemes like the destruction of the World Trade Center if the US had not been identified so long as the mainstay of Israel, the Shah of Iran, and conservative Arab regimes and the source of a cultural assault on Islam’.42 It is the US’ attempt to impose its primacy and preferences on the Middle East

that fuels groups like Al-Qaeda and fans Islamic fundamentalism. Terrorism is a form of ‘blowback’ against America’s preponderant role in international affairs. Despicable and brutal though it was, the 9/11 attack was undertaken with cool calculation to achieve well-defined geopolitical objectives. Underscoring this point, Scheurer observes that, ‘In the context of ideas bin Laden shares with his brethren, the military actions of Al Qaeda and its allies are acts of war, not terrorism . . . meant to advance bin Laden’s clear,

focused, limited, and widely popular foreign policy goals . . .’.43 Specifically, Al-Qaeda wants to compel the US to remove its military presence from the Persian Gulf, and force Washington to alter its stance on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.44 Al-Qaeda’s leaders also apparently hoped that the September 11 attacks would provoke a US overreaction, and thereby trigger an upsurge of popular discontent in the Islamic world that would lead to the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy and other pro-American regimes in the Middle East (Egypt, Pakistan, and Jordan, for example) and their replacement by

fundamentalist Islamic governments.45 In other words, Al-Qaeda seeks to undermine US primacy, and thereby compel changes in America’s Middle Eastern grand strategy. The US presence on the ground in the Middle East also incites terrorists to attack American interests. In his study of suicide terrorist groups, Pape has found that ‘what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland’.46 Al-Qaeda fits this pattern, and one of its principal objectives ‘is the expulsion of American troops from the Persian Gulf and the reduction of

Washington’s power in the region’.47 Here, the Bush administration’s inflexible determination to maintain a long-term American military presence in Iraq is exactly the wrong policy to reduce terrorism. The Bush administration, of course, claimed that the US is fighting terrorism in Iraq. To make this point, it has grossly exaggerated the links between the insurgent group Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda organisation and, hence – in a blatant prevarication – tied AQI and the war in Iraq to 9/11.48 Bush repeatedly asserted that, in Iraq the US is fighting the same terrorists who attacked the US on 9/11. Of course, this claim overlooked the fact that AQI came into existence only after the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and that its links with Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda are, at best, tenuous. The Bush administration’s deliberate fabrications were designed to win Congressional and public support for a prolonged ‘surge’.49 When it first announced the surge, the administration said it would last through 2007. Instead it lasted well into 2008, and it is likely that there will be

more US forces in Iraq in January 2009 than there were prior to the surge. And, even when the surge itself has ended, any draw-down of US forces will take place gradually.50 General David Petraeus, who served as senior American commander in Iraq during the surge and now heads CENTCOM (the US military command with overall responsibility for the Middle

East) has repeatedly emphasised that the US commitment to Iraq is long-term in nature, and American military planners are preparing for a long-lasting ‘post-occupation’ US presence there.51 In fact, it is clear that the Bush administration never intended to withdraw from Iraq militarily and aimed for the US to retain permanent US military bases there. President Bush all but confirmed this in May 2007 when he said that he wanted the US to play the same kind of role in Iraq that it has in South Korea since the end of the Korean War.52 What will happen under the new US administration is unclear. During 2008, the government of Iraqi Nouri al-Maliki indicated that Baghdad wanted to set a timeline for US troop withdrawals. The Iraqi government refused to accede to the Bush administration’s desire to negotiate a long-term security agreement that would allow the US to maintain permanent bases in Iraq. Although the Bush administration had strongly opposed any suggestions that there should be a fixed timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq in July 2008, Bush’s position seemed to soften and the administration said the US would support a ‘time horizon’ for US troop withdrawals from Iraq as an ‘aspirational goal’.53 What the new US administration will do about the US presence in Iraq is an open question, but based on the positions taken by Senator Barak Obama (D. Ill.) and

Senator John McCain (R. Ariz.) during the 2008 US presidential campaign, it seems certain that there will be a significant American military presence in Iraq for some time to come.



Instead of reducing American vulnerability to terrorism, the presence of US troops in Iraq and the Middle East increases it by reinforcing the widespread perception in the Islamic world that the US is pursuing a neo-colonial policy in the Middle East in furtherance of its own imperial ambitions. The huge US politico-military footprint in the Middle East region – including Iraq – is, along with America’s policy on the Israel/Palestinian

issue, the primary driver of Middle Eastern terrorism. The administration’s overall policy in the Middle East has inflamed anti-American sentiment, and turned the entire region into a source of recruits for various radical terrorist groups. Instead of solving this problem, staying in Iraq will exacerbate it.



Aff



No China Challenger

China will not surpass the United States, multiple reasons. Nye 11/2010 (Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Future of American Power, http://www.academyofdiplomacy.org/publications/article_archive/Nye-Future%20of%20American%20Power%20Nov2010%20%282%29.pdf)

For more than a decade, many have viewed China as the most likely contender to balance U.S. power or surpass it. Some draw analogies to the challenge that imperial Germany posed to the United Kingdom at the beginning of the last century. A recent book (by Martin Jacques) is even titled When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of

a New Global Order. Goldman Sachs has projected that the total size of Chinas economy will surpass that of the United States in 2027. Yet China has a long way to go to equal the power resources of the United States, and it still faces many obstacles to its development. Even if overall Chinese GDP passed that of the United States around 2030, the two economies, although roughly equivalent in size, would not be equivalent in composition. China would still have a vast underdeveloped countryside, and it would have begun to face demographic problems from the delayed effects of its one child policy. Per capita income provides a measure of the sophistication of an economy. Assuming a six percent Chinese GDP growth rate and only two percent American GDP growth rate after 2030, China would probably not equal the United States in per capita income until sometime around the middle of the century. In other words, Chinas impressive economic growth rate and increasing population will likely lead the Chinese economy to pass the U.S. economy in total size in a few decades, but that is not the same as equality. Moreover, linear projections can be misleading, and growth rates generally slow as economies reach higher levels of development. Chinas authoritarian political system has shown an impressive capability to harness the country’s power, but whether the government can maintain that capability over the longer term is a mystery

both to outsiders and to Chinese leaders. Unlike India, which was born with a democratic constitution, China has not yet found a way to solve the problem of demands for political participation (if not democracy) that tend

to accompany rising per capita income. Whether China can develop a formula that manages an expanding urban middle class, regional inequality, rural poverty, and resentment among ethnic minorities remains to be seen. Some have argued that China aims to challenge the United States’ position in East Asia and, eventually, the world. Even if this were an accurate assessment of Chinas current intentions (and even the Chinese themselves cannot know the views of future generations), it is doubtful that China will have the military capability to make this possible anytime soon. Moreover, Chinese leaders will have to contend with the reactions of other countries and the constraints created by Chinas need for external markets and resources. Too aggressive a Chinese military posture could produce a countervailing coalition among China’s neighbors that would weaken both its hard and its soft power. The rise of Chinese power in Asia is contested by both India and Japan (as well as other states), and

that provides a major power advantage to the United States. The U.S.-Japanese alliance and the improvement in U.S.-Indian relations mean that China cannot easily expel the Americans from Asia. From that position of strength, the United States, Japan, India, Australia, and others can engage China and provide incentives for it to play a responsible role, while hedging against the possibility of aggressive behavior as Chinas power grows.



China won’t economically surpass the United States for decades, lacks the mass immigration to America.Nye 11/2010 (Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Future of American Power, http://www.academyofdiplomacy.org/publications/article_archive/Nye-Future%20of%20American%20Power%20Nov2010%20%282%29.pdf)

Equally important are the benefits of immigration for the United States soft power. Attracted by the upward mobility of American immigrants, people want to come to the United States. The United States is a magnet, and many people can envisage themselves as

Americans. Many successful Americans look like people in other countries. Rather than diluting hard and soft power, immigration enhances both. When Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew concludes that China will not surpass the United States as the leading power of the twenty-first century, he cites the ability of the United States to attract the

best and brightest from the rest of the world and meld them into a diverse culture of creativity. China has a larger population to recruit from domestically, but in his view, its Sinocentric culture will make it less creative than the United States, which can draw on the whole world. On the other hand, a failure in the performance of the U.S. economy would be a showstopper. Keeping in mind that macroeconomic forecasts (like weather forecasts) are

notoriously unreliable, it appears that the United States will experience slower growth in the decade after the 2008 financial crisis. The International

Monetary Fund expects U.S. economic growth to average about two percent in 2014. This is lower than the average over the past several decades but roughly the same as the average rate over the past ten years. In the 1980s, many observers believed that the U.S. economy had run out of steam and that Germany and Japan were overtaking the United States. The country seemed to have lost its competitive edge. Today, however, even after the financial crisis and the ensuing recession, the World Economic Forum has ranked the United States fourth (after Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore) in global economic competitiveness. (China, in comparison, was ranked 27th.) The U.S. economy leads in many new growth sectors, such as information technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. And even though optimists tend to cite the United States’ dominance in the production and use of information technology, that is not the only source of U.S. productivity. The United States has seen significant agricultural innovation, too, and its openness to globalization, if it continues, will also drive up productivity. Economic experts project that American productivity growth will be between 1.5 and 2.25 percent in the next decade.

The United States will not be replaces as hegemon, China is not a competitor.Nye 11/2010 (Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Future of American Power, http://www.academyofdiplomacy.org/publications/article_archive/Nye-Future%20of%20American%20Power%20Nov2010%20%282%29.pdf)Any net assessment of American power in the coming decades will remain uncertain, but analysis is not helped by misleading metaphors of decline. Declinists should be chastened by remembering how wildly exaggerated U.S. estimates of Soviet power in the 1970s and of Japanese power in the 1980s were. Equally misguided were those prophets of unipolarity who argued a decade ago that the United States was so powerful that it could do as it wished and others had no choice but to follow. Today, some confidently predict that the twenty-first century will see China replace the United States as the world’s leading state, whereas others argue with equal confidence that the twenty-first century will be the American century. But unforeseen events often confound such projections. There is

always a range of possible futures, not one. As for the United States power relative to Chinas, much will depend on the uncertainties of future political change in China. Barring any political upheaval, Chinas size and high rate of economic growth will almost certainly increase its relative strength vis-a-vis the United States. This will bring China closer to the United States in power resources, but it does not necessarily mean that China will surpass the United States as the most powerful country—even if China suffers no major domestic political setbacks. Projections based on GDP growth alone are one dimensional.



They ignore U.S. advantages in military and soft power, as well as Chinas geopolitical disadvantages in the Asian balance of power. Among the range of possible futures, the more likely are those in which China gives the United States a run for its money but does not surpass it in overall power in the first half of this century. Looking back at history, the British strategist Lawrence Freedman has noted that the United States has “two features which distinguish it from the dominant great

powers of the past: American power is based on alliances rather than colonies and is associated with an ideology that is flexible. . . . Together they provide a core of relationships and values to which America can return even after it has overextended itself.” And looking to the future, the scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter has argued that the United States culture of openness and innovation will keep it central in a world where networks supplement, if not fully replace, hierarchical power. The United States is well placed to benefit from such networks and alliances, if it follows smart

strategies. Given Japanese concerns about the rise of Chinese power, Japan is more likely to seek U.S. support to preserve its independence than ally with China. This enhances the United States’ position. Unless Americans act foolishly with regard to Japan, an allied East Asia is not a plausible candidate to displace the United States. It matters that the two entities in the world with per capita incomes and sophisticated economies similar to those of the United States—the European Union and Japan— both are U.S. allies. In traditional realist terms of balances of power resources, that makes a large difference for the net position of U.S. power. And in a more positive-sum view of power—that of holding power with, rather than over, other countries— Europe and Japan provide the largest pools of resources for dealing with common transnational problems. Although their interests are not identical to those of the United States, they share overlapping social and governmental networks with it that provide opportunities for cooperation. On the question of absolute, rather than relative, American decline, the United States faces serious problems in areas such as debt, secondary education, and political gridlock. But they are only part of the picture. Of the multiple possible futures, stronger cases can be made for the positive ones than the negative ones. But among the negative futures, the most plausible is one in which the United States overreacts to terrorist attacks by turning inward and thus cuts itself off from the

strength it obtains from openness. Barring such mistaken strategies, however, there are solutions to the major American problems of today. (Long-term debt, for example, could be solved by putting in place, after the economy recovers, spending cuts and consumption taxes that could pay for entitlements.) Of course, such solutions may forever remain out of reach. But it is important to distinguish hopeless situations for which there are no solutions from those that could in principle be solved. After all, the bipartisan reforms of the Progressive era a century ago rejuvenated a badly troubled country.

China will not overtake the US, geopolitical predictions are inaccurate and onesided.Nye, 3/2011 (Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is Chairman of Pacific Forum CSIS, and also the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations, John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University, The Future of Power, )http://csis.org/files/publication/issuesinsights_vol11no08.pdf

Let me go back now having talked about the problems of diffusion of power to power of transition because we a story of American decline and the rise of China, but this is also mistaken also don’t understand that very well. If you look at power of transition we tend to say it’s. I think it’s mistaken on two fronts. One is when

we talk about the rise of China, you have to remember in what I’ve said earlier about the shift from west to east was a shift of Asia not just China and China’s only part of Asia. You have a number of other crucial countries as well. In addition to that I don’t think that the metaphor of the United States being in decline is a very accurate description of what’s happening in the world. If you think about the question of is the United States in

decline obviously there’s a wide spread view now that it is. Particularly after the 2008 financial crisis it became a new conventional wisdom that this is the end, the Americans have reached their peak, they’re past their peak and they’re in their final phases and so forth. The trouble with this is nobody knows what the life cycle of a country is. Life cycle of a human being – we’ve got a pretty good idea – anybody who looks at me knows that I’m in decline. But life cycle of a country is not so clear. For example in the 18th century after Britain lost its North American colonies the British statesmen Horace Walpole said, “Woe is Britain, we’re now reduced to a miserable little

country like Sardinia or Denmark.” What he didn’t realize was that Britain was on the eve of its greatest century, which was because of the new industrial revolution. And even if

you try to think about the classic case of Rome, yes, there was eventually a decline and fall of Rome but



it took three centuries after Rome had reached the peak of its power. So we have no idea of where the United States is in terms of its power cycle at this point. It’s true that if you took a public opinion poll you will get a majority of Americans now thinking that the US is in decline. You will also get a majority of Americans thinking that China is larger than the US economically. That’s simply false. But public opinion polls register moods, they don’t register facts. And we’ve been through this before in the United States. After Sputnik the Soviets were 10 feet tall. In the 1980s the Japanese were 10 feet tall. Today the Chinese are 10 feet tall after the 2008 crisis. But I suspect we will outgrow this and then we will begin to have a more realistic sense of what power relations look like. 4 One question of course is will China become larger than the United States. And if one thinks

simply in economic terms the answer to that is probably yes. Indeed Goldman Sachs has even

put a date on it, 2027, the year in which the Chinese economy will be equal to the size of the American economy. Well, that’s plausible, even though one should be skeptical about any precise projections about the future. The idea that a country of 1.3 billion growing at 10 percent a year would be equal in size of the American economy is plausible. But even when China equals the United States in total size of its GDP it won’t be equal in composition of its GDP. China will still have enormous pockets of poverty, enormous pockets of backwardness, and a better way to measure the composition of an economy is by per capita income. In most projections that look at per capita income see that China will not reach the American level until somewhere in the 2040s or more if then. So economics alone in terms of size of GDP doesn’t show that China is necessarily larger. What’s more is many of these projections of China taking over the world now are based on one dimension. They look at the question of economic size. But if you look at military power and you look at soft power then in fact it turns out that it’s unlikely that China will equal the United States in the next couple of decades or more. Yes, China is building an aircraft carrier, the big difference between a carrier and 11-carrier battle task forces. And similarly in soft power Hu Jintao properly told the 17th Communist Party in 2007 that China needed to invest more in its soft power, that’s a very smart strategy for a country whose hard power of economic and military strength is rising. If your hard power rises, what happens is you scare your neighbors and your neighbors form a coalition against you. But if you can combine this rise with your hard power with an increase in your soft power of attractiveness it makes it less likely that you’re going to have these coalitions form against you. So in that sense Hu Jintao’s advice to the 17th Party Congress to increase soft power for China was a smart power strategy, smart power being the combination of hard and soft power. The problem is that China has a very hard time accomplishing this. And the reason isn’t because they aren’t spending

money on it, they are, billions of dollars on Confucius Institutes and broadcast systems and so forth. But there’s an unwillingness to unleash civil society and a great deal of soft power or attractiveness comes from civil society not from governments. Government broadcasting is often mistrusted, it seems like propaganda. But in civil society contacts you have something which is much more credible. And the problem that China has I think is that it’s very difficult with the political system now to unleash civil society. I was giving a lecture in Beijing University and a Chinese student asked me, “How can we increase China’s soft power?” I said, think for a minute about the comparison of China and India. India has Bollywood which produces more films than Hollywood. And why is it that India dominates the international film market this way and China doesn’t? Is it because India has better directors, better actors? I suspect not, it’s because India doesn’t have censors. And I think the answer for China if it wants to really develop its soft power is it’s going to have learn to ease up and let go. But that is very hard advise at

this time in China’s history. So if I look ahead at the total question of power over the next decade or two in East Asia and I ask is China when its economy equals the size of the US or so sometime in the 2020s, will it be more powerful than the US? I think not. I think in fact the US will remain more powerful. 5 It’s worth noticing something. What I’m telling you is not that China won’t do better. China is doing better and it’s getting closer to the US. So in relative terms the rise of the rest not just China but others, means that the Americans are not going to have the same lead that they’ve had in the past. But does it mean that others will be larger or more powerful than the US, the answer to that I think is probably no. You could say “so what, why worry about this, who cares, this is just bragging about who’s number 1?” It’s like the Green Bay Packers versus the Chicago Bears in the Super Bowl. And the answer is no, it matters not because power is


SCFI 2011 Hegemony BadSilent Nihilists ___ of ___good per say, it’s not. Power is like calories in your diet. Too little of it then you expire, too much of it and you become obese. The problem with power is to understand what’s the right amount you need and how does it relate to the amounts that others have. And if you make mistakes about that you can have quite disastrous policies. There’s a classic story that is told by theorists of international relations which is a story of what happens when one power grows stronger and creates fear in an existing great power. And this was first described by Thucydides in his description of the Peloponnesian War which is the war in which the Greek city state system tore itself apart. And it was caused by, according to Thucydides, the rise in the power of Athens and the fear that created in Sparta. And many people say that was the story of the 20th century, when the European state system tore itself apart in World War I because of the rise in the power of

Germany and fear that created in Britain. And there are some who say that will be the story of the 21st century. But the rise in the power of China and fear that creates in the United States will create a great conflict. I think this is wrong. I think its bad history. For one thing, Germany had already passed Britain in economic strength by the year 1900. And if I’m correct about my earlier assessment China is not likely to pass the US for another couple of decades if then. But why does that matter? What matters is if the Chinese develop the view that they are passing the US and they’re rising and the US is in decline it can lead to hubris, to a more assertive Chinese policy which can make it very difficult for the American’s to compromise as they try to deal with China. Because every time the American’s offer a deal or a compromise the Chinese say, “oh just what we thought, they’re in decline, they’re weakening so push even harder.”


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SCFI 2011 - Hegemony Bad